Blue Molly (Danny Logan Mystery #5) (13 page)

He shook his head again. “No.”

“Something you can put into words, then?”

He hesitated, then nodded. “Yeah. Apaches don’t do well underground. It’s on account of the Tuar-Tums.”

I stared at him. “Say again?”

“Tuar-Tums. The Little People.” He looked past me up the darkened path. He took a deep breath. “I can just about tolerate it, but you’d never get Pri in a place like this. She’s San Carlos Chiricahua. For them it’s worse. She was born about twenty miles away from the Superstition Mountains. That’s where the original Tuar-Tums live. Inside the mountains. They’re dangerous, man.”

“This is what, something you grew up with?”

He nodded. “From a young age. The Tuar-Tums—the Little People. They live underground. They’re not kind to visitors.”

“You’ll be okay if we go on in?”

He hesitated, apparently wrestling with himself. After a few seconds, he nodded. “Yeah. Just be ready to run. If they show up, I ain’t waitin’ for you.”

Little by little, things that a minute ago had been hidden by the dark began to drift into focus as our eyes adapted. The detritus strewn about was mostly shoved to one side of the walkway or the other, leaving the center relatively clear. This was good, because I didn’t even want to think about the diseases I might contract if I scraped into the jagged end of a 120-year-old rusty pipe. We moved forward, concentrating on avoiding the junk. After just a few steps, though, I stopped.

“Wait a second, Doc. This is stupid. I’m sitting here straining to avoid all this crap, and what’s likely to happen is that we’re going to walk right past the stuff we’re supposed to be looking for in the first place. Let’s make it easy and use our lights.”

“Okay by me. You’re the one wanted to fumble around in the dark and be all stealthy.”

I shook my head. “You’re right. Just on the off chance that Laskin or his boys are down here, I want to hear or see them before they see us. But the ‘no-lights’ thing ain’t working.” I pulled my flashlight out of my pocket and turned it on, kicking the beam down to low power, partly to save the batteries, and partly to reduce our exposure: my SureFire light on high power could be seen for miles.

“Light discipline,” Doc said, looking at the beam. “I’ll leave mine off.”

We were able to move faster now, making our way eastbound up Main Street, toward Second Avenue. The sensation was eerie—as if we were walking along chasing a dancing beam of light on a city sidewalk in a dark tunnel. Next to a whole bunch of boarded-up shops with bricks in the windows.

When we paused beneath a skylight in the sidewalk above, we could occasionally make out the shapes of people walking along Main Street, completely unaware of us. I pointed upward. “I got an idea,” I whispered. “Let’s count to three, then yell. ‘Save us! We’re trapped!’—something like that.”

He looked at me, his face a mixture of disgust and terror. “You’re insane.”

I grinned, then started moving again. I looked ahead, trying to make out the corner somewhere up ahead. Sylvia said it was seventy or eighty yards away, but I’d been shielding my light, aiming just ahead. I didn’t want to raise it now and announce our presence. Instead, I tried to visualize our position by picturing the street level above in my mind—Lyon Gallery on the northwest corner of the block, then came Omar Reynolds’s shop, then two more empty shops before the alley. After that, the fire station took up the rest of the block all the way to the northeast corner.

We passed the first door at Reynolds’s space, then the next two before reaching a place where the building on our right apparently gave way to a solid brick wall. I stopped and shined my light on the wall and on the street wall to our left.

“This must be the alley between the buildings,” I said.

He nodded, and then he gave a nervous glance behind us, perhaps thinking of the Tuar-Tums.

“You doing alright?” I asked.

He nodded. “Yeah. Just perfect. Let’s keep going.”

We crossed the alley, and eventually we were able to make out the corner, looming ahead in the darkness. To our right were four doors leading to the space beneath the firefighters’ museum on Main. Curiously, the padlock on the second-to-last door was missing. I pushed on the door, and it moved slightly. I pushed again, harder this time, and the door swung open enough to see inside.

I flashed my light around inside. “Look, here.” It was pitch-black inside, except for the beam of light from my flashlight. The large room was clearly not being used—hadn’t been for years, judging by its appearance. Dusty construction debris was everywhere: sawhorses, boards, a broken desk. A set of stairs in the back corner led to a landing and a doorway on the main floor.

“Let’s check it out,” I said.

“Hold it,” Doc whispered, putting his hand on my shoulder. “Why don’t we just remember where it is and check it out on the way back. We might see something better around the corner.”

“Hmm. Good idea.”

The last space on Main was locked, so we walked past it and then rounded the corner. I peered ahead into the darkness. The areaway was long, and I couldn’t see the end. Neither could I see any lights that might have indicated someone else’s presence. Hopefully, we were alone. We kept going.

We passed the firefighters’ museum, and then the building style shifted.

“This next door here must be for the piano lounge basement. And that one up there,” I shined my light ahead, “that one’s Laskin’s.” We walked up to it.

I shined my light around the areaway near Laskin’s door. “Think about it, man,” I whispered. “If Laskin’s hiding shit down here, he’d probably keep it reasonably nearby, right?”

“Maybe.”

“Just humor me. Pull your light out and help me search the space around here. We’re looking for something he could use to hold his drug stash.”

“How big would it be?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know, depends on how much of that Blue Molly stuff he’s holding. Bigger than a bread box, right? Wouldn’t need to be too huge, I imagine. Anything from a shoe box on up, I suppose.”

We started looking and almost immediately, Doc spoke up. “Whoa—look at this.” He shone his light on the ground.

As I looked, he said, “Footprints.” So far, the sidewalk, such as it was, consisted of a mix of broken and intact concrete, interspersed with occasional wood planking, and even some powdery bare dirt here and there. The ground here in front of Laskin’s window was mostly intact concrete. But the soft dirt left tracks on it. Someone had tracked the dirt onto the concrete.

I studied the tracks a little closer. “I don’t know, man. Those could be, like, eighty years old.”

“I don’t think they had Nike eighty years ago.” He pointed, and I looked closer and saw the unmistakable “swoosh” logo.

I nodded. “Oh. Good eye.”

I studied the footprints and ran through possible implications, but could only draw one conclusion: we definitely weren’t the only ones who’d been stomping about down here. Someone else had been down here, too. There had to be some reason why Laskin and his boys were interested in the areaway. Maybe the answer had to do with the Lyon Building. Or maybe the answer lay ahead. “Let’s finish up this street and work our way back. Then we’ll be half-done.”

We avoided stepping anywhere near the tracks and pushed on, all the way south to Jackson, where we ran into the reinforcing concrete the city had poured to bolster the street wall. All the doorways from Laskin’s shop to the end of the street were locked from the inside. There was no place any drugs could have been stored. We turned around and started back.

We reached Laskin’s door and paused again. I heard voices coming from inside his basement. Then I heard the rattling of a key unlocking Laskin’s door from the other side. A couple of thoughts flashed through my mind: First, if Laskin or his boys were down here doing something illegal, I didn’t want to blow our advantage by letting them know we were down here looking for clues. Be best if we remained invisible. Second, and even more immediately compelling, I didn’t want to stumble into round two of our bar fight, the opposing side having unknown numbers.

I looked at Doc. “Dude!” I whispered. “Run!”

* * * *

We needed to get back up around the corner at Main before the Russians piled outside and hit us with their lights. I figured we had forty yards to go. This should have taken only five or six seconds or so, but if we’d moved that quickly, it would have by necessity been without regard to noise, and then they’d have heard us for sure. Stealth was the order of the day, and the immediate goal was to quietly cover enough ground to get out of light range.

Of course, I didn’t have to tell Doc this. He was naturally stealthy—the man could sneak up on his own shadow, tap it on the shoulder, and then sneak away without anyone being the wiser. Me, personally, I had to work at it a little harder.

Behind us, I heard the door swing open, and Laskin’s crew spilled out into the areaway, jabbering away, making no attempt at all to be quiet. Sneaking away in the dark, I was unable to determine their numbers, but there were several at least. They laughed and talked, speaking mostly Russian with some English sprinkled in here and there, evidently with no concerns in the world. Apparently they hadn’t seen or heard us slinking away.

We rounded the corner. “Hold up,” I whispered. “I’d like to know what those guys are doing down here.” We flattened ourselves up against the wall and listened. The men continued walking our direction up Second toward the corner, the beams of their flashlights dancing ahead in front of them.

“They’re still coming,” Doc whispered a few seconds later. “We gotta move, or we’re going to get in trouble.”

I listened for a second longer, then I said, “Yeah, okay. Let’s hit it.”

We moved out again, quietly. We were heading west on Main, back down the hill toward Sylvia’s gallery. As we started, I realized that I wanted to stay, maybe hide somewhere and watch these guys, try to figure out what they were up to. Unfortunately, short of burrowing under a stack of one-hundred-year-old boards, there was nowhere to hide in the areaway. Except . . .

“Dude,” I whispered. Doc was two steps behind me.

I pointed to the open door in the second space. “In here. Let’s hide out and see what these guys are up to.”

He gave me a look indicating that I was insane, but then he followed me through the open door. Doc spent too much time in the army to waste time debating a decision in the midst of a crisis. Almost any action decisively taken was better than standing around looking stupid. He’d be free to second-guess once the crisis was past.

“You realize that if this particular place happens to be their final destination, then we just trapped ourselves, right?” he whispered. “We’d be TARFU.”

This was a valid point, but I wasn’t too concerned. The place had looked unused when we’d briefly checked it out twenty minutes ago. No one had been in here for years. Granted, the door was unlocked, but I still thought the odds were that this particular space wasn’t their target. I swung the heavy door most of the way closed, the same way it had been, leaving just enough of a gap so that I could try to hear what they were doing outside.

A few seconds later, they rounded the corner and started walking in our direction, still talking and joking among themselves. Then, they stopped. I heard the sound of keys jingling about, then the door in the corner space next to us was unlocked and opened.

“They’re next door,” I whispered. “They’re going inside.”

Once they were inside, their voices became muffled, and I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Through the wall, though, we could hear things being moved and shifted around.

“This is it!” I said with quiet excitement. “This must be their hiding spot.”

The shuffling and scraping sounds went on for twenty minutes or so, then they abruptly stopped. Still listening at the doorway, I listened as they emerged from the space, still jabbering away in Russian. The keys jingling again said they were locking up.

“Hear that? They’re leaving.”

“Good.”

Only they didn’t leave. Instead of the voices and the footsteps fading away, they started getting closer.

“Uh-oh.”

“Uh-oh?” Doc whispered. “Uh-oh? They’re coming this way, aren’t they?” I didn’t answer, so he added, “Told ya.”

* * * *

“Dude!” Doc whispered. “Over here!”

I shielded my light with a cupped hand and turned. Doc had found a reasonably well-hidden spot beneath the stairs. Being careful to not trip over anything, I quickly made my way over and ducked in beside him just as the voices outside stopped at our door.

“
Ty che, blyad?
Which one of you
govniuks
left the lock off this door?” I recognized the voice immediately: Pavel Laskin.

Suddenly, the door swung wide-open. Doc and I both scrunched down, trying to make ourselves small. We both carry .45 caliber 1911s, and they were drawn at our sides, but if a fistfight down here would have been bad, a gunfight would have been a disaster. The beams of several flashlights swung about the room, probing. Ominously, a red laser dot from a handgun also joined in and danced around the floor and walls.

A few seconds later though, a different voice said, “It’s empty.”

“Of course it’s empty,
besslovesnaya oslitsa
. What’d you expect?”

After another second, the light from the flashlights vanished as the door swung shut with a loud thump!

We remained in our hiding spaces long enough to make sure they weren’t trying to trick us into thinking they’d left. After several minutes had passed, I got up, shielded my light, and quietly made my way over to the door. I put my ear near the seal and listened. I heard nothing. I crouched down and looked through the small gap under the door, looking for the telltale beam of a flashlight. I waited another five full minutes. There was no light and no sound.

I moved back to the door and gave it a gentle tug. It didn’t move. I pulled again, harder this time, still nothing. I tried a third time, and it still didn’t move. Worse, I think I heard the latch outside rattle when I pulled. It was fully engaged now. Great.