Replica (12 page)

Face and hair hidden by the helmet, Nate edged the motorcycle out of the parking garage. If anyone checked the records, they might well question the bike’s owner about why he’d taken the bike out when he was supposed to be on duty, but no one would guess Nate had taken it. No one would know he hadn’t remained safely asleep in his bed.

*   *   *

Maybe
he was taking caution to the point of paranoia, but Nate decided not to drive the motorcycle all the way to the Basement. Instead, he pulled into a parking space on the street about three blocks from the border. By that point, he was well past the respectable neighborhoods where his outfit would draw unwanted attention. He hoped he wasn’t so far past civilization that the bike would disappear while he was gone. He didn’t want to think about how he would get home from here without it.

Of course, since he was walking into the Basement with no backup, planning to ask questions of people who generally didn’t take well to being questioned, perhaps he was being overly optimistic in thinking he would make it back at all.

With that cheerful thought, Nate stowed his helmet and donned the leather-and-chains jacket, taking a moment to check his disguise in the motorcycle’s side mirror. Was it his imagination, or did he look just a little wild-eyed?

As he walked away from the bike, his mouth was dry and his heart was jackhammering. He’d never realized before how secure Kurt’s presence on their jaunts had made him feel. Trips to the Basement had always triggered an adrenaline rush, but as long as Kurt was with him, he’d felt … safe. Which had probably been pretty naive of him. There was no such thing as “safe” in the Basement at night, even for its most powerful predators. But Kurt’s ease in his natural habitat had created a convincing illusion. And Nate had wanted to be convinced.

In polite society, the streets would be quiet at this time of night. But the Basement was anything but polite society, and the streets got progressively busier as he edged his way closer to its borders. The place came alive at night, its illicit clubs and bars filling the darkness with sounds and scents, drawing the unwary in like some exotic carnivorous plant luring insects with its nectar.

Once upon a time, the Basement had been the South Bronx, but when Paxco had bought out the state of New York, one of its first civic “improvements” had been to raze the neighborhood to the ground. That had happened well before Nate was born, and from what he’d heard, the residents had practically done the city’s work for it in the wave of riots that broke out when the plans were announced. They seemed to think they should make their own decisions about the disposition of their neighborhood and had shown their displeasure with the decree by tearing it down. Either that, or they’d just enjoyed the excuse to take to the streets in a frenzy of destruction.

The neighborhood that Paxco had built over the rubble was an homage to practicality. Every building was a high-rise, allowing Paxco to house its poor and unemployed in as small a footprint as possible, so the city could reclaim fringe neighborhoods and make them into something more respectable. And every building was identical, built of ugly gray concrete with small, regularly spaced rectangular windows.

There was technically no wall or other barrier to separate the Basement from the respectable neighborhoods of the city; however, the looming gray concrete high-rises were as intimidating as any wall, towering over the low-rent Employee housing that bordered them. When Nate passed between the first two buildings, a shiver traveled down his spine.

Most Basement-dwellers were far too poor to own cars, and most tourists were far too protective of their possessions to bring cars into the neighborhood. The architects behind the Basement had anticipated that, and they hadn’t bothered with wide avenues with multiple lanes and room to park. Instead, the Basement was a claustrophobic warren of narrow streets that made the high-rises on each side look even taller and more forbidding, and cars could only venture through when pedestrians allowed it.

In the Basement, there were no distinctions made between residences and places of business—not that there were any
official
places of business in the Basement anyway, unless you counted the soup kitchens and hospitals. The only way you could tell one building from another was by looking at the graffiti spray-painted on walls and doors.

This being a temperate almost-spring night, the streets of Debasement were at their most crowded. Floods of Basement-dwellers roamed the streets, hawking their wares or searching for prey. Others gathered just to socialize and posture, or to protect their territory.

Though Nate had been to Debasement many times, the first minutes were always a shock to the senses. In the world he was used to, there was a certain uniformity of appearance as Employees and Executives dressed in accordance with the conventions of their social circles. In Debasement, the convention was to be as unconventional as possible, each individual striving to stand out, perhaps in defiance of the uniformity of their surroundings. Nate had dressed in leather and chains because the outfit exaggerated the pallor of his ghostly alter ego, but the people around him sported a riot of colors. Neon orange, screaming hot pink, electric blue, sun-bright yellow.

Piercings had been a staple in Debasement since the neighborhood had first been born, but facial tattoos were becoming increasingly popular, and those who weren’t ready to commit to tattoos went for face painting instead. Street vendors offered to do elaborate face painting for a fee, a service that was used almost exclusively by tourists—and priced accordingly. It was like going to a very adult carnival—the kind where you could get your face painted while getting a blow job. The air smelled of street food, and of too many bodies, often laced with a whiff of illicit, sickly sweet smoke.

Dressed as he was like a native, Nate made his way through the crowd with relative ease, the predators ignoring him as uninteresting prey, the street salesmen dismissing him as not having money to burn. It was just the kind of camouflage he’d been hoping for, and it got him to Angel’s without incident. He almost let out a sigh of relief when the club came into sight, but passing through the crowd had been the least problematic part of his plan.

From the outside, the building that housed Angel’s club / bar / brothel / general den of iniquity looked no different from all the buildings around it, a bland gray pillar of concrete with windows like soulless eyes staring onto the street below. The name Angel’s had been spray-painted in metallic silver over the entryway, and the door was flanked by a pair of Debasement’s version of bouncers—men with the barrel chests and buzz-cut hair of lifelong soldiers but pierced, tattooed, and painted like some long-ago goth band.

Nate felt the eyes of the bouncers on him as he climbed the stairs to the front door of the club. He’d been here enough times with Kurt that he was sure they recognized him, but they gave him the evil eye anyway. As a general rule, Angel encouraged Basement-dwellers who didn’t work for her to take their business elsewhere; her club catered specifically to the Employee and the Executive class, where the money was. But money trumped everything, and a Basement-dweller whose pockets were pleasantly stuffed after a lucky score could buy a handsome welcome.

Nate wished Kurt hadn’t taken
all
his dollars. He shelled out the cover charge in Paxco scrip, paying three times what he would have if he’d had dollars, and immediately demoting himself in the eyes of the bouncers. Customers bearing dollars were treated like visiting dignitaries, regardless of their class. Those paying with scrip were tolerated as long as the money held out, but ripped off at every opportunity.

Nate endured an overly personal manual search from one of the bouncers, whose hands moved slowly and squeezed harder than necessary. The guy stank of body odor and cigarette smoke, and was about as sexy as a pickup truck on cinder blocks. It was an effort of will not to shrink away from his touch.

“Want me to turn my head and cough?” Nate asked when the bouncer’s hands lingered where they shouldn’t.

The bouncer gave him a scowl to let him know he wasn’t amused, then gave his family jewels a little extra squeeze. Nate reminded himself that he could hide signs of weakness without resorting to his own special brand of humor, which he doubted would be much appreciated by his current audience.

Finally satisfied that Nate wasn’t carrying anything into the club that he shouldn’t, the bouncer let him go. Yet another hurdle overcome, but the greatest challenge still awaited him.

Someone with a keen understanding of architecture and structural engineering must have helped Angel renovate her club, because although it was located in a building identical to those around it, it was completely different on the inside. The apartment buildings had eight four-room units per floor. They were supposedly designed to house families of four, but they would be tight and cramped even for two. Certainly they weren’t designed to house a nightclub, which was why Angel had had all the apartments on the first two floors of her building ripped out.

What she’d done was technically illegal—the high-rises were meant to be free housing for the poor. When the city planners had first designed the Basement, they’d made sure that there was enough housing for everyone who needed it. What they hadn’t planned for—or, more accurately, what they’d willfully ignored—was the human desire to lay claim to territory. Housing units were claimed by whoever had the strength to hold them, and if a powerful Basement-dweller like Angel of Mercy wanted to take over whole floors of an apartment building, rip out all the apartments, and turn them into a club, no one was going to stop her. And the fact that she’d managed to rip out all the apartments except for a few support pillars here and there without bringing the entire tower down around her suggested she’d had high-level help doing it.

Angel was most likely the richest person in all of Debasement, and with her money she could no doubt have decorated her club as elegantly as any legitimate Executive club in the city. However, she was also one of the savviest people Nate had ever met, and she knew exactly what her customers wanted. They didn’t come to Debasement in search of an elegant club they could find in their own neighborhoods; they came to see how the “other half” lived—without actually having to see anything more than a prettied-up fantasy.

The club was decorated in what Nate liked to think of as jailhouse chic. The pillars and floor were naked concrete, complete with chips and pockmarks to make them look like they came from a war zone. The ceiling was exposed beams and wiring, and lighting was provided by bare bulbs on wires. The walls were concrete, too, only you could barely see any of the concrete gray behind all the spray-painted graffiti that decorated them. Most of it was gang tags—for “artistic” effect, not because Angel’s was part of any gang’s territory—and suggestions to do things that were anatomically unlikely. There were also some pornographic cartoons, and one whole wall displayed a spray-painted portrait of Angel herself, holding a wicked, serrated blade to her chest and testing the edge with her finger as she looked out over her club with all-seeing eyes.

Nate fought his way through the crowd toward the bar. If you were looking for someone in a bar, the best place to start was generally with the bartender, and Kurt had always seemed to be at least mildly friendly with one of the ones who worked here. Nate darted through an opening to grab one of the rickety barstools. To his disappointment, the bar was being tended by Viper, a foul-tempered asshole Nate would have just as soon avoided. There was an off chance that Kurt’s friend, Random, was also on duty today, but Nate would just have to wait and see, because he didn’t want to ask questions of Viper if he didn’t have to.

A petite blonde in heels so high they should have given her a nosebleed climbed onto the other end of the bar. The girl was an obvious Basement-dweller, her hair dyed jet black with neon blue and green streaks, tattoos peeking out from the edges of her clothes, her face dotted with holes where she was pierced but not wearing her jewelry. But she was dressed in Executive finery, wearing a clingy red skirt suit that fit her like it was made for her, a white button-down blouse, and a conservative string of pearls. The stilt-like red pumps that looked like they were made out of plastic definitely did not go with the outfit.

As the patrons hooted and hollered out encouragement, the girl began to dance on the bar, stepping around bottles, jars, and glasses. Dollar bills and scrip appeared like magic in people’s hands, and as the girl slithered out of her clothes, she revealed convenient places for patrons to tuck the money. Viper worked around her, taking money and giving out drinks as if she weren’t even there.

Nate would have preferred to just buy a drink and sip quietly as he kept his eyes out for Random. But he knew from experience that if he ignored the stripper, she might make it her personal goal to gain his attention, and he was not in the mood for a lap dance. He held out bills like the men around him and tried to enjoy the show.

Technically, strippers weren’t supposed to remove their G-strings, and patrons weren’t allowed to touch, but those rules were ignored in Debasement with the same negligence as most laws. The strippers at Angel’s never seemed to mind, always encouraging the patrons to sample their wares—as long as there was money involved, naturally. Maybe it was because Nate was in a somewhat altered state of mind, or maybe this particular girl was new and not as practiced as the pros he’d seen before, but he couldn’t help noticing how frozen her eyes and smile were as she pranced across the bar, naked except for her shoes and her money-stuffed garters, letting the patrons, men and women both, touch her whenever and wherever they wanted.

Nate stuck a bill in her garter when she invited him to, but he did it almost gingerly, trying not to touch her any more than necessary. There were some girls he found attractive, but this chick wasn’t one of them. Her movements were almost mechanical, her expression behind the fake smile one of bored indifference. Based on the number of bills in her garters, Nate was the only one who gave a crap.