“The good news is that when it came time to rebuild, the city saw the opportunity to fix both the flooding and the flushing problems at the same time, so they passed a law and said they were going to raise all the streets in Pioneer Square. How? They decided to keep the lower sidewalks down there where they always were, but they built retaining walls behind each curb and filled up the streets in the middle. Then they built these metal archways connecting the new street level up here to the buildings. They eventually poured new sidewalks across the top of the archways and voilà! Problem solved. That’s where we’re standing right now, on the new sidewalk. What was the building’s second floor became the main floor, and what had been the main floor became the basement. And these skylights you see here are providing light to the old sidewalks down beneath us. Thus, the areaways. Got any problems now?”
He glanced from Sylvia to me and then gave a quick shake of his head, meaning no, no problem. But he was hiding something. There definitely was a problem. I’d have to ask him before we started any sort of major activity in the tunnel.
“Okay,” I said to Sylvia. “Lead on.”
* * * *
Sylvia led us into her basement. It was a large square space. All the windows to the areaways were filled in with brick, same as the other basements we’d seen, and the doors, one on each exterior wall, were made of heavy iron with padlocks (also the same). Libby Black was working on a frame on one of the two large worktables.
“Hi, y’all!” she said, enthusiastically. “Y’all fightin’ crime and makin’ the world a safer place this mornin’?”
I smiled. “Yeah, something like that. Right, Doc?”
He nodded. Since his normal demeanor was stoic; I needed to check his pulse now. I turned to Libby. “We’re headin’ on into the areaway; going to check things out.”
“Really?” she said. She gave a little shiver. “That place gives me the creeps. I sit down here and I hear things coming from the other side of that door: weird things—eerie, creepy things.”
I glanced at Doc and, if I didn’t know better, I’d have sworn he was scared. I’ve seen him take on five grown men at the same time in a dark alley, and he had never before looked scared. Amused? Yeah. Scared? No way.
But now? His eyes were wider than normal. He kind of leaned forward, on the balls of his feet, like he was ready to take off.
Libby noticed, too. “You alright there, big guy?” she asked. “You’re lookin’ a little peaked.”
Doc glanced at her, then nodded quickly. “I’m okay. Thanks.”
“Got your light?” I asked Doc.
He nodded.
I shrugged, then I turned to Sylvia. “Okay, then. We’re ready.”
“Libby?” she said. “Would you grab the key?”
Libby popped up and walked over to a nearby shelf where the key was hanging from a hook. She walked over and unlocked the padlock.
“Here you are, boys.” She pulled the heavy door back, and we stepped through into the areaway.
Even though it was broad daylight outside and the overhead sidewalk outside of the Lyon Gallery still had many of the purple-tinted prism skylights installed to light up the areaway, inside it was definitely murky, if not downright dark. The prisms were so tinted and covered over with dust, we hardly knew they were there, unless we happened to look up. It was going to take a few minutes for our eyes to adjust.
“So,” Sylvia said, “I’ll tell you what I know. You’re on Main Street. Uphill that way to the east there,” she pointed her light off into the dark, “you’ll eventually run into Second Avenue.” I shined my flashlight that way as well. It’s very powerful, but still the way got murky after a hundred feet or so.
“How far do you think it goes?” I asked.
“To the fire station on the corner, probably eighty yards or so. I think I read somewhere that the whole block is 250 feet square.”
I nodded.
“The other way here,” she said, turning to the west, “only goes about twenty feet before you hit a solid plug of concrete. The city poured that in late 2000. See the street wall there?” She shined her light directly across from the door, ten feet away. “That’s the retaining wall that holds the street up at the higher level. In 2000, the city engineer said that the wall needed reinforcing at the corners, so they poured the concrete. Perfect timing, because a year later, the Nisqually earthquake hit, and there was no damage to the street or the upper sidewalks around here.”
I nodded. “Worked out well, then.”
“It did. Except now it completely blocks the areaway. Not that there’s anyone strolling around down here nowadays, but for you guys, when you go to check out the areaway on Occidental Mall and over on Jackson, you’ll need to come back into the gallery and use the other door. It goes out on the other side of the concrete.”
“Easy enough,” I said. “They didn’t pour concrete up at the corner at Second and Main?”
She shook her head. “Nope. On this entire block, they just reinforced the street walls here at Occidental and Main, and on the opposite corner on Jackson and Second.”
I nodded just as a low moaning sound came from somewhere in the darkness.
“Oooh!” Libby said, stepping back away from the door. “Y’all hear that?”
Doc shifted nervously.
“I think those are just these pipes,” Sylvia said. She shined her flashlight straight up. Suspended from the sidewalk above were a half-dozen pipes running parallel to the overhead sidewalk, covered in dust and spiderwebs. The dust webs hung in long streamers.
I took a deep breath. “Okay, then. We’re ready. We’re going to close this, so our eyes can adjust,” I said to Libby as Sylvia stepped back into the basement. “Don’t lock it.”
She smiled. “Y’all might be down here forever if I did that. You and the other ghosts, that is.”
“Thanks for the thought,” I said. “See you guys in a bit.” I swung the door closed, and we were plunged into darkness.
* * * *
Fortunately, after a couple of minutes, our vision began to adjust, and the light wasn’t so bad. The outside of the Lyon Gallery basement from the areaway sidewalk looked almost the same as the floor above, except darker. That and the windows were bricked over. The ground itself was uneven, most likely the result of 120 years of sawdust-filled dirt settling. In fact, the cracked and heaved concrete was completely missing in some areas. Here and there, old boards and pipes and even furniture were strewn about. The areaways were definitely not in prime condition.
“May as well go this way first,” I said, pointing east up Main Street. I took a couple of steps, but then I noticed that Doc wasn’t following. I turned. “You coming?”
He didn’t move, simply stared at me. I’d never seen him like this before.
“Dude,” I said, walking back to him. “What the hell’s the matter with you?”
“This is tough, man,” he said.
“What?”
“Caves. Tunnels. Underground. I’ve got a problem being underground.”
“I’m starting to see that.”
He nodded.
“Claustrophobia? Because if that’s it, we can knock off, and I’ll come back with Toni.”
He shook his head. “No. That’s not it.”
“Afraid we’ll get lost?”
He shook his head again. “No.”
“Something you can put into words, then?”
He hesitated, then nodded. “Yeah. Apaches don’t do well underground. It’s on account of the Tuar-Tums.”
I stared at him. “Say again?”
“Tuar-Tums. The Little People.” He looked past me up the darkened path. He took a deep breath. “I can just about tolerate it, but you’d never get Pri in a place like this. She’s San Carlos Chiricahua. For them it’s worse. She was born about twenty miles away from the Superstition Mountains. That’s where the original Tuar-Tums live. Inside the mountains. They’re dangerous, man.”
“This is what, so
mething you grew up with?”
He nodded. “From a young age. The Tuar-Tums—the Little People. They live underground. They’re not kind to visitors.”
“You’ll be okay if we go on in?”
He hesitated, apparently wrestling with himself. After a few seconds, he nodded. “Yeah. Just be ready to run. If they show up, I ain’t waitin’ for you.”
Chapter 11
Little by little, things that a minute ago had been hidden by the dark began to drift into focus as our eyes adapted. The detritus strewn about was mostly shoved to one side of the walkway or the other, leaving the center relatively clear. This was good, because I didn’t even want to think about the diseases I might contract if I scraped into the jagged end of a 120-year-old rusty pipe. We moved forward, concentrating on avoiding the junk. After just a few steps, though, I stopped.
“Wait a second, Doc. This is stupid. I’m sitting here straining to avoid all this crap, and what’s likely to happen is that we’re going to walk right past the stuff we’re supposed to be looking for in the first place. Let’s make it easy and use our lights.”
“Okay by me. You’re the one wanted to fumble around in the dark and be all stealthy.”
I shook my head. “You’re right. Just on the off chance that Laskin or his boys are down here, I want to hear or see them before they see us. But the ‘no-lights’ thing ain’t working.” I pulled my flashlight out of my pocket and turned it on, kicking the beam down to low power, partly to save the batteries, and partly to reduce our exposure: my SureFire light on high power could be seen for miles.
“Light discipline,” Doc said, looking at the beam. “I’ll leave mine off.”
We were able to move faster now, making our way eastbound up Main Street, toward Second Avenue. The sensation was eerie—as if we were walking along chasing a dancing beam of light on a city sidewalk in a dark tunnel. Next to a whole bunch of boarded-up shops with bricks in the windows.
When we paused beneath a skylight in the sidewalk above, we could occasionally make out the shapes of people walking along Main Street, completely unaware of us. I pointed upward. “I got an idea,” I whispered. “Let’s count to three, then yell. ‘Save us! We’re trapped!’—something like that.”
He looked at me, his face a mixture of disgust and terror. “You’re insane.”
I grinned, then started moving again. I looked ahead, trying to make out the corner somewhere up ahead. Sylvia said it was seventy or eighty yards away, but I’d been shielding my light, aiming just ahead. I didn’t want to raise it now and announce our presence. Instead, I tried to visualize our position by picturing the street level above in my mind—Lyon Gallery on the northwest corner of the block, then came Omar Reynolds’s shop, then two more empty shops before the alley. After that, the fire station took up the rest of the block all the way to the northeast corner.
We passed the first door at Reynolds’s space, then the next two before reaching a place where the building on our right apparently gave way to a solid brick wall. I stopped and shined my light on the wall and on the street wall to our left.
“This must be the alley between the buildings,” I said.
He nodded, and then he gave a nervous glance behind us, perhaps thinking of the Tuar-Tums.
“You doing alright?” I asked.
He nodded. “Yeah. Just perfect. Let’s keep going.”
We crossed the alley, and eventually we were able to make out the corner, looming ahead in the darkness. To our right were four doors leading to the space beneath the firefighters’ museum on Main. Curiously, the padlock on the second-to-last door was missing. I pushed on the door, and it moved slightly. I pushed again, harder this time, and the door swung open enough to see inside.
I flashed my light around inside. “Look, here.” It was pitch-black inside, except for the beam of light from my flashlight. The large room was clearly not being used—hadn’t been for years, judging by its appearance. Dusty construction debris was everywhere: sawhorses, boards, a broken desk. A set of stairs in the back corner led to a landing and a doorway on the main floor.
“Let’s check it out,” I said.
“Hold it,” Doc whispered, putting his hand on my shoulder. “Why don’t we just remember where it is and check it out on the way back. We might see something better around the corner.”
“Hmm. Good idea.”
The last space on Main was locked, so we walked past it and then rounded the corner. I peered ahead into the darkness. The areaway was long, and I couldn’t see the end. Neither could I see any lights that might have indicated someone else’s presence. Hopefully, we were alone. We kept going.
We passed the firefighters’ museum, and then the building style shifted.
“This next door here must be for the piano lounge basement. And that one up there,” I shined my light ahead, “that one’s Laskin’s.” We walked up to it.
I shined my light around the areaway near Laskin’s door. “Think about it, man,” I whispered. “If Laskin’s hiding shit down here, he’d probably keep it reasonably nearby, right?”
“Maybe.”
“Just humor me. Pull your light out and help me search the space around here. We’re looking for something he could use to hold his drug stash.”
“How big would it be?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know, depends on how much of that Blue Molly stuff he’s holding. Bigger than a bread box, right? Wouldn’t need to be too huge, I imagine. Anything from a shoe box on up, I suppose.”
We started looking and almost immediately, Doc spoke up. “Whoa—look at this.” He shone his light on the ground.
As I looked, he said, “Footprints.” So far, the sidewalk, such as it was, consisted of a mix of broken and intact concrete, interspersed with occasional wood planking, and even some powdery bare dirt here and there. The ground here in front of Laskin’s window was mostly intact concrete. But the soft dirt left tracks on it. Someone had tracked the dirt onto the concrete.
I studied the tracks a little closer. “I don’t know, man. Those could be, like, eighty years old.”
“I don’t think they had Nike eighty years ago.” He pointed, and I looked closer and saw the unmistakable “swoosh” logo.
I nodded. “Oh. Good eye.”
I studied the footprints and ran through possible implications, but could only draw one conclusion: we definitely weren’t the only ones who’d been stomping about down here. Someone else had been down here, too. There had to be some reason why Laskin and his boys were interested in the areaway. Maybe the answer had to do with the Lyon Building. Or maybe the answer lay ahead. “Let’s finish up this street and work our way back. Then we’ll be half-done.”
We avoided stepping anywhere near the tracks and pushed on, all the way south to Jackson, where we ran into the reinforcing concrete the city had poured to bolster the street wall. All the doorways from Laskin’s shop to the end of the street were locked from the inside. There was no place any drugs could have been stored. We turned around and started back.
We reached Laskin’s door and paused again. I heard voices coming from inside his basement. Then I heard the rattling of a key unlocking Laskin’s door from the other side. A couple of thoughts flashed through my mind: First, if Laskin or his boys were down here doing something illegal, I didn’t want to blow our advantage by letting them know we were down here looking for clues. Be best if we remained invisible. Second, and even more immediately compelling, I didn’t want to stumble into round two of our bar fight, the opposing side having unknown numbers.
I looked at Doc. “Dude!” I whispered. “Run!”
* * * *
We needed to get back up around the corner at Main before the Russians piled outside and hit us with their lights. I figured we had forty yards to go. This should have taken only five or six seconds or so, but if we’d moved that quickly, it would have by necessity been without regard to noise, and then they’d have heard us for sure. Stealth was the order of the
day, and the immediate goal was to quietly cover enough ground to get out of light range.
Of course, I didn’t have to tell Doc this. He was naturally stealthy—the man could sneak up on his own shadow, tap it on the shoulder, and then sneak away without anyone being the wiser. Me, personally, I had to work at it a little harder.
Behind us, I heard the door swing open, and Laskin’s crew spilled out into the areaway, jabbering away, making no attempt at all to be quiet. Sneaking away in the dark, I was unable to determine their numbers, but there were several at least. They laughed and talked, speaking mostly Russian with some English sprinkled in here and there, evidently with no concerns in the world. Apparently they hadn’t seen or heard us slinking away.
We rounded the corner. “Hold up,” I whispered. “I’d like to know what those guys are doing down here.” We flattened ourselves up against the wall and listened. The men continued walking our direction up Second toward the corner, the beams of their flashlights dancing ahead in front of them.
“They’re still coming,” Doc whispered a few seconds later. “We gotta move, or we’re going to get in trouble.”
I listened for a second longer, then I said, “Yeah, okay. Let’s hit it.”
We moved out again, quietly. We were heading west on Main, back down the hill toward Sylvia’s gallery. As we started, I realized that I wanted to stay, maybe hide somewhere and watch these guys, try to figure out what they were up to. Unfortunately, short of burrowing under a stack of one-hundred-year-old boards, there was nowhere to hide in the areaway. Except …
“Dude,” I whispered. Doc was two steps behind me.
I pointed to the open door in the second space. “In here. Let’s hide out and see what these guys are up to.”
He gave me a look indicating that I was insane, but then he followed me through the open door. Doc spent too much time in the army to waste time debating a decision in the midst of a crisis. Almost any action decisively taken was better than standing around looking stupid. He’d be free to second-guess once the crisis was past.
M.D. Grayson - Danny Logan 05 - Blue Molly Page 10