by Greg Rucka
It was the way he kept repeating it, as if I hadn’t understood it, as if I hadn’t lived the past three days with the fear of what he’d do to Tommy in my heart and head at every moment.
“I’ve got your cash,” I said. “Now you put him on, you cocksucker, you let me hear his voice, right now, or you get nothing.”
He chuckled. “You sure you want to make that threat?”
“You want the money, asshole?”
There was another chuckle, but not as amused, this time, and then a rustle. I heard labored breathing.
“Tommy?”
“Miriam?” His voice was thin, as if he’d gone without water.
“God, are you all right?”
Another rustle, and the Parka Man came back.
“Three o’clock,” he said, and hung up.
For almost five minutes after he had cut the connection, I just stood in the kitchen, just stood there, thinking. Trying to find a way to get what I wanted, what I needed, without getting myself and my father killed. Because it was clear, so clear now, what he was going to do, what he had to do, if I was correct.
If Tommy knew who the Parka Man was, if Tommy knew he’d killed Mikel, then Tommy was dead as soon as he had the money. Which meant that by the time Tommy got in Charon’s line, he’d find that his daughter was already crossing the Styx; no way in hell was this guy going to let me live after he had the cash. If he was going to tie up his loose ends, he’d tie all of them up, and that meant me, too.
For a morbid moment, I wondered if he’d try to make my death look like an accident. How hard would it be? Musicians die with changes in the seasons, and it wasn’t as if I’d been living a very clean life. Maybe that was why he was having me come to a bar. Pour a bottle down my throat, the rest would be easy.
Maybe I’d get a tribute album, or fan pilgrimages to my grave.
Chapel’s office was downtown, I remembered. I’d have to cover a couple blocks on foot to do what I wanted to do, but it was possible, and if everything went well, it wouldn’t blow the schedule.
I grabbed the backpack, stuffed full, and the Taylor in its case, and went out to the garage, trying to get into the Jeep without Marcus or Hoffman getting a look at what I was doing, struggling with the weight. At first, it seemed like taking the car wasn’t maybe the best idea, that perhaps I could try to go it on foot. But the way Hoffman and Marcus had always been covered, the way there’d never been a gap in the surveillance in front of my house, made me think that there were probably cops out back, too. They wouldn’t have been doing their job if they were only watching the front door.
So I’d stick with the cops I knew. After all, they’d come this far with me.
It was twenty-six minutes to one when I pulled out, heading downtown, jockeying with the lunch hour traffic. I didn’t try to switch lanes or speed up or slow down, nothing to get them worried. It didn’t matter; they were already worried, and the one time I caught them close behind me, close enough to see them reflected in my rearview mirror, Marcus was grim behind the wheel, and Hoffman was again on her radio.
If there were others following me, I couldn’t spot them. Another thing I couldn’t control.
We crossed the river on the Steel Bridge, and it started to rain, spatters on my windshield that the wipers couldn’t quite cope with, as if it wasn’t sincere enough to require their best efforts. I turned at the light on Broadway, then again on Market, and pulled into the underground garage at Chapel’s building. When I took my ticket from the dispenser, I could see the Ford idling near the top of the ramp.
Come on, I thought. Follow me.
The bar went up, and I pulled forward, winding farther down, past rows of parked Beemers and Lexi and Acuras, then through a forest of SUVs. I found a space on the lowest level near the elevator bank, got out with my backpack, and locked up.
There was no sign of the Ford.
This is not going to work, I thought, as I got into the elevator. I am fucked, and this is not going to work.
My hands were shaking when I punched the button for the tenth floor. I had to shove them into my pockets to keep them out of sight, and when the elevator stopped in the lobby, I was glad that I’d done it.
Marcus and Hoffman got on the elevator.
“This is a surprise,” I said.
They didn’t answer, just went to the back of the car, fitting in behind me. It was funny in its own way, how none of us was even bothering to pretend anymore.
We rode another four floors, and the car stopped once more, and two men in nice suits got on, talking anxiously about what the market had done in Japan that morning. They got off again at seven, and when the doors were again closed, I turned to face Hoffman.
“I was a total asshole last night,” I said. “And I’m very sorry.”
“Passive-aggressive and apologetic,” Marcus remarked. “You’re very talented, Miss Bracca.”
“That’s what they say.” I was still looking at Hoffman. She was staring back, and I wasn’t even certain she’d heard me.
Then the elevator stopped and we all got out, and they followed me into the offices of my attorney. Marcus and Hoffman waited near the back of the reception area while I approached Joy at the desk. She got to her feet when she saw me.
“Is Fred expecting you?”
“I hope so. He left me a message last night.”
“Why don’t you have a seat, I’ll tell him you’re here.”
There was a clock in the room, hanging over a Tailhook poster, one I hadn’t seen before. In this one, I was standing beside Van, with Click on a riser just behind us. The clock told me it was seventeen minutes past one.
It was reading twenty-nine to two when Joy, back at her desk, answered her phone, and then told me Mr. Chapel would see me now. I rose and joined her, and Marcus and Hoffman stayed put, unhappy with the situation. They wouldn’t be kept at bay for long.
When we were out of the reception area and winding through the halls, I told Joy that what I really needed was a bathroom, and could she direct me to one. She veered off course, leading me to the restroom.
“I’ll wait for you,” she told me.
“No, don’t do that.” I gave her my best embarrassed grin. “Make me feel like a total princess, you have to wait for me while I pee.”
She laughed, like I knew she would.
“I know the way,” I said. “I can manage the rest.”
“I’ll let him know you’ll be right there.”
“Great, thanks,” I said, and then went into the bathroom before she could say anything else, locking the door behind me. I stood with my back to it, listening, and I didn’t hear her leave, but I didn’t hear anything else through it, either, so it didn’t mean much.
Thirty seconds, I told myself. Give her thirty seconds, then go. More than that, Hoffman and Marcus will barge in. Less, she’ll still be there, waiting.
I watched the second hand move on my wrist.
Then I unlocked the door and took a breath, stepped out as if I knew where I was going and what I was doing. The receptionist had gone, and the only people in the hall were occupied with their own affairs, and paid me no attention. I set off toward Chapel’s office, heard his voice, strained, coming from the area of Joy’s desk. I didn’t stop, hoping that he’d keep Marcus and Hoffman busy, but it still took me almost three more minutes before I found the fire door and my way to the stairs.
The latch echoed in the stairwell when the door shut behind me, and as soon as I heard it click shut, I started running, one hand on the rail, the other on the backpack strap, trying to keep it on my shoulder. I went fast, two, three steps at a time, too ambitious, and I almost fell twice, but I didn’t slow down, and I sure as hell didn’t stop. The hangover swelled in my head. Marcus and Hoffman wouldn’t take long to figure out I was ditching them, if they hadn’t figured it already, and the best I could hope for was that they’d go back to my car, thinking that’s where I was headed.
Their bad luck that Portland has such a wond
erful light-rail system.
There were two men standing in the rain, watching the ramp into the garage when I came out of the building, and I guessed they were cops, and turned my back to them before I had a chance to find out. Hoofed it across the street, my shoulders aching with the weight of the backpack, then jogged to the MAX stop. I made it by ten of two, and there was a train waiting, and I jumped on without paying the fare, working my way to the front of the carriage and dropping into a seat. It wouldn’t be a problem until I was past the Lloyd Center, since fares in downtown were waived, but I didn’t think I’d have time to hop out and pay then, either, and the thought that I might get caught only compounded my anxiety. It would be just my luck to have ditched the cops only to get picked up again for not paying public transportation.
It didn’t happen, and I made the train switch and all the way to the airport without trouble. Halfway to PDX, I started looking around the car, wondering if maybe he was on board, if he was watching, but after a minute realized that was futile. I doubted he was actually following me; the runaround was more to make certain I didn’t get any ideas, I supposed. Like I was going to start doing that at this late date.
Like I’d recognize him without his ski mask and parka, anyway.
The rain was coming heavier when I got off at the airport, and I swung through baggage claim and back outside immediately, heading for the cab stand. There were three people in line, and my watch was reading two forty-one, and the tremor in my hands was getting worse. I wanted a drink, settled for a couple drags of a cigarette, and got a Broadway Cab to take me back downtown.
“Third and Everett,” I said.
The driver, already behind the wheel and pulling us into traffic, glanced at me in the mirror. “You mean Twenty-third and Everett, yeah?”
“No, I mean Third and Everett.”
He started to argue, eyes on me in the mirror, then shrugged. If the strange white girl wanted to go to the heart of bum central, that was not his problem.
“Hurry,” I told him.
Everett straddles the dividing line between Old Town Portland and Chinatown, and there are storefronts all around the area that date back to the turn of the century, and in some cases, earlier. I almost missed the bar, because I was late by my watch, and now even more frightened that I’d fucked everything up. The rain was coming down in sheets, cold and solid, like walking through a car wash, and I had to go down the block twice before I was certain I had the right place, an unmarked and smoked-glass door sandwiched between a porno shop and a Chinese antiques store.
Inside was everything you’d expect, dark and a little dank, with the bar along the left side, and booths along the right, and enough room between the two that I could fit, if I walked sideways. I was soaked to the skin, and the straps of the backpack had dug into my shoulders so hard it felt like my arms would go numb. I was shivering, and it wasn’t the chill that was giving me goose bumps.
The bartender was a woman, alcoholically aged, trapped somewhere between forty and seventy, with drawn skin and gin blossoms on her face. She stared at me and I thought for a moment that she knew who I was.
“Jack rocks,” I said, and dug out a twenty, slapping it on the bar.
She took the bill and grunted. My watch was reading six minutes past three. Rainwater dripped down my neck, and I could feel it soaking the back of my shirt. The fingers on my left hand had started throbbing again. There were only two other patrons in the bar, and both of them would have scared me if I wasn’t already so preoccupied with other fears.
The door opened as I waited for my drink, and Brian Quick entered, soaked from the rain.
I turned hastily away, felt the panic claw at my heart. If I was right, he shouldn’t be here, this didn’t concern him. And if he was here, then I was wrong, and everything I was planning was worthless.
I heard him move to the bar, demand a bottle of beer, and the bartender snarled back at him to wait a fucking minute, then slapped my change down in front of me, planting my glass on top of it. I took the drink in a gulp. It was watered down, and if it was Jack Daniel’s to start with, I was Nina Simone, but it lit a raw fire in my chest, and made me think it was what I needed.
Brian Quick received a bottle, focused on the television hanging over the corner of the bar. He could have been just another midday alcoholic for all the interest he had in the world around him.
I picked up my change, began folding it into my pocket, and saw a small slip of notepaper wedged between bills. I pulled it free, glancing again toward Brian, caught him taking a pull of his beer.
The paper read BACKROOM.
The door was set in the wall behind the final booth, and it opened into a storage room full of cardboard boxes stacked on metal shelves. I took a last look over my shoulder before pushing through, and the bartender was enraptured by the glowing box again, but Brian had twisted on his stool, watching me go. When I stepped in, I didn’t see any lock for the door. A couple of kegs stood in a corner, and a single, naked bulb gave the only illumination. There was no one to be seen, and I thought I’d trapped myself, had started to turn around and head back out when I saw the other door, only about half-height, between two sets of shelves. The door was metal, old, and slightly ajar.
It opened into a chute of some kind, and there was a ladder propped against the wall. I looked down, and in the dim light saw a rough dirt floor maybe fifteen feet below. The walls on either side of the chute were stone, and the air smelled stale and perpetually wet. When I listened, I could hear the echo of water dripping onto stone.
There wasn’t any more time. I adjusted my backpack, and slipped through the opening onto the ladder, feet first. The alcohol wasn’t doing its job, and even when I gripped the rungs tight, forcing my injured fingers to close around the wood, they still kept shaking.
In the room above and behind me, I heard the door swing open, Brian coming from behind.
I’d been right about one thing. Whoever was doing this, they planned to leave me dead.
And they’d picked a perfect place to do it, a place where perhaps hundreds had died before me.
This was the Portland Underground, sometimes called the Shanghai Tunnels, and the reason that the City of Roses had earned the dubious honor of being called the Worst Port in the World. No one knew who had first constructed the tunnels, but they’d begun operation around the 1850s as a means to hold and move, to buy and sell, human beings. Thousands of men and women had disappeared through them during their days of operation, either taken by force or drugged into submission, dragged off the streets, most never to be seen again. It was a business, run by men called crimps, who would sell males as sailors and the women as prizes. They called their earnings blood money, and sometimes took as much as fifty dollars a head. Captains in port would request a crew, and the captured men would be drugged yet again, then loaded onto the ships this time to awaken in the Pacific, sold into slavery, on their way to ports like Shanghai and Hong Kong and Macao. Some eventually made their way home, voyaging for years to pay for their return. Most never made it home at all.
When I was sixteen, I’d written a report for school about the tunnels. I’d gone to the library and looked at microfilm of newspapers from the 1930s, read the accounts of men like Bunco Kelly and Stewart Holbrook. The tunnels had reportedly been in operation into the early 1940s, and I’d had nightmares that they were still used, that I would be walking downtown and the ground would open in front of me, and I would be put in a cage and chained and sold to a harem somewhere.
Somehow, that seemed more appealing than what I was facing now.
I hit the bottom of the ladder, trying to find the source for the light. It was out of sight, around a bend, a soft glow that made the tunnel seem darker. The sound of the water was louder here, and there was a wind that raced along the stone, whining for attention as it found me and slid up my legs and down my shirt. The water on my back got colder, and the shakes got worse.
Above me, I heard the metal doo
r swing open, hit the stone wall with a clang.
I put one foot carefully in front of the other, trying to remember how to breathe as much as walk, moving toward the light. My steps made echoes.
I was ten feet or so from the bend when he came around the side, setting a battery-powered lantern on the ground. He was dressed the same as he had been all the times before, still wearing the black mask. His hands were out and empty, and he seemed larger than he had before, and I stopped cold when I saw him.
“You were late.”
I nodded.
He raised a hand and indicated the backpack on my shoulder. “Toss it over.”
My voice sounded hollow and ethereal when I said, “I want my dad.”
“Toss it over here.”
In my jeans, my knees felt like they were turning to gelatin, trying to slide down my shins. I let the backpack slide off my arm, let the strap fall into my hand.
Behind me, Brian Quick said, “Half of that’s mine.”
The gun came out from beneath the parka as if it were a living thing, ready to leap on command, and it was up and pointed before I could begin to react. But not before Brian, apparently, because he shoved me hard to the side, snatching the backpack free with his other hand, and I hit the wall on my shoulder and bit back a cry.
The only thing that made the pain easier was that the Parka Man was now pointing his gun at Brian Quick.
Brian Quick, however, had brought a gun of his own.
“The fuck is this?” Parka Man asked. I thought it was directed at me.
“I’m your partner,” Brian said, before I could speak. “I’m the guy who’s made it easy for you so far.”
“Is that so?”
“You killed her big brother, asshole. You killed her brother, but instead of cops coming after you, I’ve had them chasing after me. I gave you room to work.”
“I didn’t ask for your help.”
“You got it anyway. How much you hitting her for? Fifty K? A hundred? We split it down the middle, right now, we never see each other again.”
Parka Man didn’t move, and neither did his gun. Unlike Brian, he held it in both hands, his knees bent in a slight crouch.