by Julie Beard
“How about you, madam?” Cosmo said, eyeing me almost seductively. “Would you like to know the secrets of the unknown?”
“Not really,” I replied. “The less I know, the better. But I would like to see you make me disappear.”
“Baker!” Mike said.
“Ah, but you don’t seem like a woman who shies away from the truth,” Cosmo murmured, turning so I couldn’t see Mike’s disapproving frown. “A whole world exists inside this box. A world that not many get to see.” He lowered his sunglasses over his nose, as Jon had yesterday, and pierced me with hugely dilated eyes. “A world not many want to see.”
At last I understood why a penny-ante street magician would set his prices so high almost no one would ask to see his trick. He was Emerald City’s northside gatekeeper. I turned and gave Mike the thumbs-up sign. “Okay, Cosmo the Magnificent, how do we do this?”
He pushed his glasses up his nose and broke into a broad grin. “One at a time.” When I pulled out my wallet, he waved his white-gloved hands. “No need, madam. I only charge idiots who insist on a real magic trick. My other services are gratis. I’ve been waiting for you.”
He helped me into the tall rectangle and leaned against the doorway with his arms crossed, talking fast like an airplane flight attendant. “Hold on to the handrails on either side. When the door slides out from under you, don’t panic. Look down and get a glimpse of the ladder. Move down slow until you get your footing, then go fast. The trick floor stays open only fifteen seconds. Be ready or you’ll fall on your derriere. But it’s only an eight-foot drop, so either way you’ll survive. Any questions? No? Good.”
He dusted his hands as if he’d just completed a difficult task.
“See you in a few. I hope.” I gave Mike a little wave and grabbed the side handles as instructed.
Everything went as Cosmo had said it would. The door slid slowly open, I lowered myself until my foot caught on the top rung of the ladder leading down into the underground, and I quickly climbed down the ladder until I found myself standing upright in an oval tunnel that was surprisingly well lit.
What didn’t go as planned was the arrival party. Just as the trick door closed overhead, I felt a shadow crawl over my shoulder and turned to find one very tall and mean-looking sonofabitch looming over me. His skin was pale but covered in ash. He had long black hair held tight to his skull in a black nylon do-rag and muscles that wouldn’t quit. One huge fist curled around a nasty-looking steel pipe with dried blood on the tip.
“Uh, hi.” I looked up with a weak grin. “Let me guess. You’re a Shadowman.”
He grunted and nodded slowly. Quite the conversationalist.
“Well, my name is—” Before I could even finish the sentence he cut me off.
“I know who you are. You’re Dead Meat.”
Chapter 15
The Cyclops
In a blaze of adrenaline, I twisted sideways and rammed my heel in his groin. When he doubled over, I uppercut my fist into his nose. The impact sent a jolt of pain through my shoulder. When he reeled back, I brought him down with a leaping roundhouse kick to the head.
Mike dropped down from the hatch above and immediately jumped into a dragon pose, ready to strike if the crumpled heap rose once more. “Who is it?”
“A Shadowman,” I replied, panting. I wiped the blood from his nose off my knuckles. “I struck before he could. These guys are like animals. They kill for fun. And they don’t usually travel alone.” I looked in either direction. “We better get moving. But which way?”
I wished I had the crystal ball. I had no clue. No hunches. Not even a gut instinct. Use your skills, Marco had said. But how? I was like a natural golfer who takes her first lesson and suddenly becomes self-conscious and forgets how to swing. So, I resorted to my failsafe: eenie, meanie, minie, moe.
Pointing right, I said, “This way.”
“No,” the dirty brute said as he struggled to recover his breath. He put his forearms on the ground to try to push himself up.
I drew back my foot to wallop him in the gut, but Mike held me back. “Hold off. Listen to him.”
“Don’t go that way,” the guy said as he pressed a fist to his bleeding nose. He looked at us with urgency. “The Shadowmen have a substation south of here. Go north two hundred yards and duck through to the right.”
I knelt down beside him and looked into intelligent eyes. “Who are you?”
“Officer Erik Roper,” he said hoarsely. “Chicago P.D.”
My mouth dropped open. “Some disguise. I thought you were threatening me.”
“No,” he said on a moan, “I was warning you that you’d be dead if you didn’t get out of here fast. The Shadows aren’t far behind me.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Undercover ops. I was assigned to follow your tracker.”
“How? My tracker isn’t live.”
“Detective Marco said you wouldn’t bother to engage, so he gave you a Lazarus Model EL. It never dies.”
So Marco had tried to outsmart me. And this poor schmuck. “I broke your nose.”
“It’s happened before,” he said, now breathing normally. “I was in the Universal Wrestling Federation before I turned to law.”
The UWF. That would explain his uncanny resemblance to a Shadowman. “Any other police down here I should know about?”
“I’m it as far as the Shadowmen go. Now get moving. They’ll be here soon. Get your quarry and get the hell out. I’ll keep the Shadows away from this launch pad until you can make your exit.”
“Thanks.” I wanted to say I was sorry, but it would sound so lame I didn’t even bother. I’d let him explain to the other Shadowmen how a tough guy like him got a broken nose. I was sure he wouldn’t mention it had happened at the hands of a petite blond chick and a Buddhist monk.
Voices echoed thinly from the south, then grew more distinct. I heard a steady pounding and realized it was the thud of synchronized jackboots hitting the tunnel’s concrete floor. Jon told us the Shadowmen ran in tandem, sometimes ten deep. They ran everywhere with the endurance of marathoners. If you got in their way, they mowed you down and trampled you, unless they wanted to filch your jewelry. Then you got a simple whack on the head with a steel pipe and were left for dead. God help you if you were considered an enemy. Then they dragged you to their station where the L platform had been wired with pirated juice. They stretched you out on the third rail for a fry job and watched you twitch like bacon on a skillet.
“Go!” Roper urged us.
He didn’t have to say it twice. Mike and I both turned and ran at the same time. I pulled a flashlight out of my Velcro leg organizer and led the way. We were running on hard-packed dirt, and I realized this narrow tunnel was not part of the Chicago Transit Authority’s twenty-first century public transportation system. I guess a century is long enough to build a whole new underground passageway if you have the knowledge and determination. I’d read that over the years a few ministers, ultraliberal types and loners, had voluntarily moved to the Emerald City complex. I suppose some of them might have been architects or engineers.
We veered right as the undercover operations officer had instructed. Quickly, we found ourselves reaching a hive of activity. There were voices, laughter, but before we could get close enough to check it out, two young men stepped out of the shadows with automatic weapons.
Mike and I froze, but when the young sentries called us by name, we relaxed. They motioned us into the large underground station. We stepped out of darkness into a yellow haze created by gas jets blazing against the tile wall near the now-defunct train ticket booth.
“Hello,” a man greeted us with a warm smile. He wore a serviceable brown omni suit that zipped up the front. He looked like Jon, but with graying hair. “My son said you were coming. Welcome. I hope the Shadowmen didn’t give you any trouble.”
Mike and I exchanged a droll look. “No,” I said, finally breathing easy. “No trouble at all.”
It turned out that Jon’s father was one of the elders who determined policy for five families that lived in and near the Addison station. He was self-educated and had spent his whole life in Emerald City. Cal Moore was the grandson of Jack Wendell Moore, one of the founding fathers of the underground society. He helped organize the homeless who took over when the CTA abandoned the underground lines in 2020 for the aboveground superconductor lines.
Moore had been a very successful engineer who worked at the Stone Container Building on Wacker Drive. He lost his job when American corporations sent white-collar jobs to join the blue-collar positions already overseas.
Overnight Moore lost his Winnetka mansion, his Mercedes, his wife and his faith in the system. But he believed strongly in the American Dream and set out to create a better form of democracy beneath the streets of Chicago. He never achieved his dream but died trying.
Cal proudly displayed a photograph of his grandfather on the wall of his family’s large living quarters in the southeast corner of the station. We sat around a table lit by a candle, sipping water, and studied a map of the underground system.
“I don’t know who down here would want your mother,” Cal said after hearing our story.
He stroked his attractive, clean-shaven face. Like the others, he was pale and his wide, unprotected eyes seemed omniscient. “Most of our folks are good people. Of course, the Shadowmen are savages. Bred in mayhem, they’re raised without consciences, but they do have a strong tribal sense, so they’re organized. Still, I can’t imagine them kidnapping your mother.”
“I believe she was taken by the R.M.O.,” I said. “But then how would she end up down here?”
“Tell me again what clues brought you here?”
“A vision,” Mike said.
I nodded. “I saw Lola someplace very dark, devoid of light. And I heard creaking chains. I saw this…this enormous eyeball. Very creepy.”
I shook off the memory and turned my attention back to Cal. His wide eyes glimmered with something that looked a whole lot like dread.
“What is it?” I leaned forward. “Cal, did I say something wrong?”
He swallowed thickly and pursed his lips. “No. Not really. It’s just…it’s just that what you described can point only to one man.”
That was good, I thought. No running in circles. We could grab Lola and get the hell out. “Who is it?”
“Cy.”
“Cy who?”
“Just Cy. It’s short for Cyclops.”
When we reached Cy’s prison forty-five minutes later, I mentally thanked Cal for great directions. The path had been incredibly convoluted. We would never have found it without his help. His runners led the way until we almost reached our destination, but they turned back, clearly nervous about wandering so far from home base in the darkened tunnels.
I could well understand why. According to Cal, the so-called Cyclops was a deranged young man who had been badly burned in the gas explosion Hank had talked about. While others in his clan had either died or reluctantly accepted their fate as scarred survivors, this guy had lashed out at the world. He’d built a stone prison, somehow managing to install mechanical wrought-iron gates that he operated on a pulley system.
Cal said sometimes Cy sent his hired Shadowmen in search of someone randomly to imprison. Then he’d rant at his terrified and innocent prisoner, quote Shakespeare and rail against the world that had disfigured him so badly. Usually, however, Cy’s prisoners were people he’d been paid to keep for others. Cy would hold prisoners for a fee, and it was widely known in Emerald City, if not above, that the R.M.O. employed him regularly. There was some speculation that a skeleton in the first cell to the right was all that remained of Chicago’s last powerful Italian don. He’d gone missing two years ago and the moles down here said he would have been better off sleeping with the fishes than spending an eternity listening to Cy’s melodramatic rendition of Shakespeare’s plays.
I didn’t care whose bones I’d find as long as they weren’t Lola’s. At least I didn’t care until we unexpectedly found the prison after turning a sharp corner.
“This is it,” I whispered.
Mike had already come to a stop beside me. We faced a short hall carved in stone that opened to a big stone support beam. Through the side bars of the first iron prison to our right, I could see an open area beyond that was domed and bore a sign that read: The Globe. I guess that’s why Cy named it after Shakespeare’s round Elizabethan theater. A torch blazed on the support beam, giving the whole area a golden glow. Cal said that Cy had been unwilling to tap into underground gas lines, for obvious reasons.
Mike looked to me for guidance. Should we go forward? What would we face? I sensed no one was here—no one who could harm us, anyway. I jerked my head toward the dome prison, gave a silent follow-me sign and led the way. After a few steps, I could fully see the first cell.
Sure enough, it contained a skeleton propped against the back stone wall, legs straight out, hands on either side, head slumped forward. It was still fully dressed in expensive, though tattered, clothes. A mouse had made a nest in the dead prisoner’s remaining gray hair. Another poked its head out of the dead man’s eye socket to see who had come to visit.
Cold prickled over me and suddenly I didn’t want to be here anymore. Mike stared in dismay at the skeleton, as well. If this person had simply died in that position waiting for another crust of bread and had decomposed there, the stench must have been unimaginable. Much later Mike and I would debate whether this was a hoax designed to frighten away unwanted visitors or a sign of Cy’s dereliction of duty as a prison warden. Right now all we wanted to do was get Lola and get the hell out.
“It’s now or never,” I whispered. “Let’s go in.”
We were drawn by the soft crackle of a torch adorned with the wrought-iron head of a dragon. The flames licked out of its mouth.
As we drew closer, we could make out more cells—six in all. All were empty save for one that contained a prone figure on the floor, dead to the world. My heart started to race and my throat tightened. No, she couldn’t be dead. She was simply sleeping. While Mike kept watch at the entrance, I walked soundlessly toward the prisoner until I saw a glimpse of brassy red hair and heard soft snoring. Hugely relieved, I rushed the distance.
“Lola,” I called sotto voce. “Wake up!”
I grabbed the black bars that separated us and confirmed in my mind that this crumpled heap in the corner could be no one but my crazy mother. Her hair—chaotic in the best of circumstances—was riotous and knotted. Her brown, flowing shift, gathered around her knees, exposed her wrinkled legs. The shadows deepened the wear and tear on her once beautiful face.
She looked so helpless. And old. She wouldn’t live forever. My hands tightened around the bars and my legs felt weak. Oh, Mom.
“Baker,” Mike whispered. “Hurry.”
I nodded, clearing my throat. “Lola. You have to wake up.”
Suddenly her head snapped up in surprise, instantly awake. She looked at me with a blank expression while she struggled to sit up. She made an effort to straighten her hair, which she would do even if the devil himself came to call. Appearance is everything, Angel. I’d heard her say that a million times, which she invariably followed up with a cheerful, Fake it till you make it! Fake it even if you don’t make it.
Lola sat up and her confusion vanished. She squinted at us against the yellow and black dance of light. Then recognition transformed her face—briefly into the woman I had known and loved when I was about five years old.
“Angel!” she cried.
With tears brimming in my eyes, I reached my hand through the bars. “How can I get you out of here?”
She crawled toward me, then grabbed my hand and pulled herself up. She flung herself to the bars and squeezed one plump arm through to hug me. I wrapped my arm around her. “Oh, honey, I knew you’d come. My baby, my baby, I knew I could count on you.”
Tears burned my eyes. “Lola
, we have to go,” I whispered, pulling out of her powerful hold. “How do I operate this thing?”
“Over there.” She pointed against the wall. “Pull the fourth lever from the left and then…then crank that handle.”
I rushed over to the primitive control panel that linked to the chains that raised and lowered iron grates like you see in pictures of castles. I cranked hard and the front of Lola’s cell started to open. At the same time I heard a guttural shout and the slap of fists on skin and the thwomp of feet meeting flesh and bone.
I glanced over my shoulder and saw Mike fighting a leather- and muscle-clad Shadowman who was a foot taller than him. My first impulse was to run to his side, but the pointy teeth of the iron grate began to lower just as Lola was halfway through on her hands and knees. I grabbed the crank before the leaden arrows impaled her and continued cranking until she scrabbled out. I helped her up and we ran toward the entrance.
“Go, Lola, run!” I pushed her to the right and came around to help Mike.
“No,” Mike shouted. “You go with Lola. I’ll fight.”
“Together or nothing, Mike,” I said as a second brute came loping toward the sounds of the fight.
I shoved Lola toward the corner. “Wait outside,” I whispered, not waiting to see if she’d obey. No time. The second Shadowman bypassed Mike and his foe, coming directly for me, raising a nasty wooden cudgel. I slammed the toe of my boot against his kneecap, eliciting a grunt of pain. His leg buckled, but it wasn’t enough to stop the downward arc of his powerful swing.
The club grazed my shoulder, scraping a bloody path down my arm. Better that than a broken clavicle. I moved in and landed a solid punch to his solar plexus, putting the full force of my body into it, driving deep enough to double him over this time. As he started to crumple, I raised both fists locked above my head and crashed them down on the back of his neck. He was out cold. I turned in time to see Mike’s opponent hit the stone floor.
