CONCRETE UNDERGROUND
by Moxie Mezcal
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2010 Moxie Mezcal
March 2010
San Jose, California
a ZIZEK PRESS joint
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons or institutions, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.
For Steph
BOOK ONE: The Rules
PLAYLIST
My My Metrocard | Le Tigre
Compared to What | David Holmes + Carl Hancock Rux
Red Dress | TV on the Radio
Id Engager | Of Montreal
Sheela-Na-Gig | PJ Harvey
Stagger Lee | Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Chapter 1. They Watch You Fuck
"They've got cameras everywhere, man. Not just in supermarkets and departments stores, they're also on your cell phones and your computers at home. And they never turn off. You think they do, but they don't.
"They're always on, always watching you, sending them a continuous feed of your every move over satellite broadband connection.
"They watch you fuck, they watch you shit, they watch when you pick your nose at the stop light or when you chew out the clerk at 7-11 over nothing or when you walk past the lady collecting for the women's shelter and you don't put anything in her jar.
"They're even watching us right now," the hobo added and extended a grimy, gnarled digit to the small black orbs mounted at either end of the train car.
There were some days when I loved taking public transportation, and other days when I didn't. On a good day, I liked to sit back and watch the show, study the rest of the passengers, read into their little ticks and mannerisms and body language, and try to guess at their back stories, giving them names and identities in my head. It was fun in a voyeuristic kind of way.
And luckily, today was a good day.
I watched the old Vietnamese woman with the cluster of plastic shopping bags gripped tightly in her hand like a cloud of tiny white bubbles. My eyes traced the deep lines grooving her face, and I wondered about the life that led her to this place.
I watched the lonely businessman staring longingly across the aisle at the beautiful Mexican girl in the tight jeans standing with her back to him. He fidgeted with the gold band on his finger, and I couldn't tell if he was using it to remind himself of his commitment or if he was debating whether he should slyly slip it off and talk to her.
I watched the two black teenagers making out, completely absorbed in the novelty and excitement of newfound love. It never occurred to them that their public display might seem cliché or rude or vulgar; their hearts had still not been hardened with the inevitable cynicism that familiarity and experience breed. Absorbed in their own private world, they were touching the divine.
And I even watched the bum with the wild, fiery orange mass of hair exploding from his pores, covering almost his entire face but for the small, narrow-set blue eyes peering out through the roughage. They were such a brilliant shade of blue that they made me think of the Fremen from Dune. In my head, I decided he was named Seamus Freeman.
"Everything gets streamed back to a giant server farm they keep up in the mountains, a massive concrete bunker that's buried nine-tenths underground like an iceberg, so they'll still be around after they take us all out with their WMDs."
Mostly, though, I just tried not to watch the blonde sitting next to me – specifically, I was trying not to notice the satisfying way that she jiggled under the low cut of her pink Sate University tank top as she bopped her head pleasantly to whatever was being piped through her tiny white earbuds. I wasn't altogether successful in that effort, but fortunately she seemed too engrossed in her Abnormal Psychology textbook to notice.
Finding myself staring again, I quickly averted my gaze and made eye contact across the aisle with a gruff middle-aged workman in black coveralls. He had looked up from his newspaper just in time to catch me ogling the blonde and shot me a sour, disapproving look.
I briefly thought about saying something to him, but before I could come up with anything smartass enough to be worth the effort, my cell phone went off. Several other passengers whipped their heads around to look at me as my ring tone sang out loudly:
I tried to call you before, but I lost my nerve.
I tried my imagination, but I was disturbed.
I pulled the phone out of my pocket; the display read: Jenny.
"Hey, what's up?" I answered.
The chipper female voice on the other end said, "Not much, just getting ready. Last minute stuff, you know. Trying not to let my nerves drive me crazy."
My eyes drifted back across the aisle to the workman's newspaper. He had it folded around so I could see one of the interior pages, the one before the article he was reading. It had a full-spread advertisement for Abrasax, the search engine and software company. Along with their corporate logo, a stylized red drawing of a rising sun, the ad contained a photograph of their CEO, Dylan Maxwell, looking straight into the camera with his giant, creepy fucking eyes. It was the kind of picture that seemed like it was staring right at you no matter what angle you looked at it from. My skin crawled just looking at the fucking thing.
"So what are you doing?" Jenny continued over the phone.
"Not much, just trying to stop staring at some college chick's tits," I replied nonchalantly.
"What?"
The workman again raised his eyes from his paper to glare at me disdainfully.
I chuckled, "Nothing, I'm just on the Light Rail going to meet someone for an interview."
"Cool, cool," she responded dismissively and followed up with a carefully-timed pause before adding, "So you're still coming tomorrow, right?"
"Of course I'll be there. You think I'd miss my sister's wedding?"
"It's just that I know how you are, D," she said in the voice she used when she wanted to nag without it sounding like nagging. It wasn't actually as effective as she seemed to think. "I hardly ever see you anymore – ever since you got back from Oak Hill, you're so... withdrawn. We used to be so close, and it means a lot to me for you to be there."
I looked up and saw the workman watching me, eavesdropping on my half of the call. He quickly dropped his eyes back down to the newspaper and began riffling randomly through the pages. Anything to pass the time on a long train ride, I thought to myself, and then repeated to Jenny, "I'll be there."
"Great. It'll be nice to have at least one person from my family there," she continued. God, she could be so fucking relentless. "I mean, I'll have friends there and everything, but it's mostly all going to be Brad's side, between his family and business contacts and all the politicos his uncle knows."
The workman stopped fussing with his newspaper and held it fully spread out in both hands with the cover facing me, as if trying to hide as much of himself from my view as possible. It was a tabloid-sized alternative weekly with the title Concrete Underground spelled in cut-out lettering like a Sex Pistols album sleeve. The cover was a photo of city hall superimposed over a background of hundred-dollar bills with the caption: City Contracting Scandal Exposed, by D Quetzal, page 33.
I felt my spirits lift a little as a smug smirk spread across my face and I replied into the phone, "Speaking of Brad, I was meaning to ask you if he read the article yet."
Jenny didn't respond, but just let out a prolonged, exasperated sigh.
"That's a yes. What did he think?"
"I'll see you tomorrow," she said tersely. "Please try not to be an asshole."
I slid the phone back in my pocket and couldn't help but feel a little triumphant. Call me immature, but there was something about getting under Jenny's skin that I still found as entertaining as I had when we were kids. I guess that's the beauty of siblings.
I whistled across the aisle at the workman to get his attention. He folded the newspaper sloppily on his lap and looked at me with blank, listless eyes.
"So what do you think about all that stuff going on with the city?" I asked, indicating his paper.
"I don't read the fucking articles in these things," he grumbled. "I just pick them up to see what movies are playing."
I smiled and nodded my head in agreement. "Yeah, I'm with you, brother. A bunch of liberal paranoia bullshit, far as I'm concerned."
He didn't respond one way or another to my comment, but kept looking at me with a glazed-over, uninterested expression, as if waiting impatiently for me to get to the point of whatever I'd interrupted him for. I glanced at the logo sewn in bright red letters into the breast of his coveralls, which read: Asterion Record Management.
"Hey, Asterion," I said, pointing at the logo. "Didn't you guys just get that big contract from the city?"
He jerked forward suddenly and jabbed a thick, calloused finger at me. "Look, faggot, I don't know what you're getting at, or if you're trying to hit on me or what, but if you don't get off my nuts and stop staring at me, you're gonna be picking your teeth up off the floor."
I bristled at his epithet and thought it was a pretty broad assumption to make as I smoothed the lapels of my crushed velvet jacket with a couple black-nailed fingers. I let my lips hang open loosely in a mischievous grin and stared him down, keeping my eyes locked unwaveringly on his.
The passengers immediately around us shifted uncomfortably in their seats and watched nervously. The blonde next to me bobbed her head obliviously, still buried in her textbook. And Seamus the hobo kept right on preaching.
"They use biometric analysis to sort through all the hours and hours of footage so they can follow you from one camera to the next, keeping you forever under their watchful eyes."
I saw the workman's eyes drift over to one of the opaque black orbs that housed a security camera. He sank back into his seat. I pursed my lips together and made an exaggerated kissing face at him.
The train lurched and jerked to a sudden stop.
"Well, girls, looks like this is where I get off," I said, addressing the blonde's chest with a tip of my hat as I stood up.
She yanked the earbud out of one ear and looked at me quizzically. "Huh?"
I recognized the music that spilled out of the stray bud as Le Tigre, which I found a bit surprising based on her appearance, expecting her tastes to run more pop and mainstream.
I shrugged and headed for the train door. On my way out, Seamus held out one hand to my chest to stop me, then passed me a piece of paper with the other. It was a half-sheet flyer, a cheap black-and-white photocopy with three narrow vertical pictures – a closeup of the pyramid from the back of the dollar bill on the left, a police officer in riot gear in the middle, and a woman in lingerie on the right. The phrase "You Are Being Lied To..." was emblazoned across the top, and right below the images, it continued "Trust Us". At the very bottom, in tiny letters, was the words "The Highwater Society" along with a stylized logo of a globe with a crown floating above it.
"How do you know so much about all this?" I asked Seamus.
His deep blue eyes twinkled as he replied jovially, reeking of sweat, piss, and Mad Dog 20/20, "I used to work for Abrasax. I helped them build the damned thing."
Chapter 2. Can't Be Held Responsible
The address I had been given was a flophouse called Casa Salvador in the scummy side of downtown, the part where the city's redevelopment (read: "gentrification") efforts hadn't yet managed to drive out the sundry undesirable elements.
I walked inside past the front lobby. I could tell the desk manager wanted to hassle me, but he was too busy arguing with a middle-aged peroxide-blonde woman in a leopard-print top. Her skin was leathery and weather beaten, and I guessed she was the type who was actually a good ten years younger than she looked.
I made my way up the narrow staircase that smelled of urine and bleach, going all the way to the third floor. I continued down the dimly lit hallway, past a series of closed doors that muffled the sounds of women faking moans of pleasure.
Room 313 was down at the far end of the hall, and its door was already slightly ajar. I knocked anyways, but there was no answer. Pushing the door open just enough to poke my head in, I called, "Hello? Is anybody in there?"
There was no response, so I went in and felt along the wall for the light switch. A single weak bulb came on, lighting up the tiny, sparse room with a dim yellow glow. The room was about 8 feet by 8 feet, and the only furniture was a dingy, unmade bed and a metal foot locker. There were no windows, no closet, and no bathroom. As I stepped all the way in, I noticed a wooden baseball bat propped up beside the door.
My watch said 6:20 – twenty minutes late for the interview. I sat on the edge of the bed to wait, hoping that maybe my contact had just stepped out momentarily.
After a few minutes, a phone started ringing out in the hallway. I let it ring six times with no one answering before I decided to get it – partly in the off chance it was my contact, but mostly out of morbid curiosity as to what kind of business someone would have calling this dump.
On my way to the door, though, a small blue flash of light caught my eye. It came from inside a vent at the top of the opposite wall. I moved closer and saw that there was something blue and metallic stashed behind the grating. The flash must have been a reflection of light off the metal surface.
I slid the foot locker over and climbed up to get a closer look. Inside, I could make out what appeared to be a small rectangular box about five inches long and two inches thick. I tried to pull the vent loose but found it was screwed in place. Digging my pocketknife out of my jeans, I started loosening the screws and had managed to work two of the four out when I suddenly heard a voice call out from behind me.
"What are you doing here?"
I spun around to see an old man standing just inside the doorway, thin and gaunt, wearing a cheap brown suit. He had picked up the baseball bat and was pointing it at me threateningly, as if trying to keep me at bay. I stepped down off the locker, and he advanced on me quickly, extending the bat out to just barely tap my chest with the tip.
"Stay right there."
"Whoa, calm down," I said. "You called me and asked me to meet you here."
"I didn't call you. Who are you? Who sent you here?"
"Look, someone called and told me to come here. I'm a reporter."
I started reaching inside my jacket to get my card, but he jabbed at me with the bat. It wasn't close enough that he meant hit me, but close enough that I got the message.
"I'm just gonna reach into my pocket to get my business card and show you who I am."
He watched me silently as I slowly tried again for my jacket pocket. I produced my card and handed it to him.
The top of the card was stamped the Concrete Underground cut-out logo. Underneath was printed:
D Quetzal
Punk-as-Fuck Investigative Journalist
He glanced at the card before training his gaze and the bat back on me.
"Is this supposed to be some kind of a joke?"
I took a couple steps forward. "It's no joke. I'm a reporter and--"
He swung the bat square into my mid-section. I doubled over, my abdomen on fire from the blow. Before I could recover, another swing brought the bat down on the back of my head, dropping me to the floor as I quickly faded out of consciousness.
---
I am having that dream again.
I sit in a crowded movie theater. On my right is an empty seat. To my left, a woman sits beside me. I think that I followed her into the theater because she looked familiar, like my old girlfriend from high school, but now I can see that she's not who I thought she was. She rests her head on my shoulder, and I sweep away her purple hair from her forehead and give her a kiss.
I watch a man on the movie screen riding in a car as it drives onto a small airfield in the middle of the night. Actually, I don't see the man himself; I see through his eyes. The man on the the screen is me; the me in the audience fades away, and I focus my concentration solely on the me on screen.
On screen, I get out of the car and am greeted by a short, balding man carrying a flashlight. He says something, but I can't make out his words over the sound of the film projector behind me. I follow the man with the flashlight into one of the airplane hangers. It is dark all around.
There is a single plane in the hanger, a small private jet. The forward hatch is open and a rolling staircase has been moved into place. I follow the other man up the stairs and into the plane. Inside, the beam lights up only small parts of the cramped space randomly, the flashlight bouncing in the man's hand as he walks down the aisle toward the back.
He stops at the end of the cabin and points the light at one of the seats. I move closer to see what he's showing me. It is a woman. She is dirty and disheveled – clothes torn, greasy black hair matted to her face with grime and sweat, large purple bruises on the exposed flesh of her neck where she has been strangled.
I kneel down and sweep away a few strands of hair to expose her face. I touch my hand to her cold skin, which feels almost unreal, like she's a wax dummy. Gently, tenderly, I run my fingers down along her lifeless cheek. I know her, but the me sitting in the theater can't quite place how or where from.
On screen, the man with the flashlight tells me, "Look in her hand." He moves the beam down so I can see her clenched fist. I force her grip open and see she's holding a necklace with a large, brilliant ruby mounted on a pendant. I flip the pendant around; there is a symbol etched on its back – a globe with a crown floating over it. I take the necklace from the dead woman's hand and stuff it in my pocket.
Back in the theater, I cough. The woman on my left shushes me angrily. The me on the screen whips his head around and looks over his shoulder, past the fourth wall and into the audience. I can see his face, and he isn't me. His deep blue eyes are filled with piercing anger, glaring at me through the darkness, projected larger than life.
The image on the screen flickers and dissolves briefly into static before cutting to a grainy, wide-angle shot of a room, the monochrome image washed in blue, giving the impression it is a feed from some kind of surveillance camera. The room is small and sparsely-furnished with only one occupant – a man sitting on the edge of a bed, his back turned to the camera. In the bottom right corner of the screen are digitized numbers reading: 00033.
I turn to my left. The woman beside me casts a disapproving look at me and says, "You shouldn't be here." Her face is covered by a half-mask made of dark gunmetal. I reach out to lift the mask, but when I see her face, I realize she's not who I thought she was.
I turn to my right and see a man sitting in the previously-empty seat, his face covered in a grotesque black mask pocked by red boils oozing puss. A long crooked nose protrudes from his mask, and underneath his lips part to reveal a mouthful of jagged yellow teeth jutting out from purple, bleeding gums.
The man in the mask starts laughing – a tinny and mechanical laugh, like the sound of a clanky old film projector.
---
When I came to, my assailant was gone. I struggled slowly to my feet, feeling my head throbbing and my stomach stinging like hell. Then to make matters worse, that damned phone in the hallway started ringing again.
Once I finally regained my bearings, I realized that the vent cover had been fully removed and the box had been taken.
My head still swimming, I staggered out into the hallway in time to see the leopard-print lady from the lobby pick up the phone.
"Hello?" she answered and then turned her head to look directly at me.
"Yes, he is," she said after a brief pause, then held out the receiver to me. "It's for you."
I took the phone from her and took out my reporter's notebook from my back pocket. "D's Sporting Goods. This is D speaking."
"Did you find the parcel?" asked a man's voice on the other end of the line, low and raspy, almost sounding mechanical.
"Who is this?"
"Did you get it?" he demanded.
I wrote the word "parcel" in my notebook. "You mean the little blue box? No, I was too busy getting bludgeoned into unconsciousness with a baseball bat. Now would you mind telling me who the fuck you are?"
I heard multiple voices whisper faintly in the background, but couldn't clearly make out what they were saying. One of them might have said something like, "He's going inside."
"You shouldn't have been late," said the man. "You need to get out of there right now. If you don't, we can't be held responsible for what happens to you."
The line went dead. I hung up the phone and made a few more notes before heading back downstairs. On my way through the lobby, the manager rushed out from behind the front desk to cut me off.
"Hey, there's a visitor's fee here. Twenty bucks," he said.
"What?"
"All visitors pay twenty bucks. I have to clean up after you assholes. And between scrubbing the jizz stains out of the hookers' rooms and mopping up vomit and blood and God knows what else in the dealers' rooms, twenty bucks a pop don't even start to cover it. So pay up – and that goes for you, too."
I looked over my shoulder to see that the manager was also addressing a man who had just walked through the front door. He was a giant shit-kicking type, easily 6'8" and built like a bulldozer, with a shaved head and a dark olive complexion of indeterminate ethnicity. He wore leather pants, steel toe jack boots, and a black t-shirt with "Bad Seed" printed in white block lettering.
"What did you say?" asked the newcomer.
The manager stepped towards him, holding out his left hand face up and jabbing his right index finger down into the open palm. "You heard me. I said put some God-damned money, in my God-damned--"
The tall man head-butted the manager in the face, mashing his nose into a red squirting pulp. He looked up at me, blood dripping down his forehead, and said, "He shouldn't have blasphemed." I couldn't tell if he was joking or not – probably wasn't.
I just shrugged in tacit agreement and stepped past him towards the exit. On my way out the door, I looked back to see him heading upstairs. Something told me he was probably headed for room 313, but I'd be damned if I was going to follow him to find out.
Chapter 3. This Machine Kills Yuppies
"Congratulations, jackass, you just got us sued."
My editor, Sharon, was standing in front of my desk. She was apparently not happy.
I shrugged, slouching further down in my chair, trying to hide from her gigantic crazy eyes behind my computer. It was a white laptop with a sticker that said "This Machine Kills Yuppies" slapped over the corporate logo on back.
She reached out with one of her freakish man-hands and slammed the screen shut. "Let me try this again. You just got us sued six times over."
Sharon Sinclair was a six-foot-tall beast of a woman with a huge mane of wiry black and gray hair pulled back in a pony tail. I had every confidence that she could tear me in two and use my bloody carcass in some kinky hedonistic lesbian cult ritual or something. So I usually tried to choose my words with the appropriate care around her.
"Jesus-fucking-Christ, I haven't even had my morning coffee yet, and my head's still reeling from the Louisville Slugger that pummeled it last night. So I really don't feel like dealing with whatever annoying hormonal episode you have going on here."
She glared at me silently, watching me squirm a little before asking, "Are you done?"
"Probably."
"Good," she said with a suppressed grin as she took a seat next to me. "Because I just let you publicly accuse the mayor and the valley's most powerful corporations of conspiring to defraud the taxpayers. So what's your plan for keeping my ass off the firing line?"
I tilted back in my chair and met Sharon's gaze. "Look, we knew we'd get a strong reaction. Let them sue. We have e-mails to back us up."
"These legal briefings say your e-mails were forged," she responded, waving a thick stack of papers in my face.
"Of course they're gonna say that. That's why I made sure to get corroboration. Abrasax confirmed that the e-mails between Dylan Maxwell and City Hall are legit. But you know all this, so I don't know why we're wasting time going over it again."
"Because Abrasax is not returning calls or answering any questions related to your story. They won't confirm that their spokesperson actually gave you that statement. They've cut you loose."
I felt my stomach sink. "You're kidding me?"
Sharon shook her head. "Nope. You know how you were telling me that their admission was almost too good to be true? Well guess what...?"
I leaned forward, propping myself against the desk on my elbows and massaging my temples. My headache was getting worse.
"It would make things a lot easier if you told me who your source on those e-mails was," she pressed.
"I can't. I promised them complete anonymity."
"Fair enough," she conceded, "but you got to give me something here, D. What's your plan?"
"I have to talk to Abrasax again and make sure they're still backing my story. Only this time I have to talk to Dylan Maxwell himself, not that horrible shrieking bitch flack, Lynch." I paused, stroking my chin, then added, "He'll probably be at my sister's wedding tonight. Hell, it might make the thing actually worth going to."
Sharon relaxed her posture a bit and softened her tone. "Nice to see you finally joined the conversation. Because if this thing goes to court, and you can't get Maxwell to back up those e-mails, then I'm forced to go into damage control mode. And that starts with publishing a full retraction and shit-canning your sorry ass."
Just then an intern appeared at the entrance of my cubicle with three full mail trays stacked on top of each other. "Here's the mail you asked me to bring in, Ms. Sinclair," she said meekly.
"Just set it down on his desk," Sharon instructed with a nod. The intern obeyed, struggling with the weight as she hefted the load onto my desktop with a thud. She was typical of the girls Sharon brought in – idealistic college students with big vocabularies and big tits. Not that I ever complained.
This particular intern had a lip ring and dyed jet-black hair. She wore a denim shorts over ripped black fishnet stockings and a carnation pink t-shirt with a silk screen of She-Ra that I wasn't sure if it was supposed to be ironic but at any rate was definitely a size or two too small. As I turned my gaze back to Sharon, I saw that she was also checking the girl out.
I shook my head. "Not worth your effort. I know her type. Probably has a long-term boyfriend, some dweeby music major with a pony tail or something."
"Says you," Sharon replied with a smirk. The intern stood there awkwardly, her eyes shifting back and forth between us.
"Prove me right, Princess of Power," I said.
"What?" the intern asked tentatively, her pale cheeks becoming flushed.
"Oh now don't go getting all embarrassed," I said. "I know we're living in more enlightened times and it'd be totally inappropriate for me to just ask you straight up if you like to eat box or not, and of course I want to be sensitive to all that bullshit. But this has to be settled, so just tell me this – which of the two of us would you be more likely to fuck?"
She-Ra shook her head, not quite sure to make of the situation. Finally, with an apologetic shrug, she answered, "Well I'm not gay, but definitely her."
Sharon laughed heartily as the intern walked away. I flashed a wolfish grin at her. "So what's all this?" I asked, indicating the mail trays.
"That's the hate mail generated by your article. Most of them just question your journalistic integrity – granted, they use some very colorful language to do it – but there are also a handful of bona fide death threats in there."
"I'm just surprised that many people actually read this paper," I muttered.
I wasn't really worried about the heat my article was bringing down. I knew Sharon could handle it, and I knew that she would get my back.
---
Sharon Sinclair ran away from home for the first time at age 14 to go see the Stooges. She ran away for the last time two years later and moved to New York. It was the late seventies, and she split her time between two movements – punk rock and gay lib. Somewhere along the way she got into journalism. She'd let me read some of her early stuff, and they were crazy good – frenetic gonzo journalism fueled by heroin and the self-righteous conviction that she was the coolest bitch on the planet.
By the time I met her, she had ended up here and started the Concrete Underground. It had meant something to her at some point, but now she'd just resigned herself to babysitting a bunch of mediocre smart-asses – present company most definitely included.
She drove a prehistoric beater with a biodiesel-converted engine. The rear bumper was plastered with old campaign stickers for failed Democratic candidates as her own little fuck-you to the world. Seriously. If only I were into homely dykes old enough to be my mother, I'd have proposed to this woman years ago.
---
I thumbed through the tray of hate mail absently, not really looking for anything at all, and came across a small blue envelope that caught my attention. It bore no stamp or postmark, but was addressed to me in care of the newspaper. The back flap was stamped in silver foil with the crowned globe symbol from my dream.
I unsealed the flap and pulled out the paper inside. It was a thick white sheet with a typewritten message:
Have you seen today's Morning Star?
Page 9-B
The Morning-Star was the major daily paper in the valley. As a rule, I never read it. So when I asked Stan, our movie listings editor, to borrow his copy, he was understandably suspicious. I had to promise to return it unharmed and not burn it in effigy or anything.
I pulled out the B-section, Local News, and flipped to page 9. Buried at the bottom of the page was a small one-column story about a woman found dead in a ditch on the side of Highway 77, about three miles south of the Hastings Airfield at the far southern tip of the valley. She had been strangled. Police found no identification on the body, and she did not match the descriptions of any known missing persons in the area. The police spokesman said that she was most likely a vagrant.
I turned the page. On the back of the article, page 10, there was a full-page color ad for Abrasax, again with a photograph of their CEO Dylan Maxwell. With his shaggy, jet-black hair, slim build, and loose, brazen way of carrying himself, people tended to think of him as more rock star than tech executive. I stared at the photograph, meditating on the way he seemed to gaze out from the page with those intense blue eyes. My brain flashed to an image of that same steely gaze projected larger than life on a movie screen. I felt a chill course through my body and make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, then imagined for a second that I could hear the sound of an old, clanky film projector.
Chapter 4. Strangers on a Bathroom Floor
There were a good many things I'd rather do on a Friday night than try to gain entry to the St. Augustine, an exclusive west-side hotel that catered to two types of clients – the rich and the powerful. And yet there I was, trying to weasel my way past some overgrown Aryan doorman blocking me from the grand ballroom.
"No, you don't understand. I'm a journalist, man. I have credentials."
I flashed him the first thing I found in my jacket pocket, which happened to be my press pass from a tech trade show two months past. It didn't seem to help my case. It probably also did not help that I showed up to a wedding in a five-star hotel wearing jeans and chanclas. Or that I reeked of whiskey. In my defense, however, I had to rush straight from work to make it here, so there was no way I could have stopped both at home to change and at the bar to get suitably blitzed. Something had to give.
I persisted in arguing with the doorman until, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a very short, very angry young Mexican woman in a wedding dress charging towards us from across the ballroom.
"Now you've done it, Adolf. Get ready to see what happens when you infringe upon the rights of the Fourth Estate."
The young woman reached past the doorman and grabbed me by the arm.
"It's okay," she said. "He's my brother."
---
Jenny and I were twins, and we were always close growing up despite our very different personalities. Besides a birthday and a couple dead parents, there wasn't much else we shared in common. She was an over-achiever and a bit of a kiss-ass, always trying to make mom and dad proud, which she seemed to pull off with ease. She was the girl in high school who played every sport, joined every club, ran the student council, and somehow still managed to pull A's without breaking a sweat. Intense doesn't even begin to describe her. I could never compete with that, so instead I decided to build an identity for myself as the rebel. Unfortunately, I somehow equated rebelling with turning into a giant asshole.
We grew up in a middle-class suburban family. Our father was a teacher and our mother an architect. They were the kind of couple that kept a date night to go dancing every Friday for the 31 years they were married. They died when Jenny and I were twenty-two. We sold the house where we grew up and split the cash; neither of us wanted to set foot in it again.
Jenny used the money to pay for her Master's. After school she went to work for James McPherson, one of the most powerful and richest men in the city. Aside from owning the St. Augustine, McPherson had interests in real estate, land development, venture capital, and other things I really should've known more about. The McPherson family was old money here going back to when this valley was nothing but orchards. If I said that at one time or another the McPherson family had owned every single square foot of land in our city, I'd probably be exaggerating – but not much.
Jenny ran the McPhersons' charitable foundation, which basically meant that not only did they have so much money that they had to start giving it away, but they even had to hire someone else just to get rid of it for them.
---
Jenny grabbed two glasses of scotch from the bartender and handed one to me.
"From the look of you – not to mention the smell – I know I really shouldn't be giving you this, but.." she trailed off and shrugged.
"Here's to your big day," I said as I clinked my glass to hers.
"So big that you showed up an hour late and missed the ceremony completely," she added, flashing me an expression of disapproval that made her look like our mother. I opened my mouth to protest, but mercifully she pressed her finger to my lips to silence me. "I'm just happy you made it."
"I am, too," I replied.
We managed to sneak away from the reception through the hotel kitchen and out a service door that opened onto a loading dock at the back of the hotel. We sat on the dock and caught up over scotch and cigarettes.
"I haven't smoked in ages," Jenny said after exhaling a series of perfect rings. "If Brad saw me, he'd flip."
"What are you going to do when he smells it on you?"
"Blame it on you, of course."
I chuckled and stubbed out my cigarette butt. "Do you remember when we were in high school and we used to sneak out onto the roof over the garage to smoke?"
Jenny smiled. "Yeah, and I remember the time junior year when I came out to find you frying, babbling about spy satellites, government radio signals, and Philip K. Dick."
"Yeah, and you blackmailed me for fifty bucks to keep from telling mom and dad," I said with a grimace.
"Like they couldn't figure it out anyways when you spent the next morning bug-eyed and twitchy during Sunday brunch with grandma." Jenny laughed so hard she snorted.
"We used to be so close," I said, letting a hint of genuine emotion escape my lips for the first time in as long as I could remember. "What happened?"
"I guess we grew up," Jenny shrugged.
I scoffed. "Speak for yourself."
The service door swung open and a large, square-jawed man stuck his head out onto the dock. "Jenny, I've been looking for you for half an hour."
"Hi, Brad," I said while chewing on the rocks from my scotch. "Nice party."
He ignored me while Jenny stood up and walked over to him. "Why do you smell like smoke?" he asked.
"Sorry, honey. D was smoking, and the wind kept blowing it right into my face."
"Let's get back inside," he replied coolly. "Our guests are waiting for us." He held the door open as Jenny stepped inside.
"Hey Brad, I was meaning to ask you," I called out as they left, "did you get a chance to read my article? I sent you a copy at your office."
The door slammed shut.
---
Jenny met Brad through her work. Brad McPherson was James McPherson's nephew and protégé. He managed a number of McPherson's business holdings, including the venerable St. Augustine. Presumably that got him a discount for the reception. He also engineered a deal with the Mayor's office for millions in city redevelopment money to help revitalize parts of downtown. Coincidentally, Brad's uncle owned just over half of the land in the area slated for redevelopment.
It was hard to explain why I hated Brad so much. He was successful, charming as all hell, and from all accounts very committed to my sister. Granted, he had that moral blind spot that the rich and successful develop out of necessity, but he wasn't at heart a bad person. Sure, I had always pictured Jenny ending up with a smarter man, someone who could match her intellectually, who was a little more like our dad – but on the other hand, I could see that Brad had the kind of all-American good looks and charisma that middle-class brown girls go crazy for. To her, he represented the last step of integration and acceptance, like her ticket into honorary WASP-dom.
So maybe it wasn't that hard to explain why I hated him after all.
---
I made my way back through the reception, trying to count the faces I recognized out of Jenny's guests. The sad thing was that she had almost no family there, so I knew more people from photos or TV than from real life. There was the Mayor, two sitting congressmen, one senator, a handful of local politicians, the publisher of the Morning-Star, a smattering of billionaire venture capitalists, the CEOs of the city's dozen or so largest tech companies, and me.
One of these things is not like the others.
All of the city's best and brightest were here with one glaring exception – Dylan Maxwell.
I decided to find my assigned table, figuring it was a good place to kill time while I waited to see if Maxwell showed. When I got there, I realized Jenny had sat me next to my old high school friend Brian Lopez. She probably thought she was doing me a favor by giving me someone to talk to.
"Well if it isn't old Double-Dip himself," I said as I walked up to the table, slapping Brian on the back. "Good to see you, Bri-Bri."
Brian stood up, trying to force his grimacing lips into a smile. "D, good to see you."
He extended a pudgy hand to me. He had always been what they politely referred to as "husky" when we were kids, and time and age had not improved things. He shook my hand, gripping it tightly, and then introduced me to the other three people at our table – two of his co-workers from City Hall and his fiancée, Sandra.
"Nice to meet you," I said to Sandra, ignoring the other two. She was a few years older than him and it showed. Her facial features were harsh and uneven, but she compensated for it with an amazing body that she was showing off in a tight tan cocktail dress so low cut it threatened to spill out her ample cleavage.
"Very nice, congratulations," I said as lewdly as possible to Brian. He couldn't help but smile smugly; he was the nerd from high school whose newfound power and influence had nabbed him the kind of girl that used to laugh in his face.
"No really, she's hot. I definitely like what's going on up here," I continued, waving my hand in front of her chest. "Brian has always been a breast man."
"D, please..." Brian stammered.
I opened my mouth to say something else, but got distracted when I noticed a woman walking through the reception hall in a multi-colored checkered ball gown and a black veil. That was weird. I considered asking the others at the table if they had seen her too, but then realized that their backs were to her.
I continued, "No seriously, you should have seen this guy in high school. Sometimes I think the only reason you used to hang out with me was to come over to my house and stare at my sister's tits." Brian's face turned beet red. "It used to creep her out. In fact, I'm kinda surprised she invited you. You two never really used to get along."
Brian took a deep breath. "A lot of things have changed since high school," he said, pointedly. "Jennifer and I see each other professionally a lot now, and we have become friends."
"That's right, you work for the Mayor now," I said, snapping my fingers as if it was just coming back to me. "I should have remembered because of that time you had me dragged out of the council meeting. I guess things have changed since high school. If you'll excuse me, I need to go see a man about a drink."
---
I walked out onto the terrace that led to the ballroom's private garden and made my way to the terrace bar. After quickly downing two more shots of whiskey and taking a third to go, I meandered through the garden a bit and thought to myself that all things considered, I was having about as good a time as I could have at this thing.
As I turned a corner around a bush, I caught sight of a familiar face – Lilian Lynch, press secretary for Abrasax and conniving, backstabbing harpy. She was sitting on a bench, talking to someone who was hidden from my view by a topiary bull. She didn't see me at first because her eyes were fixed on her companion.
"Look, just tell Max that I am handling it, and as for the Ariadne Key, I don't know--"
She cut herself off as soon as she saw me approaching.
"Why Miss Lily, you look stunning. Aren't you going to introduce me to your friend?" I said loudly.
As I took my final steps closer, her companion came into view, and I recognized him as the shit-kicker from the flophouse, Mr. Bad Seed, albeit cleaned up and wearing a very expensive tuxedo that must have been custom made to fit someone of his size so well.
"I've got to get going," he said to Lily as he stood up. "We'll talk more later."
That last line was meant for Lily, but he was looking at me when he delivered it. I was a tall guy myself, but he towered more than a half-foot over me, easily, and he was no less intimidating in the monkey suit than he had been covered in the flophouse manager's blood.
I stepped aside to let him pass and then took his seat on the bench next to Lily. She was a thin redhead in her mid-thirties. Her skin looked like it was stretched too tightly over her body, like she was nothing but skin and bones, and she always had very serious, almost worried look to her face. Her thin lips seemed frozen into a permanent half-frown, and I don't think I had ever seen her smile or laugh. Her humorlessness made her seem older than she really was, and the way you could see her skull so well-defined under her face always made her look somehow macabre to me, like she was dying a prolonged and agonizing death from some disease.
I noticed a scrap of paper in her left hand. I tried to inconspicuously glance at it and saw that it was a newspaper clipping of the "Woman found dead off Highway 77" article. She caught me looking and quickly stuffed the paper into her purse.
I returned my eyes to her. She was draped in a tight red dress with a plunging neckline. Although she did not appear entirely comfortable in it, it did show off her trim figure nicely. Between the dress, wearing her hair down, and the smoky eyeshadow she had on, I wasn't lying when I called her stunning.
"I can't believe you actually had the balls to show up here tonight," she said with disgust, staring me down with a pair of steely gray eyes.
"What do you mean? It's my sister's wedding."
"Yes, and a mere two days after you publicly accused your new brother-in-law, his family, and most of their closest business associates of conspiring to misappropriate city funds."
"Yeah," I conceded, "But how could I pass this up? Especially since I heard single women get crazy horny and desperate at weddings. And I just want you to know, if your hormones are telling you to do something you're gonna regret in the morning, then baby, I am definitely willing to be your mistake."
Lily screwed up her face and mimed choking. "Ah, excuse me, Mr. Quetzal, but the thought of our skin touching just made me throw up in my mouth."
I grinned and looked at her reproachfully. "It's okay, you're not at work anymore. You can drop the hard-nosed flack routine and admit your true feelings."
"Okay, then speaking truthfully, when I first met you I thought you were gay. It made you seem a lot more interesting. Sometimes I like to imagine that you fake these pathetic attempts at fucking me just to stay in the closet, like being a chauvinistic asshole is your beard. It helps me keep from jamming a letter opener into my eye every time your number shows up on my caller ID."
I nodded and threw her a wink. "I get it, let's keep it professional. I'd only end up breaking your heart anyways."
She rubbed her temples in exasperation. "Listen, D, it's been a long night. Just tell me what it's going to take for you to leave me alone."
"An interview with your boss."
She guffawed loudly. "You can't be serious. Mr. Maxwell is very selective about the press he does. He won't even give a personal interview to the Morning-Star."
"I'm way better than the Morning-Star."
"You write senseless drivel to fill space between the movie listings and the hooker ads in a cheap rag that most people end up using to line their hamster cages."
"Yeah, but I look fucking suave doing it."
She rolled her eyes. "I can't tell if you put on this act intentionally to wear your adversaries down, or if you are just legitimately retarded."
I gave her my best roguish grin. "Well if I can't talk to Maxwell myself, maybe you can tell me why you all of a sudden won't take any calls about my story."
"Look, it's simple. I asked Mr. Maxwell for a statement regarding the accusations you were making, and for some reason he told me to admit they were true. I have no idea why he did this, probably for the same reason he does most things – because he was bored and thought it would be good for a laugh. At any rate, he lost interest in your little story as soon as he hung up the phone with me, and he isn't likely to expend any more time or energy on you."
She paused, chuckling to herself and shaking her head before continuing. "As for me, I am avoiding any association with you for the same reason as everyone else in that ballroom. You're toxic, a pariah. No one's going to stick their necks out for you. Even if what you wrote is true, you've made powerful enemies who are going to tear you apart one way or another. And some of us are going to enjoy watching it."
I slumped down in the bench. "You know, Lily, you really are an epic fucking cunt."
"I may be a cunt, but at least I'm not a pussy," she sneered back and patted the top of my head condescendingly as she stood to leave.
I turned to my right to see a shrub trimmed into the shape of an elephant standing on its hind legs, its front legs raised up like arms. Setting my drink down on top of one of its front hooves, I took out my notebook and jotted a few notes on what I had overheard of her conversation. I drew a big fat circle around the phrase Ariadne Key.
When I finished, I took my drink back from the topiary elephant and tipped the glass to him in salutation.
"Here's to you."
---
I staggered back through the ballroom, my head swimming from the booze, which had crept up stealthily and then hit me all at once. My ears started ringing with a strange noise like the static crackle of radio interference mixed with a faint but incessant whine of a feedbacking speaker.
Bits of conversation faded in and out as I weaved between the wedding guests.
"--in way over his head. The man has no business being in an executive-level position--"
"--shooting at Club Vox? It's the third one this month downtown. A bunch of savages, no matter how many cops--"
"--fucking liberal crybabies with no idea what it takes to run a--"
"--only a matter of time before I make partner--"
"--did you see the nose dive their stock took--"
"--not to worry about re-election, no one's dumb enough to try to run--"
My stomach churned, and the feedback in my head suddenly spiked with a loud squeal. I put my head down and barreled my way into the restroom.
Mercifully, it was empty. I stepped up to one of the sinks, braced myself against the counter with my arms, and stared into the mirror. My nose was bleeding. I looked down and saw a few perfectly-round dots of deep crimson had dripped onto the pristine white basin.
I leaned in and splashed a little water on my face, feeling my senses start to normalize and regain some focus and clarity. I switched off the faucet and looked back at my reflection in the mirror. Then I heard giggling coming from one of the stalls. It sounded like a woman's.
"Hey, keep it down in there," I called out. "Don't want any of these uptight country club types catching you two getting nasty in there."
"No, it's not nasty – I'm alone in here," a woman's voice called back.
I perked up. "Um, that's actually a little nastier. And extremely hot."
The giggle returned, and the door to one of the stalls opened up. It was the girl I'd seen earlier in the motley dress and black veil. "Eww, I wasn't doing anything in there. I was just hiding out."
"Hiding out in the men's room?" I asked.
She nodded emphatically. "Bathrooms are good places to hide out. They're quiet, and they're private. I started hiding out in bathrooms back when I was, like, 13, and my dad would drag me to boring dinners in stuffy restaurants with his boring friends."
"Yeah, but hiding out in the men's room?" I repeated.
"Women linger longer and they're too chatty," she explained. "Men's rooms are quieter and more likely to be empty."
"Fair enough."
The girl took a step closer, and I could see her more clearly through the veil. She was young, at most nineteen, with short brown hair and a pixie-like face. Her skin was pale, but there was something exotic about her features, implying she may have been of mixed ethnicity. She moved past me to the bathroom door and turned the deadbolt.
"Why'd you lock it?" I asked.
"I saw you out there; you looked like you could stand to hide out a little yourself," she explained and started back to the far end of the bathroom. She sat on the floor, her back propped up against the wall under a small window. "Have a seat."
"On the floor?"
"They keep things pretty clean in places like this," she said and patted the cold white tiles next to her.
I reached up to slide the window open before joining her. Then I fished a pack of smokes out of my pocket and offered one to her.
"If we're gonna break the rules, we might as well do it right. Do you smoke?"
"Yeah, all the time," she said as she took it and lifted her veil. I lit our cigarettes and then watched her take a drag without inhaling. She held the smoke in her mouth for a second before spitting it back out in a messy cloud. It was obvious she had never had one before in her life.
"So it looked pretty brutal for you out there," she said, trying to pose with the cigarette like a film star from the thirties. "Everyone you walked past was staring daggers at you. I mean, it's obvious why they've got a problem with me," she paused to indicate her dress, "but what'd you do to piss them off?"
I shrugged, then took a deep drag and held it in my lungs. "It's complicated."
"Ooh, mysterious," she replied. "I like that."
I smirked. "Besides, I never really fit in at things like this. I'm just here for my sister – to support her or whatever, even if I do think her new husband is a raging douchebag."
She chuckled and took another phony drag. "So you're Jennifer's brother?"
I nodded. Then something clicked in my head; she definitely wasn't from our side of the family, and she was too young to be Jenny's friend or a professional acquaintance, so...
"You must be related to Brad then, right?" I asked, wincing.
"Yeah. Well actually it's complicated, and a little awkward for me to be telling you," she replied as she leaned forward conspiratorially. "The thing is, I'm actually married to Brad, too."
I laughed and half-choked on a mouthful of smoke. "You're kidding, right?"
She shook her head. "Brad and I met in the islands three years ago. We fell madly in love and were married in less than a month. Of course, his family disapproved and has never acknowledged it as valid. Still, they flew me out here and are letting me live on the family estate just to keep me quiet."
She was clearly lying. I laughed again, not knowing how else to respond.
"So if you're Jennifer's brother, and I'm your sister's husband's secret other wife, are we related?" she pondered. "What does that make us?"
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