The Long Way Down (2 page)

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.

“‘S for the widows, so I can see ’em when they creep up on me,” the man grumbled. He might have been in his late thirties, a little older than me, but his eyes were sunken and his pale skin was pockmarked with acne scars and wrinkles that had come a decade too soon.

“Sorry?”

“Saw ya lookin’,” he said, gesturing around him. I realized he meant the paint. “Black widows. Tunnels are full of the bastards. I seen webs with forty, fifty of ’em, just nestled there, waiting. One bite, you swell up like a water balloon. The roaches are bad, but those widows, man, they’re mean.”

I fought the urge to slap at my arms and legs, already imagining them crawling with shiny spiders. Instead, I took a step forward and offered him my hand.

“I’m Daniel. You been down here long?”

He took it with a firm grip and a nod. “Eric. Been here…man, six years? Seven? Better than the streets, once you get used to it. Nobody hassles me down here.”

“Good to meet you, Eric. I was wondering about somebody else who might have been crashing down here. You ever see this girl?”

I fished the ragged newspaper article from my pocket and showed it to him. They’d run it with a high school prom picture of Stacy smiling like a girl with a future made of diamonds. Eric frowned.

“Shit, man, that was the cops that did that.” He shook his head.

“That did what? Came and fished her body out?”

“No,” he said, “the cops brought her
down
here.”

I suddenly remembered the bad feeling I got sitting across the table from Jud. The roller coaster ratcheted up another notch toward the inevitable plunge.

“It was a couple nights before the last rain,” he said. “A couple of ’em came down with that poor kid in a body bag. Dumped her about a hundred yards up Tunnel C, near the water intake.”

“How do you know they were cops?” I asked.

“Me and a few of the other guys down here, we pressed ’em, wanting to know what they thought they were doing. One of the cops, he flashes a badge in our face. The guy was a detective, no joke. Told us to get the fuck back, and then he shows us the gun in his waistband. We got back.”

“You sure it was real?” I desperately wanted him to be wrong. “You can buy badges—”

Eric shook his head, giving me a sad smile. “I used to be on the job, before I got a bad habit and ended up down here. I know badges. They were real cops. Skinny guy with a face like a hatchet, and a bodybuilder with a blond perm. Hatchet-face was the one who liked waving his gun around.”

“Did you tell anybody?”

“Man, who am I gonna tell?” He scuffed his gym shoe on the dank concrete. “You think anyone wants to hear anything we have to say? They’d just say I killed her, or maybe those cops’d shut me up for good. I felt bad, but I’d rather feel bad than feel dead.”

I nodded. “They didn’t leave anything behind, did they? I mean, besides the girl.”

“Nah, and if they had, it woulda been picked clean five seconds after they left. Hell, me and my buddy Amos took turns standing guard over the kid’s body until the rain came, just to make sure nobody messed with her. It ain’t right, you know? It just ain’t right. You can have a look down Tunnel C if you feel like it, but I wouldn’t if I were you.”

“Why’s that? Black widows?”

A nervous look crossed Eric’s face, his gaze darting toward the darkness at my back. He shook his head and lowered his voice.

“Nah, man. That kid? She’s still down here. And she ain’t happy about it.”

Three

I
couldn’t guess which habit had sent Eric’s life into a tailspin. In Vegas, you can pick your poison: booze, gambling, sex, meth. It’s all here and waiting for you, twenty-four hours a day. He didn’t come across like a junkie, though, and the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach told me he wasn’t sharing some alcoholic fever dream.

“No such thing as ghosts,” I said, keeping my voice light.

He curled his chapped lips into a grin. “You know. You know what’s up. Don’t pretend you don’t. You got that look.”

“Maybe I do. Anybody else see this maybe-ghost?”

“My buddy Amos,” he said. “He don’t live down there no more. He went topside, said getting beaten up on the streets was better than one more night in Tunnel C. Couple of other guys took off a couple of days later, haven’t seen ’em since.”

“But not you? Aren’t you scared?”

Eric waved his hand. “She stays over there, I stay out here. We don’t bother each other none. Besides, when she gets close, you know it. There’s a smell. Gives you time to run.”

“What kind of smell?”

“You’ll know it when it hits you. Seriously, man, you don’t want to go down there.”

I dipped into my pocket, palming a five-dollar bill while pretending to adjust my flashlight with my other hand. I unfolded the cash with a spread of my fingers and offered it to him.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m a magician.”

Eric snickered and took the bill with a nod. “You could do a card trick for her, but I don’t think it’ll help.”

“You’d be surprised. I have some really good card tricks.”

Eric watched me go. As I continued down the tunnel, the glow from his lamp fading at my back, a sense of cool confidence washed over me. Black widows were one thing, but ghosts? Ghosts I could deal with.

Your typical ghost is just a psychic imprint. They’re the aftermath of trauma, despair, an emotion so strong that it doesn’t die with the person experiencing it. Scary, but about as dangerous as a filmstrip. If Stacy’s murder created an after-impression, I might be able to learn something from it. If nothing else, I could at least banish it and do Eric and his buddies a favor. They had enough ghosts of their own to wrestle with.

Scraps of detritus cluttered the tunnel floor. My flashlight beam flickered across a broken hockey stick, a few plastic bags, a grocery cart lying on its side with one wheel slowly turning in a half-felt draft. I looked back to the middle of the tunnel and froze.

A black plastic sphere sat in the center of the floor, looking less abandoned than carefully placed there, like a prop in a canceled play. I crouched down to pick it up, finally recognizing it as one of those old Magic 8 Ball toys. Taken by a whim, I gave it a shake.

“Is anyone down here?” I asked and then flipped it over. Through a scratched plastic window, I was greeted with the words “Answer hazy, ask again later.” I chuckled and moved to put it back down.

Then the ball jerked in my hand, and the answer flipped to “Yes.”

The sphere tumbled from my fingers, cracked against the concrete, and bounced into the dark. I slipped a deck of cards from my pocket and gave them a slow, overhand shuffle as I walked deeper into the tunnel. The sinuous riffling of the pasteboard in my hands helped me concentrate.

“All right,” I said to the shadows, “we can do it that way.”

The underground air had felt damp and cool, like a day in late autumn. Now winter gusted in. A chilling breeze rubbed up against my spine and turned my breath to frost just before the smell hit me. The stench of raw sewage swelled up like someone had opened a cesspool right under my feet. My stomach lurched, and I struggled to breathe as I flipped over the top card of my deck. Queen of spades. I shuffled it back in.

The flashlight beam flickered across a recessed alcove in the tunnel wall. Stringy blond hair, a naked shoulder, bloodless lips. With a whispering rasp, Stacy came out to greet me.

Not all of her, though.

Jud Pankow’s murdered granddaughter hovered in the beam of my flashlight, a shambling twitch in her step, staring at me with mad eyes the color of silver dollars. One of her arms was missing. And half a leg. And an oval chunk of her stomach that looked like it had been scooped out with a precision saw. There was no blood, no gore, not even the hint of a wound. Her body just
stopped
here and there, like pieces of her had been edited out of existence.