The Long Way Down (Daniel Faust #1)(3)
“Tonight,” she said. “You come down to the Garden tonight. Don’t you say no to me, boy. I’ll come and drag you by the ear. Don’t think I won’t.”
I couldn’t help laughing. “All right, all right, I believe you. I’ll be down later. I have a job to take care of.”
“Mm-hmm?” I could hear her disbelief dripping from the receiver. “A job? That what you call fleecing tourists at three-card monte?”
“A real job, though I don’t think it’s going to amount to much. Mostly just trying to keep my client from going postal on a guy who might be innocent. You know anything about the storm-drain tunnels?”
“I know not to go down there, ever. Full of crazy junkies and worse.”
“I know about the junkies,” I said. “It’s the ‘and worse’ part I’m concerned about.”
She sounded cagey all of a sudden. “Nothin’ too particular, but I threw the shells last night, just to see which way the wind was blowing. The Loa say a storm’s coming. A bad one.”
“Don’t suppose your spirits could be a little more specific?”
“You just watch yourself,” she said. “There’s a whole mess of trouble fixin’ to land on somebody’s head.”
? ? ?
When Mama’s spirits said trouble was on the way, I knew better than to second-guess her. Still, a job was a job, so I’d just have to hope any dark clouds looming on the horizon weren’t headed my way. I pulled up a map of storm-tunnel entrances on my laptop and cross-referenced it with the article on Stacy’s death, trying to pinpoint the most likely spot where she would have gone underground. Or where her body was dumped.
I put my hopes on a ditch a few blocks north of Fremont Street. It was four in the afternoon by the time I parked my battered old Ford on the side of the road and walked up to a barbed wire fence. I wanted to be away from here by nightfall, not that it would matter once I went underground. I hadn’t counted on the fence, but it wasn’t a problem; some adventurous soul had already taken wire cutters and peeled back a hole big enough to slip through, right under a stark No Trespassing sign.
The ditch ran about fifteen feet deep with steep, sloping walls. Garbage littered the water-stained concrete below, a wasteland of crumpled beer cans, scraps of plastic, and glittering shards of broken glass. I climbed down an access ladder, and checked my flashlight for the twentieth time. It was an old clip-on model. It had never failed me before, but this would be a bad place to start.
One of the storm-drain tunnels opened up here, nearly ten feet wide and just as high. Graffiti in a riot of faded colors adorned the walls of the tunnel mouth. Layer upon layer of tags and scrawls and symbols, like a dig site waiting for some archaeologist to peel the paint back a millimeter at a time, discovering ancient wisdom. The freshest tags were harsh, angular, and angry red. They didn’t look like modern art. They looked tribal.
The sunlight died a few steps into the tunnel. Gravel and glass crunched under my shoes. I clicked on the flashlight and attached it to my pocket, cursing the feeble beam as I made my way deeper. The tunnel was awash in the odor of mildew and stale water. I kept glancing back at the entrance, at the reassuring blob of daylight, as it faded farther and farther away. After a couple minutes of walking, the tunnel made a sharp bend, and that last comfort vanished.
It felt like being sealed in a tomb. The concrete walls amplified my footsteps to the sound of a gunshot. The echoes of dripping water surrounded me. Something scurried, sending a rock tumbling, and I angled my beam around trying to catch a glimpse of anything but the squirming, thumb-sized cockroaches that fled from the light.
It was dark. Not midnight dark, not even midnight on a new moon. Pitch dark. The kind your eyes can’t adjust to, no matter how you strain. Maybe a hundred feet past the bend, the tunnel split into a three-way junction. A faint, distant glow beckoned me down the left-hand turn.
The glow turned out to be a lamp nestled behind a patchwork wall, tiny fingers of light escaping to reach toward me. My flashlight drifted across ramshackle boards and an overturned grocery cart. I almost choked with the stench of mold and rancid trash. The lamp was behind a crude lean-to built with scavenged scrap. As I approached, I thought I heard whispers and the clink of glass on metal.
I froze in mid-step. No telling who I’d run into down here, but nobody lived in a storm tunnel because they were a social butterfly who loved making new friends.
“Anybody up there?” I called out, wincing at how the tunnel threw my voice back at me. “I’m just passing through, not looking for trouble.”
A pair of bloodshot eyes peered through a break in the scrap wall. “You Metro?” asked a cracked voice.
“No. Just doing a favor for a friend. Mind if I come closer? Want to ask you a couple of questions.”
The eyes narrowed, and I held up my open hands.
“Yeah, all right,” the voice grumbled. I approached slowly, taking my time, no sudden moves, like visiting a possibly deranged vagrant in a hut twenty feet below the city streets was the most natural thing in the world. To be fair, I’d been in weirder places.
The lean-to only had two walls, I realized as I came around the side. The back lay open between one wall and the tunnel concrete, and the resident had carved out a little home for himself inside. He had an army-surplus cot, a table with a hot plate and the lamp, and some transparent garbage bags stuffed with clothes. It seemed oddly bright, brighter than the tiny lamp should have been able to muster, until I noticed he’d spattered the inner walls and tunnel ceiling with a coat of paint the color of a dusty eggshell.