The man studied him, eyes dark holes shaded under his brows. He sat still for a moment. Then he nodded.
Any more questions, Daniel would cross the line. Become one of "them," labeled as an undercover cop in the drunk's paranoid mind.
Daniel stared down at the bottle and the man hugged it closer, tensing, ready to fight to keep his bribe. Shaking his head, Daniel turned away and shuffled down the alley, touching the flaky bricks every third step as if he needed them to confirm "vertical" to his brain. Nobody here but us drunks. Have to keep in character, even when you're headed off the stage.
The Paramount. An old five-story hotel, it dated back to lumberjacks and river-drivers, a hell-hole even then. Cheap whiskey downstairs, cheap women upstairs, cheap graves in the cellar that opened directly onto the Naskeag River. Men came down-river with the spring floods, the long-log drivers riding the tail of ice-out, a winter's pay weighting their pockets and looking for a little fun. The Paramount and the other "hotels" existed to remove that extra burden, send the workers back hungry and hung-over.
With the occasional case of pox.
That had been Naskeag Falls in the 1800s — get the logs and the winter money, both. Sawmills and dives. And eight or ten churches, steeples high on the hills above the water, among the mansard mansions and above the stink and noise, representing the pious hopes of the families that kept the money. Morgans weren't the only pirates working the Maine coast.
The Paramount was about the only old hotel still standing — if you could count it as still standing. Half and half, maybe. Boarded up for years, a couple of minor fires, part of the roof collapsed in a snow-storm a few winters back. Condemned. The city hadn't torn it down because of a listing on the National Historic Register. The owner kept claiming he was going to make repairs.
Daniel worked his way toward the waterfront and a section of downtown that had escaped the big fire back around 1900. The alleys grew even more crooked, frost-heaved cobbles instead of asphalt underfoot, narrower, darker, designed for traffic when horsepower was literal and men moved tons of cargo by their own muscle. The alleys grew emptier, as well — that police sweep preceded itself, as word of it spread like ripples faster than a man could walk and ask questions.
The Paramount looked strange, bereft of the flanking buildings that had left blank side walls up to the third floor, wide and shallow to get the maximum number of daylight rooms to save on gas lights. Daniel ignored the "No Trespassing" signs, the even larger "DANGER" signs. Third cellar window from the left, his source had said, a roof over your head if you were desperate.
Daniel dug a pair of filthy gloves out of his pockets and pulled at one corner of the weathered plywood covering the window. It groaned like an Addams Family door, swung towards him, and damp musty air flowed out. He smelled rats and pigeons and rot, old charred wood, wet plaster. And things long dead. He hoped they were the rats and pigeons. He patted the small of his back, verifying his hideout .22 auto before he went any further.
This wasn't necessary. It wasn't a good idea, and likely wouldn't tell him anything he didn't already know. "Tina" was dead, safely toe-tagged in a morgue, Jane spreading havoc among the boys at the university just outside of town. That other big blonde nagged at Daniel's memory, though, the mental image fitting perfectly over his memories of Jackie Lewis, Kate Rowley's kid.
Daniel had seen her lying dead outside Tom Pratt's blazing carriage house, shot in a drug war. Alice had set that up, damn her tangled witchy fingers in every pie, a diversion to her hunt for that Peruvian brujo and also Gary and Caroline's raid on the Pratt tunnels below. And then the kid's body disappeared. He'd seen it, seen the wound even through a grainy closed-circuit TV monitor. But no body found. Cops hadn't found the slime Gary killed, either.
"Nasty scar on the side of her head."
Ugh. Not a pretty picture. And likely to be way into Alice Haskell's territory.
But he slipped through the window into damp fetid darkness. His feet squished something, and he pulled out a thin Mag-Lite and twisted it on. Mushrooms. Decades of rains and leaks and spring high water had washed a deep layer of silt across the room, and patches of mushrooms dotted the floor. Footprints also patterned the mud, human and animal, fossil reminders of earlier trespass.
He followed them, through a broken door and into deeper shadow, his flashlight beam flickering across stub ends of pipes and wires stripped out for scrap, a hulking boiler white with asbestos insulation and dust, talus heaps of collapsed brick, old mattresses and cardboard furred with mold. A stairway led upward, more than half the treads ripped away for firewood, handrails long gone. The plaster walls dripped fungus.
The next level up smelled cleaner, less rot and silt and more the sharp dusty ammonia of pigeon crap. Hummocks of salvaged brick spotted the old flooring, with ash and charred ends of wood showing the hearths of private fires. Blackened cans and cheap abandoned cookware set off kitchens from living rooms, tangled cardboard and moldy discarded clothing marked bedrooms. Light filtered around the plywood window covers and made shadows into a complex of caves.
"Upstairs," the hints had said. Daniel's flashlight beam found a saw-tooth curve, the remains of an ornate sweeping stair that had led along one wall and upward, an ominous black hollow underneath. All the treads and risers had vanished. A line on the grimy wallpaper showed where hands had found balance on the inner wall, climbing the tightrope skeleton of supporting stringers that remained. He followed.
The smell of old death grew, replacing pigeon shit. Daniel paused. This was really not a good idea. But he needed to know as much
