The City Under the Skin (24 page)

He was in the middle of nowhere, by the skeletons of some old silos and an abandoned greyhound track. He'd have to change the tire himself, which only confirmed his lowly status: he couldn't see Wrobleski doing something so banal. He opened the trunk to get at the spare and the jack. He found a woman's shoe jammed in the wheel well—Carol Fermor's, he supposed—and he tossed it into the gutter before manhandling the tire out of the car.

It was a long, awkward task: difficult to position the jack, and even harder to loosen the wheel lugs. As he examined the flattened tire, he noticed a small hole in the sidewall that looked suspiciously neat, as though somebody might have made it deliberately, to create a slow puncture that would ensure he'd be brought to a halt long before he got home. Did that make sense? Maybe he was being paranoid. And did it make any difference? He still had a tire to change. And only when the job was done did he realize he had oil, rubber streaks, and road gunk all over his new suit. Fuck it. You were so much better off wearing leather: the more you abused it, the better it looked.

For the rest of the drive home he tried to keep his mind on the road: that was a better place for it than any other he could think of. Sanjay would still be there, guarding the lot, keeping an eye on Carla. Poor guy, he didn't seem to have anywhere else to go. And yet as Billy approached the lot, there was no sign of him. There was a folding stool lying on its side by the front gate, and there was a book tossed on the ground some feet away. That didn't look right. But nothing else seemed amiss: the security lights were on, the gates, the subcontractors' trucks, the trailers appeared the way they always did.

“Sanjay?” he called, not too loud, not too insistently. He didn't want to wake Carla.

He thought he heard a groan, something feeble but close at hand, and then as he moved toward it, in the direction of the trucks, he saw Sanjay lying on the ground, the pristine pink and black of his clothes now smeared brown and red. His body was twisted into a position no body could easily adopt, legs tangled at improbable angles under him, head sagging against the truck with the
CAUTION: EXPLOSIVES
sign. Sanjay had been mashed, pulped, beaten with his own baseball bat. He was scarcely conscious, but he was still able to look at Billy, twist his lips into a sad smile, half-raise a pointing hand, and say, “Carla.”

Billy Moore looked toward Carla's trailer, and he saw that the door was open, and not simply open but broken wide, dangling from its buckled hinges. He ran across the lot, having just enough time to wonder which was the greater terror: that Carla would be there and in the same state as Sanjay, or that she'd simply be gone. He stepped inside the trailer. It was the latter: silence, stillness, disorder, emptiness. There was broken glass, a kicked-over chair, skewed carpet. Carla had not gone quietly. Well, Billy had never thought she would. He was searching around the interior, looking for something that would tell him what had happened, when he saw that Sanjay had dragged himself all the way across the lot to the trailer door.

It seemed he could barely speak, barely breathe, but he said, “I think, sir, they didn't kill me, sir, because they wanted me to give you a message.”

“Who's they?” demanded Billy.

“Several men, one of them of African heritage, who did most of the talking.”

“Akim.”

“We didn't exchange names, sir.”

“Keep it simple, Sanjay,” Billy said, but simplicity wasn't Sanjay's way.

“This man told me to tell you that your daughter is temporarily in safe hands, being looked after by somebody named Laurel.”

“My daughter's being looked after by a tattooed whore?”

“That I cannot say, sir. But the rest of the message is that ‘Mr. Wrobleski would like to see you again when you've changed your mind about the job.' Does all that make sense, sir?”

His voice dribbled away with pain and exhaustion.

“Sense is one word for it.”

“Now, sir,” said Sanjay, “I wonder if you might be good enough to call an ambulance for me, sir?”

“I'll drive you there myself. We'll talk on the way.”

Sanjay readied himself to do some more talking.

 

36. A BIGGER BANG

Zak Webster had never given much thought to dynamite, but if he
had
thought about it, he'd have assumed that today's mining and demolition engineers, such as those blasting the tunnels for the Platinum Line, the ones parking in Billy Moore's lot, would have something rather more sophisticated, more modern, in their trucks. Billy Moore, repeating what he'd very recently learned from Sanjay on the way to the hospital, was able to tell him he'd have been wrong about that.

Billy had gone from the emergency room back to the lot, and then to Zak's apartment, and even though it was the early hours of the morning, he found Zak all too awake, twanging with anxiety, debating if he should try to call or text Marilyn, wondering if he should go over to the Telstar Hotel, where he assumed she now was. Billy was able to tell him he was wrong about that too. He explained what needed explaining, that one way or another—and he knew it was wrong, and it was largely his fault, and he took full responsibility for his part in it, and yes, he was kind of ashamed of himself—both Marilyn and Carla were now inside Wrobleski's compound, but terrible though that was, he had a plan for getting them out.

“You see, Zak, there's no big mystery about dynamite,” said Billy. “My man Sanjay just enlightened me; it's stuff geologists know, apparently. It turns out dynamite is just sawdust and nitroglycerin, stuffed into a tube, with a blasting cap and a fuse added.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Zak asked.

Billy Moore pulled a single stick of dynamite from the inside pocket of his newly reinstated leather jacket and placed it gently in Zak's less than willing hand. Zak looked at it with some disbelief, amazed by the absurdity and what felt like the danger of the situation, even as Billy explained that the stick was harmless until the blasting cap and fuse were in place. As Zak held the stick, he felt a little like Wile E. Coyote, and the dynamite itself had an unreal quality about it. It looked so rudimentary, so provisional, wrapped in buff paper like a homemade firework, though the warnings printed on the side looked authentic enough.

“You place the stick,” said Billy. “You walk away, you detonate the dynamite, and you're in business. I think we can do those things, can't we, Zak?”

“I can certainly walk away. I might even run.”

“You actually don't have to walk all that fast. We're not talking about lighting the fuse, throwing it, and hoping for the best. See here.”

He handed Zak a device that looked like a cross between a cell phone and an antiquated channel changer.

“It's a remote electronic trigger,” said Billy. “Self-explanatory, yeah?”

“I guess so,” said Zak.

“And really, you don't even have to get all that far away. Sanjay tells me that a single stick, put in the right place, is enough to move one cubic yard of rock, which weighs about a ton, depending on what kind of rock it is. When you're blasting a tunnel, like in the Platinum Line, you drill a hole and you put the stick in the hole, because that gives you maximum destruction: something to do with compression.”

“Sounds reasonable,” said Zak; then he wondered if he'd gone even further out of his mind than he realized. There was nothing even vaguely reasonable in what Billy was saying. Billy hadn't explained the details of his plan yet, but Zak suspected there would be little that was sensible or logical or even
recognizable
in what he was about to propose. Zak got the feeling that he was living somebody else's life.

“But we won't be in a tunnel,” said Billy. “And in the wide-open spaces it's a whole different story, apparently. There's a lot of math involved, and I didn't really follow that part. But anyway, in the not quite so wide-open spaces, Sanjay tells me that one stick isn't that big a deal. It wouldn't be enough to completely destroy, say, a house, and definitely not Wrobleski's compound, but it would make one hell of a mess of a car, say, a big black SUV.”

“You're going to blow up Wrobleski's SUV?”

“That's part of what I'm going to do, yes. There's more. That's where you come in, Zak.”

 

37. THE BEST LAID

Marilyn Driscoll wouldn't have believed that she'd ever be able to fall asleep in that darkness, in that place, in that condition, but suddenly she was awake, the night was over, and she was rising, coming back from some gloomy, troubled, cloacal place in her dreams. She could feel somebody beside her, somebody touching her lightly, untying her.

“I'm Laurel,” a woman's distant voice said: Laurel, a tattooed whore in Billy Moore's accounting. “It's okay, I'm on your side, more or less. It's been quite a night. I seem to be doing child care now.”

Marilyn had no idea what she was talking about. Laurel busied herself undoing the ropes and pulling streamers of duct tape from Marilyn's body and face. Once her eyes were unpeeled, Marilyn saw she was in a long, low basement room, not quite a cell or dungeon, but claustrophobic, airless, and full of shadows, with one narrow, distant, barred window and a row of a dozen or so single beds. A cloud of tired female sweat hung low in the room, a TV played in the far corner, and on the wall she noticed a framed three-dimensional cartoon map of Hollywood, with a cartoon dinosaur rampaging over the sign.

She became aware of other people in the room, women, four more besides Laurel, and two of them she more or less recognized, though she didn't know their names: the homeless woman from outside Utopiates, the stripper from the club. There was also a blowsy, voluptuous woman, overdressed but shoeless, and a severe, professional-looking type with a gray bob that must once have looked pretty stylish. Quite a collection, mismatched you might think, but Marilyn knew precisely what they had in common: the maps that they weren't showing, and the violence that had created them. Besides that, they also shared a dejected, opiate-induced blankness. They stared vacantly in Marilyn's direction but hardly acknowledged her presence.

“I saw your little act last night,” said Laurel.

“It wasn't an act,” Marilyn insisted.

“Whatever,” said Laurel. “What exactly did you think was going to happen when you got here? You thought you'd arrive and have some face time with Wrobleski and he'd say, ‘This must all have been very puzzling for you, young lady. Now, allow me to explain.' Is that what you thought?”

Marilyn said, “No, I didn't expect that,” but of course a part of her had imagined something precisely along those lines.

“It's okay, we're all allowed to have our fantasies,” Laurel said, and she stripped away the last of the rope and tape, and then helped Marilyn straighten herself up. Marilyn stood, stretched, as if she were starting a warm-up session.

“Looking good,” Laurel said. “We have food if you need it. It's not bad. The secret ingredient is drugs.”

Marilyn shook her head. She stood up, walked a few paces, trying to get some sensation back in her legs. Her body felt all wrong inside her clothes, her bones and flesh pulled out of shape just as much as the fabric of her pants. In fact, there was something especially wrong with one of the pants pockets. There was something in there, something metallic and loose that didn't belong. It took her a moment to realize what: a set of keys. She pulled them out, a dozen or more keys held together with wire. She viewed them suspiciously, showed them to Laurel.

“I don't know how these got here,” she said.

Laurel gazed at the keys with some puzzlement but considerable pleasure.

“I think I do,” Laurel said. “I think Akim put them there.”

“Who's Akim?”

“The specimen who tied you up.”

“Planting the keys is kind of a weird thing to do, isn't it?”

“You want weird, stick around this place for a while,” Laurel said.

She took the set of keys from Marilyn, then tossed them from hand to hand, so that they made a thin, insistent, metallic rattle that trickled through the room. It took a while before any of the others noticed. Finally a couple of them looked up, paid just the slightest attention, and slowly moved closer, like frightened animals drawn to the watering hole.

“What are those?” Chanterelle asked.

“A gift from Akim. Some of Mr. Wrobleski's keys,” Laurel said. “Not his main bunch. Maybe Akim made copies.”

“What do they open?”

“Only one way to find out.”

“What's Akim up to?” said Carol Fermor.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” said Laurel. “Maybe he lost his passion for the job. Or maybe he thought child abduction wasn't in his job description. In any case, I don't think we should turn down the opportunity.”

“What opportunity?”

“To start opening doors.”

“Why do we want to start opening doors?” Genevieve asked.

“Oh, I'm sure we'll think of a reason,” said Laurel.

 

38. SHY

Wrobleski, Akim, and Carla Moore had been sitting together in the rooftop conservatory, in silence, for a good long time. The morning was becoming clear and pale, the sky slowly brightening through streaked glass. Carla was managing to keep it all together. Another kid might have cried or sulked or pleaded, but Carla looked beautifully, if studiedly, indifferent, and Wrobleski was impressed by that. Akim meanwhile looked like a man being quietly tortured, though he also managed to send barbed, peevish looks of disapproval in Wrobleski's direction.

“All right, Akim, your stink eye has been duly noted. Why don't you go away and prepare yourself for the impending arrival?”

Akim got up and slouched out of the conservatory door, his eyes now looking firmly ahead of him.