Darkside (18 page)

“Company?” Bagger asked softly.

They stood there and listened. Indistinct sounds bounced down the concrete walls, but there was no way to tell how far away they were. Or what they were. They both switched off their flashlights and listened.

Another soft clang of metal, then a sound they couldn't identify. Because of the S-turn, they couldn't see back down the main tunnel, and every sound was being distorted by the background hum of power lines and water pipes. Jim thought he felt a slight change in the air pressure. Bagger had his eyes closed, listening.

Another noise, unrecognizable. Then a sputtering sound. Jim tried to place it. Sputtering. Like a…fuse? Bagger heard it, too, and was looking at Jim, who mouthed the word
fuse,
saw Bagger comprehend it, and then there was an explosive roar from the main tunnel, a roar that was approaching very quickly.

Before they had time to react, a red glow lighted up the tunnel and the roar doubled in volume as a rocket of some kind came around the corner, ricocheting low off the walls and then blasting right at them, spinning wildly, chest-high. They barely had time to dive to the deck plates before the thing went blasting over their heads, screaming down the tunnel, where it slammed into the flat concrete wall of the next turn, some fifty feet beyond them. There was a flash of bright green light and a loud bang when it hit. The tunnel disappeared in a cloud of dense white smoke that stank of sulfur, and they had to stay down on the deck plates just to find breathable air. From somewhere behind them in all the smoke, they heard a nasty laugh echoing through the smoke and then the pronounced clang of a metal door.

“What the
fuck
!” Bagger muttered, trying not to cough as the dense trail of smoke drifted down toward the deck plates.

Jim had pulled his Glock. He crouched just beneath the thick layer of smoke, waving it out of his face. “Fireworks,” he said. “Some fucker set off a Fourth of July rocket and sent it down the tunnel.”

There was definitely a change in the air pressure now, a sudden feeling of release, and, amazingly, the smoke began to retreat, almost as if it were alive, back down the tunnel from which the rocket had come, like a film being run in reverse. Jim saw a blinking red light pulsing through the smoke from just around the corner.

“Smoke detector,” he said. “The smoke-evac system's fired up. We're gonna have firefighters next.”

They stood up as the smoke shrank back around the corner like a fleeing ghost. They followed it. Just beyond the three-way junction, an exhaust fan in the ceiling was run
ning noisily at high speed, sucking the air from the tunnel and now beginning to squeeze their ears. Another red light was flashing on a sensor panel high in the tunnel ceiling.

“Let's go get the rocket,” Bagger said. “Before the firemen show up.”

They turned around and went down to the end of the passageway. The rocket body was crumpled up against the door of a telephone equipment vault. It appeared to be made of thick cardboard, two and a half feet long and two inches in diameter, with badly charred fins at the back. The lower part of the rocket body was blackened, and what was left of the front end was smashed flat and also burned. The stink of sulfur was almost overpowering. Jim picked it up and promptly dropped it.

“Yow! Hot motor scooter,” he said, waving his hand in the air. “Gunpowder?”

“Yeah, I've seen these. Commercial fireworks. You saw that green flash.”

“Still do,” Jim said. “Every time I blink.”

“How do midshipmen get their hands on commercial fireworks?”

“Brigade activities committee maybe. You know, for football games. They've got that touchdown cannon. I don't know, though. First spray paint, now this. That thing would go right through someone, going like that.”

“No shit,” Bagger said, examining the simmering tube. “I think we've flushed our sick puppy.”

“I'd prefer the vampire scene to being impaled by that damned thing. I think I hear the fire brigade. Let's go tell 'em what happened.”

“You better put that away,” Bagger said, pointing with his chin at Jim's Glock. “Unless you think Drac's still back there somewhere.”

“He'd better not be,” Jim growled.

A single fire truck had shown up on the street above the grate in front of Mahan Hall, and a team of three respirator-clad firemen came down into the main tunnel. Most of the smoke had been evacuated by then. Jim identified himself
and explained that someone had set off some fireworks in the tunnel. He produced the still-smoldering rocket tube. The firemen, used to midshipman antics, secured the alarm system and took the tube with them to add to their collection of crazy mid memorabilia.

Jim then took Bagger back down the main tunnel and out to the King George Street utility vaults closest to St. John's College. On the way, they passed the original shark tag Jim had defaced with his own pictogram and the words Hall-Man-Chu. At first, Jim thought it was unchanged, until he saw the addition of two small black letters to his own signature: Hall-Man-Chu-mp.

“Our boy offends easily,” he said.

“Not bad work for an ex–Jar-head,” Bagger said, examining Jim's tag.

“I cheated; got it from a tattoo parlor downtown. There's a bigger one closer to the King George Street doors.”

The second tag remained unchanged. Bagger studied it for a long time.

“The shark motif is consistent,” Jim said. “That fish with serious teeth. I don't know who WD is, or why the shark is about to bite him.”

“This is a white guy,” Bagger said.

“How can you tell that?”

Bagger just looked at him. “Trust me. This is a white guy,” he repeated. “This the way out to town?”

Jim took him to the utility interchange with the city's vaults. He showed Bagger where they were in relation to the Academy's steam plant across Dorsey Creek. “I've even been under your building,” he said, pointing to the location of the old postgraduate school building on the map. “Those are some old tunnels. Date back to the 1920s. Still in use, though.”

They stood in front of the steel doors as a large truck rumbled overhead out on King George Street. The tunnel walls were all smooth concrete, but the lightbulbs trembled in their sockets and the steel pipe hangers rattled with the vibration of the passing truck.

“Hate this shit,” Bagger muttered. “Don't like being underground.”

“Can you imagine working down here all the time?” Jim said, unlocking the door. They stepped through, and Jim closed the door behind them.

“How far to the ee-gress?” Bagger said in reply, and Jim detected some real anxiety in the man's voice. He took him down the King George Street leg and up the sloping tunnel to the grate on the St. John's campus. Two more doors and they were sticking their heads up into the cool night air. Bagger shrugged out of his backpack and wiped perspiration off his forehead.

“Better,” he said. “Much effing better.”

Jim grinned. “What's not to like?” he said. “Nice wall art, fireworks, the sweet sound of sewage gurgling beneath your feet.”

Bagger shook his head and then looked around as if checking for rockets. “I could use a drink,” he said.

“Let's hit that Irish pub on Maryland Avenue,” Jim suggested. “It's only two blocks away.”

They drew some stares from the college kids when they came in wearing jumpsuits and carrying backpacks, but not for long. The singer, an anorexic-looking blonde whose lank hair mercifully hid most of her face, was wailing something about Celtic dreams as she plunked on a much-abused guitar. They squeezed into a tiny booth at the other end of the narrow barroom.

“So what makes it an Irish pub?” Bagger said.

“Fresh Guinness on draft, for one thing,” Jim replied. “Never been here?”

“Not exactly a homie place,” Bagger said, looking at the small sea of white faces. “And what's a Guinness?”

The bartender, a loudly cheerful Irishman in his forties, took Jim's shouted order for two stouts from across the room. The singer shot them both a hurt look.

Jim nudged Bagger's knee under the table and pointed with a lift of his face over the agent's shoulder. Bagger casually turned around. In another booth halfway down the long,
narrow barroom were three girls dressed all in black clothes. They looked to be of college age, although it was hard to tell because of their bizarre makeup. Bagger turned back around.

“Crabtown Goth posse?” he asked.

“Local cops said there were three of them, probably Johnnies. This place is a Johnnie hangout.”

The bartender brought two pints of glistening black Guinness stout. Jim dropped a twenty and the bartender left to make change. Bagger tried some and nodded approvingly. The singer gave up her dirge, to the visible relief of most of the patrons. The bartender immediately turned up some Irish background music, and the noise level in the bar went up pleasantly. He brought Jim his change and told them that the kitchen was closing in thirty minutes, if they wanted any food.

Bagger, who had been examining the table menu, ordered a Reuben. Jim said no, but then he asked the bartender about the back-in-black coven three booths over.

The bartender, who recognized Jim as a sometimes regular, laughed softly. “Call themselves Goths. They're harmless. They come in here on slow nights, usually order coffee, and then sit there for hours, trash-mouthing all the straights. Freak show.”

“They ever pick up guys?” Bagger asked casually.

“I-don't-think-so,” the bartender intoned, rolling his eyes. “I wish a crowd of real Goths would come in one night. You know, those guys with the long hair and horns on their helmets? Bet they'd know what to do with that lot over there.” Then he went back to the bar.

“Heard that,” Jim muttered. One of the girls might actually have been attractive, but the other two were decidedly dumpy. But with their white-to-pink painted faces, black-rimmed purple lipstick, double lashings of mascara, top and bottom, they looked like vampire mimes taking a break. One of the plain ones had seen him looking and was now whispering to the other two. Jim concentrated on his Guinness to avoid eye contact.

“So, what do you think of the Guinness?” he asked Bagger.

“Ain't half-bad,” Bagger said, taking a substantial hit.

“You guys getting anywhere with that suicide?” Jim asked as casually as he could.

Bagger drained the remainder of his Guinness and wiped his lips. “Branner had to go up to DC for a meeting on it. NCIS brass and reps from the SecNav's office. The ME's report raised some questions. Bruising indicates the kid's arms were pinned, which is weird. Navy staff told Branner to go through the motions of a homicide investigation, but more like to rule out murder. Then they'll decide between DBM and a suicide ruling.”

The attractive Goth girl had turned sideways in the booth so that she could fiddle with the laces on her witch boot. She wore a studded dog collar around her neck. “I guess a homicide would be tough to prove,” Jim said, watching her out of the corner of his eye. “I mean, there're three thousand upperclassmen who have a duty to make life miserable for the plebes for the entire year. Where the hell would you start?”

The girl raised her knee to get a better grip on the laces and her dress parted, revealing a breathtaking length of thigh dressed up in shiny fishnet stockings. Jim tried not to stare, because it had been a very deliberate move. “We start with the girl whose underwear he had on,” Bagger said. “Man, what are you looking at?”

The girl put her leg down, slid a seductive smile on and off through all the heavy makeup, and turned back around. “Goth girl putting on a little leg show. Part of the act, I suspect. ‘You straight guys all think we're beyond weird, but we can still make you look.'”

“They can
all
make me look,” Bagger said, lifting his empty glass so the bartender could see it.

Jim wondered if he should caution Bagger on the alcohol content of the Guinness. “That girl today, the midshipman, I mean, she was pretty damned good-looking,” he said. “Maybe the Dell kid was in lust.”

Bagger nodded. “She was okay, nice rack an' all, but I
was diggin' that slick little lady lawyer, sexy legs right up to there, phone-sex voice, definitely old enough to know how. You probably noticed—Branner hated her, naturally, but I was being nice as I could be.”

“Bet you pulled the wool right over her eyes, huh?”

“Oh yeah.” Bagger laughed. “Must have taken her, oh, two, maybe three seconds to see right through my insincere ass. But still. That interview today with Markham? Lady mouthpiece walked all over Sugar Britches.”

Jim grinned. “Sugar Britches—that would be Branner?”

“On account of her famously sweet disposition, yeah. Comes with that red hair, I suppose.”

Jim still had warm memories of the sight of Midshipman Markham in her spray-on competition swimsuit. The possibly pretty Goth bore a faint resemblance to her, but then he realized, no, it was just those gorgeous wheels. The bartender brought Bagger's Guinness and the sandwich. As he walked back by the Goth booth, one of the girls stopped him and whispered a question. The bartender looked back over his shoulder for a moment at Jim and Bagger, then shook his head and walked on. Jim continued to watch them out of the corner of his eye, still not wanting to make eye contact with them. They'd be just the type to set up something embarrassing in a public bar. As the Academy security officer, he didn't need that hassle.

He wanted to ask some more questions about the Dell investigation, but he decided to let it go for the moment. He didn't want Bagger to suspect he was being pumped for information.

“Man this is a damned good Reuben; you ought to get you one.”

“Still trying to preserve my girlish figure,” Jim said, finishing his beer. “I'm thinking of getting some motion detectors. Chief knows this guy here in town, does security equipment? Put a series down there in the tunnels, use a timer to turn them on after hours, see how much traffic we've got down there.”