Undertow (The UnderCity Chronicles) (2 page)

He wanted to come back. Okay, not to see her. Still, there was no way he wouldn’t look her up. She squashed down her excitement. “How long do you think they’ll take to map?”

Jack gave a short laugh. “A lifetime.”

She stopped in her tracks. “You want to spend your life in tunnels? Don’t you think that would get old after a while?”

“Not for me. Come on, I want you to meet someone.”

“What?”

“There’s this guy who lives down here. Name’s Tim.”

“Who the hell lives in a tunnel?”

“People with nowhere else to go, Linds,” he said quietly and, to her ears, reproachfully. “Used to be a lawyer or judge or something. When the transit authority kicked him out of the tunnels, I got him a copy of the keys so he could get back in.”

Lindsay wondered what the men in her family would say if they knew Jack was taking her to visit a bum. Or that he’d done something shady for that bum. Maybe she’d skip this part.

“Tim knows everything about the tunnels. My dad told me they’ve had people down here since the 50’s. Tim says there were people underground before that. Way before. You wouldn’t believe the stuff that goes on down here.”

Lindsay looked over her shoulder, uneasily noticing how far they were getting from the work crew, and bumped into Jack, who’d stopped immediately ahead of her.

“Sorry…”

Jack didn’t seem to notice, his gaze focused down the tunnel on some point beyond the beam of his helmet light.

“What is it?” she whispered.

“I thought I heard something up ahead. Like a yell or…something.”

Lindsay strained to hear anything. Nothing but the faint dripping of water. “One of the workers?”

“No,” he replied hesitantly. “They’d be wearing a light.” He started forward again. She couldn’t stop herself. She caught his arm.

“Shouldn’t we go tell your dad?”

Jack kept his eyes on the darkness. “It’s probably just Tim. He said he has nightmares sometimes. Sees things that aren’t there. Come on. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

Then why had his usual confident pace slowed? Wordlessly, she followed on Jack’s heels down the tunnel for what seemed like a mile, each step taking them further into the gloom of the underworld until the lights behind them had almost faded to nothing. Cold crept over her, a vapor that twined about her limbs.

She was about to suggest again they return when Jack pivoted to face a small side passage that branched off the subway line. The opening didn’t reach Lindsay’s shoulders and was barely as wide as her body, and it was so obscured by pipes and cables that she never would have noticed it on her own.

“In here,” he said, and crouching, disappeared inside.

Fear rooted her feet to the ground. Something was wrong here. Very terribly wrong, and though she trusted Jack, her intuition screamed at her to run back to the safety of the surface, away from whatever lay beyond. But Jack was waiting for her, and she’d never abandon him even if she knew that disaster lay ahead. Especially then. She took a deep breath and followed.

She stayed right on his butt so she was beside him when the cramped passage emptied into a chamber the size of Lindsay’s bedroom.

It was the smell that hit her first. Warm, metallic. Blood. Jack’s hand clamped around hers, the beams from their helmets skittering about as they frantically scanned the room. Lindsay took in scattered newspapers and paperbacks, an overturned folding cot, pop bottles and a kerosene lantern.

Then Jack made a soft pained noise, and she turned so that her light ran alongside his. Blood was smeared along the wall by the entrance, left by hands that had clawed futilely at the concrete before being dragged off into the darkness.

“Oh my God,” Jack whispered. “They’re real.”

Eighteen years later

Lindsay sat alone in Captain Monroe’s small, drab office and tried not to be sick all over his desk, a mishap that might not have mattered much since it already looked as if raccoons had been set loose on it. The fluorescent lighting flickered, emitting that mosquito-like frequency as it prepared to burn out, though it wasn’t loud enough to drown out the death rattle coming from the computer hard drive. On the printer sat a delicately balanced styrofoam cup of cold coffee, perched there like a bad deodorizer. She might’ve opened the window with its view over the slate gray waters of the Hudson River, except he doubted that would be appreciated given the freezing temperatures that had gripped the East coast during the past week.

Deep down she knew it wasn’t her environment that was making her nauseous. It was why she had to be there. Her eyes drifted, as they did every time she visited, to the maps plastered on the walls. Faded from long years of use, they were, except for the one of the New York subway, all byzantine in their complexity. They depicted tunnels and sewers, air ducts and water mains, forgotten train lines and long-sealed garbage pits. There were maps of cable, gas and steam lines, each representing vast labyrinths buried deep beneath the streets, systems that joined and overlapped, multiplying their complexity.

If that were not enough, many of them were incomplete, inaccurate or both, rendering navigation in some sections of the city’s bowels virtually impossible. She’d learned as much from several private investigators, all of whom had turned down her case.

After an eternity, Captain Monroe entered, steaming cup of coffee in hand, and sat across from her without a word of greeting. She bit back the urge to tell him about the precarious position of the abandoned cup. She wasn’t here to regulate his coffee consumption.

“Thank you for seeing me, Captain,” she said as evenly as she could. “Again.”

He grunted, and began shuffling through the papers on his desk, clearly searching for something. “You here for an update?” His dismissive tone made it clear he wanted her out the door as quickly as possible.

She tried to keep the frustration out of her voice. “Yes. I’d like to know why nobody is searching for her.”

Monroe examined a sheet, frowned, tossed it back and kept rooting around. Lindsay itched to jump in and make square corners and open spaces on his desk.

“Ms. Sterling, do you know how many miles of tunnels there are beneath New York?”

“No. I don’t.”

Monroe squinted at another scrap of paper. “Neither do I, or anybody else. They run for hundreds of miles, and go down as deep as twelve stories. What I do know is how many men I have to patrol those tunnels, and that number is exactly thirty.”

There was a stapled sheaf of papers suspended over the edge of the desk, and the way the Captain was bulldozing around it was going to slide off. “Nevertheless, it’s your duty to search for missing persons.”

He pinned her with a look no doubt reserved for punks and do-gooders. “I don’t need you to remind me of my job. I’ve been on the force for thirty-four years. I know my responsibilities.”

Clearly being nice wasn’t going to work. “Then, why aren’t you doing anything?”

“Ms. Sterling, how many times do I need to repeat myself before you get it? The people down there are not like the people up here. Most of them are drug addicts. Many have extreme psychological problems. Unless we get some kind of solid lead on this investigation, I’m not sending my men down in a blind search. It’s too dangerous.”

“But you’re the police!”

The captain’s face reddened in anger. “Last year we had an officer knifed to death down there. Another one was beaten so badly he’ll never walk again, and do you know what he was beaten with? His own nightstick. And that’s in subway and maintenance tunnels we regularly patrol, not in the lower levels. We’d need an army to conduct a thorough search, and—surprise, surprise—we don’t have one. I explained this to your niece before she went down. She decided she knew better.”

Lindsay sucked in her breath to snap back, and then slowly released it. If she was going to find Seline, she needed his cooperation, no matter how unwilling he might be to give it. She rescued the slipping report and set it safely on his desk. He peered at it, then snatched it up.

“Well, at least you found something that you were looking for,” she commented with emphasis. “Look, I understand my niece was no great friend of the NYPD. I understand she was conducting her research despite your warnings, and despite
my
warnings, to be frank. I understand that you’re undermanned and don’t want to place your men in danger. But Captain, I can’t just forget about her. There must be something we can do.”

Monroe stared coldly across at her. She held it. “Ms. Sterling, I really don’t think I can help you…” he began, but his eyes darted to a battered old Rolodex tucked against his computer. She pressed for the advantage.

“Please, Captain,” she pleaded, “if you can think of anybody who could find her, anyone at all, I need to know.”

Monroe stared back, setting his jaw as if weighing his options. “There is one guy,” he said after a moment, though by his expression he was already regretting his words.

“Who is he?”

“His name is Jack Cole. Used to be a professor.”

Lindsay froze, went as stiff as the bodies of the homeless that turned up every day now on the city’s icy streets. “Did you say Jack Cole? Jack Andrew Cole?”

Monroe’s hand hovered over the Rolodex. “You know him?”

“Yes,” she replied, fond memories softening her initial shock. “We used to be best friends back in high school. I haven’t seen him in”—she did the math—“eighteen years. He’s a…a scientist?”

“Anthropologist. Expert in urban subcultures.” Monroe set the Rolodex in front of him and began flipping. “Did a lot of work around the world. London, Paris, Rome, Moscow and here in New York. Nobody knows more about the underside of cities.”

Lindsay shook her head in wonder. “That’s the kind of work he always said he was going to do. He could find Seline, couldn’t he?”

“If he wanted, though I doubt he will,” Monroe said. “I guess you could say he’s retired.”

“Retired?” Lindsay echoed.

“About three years ago, Dr. Cole went missing in the underground during one of his expeditions. We searched for him as best we could. After a couple of weeks, we simply didn’t have resources to keep it up. He was presumed dead, and that’s the way things stayed till early last year when he finally surfaced.”

“He spent two
years
underground? What happened to him?”

Monroe eyed one of the cards, then shook his head and kept flipping. “He didn’t say.”

“What do you mean he didn’t say?” Lindsay asked. That wasn’t the Jack she’d known. He would’ve popped up, those lion-like eyes of his bright with enthusiasm, and begun telling the world of his adventures.

“I’m saying he didn’t say,” Monroe growled. “End of story.”

Not for her. She’d find him and he’d help her. He wouldn’t let her down. She knew that much about him.

“Yeah, here it is.” Monroe stopped at a card and began patting the papers in the hunt for a pen.

Lindsay produced her own pen and paper.

Monroe smirked as he jotted down the address. It was a few blocks from Gates Avenue, in Bed-Stuy. Though parts of Bedford-Stuyvesant were wonderful places to live, featuring beautiful tree-lined rows of century-old brownstone homes and tight-knit communities, Gates Avenue was infamous for its poverty and crime rate. She didn’t need to be a psychologist to see Monroe doubted that a professional white woman, dressed like she’d stepped off the pages of a fashion magazine, would dare set foot there.

“You have his phone number?”

“No,” Monroe said flatly. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a lot of work to do today.”

Lindsay had the address memorized before she reached the door. As she was leaving, the captain called out to her.

“Make sure you go yourself.”

She turned in the doorway. “I beg your pardon?”

“I said you’ll need to go there yourself. Cole isn’t likely to help you, Ms. Sterling. He definitely won’t if you hire someone to go talk to him.”

What did he take her for? Thirty years on the force and he hadn’t figured out that appearances meant nothing. “I learned long ago that if I wanted anything done, I’d have to do it myself. Today you just reminded me of that.”