“And of course getting me involved means that you don’t have to expose yourself in order to do the right thing.”
He opened the fridge and looked into it. “That sounds kind of selfish of me. And cynical of you. You want a beer?”
“Well, if you’re going to call me cynical, what kind of beer?”
He laughed. “I don’t know. I have one or two bottles of about five different things in here—people keep paying me for stuff in beer. Or books.”
A sudden muffled rapping came from the wooden wall by the bed. Quinton kicked the refrigerator closed and trotted past me to the sleeping alcove. He pushed on something and looked at the small screen that was revealed behind it. Then he covered it up again and grabbed one edge of the wall. He pulled and it swung open. It was, as I’d imagined, a door within a larger gate that only looked like a wall. Now I knew how he’d moved in the bed, since the bunker door wasn’t very large.
In the doorway stood a hunched, dark form. It leaned into the light and looked up at Quinton—he’s a little shorter than I am, so the figure was hunkered down pretty small. It was a dark-skinned man, but I couldn’t tell if that was natural or just dirt. He held out a metal box—some kind of electrical equipment to judge by the colored wires hanging off it. He was shaking and looking behind himself, wrapped in a twitchy haze of substance withdrawal.
“Hey, Q-man. I brought you the radio. See, I said I would. It’s OK, right?”
Quinton took the radio and looked it over. “Yeah, this’ll be good. Hang on.” He went to one of the tables, put down the radio, and picked up a palm-sized object made of black PVC pipe with a couple of metal horns sticking off one end. He carried it back to the door and started to hand it to the man. Then he hesitated.
“You know how to use this?”
“Yeah, yeah!” the guy said, reaching out for the thing.
Quinton looked askance at him and kept the black tube just out of reach. “Sure, Lass. Let me show you, just in case. You hold the plain end and you push the button on the side, see.” A blue-white ribbon of electricity jumped between the horns with a crack. “Make sure that bit’s touching the bad guy when you push the button, OK?”
The hunched man nodded vigorously and accepted the shock gun. “Yeah, yeah. OK. Got it.”
“No shocking Tanker’s dog, all right?”
“He scares me! I don’t like . . . animals,” he added, shooting another glance behind himself.
“Avoid him. If you take out that dog, Tank’ll take you out— zap gun or no zap gun. Got it?”
Lass hung his head. “Yeah, yeah . . . No shocking the dog. I got other ways around that dog. . . . All right. Just the creepy guys. And monsters.”
“Monsters? What monsters?” Quinton asked, intense.
The smaller man looked startled and backed up a step. “You know. The things that come out of the walls, up out of the holes, the sewer . . .” Lass’s voice got shrill and he started to shake harder.
“Ah. Those. Yeah. That’s all right. You go ahead and shock the hell out those,” Quinton said, patting the man on the shoulder. “You’ll be all right.”
The other man nodded and tucked the little device into his pocket. “Yeah. OK. Thanks, Q-man.” He scampered off into what looked like a brick corridor beyond the door.
Quinton closed the wooden portal and turned back to me. “Want that beer now?”
“Sure,” I said, relaxing into a chair I pulled out from under one of the tables. I was reassured by the little scene that Quinton wasn’t a dangerous lunatic who had lured me to his lair to kill me or something. Lass would have been an easier mark and less likely to cause complications.
Quinton gave me a New Belgium Brewing Company bottle that had lost its label. “Mystery beer—figured it was a better risk than the Rolling Rock.”
I made a face while Quinton uncapped the brown bottle for me. The contents proved to be Sunshine Wheat. That was fine.
“Does that sort of visit happen often?” I asked.
Quinton quirked his mouth up on one side and frowned a little. “Not quite like that. People do ask me to fix things or solve problems, but Lass’s been really freaked out lately and wanted something to drive the spooks off—he’s been trying to quit drinking again, and he gets jittery and crazy.”
“So, he’s got DTs—hallucinating and that sort of thing.”
“Maybe. He’s sure there’s someone after him, but around here there may well be. Vampires turn up around here sometimes, hunting.”
“You know, Quinton, you’re pretty calm about the vampire thing. Most people don’t believe they exist. Most people don’t believe in anything magic or occult. People like Will—”
I caught myself before I went too far, but Quinton peered at me. “Will.” He shook his head. “I imagine it’s . . . hard for you . . . dating someone who isn’t comfortable with those ideas.”
I looked away, annoyed with myself for feeling a flush of misery and anger I didn’t want him to see. “Yeah . . . well . . . I don’t think we’re dating anymore.” I held up a hand and, shaking my head, I added, “Right now, I don’t want to talk about Will and all those other people who believe in pop science and TV and what the newspapers tell them—stuff that fits in their transparent little scientific world. I thought you didn’t particularly care for vampires and ghosts and witches and magic, but you don’t seem to have any problem with the idea—the reality—of them. Or with me. Why is that?”
He took a moment before he answered. “I don’t believe in holding on to notions that don’t work, just because a majority of people prefer them. I learned that slipping into the cracks meant I had to learn to see the cracks first.” He leaned one hip against a worktable supporting the carcass of a gas-powered leaf blower and sipped his beer. “Sometimes I’ve had to figure out that something exists by inference or inductive reasoning when—like gravity—it’s not something you can see or touch. I went looking for the holes in what most people accept as reality, and where I couldn’t find a solid answer just sitting there, I poked around until other things led to a conclusion that fit, even if it seemed screwy. The knowledge of those holes and cracks has helped me out many times.
“So I’m used to acknowledging things that most people don’t even believe in. I can’t see magic—like I think you do—but I can see evidence that there’s an unexplained force in the world. Down here where anarchy is the status quo, the presence of magic and the things that go with it are a lot more obvious, if you’re alert. Or unlucky.”
“Have you ever seen a ghost?” I asked. It would be nice to know that someone else did. . . .
“Ghost? No. I don’t think so. Weird stuff, cold stuff, sourceless movements of air or steam, auditory anomalies—yeah, plenty. Is that what a ghost is?”
“No. That’s just the special effects,” I replied in a dry voice.
“Magic and ghosts are two things I have to concede, but I still don’t like them. I don’t like vampires either, but that’s a different thing. When you’re one of the hidden people, you’re fair game for them—no one’s going to notice you’re gone.” The air around him seemed to curdle with his disgust, his emotional radiation going olive green shot with angry bolts of red. “The homeless are just as disposable to them as they are to the rest of society, but the vampires can get something from them before they toss them on the dung heap. I think they’re responsible for whatever is happening to the homeless people and undergrounders.”
“The vampires? Why?”
“Why not? Who else would be down here, preying on people? We’re like the fast food of the vampire world. Just drop down to Pioneer Square after dark, find an alley or a doorway, slip down into a basement, and there’s lunch. I just can’t figure out why their approach has changed. They’re usually careful and they don’t rip into people the way most of these bodies have been. They don’t chew, for one thing.”
“Why haven’t you asked Edward? You obviously have some clout with the . . . undergrounders.” The term felt odd in my mouth. “You know Edward and he knows you. Couldn’t you go to him as a neutral party, a representative of the homeless?”
Not that I thought the city’s chief vampire was likely to welcome Quinton with open arms—they didn’t seem to like each other—but I’d thought there was some mutual respect there, at least enough to make a parlay possible.
Quinton snorted and coughed on his beer. “Hell, no! I’ve gotten between the vampires and their next meal often enough to be unpopular with Edward and his friends.” If he hadn’t been drinking good beer, I think Quinton would have spit.
“And none of them’s tried to whack you yet?”
“They’ve tried. But I know what their weaknesses are and how to hurt them without killing them outright—which would make me fair game. I have tried to stay neutral—it’s a bad idea to have enemies down here. I used to do bits of work for Edward when I first got here, but working for him’s like working for the government, and I’ve had to keep my distance—and force him to keep his. I’m in no position to go snooping around at the After Dark.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised that Quinton knew about the vampire club—he seemed to know about a lot of things I was still figuring out. I sighed. “So, you want me to go to Edward?”
“Only if it’s necessary. I think it’s his crew, but I could be wrong. I don’t have the skills to really know what’s going on. That’s what I want—to know what’s going on and stop it. I don’t want to be lunch and I don’t want any more of my neighbors to be lunch, and I sure as hell don’t want anyone snooping around down here and bringing this place to official notice. Things are getting pretty high-profile now that the cops are looking into the guy I found in the tunnel, and it won’t be long before other . . . people start to stir the waters. That’s not good for any of us.”
“All right,” I said, putting down my empty bottle. “I get you. How many dead or missing are there?”
“Three dead, five missing. And the leg in the pit—which might be unconnected, but I doubt it.”
“Some of the missing could have moved on to some other location,” I suggested.
“One or two, but most of these guys have no way out of here. It’s not like they have cars or money for fares. In this cold at this time of year, most couldn’t walk far enough in a day to make it to the next place they could be assured of food and shelter. And it’s not like you can continuously hop transit buses from here to Los Angeles or someplace. Most of these people are stuck here— they didn’t come here by choice like I did—so they’re already at the end of the line. If they go missing from this community, the chances are good they’re dead.”
I narrowed my eyes at him and played devil’s advocate. “Some of them do get out. They find homes and jobs.”
“Some do—there are some good service groups around Seattle helping the ones who want help—but they usually let the rest of us know. That’s not what’s happening here. It’s the ones who stand the least chance of that who’ve been disappearing or turning up dead: the odd men out. They haven’t been killing themselves, so someone or something has been doing it for them.”
I put up my hands, conceding. “All right. Someone’s killing homeless people, and if the guy in the tunnel is typical, it’s in a pretty bizarre way. All right, you’ve convinced me. But I’m still not ready to agree it’s vampires. I don’t really want to mess with Edward unless there’s a good reason.”
“Then let’s go find one. Or find something else.”
Quinton stepped away from the table he’d been leaning on and collected his coat and hat before he started for the wooden door by the bed. I shrugged and got up to follow him.