The City Under the Skin

by Geoff Nicholson

  “Is this too subtle?” Billy said to Zak. “Or is it not subtle enough?”

  “It’s not subtle at all,” said Zak.

  “Okay,” said Billy. “That’s the beauty of it, right?”

  “Right,” said Zak.

  This was the first time Zak had ever ridden in a Cadillac: he wondered what the odds were that it might be his last. And then Wrobleski appeared, shambling down a set of metal stairs from an upper level, moving awkwardly, gun in one hand, Carla Moore tucked under the other arm.

  Billy and Zak eased themselves out of the car, walked slowly, measuredly, toward Wrobleski. Billy Moore was aware that he was trying to behave “normally,” though he had no idea what normal looked like when confronting a murderer who’s holding your daughter like a rag doll.

  “You all right, Carla?” he called out.

  “What do you think?” Carla snarled back.

  “Of course she’s all right,” said Wrobleski. “She’s hurt me more than I’ve hurt her.”

  Billy looked at the damage on Wrobleski’s face and said, “Well, good for her.”

  Wrobleski checked angles, casing his own joint. The place was surprisingly, unusually empty. Where were those guys he paid to be there when he needed them? At least Akim, resentful or not, was a reliable presence.

  “Who’s this scumbag you’ve brought with you?” Wrobleski demanded. “Your bodyguard? Your boyfriend?”

  “This is my pal Zak,” said Billy. “He knows a thing or two about maps.”

  “Well, good for him,” Wrobleski said. “What’s that he’s got in his hand?”

  Zak thought it best to speak for himself. “It’s a cylindrical map case, leather, early twentieth-century…”

  “I know what a fucking map case is,” said Wrobleski.

  “And there’s a map inside,” said Zak helpfully, nervously.

  And then something clicked.

  “Wait a fucking minute,” said Wrobleski. “I know you, don’t I? Akim, you know this guy?”

  Nothing from Akim.

  “No, you don’t know me,” said Zak, trying to sound as though he believed it.

  “Yeah, you’re the little fucker who climbed into my compound. You came back. You really are an imbecile. And this other imbecile brought you here. So what’s this all about?”

  “I’m a map dealer as well as an urban explorer,” Zak said.

  Wrobleski looked at him with mild, generic disgust.

  “So? What has this got to do with you, Billy?” Wrobleski demanded. “What the fuck has this got to do with you and me?”

  “I work for Ray,” Zak said.

  “Ray fucking McKinley?” said Wrobleski, becoming aware that this might actually be leading somewhere, though not anywhere he wanted to go.

  “He’s my boss. I work at Utopiates.”

  “What, that crappy little shop he owns?”

  “That’s my life you’re talking about,” said Zak.

  “Zak has something we think you might like to see,” said Billy.

  “What’s this ‘we’ all of a sudden?” Wrobleski said. “What the fuck are you two playing at?”

  A vein danced in the flesh next to Wrobleski’s eye. Billy could tell he was getting to him, confusing him: he liked that.

  “Zak,” Billy said, “show Mr. W. the goods.”

  Zak offered the map case to Wrobleski.

  “Don’t be a jerk. I’ve got a gun in one hand, a kid in the other. Hand it to Akim.”

  Zak held the case upright, pulled out the scrolled map, buckled up the case again, and gently placed it on the ground at his feet. He handed the map to Akim, who raised it to the height of his shoulders and let it unravel in front of him like a narrow length of wallpaper. It didn’t look like much to hide behind.

  “The Jack Torry rape map,” said Zak.

  “All right,” said Wrobleski, not entirely unimpressed. “I’ve heard of it. Not bad. In another time and place we might be doing some business. But in the current circumstances … so fucking what?”

  “We thought you might like to have it,” said Billy. “For the collection. We’re putting it on the table as part of the negotiation.”

  “We’re not negotiating,” said Wrobleski. “All you have to do is head down to the basement, do the job I’ve asked you to do, and you’ll get your daughter back.”

  “Everything’s negotiable,” said Billy. “Everything’s renegotiable.”

  Akim continued to hold the map up, but he looked increasingly likely to screw it into a giant ball. Billy Moore took half a step forward, putting himself between Wrobleski and Zak, blocking the line of sight, so that Wrobleski couldn’t see when Zak gently side-footed the map case under Wrobleski’s SUV. If Akim saw it, he didn’t care.

  “Dad,” Carla pleaded, “don’t negotiate with the bastard!”

  “The kid has a point,” said Wrobleski. “You don’t honestly think I’m going to take the map, give you your daughter, and say no hard feelings?”

  “No,” said Billy. “I don’t think that.”

  “Then what do you think?”

  “I think this. What if I do the killings like you ask, and let’s say you even give me Carla, though there’s no guarantee you will, well, that’s not going to be the end of it, is it? What’s to stop you turning me in for the murders?”

  “Beats me,” said Wrobleski.

  “I think you want a fall guy. You want those maps gone, those women gone, and then you want me gone. You can see why I don’t find that very appealing.”

  Out of the corner of his eye Wrobleski saw a movement up on a higher level of the compound, a flash of light. It was a distraction he didn’t need.

  “So where do we go from here?” said Wrobleski. “Akim’s got the map, and I’m still the one with the gun and the girl.”

  Billy was not stupid enough to put his hand in his pocket, to appear to be reaching for anything. Instead, he placed his right palm against his chest, as though he was about to make a plea for mercy and decency, as though he was about to speak from the heart. He pressed harder, pressed through the leather onto the electronic trigger lodged inside his jacket.

  The world around him, around all of them, seemed simultaneously to implode and explode. Sound waves, hard as rock, slammed against his ears. The SUV flipped up weightlessly in a violent cloud, ash gray and burnt orange, showering glass, steel, and automotive innards. Billy and Zak made a dive for the ground. The front end of the vehicle was hefted sideways, slamming against an internal wall of the compound, punching a hole as big as a double garage. Blue-black smoke and a film of shimmering gasoline fumes veiled the air.

  Akim fell on his side, the map draping him like a scorched towel. Wrobleski staggered backward, crouching, choking, but he stayed on his feet. A weaker man would have let go of the girl, but he only held on tighter. He fired his gun impotently in the air, not at anything in particular. But with Zak and Billy still on the ground, he was able to dance away through the smoke, and as he went, he became aware that the explosion had caused small, localized fires in various places around the courtyard. He had people to deal with that, right?

  He saw Akim crawling across the tarmac, dragging himself to his feet, finding his way to one of the fire extinguishers. It wasn’t much: preventing your place of work from burning down seemed like the minimum requirement of any job, but it was more than he was getting from his other goons, now entirely absent. Akim brought the extinguisher to life, but then Wrobleski realized that he wasn’t trying to put out the fires, he was simply clearing a path for himself as he headed for the gate. There was a brief, fierce argument between Akim and Charlie the gateman, but Charlie was no hero, and he didn’t just let Akim out of the compound, he followed, letting the electronic gate shut itself behind him. And was Wrobleski imagining it, or did he hear an approaching siren, maybe more than one?

  Then there was a new distraction, bright heavy things, swooping down on him like angular birds of prey, spinning from high across the other side
of the compound. At first Wrobleski thought they were sheets of wood, pieces of metal and glass, maybe something pulled from the roof. But then came the sickening realization that they were frames, and not just empty frames, frames containing maps. His collection was taking flight, attacking him. He looked up and saw the women, their arms loaded with maps, launching them haphazardly into space. They’d got into his storage rooms. How the fuck was that even possible? The frames dive-bombed the ground, shattered as they hit. Splinters of wood and glass spiked around his legs.

  The maps weren’t aimed precisely at him—they weren’t aimed with any precision whatsoever—but a random throw, one with an accidentally perfect trajectory, came heading right his way, and before he could sway or duck, a neat, stainless-steel corner gouged its way into the flesh above his cheekbone. His head jolted back, a piece of skin flapped open, and he felt blood on his face. He shuddered, tried to shake off the blow, but he couldn’t, not quite, not immediately. Carla struggled to get free, flipped around like a baby shark: he tightened his grip.

  Something loomed at him through the smoke. Billy Moore was on his feet and in action, and he grabbed hold of Wrobleski’s gun arm. Wrobleski tried to shake him off, shoulder him away, aimed a venomous kick at him, even as Carla was biting him. The shark had teeth: he was fighting half a family here. He tried to turn his gun into Billy’s face, but he felt the man’s desperate, intractable strength. For a second he even thought of letting the kid go so he could deal solely with Billy, but no, he wasn’t a guy who willingly let go of his assets: it was a matter of principle.

  Then he got lucky. Another map sliced through the air above them. Wrobleski stepped back and he pulled Billy with him, into the path of the tumbling, curling, accelerating frame. It gashed Billy on the temple, hard, precisely: he sank to his knees. Wrobleski kicked him aside, so he could retreat deeper still into the compound.

  Flames skipped around the doors up on the top level. The women were immolating his maps, his whole building. Wrobleski started toward the stairs that led upward. If he could get there, he knew he’d be able to handle half a dozen drugged, damaged bitches and save the rest of his collection. But then he stopped himself. Maybe there were other priorities. He hadn’t imagined those sirens: they were real and they were getting louder and very close.

  On the other side of the courtyard, Zak, shuddering, shaken, and astounded by the explosion, his sense of balance no longer reliable, looked up into the higher levels of the compound. He shouted, “Marilyn,” but his voice seemed entirely within his own head. He could see bodies moving around up there, but there was no sign of her through the growing turmoil of smoke and flame. He couldn’t pretend to know the feelings of Wrobleski’s women; maybe if you’d been forcibly tattooed, kidnapped, brought here, you might feel differently about maps from the way he did. Even so, he couldn’t help feeling that destroying maps simply because you despised their current owner was more than wrong, that it was a kind of blasphemy.

  Wrobleski withdrew still farther as the world around him was thrown dangerously, giddily off-kilter. He was experiencing a brand-new sensation: panic. So this was what it felt like, what other people felt all the time. Not pleasant. Not good. His killings had always been placid, well-organized affairs, and he’d always been the one causing panic in others. He felt betrayed. He did the only thing he could think of. Clutching Carla like a security blanket, he hauled her into the deeper reaches of the compound, into a dark, untidy, familiar corner, where he lifted the flat, diamond plate hatch. It wasn’t any version of escape, nor any version of safety. He hardly even knew his way around down there except for the one route that took him to the disused subway station, but he reckoned that was more than anybody else knew. A man with a gun and a little girl who could be used as a shield would surely find a way. Carla Moore might yet save him.

  40. PENULTIMATE THINGS

  Wrobleski and Carla Moore passed swiftly through damp, hanging, enclosed darkness. Wrobleski had crammed an oversized miner’s helmet onto Carla’s head, and one on his own. She looked almost adorable. Their feet were wet: dankness soaked into them. At some incalculable distance there was the vast sound of moving water.

  Wrobleski told himself he’d been in tougher spots than this. Yes, he was in a sewer. Yes, he was in several kinds of pain, but in the end, pain was nothing, either it went away or you lived with it. And yes, sure, he assumed he would be pursued, and he didn’t know exactly who by or how many there’d be, but in any case nobody he respected.

  For now he was prepared to look upon the kid as an asset, although that could change, because looked at in most ways, she was a liability and a total pain in the ass. At least, now that they were down in the tunnels, she’d stopped kicking and biting. She seemed to have realized that, for better or worse, the two of them were in this together. Of course, she could find other ways of being irritating.

  “Do you know where you’re going?” she asked, as insolently as she knew how.

  “Obviously,” Wrobleski replied.

  “Doesn’t seem so obvious to me.”

  “That’s because you’re a kid. You don’t know shit.”

  She let that hang for a while, as if it might be enough to shut her up, though of course it wasn’t.

  “Are we playing hide-and-seek?”

  “I’m surprised you even know what hide-and-seek is,” said Wrobleski. “I thought it was all computers and video games for you kids.”

  “Oh yeah, I’m very old-school. So how long do we hide for?”

  “As long as it takes.”

  “We could be down here forever.”

  “Maybe you could, if you don’t shut the fuck up.”

  “Boy, aren’t we a grouch today?”

  “Not only today,” said Wrobleski.

  * * *

  Billy, Zak, and Marilyn stood in a corner of the compound, under a metal gantry, sheltering from smoke, flames, and cops. The good guys are always slow off the mark. They have to do the right thing, to make sure the victims are okay, which may also include finding out who the real victims are. They have to say something warm and supportive, or possibly cool and ironic. “You actually came to rescue me, Zak?” “Yes, Marilyn, I actually did. Don’t sound so surprised.” Then there’s some explaining to do, to the cops, or the concerned citizens, and in this case also to the fire fighters. Which is to say that sometimes the good guys also have to prove they really are good guys. Establishing an “innocence” that involved blowing up a car with stolen dynamite in Zak and Billy’s case, and in Marilyn’s, opening locked doors, destroying property, and torching the place, might be a time-consuming business. By then Carla and Wrobleski could be anywhere. Maybe they didn’t need to establish their good-guy credentials right there and then.

  Billy Moore pulled open the steel trapdoor that led to the world beneath the city, found a cluster of heavy-duty, rubber-sheathed flashlights hanging from hooks at the top of the stairs, and called urgently to Zak and Marilyn, “Are you coming down with me or not?”

  “Of course I am,” said Zak. “I’m an urban explorer.”

  “And,” said Marilyn, “nobody descends into the underworld without me.”

  * * *

  “The thing about hide-and-seek,” said Carla, trudging on gamely beside Wrobleski, “is that in the end it’s never much fun. You hide, and then nothing happens. So you get bored, and after a while you start wanting to be found. Is that what you want, Mr. Wrobleski?”

  “Even if they find me, that doesn’t mean they’ve caught me. That’s when the fun really starts.”

  “Gosh, you sure are tough, Mr. Wrobleski. Tough and grouchy; I’ll bet that makes you a lot of friends.”

  “Kid, shut up.”

  Then, out of nowhere, there was the sound of a deep, booming explosion, a sustained bass rumble, as though the earth around them was growling. Without thinking, Carla grabbed Wrobleski’s hand, as if he were her protector, but then she immediately threw it aside, ashamed. Wrobleski was almost as
surprised. In spite of everything, he actually felt somehow protective toward this infuriating little brat: he didn’t completely hate the touch of her hand.

  “It’s all right,” he said as gently as he knew how. “It’s nothing. It happens all the time down here. It’s the new subway line.”

  The sounds receded, the tremble diminished, though Carla continued to feel ashamed of herself.

  * * *

  In a tunnel not so far away, Billy Moore absorbed that same bass sound.

  “Looks like the Platinum Line is getting by without that dynamite,” Zak said.

  “Quiet,” said Billy. “I’m trying to listen. I’m trying to hear my daughter.”

  Zak Webster, Billy Moore, and Marilyn Driscoll moving through the underworld: brains, brawn, good looks, not necessarily in that order, and not evenly or discretely distributed. They plodded along a storm drain, the flashlights modeling yellow-gray cones through the darkness ahead of them. They were not exactly lost, but they had no clear notion of where they were heading. Sometimes they thought they heard voices and footsteps, but they knew it might be their own echoing back at them. Certain spaces and constrictions seemed more inviting than others, but to what were they an invitation? The darkness simultaneously beckoned and repelled, the air was thinner and colder than any surface air, and unidentifiable smells wafted through the tunnels, often foul, but sometimes surprisingly, incomprehensibly sweet.

  “I suppose there must be maps of this place,” said Marilyn.

  “Sure,” said Zak. “I know collectors who are only interested in maps of sewers, catacombs, subway systems.”

  “You hang with a really interesting crowd, don’t you, Zak?” said Billy.

  Zak didn’t react to that one. Instead, he said, “Did you ever kill anybody, Billy?”

  “No,” Billy admitted, “but some people probably think I did, and that has its advantages.”

  “How about Wrobleski? Does he think that?”

  “By now Wrobleski will have realized he knows absolutely nothing about me. Or about you either, Zak. That’s good. He won’t know what he’s dealing with. We could have more dynamite. We could have tear gas and stun grenades. We could be armed to the teeth.”