Excerpt From "The Perfect Ending"

PROLOGUE

Artie Majewski had a bad feeling as soon as he hung up with Central.

In twenty-plus years with Metro-North, this wasn’t the first time he’d gotten a five o’clock wakeup to sub on the Harlem Line. No, the creepy feeling was because of what Karen had said when the phone rang. “Bad things come in threes,” she’d muttered before drifting off to sleep again. And given the way his luck had been lately, Artie suspected his wife was right.

It all started the night before at Paddy’s—seventh-inning versus the Red Sox, Yanks up by three, and Ray O’Malley running his mouth. Artie often bragged to his buddies that he could do his job with his eyes closed, but he should’ve known better than to bring up the new PTC system they were installing. Trying to explain it to Ray was like trying to explain quantum physics to a squirrel. Artie had to tell him three times that PTC stood for Positive Train Control, and even after he detailed how Central used GPS to track trains and slow them down, the moron had the balls to say, “Now you really can do your job with your eyes closed!” Artie was so pissed off, he bet Ray double or nothing on the ballgame—which ended up biting him in the ass when the Yanks lost on a grand slam in the ninth. A hundred bucks down the drain.

Yeah, that was number one—the first bad thing to happen.

And now here he was, raking his fingers through his thinning hair, trying to breathe the humid air that hung like molasses inside the overheated train cab. His hangover had tapered off to a dull ache behind his eyes, but he could still hear Ray and those other douchebags laughing as if they were sitting right there beside him. This wasn’t the first PTC system he’d tested, but he certainly didn’t expect to be dicking around with it on his day off, nor did he like that Central kept making him stop the train. This time he was a mile out of Hartsdale. Almost fifteen minutes now he’d been waiting—something about “refreshing the data in the monitoring system.” Whatever the hell that meant.

Artie tried again to take a deep breath and fixed his eyes on the heat waves squiggling up from the stretch of empty track before him. Temp gauge on the dash read ninety-one outside, and inside wasn’t much better. Artie could feel the sweat trickling down his back and under the folds of his flabby pecs. How many millions Metro-North spent on PTC and they still couldn’t get the friggin’ air conditioning to work?

Artie glanced up at the camera that monitored his every move and threw up his hands with a silent “Hurry up!” gesture. A few seconds later, the signal light on his dash turned from red to green.

“All clear,” said the voice on the radio. Artie gave the camera a half-salute with one hand, and with the other, pushed forward on the accelerator stick.

Finally, he was moving again —

The only good thing about today was the new M8 he was driving—like a damn spaceship compared to the old M6 shit-buckets he used to drive. The Hudson Line had had the M8s for years now—and, of course, it had been the first to get the PTC after some new guy fell asleep in the cab and took a thirty-mile-per-hour turn at eighty a few years back. Lots of people dead, a bunch more injured. What a freaking shit show caused by a lazy dipshit.

But today, Artie was the one who felt like a dipshit. He should’ve been sleeping off his hangover, but no, he had to go and put his name in for overtime, and sure enough, the call at five told him to be at Grand Central by seven. Karen didn’t know about the hundred he’d lost to Ray the night before, but she was still right in theory: the phone call was number two – the second bad thing that happened.

Artie cursed himself and kicked the train’s speed up to seventy. The light on the dash immediately started blinking red, and then the PTC kicked in and the train slowed down to the posted sixty-five.

“All clear,” Artie radioed back to Central, and the controller gave him a quick, “Check.” The plan from up top had been for him to test out the M8’s new system one last time with no passengers, and then they could get the train officially online for the afternoon rush. But now, with all the stops and data refresh crap, Artie wasn’t sure they were going to make it. Neither was Central, apparently—which was why they greenlighted him through Hartsdale at thirty-five. It’d be the same for Scarsdale, it looked like, as he approached the station a few minutes later.

And then he saw the guy at the end of the platform.

Maybe it was how he was standing that tipped Artie off—tense, leaning slightly forward with his feet too close to the edge. Or just maybe, it was the bug Karen put in his ear that morning. Either way, Artie somehow knew the third bad thing was about to happen.

He’d never had a jumper, but he’d certainly heard the stories of people being pushed or leaping in front of the train out of nowhere. It all happened so fast, the engineers always said, but for Artie Majewski, everything next unfolded slowly—almost as if he were seeing it before it happened.

At least, that’s how he would explain it to Karen later that night, when the half bottle of Dewar’s he’d polished off finally stopped his hands from shaking. In one moment, there was the guy leaning way too far over the edge of the platform, and in the next, there was this young blonde woman wearing a bright red tee-shirt reaching for his arm as if she knew what was about to happen.

Artie shouldn’t have been able to see it all in such detail as the PTC kicked in—sixty to fifty to thirty-five. “But it was like I was on a conveyor belt or something,” he told Karen. “Like a dream, you know, where you’re moving but at the same time you’re frozen?” And yet, Artie wasn’t frozen—at least according to the cab footage, which clearly showed him switching on the PTC’s manual override to slow the train down faster.

But still, years later, and long after he’d hung up his engineer’s cap for good, Artie Majewski would bolt awake in the middle of the night—his cries of, “Don’t do it!” muffled and thick with weeping as the train’s brakes screeched back at him from the dark.