Underground Read online

  Not that I thought the city’s chief vampire was likely to welcome Quinton with open arms—they didn’t seem to like each other—but I’d thought there was some mutual respect there, at least enough to make a parlay possible.

  Quinton snorted and coughed on his beer. “Hell, no! I’ve gotten between the vampires and their next meal often enough to be unpopular with Edward and his friends.” If he hadn’t been drinking good beer, I think Quinton would have spit.

  “And none of them’s tried to whack you yet?”

  “They’ve tried. But I know what their weaknesses are and how to hurt them without killing them outright—which would make me fair game. I have tried to stay neutral—it’s a bad idea to have enemies down here. I used to do bits of work for Edward when I first got here, but working for him’s like working for the government, and I’ve had to keep my distance—and force him to keep his. I’m in no position to go snooping around at the After Dark.”

  I shouldn’t have been surprised that Quinton knew about the vampire club—he seemed to know about a lot of things I was still figuring out. I sighed. “So, you want me to go to Edward?”

  “Only if it’s necessary. I think it’s his crew, but I could be wrong. I don’t have the skills to really know what’s going on. That’s what I want—to know what’s going on and stop it. I don’t want to be lunch and I don’t want any more of my neighbors to be lunch, and I sure as hell don’t want anyone snooping around down here and bringing this place to official notice. Things are getting pretty high-profile now that the cops are looking into the guy I found in the tunnel, and it won’t be long before other . . . people start to stir the waters. That’s not good for any of us.”

  “All right,” I said, putting down my empty bottle. “I get you. How many dead or missing are there?”

  “Three dead, five missing. And the leg in the pit—which might be unconnected, but I doubt it.”

  “Some of the missing could have moved on to some other location,” I suggested.

  “One or two, but most of these guys have no way out of here. It’s not like they have cars or money for fares. In this cold at this time of year, most couldn’t walk far enough in a day to make it to the next place they could be assured of food and shelter. And it’s not like you can continuously hop transit buses from here to Los Angeles or someplace. Most of these people are stuck here— they didn’t come here by choice like I did—so they’re already at the end of the line. If they go missing from this community, the chances are good they’re dead.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him and played devil’s advocate. “Some of them do get out. They find homes and jobs.”

  “Some do—there are some good service groups around Seattle helping the ones who want help—but they usually let the rest of us know. That’s not what’s happening here. It’s the ones who stand the least chance of that who’ve been disappearing or turning up dead: the odd men out. They haven’t been killing themselves, so someone or something has been doing it for them.”

  I put up my hands, conceding. “All right. Someone’s killing homeless people, and if the guy in the tunnel is typical, it’s in a pretty bizarre way. All right, you’ve convinced me. But I’m still not ready to agree it’s vampires. I don’t really want to mess with Edward unless there’s a good reason.”

  “Then let’s go find one. Or find something else.”

  Quinton stepped away from the table he’d been leaning on and collected his coat and hat before he started for the wooden door by the bed. I shrugged and got up to follow him.

  Beyond the wooden wall was a tall, narrow corridor of brick and stone on one side and heavy stone blocks on the other. The surface beneath our feet was rough cement. There were no lights except what Quinton made with a pocket flashlight.

  “There aren’t that many places where you can get in without anyone knowing,” he said as he led me down the cold hall. “Most of the actual underground is closed up pretty tight if it’s not in use by the property owner. I sort of forced my way in.”

  “How did Lass get in, then?”

  “Oh, there’s a way down here where some service stairs go into the basement of the building at the other end of the block. He doesn’t know about the other door. Most people don’t.”

  I stopped and stared at the wall on the right dimly illuminated by the light from Quinton’s flashlight, and I recognized the bricked-in shapes of windows and doors set above crumbled steps. “Where are we? What’s this building?”

  “I don’t know the building’s name, but if you walked through the wall, you’d be in the kitchen of Las Margaritas Mexican restaurant. Next to that is the workroom and storage space for a wedding dress boutique. From here to the hotel is the back rooms of the stores that face Post. We’re under the sidewalk of First Avenue.”

  “How far does this go?” I asked.

  “Only to the end of the block. Then you have to get back out on the street. We’ll come out under McCormick and Schmick’s side door. There’s a lot more of these buried sidewalks, though. In some places, you can get into the basements of buildings, if you know what you’re doing. It’s supposed to be completely closed up, but nothing’s ever totally sealed. In weather like this, people who can’t get into the official shelters will look for any shelter they can get, even if it’s a hole in a wall, and some of those holes lead into the underground.”

  I knew that there was an “underground city” below parts of Seattle—mostly Pioneer Square—but I hadn’t put any thought into what it actually was or how it would be laid out. I wasn’t sure of the details, but I did know the underground was a remnant of the city’s rebuilding after the famous fire. The streets had been raised from the muck and fireproof stone and brick architecture mandated in place of the previous tide-flat-level roads and wooden buildings. They’d even laid a modern sewer and water supply that didn’t backflush every time the tide came in. This buried corridor, formed of the building’s foot and the raised road’s retaining wall under the modern sidewalk, was just a part of that whole tangled, buried mess.

  I’d thought the underground city was just a tourist version of local history in basements and sewers. Listening to Quinton, it seemed that there were really two undergrounds—the physical one and the hidden social structure of the economically dispossessed who lived near or in it. I couldn’t help but wonder if there was more to it. . . .

  I put my hand against the building’s wall and relaxed, breathing in the musty smell of the space below the street. Quinton just stood by without speaking as I let the Grey come up to full strength around me.

  Most of the time, the Grey seems darker than the normal world, but this time, the silvery overlay of time and memory was brighter—much brighter. The accessible layers of time at that spot all seemed to be filled with daylight. Ghosts bustled past, busy with their own long-ago affairs: women in sweeping dresses from the 1890s, men in suits or work clothes. A mob of giggling flappers stumbled through me, shushing each other in drunken whispers and going on their way just as giddily as before. I shivered involuntarily when they touched me. I looked around, expecting to see an open sky over the street on the other side of the walkway, but there was still a wall, even then. I glanced up and realized that the light poured down into the sidewalk through thick glass prisms in the concrete above. In other angles of time there was no upper walkway, just ramps that connected the upstairs shop doors to the street across the open hole and a wooden staircase at the corner.

  It was like some underground mall that had collected an undue measure of history. I gave a small gasp of surprise as I realized that this now-abandoned place had been the thriving heart of the city’s shopping and business district at one time, full of people at all hours where now there were only shadows and dust.

  “Do you see something?” Quinton asked. I shifted my focus back to him and saw he was a little nervous at his question. I considered lying—it was what I usually had to do—but if ever there was a time to risk disclosure, this seemed like the best
chance I would ever have.

  “Ghosts,” I replied. “Lots of the city’s memory of itself.”

  He was curious. “The city’s memory? That’s a funny way to put it.”

  “It’s the best I can come up with. The things I’m seeing here aren’t aware of us. They’re just like recordings. But there’s a lot of them. Layers and layers. This must have been a popular corner.”

  “I don’t think so. This end of the city was built up later than the parts around Pioneer Square, though I think the fire started near here. . . .”

  “Hm.”

  I just looked at it a while longer, letting it flood in: the flickering images of the original buildings overlaid with the roar and rush of fire consuming the wooden city and the stop-motion play of the landscape as it became a towering canyon of brick and stone where dead generations shopped, visited, and caroused in helical time. This was not the low-down history I’d seen replayed on Occidental, but something more middle class that had risen with the streets, eventually, rather than being buried and disinterred only for tourist show-and-tell.

  “Do you want to continue?”

  I could feel my toes going numb from the cold seeping into my boots and I pulled myself out of the hypnotic depth of history. “Yes. These ghosts aren’t going anywhere and there’s probably a lot more of them around. Let’s go.”

  We went down the dank corridor and around a corner to a low door. Quinton tinkered with it a bit and opened it with care, looking around before he stepped out to let me through. We stepped out and headed uphill to First. The weather had driven people indoors, and none were looking out of McCormick and Schmick’s windows to see us emerge. We crossed between the old and new federal buildings and continued back toward Pioneer Square.

  FIVE

  The streets seemed to grow darker as we went south into the older environs of the city. The roads were narrower below Cherry Street, where the city plat bent to run truly north and south rather than northwest to southeast to match the shoreline. Cherry was also the northern boundary of the historic district where the darkness I saw was not entirely due to dimmer, cuter street lights.

  “Let’s go see who’s at BOLM,” Quinton suggested. It sounded like he’d said “balm.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “The Bread of Life Mission on Main and First. It’s the smallest shelter and they only take in men overnight, but they’re the closest to the Square. It’s where Zip was headed. We’ll try the Union Gospel Mission afterward.”

  “If these guys sleep in the shelters, how did they get killed on the street? Vampires wouldn’t be hunting in those places,” I objected.

  “They weren’t sleeping in the shelters. Some of them won’t sleep indoors or in certain buildings—some of the undergrounders are funny that way. Others can’t get in and some don’t even try. There aren’t enough beds—even when the Christian shelters like BOLM and UGM open the chapels in extreme weather. But there’s usually more food than beds, so people come for that and maybe an extra blanket, then go out again to see what they can find. But the beds fill up fast. That’s when people start getting into the staircases, doorways, and cellars if they can. That’s where the bodies have been found—near the underground accesses.”

  “And you’re thinking that the ones who disappeared were also in the underground tunnels or near access points?” I asked.

  “Yeah. But I’m not sure. If we ask around, we might find out.”

  Even in the sub-freezing cold, there was a line on the sidewalk in front of the Bread of Life Mission. Most of the people in the line were men, or seemed to be—it was a little difficult to tell under the layers of clothes everyone wore against the cold. Quinton left me for a moment and went up to the front to talk to a man at the door. He came back shaking his head.

  “He won’t let us in. We’ll have to talk to the people in line and try to catch the rest another time.”

  We started near the front, where we found Zip listening and nodding along with a woman dressed head to toe in black. She looked about forty-five, Hispanic, thin in the ropy, muscular way of people who’ve done manual labor most of their lives. Her clothes were clean and reasonably new, and a woolly hat covered most of her dark hair. She seemed oblivious of the rank odors that hung around the men near her, even in the cold.

  “. . . on Wednesday,” she was saying as we approached. “And you’re coming this time, Zip.”

  Zip bobbed his head. “Yes’m.”

  She looked up at Quinton and me as we stopped beside to them. “Quinton! You can help me. We’re having a vigil on Wednesday in front of the Justice Center from one to three. We need leafleteers—we have two leaflets this time, so we need plenty of help.”

  “I don’t do leaflets,” Quinton said.

  The woman shook her head in sharp negation. “Nonono. You get to be my cattle prod. Some of these guys aren’t very reliable,” she added, giving a hint of a smile as she elbowed Zip in the ribs, “but they may show up if they’re reminded by someone they trust.”

  “Oh.” Quinton nodded. “OK, Rosa. I’ll play big brother.”

  She looked surprised. “Well, OK, then.” Rosa turned her gaze on me and I felt like I was being sized up. “Who’s this?”

  Quinton put his hand behind my shoulder. “This is Harper Blaine.” He caught my eye and gave a small smile, tipping his head. “Harper, this is Rosa—Rosaria Cabrera.”

  Rosa put out her mittened hand and took mine in a quick, hard grip. “I’m with Women in Black. We organize silent vigils to remember the homeless who’ve died on the street.”

  “Does that happen a lot?” I asked, retrieving my hand.

  Her face went stern. “More than you want to know. Winter’s always the worst, and this one is worse than that.”

  “Who’s your vigil for on Wednesday?”

  “The dead in general, of course, but recently we lost Jan and Go-cart—Chaim Jankowski and Robert Cristus.”

  I glanced at Quinton. “Go-cart was the guy in the train tunnel, ” he said, and then he looked at Rosa. “Harper found him.”

  Rosa’s gaze became very sharp and she shot a look between us as if she knew the truth of the matter. “How is it you found Go-cart? ” she asked me.

  “I’m a private investigator,” I replied. “I was looking for someone else, but it was Go-cart—Robert—I found.”

  “Who were you looking for?”

  I pulled a name out of Nan Grover’s list. “One J. Walker Eddings Jr. A witness in an upcoming court case.”

  Rosa shook her head. “Don’t know him—at least not by that name.”

  “Do you know if Go-cart had any family? What’s going to happen to the body?” I asked. “They know the cause of death yet?”

  Rosa sighed. “They don’t tell us any of that. We don’t even know if they’re investigating his death except to relieve the railroad of any fault. Usually guys like Jan and Go-cart just end up in an anonymous grave with nothing but a number on the plot or as a box of ashes in a file cabinet, and that’s the end of it. I understand he had a brother someplace in the Midwest, but who knows?” She looked back to Quinton. “Quinton, can you find out? I know you’re good at that sort of thing, and Go-cart was in the military once, so he must have some records. We should mention his service on the vigil leaflet—and the memorial if the county comes through.”

  “I’ll see if I can find out,” Quinton agreed. “How many’s that make in Seattle since the storms?”

  Rosa rolled her eyes in thought. “Uh . . . six. No, seven.”

  “What about missing men?” I asked. “Do you guys count those as dead?”

  Rosa looked at me like I was growing donkey ears. “No. If I wanted a shocking statistic to take to city hall, then I might, but we only count the ones we know died. It doesn’t matter where they died or how. That they died homeless is what matters.”

  I felt a nudge and noticed that while we’d been talking to Rosa, the line of homeless men waiting for dinner had moved. Zip
had disappeared inside and a new group had come abreast of us. Our witnesses were dwindling away into the food-scented warmth inside the mission. I looked at Quinton and Rosa caught it.

  “You guys didn’t come out here to talk to me,” she said, “and I have a lot to do, too. So I’d better get to it. Spread the word, Quinton, and let me know what you find out about Go-cart.”

  Rosa waved and walked past us, down the line of shivering people waiting for food. She buttonholed a few as she went, telling them to come to the vigil—she didn’t ask but couched it as a duty they had already agreed to perform, and each one nodded quickly, eyes downcast. I had the feeling people didn’t argue with Rosa Cabrera.

  Quinton and I asked the remaining men about the recent deaths and disappearances, but most knew little that was useful. As we neared the end of the line, Quinton found Lass’s nemesis: a stocky, long-coated, spotted mutt named Bella who definitely had some kind of fighting dog in her ancestry. Quinton squatted down and scratched her ears and back, chattering to her.

  In spite of the cold, Bella frisked around at the end of her rope leash as if it was the finest day of summer. She whined with joy, licked Quinton’s face, and tried to climb up his body as if she would curl up around his neck like a cat. I supposed that if Lass were spooked by dogs in the first place, that behavior might freak him out a little. To me it was endearing, in a sort of doggy-disgusting way. All right, so I like big dogs.

  At the other end of the leash, the man I assumed was Tanker gave one sharp tug on the rope. His voice was soft and slow as he said, “Off, Bella. Don’t be such a kissy-face.” The hood of his sweatshirt hid his face as the man put his hand down to pat the dog’s huge head. His clothes were the most ragged of any man’s there, and he smelled of engine grease and sweat.

  Bella sat down next to Tanker at once. Her stumpy tail went still and she looked up at her master in anticipation. Quinton got back to his feet and we all moved a foot or so closer to the door as the line of hungry men advanced.