Concrete Underground (2010) (20 page)

The song died down, and the stripper reached to scoop up the bills Anthony had laid out. As she extended her hand, Anthony quickly grabbed her wrist and gave her a good, startling jerk.

"So how about a private dance, honey?"

An unmistakable look of fear flashed in her eyes, but she slowly nodded in agreement.

Anthony insisted on dragging me along, and she led us to a small cubby hole in back of the club about the size of a department store dressing room. As Anthony and I sat down, she pulled a red velvet curtain across the entrance to give us privacy.

"Do you want me to dance for both of you together or one at a time?"

"Just me," Anthony answered. "He's only here to learn something."

The stripper climbed onto him and started her lap dance, still naked but for the domino mask. She did her best to act sexy and aroused, but she was nearly trembling with fear, like she was rubbing up against a ticking time bomb.

"You know what makes guys like me different from guys like you?"

I shook my head, at a loss and trying not to watch this poor terrified girl grinding her pussy against the unsettlingly large log in Anthony's jeans.

"Faith."

Even the stripper paused for a second and did a double-take, trying to process whether he actually just said what she thought she heard.

"I have faith in a higher power, faith in a grand design that's larger than I could ever hope to comprehend. And this knowledge gives me freedom because I don't have to worry about questioning how I fit into the big picture, all I have to do is play the role that's been laid out for me."

The stripper resumed her gyrations, although at this point the fear in her eyes was mostly replaced with a confusion that closely matched my own.

"Wait, hold on, I'm having trouble seeing the connection between being Dylan Maxwell's violent thug and God's divine plan."

"Take it out."

"Excuse me?"

Anthony rolled his eyes. "Not you, her."

The stripper fumbled with the buttons on his fly. I quickly turned to look away.

"Jesus fucking Christ!"

Anthony slapped me upside the head. "Don't blaspheme!"

"What the fuck?" For a second I involuntarily jerked my head back to face him and caught a glimpse of the stripper straddling his left thigh while kissing his neck and pumping her hand back and forth between his legs. I quickly whipped my head away again.

He let out a low chuckle and then continued, "You see, I'm like an existential hitman. When people get too abstract, start questioning the natural order of things, looking under rocks that shouldn't be turned over, losing sight of what really matters, that's when I step in to put everything back into perspective. I make sure shit turns
real
real
,
real fast."

He let out a series of low, gravelly grunts, and I could hear the stripper pumping her hand faster, hear the friction of dry skin on skin, until finally Anthony let out an extended groan and I felt his body shift and tense up on the seat next to me.

"Fucking hell," I muttered, still turned away.

The stripper stood up and began to dress.

"Let me give you an example," he said, giving my thigh a few hearty pats. "Say you're a stripper, and you come into a place day-in, day-out, taking your clothes off for fat, ugly slobs and giving handjobs in some dark little closet. And you start asking questions about things like why is the rich asshole who owns this place taking such a big cut off all these poor working-class girls who are the ones stuck washing clumps of jizz out of their hair every night?

"And that's a dangerous question to ask because it leads to others - questions about fairness, about your station in life, about the exploitation of women. Heady stuff. It's easy to get so wrapped up in these questions that you forget that at the end of the day, what it really boils down to is survival. But when you lose sight of that, you start making bad decisions.

"Decisions like, say, skimming off the top before giving your rich asshole owner his cut."

The stripper suddenly stopped dead in her tracks, her fingers frozen in mid-action while lacing up her corset.

"Now to me, that's just plain dumb," he continued. "Imagine, throwing away your most basic biological imperative, survival itself, over some petty abstract notion of
fairness
or
justice.
But that's what happens when you make things more complicated than they need to be."

Anthony lunged forward like a panther, springing from his seat with blinding speed and slamming the stripper up against the wall, his massive, powerful hands tightening around her throat in a crushing grip.

I watched in stunned silence as he choked the life out of her, then let her collapse into a heap, her cheek landing in the small puddle of his white goo on the floor, the domino mask still affixed to her face.

Anthony meanwhile was left holding her purple wig, which had come off while she struggled. He tossed it onto my lap.

"Here's a souvenir. Something to rub against your face on those long lonely nights when you're jacking off and imagining what I'm doing to the real deal."

I looked down at the disembodied wig and ran my fingers through its synthetic locks.

"Fag," Anthony snorted.

We walked out through club unmolested. Either no one realized what happened, or they all knew better than to let on that they did.

As we approached the Porsche, he tossed the keys to me.

"You can drive your fucking self home," he said.

I didn't actually agree, seeing as how I still couldn't keep my eyes open and even when they were, I was seeing at least triple. But I was still too shell-shocked to even attempt to protest.

He continued on to a black Escalade parked nearby. I shook my head and wondered just how stage managed the night had been.

"You know, for someone who claims to like to keep it simple, you sure have a round-about way of making a point. This whole setup smacks of your boss. You should warn him he's starting to get transparent."

He stuck out a thick, bright pink tongue and licked it slowly across his front teeth. "You want it straight up? Here it goes: your job is Lily. Focus on her - go through her files, check the surveillance records on her, talk to people who knew her. Forget about McPherson, you're barking up the wrong tree there. Keep your nose out of Asterion's business, and for fuck's sake, I never even want to hear the words 'Room 33' out of your mouth again. Is that simple enough for you?"

He climbed into his car, and I got in mine, made myself as comfortable as I could manage, and then quickly passed out.

22. What the Fuck Is Wrong with You?

The next morning I dragged myself into Abrasax and asked Max to see the surveillance records on Lily.

"Ah, so I take it you and Saint Anthony had a nice chat on the way home last night," he gloated.

"Yeah, it was so nice, I still have some of his spunk encrusted on my shoe."

Max nodded in amusement while he tapped something into his phone. A second later, my phone buzzed. I checked it and saw that I had a text from him, which consisted of a 13-digit alphanumeric code.

"Go down to the 17
^th
floor, show them that reference number, and they'll set you up with the records," he instructed.

"What's wrong with writing it down on a sticky note?"

He scrunched up his face. "Ugh, paper is so barbaric. I also just sent them a message, so they know you're on your way."

---

I settled into a cramped private stall with a computer terminal and logged in to pull up the files on Lily. I was shocked by the breadth of the information collected.

Every credit card purchase, whether on her company or personal card, going back years. Same thing for phone, e-mail, and internet logs. One log compiled from the internal GPS from her cell phone and another from her car showing her each and every move. Video and audio surveillance of her home and office for the last two weeks, presumably when Max first became suspicious of her.

I watched the video feeds from her town house first. It looked like there were two cameras in her living room, one in her bedroom, and one in the kitchen. At least they had the decency not to put one in the bathroom.

Thankfully, they were all motion activated, so they only recorded when she was home. I played them back at 4x speed, scanning for anything that might be useful.

As I sat there, staring like a drone at the images flashing on the screen, my mind wandered. I thought about Seamus the bum saying, "They watch you fuck," on the Light Rail, and then days later ending up dead and buried. I thought about the dead stripper last night and how sorrowful her lifeless eyes looked peeking out from under that domino mask, and then for some reason that made me think about Columbine and the veil she wore the first time we met. Then I thought about Anthony holding that purple wig, and that morphed into Anthony holding Violet, taking her soft, shapely body into his arms and sliding his cock inside her, and I imagined her pussy looking exactly like the stripper's had as she gyrated on stage.

I slowed the video down to real time. On the screen, Lily had undressed and dug the sex toy out of her underwear drawer. Now she was lying back in bed and using it.

A wave of blood rushed to both my face and my crotch simultaneously, causing my cheeks to turn bright red and my penis to swell within my pants. I looked around. No one could see into or out of the booth I was in. So I unzipped my pants and started to masturbate.

On the screen, I watched the fuzzy, pixelated image of Lily plunging the dildo into herself as she writhed on the bed and bucked her hips wildly. Meanwhile, I jerked off furiously to reach my own orgasm, feeling the seed pumping out in short, powerful bursts.

I looked down at the floor and saw my semen pooled in the exact same shape as Anthony's had been last night. At first this surprised me, but soon that gave way to an overwhelming sense of nausea.

What the fuck did you just do?
I wondered to myself.

My gaze returned to the video. Lily had put away the toy but taken out something else. Straining my eyes, I was able to recognize it as the framed photograph of Max. And from the gentle bob of her head, I could tell she was crying.

I suddenly felt dirty, like my skin was coated in an invisible layer of thick grime, and no matter how much I rubbed it wouldn't come off.

Fuck it, I need to get some air.

---

After grabbing a cigarette on the 17
^th
floor smoker's balcony, I returned to my booth to find that someone had gone in while I was gone and mopped the floor clean. I tried not to think about the implications of this.

I resumed sifting through the records, but I couldn't focus on the work; my mind kept wandering. I wasn't sure if I was still twisted up from mixing pain pills with booze, or it was some after-effect of all the blows to the head I've been taking, or maybe even just mental strain from the epic fucked-up-edness of the past couple weeks. But for some reason I felt disassociated, like I wasn't actually in control of my own actions, like I'd severed the connection between my body and mind. It was as if I were a ghost watching my own body or a passive observer watching all this on a screen from somewhere else entirely.

I wondered whether I had even just jerked off here in this booth. It seemed hard to believe, and certainly it was much more convenient to tell myself I'd only imagined it. After all, there was no physical evidence it had happened.

I stared blankly at the screen, which contained rows and rows of data inputs, coordinates and time stamps sent from the GPS in Lily's car. My eyes unfocused and the characters blurred together into a wash of red, blue, and green pixels.

I rubbed my eyes, cursing the futility of my task before plunging right back into it.

Then, surprisingly, I noticed something interesting.

Every day over the past week, she stopped at the same point on her way home from work. It was a deviation from her normal route.

The terminal wasn't connected to the internet, so I took out my own cell and looked up the coordinates on Google Maps. It was a point on the Serra Expressway overpass where it crosses Highway 77, not far from the Guadalupe Bridge. Normally the Millennial Bridge would have been the quickest way for her to get home to the west side from downtown. Taking the Guadalupe Bridge would be at least a fifteen minute detour, so there must have been some reason behind it.

I considered whether it was worthwhile to go rushing straight out there.

Fuck it, I need to get some air
, I thought and briefly paused to wonder why that sounded familiar.

On my way to the elevators, I ran into Max's assistant. I wondered how long she had been waiting around for me and whether she knew what I had done inside the booth. Then I wondered whether she had been the one who cleaned it up.
That's ludicrous
, I told myself as I pictured her on her hands and knees, naked but for a pair of vinyl gloves and a hair net, scrubbing at the floor with a sponge and bucket of sudsy water.

What the fuck is wrong with you?
I screamed in my head - or maybe to my head.

"Mr. Maxwell asked me to give you this," she said and handed me a glossy rave card like the one Columbine gave me for the
Labyrinthine
party. "He said he was going to e-mail it to you, but then thought maybe you'd appreciate the feel of paper. I'm not sure what that means."

I looked over the card. One side was red with black lettering that read:

HIGHWATER SOCIETY

CORONATION ANNIVERSARY

MASQUERADE BALL

Saturday, March 20, 9:00 PM

Invitation Only

Costumes Mandatory

That was tomorrow night. It sounded intriguing, but I was a little weary of the bit about costumes. Then I flipped the card over. The other side was printed white-on-white. I held it at an angle so the light caught the ink just right to reveal the message: