Undertown by Melvin Jules Bukiet

Author:Melvin Jules Bukiet
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2013-01-09T00:00:00+00:00

tension. The air in the trailer was dank with sweat and frustration. Half-empty coffee cups and sticky doughnut wrappers and Chinese food cartons littered every surface in sight except for one small desk reserved for the schematic plans and blueprints of Civil Engineer Cass Wainwright, who seldom ate and never complained. Unlike NYPD Captain Walter Mullane, who growled at anyone who opened the door or called on the perpetually ringing phone.

“Well, go eastward then,” he ordered the first of the police boats in the sewer as he sent the second boat west.

“Can’t you move any faster?” he snapped at the individual officers wading south toward 125th Street.

“What do you want?” he barked, biting the head off a rookie who tried to ask for a bathroom break.

And the whole miserable SDJ was made worse by the grotesque error of the night before. “Yes, sir,” he replied to the commissioner. “We’re doing as much as we can. Yes, sir,” he repeated, while scratching at his toupee as if it was inhabited by a colony of lice.

The commissioner kept him on the phone for fifteen minutes, complaining that the press was claiming that the NYPD wasn’t able to find a pair of teenagers on a broken boat slower than a three-legged dog.

He was right. Journalists were insatiable. Along with reporters for the daily tabloids came a stringer from Le Monde and a sophomore from the Columbia Spectator. And the late-edition papers were crueler than the initial reports, focusing less on the pathos of the lost children than the incompetence of the police. “Still Missing!” cried the Post. “Sewer Madness,” chuckled the Daily News, whose reporter had to be evicted from the trailer for badgering the grieving mother for a quote.

Miranda Hazard looked haggard, now a mere shadow of the lively young widow who’d set out for a nautical jaunt with her new boyfriend. She cast daggers at Tom Murphy every time their eyes met in the confined space, and occasionally gazed out the windows of the trailer with undisguised loathing for the crowd—diminished by now but still substantial—that found thrills in her suffering.

“Are you sure we can’t get you a hotel room, ma’am?” Mullane asked.

All she did was shake her head.

Mullane sympathized. After the hours it had taken to find, transport, and lower the two motorboats from Brooklyn into the sewer, the department was squarely behind the eight ball. It hardly made a difference that Johnny Angel had also located a fleet of Coast Guard vessels that were entering the system at the 145th Street outflow, per Cass Wainwright’s suggestion. Nonetheless, Mullane tried to act confident. “We’ll get them now, ma’am. For sure.”

“Sure,” she echoed dully.

Mullane looked at Murphy, who offered no help but instead said, “I’m going to take a walk.”

Outside the trailer was another beautiful summer afternoon. Tom skirted some local kids shoving each other into the yellow tape. Once upon a time, he might have been one of those kids, though the most dramatic event he could remember from his childhood involved a pet-store fire.

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