Underground Read online

  “Hey, Tanker,” Quinton started. “This is Harper. Harper, this is Tanker.”

  Tanker turned his head to look at me. As the light from the streetlamp fell on his face, I twitched with stifled horror. Tanker’s dark face was a lumpy mass of scars that covered him from collar to crown in a patchwork of burns, grafts, and emergency reconstruction that had never been prettied up afterward. In whatever disaster had overtaken him, his mouth had been reduced to a lip-less, twisted cut and his one visible ear was a misshapen knot. If he had any hair, it was on a part of his head I couldn’t see.

  He ignored my start and offered a massive hand covered in a brown leather glove that didn’t match the blue ski glove on his other hand. “Hi.”

  “Hi,” I replied, taking his offered hand.

  “Sorry if I scared you.” I wasn’t quite sure from his expression and voice, but the sparks that danced around his head made me think he wasn’t entirely sincere. Some turmoil boiled beneath his blank surface.

  Touching him sent a feeling of disquiet through me and I released his hand. “No, you’re not,” I said.

  He made a wheezing, barking sound and glanced at Quinton. “Where’d you find her?”

  “Couple of blocks up, on the skid.”

  “Pig shit.”

  “Absolute truth. Hey, you know about the vigil for Jan and Go-cart?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. Where’re you sleeping tonight? It’s pretty cold.”

  Tanker seemed to glower at Quinton, though it was hard to tell in the gloom. “Got a place in the bricks.”

  “You better be careful down there. That’s where Jan was staying before he kicked it.”

  “Nothing’ll bother me. Not with Bella.”

  “Lass is probably staying down that way, too—”

  Tanker interrupted him to say, “That little turd. Better keep his distance or I’ll tell Bella to rip his throat out.”

  “That’s why I’m telling you to keep an eye open. Lass is flipping out about things following him around—”

  “Man’s a freak, what d’you expect?”

  “So,” Quinton went on as if he hadn’t been cut off again, “I gave him a stunner. I told him to keep away from you and Bella, but you know how Lass gets when he’s off the juice.”

  “He should drink till he croaks.”

  “Tanker, I know Lassiter’s a head case, but I’m not sure he’s just hallucinating. You see anything strange down there since the storms? Notice anything, anybody missing?”

  “Aside from Tandy? And Hafiz and Go-cart and Jan?” Tanker asked with a snort. Then he turned aside and looked into the open door of the mission.

  We’d come up the door as we’d been talking, and now Tanker stopped and looked at the mission worker inside. The man held out a small paper box, like restaurants give you for the leftovers.

  “Can’t bring the dog inside, Tanker,” he said, looking nervous, “but we put some bacon aside for her and a couple of the guys brought some dog food samples.” He held up two small bags of dry kibble with green labels declaring the food within to be “natural” and “healthy.” Looked like the dog ate better than the people.

  Tanker mumbled thanks and took the bags and the box and stepped out of line. We followed him a few feet away to an alley mouth where he put the box on the sidewalk and opened it before ripping open the bags and pouring them in. Bella sat still and stared at Tanker, though her eyes shifted toward the food once or twice before he said, “OK, Bella. Eat.”

  Bella leapt for the food and began crunching it down. We watched for a few moments. I noticed the ease with which the mutt reduced even the hardest-looking kibble to dust and thought I wouldn’t like to be on the wrong side of her jaws.

  “I saw a hand,” Tanker said, still watching his dog, “down in the stairs by the record shop.”

  “You mean Bud’s? On Jackson?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re sure it was a hand?” I questioned.

  Tanker glared at me and a swirl of black fury roiled around him. “You think I’m stupid? Think I don’t know what I see with my own eyes? It was a hand, sister. A hand just like yours.” He slapped my left hand with his right, and the dog stopped eating, going tense and alert, staring at us. “I seen body parts. I see body parts flying through the air like crazy birds. A freakin’ hand!”

  Bella had begun to growl low in her throat.

  Quinton, keeping an eye on the dog, grabbed Tanker by the shoulder. “Hey, hey. She’s not dissing you. She just wants to be sure. We’re trying to figure out what’s happening to people here. You know—like Tandy.”

  Tanker breathed heavily through his mouth, staring at me. I stood still and looked back with as much blank calm as I could muster to cover my wariness. As with his dog, I didn’t think it would be wise to rile him. Finally Tanker waved at the dog, making a down-patting motion with his hand. “Peace, Bella.” The dog sat down by the remains of her dinner, but she kept an eye on her master.

  He turned his focus to Quinton, cutting me out of the conversation. “Tandy’s gone, man.”

  “I noticed that,” Quinton said. “I want to know who else you haven’t seen around lately. Who’s missing?”

  Tanker stepped backward until he could lean against the stained wall of the alley. His breath had slowed down and the nightmare color around him had drained away, but he still seemed agitated. “John Bear. Haven’t seen Bear in a while.”

  “Was he staying in the bricks, too?”

  “Man, you know Bear wouldn’t sleep inside. He’s the bear, he sleeps with the bears. Crazy mofo.”

  “But he hasn’t been sleeping in the park lately, has he? In this cold?”

  “No. I haven’t seen him. I seen his blanket—Jay had it.”

  “So Bear’s missing and so’s Tandy. Anybody else?”

  “I don’t know,” Tanker snapped. “I don’t know and you and your questions can go to hell! And I don’t want your help!” he added as an afterthought. Then he grabbed Bella’s leash and gave it a sharp jerk as he began to stalk off down the alley. “You go to hell!” he shouted back.

  Quinton took my hand and pulled me away, into the street. “We’d better move on.”

  “What just happened?” I asked, falling into step beside him.

  Quinton shook his head. “Tanker’s got problems.”

  “I imagine most of the people down here have problems.”

  “Yeah. Well. Tanker’s got more. He used to drive a gasoline tanker—hence the nickname—and he was in an accident that killed a couple of other people in a pretty ugly way and gave him those scars. The company blamed him, fired him, and refused to pay his medical bills. Later it came out that the company was using cheap retreads on the tractors and that was the cause of the accident, but by then it was old news and Tanker was on the skid. The icing on the cake is that Tanker got burned trying to save people in the cars, but one of them came apart as he was hauling him out—in the smoke, Tank didn’t realize the guy’d been sheared in half by the steering column. He kind of flipped out after that.”

  The story shook me and I studied Quinton’s face; he looked grim and didn’t meet my eyes. I couldn’t think of what to say, so we just walked on in silence.

  We headed up the hill toward the Union Gospel Mission in Chinatown, hoping to catch some more of the undergrounders sitting still to have dinner.

  UGM took in families and women as well as men and were a little more open to letting us come in and talk to people, though I was pretty sure they wouldn’t have let me in without Quinton beside me. The volunteers running the kitchen and dining room told us we could talk to anyone in the common room, but we couldn’t go into the sleeping areas and that was fine by me. I figured most of the people we wanted to see would be awake, but I was surprised by how many people had already gone to bed.

  “Homeless is hard work,” one of the volunteers said. “These people are on their feet all day, and having no home doesn’t mean a lot of them do
n’t work or try to get work. If nothing else, they panhandle, sweep sidewalks, wash windows, do manual day labor, and walk their rounds, looking for work, or food, or recyclables— whatever they do to put a little change in their pockets. They hit the hay while the night’s still young and it’s not only because the good places to sleep fill up fast. Sometimes going to bed early is the only way to get any sleep at all.”

  That puzzled me. “It seems quiet compared to the street and it’s warm. Why don’t they sleep?”

  “They’re worried about being robbed or attacked. Even in here where we try to make it safe.”

  I looked at the heaving roomful of people. In such a mob scene, where no one was turned away until the shelter was full, crimes would be easy to perpetrate. Though the theft of what these people owned was petty to the law, it would be much more important to the people who had so little to begin with. Assault of some kind would be even worse.

  “They must live in a state of constant paranoia,” I said.

  “Yup. That’s why a lot of them drink or use drugs—though we don’t allow that here—so they don’t have to feel so much. Despair’s an easy trap to fall into.”

  I could see that too in the sick, sad colors that swirled around many of the figures in the room. Here and there, hot sparks and columns of brighter or crueler emotions pushed up from the low-lying fog of exhaustion. The smell that clung to them seemed to be as much despair or apathy as dirt.

  “How do you keep doing this? Doesn’t it grind you down?”

  The volunteer gave a tired smile. “The Lord gives me strength. If I can help some of them in His name, even if it’s just a night’s hot meal or a blanket, then maybe they will find hope and strength to rise from this.”

  A child’s wail distracted us. “Oh, boy . . . I’d better go see what that is. You know, if you have a lot of questions about who’s doing what, you might want to talk to Sandy over there.” She pointed and I followed her indication to a woman sitting against the near wall in a bright yellow energy corona that sent tendrils over everything near it. “She’s a little . . . imaginative, but she keeps a sharp eye on things.” Then the volunteer left me alone.

  I glanced around and spotted Quinton moving slowly through the room. He seemed to be making slow progress, so I thought I’d give Sandy a try. I walked over to where she was sitting and plopped myself onto the floor in front of her. My knee complained a little at the sudden acute angle as I folded my legs.

  She was probably in her mid-sixties—though it was hard to tell the ages of the homeless and most seemed much older than they had to be. Her salt-and-pepper hair was clipped very short, and she was curiously round and thin at the same time as if she’d been comfortably well off before something had changed her circumstances drastically. She had a pair of very large glasses that she adjusted on her nose as I sat down. She was still shorter than me, but not tiny, so I guessed she was about average height when standing. She was wearing a white raincoat over a collection of blue and purple sweaters and skirts and ragged work boots. She smelled of potting soil and talcum powder.

  She met my eyes at once. “Hello,” she said. “Do you need help?”

  “Are you Sandy?” I asked.

  She nodded once. “I am Sandy. What do you want?”

  “The volunteer back there said you see everything that happens around here, and I’d like to ask you some questions.”

  “I can answer some. So long as they don’t blow my cover.”

  “Your cover?”

  “Yes. I’m undercover. Part of an ongoing investigation. I can’t discuss the details. You’d have to call my lieutenant.”

  “Oh.” She didn’t sound much like any undercover cop I’d ever met—they don’t go around saying they’re undercover for one thing. But she seemed willing to talk if I was willing to play along. So I did. “I’ll be discreet when I call. What’s your full name?”

  “Detective Sergeant Sandra Livengood.”

  “Thank you, Sandy. Here’s the situation. I’m a private investigator—”

  She interrupted me. “Oh, I know who you are, Ms. Blaine. I see you in the Square all the time. We’ve checked you out. Go on.”

  That startled me a little, but it was plausible that she had seen me and did know who I was if she spent enough time in Pioneer Square. Though it was strange that I didn’t recognize her. In spite of that creepy factor, I went on. “I’m trying to discover if there’s been anything . . . strange going on in the area around the underground accesses in Pioneer Square.”

  “Oh, that. Yes, there’ve definitely been more of them lately.” As she was talking to me, she scanned the room, watching constantly.

  “More what?”

  “Zombies. I’m pretty sure some of them are recently coined, not just immigrants or plants. The new ones smell less.”

  “Immigrant zombies? Where do they come from?”

  “Oh, for the love of— They come from China. On boats. In containers. Or they come in from Tacoma and Bellingham at their master’s bidding. You can bet we’ll figure out who he is someday. We can’t let this zombie thing get out of hand. Luckily, they’re easy to kill.”

  If I hadn’t seen one myself, I’d have thought she was totally bonkers. As it was, I thought she was mostly bonkers. “What did you mean by ‘recently coined’?”

  “I mean they’re the recent dead raised by whatever voodoo someone is up to. I really could wish the department was a little more on the ball about that—I know they’re fragile, but that doesn’t mean zombies aren’t a threat for as long as they do survive. Good Lord, they’re not exactly the sort of things you want crawling around in infrastructure. Next to bioterrorism, there’s not much worse than a zombie in the water supply. They’re no treat in the electrical systems, either.”

  “Could their appearance be related to the spate of disappearances and deaths among the homeless?”

  “Certainly! I wouldn’t be surprised in the least. Now you mention it, I think the first one turned up a few weeks after they found that leg at the construction site on Occidental South. I’ve found a few bits and pieces since then.”

  “What sort of bits and pieces?”

  “Body parts. Let me think. A few fingers, a toe, a hand, a foot, most of an arm.”

  “Where did you find them?” I asked, leaning forward.

  “Some of the fingers I found in the alley behind the kite shop. The arm was down under Jackson Street. The foot . . . I think that was up against the wall by the Grand Central Bakery’s glass porch, though that might have been the hand—I’d have to look at my notes. The toe I found on Yesler in a stairwell. No—I’m confusing that with the hand. Definitely. I found the hand in the stairwell by Bud’s Jazz Records. The toe was on Yesler, but it was just next to the door the Underground tour uses when they come up from the bank. The tourists probably walked right past it and didn’t notice—it looked like a piece of dog dropping.”

  “Surely a toe looks like a toe?”

  “Not really. Even fresh they don’t look too impressive, and you might not notice if they’re dirty and bloodless. That’s a thing to note—the bodies and the parts have all been quite bloodless. The scenes aren’t cleaned up, so the perp isn’t wiping up afterward. There just isn’t much blood.”

  “Which bodies are you referring to?”

  “Hafiz and Jan. I didn’t see Go-cart’s body, but I heard it’s the same way—not enough blood. Believe me—when you cut into arteries there’s a lot of red, even when the body’s been dead a while. Saw a man hit by a train once—God, what a mess that was.”

  I put a lock on my imagination and pushed that vision aside. “Any ideas on why there’s so little blood?”

  She frowned and finally turned to study me. “I don’t like to advance theories without more evidence, so I’d rather just say something is draining the blood or keeping it from flowing. Could be a lot of factors. You need an autopsy report to know for sure.”

  Her attention shifted over my shoulder and
the bright energy around her slammed down to a narrow yellow outline that hugged close to her body. Sandy stood up in a rush and grabbed her bag. “I have to go. My suspect is on the move.” She darted off through the crowd and ducked out the front door before I could see who she might be following as her energy shadow vanished in the sea of homeless diners. I couldn’t decide if I thought she’d been incredibly helpful or incredibly nuts.

  I scanned the room and caught sight of Quinton talking to someone who was hidden from my sight. I eased toward him and came level with Quinton as he squatted down in front of an old, rough-skinned native man.

  “No, don’t think I’ve seen him in a while,” the man was saying in a tired mumble as I arrived. He poked the food on his tray with a fork in a desultory way and didn’t meet Quinton’s eyes. He had a round face graced with a mouth that folded in over mostly toothless jaws, making his chin thrust forward. His hair was coarse gray strands that brushed his shoulders. The aura around his head was small and pale, as if even the energy of the Grey was running low here. “Aside from them what died, I’d guess there’s a few gone missing.” Cheap, hoppy beer clung to his breath and his coat had a scent of garages and motor oil to it. He looked up as I came to a stop beside them, jerking his head over to peer at me from one eye and going silent and scared.

  “She’s OK, Jay. This is Harper. You’ve seen her around the Square,” Quinton said.

  “I’m not sure. . . .”

  “You like to sit near the first tree on the Square, near the Pioneer Building’s door,” I said as I recognized him. “You remember back in October when I gave Zip back his lighter when he dropped it?”

  He hesitated, licking his lower lip as he thought about it. Then he grunted. “Uh. Yeah. I do know you. You gave him money, too. We had some good smokes that day, me and Zip.”

  “That’s good. May I sit next to you?”

  Jay grunted and slid over, dragging a stained blanket patterned in gray, red, and black along the bench under his legs. I sat down in the tight space between him and the next diner, who shot me a glance and hunched over his tray possessively.

  Guessing, I asked, “Are you Blue Jay?”