Read Online Endorphin Conspiracy, The by Fredric Stern - Free Book Online

rats before?”
    “Just in the lab,” Geoff said with some embarrassment.
    The officer guffawed, his protuberant, middle-aged gut twitching. He raised his heavily equipped belt over his jutting abdomen, let it slide back down to its natural resting place. He paused and looked down, then glanced thoughtfully towards Geoff.
    “Well, let me give you some free advice. Dumbrowski’s rules of riding the subway. Rule number one: don’t make no eye contact. Rule number two: go about your business as quickly as possible. Rule number three: don’t take the IRT elevator. It’s the most dangerous ride in the whole goddamn city this side of the Port Authority. Patrolman Dumbrowski here’s been around this jungle and survived. I seen things down here you’d never imagine. Stick to Dumbrowski’s rules, you should make out okay.”
    “Thanks for the advice.”
    “So where you goin’?”
    “Uptown, 181st Street.”
    “Well, good thing you ran into old Dumbrowski here then, cause you’d be taking this dangerous ride for nothin’ and end up in Fort Apache.” Dumbrowski smiled widely, clicking his gum. He patted Geoff on the shoulder—the good one—with his bulky hand. “IND’s over that way, down those stairs.” Dumbrowski pointed his stick down the corridor to the left.
    “Thanks.”
    “Dumbrowski. Joe Dumbrowski. Friends call me the Brow. Sure beats the first part of my name, huh?” he said with a chuckle. He slid his nightstick back in its holster. “Don’t forget the rules, now. This world down here ain’t forgivin’ to foreigners.”
    Geoff nodded, checked his watch as Dumbrowski walked away, then heard a thunderous rumble in the distance. The floor began to shake. A train was arriving down below on the IND platform. Geoff broke into a trot and along with a handful of people who came seemingly from nowhere, headed to the uptown platform. He descended the stairs quickly. Just as his foot touched the platform, the shrill honk of the train sounded and its twin beacons emerged from the murky depths of the tunnel. The long graffiti-smeared train screeched to a halt and opened its doors, allowing passengers to exit.
    Instinctively, Geoff looked up at the sign on the side of the train to make sure it was the “A” train, though he didn’t need to check since no other subway line ran this far north. He entered the second car.
    Geoff had his own “rules of the rails,” born of his generally cautious nature. He made it a practice never to get into the first car, since he’d surely be crushed to death if there was a collision, or the end car, since that was the least occupied and presumably the most dangerous. This strategy had worked well for him over the last seven years. In spite of the considerable amount of crime in the subways, not only had he never been accosted, he had never even witnessed a serious incident.
    Geoff sat down on one of the long benches just inside the doorway. The car was about half full, mostly people on their way home from work downtown. The neighborhood north of Washington Heights, known as Fort Tryon Park, remained a fairly stable enclave for elderly German Jews as well as those of the Hasidic sect, an ultra-religious group of Eastern European descent whose literal interpretation of the scriptures often put them at odds with the rest of Judaism.
    A young, heavily-bearded man with a pasty complexion, wearing a wide-brimmed black hat, a white shirt, the tails of which hung below the border of his drab, black jacket, flew through the doors, large briefcase in hand and horn-rimmed glasses ajar, narrowly escaping the capture of his shirt tails in the double-doors as they slammed shut. The man took a deep breath, adjusted his glasses, and sat down with a loud thud next to Geoff.
    “Almost got me that time,” he said with a sigh as he wiped his sweat-beaded brow.
    Geoff smiled and nodded. The last thing he ever did in the subway was strike up a conversation. Not that he felt threatened by the