"Look at his locker key," I told him.
Rourke stopped.
His head came up slowly, his pale gray eyes fixing on mine beneath the harsh electric glare.
"What does his locker have to do with this?"
"Miller Vance hasn't been taking cash home in his pocket," I said, leaning forward until my chest pressed against the edge of the wood.
"A transit cop can't walk through the turnstiles at his home station in Queens carrying four thousand dollars in undeclared small bills every Friday morning. Not with the station cameras covering the booth. He uses the abandoned token booth behind the old ramp at Hoyt-Schermerhorn."
"That booth has been boarded up since the transit strikes in eighty-four," Rourke said.
"The plywood on the track side isn't nailed down," I told him, pulling a small, notched piece of brass from the canvas bag at my feet.
It wasn't an official transit tool; it was a modified track-switch key, filed down at the teeth until it could slip the old double-tumbler locks the maintenance crews used on the utility closets.
"My boy worked track maintenance down here before he went into the service. He showed me the layout before he died. Vance uses the old electrical junction box beneath the token booth floorboards. That’s where he stashes the week's collections until Sunday morning, when the cleaning contractors leave the side gate unlocked for the trash bins."
Rourke stared at the notched brass key sitting on the yellow carbon pad.
"You didn't just wire yourself for sound tonight, Frank," Rourke said quietly.
"I buried my wife two years ago, Arthur," I answered, my voice steady, though my bad knee felt as if someone had driven an iron spike through the joint.
"I’ve got nineteen months left on the mortgage on a row house that’s been in my family since nineteen forty-six. When Vance started shaking down the cleaning girls who take the two a.m. local from Nostrand Avenue, nobody said a word because they were scared of losing their city badges. But I don't have a badge to lose. I have a pension that was earned with burned lungs and forty years of coal soot."
I stood up, resting my weight on the desk until the joint held.
"If Cleary wants to claim Vance was running an authorized audit," I said, "take two of your men and open the junction box under booth fourteen. If you find only my envelope, Vance walks. But if you find six other bank envelopes from the last two months, Cleary can't bury the docket without hanging himself from the same ceiling."
Rourke didn't hesitate.
He picked up the notched brass key, closed his thick fingers around it, and turned toward the heavy iron door that led back into the cold belly of the tunnels.
"Diaz," Rourke barked into his collar set as he shoved the door wide into the darkness.
"Meet me at the north service gate. Bring the heavy bolt cutters and the county property seals. We’re going under the floor."
CHAPTER 3: The Hearing Behind Locked Turnstiles
The concrete tunnel beneath Booth 14 smelled of damp lye, rotting timber, and sixty years of accumulated electrical grease.
Captain Rourke held the heavy halogen lantern low, its beam cutting across the warped floorboards until the light hit the rusted flange of the junction box.
Lieutenant Diaz dropped to his knees on the salt-eaten ballast stone, wedging the crowbar under the cedar runners.
Beside him, Officer Kovacs kept his back pressed against the service railing, his eyes locked on the dark corridor behind us, his service weapon unstrapped and resting loose in its holster.
"The seal on the hasp is modern," Diaz said, his breathing loud and shallow inside the narrow void.
He pointed the tip of the pry bar at a bright zinc padlock.
"Master lock, series four hundred. This didn't come out of any depot supply cage. It's retail hardware."
"Pop it," Rourke ordered.
The steel jaws of the bolt cutters bit into the shackle.
Diaz leaned his full weight against the rubber handles until the hardened metal snapped with a sharp, violent crack that echoed down the length of the abandoned signal conduit.