Underlife by Robert Finn (different e readers txt) 📕

thought out of her head. What she was hearing was the train’s intercom, malfunctioning but still partly working. God, she must be freaked out if her first thought was that she was hearing the voices of the dead.

But there were more immediate priorities than her mental state. Warren would hear the noise and come straight out to investigate. She was standing there with a loaded pistol in her hands in plain view.

The indecipherable voice was trying to make an announcement — she could tell from the intonation — but the intercom was swallowing up the sense of it. Apart from the occasional loud crackle, the rest was just muffled murmurs.

Rachel’s instinct was to bury the gun in her bag and retrieve it again later, but what if she never got the chance? She caught sight of her jacket, over by the pool of blood, discarded after Sebastian had died, no longer needed to cushion his head. She flipped the gun’s safety catch on, stuffed it into the waistband at the back of her skirt and took four quick steps across to her crumpled jacket just as Warren looked out of the cab and frowned, registering the fact that she wasn’t where he wanted her to be.

Making sure to face him, she dipped and came up with the jacket. Holding it up so he could see the reason she’d wandered. She brushed it with her hand, dislodging a few nuggets of broken glass and slipped it on, reaching around to make sure the back covered the grip of the gun. She gave a little shiver that she hoped didn’t look too fake and pulled the jacket’s sides around her.

Warren clicked his fingers and pointed to the seat where she’d been sitting earlier, like he was instructing a dog. He was watching her, alert for anything suspicious and this clearly wasn’t the right moment to confront him. Obediently she returned to her place, angling her knees towards him as she sat down so as to conceal the bulge at the back of her jacket.

It looked like Warren was about to say something more to her, but a sound from behind him made him turn. Despite his injured foot, he twisted as quickly as a cat to investigate the source of the noise. Then, with a glance back to her, and a finger raised once to indicate that she should stay put, he withdrew into the cab.

Matt must have returned, though she couldn’t see him. She could hear him though, and by concentrating she could make out what Warren was saying to him: “Pass it up here. No, you can wait down there. Stay put while I look at this.”

Then Warren rejoined Rachel in the passenger compartment carrying Kieran’s scuffed leather briefcase in his hands. It was one of the old kind that stood upright and hinged open at the top. It was fuzzy with age, the brown leather faded almost to orange, and now it was streaked with what looked like fluff mixed with axle grease. Warren popped the catch, pulled wide the jaws at its top, and then tipped it upside down, emptying out what was inside. For some reason it made Rachel think of gutting a fish the way the contents spilled out onto the floor of the train. The scene in Jaws, maybe.

Two irregularly-shaped bricks of money hit the floor: half-inch-thick bundles of green notes, piled into thicker blocks and stacked side-by-side, and then bound together with Saran wrap. There were also pens, a phone, a sheaf of papers, some keys and a CD-ROM. Warren flicked quickly through the papers — and Rachel could see the navy and gold of a U.S. passport — before he discarded them and pounced on the shiny silver disk. For a moment he looked triumphant. Then he turned it over and she saw anger tightening his jaw. She wasn’t that far from him and surreptitiously tilted her head to read the scrawl across the disk’s surface.

In red marker it said, ‘J’ and then separately, ‘Disk 2’. If she’d had to guess, Rachel would have been inclined to think it was the numeral ‘2’ that was bothering Warren, because there was only one disk. He was nodding his head impatiently and repeating ‘J’ to himself as though trying to remember where it came in the alphabet. Then he pivoted and stalked, stiff-legged, back into the cab. She could just make out the exchange that followed.

“What are you doing now? Get up,” Warren barked.

“I thought I saw something. But it was just a bit of glass,” Matt was saying.

“Where’s the other disk,” Warren demanded.

“What other disk?” Matt said. “And what do you mean ‘other’?”

“Don’t get clever. I can see you’re lying,” Warren said. “You know something.”

Rachel craned her head. By rising up in her seat she could just see Matt’s head over the ledge of the train floor. He was still down on the tracks. She looked at him sweat under Warren’s gaze. He wasn’t doing a very good job of appearing innocent and Warren didn’t seem likely to let it pass. Rachel mentally pleaded with Matt to stop looking so guilty and to say something that would reassure Warren.

“Why would I hide something from you?” Matt said at last. “You can search me. And you can look in the tunnel. If there’s something I haven’t found yet, then maybe it’s because he… maybe it’s on the body.”

“Fine. Search the body. Bring me everything. And I would be particularly delighted if you could find something that looks like this,” Warren said, holding up the disk by its edge like a politician waving a manifesto. Then, as an afterthought he said, “And make sure you move the body off the tracks so they can turn the power back on when we’re finished with this.”

That one moment of confident defiance seemed to have used up Matt’s entire supply. She saw him nod slowly and turn back towards the tunnel, his head low. He looked worn out, nervous and pretty much hopeless as well, and her heart went out to him. His job now was to find Kieran’s ruined remains and to pick over the body like a grave robber. And when he was done with that awful task, he had to walk back again, probably wondering as he did so whether Warren would kill him when he arrived.

As he trudged off, looking dejected, Rachel found herself wishing he would just leave her behind and run. Whether he came back or not, she no longer really believed it would make much difference to her chances of surviving. He might as well save himself.

But if he was planning to run, wouldn’t he have done it by now? The first time he’d got out of Warren’s sight he should have made a break for it. But instead he had dragged himself back along that tunnel, carrying the briefcase, heading towards the man who killed his friend.

And there was only one way to explain that. He had come back because Warren had persuaded him that it was the price of her safety — and for some reason, that must have mattered to him. And now he was going to go through it again even though he was plainly scared stiff, even though she could see from his face he dreaded how this might end. If he returned a second time and then Warren cut him down, he would have died because he’d tried to help her. Warren was going to use Matt’s desire to protect her to lead him to his death.

She couldn’t quite identify the emotion that realisation stirred up inside her, but it burned painfully. It was sickening and strong and she suspected that it was some kind of fury because it made her want to stride into the cab right now and blow Warren’s brains out, no matter how suicidal attempting that might be.

But if she tried it now and failed, she would be bringing both of their lives to an end. Better to wait, and choose her moment with a little care. Better to make sure there were no mistakes. She should wait until Warren had his mind on other things — and the best time for that would be when Matt returned again. That would be her chance.

She ran through it in her mind, trying to prepare herself. Warren would be looking down over the track, the light would be coming from behind him so she would need to be careful that her shadow didn’t warn him of her approach. On the other hand, she couldn’t sneak up slowly. She’d only have a second or two to close the distance between them. And she needed to get close because her best guess was that whatever it was that protected him from harm, it wouldn’t work against a bullet fired from a gun pressed into his flesh.

If she’d had to do it right at that second, as she watched Matt drag himself back into the tunnel, she felt sure she could. And so it was agony knowing that she had to wait, that she had to risk letting the fire she was feeling go out. Because then the doubts would crowd back in, her nerve would begin to slip away and soon enough she’d feel cold with fear again.

She was so wrapped up in these thoughts that she twitched with alarm as Warren emerged unexpectedly from the cab. Though it was adrenaline, he would undoubtedly assume it was nervousness.

“I want to…” he said to her, clearly frustrated with whatever he needed to say to her. He tried again, speaking slowly as though telling off a child, “Do you know how I can talk to the driver? I can’t make this thing work,” he said, pointing back towards the cab.

“I…” she wasn’t sure what to say, “I can look.”

It was important that he not get behind her where he might see the gun. On the other hand, if they were manoeuvring around each other in a tight space, she might get her chance earlier than expected, which is why she’d offered to help. The difficult part would be to stop him noticing that she was concealing something. When he looked like he might be pausing to let her get by him, she pretended not to notice and rubbed her neck as though it was troubling her, like she’d paused to relieve the stiffness a little.

When she didn’t move after a moment, he simply carried on walking and preceded her into the cab. She followed along behind and moved around to the side of him, trying to angle her back to the cab wall which left her tucked in behind the driver’s seat. In the gloom, she had to stand uncomfortably close to Sebastian’s corpse to do it, but it was the only way to keep the gun hidden.

When she thought about it, she realised that every one of the bullets that had been fired earlier had hit some part of the train. Even the two that had struck flesh had continued on until they encountered metal, glass or plastic. She could even see that one of the windows in the cab had been blown out. It was no wonder that the electronics were malfunctioning. There was a phone set halfway up the frame of the driver’s side window and she guessed that would be the intercom. She lifted up the handset and looked at the array of buttons on it. But no matter which one she pressed, nothing happened.

“Great. Thanks for your help,” Warren said, unpleasantly. He’d obviously been through this routine.

Then Rachel had an idea. “Listen, there are emergency intercoms all through the train,” she pointed towards the compartment they’d just come from. “You can pull the alarm and it will connect you