Concrete Underground (2010) (11 page)

I smirked smugly to myself and started looking over the flyers laid out on the counter to pass the time while I waited for Columbine. It was the usual punk show half-sheets, cheap black-and-white zines, and political leaflets. Thumbing through them, I came across a small stack of half-sheets that I recognized as the same one that the bum handed me on the Light Rail:
You Are Being Lied To... Trust Us.

When Columbine returned, I could tell she had something on her mind.

"There's something I just thought of, it might be relevant or it might not be," she said as we stepped outside.

"What is it?"

"Your list, it said that Max is the 'Fool' - do you know what that means?"

I shook my head.

"The Fool is the games master," she explained. "He organizes the entertainment. And not everyone in the group is happy with the way Max is running the games. He has a tendency to raise the stakes, push the boundaries. He likes watching how people react when they're backed into a corner."

"Yeah, I noticed," I said.

"I was just thinking that because of the necklace with the symbol, maybe the dead woman had something to do with Max's games."

"Yeah, that's really good," I said and fished out my notebook to write that down.

I noticed a cab coming up the street, so I waved it over and told Columbine it was for her.

"You're not coming?" she asked.

I gave her an apologetic half-smile. "It's been a long night, and I need to get home and get some rest."

"Well, I could go with you," she offered hopefully. "I don't really have anything to do this afternoon anyways. I could just hang out while you nap, and then we could go out to dinner when you wake up."

I opened my mouth to answer, but she cut me off before I had a chance. "No, I get it. It's okay."

Her cab drove off, and I started walking down the street to find another one. About a block away, I came across the redhead from the diner sitting on a bus bench, waving her hands slowly back and forth in front of her face and staring at them as if mesmerized.

I sat next to her. She looked up and smiled, but didn't say a thing.

"You look like you could use some help," I said.

She smiled widely and nodded. I was sure the smile was meant to be a sheepish grin, but she fucked it up and spread it ear-to-ear the way people do when they're stoned.

Just then, I spotted another taxi and flagged it down. As it pulled up in front of us, I got up and held the door open for her.

"Come on, I'll help you get home," I told her.

She beamed appreciatively and got in. I watched with satisfaction as her ass made a perfect heart shape when she bent over, then followed her in and gave the cabbie my address.

I never claimed to be a good man.

10. Cautionary Tale

I was late coming into work Monday morning and ran into Sharon in the front lobby. She was escorting out two women I didn't recognize, well dressed middle-aged professional-types in pants suits.

She reached a hand out to grab my shoulder and stop me as I tried to slink past. "Ms. Singh, Ms. Palmer, this is Dedalus Quetzal. He's the man you have to thank for the small fortune in legal fees your firm is charging this newspaper."

"You're still letting him work here?" one of the women asked incredulously.

"
Work's
maybe too strong a term when you're talking about D," Sharon replied.

"He smells like he's been drinking," the other woman added.

"He does indeed," Sharon nodded.

I broke free of Sharon's grip. "Really, ladies, I'd love to stay here and take part in whatever menopause-apalooza you have going on, but I have important journalisty-type things to get to."

I headed inside, made straight for my desk, and started searching through my files for a mention of anyone named Cobb in connection with Abrasax or the other companies related to my article.

Nothing was coming up. None of the top brass were named Cobb, nor was anyone who might have reason to hold a grudge, like recent layoffs.

"Fucking insubordinate bastard," I grumbled as I tapped angrily on my laptop. "Why don't you ever tell me anything useful?"

"Funny, I was just about to say the same thing." I looked up to find Sharon leaning against my desk. "Please tell me you did something productive over the weekend."

"As a matter of fact I did," I replied without looking up from my laptop. "I had a nice little chat with Dylan Maxwell himself. Swell guy, excellent diction, you'd like him."

"And...?"

"We made a deal," I answered. "I help him look into something, and in return he'll back up the story."

I decided that maybe Cobb was someone connected to Max from the past, so I logged onto the
Morning-Star
online archives to see if the name popped up in any old articles about Abrasax.

"Doesn't seem entirely ethical," Sharon mused.

"Do you actually give a shit?" I shot back, keeping my eyes locked on the screen.

"Not really," she replied. "As long as you're sure he'll hold up his end of the deal."

"Holy fucking shit," I said, my jaw dropping.

My search of the archives returned dozens on articles. But the name Cobb wasn't showing up in the articles themselves, it was in the by-line.

"Have you ever heard of a reporter named Patrick Cobb who worked for the
Morning-Star
back in the nineties?" I asked, looking up from the screen.

She folded her arms over her chest and sighed. "Are you serious? You've never heard of Patrick Cobb?"

I shook my head.

"And you claim to be journalist," she muttered. "He's a cautionary tale. If you'd ever actually shown up to any of your journalism classes at college, you'd have heard all about him."

I shrugged. "I never really saw the point, so can you just give me the Cliffs Notes version?"

"He was one of the best, most fearless investigative reporters I've ever met, back when the
Morning-Star
used to be a real newspaper instead of a sad corporate lap dog. He was also a good friend," she explained.

"So what happened? Why's he a cautionary tale?"

"About ten or eleven years ago, he wrote an article alleging that the US military was selling arms to right wing paramilitary groups in Columbia. In it, he quoted an unnamed source, a commissioned army officer, who claimed to have been ordered by his superiors to distribute the weapons to the death squads through his soldiers. They were supposed to be there training the legitimate Columbian army. After the article was published, it came out that the quotes were bogus and the officer never existed."

"Oh, I do remember hearing about that," I said. "But didn't the bulk of his story later turn out to be true?"

"It didn't matter, by that time, Cobb had already been discredited and fired from the paper. The right wing lambasted him as a prime example of the liberal media agenda run amok, and the left wing turned on him to prove what good, patriotic Americans they were. The national media turned on him and vilified him. At first he tried to defend himself, saying he had been misled, but after a while he gave up and just faded away. I ran into him about four years ago. He was a drunk, doing odd jobs and unable to hold onto any steady work. He was also completely paranoid and delusional, convinced that his fall from grace had been a deliberate plot orchestrated against him."

"Orchestrated by whom?" I asked.

"He didn't say for sure," she said, then paused, as if debating whether she should continue. "It's funny you should bring him up, though. At the same time that he broke the Columbian story, he had another on the back burner. It was a piece about human trafficking, girls being brought in from impoverished countries to work in the sex industry - southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Eastern Bloc. There had been a big police raid on some brothel; all the girls working there were undocumented and basically being held as prisoners. Cobb was doing some digging for a follow up, and I remember him telling me about a few people in high places who might have been connected. One was an up-and-coming young executive whose internet startup had only been around a year or two but was already making waves in a big way. Care to guess who?"

"Fuck," I groaned, not needing to say his name out loud for confirmation.

"Why do you want to know about Cobb, anyways? Is this part of your favor for Maxwell?" she asked.

"I think I met him," I said. "Do you have a picture of him?"

Sharon stood there motionless, studying me skeptically. "Yeah," she replied. "Let's go check my files."

I followed her to her office, where she opened a file cabinet and thumbed through it, then pulled out a folder. It was full of photographs and newspaper clippings about Cobb, which she laid out on the desk and picked through to find a clear head shot.

The intervening years had not been kind, for sure, but it was unmistakably the man from the flophouse.

"That's him," I said, taken aback. "He's the guy who hit me with the baseball bat last week."

"What?" Sharon shook her head, trying to wrap her brain around the implications. "What does Patrick Cobb have to do with your story?"

She looked to me for a response, but my attention was diverted to another photo on Sharon's desk. This one showed her and Cobb lined up on a stage along with a couple others holding plaques. Another row of people stood behind them on a slightly elevated platform. It was the woman at the far right of the back row who had caught my attention.

"Who is this?" I asked, holding up the picture.

Sharon squinted. "That's Jacinda Ngo. She used to be the head of Apex Computers. This was taken when Cobb and I won Feinman Journalism Fellowships. Apex was one of the sponsors, and she was a judge."

"She's dead," I said.

"Yeah, she died in a boating accident several years back," Sharon replied.

"No, she died last week," I corrected. "They found her body in a ditch at the side of the highway."

"I thought that was a vagrant," Sharon objected. "Why do you think it's her?"

"Hang on," I said, pulling my phone out to call Nick. When he answered, I switched it to speaker so Sharon could hear. "Hey, it's me. You remember how you said someone on the force thought he recognized the woman in the ditch as the head of some computer company? Was the woman he was thinking of named Jacinda Ngo?"

"Actually, I think that was it," he conceded hesitantly. "Why?"

"Long story, I don't have time to go into it now. Do you think you can get me a picture of the body, like just take a photo of her face with your phone or something?" I asked.

"They cremated her already," he replied, "but I'll fax you some of the photos the medical examiner took."

"Yeah, that'll work," I said. "Thanks for your help, Nick. And I hate to say this, but I kinda need them ASAP."

"You always do," he groaned before hanging up.

I looked back to Sharon, who was shaking her head in disbelief. "What the hell is going on here?"

I explained in as little detail as I could manage about the body found in Max's airplane and the nature of my deal with Max, conveniently leaving out the bit about me dreaming the whole thing. I also recounted my visit to the flophouse and my run-in with Cobb. And though it wasn't immediately clear how, I was sure that the two were somehow related.

"Did anyone at the flophouse know what Cobb was doing there?" Sharon asked.

"I didn't get a chance to ask. Just as I was coming downstairs, I ran into one of Max's thugs, and he didn't really seem like he was in the mood to entertain questions."

"You should go back and check it out," Sharon said, almost absently, her eyes looking off into the distance, as if she were trying to sort something else out.

"It's strange," she added. "Whoever sent you in there to get that blue box, why didn't they just get it themselves? I mean, they knew where it was, they knew when Cobb would be gone."

I nodded. "I wondered about that, too. The only thing I could come up with was that they knew Max was after it If he showed up or had someone watching the building, they might have been recognized, whereas I could come and go without raising any alarms."

Sharon nodded, agreeing with the logic.

Just then my phone started playing the White Stripes' "Blue Orchid". It was Nick calling me back.

"I don't know how to tell you this," he started. "In fact, I'm not telling you this. Officially, I am telling you that the department requires that you submit a formal public records request in writing to view the file."

"Got it," I said. "So what about off the record?"

"Off the record - and I mean really off the record," he added cautiously, "the pictures are gone."

"What do you mean gone?" I asked.

"I mean gone. Missing. And not just like someone lost them or swiped them. There are no negatives, nothing in the electronic files. There is absolutely no evidence of what that corpse looked like."