Cuts Through Bone

by Alaric Hunt

  “We need some answers, chico,” she said. “Don’t waste our time.”

  Peiper grimaced but didn’t look away from his computer screen. “Shouldn’t you bring somebody big to do the bruiser part?”

  Guthrie ignored the jab. “Where were you on the twenty-third?”

  “In there,” Peiper replied, pointing briefly at the screen before turning to face Guthrie. A sly smile brightened his face, but even the hint of malice left him charming. “I think somebody wants to challenge you, Mr. Detective.” His finger flicked at a crowd gathering around them like wings spreading from the two tall men wearing armor and visored helms. “You must’ve said something to the wrong lady on your way over here.”

  Guthrie glanced at the crowd, then turned back. “I ain’t got time for nonsense, son,” he said.

  One of the armored men extended his staff and rapped the little detective on the side of his head. His brown fedora rolled beneath the table. Guthrie spun to his feet, scanning the crowd. The tall men held their padded staffs poised, while the crowd began chanting, “Joust! Joust! Joust!”

  With their faces hidden in visored helms, the tall men were unreadable. One thrust his staff at Guthrie. The little detective swiveled his hips to dodge, and caught the tip of the staff in a firm grip; while they struggled for the weapon, Guthrie slid slowly closer along the smooth floor. The other jouster swished his staff like a bat. Guthrie’s head rolled like a ripe melon. He doubled over, still clinging to his grip on the outstretched staff.

  “O, foul!” one of the costumed ladies cried.

  Vasquez caught Peiper’s wrist when he tried to stand, and shoved him against the side bar. “No, chico, you stay here with me,” she said.

  He grinned, raising his other hand in mock surrender. “No problem.” He leaned against the bar, watching, as the crowd scattered to avoid a wide slash from a padded staff.

  The little detective unrolled a sloppy somersault on the floor, ramming the legs of one jouster. The other tall man jabbed with his staff, but he missed. Guthrie sprang to his feet, clinging to the leg of the man standing over him. Guthrie’s punch connected solidly with the tall man’s crotch, folding him onto the floor. The crowd groaned in sympathy.

  Guthrie sidestepped to avoid a hammer blow. The jouster backpedaled, recovering his staff, while the little detective paused to wipe a thread of blood from his nose. His face wrinkled with a disgusted frown. A lady and her bard pelted the tall jouster with jeers and square leather cushions from a nearby bench.

  The jouster slashed. Guthrie ducked, then sprang forward with a kick before the backswing began. The jouster fended him away with a cross-check, then tried a jab, but the little detective slipped inside and slapped his visor. The jouster landed on his ass amid a chorus of laughter. Guthrie kicked him in the chest and he slid into a sprawl.

  “Another blow receives banishment!” A pair of hefty bouncers dressed as English foresters pushed through the crowd. The onlookers swirled and scattered, while the bouncers pulled the tall men to their feet. Guthrie crawled beneath the table to retrieve his fedora before looking them over once their helmets came off, but he didn’t recognize them.

  “You got plenty of friends, Justin,” the little detective said, dusting himself off.

  “I can’t help that you piss people off, Mr. Detective,” Peiper said. He shrugged.

  Vasquez prodded the young man again. “That was your little man, chico, the one that fell down?” She pointed at the unattended computer.

  “Fuck!” Peiper stepped to the computer, and his fingers blurred on the keyboard. “What happened to the clerics? Morons!” He dropped back into his chair, and the snarl vanished from his face. “Don’t matter … just a game.”

  “Right now, you got real-world problems,” Guthrie said, “besides playing games with me. You need to account for your time on the twenty-third of July.”

  The young man turned to face Guthrie, grinning nastily. “No problem, Mr. Detective. I was in my dorm room, raiding with my guild. They’ll vouch. We popped a Quarm on Time on the twenty-third, and it was my drop. I had a buyer waiting with five hundred to buy costume jewelry to wear during chat.” He pointed at the costumed gamers around them. “Like those. This’s where it turns freaky, though. I stayed in the dorm because I was running another account, selling crack—clarity—in the Nexus. Usually I wear my headset, but that Thursday I didn’t. It wouldn’t work without tinkering every few seconds. I didn’t feel like being bothered, so I ditched it.”

  “Usually your mates could hear your voice when you played, but that Thursday, not so much?” Guthrie asked.

  “My guild can vouch,” he repeated. “I’ll send you names. Anyway, that freak Olsen used his own gun to kill Cammie—that’s in the papers, Mr. Detective.”

  Guthrie nodded, handing over a business card. “Sure. The same gun he kept at the Grove Street apartment in the Village. You remember that place? How many times did you have the key?”

  Peiper laughed without missing a breath. “Silver-spoon central, right? Who cares? So I’ve been there.” He turned back to his computer.

  Unsatisfied, the detectives left Everland; the midtown night was under way. Traffic on Lexington was like a swing orchestra, and people rushed like blood from beating hearts on the sidewalks. Vasquez paused after she started the old Ford. “You looked pretty good in there, viejo, after you warmed up.”

  Guthrie shot her a sour look and wiped his nose.

  “He was real comfortable on that computer,” she offered.

  Guthrie nodded. “Maybe enough to leave it behind after he took what he wanted,” he said. “We’re lucky he gave us the alibi. We ain’t cops, to beat it outta him. That piece of crap is dirty. I can smell it. Boxing him in a corner is gonna be the hard part.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The detectives drove crosstown to the office. Guthrie took his Colt revolver from the desk drawer and slid it into a shoulder rig beneath a ragged field jacket from the secondhand store. When Vasquez came from the bathroom after changing into fatigues, he handed her a small holstered pistol. She paid him with a puzzled look.

  “It’s just like the one you’re already carrying,” he said. “A Chief’s Special, forty caliber, except this one’s got blue bullets. They’re plastic. Next to the other one, this one won’t kick.”

  “What’s it for?” she asked.

  The little old man took a deep breath. “Sometimes you might want to give somebody a warning,” he said. “The plastic stings, might even draw some blood, but it ain’t doing permanent harm except maybe to an eye. You can use that pistol to hammer away, even in a crowd. Especially if I’m standing there. If something happens, I’ll tangle them up and try to keep you out of it, so you can get a clean shot.”

  “The same way you did with Ralph Gaines,” she said.

  “Sure, like that. Just don’t get too in love with the idea that you can weigh in with this particular argument. Weitz drew trouble for that a few times. Probably it’s a good thing you didn’t have this earlier.” He handed her an extra clip, already loaded. “Put your pistols in your jacket pockets for tonight, so they’ll be handy. Some of these underground types ain’t friendly. I don’t want you ending up like Stoop-O for not having a pistol out quick enough to back somebody off.”

  Vasquez drove them up Eighth Avenue to Harlem. The night was already deep and dark by the time they parked and locked the old Ford on 151st Street. August heat still lingered on the street and reached out from the redbrick buildings to slap at them while they waited. Expectation transformed the abandoned lot. As a porch on the doorstep of unknown lands, the manhole oozed uneasiness the way a jack-o’-lantern spills flickering light.

  A half hour before midnight, the Gaines brothers lurched from the alley across 151st Street and rushed the manhole like a badly organized tag team. Rodney went straight for the manhole. Ralph craned his head as he swung along, until he spotted Guthrie. He became a fast limper when he wanted to be somewhere. The little de
tective reassured him about the money, but he had the ill grace of a deprived addict. They all joined Rodney at the manhole. He peeled open the warped iron door to reveal steep stairs, and they went down into darkness. The hatch closed with a squeal and a clang.

  Rusty stairs dropped twenty feet to a dirty brick tunnel running north and south. Guthrie and Vasquez lit it up with big halogen broad lights, saw that it shrank back into dark holes in both directions, then switched to smaller handheld lights. Rodney had a penlight, but he slipped it back into his pocket. Empty light sockets hung on the walls like eyeless watchers, spaced among conduit and piping. The Gaines brothers blended smoothly with the rough graffiti on the bricks, the scorch marks from campfires, and old bottles, cans, and bags littered beneath the piping at the bottom of the walls.

  The tunnel was stand-up spacious and wide enough for the Gaines brothers to walk side by side. Rodney paused to fortify himself from a pint bottle of cheap vodka, then led them south as he fumbled it back into his pocket. The brothers shuffled along mostly side by side, but, like on the street above, Ralph would fall behind and then Rodney would pause to wait. In the bright, stabbing beams of the flashlights, they often looked like headless bodies, with the dark tunnel only present underfoot and in the puddles and swoops of light reaching ahead. Guthrie came along last. They walked south, passing dark openings that yawned silently and stank of still water, relieved by an occasional whiff of the distant river. Old repairs showed like dirty bandages on the piping along the walls, while the bricks changed colors like strippers doing sets, and alternated between running and English bond.

  “We coulda come in closer?” Guthrie asked after a few hundred yards of darkness were behind them. His voice was quiet but seemed loud and sudden against the backdrop of silence under the city.

  Ralph grunted assent. “Harder climb down, though.”

  A stiff leg saved them a climb down a ladder, at the cost of a long detour in darkness. They walked south. Rodney turned left into the ninth clear-out, kicked a clutch of ringing bottles out of his way, and muttered something about rats and a beating. Sour beer and the smoke from a recent fire failed to mask the stench of the drain. A slope of rough and dirty steps allowed them to scramble down, then drop a handful of feet onto fine gravel that was moist with seepage. Their handheld lights illuminated the naked tails of rats, which scurried to put distance behind them before turning to glare with shining eyes. The drain ran downhill, angling away from the access tunnel, toward the Harlem River in the dark distance.

  Up the slope, a ragged opening marred the rounded wall. The corners of jutting bricks emerged from the mortar like shattered teeth. The opening revealed a brick-walled room, roughened by the use of vandals and the passage of time. Trampled garbage carpeted the floor. A half-rotten piece of plywood leaned against the back wall. Rodney Gaines crossed the room, gripped one edge of the plywood, and tugged. With a squeal, it swung aside, revealing a dark opening.

  The rotted plywood was only a faceplate on a spring-hinged door, braced neatly into the opening. Guthrie paused to admire it, while Ralph waited to close it behind them. The brickwork was pierced with lines as smooth as saw kerfs. Waiting beyond, an earthen tunnel smelled of damp and old metal. Ralph tugged the door in an over and down motion to secure the latch, needing two tries to close the puzzle box.

  “The man is crazy smart,” Ralph Gaines whispered. “Like now, there was supposed to be people watching the door. They’ll catch it for going off without leaving nobody.”

  “Crazy, all right,” Guthrie muttered.

  “He just likes the dark,” Ralph said. “He don’t never come topside, they say. Anyway, when we come to the end of this tunnel, we gotta out the lights and holler. They’ll splash us with a searchlight, so they get first look. You just go toward the lights.”

  The tunnel was nearly straight, beyond the necessity of veering around some large buried stones and one half pipe of brickwork that was tapered like a smokestack. Pick and shovel marks decorated the earthen walls, showing the slick glow of moisture in the beams of the handheld lights. The tunnel ended at another neatly pierced brick wall, with steps leading down. The space beyond sounded vast. Rodney’s shout fell into it, and Ralph waved for them to douse their lights.

  Rodney Gaines led them down the narrow steps. A searchlight puddled him in brightness, then washed each of them in turn as they went down. The loophole in the brickwork led down into an ancient train tunnel. The rails were rough with rust. They trudged toward the light on crunchy gravel. Behind them, the tunnel shrank down to darkness, and the loophole hung on its side like a crow on a perch.

  “Wasn’t nobody at the door,” Rodney called when they were nearer to the light.

  Silence answered for a moment, then a disembodied voice said, “All right. Two of you I seen before; you can go along. You others, listen up before you go. This’s the laws down here. You use the toilets, that costs a dollar. You piss ’n shit anywhere else, you get a beating. You throw your trash in the cans, that costs a dollar. Throw trash anywhere else, you get a beating. You don’t tear nor mark anything up, or you get a beating. You worry anybody that’s peaceful about their business, you get a beating. You want to rent a place, you see the man. You don’t like the laws, turn round before you get a beating.” The litany was worn, but the voice held a lingering trace of venom that suggested any beatings would not be soon forgotten by their recipients.

  The Gaines brothers made herky-jerky time up the tunnel. The lights snapped out. Guthrie and Vasquez turned on their flashlights, and the glow illuminated the vague shape of a broad box framed to the ceiling, with a catwalk running away from it. The watchers were invisible. A faint glow emerged from the distant end of the tunnel, and the quiet was grooved by a sound like splashing water. As they went closer, it assembled into voices, snatches of music, occasional shouts, and mechanical humming.

  The tunnel flared open into a broad subterranean yard. Numerous lights made puddles in the darkness without banishing it. Coaches lined up on rail spurs, leaking lines of light from blacked-out windows or briefly opened doors. The vastness of the space was traced out by distant coaches and swinging arcs from flashlights as people moved around the yard. Dark spaces around the periphery suggested other tunnel entrances. The hum sounded like the working of machinery, with fits of stuttering when something drifted from alignment. The Gaines brothers crunched to a halt in the gravel.

  “You’re here, man,” Rodney said. “This’s the carousel. Man, you’re on your own looking for that nutcase.”

  Ralph shrugged apologetically but edged closer to Guthrie. The promised money held him like a leash. The little detective pulled a roll of bills and slipped it to him.

  “Try not to get killed,” Guthrie said. “That shit you do can bust a heart.”

  Rodney grinned. “If we’re lucky,” he whispered.

  Guthrie and Vasquez let the Gaines brothers tag along out into the center of the yard. Ralph moved as if he had an important destination in mind. Guthrie looked around carefully, without moving more than turning a small circle in the gravel. The number of people and lights surprised him. He pointed out some watermarks on the bricks, and decided that the machinery sounds came from pumps. The air smelled dry and musty, with a whiff of oil and a lot of iron, but no exhaust.

  An old man crunched up to them. He had no light. Once he came close, the crustiness of his unwashed clothes sharpened the air. His leer might’ve been intended as a friendly smile, but gaps in his teeth made the remainder resemble bared fangs.

  “You’re new, huh?” he asked. “I can lead you along, for a few dollars. That’s all. An old man needs money to piss ever so often. And maybe drink a bit. I know the best cathouse here.…” His chatter paused when he peered at Vasquez. “That ain’t what brings you, huh? Cards? Drugs? Sport?”

  Guthrie flashed a fifty in the beam of his light, then folded it into his fist as the old man reached. “Where’re the flops?”

  “You aim to lay up? Troub
le up under the sun, huh?” He licked his lips, almost hidden behind a gray mustache. “Them presidents will get you something right nice. If I go along, I can keep it all honest. I got friends here.” His hollow eyes darted over them with fresh intensity.

  “What I need can be worth something to you—but only if I get it,” Guthrie said. “I need the flops that don’t cost nothing, because I’m looking for somebody who ain’t spending.”

  “Who’s that?”

  Guthrie took a quick step forward and gripped the old man’s collar. “Right now, you.” He tightened his grip with a twist. “Just so you don’t get an idea to run away. You don’t want to know my business and then tell it.”

  “Let me go! I’m peaceful! I got friends!” the old man screeched. He twisted, wrestling at the little detective’s arm.

  “Sure you do,” Guthrie said. He glanced at Vasquez. “Show this man what he’s won.”

  She pulled a pistol and pointed. The old man fell quiet and stopped struggling. She slid the pistol back into her pocket.

  “How big a piece of trash can I throw away for a dollar?” Guthrie asked in an amiable voice, then gave the old man a little shake to make the threat sink home. “Now maybe you got friends, old man, but you can have some friends named Ulysses Grant and Benjamin Franklin if I turn satisfied. You see how that’ll work?”

  The old man nodded sullenly, and Guthrie continued. “I’m looking for a big gray-bearded drifter called Ghost Eddy. Usually he stays up top, but a little bit ago he moved underground. He might have a little money.”

  “I know who you’re talking about,” the old man whined. “He lays up in the fueling station.” He squirmed. Guthrie let him go. “That big man is mean. I suppose you’re gonna get rid of him, huh? He’s hiding from something. There a reward?”

  “Sure. Ulysses might have some extra cousins.”