Underground (7 page)
“What am I going to do?” I asked the ferret.
Chaos, impatient little beast, wriggled with annoyance as I tried not to break down. I gave up and let her go, dropping onto the sofa and putting my face in my hands. Hot salt water ran against my palms and down my wrists but nothing, not even breath, could pass the stone that seemed to have settled in my throat. I didn’t even have the comfort of howling or sobbing, just stupid, hard tears.
I cried until it stopped hurting and put my head down on the arm of the sofa. Chaos skipped over to check on me, climbing the upholstery to lick the moisture from my face. “You don’t love me, you just want salt,” I muttered, letting her tiny kisses tickle my cheeks until I stopped feeling so wretched and wrung out.
“What now? I’m not ready to go after Wygan,” I continued. “Not skilled enough for that yet. So . . . just pick myself up and go on like there never was a William Novak in my life? Yeah, right.”
I wondered what had happened to the thread of Grey that had tangled on Will’s arm. I’d have to check—
The ferret stuck her cold nose in my ear.
“Hey!”
She snorted and bounced away, busy as always. Busy.
That’s what Will and I would both do. That’s how we got by; working to avoid dealing with the personal ugliness. He wasn’t likely to let me near him for a while—at least not until he wasn’t so horrified. Much as I wanted to get at that bit of Grey, I’d have to wait and let his mind make some more comfortable suggestion of what had happened before I could. We’d have to talk and it would probably be the last time—I could no more keep on with this mess than he could, after this—and that would be my chance to fix what I could, including the strand, and let the rest go forever. But the Big Break would have to wait for calmer daylight, when there were fewer shadows heavy with reminders of shambling creatures and dark actions under the otherworldly stare of fox eyes and ghostly things.
FOUR
One of the requirements for my degree in criminal science was a psychology course about criminals and victims of crime. For a week we discussed how victims cope with the results of the crimes—everything from burglary and bank fraud to rape and the murder of loved ones—committed against them. In the end, all traumas elicit one of two major categories of response: break or cope. Breaking down is good for you, I’m told—catharsis and all that jazz—but I rarely indulge in it and never for long. Me, I’m of the suck-it-up school of coping till you crack. So after a night of feeling like a dog that’d been kicked, I dragged myself out of bed, worked out, and went back to my job. But Will was in the back of my mind and I worried in silence while I made myself work.
In between witness checks for Nan Grover, I left a message for Quinton and eventually arranged to meet up with him back in Pioneer Square about three o’clock. Quinton was standing near the bust of Chief Sealth and talking to Zip when I spotted him.
“. . . Thoreau was protesting the Mexican-American War,” he was saying as I approached.
Zip lipped an unlit cigarette and spoke in an impaired mumble that twitched out of one corner of his mouth. I’d gotten used to his odd speech in the months we’d been acquainted. “So he din’t pay his taxes?” Zip asked.
Quinton nodded. “Yup. And they threw him in jail.”
Under his flap-eared cap Zip looked thoughtful, rubbing his white-bristled chin with one hand that was clenched around his prized lighter. “Huh. So, this in’t new? Tellin’ the gov’ment you in’t gonna pay fer a war?”
“Nope. See, man, you were the practitioner of an honorable tradition.”
“Hm,” Zip grunted, lighting his smoke and stamping his feet to stay warm. “Wish they hadn’t thrown me in the nuthouse, though.”
“Setting yourself on fire may have been a bit much, Zip.”
“I come out OK.” He looked up and noticed me. “Hey’m, Harper.”
I had to shake myself out of my distracted funk. “Hey, Zip. Do you mind if I take Quinton for a while?”
He flipped his hand lazily at us. “Nah. Gonna get dinner in a minute. God Squad’s got chowder on Friday. S’Friday, right?”
“Has been all day,” Quinton replied.
“Good. ’Cause y’know, they change that on ya sometimes. Sometimes it’s Wednesday halfway through, then it’s Vienna sausages. Don’ like them. They’s like fingers. I in’t gonna eat no fingers.”
“Not even fish fingers?”
Zip pushed out his lips and frowned, the smoldering cigarette wobbling on his lip like a wind sock in a changeable breeze. “Fish in’t got fingers.” Then he huffed, hunched into his filthy layers of clothing, and marched off.
“Think he’s offended?” I asked.
“With Zip you never know. So. You wanted to talk . . . ?”
“Yeah. About that incident yesterday. But this isn’t the best place.” I forced my wandering mind into the work at hand and looked around, letting my gaze sweep past the pair of heavily jacketed beat cops chatting up the bums on the benches in front of Doc Maynard’s Public House. It wasn’t tourist season and their demeanor was more solicitous than threatening, but with Quinton’s dislike of cops, I assumed he wouldn’t want to talk about dead men out on the street where they might hear.
“Yeah,” he replied. He bit his lip and frowned a moment before continuing. “Come on. I know where we can talk and you can get a better idea of what’s happening.”
He led the way west toward the water. I shuddered at the memory of the previous evening, but after we’d crossed First, we walked only one more block before Quinton turned right onto Post. It’s not officially designated Post Alley at the south end, but it’s not much wider than if it were. It was already dark in the narrow street between the old masonry buildings, and the picturesque red brick underfoot was crusted with dirty ice. I dug my boot soles into the uneven and ghost-strewn surface with firm steps, following Quinton through the turns of the road until we reached a poured concrete wall under the Seneca Street off-ramp from the viaduct. A three-story retaining wall held back the tumble of the hill while a wide stone staircase climbed the side of the building perpendicular to it, creating a dark half room roofed by the roadbed above us. The other side of the street held the southern loading docks and dog-walking slab for the hotel tower of the Harbor Steps complex—an area I had discovered had no active history in the pit that had been gouged into the cliff edge for its foundations. Just behind us, the rich, tilting timescape of the Grey looked like the Painted Desert done in shades of mist. Our location lay at the intersection of history and void, and I couldn’t help but stare at the contrast.
Quinton touched my shoulder and startled me out of my rapt gaping. He motioned me into the darkest corner, where the retaining wall met the back of the staircase. A shallow, bunkerlike structure of concrete slabs poked out from the retaining wall. A rusted steel door had been set into the bunker wall and sported a triangular yellow caution sign with an odd symbol of spikes and circles and the words AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
Quinton pulled a short cylinder—about the size of a fat pocket flashlight—from his coat and pushed it against a plate above the door’s lock. I heard something clunk and he grabbed the door handle that looked as if it shouldn’t turn, but did. The door swung in, and he stepped through into darkness and pulled me in behind him.
The door closed with the thick thud and hush of heavy rubber seals. The lock clunked again and the lights came on. We were in a small cement vestibule that opened into a larger area bounded by old walls of stone and brick. The room was cluttered with shelves and tables made of plain boards and various containers or architectural elements that must have been discarded in someone’s rebuilding scheme long ago. Electronic equipment was neatly arranged among stacks of parts, books, clothes, and canned goods. A dorm fridge hummed under one of the tables. It was like some mad scientist’s basement that had been taken over by engineering students.
A crazy collection of lights hung from wires strung between the walls to illuminate the roughly L-shaped room. The walls rose to a height of about thirty feet, and we were standing right in the corner of the L with the door behind us in the short side. A bed hid in an alcove at the long end of the L. The final wall beside the bed was built of heavy timbers held together with archaic metal straps and huge bolts—not medieval so much as Victorian gothic. It reminded me a bit of a castle’s massive gates that had smaller doors cut into them.
I stared around the place. “We’re under the sidewalk,” I said in wonder. “Or part of it . . .”
“Yeah, that wall supports the stairs,” Quinton agreed, pointing toward the bed alcove. “The wooden part blocks off the old sidewalk level.”
“You live here?”
“For about six years. The company that built the Harbor Steps put in the bunker as a temporary security box during the excavation and I . . . appropriated it when they were done, before anyone thought to remove it. I made sure the paperwork disappeared, and once the sign and locks were on the door, everyone seems to have figured it was someone else’s problem. Especially since no one’s keys work on the lock.” He shrugged. “Must not be the authorized personnel.”
“Where’s the electricity come from?”
He waved at the concrete wall. One end was covered in electrical panels. “It comes straight off the utility grid. Just looks like more of the city works to the system. I thought about pulling cable, but it’s been hard to get at without attracting attention. I use the library’s system or the Wi-Fi that’s all over the place in Seattle now. No water, though. I’m not too handy with plumbing.”
I ignored the trivia. “How . . . ?”
“People don’t pay much attention to things that look like they belong. I keep things repaired and smoothed over so no one has any reason to come and look for problems or wonder what’s in here. Just a utility hole for something no one’s curious about.”
“So the symbol on the door . . . ?”
“Means nothing—I made it up—but it looks like something you ought to be afraid of, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” I agreed, and I wondered if there were other things to be afraid of here. The diabolical cleverness of the bunker was unnerving. The situation with Will had left me raw, and the oddity of Quinton’s actions the previous day had me on high alert for trouble. “Why go to all this effort, though? What are you hiding from?” I asked. I was a little afraid to hear the answer.
“Kind of a long story, but, basically, I just want my own life entirely in my own control. Or as much as I can get it.” That was a sentiment with which I could concur. Not knowing my thoughts, he continued, “The only way I can see to have that is to be out of the system. So I got out of it. I don’t have a social security card or a driver’s license or a voter registration. I have no fixed address, no job, no ties, no bank account.”
He hung up his coat and hat and turned on an electric space heater that was sitting near one of the tables.
“Sounds kind of isolated.”
He shrugged and pulled the elastic band off his ponytail, scrubbing his hair loose onto his shoulders with a growl of pleasure before heading for the tiny fridge. “In some ways, yeah, it is, but it’s not so lonely. There’s a lot of people down here who are like me in one way or another.”
“Down where?” I asked, leaning against the nearest wall with my arms crossed, still a bit unsure of the situation.
“Here. The literal underground, Pioneer Square—the skids. The homeless, the discarded, the hidden . . . we’re all down here. We’re our own community. And that’s why I’m a little pissed about the deaths and disappearances. These guys are my friends—my neighbors. Sometimes I’m the only one around who isn’t off his rocker, and I feel like I ought to do something when we’re threatened.”
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