straps of the backpack had dug into my shoulders so hard it felt like my arms would go numb. I was shivering, and it wasn’t the chill that was giving me goose bumps.
The bartender was a woman, alcoholically aged, trapped somewhere between forty and seventy, with drawn skin and gin blossoms on her face. She stared at me and I thought for a moment that she knew who I was.
“Jack rocks,” I said, and dug out a twenty, slapping it on the bar.
She took the bill and grunted. My watch was reading six minutes past three. Rainwater dripped down my neck, and I could feel it soaking the back of my shirt. The fingers on my left hand had started throbbing again. There were only two other patrons in the bar, and both of them would have scared me if I wasn’t already so preoccupied with other fears.
The door opened as I waited for my drink, and Brian Quick entered, soaked from the rain.
I turned hastily away, felt the panic claw at my heart. If I was right, he shouldn’t be here, this didn’t concern him. And if he was here, then I was wrong, and everything I was planning was worthless.
I heard him move to the bar, demand a bottle of beer, and the bartender snarled back at him to wait a fucking minute, then slapped my change down in front of me, planting my glass on top of it. I took the drink in a gulp. It was watered down, and if it was Jack Daniel’s to start with, I was Nina Simone, but it lit a raw fire in my chest, and made me think it was what I needed.
Brian Quick received a bottle, focused on the television hanging over the corner of the bar. He could have been just another midday alcoholic for all the interest he had in the world around him.
I picked up my change, began folding it into my pocket, and saw a small slip of notepaper wedged between bills. I pulled it free, glancing again toward Brian, caught him taking a pull of his beer.
The paper read BACKROOM.
The door was set in the wall behind the final booth, and it opened into a storage room full of cardboard boxes stacked on metal shelves. I took a last look over my shoulder before pushing through, and the bartender was enraptured by the glowing box again, but Brian had twisted on his stool, watching me go. When I stepped in, I didn’t see any lock for the door. A couple of kegs stood in a corner, and a single, naked bulb gave the only illumination. There was no one to be seen, and I thought I’d trapped myself, had started to turn around and head back out when I saw the other door, only about half-height, between two sets of shelves. The door was metal, old, and slightly ajar.
It opened into a chute of some kind, and there was a ladder propped against the wall. I looked down, and in the dim light saw a rough dirt floor maybe fifteen feet below. The walls on either side of the chute were stone, and the air smelled stale and perpetually wet. When I listened, I could hear the echo of water dripping onto stone.
There wasn’t any more time. I adjusted my backpack, and slipped through the opening onto the ladder, feet first. The alcohol wasn’t doing its job, and even when I gripped the rungs tight, forcing my injured fingers to close around the wood, they still kept shaking.
In the room above and behind me, I heard the door swing open, Brian coming from behind.
I’d been right about one thing. Whoever was doing this, they planned to leave me dead.
And they’d picked a perfect place to do it, a place where perhaps hundreds had died before me.
This was the Portland Underground, sometimes called the Shanghai Tunnels, and the reason that the City of Roses had earned the dubious honor of being called the Worst Port in the World. No one knew who had first constructed the tunnels, but they’d begun operation around the 1850s as a means to hold and move, to buy and sell, human beings. Thousands of men and women had disappeared through them during their days of operation, either taken by force or drugged into submission, dragged off the streets, most never to be seen again. It was a business, run by men called crimps, who would sell males as sailors and the women as prizes. They called their earnings blood money, and sometimes took as much as fifty dollars a head. Captains in port would request a crew, and the captured men would be drugged yet again, then loaded onto the ships this time to awaken in the Pacific, sold into slavery, on their way to ports like Shanghai and Hong Kong and Macao. Some eventually made their way home, voyaging for years to pay for their return. Most never made it home at all.
When I was sixteen, I’d written a report for school about the tunnels. I’d gone to the library and looked at microfilm of newspapers from the 1930s, read the accounts of men like Bunco Kelly and Stewart Holbrook. The tunnels had reportedly been in operation into the early 1940s, and I’d had nightmares that they were still used, that I would be walking downtown and the ground would open in front of me, and I would be put in a cage and chained and sold to a harem somewhere.
Somehow, that seemed more appealing than what I was facing now.
I hit the bottom of the ladder, trying to find the source for the light. It was out of sight, around a bend, a soft glow that made the tunnel seem darker. The sound of the water was louder here, and there was a wind that raced along the stone, whining for attention as it found me and slid up my legs and down my shirt. The water on my back got colder, and the shakes got worse.
Above me, I heard the metal door swing open, hit the stone wall with a clang.
I put one foot carefully in front of the other, trying to remember how to breathe as much as walk, moving toward the light. My steps made echoes.
I was ten feet or so from the bend when he came around the side, setting a battery-powered lantern on the ground. He was dressed the same as he had been all the times before, still wearing the black mask. His hands were out and empty, and he seemed larger than he had before, and I stopped cold when I saw him.
“You were late.”
I nodded.
He raised a hand and indicated the backpack on my shoulder. “Toss it over.”
My voice sounded hollow and ethereal when I said, “I want my dad.”
“Toss it over here.”
In my jeans, my knees felt like they were turning to gelatin, trying to slide down my shins. I let the backpack slide off my arm, let the strap fall into my hand.
Behind me, Brian Quick said, “Half of that’s mine.”
The gun came out from beneath the parka as if it were a living thing, ready to leap on command, and it was up and pointed before I could begin to react. But not before Brian, apparently, because he shoved me hard to the side, snatching the backpack free with his other hand, and I hit the wall on my shoulder and bit back a cry.
The only thing that made the pain easier was that the Parka Man was now pointing his gun at Brian Quick.
Brian Quick, however, had brought a gun of his own.
“The fuck is this?” Parka Man asked. I thought it was directed at me.
“I’m your partner,” Brian said, before I could speak. “I’m the guy who’s made it easy for you so far.”
“Is that so?”
“You killed her big brother, asshole. You killed her brother, but instead of cops coming after you, I’ve had them chasing after me. I gave you room to work.”
“I didn’t ask for your help.”
“You got it anyway. How much you hitting her for? Fifty K? A hundred? We split it down the middle, right now, we never see each other again.”
Parka Man didn’t move, and neither did his gun. Unlike Brian, he held it in both hands, his knees bent in a slight crouch.
I tried to straighten up, using the wall.
“You fucking don’t move, bitch,” Brian snarled, adjusting his grip on his gun. His tongue stabbed out, wetting his lips. “You and me, we’re not done.”
“You’re the pervert,” Parka Man said. It came out soft, but there was no mistaking the realization in his voice. There was no mistaking the mirth, either.
“I’m no perv, asshole,” Brian said, agitated. His hand was beginning to jump, and I wondered if he sampled the product he and his brother used to cook. “I’m a goddamn entrepreneur, I had a fucking sweet system going, then you came along and fucked it up.”
“Did I?”
“Fuck you, man, I’ve got the money here, you want to take a shot? I fucking bought you time! We split this straight, fifty-fifty.”
