Concrete Underground (2010) (2 page)

I slid the foot locker over and climbed up to get a closer look. Inside, I could make out what appeared to be a small rectangular box about five inches long and two inches thick. I tried to pull the vent loose but found it was screwed in place. Digging my pocketknife out of my jeans, I started loosening the screws and had managed to work two of the four out when I suddenly heard a voice call out from behind me.

"What are you doing here?"

I spun around to see an old man standing just inside the doorway, thin and gaunt, wearing a cheap brown suit. He had picked up the baseball bat and was pointing it at me threateningly, as if trying to keep me at bay. I stepped down off the locker, and he advanced on me quickly, extending the bat out to just barely tap my chest with the tip.

"Stay right there."

"Whoa, calm down," I said. "You called me and asked me to meet you here."

"I didn't call you. Who are you? Who sent you here?"

"Look, someone called and told me to come here. I'm a reporter."

I started reaching inside my jacket to get my card, but he jabbed at me with the bat. It wasn't close enough that he meant hit me, but close enough that I got the message.

"I'm just gonna reach into my pocket to get my business card and show you who I am."

He watched me silently as I slowly tried again for my jacket pocket. I produced my card and handed it to him.

The top of the card was stamped the
Concrete Underground
cut-out logo. Underneath was printed:

D Quetzal

Punk-as-Fuck Investigative Journalist

He glanced at the card before training his gaze and the bat back on me.

"Is this supposed to be some kind of a joke?"

I took a couple steps forward. "It's no joke. I'm a reporter and--"

He swung the bat square into my mid-section. I doubled over, my abdomen on fire from the blow. Before I could recover, another swing brought the bat down on the back of my head, dropping me to the floor as I quickly faded out of consciousness.

---

I am having that dream again.

I sit in a crowded movie theater. On my right is an empty seat. To my left, a woman sits beside me. I think that I followed her into the theater because she looked familiar, like my old girlfriend from high school, but now I can see that she's not who I thought she was. She rests her head on my shoulder, and I sweep away her purple hair from her forehead and give her a kiss.

I watch a man on the movie screen riding in a car as it drives onto a small airfield in the middle of the night. Actually, I don't see the man himself; I see through his eyes. The man on the the screen is me; the me in the audience fades away, and I focus my concentration solely on the me on screen.

On screen, I get out of the car and am greeted by a short, balding man carrying a flashlight. He says something, but I can't make out his words over the sound of the film projector behind me. I follow the man with the flashlight into one of the airplane hangers. It is dark all around.

There is a single plane in the hanger, a small private jet. The forward hatch is open and a rolling staircase has been moved into place. I follow the other man up the stairs and into the plane. Inside, the beam lights up only small parts of the cramped space randomly, the flashlight bouncing in the man's hand as he walks down the aisle toward the back.

He stops at the end of the cabin and points the light at one of the seats. I move closer to see what he's showing me. It is a woman. She is dirty and disheveled - clothes torn, greasy black hair matted to her face with grime and sweat, large purple bruises on the exposed flesh of her neck where she has been strangled.

I kneel down and sweep away a few strands of hair to expose her face. I touch my hand to her cold skin, which feels almost unreal, like she's a wax dummy. Gently, tenderly, I run my fingers down along her lifeless cheek. I know her, but the me sitting in the theater can't quite place how or where from.

On screen, the man with the flashlight tells me, "Look in her hand." He moves the beam down so I can see her clenched fist. I force her grip open and see she's holding a necklace with a large, brilliant ruby mounted on a pendant. I flip the pendant around; there is a symbol etched on its back - a globe with a crown floating over it. I take the necklace from the dead woman's hand and stuff it in my pocket.

Back in the theater, I cough. The woman on my left shushes me angrily. The me on the screen whips his head around and looks over his shoulder, past the fourth wall and into the audience. I can see his face, and he isn't me. His deep blue eyes are filled with piercing anger, glaring at me through the darkness, projected larger than life.

The image on the screen flickers and dissolves briefly into static before cutting to a grainy, wide-angle shot of a room, the monochrome image washed in blue, giving the impression it is a feed from some kind of surveillance camera. The room is small and sparsely-furnished with only one occupant - a man sitting on the edge of a bed, his back turned to the camera. In the bottom right corner of the screen are digitized numbers reading: 00033.

I turn to my left. The woman beside me casts a disapproving look at me and says, "You shouldn't be here." Her face is covered by a half-mask made of dark gunmetal. I reach out to lift the mask, but when I see her face, I realize she's not who I thought she was.

I turn to my right and see a man sitting in the previously-empty seat, his face covered in a grotesque black mask pocked by red boils oozing puss. A long crooked nose protrudes from his mask, and underneath his lips part to reveal a mouthful of jagged yellow teeth jutting out from purple, bleeding gums.

The man in the mask starts laughing - a tinny and mechanical laugh, like the sound of a clanky old film projector.

---

When I came to, my assailant was gone. I struggled slowly to my feet, feeling my head throbbing and my stomach stinging like hell. Then to make matters worse, that damned phone in the hallway started ringing again.

Once I finally regained my bearings, I realized that the vent cover had been fully removed and the box had been taken.

My head still swimming, I staggered out into the hallway in time to see the leopard-print lady from the lobby pick up the phone.

"Hello?" she answered and then turned her head to look directly at me.

"Yes, he is," she said after a brief pause, then held out the receiver to me. "It's for you."

I took the phone from her and took out my reporter's notebook from my back pocket. "D's Sporting Goods. This is D speaking."

"Did you find the parcel?" asked a man's voice on the other end of the line, low and raspy, almost sounding mechanical.

"Who is this?"

"Did you get it?" he demanded.

I wrote the word "parcel" in my notebook. "You mean the little blue box? No, I was too busy getting bludgeoned into unconsciousness with a baseball bat. Now would you mind telling me who the fuck you are?"

I heard multiple voices whisper faintly in the background, but couldn't clearly make out what they were saying. One of them might have said something like, "He's going inside."

"You shouldn't have been late," said the man. "You need to get out of there right now. If you don't, we can't be held responsible for what happens to you."

The line went dead. I hung up the phone and made a few more notes before heading back downstairs. On my way through the lobby, the manager rushed out from behind the front desk to cut me off.

"Hey, there's a visitor's fee here. Twenty bucks," he said.

"What?"

"All visitors pay twenty bucks. I have to clean up after you assholes. And between scrubbing the jizz stains out of the hookers' rooms and mopping up vomit and blood and God knows what else in the dealers' rooms, twenty bucks a pop don't even start to cover it. So pay up - and that goes for you, too."

I looked over my shoulder to see that the manager was also addressing a man who had just walked through the front door. He was a giant shit-kicking type, easily 6'8" and built like a bulldozer, with a shaved head and a dark olive complexion of indeterminate ethnicity. He wore leather pants, steel toe jack boots, and a black t-shirt with "Bad Seed" printed in white block lettering.

"What did you say?" asked the newcomer.

The manager stepped towards him, holding out his left hand face up and jabbing his right index finger down into the open palm. "You heard me. I said put some God-damned money, in my God-damned--"

The tall man head-butted the manager in the face, mashing his nose into a red squirting pulp. He looked up at me, blood dripping down his forehead, and said, "He shouldn't have blasphemed." I couldn't tell if he was joking or not - probably wasn't.

I just shrugged in tacit agreement and stepped past him towards the exit. On my way out the door, I looked back to see him heading upstairs. Something told me he was probably headed for room 313, but I'd be damned if I was going to follow him to find out.

3. This Machine Kills Yuppies

"Congratulations, jackass, you just got us sued."

My editor, Sharon, was standing in front of my desk. She was apparently not happy.

I shrugged, slouching further down in my chair, trying to hide from her gigantic crazy eyes behind my computer. It was a white laptop with a sticker that said "This Machine Kills Yuppies" slapped over the corporate logo on back.

She reached out with one of her freakish man-hands and slammed the screen shut. "Let me try this again. You just got us sued six times over."

Sharon Sinclair was a six-foot-tall beast of a woman with a huge mane of wiry black and gray hair pulled back in a pony tail. I had every confidence that she could tear me in two and use my bloody carcass in some kinky hedonistic lesbian cult ritual or something. So I usually tried to choose my words with the appropriate care around her.

"Jesus-fucking-Christ, I haven't even had my morning coffee yet, and my head's still reeling from the Louisville Slugger that pummeled it last night. So I really don't feel like dealing with whatever annoying hormonal episode you have going on here."

She glared at me silently, watching me squirm a little before asking, "Are you done?"

"Probably."

"Good," she said with a suppressed grin as she took a seat next to me. "Because I just let you publicly accuse the mayor and the valley's most powerful corporations of conspiring to defraud the taxpayers. So what's your plan for keeping my ass off the firing line?"

I tilted back in my chair and met Sharon's gaze. "Look, we knew we'd get a strong reaction. Let them sue. We have e-mails to back us up."

"These legal briefings say your e-mails were forged," she responded, waving a thick stack of papers in my face.

"Of course they're gonna say that. That's why I made sure to get corroboration. Abrasax confirmed that the e-mails between Dylan Maxwell and City Hall are legit. But you know all this, so I don't know why we're wasting time going over it again."

"Because Abrasax is not returning calls or answering any questions related to your story. They won't confirm that their spokesperson actually gave you that statement. They've cut you loose."

I felt my stomach sink. "You're kidding me?"

Sharon shook her head. "Nope. You know how you were telling me that their admission was almost too good to be true? Well guess what...?"

I leaned forward, propping myself against the desk on my elbows and massaging my temples. My headache was getting worse.

"It would make things a lot easier if you told me who your source on those e-mails was," she pressed.

"I can't. I promised them complete anonymity."

"Fair enough," she conceded, "but you got to give me something here, D. What's your plan?"

"I have to talk to Abrasax again and make sure they're still backing my story. Only this time I have to talk to Dylan Maxwell himself, not that horrible shrieking bitch flack, Lynch." I paused, stroking my chin, then added, "He'll probably be at my sister's wedding tonight. Hell, it might make the thing actually worth going to."

Sharon relaxed her posture a bit and softened her tone. "Nice to see you finally joined the conversation. Because if this thing goes to court, and you can't get Maxwell to back up those e-mails, then I'm forced to go into damage control mode. And that starts with publishing a full retraction and shit-canning your sorry ass."

Just then an intern appeared at the entrance of my cubicle with three full mail trays stacked on top of each other. "Here's the mail you asked me to bring in, Ms. Sinclair," she said meekly.

"Just set it down on his desk," Sharon instructed with a nod. The intern obeyed, struggling with the weight as she hefted the load onto my desktop with a thud. She was typical of the girls Sharon brought in - idealistic college students with big vocabularies and big tits. Not that I ever complained.

This particular intern had a lip ring and dyed jet-black hair. She wore a denim shorts over ripped black fishnet stockings and a carnation pink t-shirt with a silk screen of She-Ra that I wasn't sure if it was supposed to be ironic but at any rate was definitely a size or two too small. As I turned my gaze back to Sharon, I saw that she was also checking the girl out.

I shook my head. "Not worth your effort. I know her type. Probably has a long-term boyfriend, some dweeby music major with a pony tail or something."

"Says you," Sharon replied with a smirk. The intern stood there awkwardly, her eyes shifting back and forth between us.

"Prove me right, Princess of Power," I said.

"What?" the intern asked tentatively, her pale cheeks becoming flushed.

"Oh now don't go getting all embarrassed," I said. "I know we're living in more enlightened times and it'd be totally inappropriate for me to just ask you straight up if you like to eat box or not, and of course I want to be sensitive to all that bullshit. But this has to be settled, so just tell me this - which of the two of us would you be more likely to fuck?"