Frag Box (18 page)

“Got it,” said the Prophet.

“Now see who commands that same outfit today.”

That took a little longer, but he got that, too.

“The name of the soul is Rappolt.”

“No way,” I said. “I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, Prophet, but you screwed up. You’re still back in the sixties, and Rappolt was a lieutenant.”

“Not so. Look for yourself. Colonel John S. Rappolt, the Third. He took command less than a year ago.”

“Well, I’ll be go to hell.”

“Not in my inner sanctum, you won’t.”

“What’s the big deal?” said Wilkie.

“We’re not looking for a service buddy, after all,” I said, “we’re looking for kin. John Rappolt was the name of the first officer Charlie ever fragged.”

“Not that common a name,” said Wilkie.

“It sure isn’t. I’m thinking this is his son.”

“Could be a grandson, by now.”

“I don’t think so. Not an immediate enough link. I’m thinking it’s somebody who grew up fatherless on account of Charlie and has been pissed off about it ever since. Somebody who took a long time and went to a lot of trouble to find out who to kill. Can you get me a picture of him, Prophet?”

“Coming out of the printer now.”

It was a face I had never seen before.

“Wide, you were in the Army, weren’t you?”

“Don’t remind me. Yeah, I was in Desert Storm.”

“So tell me: if a colonel decided to go off duty and off the radar to kill somebody, who would he trust to go with him?”

“That’s easy. He’d take his sergeant major.”

“Isn’t that two people?”

“It’s a hybrid rank,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s the battalion commander’s link to the grunts, and the two of them are usually tighter than cell mates.”

“And what about the others?”

“A sergeant major would have a few enlisteds who are more loyal to him personally then they are to the army. It wouldn’t be hard to find a few to go along. In the current crop of grunts, there would even be some who would make the trip just for the chance to break some rules and raise a little hell.”

“Who pays for this supposed operation?”

“Rappolt, of course. He’s a full colonel, Herm. He’s got money coming out of his brass ears.”

“That much?”

“Hey, it’s an officers’ corps. Always was, always will be.”

I looked back at the Prophet and said, “Can we find Rappolt’s sergeant major?”

Two minutes later, we had the name of a Sergeant Major Robert Dunne.

“You want a picture of him, too?”

“Yes.”

His picture shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. A line at a time, the machine spat out the face of a fiftyish man in full dress uniform. He’d worn a uniform the last time I saw him, too, but not that one. It was the beefy-faced cop that I had followed into Nighttown.

“Do you have a fax?” I said.

“Is the Pope a child molester?” He spread his palms outward and grinned.

“I take that for a yes. I’ll need a regular phone, too.”

“Secure?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Then I don’t have one.”

“All right, then, secure.”

“Twenty bucks, Pilgrim.”

“You’re something else, you know that?”

“I am the thing nobody knows how to cope with: a genuine holy man with business sense.”

“Wide, loan me your phone, okay?”

“Some people just don’t believe in free trade.” The Proph went off somewhere to sulk.

I called Anne at work and got her fax number, so I could send her all the stuff we had just printed. But she had something else on her mind, as well.

“I’m glad you called,” she said. “I think I know where your dead man’s tunnel is.”

Chapter 25

The Road to the Jungle

Anne had found out about the tunnel quite by accident, chatting with an old-time staffer at her newspaper about the problems of interacting with the pressmen, who were across the river and a mile away. Email was all well and good, he said, but it was better when the presses were just down the street, at Fourth and Minnesota.

“They were? How did they get the big rolls of paper there?” she had idly asked. “Don’t they always come in by rail? There are no train tracks on Fourth Street, never were.”

The answer was that there was a long, sloping tunnel that ran down from the basement of the old press building, south, under Kellogg Boulevard, under Kellogg Park (né Viaduct Park,) and finally down to a small warehouse by the railroad tracks. The tunnel daylighted on the Mississippi river flats, at the base of the limestone bluffs that hold up Downtown. When the press building was wrecked and replaced with a parking ramp, the little warehouse down by the tracks was also leveled, and the tunnel was simply sealed up and abandoned.

I let Wilkie and The Prophet listen in on my phone call with Anne. It turned out that The Prophet also knew where Charlie’s tunnel was. Silly soul that I am, I had neglected to ask him. He knew most of what went on in the homeless community, but he never volunteered anything that wasn’t either for enlightenment or for sale.

“That place is full of bad joss, Pilgrim. Maybe demons, too. And it’s all linear, so you can’t dodge them. Nobody ever followed your man Cee Vee in there. Nobody even talks about what’s in there.”

“Where is the entrance, exactly?”

“Trust me, you do not want to go there.”

“I have to.”

“Then may Yah! protect you.”

“Where?”

He told me.

***

I had promised Anne that I wouldn’t go in the tunnel until she could get clear of her office and maybe bring a photographer with her. That would be about two hours, she said. Tight, but doable, if everything went right.

I drove back downtown from The Prophet’s place and dropped Wilkie off at Lefty’s. He didn’t like the idea of being cut out of the action, but I told him I had to do some things that were better done without any witnesses. That, he could dig. I went to my office and took a few things out of my desk, including the copy of Charlie’s Master key and Eddie Bardot’s wallet. Then I took my copy of Charlie’s will, penned a quick note to myself and headed out.

“Leaving again so soon?” said Agnes.

“Got to. Can’t let the bad joss catch up with me.”

“Well, I definitely know who you’ve been talking to. Where will you be, if anybody asks?”

“If anybody asks, you think I went to Lefty’s.”

“And if I ask?”

“I’m off to play tunnel rat. I also need you to make a couple of phone calls for me, but not just yet.”

“Honestly, Herman, why don’t you just give up and get a cell—”

“Don’t even start, Agnes.”

***

The rail yard that used to cover the river flats below Downtown is almost all gone now, mostly ripped out and replaced with contract-only parking lots. That makes the base of the bluff not so easy to get to anymore. I parked a quarter of a mile to the west, near the sally port entrance to the County Jail, took a flashlight out of my trunk, and walked back east, under the Wabasha Bridge. I followed the limestone rubble at the bottom of the looming wall of stone, skirting the parking lots that were baking in the late afternoon sun.

There were a lot of openings in the bluff face that had been plugged up with concrete or bricks. Most of them were quite high up, including a lot of them right under the steeply sloping roadway of Second Street. But down at base level, almost blocked by fallen stones and sand, was one that had not been simply bricked in. It had a rusty steel door built into the brickwork, with a hasp and a padlock. I took the copy of Charlie’s key out of my pocket and tried it.

Click.

I swung the door toward myself, and it drew with it a breath of musty, cold air. It smelled like wet limestone and dead rats and failed dreams. It smelled like fear. I pulled the door open as far as it would go, clicked on the flashlight and walked into Charlie Victor’s nightmares.

The machinery for moving the big rolls of paper was still there, sort of a trough-shaped skeletal steel framework with rollers on the cross-frames and a heavy chain running down the center. The chain had big hooks on it at regular intervals, and it looked like something out of a mechanized slaughterhouse for elephants.

The rusted conveyor took up most of the tunnel width, but there was room enough to walk alongside it on the left. Service access, probably. I imagined that once in a while a roll of paper would fall off the frame or get stuck, and some poor bastards would have to go into the tunnel and fix it. I also imagined that they didn’t like the job much. I wasn’t quite ready to start using terms like “bad joss,” but the place did not have a good feel to it. I found myself walking with my shoulders hunched. Whether you think you’re claustrophobic or not, the thought of about a million tons of earth above your head is going to be oppressive. There also seemed to be a draft at my back, which didn’t help my mood any.

I had left the door fully open, but a dozen steps into the tunnel, it provided no light at all. I turned around now and then to satisfy myself that it was still there, an increasingly small white rectangle in a universe of black. Not an auspicious thing, having the light at the end of the tunnel behind your back.

My flashlight was woefully inadequate, and I used the steel framework like a banister, to keep myself oriented and to pull myself up at times. The tunnel floor was a soft, yellowish sand, almost a powder, and it sloped upward fairly steeply. Walking up it was a lot of work. Now and then something would drip onto my face and arms, cold and startling. If it was something other than just water, I didn’t want to think about it. And then there was the other thing.

I didn’t call it a ghost, and I didn’t think it was the Prophet’s demons, either, but there was definitely some kind of
presence
in the tunnel. And somehow or other, it was both with me and waiting for me to arrive. Was the Prophet’s instant coffee hallucinogenic, as well as his tea? Would he have told me if it was? I let my guts feel what they wanted to and forced my feet to move forward in spite of it. I had a job to do. I did not have to be comfortable doing it.

After maybe fifty or sixty yards, I came to a smaller tunnel, crossing the main one, with some kind of pipe in it. I tried shining my flashlight down it to see if it looked worth exploring, then shone it on the floor to see if there were any obvious footprints going into it. That’s when I saw the first of the white powder.

It crossed the path of the pipe and made a sort of one-pronged arrow, pointing deeper into the main passage. What was it Charlie had told me about marking his path in the VC tunnels?

I never used string, Harold. Somebody can move string on you. Some kind of white powder is better, some flour or baking powder, or something. You got to put it off to one side, so you don’t accidentally scuff it out, but it never moves on you. And the enemy don’t have any of the stuff.

It wasn’t a lot lighter in color than the sand of the floor, but now that I knew what to look for, I spotted lots more of it, always directing me farther up the main tunnel.

I passed another small pipe tunnel, then a bigger cross-passage that looked natural, rather than man-made. It looked irregular and deep, and the draft I had felt at my back seemed to be flowing into it. And there was a string on its floor, leading straight away from me and into the darkness. I smiled and continued the way I had been going. I imagined hearing Charlie chuckle and say
I knew you’d be too smart for that one, Herbert
.

I must have been under Kellogg Boulevard by then, deep underground, where the temperature should have been a constant fifty degrees or so. It felt colder. I remembered Charlie telling me it got too cold in his box for him to stay there all winter, and I wondered if he was confusing the chill in the tunnel with the chill in his soul. This was a place where you could have a lot of chill in your soul.

I was starting to get short of breath from the climb and was about to stop for a bit when I came to another side-tunnel, this time with a definite white arrow pointing into it. I turned into it, sorry to leave the reassuring touch of the steel rail. I was swimming in thick blackness now. I moved forward a bit more slowly, sweeping the flashlight around a lot, pushing one hand out in front of me to grope at nothing. Somewhere up ahead, I could hear the faint gurgle of rushing water. Storm sewer, probably. Not a good thing to walk into.

The passage ended in a great black hole, which I assumed dropped to a main storm sewer line somewhere far below. But before that, there was a slightly wider spot in the floor and a messy campsite. I was there.

As promised so long ago, there was a cardboard box big enough for a person to sleep in, “under the wye-duct.” It had a tattered sleeping bag, some clothes, and a few rags in it. They smelled like mildew. In front of the box was a small Coleman camp stove, some assorted full and empty tin cans, a green glass wine jug, and other junk not so easy to identify. Several candles sat in various kinds of holders with wax dribbled all over them. And behind it all, in a niche in the wall, was a box, a heavy white cardboard box of the sort that offices use to archive their paper files. But this one, I positively knew, contained something else. I had found Charlie Victor’s frag box.

I lifted the lid and found Addendum Number One to Charlie’s last will and testament, sitting on top of a big pile of cash.

Then I heard the noise.

Chapter 26

Fire in the Hole

It came from far behind me, echoing back up the unseen rock walls. It wasn’t a boom, exactly, but it wasn’t a machine noise, either. I went back to the place where my tunnel joined the bigger one, killed the flashlight and looked around the corner. The light at the end of the tunnel, the door opening, tiny as it had been, was gone. What I had heard was somebody slamming the door.

I could hear voices now, too, but not well enough to make out what they were saying. Fairly young voices, male, wise cracking but insistent. The goon squad from the scene at the motel, and this time I had no shotgun to point at them.

And why had they shut the door?
Because they have night vision goggles, and they know you don’t, dummy.
Shit.

I ran back to Charlie’s squat and put the lid back on his box. Then, as fast as I could, I dug a hole in the soft sand floor with my hands, shoved the box in it, and pulled Charlie’s big sleeping-box over the top. Then I scuffled the area where I had dragged it and got the hell out of there. I didn’t know what my plan was, but being found at the campsite seemed like a very bad idea.

I went back to the main tunnel, killed my flashlight again, and groped my way across to the steel conveyor frame. As quickly as I could in the dark, I worked my way down into the lower framework and against the back wall. Then I crawled uphill maybe another dozen yards or so, banging various parts of my anatomy on the steel, and finally stuffed myself into a hollow in the limestone wall. I pushed some loose sand into a heap in front of me and settled down to wait. It wasn’t much of a hiding place, but it was as good as I could do. I had to count on people not looking too closely into the jumble of angle irons and chains. And if they all went into the campsite cavern, maybe I could slip past them and work my way back outside. Maybe. It would have to do.

The voices began to get louder. I pulled my jacket up over my head, to hide my face and eyes, and worked on quieting my breathing.

Bring back memories, does it?

What?

Detroit, boyo.

Who the hell…?

What, has it been so long that you’ve forgotten the sound of me lilting voice already?

Jerp?

Himself. How’ve you been, lad?

This is crazy; you’re dead.

Picked right up on that, did you? Of course I’m dead. I couldn’t very well be here if I wasn’t, now could I?

You’re not. You came out of a cup of the Prophet’s doped coffee. You’re nothing but a piece of abnormal brain chemistry.

I’ve been called worse, I suppose.

No kidding. Since you’re here, though, I’ll tell you that I’m sorry I abandoned you in Detroit. I mean, I didn’t want to, but you said—

Hush it now, then. I bled to death behind the wheel of the Mercury, is the thing. That’s what I did. I didn’t burn up. But if we’d ha’ gone straight to the hospital, I’d bled to death before we got there, too. The thing of it is, I forgave you before I even drew me last breath. Time you forgave yourself, you hear?

I hear.

It’s time and a half, and that’s the truth of it. Can you do it?

I have to say, I needed to hear that, Jerp. But yes, I can do it. Two days ago, I’d have said no, but I had a sort of awakening, in an alley up on the Iron Range.

An awakening?

Call it a sea change.

Ah, one of them.

Now it’s not only possible, it’s easy.

That’s the stuff, then.

Thanks.

Don’t give it a thought, lad. So how are you getting on here, then?

Here? Not so well.

Not about to join me, are you?

No. I’ll die soon enough, like anybody else, but not today and not here. I don’t know what I’m going to do, exactly, but I know that much.

Now you’re talking, lad.

He sure is.

And just who the hell is this, then?

Jesus, I don’t believe this. It’s a regular party. That’s Charlie. You two have a lot in common; he’s dead, too.

I may be dead, Humboldt, but I ain’t gone. You want I should take care of those goons for you?

I don’t think you can scare them, away, Charlie.

Oh, I can do lots better than that. Sit tight; I think you’ll like this.

Sit tight, he says.

You wouldn’t happen to have a drop of the pure, in a hip flask or some such, now, would you?

You can’t drink; you’re dead.

I meant for yourself.

Losing my mind is bad enough, Jerp. I don’t think I’ll add getting drunk.

Suit yourself, lad.

Far down the tunnel, voices that were altogether too real replaced the ones in my head.

“Hey, there’s a string going down this one.”

“So?”

“So, I bet it’s a trail marker.”

“Could be. Or it could be a string. Dipshit. Are there any tracks?”

“Hell, this whole place is nothing but tracks. And in the soft sand, you can’t tell the old ones from our own.”

“What’s that smell? Sort of like—”

“Hey, I saw the string jerk!”

“Jesus, me, too! Run it down fast, before our man has a chance to pull it all in!”

“You want me to stay and keep watch in the main tunnel?”

“What for? We know where he is now. Let’s move it!”

There were a lot of scuffling noises and some clatter of gear. It and the voices gradually got more muted, until I couldn’t make out the words any more, even though they were shouting now. Then for a short while, everything was silent.

And then there was the loudest explosion I have ever heard, accompanied by a flashbulb illumination of the whole place. After half a second or so, there was another, and then a third. Charlie’s string had led straight to a whole cluster of booby traps.

Soft dust rained down on me, and for a long time the whole tunnel seemed to ring like a piece of steel on an anvil.

After a while, when I heard nothing more, I went back to Charlie’s campsite and made the appropriate adjustments to the box, then put it back where I had first found it. Then I walked back out. The door at the bottom of the tunnel had blown back open, and the draft that I had felt when I first walked in was blowing smoke and dust into the side passage where the explosion had been. I stopped and watched it swirl in the beam of my flashlight for a while, thinking it was beautiful. It looked like deliverance.

Then I was outside, squinting into the daylight. Looking at my watch, I saw that less than an hour had passed since I had first opened Charlie’s padlock. Amazing stuff, time. I still had enough of it to brush the dust off myself and maybe get my hearing back to normal. If my hands stopped shaking, that would be nice, too.

I did not hear any more voices from the tunnel, either of soldiers or ghosts.