Concrete Underground

by Moxie Mezcal

  He stuck out a thick, bright pink tongue and licked it slowly across his front teeth. "You want it straight up? Here it goes: your job is Lily. Focus on her – go through her files, check the surveillance records on her, talk to people who knew her. Forget about McPherson, you're barking up the wrong tree there. Keep your nose out of Asterion's business, and for fuck's sake, I never even want to hear the words 'Room 33' out of your mouth again. Is that simple enough for you?"

  He climbed into his car, and I got in mine, made myself as comfortable as I could manage, and then quickly passed out.

  * * *

  22. What the Fuck Is Wrong with You?

  The next morning I dragged myself into Abrasax and asked Max to see the surveillance records on Lily.

  "Ah, so I take it you and Saint Anthony had a nice chat on the way home last night," he gloated.

  "Yeah, it was so nice, I still have some of his spunk encrusted on my shoe."

  Max nodded in amusement while he tapped something into his phone. A second later, my phone buzzed. I checked it and saw that I had a text from him, which consisted of a 13-digit alphanumeric code.

  "Go down to the 17th floor, show them that reference number, and they'll set you up with the records," he instructed.

  "What's wrong with writing it down on a sticky note?"

  He scrunched up his face. "Ugh, paper is so barbaric. I also just sent them a message, so they know you're on your way."

  ---

  I settled into a cramped private stall with a computer terminal and logged in to pull up the files on Lily. I was shocked by the breadth of the information collected.

  Every credit card purchase, whether on her company or personal card, going back years. Same thing for phone, e-mail, and internet logs. One log compiled from the internal GPS from her cell phone and another from her car showing her each and every move. Video and audio surveillance of her home and office for the last two weeks, presumably when Max first became suspicious of her.

  I watched the video feeds from her town house first. It looked like there were two cameras in her living room, one in her bedroom, and one in the kitchen. At least they had the decency not to put one in the bathroom.

  Thankfully, they were all motion activated, so they only recorded when she was home. I played them back at 4x speed, scanning for anything that might be useful.

  As I sat there, staring like a drone at the images flashing on the screen, my mind wandered. I thought about Seamus the bum saying, "They watch you fuck," on the Light Rail, and then days later ending up dead and buried. I thought about the dead stripper last night and how sorrowful her lifeless eyes looked peeking out from under that domino mask, and then for some reason that made me think about Columbine and the veil she wore the first time we met. Then I thought about Anthony holding that purple wig, and that morphed into Anthony holding Violet, taking her soft, shapely body into his arms and sliding his cock inside her, and I imagined her pussy looking exactly like the stripper's had as she gyrated on stage.

  I slowed the video down to real time. On the screen, Lily had undressed and dug the sex toy out of her underwear drawer. Now she was lying back in bed and using it.

  A wave of blood rushed to both my face and my crotch simultaneously, causing my cheeks to turn bright red and my penis to swell within my pants. I looked around. No one could see into or out of the booth I was in. So I unzipped my pants and started to masturbate.

  On the screen, I watched the fuzzy, pixelated image of Lily plunging the dildo into herself as she writhed on the bed and bucked her hips wildly. Meanwhile, I jerked off furiously to reach my own orgasm, feeling the seed pumping out in short, powerful bursts.

  I looked down at the floor and saw my semen pooled in the exact same shape as Anthony's had been last night. At first this surprised me, but soon that gave way to an overwhelming sense of nausea.

  What the fuck did you just do? I wondered to myself.

  My gaze returned to the video. Lily had put away the toy but taken out something else. Straining my eyes, I was able to recognize it as the framed photograph of Max. And from the gentle bob of her head, I could tell she was crying.

  I suddenly felt dirty, like my skin was coated in an invisible layer of thick grime, and no matter how much I rubbed it wouldn't come off.

  Fuck it, I need to get some air.

  ---

  After grabbing a cigarette on the 17th floor smoker's balcony, I returned to my booth to find that someone had gone in while I was gone and mopped the floor clean. I tried not to think about the implications of this.

  I resumed sifting through the records, but I couldn't focus on the work; my mind kept wandering. I wasn't sure if I was still twisted up from mixing pain pills with booze, or it was some after-effect of all the blows to the head I've been taking, or maybe even just mental strain from the epic fucked-up-edness of the past couple weeks. But for some reason I felt disassociated, like I wasn't actually in control of my own actions, like I'd severed the connection between my body and mind. It was as if I were a ghost watching my own body or a passive observer watching all this on a screen from somewhere else entirely.

  I wondered whether I had even just jerked off here in this booth. It seemed hard to believe, and certainly it was much more convenient to tell myself I'd only imagined it. After all, there was no physical evidence it had happened.

  I stared blankly at the screen, which contained rows and rows of data inputs, coordinates and time stamps sent from the GPS in Lily's car. My eyes unfocused and the characters blurred together into a wash of red, blue, and green pixels.

  I rubbed my eyes, cursing the futility of my task before plunging right back into it.

  Then, surprisingly, I noticed something interesting.

  Every day over the past week, she stopped at the same point on her way home from work. It was a deviation from her normal route.

  The terminal wasn't connected to the internet, so I took out my own cell and looked up the coordinates on Google Maps. It was a point on the Serra Expressway overpass where it crosses Highway 77, not far from the Guadalupe Bridge. Normally the Millennial Bridge would have been the quickest way for her to get home to the west side from downtown. Taking the Guadalupe Bridge would be at least a fifteen minute detour, so there must have been some reason behind it.

  I considered whether it was worthwhile to go rushing straight out there.

  Fuck it, I need to get some air, I thought and briefly paused to wonder why that sounded familiar.

  On my way to the elevators, I ran into Max's assistant. I wondered how long she had been waiting around for me and whether she knew what I had done inside the booth. Then I wondered whether she had been the one who cleaned it up. That's ludicrous, I told myself as I pictured her on her hands and knees, naked but for a pair of vinyl gloves and a hair net, scrubbing at the floor with a sponge and bucket of sudsy water.

  What the fuck is wrong with you? I screamed in my head – or maybe to my head.

  "Mr. Maxwell asked me to give you this," she said and handed me a glossy rave card like the one Columbine gave me for the Labyrinthine party. "He said he was going to e-mail it to you, but then thought maybe you'd appreciate the feel of paper. I'm not sure what that means."

  I looked over the card. One side was red with black lettering that read:

  HIGHWATER SOCIETY

  CORONATION ANNIVERSARY

  MASQUERADE BALL

  Saturday, March 20, 9:00 PM

  Invitation Only

  Costumes Mandatory

  That was tomorrow night. It sounded intriguing, but I was a little weary of the bit about costumes. Then I flipped the card over. The other side was printed white-on-white. I held it at an angle so the light caught the ink just right to reveal the message:

  YOU ARE BEING LIED TO...

  TRUST US

  * * *

  23. Sunsets, Mirrors & Convenient Illusions

  "Yeah, I guess I'm going," I said into the phone. "I'm just not sure about this wh
ole costume thing."

  "Argh, why are you always such a wet blanket?" Columbine replied. "Have a little imagination. I bet you're the kind of guy who likes to point out all the mirrors and wires during a magic show."

  "Of course, at least until some bitter cow inevitably starts mooing about how I'm spoiling the show for her snotty little brats."

  That got a laugh out of her. "So anyways, I wanna hang out tonight. Come get me?"

  "No, I told you, I'm following that lead on Lily. And the way shit's been going lately, I want you to stay out of it for a while. I don't want to be responsible if something happens to you."

  "Boo," she jeered in response.

  "Listen, I'm almost there, I gotta go."

  "Okay, but at least come see me tomorrow before the party, then we can go together."

  "Sure," I agreed before hanging up and pulling over the Porsche.

  The sun was already setting as I parked on the shoulder of the overpass. I got out of the car and stood in the exact the spot where Lily would, according to her phone's GPS. It was on the western shoulder of the expressway, facing toward the sun as it disappeared behind the Dientes Torcidos mountain range across the valley. I wondered if that was why Lily had been stopping here after work – to see that magnificent view of the sunset. Then I looked down at the cars whizzing by on Highway 77 and followed them as they crossed the Guadalupe Bridge over the San Hermes and vanished in the distance.

  Twilight settled in, and I watched as little dots of fire flared up on the east bank, marking the shantytown that started under the bridge and spread north back up the river.

  I thought about how each of those flames represented a cluster of people gathering around for warmth, people who had fallen through the cracks and disappeared from society. People the rest of the city preferred to see as nameless, faceless, anonymous. I imagined what it would be like to end up down there, how easy it would be to lose your own sense of self, your identity – how easy it would be to be forgotten.

  Suddenly I felt a strong, irresistible magnetism pulling me there, beckoning me. And somehow, I knew with absolute certainty that Lily was there.

  ---

  The San Hermes River runs down from the mountains northeast of the valley and snakes its way right through the middle of our city.

  The San Hermes River Park is actually a series of smaller parks, a long, narrow stretch of preserved open space that follows along either bank for miles, beginning from the old Guadalupe Bridge that connects the northern industrial zone to the city proper, and spanning all the way past the newer Millennial Bridge that was just completed before the turn of the century.

  The park varies in width from small public gardens no wider than a city block all the way up to the ten mile wide area surrounding Hermosa Ravine, which is set up for campgrounds, hiking trails, rock climbing, and river rafting.

  Hermosa Ravine is the park's heart, where people go to play, to escape, to fall in love. Millennial Bridge is its face, the point most visible to residents in the city proper, the shiny new monument that gets slapped on postcards and travel brochures as an homage to progress. And that makes Guadalupe Bridge the asshole. It's there and it serves a function, but it's ugly and smelly and most people would rather not think about it too much.

  The shantytown, then, is the turd that the bridge squeezed out. It consisted of a couple hundred makeshift shacks cobbled together out of scrap metal, old wood, cardboard, plastic tarps, and anything else that could be scavenged.

  Most of the people who lived by the river were undocumenteds – mostly newcomers who didn't have local family and hadn't been able to make any connections for a place to stay. Then of course you had your junkies and your alcoholics who had been bounced from the shelters for continuing to use, your runaways, your garden variety crazies who were booted onto the street when County Mental Health closed half its beds, and finally other sundry people who for whatever reason found value in living off the grid – people who were hiding out, people who had nowhere else to go, and people who were feeding off the carcasses of the weak.

  I passed by a mirrored closet door that had been refashioned into the wall of someone's shack and caught a glimpse of my reflection. The glass was cracked in an intricate spiderweb pattern in the upper left hand corner, but other than that it was in pretty good condition. I paused for a minute to look at myself in it and was disturbed how well I seemed to blend into the surroundings.

  I hadn't shaved since before I was kidnapped, my shower this morning was at best perfunctory, and I hadn't had a chance to do laundry and therefore had been wearing the same tattered coat and torn jeans for days. Add to that my scarred and twisted mess of a face, and you'd think I purposely dressed in a kind of hobo camouflage.

  Then suddenly a face appeared in profile in the broken glass. It was Lily's; she was talking to a dark-skinned Latin American woman about twenty yards behind me. I spun around and found the other woman cooking some unidentifiable animal on a spit over a metal drum fire, but Lily was nowhere in sight.

  I ran over to her and shouted, "Where did that woman go that you were talking to, the redhead?"

  She stared silently, half from lack of comprehension, half from panic caused by my frenzied state.

  I tried again in Spanish, "¿Adónde se fue la pelirroja?"

  She extended her hand out to point right, and I sprinted off.

  Pumping my legs as hard as I could, I weaved my way through the dense crowd. From time to time I'd catch fleeting glimpses of her, flashes of her vivid red hair standing out against the drab surroundings, but she was always just at the edge of my sight, always rounding the next corner, always a step ahead of me.

  I chased her through the haphazard, maze-like layout of the shantytown along a path that twisted and doubled back on itself. It soon felt like I'd been running for miles, but I couldn't be sure that I wasn't going in circles.

  Then, just as I felt my legs about to give, I saw her again, closer than she'd ever appeared before. I launched myself with renewed vigor and hurtled through a small group of migrant day-laborers. But when I broke through them, I saw that my target was really just Lily's reflection in a mirror. I scanned the area, but couldn't find her anywhere. Then I noticed a sickly-thin woman with flaxen hair and realized that the reflection was hers, and that the glow from a nearby fire was making her hair appear red in the mirror.

  She noticed me staring and shot me a sour expression. It was hard to gauge her age; she gave the impression of someone very young, but who was aging prematurely from a harsh living. Her ashen gray skin had lost all the luster and freshness of youth, and her eyes were sunken deep into dark black sockets.

  She wore a bare-midriff halter top and a tattered denim skirt. I imagined that she thought showing that much skin was somehow sexy, but on her it induced pity more than anything else. She was so emaciated that you could see the bones protruding grotesquely through her skin, making her frame look frail and brittle, like a strong wind would knock her over with enough force to snap every bone on impact. Her arms and legs were covered with track marks and needle holes, many of which had become infected.

  "What are you looking at?" she demanded in a voice much throatier and raspier than I expected.

  I opened my mouth to try and somehow explain, but then decided it wasn't worth the trouble. So instead I shrugged and was about to turn away when a familiar voice called out, "There you are, Claire!"

  Violet walked up to the woman, Claire, and tried to throw a wool blanket over her but was rebuffed.

  "Why'd you run off like that?" she asked, not yet noticing me.

  Claire answered, "Because there's nothing else to say. We're done, give it up."

  Violet was about to reply, but then finally caught sight of me out of the corner of her eye. She did a double-take. "D? What are you doing here?" She paused, and then peered more closely at me, unable to stop her upper lip from curling in disgust. "And what happened to your face?"

  I scratched my head. "Um, it
's a long story."

  She shifted her eyes back and forth between the two of us, trying to decide who was the lost cause and who was still worth trying to save.

  Then Claire made the decision for her.

  "I don't have time for this. I've got to go make some money," she said and pushed her way past us, then headed over to a group of four migrant workers who were squatting in a circle, playing cards. She knelt down beside them and tried to strike up a conversation with a mix of broken Spanish and clumsy attempts at seduction – awkwardly running her fingers through her hair and getting them caught in the tangled knots, placing her hand on one man's arm but not being able to stop it from shaking.

  "Jesus," I muttered, "people actually pay for her? I mean seriously, I get that it'd be rough, being poor and alone in a foreign country, cut off from your wife for months, unable to speak the language – sure you'd be hard up. But her? It'd be like fucking Schindler's List."

  Violet stared at me in wide-eyed disbelief, and I made a mental note to keep working on that whole thinking-about-shit-before-saying-it-out-loud trick.

  "God, D, I never realized you were such an unbelievably callous asshole."

  "Look," I tried to backpedal. "I'm just saying if I was gonna pay for it, I'd be a little bit more picky about the merchandise. I mean, not merchandise, I'm sure she's a very nice girl and a real human being with feelings and all that, but she looks like fucking Skeletor. No, that came out wrong. I mean, she's just not my type. I'm into curves – like you, I'd rather pay for you over her any day. Not that I'm calling you a whore, or saying that I would go to one, I'm just saying I'd sleep with you. No wait... look, in fairness, people usually realize that I'm an asshole right away, so you can't hold it against me that you didn't figure it out 'til now."

  Stop. Talking. Right. Now. You. Fucking. Idiot!

  Violet blinked her eyes silently.