Then he went shit-diving.
I don’t know if it was a plan he had, the way he went spastic and cut up the cripple makes me think planning isn’t his forte, but when he dropped out of the train tunnel and wallowed in a bank of sewage that had washed up in the storm drain below he put me off the scent.
Went from tracking a guy who smelled like an abattoir to a guy who smelled like a porto-potty. Which pretty much describes the way everything under Manhattan smells.
Got dicey after that. Cagey little fucker realized I wasn’t right on his ass, he started to calm down a bit, caught his breath some, stopped panting so much, stopped stumbling so much, started picking spots he could hole up a minute at a time and be quiet. If there’d been any kind of light at all I’d just have started throwing rocks at him until he went down. All I needed was one of those odd reflections you get down here sometimes. Sunlight filters through the grates over the train tunnels, a spear of it finds its way down a sluice, it reflects in some runoff from the sewers and you find a whole section of drain takes on a haze of light. Enough so you might see an idea of your hand if you held it an inch from your eyes. That’s you. Me, I’d see a damn sight more than my hand. But even my eyes need some light to work with. Something to reflect off the surfaces and show me what they are.
Instead I’m blind. Whether that means it’s night up top I couldn’t say. Been some time since I’ve kept track of the hour. Used to be I knew sunup and sundown like my own heartbeat. But after you miss a couple hundred of each you start to lose that sense.