Undertow (The UnderCity Chronicles) (31 page)

His hand hooked around her upper leg in casual intimacy, and it felt as nice as when he’d done it by the fire in Sumptown.

“I’ve already told you how once the Moles caught me, I was tortured, drugged, dehumanized till they cut me off from everything that I knew. The goal was to break my mind, Linds, then to put it back together the way they wanted it, except I found a way to beat them. And that’s where Tasha comes in.

“I couldn’t hold onto everything they were stripping away from me. It was impossible. So I held fast to Tasha. I figured if I could just remember her and our times together, if I could focus on what our future would be like when I got out, then I could preserve the most important part of myself. So that’s what I did. I kept her alive in my mind. I held her face, her hair, her body in my thoughts. I concentrated on trying to remember her voice and her laugh. I concentrated so hard that at times I swear I could hear her. I really believed—as naive as it sounds—that so long as I got out of those damn tunnels everything would be all right.”

His hand tightened on the flesh above her knee.

“So what happened?”

“When I found my way back to her, I—I didn’t recognize her. She knew who I was, but I couldn’t believe it was her. She had to show me pictures of us together before I could accept it. The thing is, she had dark hair and these big brown eyes. She was beautiful in her own way, but she hadn’t been what had kept me sane.”

He gave her an almost desperate look, his grip on her leg now hard. “My mind got twisted up with the time we were in the tunnels together, with how we’d been friends so many years before. The name, Tasha, stuck with me, but the woman I made it out for had blue eyes and blonde hair, loved Chinese takeout and was scared of heights.”

His eyes stayed locked on hers, and she could see he was trying to gauge her reaction. She didn’t know what to think or how to feel. She felt happy, vindicated, frustrated, confused. All churned in a volatile brew out of which she extracted one question. “This real Tasha, were you were married to her?”

He bowed his head and seemed to notice for the first time what he was doing to her leg. He let go, his fingers smoothing the redness there. “Yes. When I went down after Reggie we’d been married three months. When I made it back two years later, she was with another man. In fairness to her, she’d thought I was dead, though I wasn’t even out of hospital before she was handing me divorce papers.”

Lindsay’s heart constricted. Hadn’t he told her he would only marry for love?

“She felt bad. By then, it didn’t matter. She’d moved on. We’d both moved on. Both in love with different people, only mine was imaginary.”

“I wasn’t imaginary, Jack,” she said softly.

“
You
weren’t. But the woman in my mind wasn’t you, Linds. She was a mix of memories and fantasies of which you were only a part. The Tasha I’d created was my soul mate, and as crazy as it sounds, I loved her with everything that I had. We’d explored the undergrounds of countless cities together. Shared every interest. Every desire. She was the best of you and my wife and maybe a dozen other people, all wrapped up into an ideal.”

He was telling her the truth, opening up as she’d wanted him to. Talking was good for Jack. Tension was evaporating from him, his speech was less wooden and harsh with each word as he remembered Tasha. The memory of her was healing him, fixing him.

And killing her. How could she compete with perfection? She lifted her legs off his lap, curled them underneath her. It was too much to know that it wasn’t really her he was thinking about when he touched her. He watched her withdrawal and he bent forward into the space she’d occupied, his elbows on his knees, his hands hanging empty.

“I have a confession, Linds.”

Stop, Jack. Please.

“I once loved you.”

Once
.

Jack gave her an apologetic smile. “When I first came back to New York five years ago, I looked you up. I was still in love with you. I figured if I saw you, maybe it wouldn’t be too late for us to have something together. I phoned your place, but you weren’t home. I talked to Seline. She told me you were away on your honeymoon. That kind of ended that.”

Yes, it had.

“I met Tasha a few months later. She was pretty. A Russian girl with the cutest accent. And she’d been down in the Moscow underground. Organized raves in abandoned catacombs and the like. I figured since you were taken, I wasn’t going to find anyone better, so I let myself fall in love.

“It was never the same as what I once felt for you, Linds. Never as strong. Not until the woman in my mind did I ever love anyone as much as I’d loved you.

He paused, waiting for her to speak. He wanted her to accept what he’d said. To understand that with her, he was reliving the Tasha of his imagination. She, the warm, living person, was a substitute for an imaginary savior.

“I know this isn’t fair,” he said quietly.

No, it wasn’t. And even more unfair was that he still expected her to fix him. To be that angel which had lent him the strength to struggle free of the abyss. But how could she be someone that had never existed in the first place? How could he ever love her back when she was a shadow of the mythical Tasha? He wanted forgiveness, understanding, acceptance. And after all he’d risked for her, she knew she needed to give it to him.

“Do you hate me?” he asked.

She bit her lip, hard. “How could I?”

“Because I told you the truth. An ugly one. An unjust one. You deserve better.”

“I don’t hate you, Jack.”

“You want me to leave?” He pressed his fists into the cushions, ready to push off.

“You can’t go. Your clothes are still in the wash.”

He halted. “That the only thing keeping me here, Linds? Wet clothes?”

She looked away. “I don’t hate you, Jack.”

“So you said.”

“I don’t. I….”

“It’s okay, Linds. I dumped a whole lot on you. Things I’ve been holding onto for a year. I don’t expect you to have an answer right now.”

“An answer? To what?”

He stared at her. “What do you mean? My whole story was one big question.”

“I don’t understand.”

He swept his arm about her place. “Linds, you’ve got everything, and I can’t bring anything to it. I don’t have a job, I’m broke, my place is a dump, I’m half-crazy, I’ve got more connections below ground than above…the only thing I can give you is the hope of finding Seline.”

Hope. He had no idea. No idea how that hope had taken away her fear and desperation, had created new hopes. He had no idea what a gift that was. Yet, for him, hope had turned traitor. Had raised him to the surface and then deserted him. And given him nothing else. Denied, he still sought to give it to others.

He kept on. “And there’s still hope, Linds. If we can get Tocat’s smuggler on side with us, we can get back to the place where I escaped, and I know The Pits better than any person alive. The Moles are dangerous as hell, but they’re not omniscient. We could pull this off. We really could, Linds.”

She had to stop him. “I know that, Jack. What I don’t know is your question.”

Sunlight broke through the windows onto Jack’s muscled back, pale and hunched. He flinched and darted a look behind him.

“Still not used to the light?” she said softly.

“Sometimes it still takes me by surprise.”

“Because you expected it to be one thing and it’s another.”

He turned to her and the sun glowed warm on his face. “Because,” he corrected quietly. “Because she burns so bright. Better than anything I could ever imagine.”

Lindsay felt herself dissolving, melting under the power of his words. He took her hand in his, held it as if he were about to propose. His eyes searched hers. “It’s the same question I wanted to ask five years ago. Do we have a chance, Linds?”

She didn’t think about it. She wrapped herself around him and he lost no time in doing the same with her. In the certainty of the sun and their bodies, she told him, “Yes, Jack. Together we can have something real.”

As a train rattled by the window of his dilapidated apartment, Isaac Crabbe ran his hand through his straggly red hair and took a long, nervous drag on his last cigarette. Tocat’s pals were due any moment, and as far as he was concerned they couldn’t arrive soon enough. His apartment had been without heat for the past week, a result of his failure to pay his bills, as all the cash from welfare and panhandling had gone to smokes, food, and his phone.

A nice, simple smuggling job was just the thing he needed. A day’s work, and he’d be back in the black—or at least get his place warmer than a meat locker.

He took another puff, and looked at his watch. It had stopped. “Shit,” he mumbled. He struck it against the table and the second hand continued its circular march. There was a time he’d been a professional, master of New York’s secret ports, tunnels and byways, ferrying contraband into and around the city like a shadow. But his reputation alerted the police, and the day had come when they’d caught him making a twenty-pound delivery of cocaine. Twelve years of prison later, he had lost his contacts and the city had changed, leaving him to play gopher to small-timers, burnouts and renegades.

Those were the breaks.

He rolled his shoulders under his thick parka, and stubbed his cigarette out in the overflowing ashtray, the centerpiece on his kitchen table. They’d better get here soon. Ever since power was cut off last week, his only light source was from the sun, and here in the late afternoon, it was almost setting.

Despite expecting visitors, he still jumped when there was a knock at the door. Crabbe headed over to the triple-bolted entrance, squinted through the peephole, then opened up.

Jack looked down at the man who answered, and knew that beside him, Lindsay was surprised, too, at seeing the dwarf. Standing a few inches under five feet tall with a rotund physique, Crabbe looked more like a scruffy garden gnome than a smuggler.

“Isaac Crabbe?” Jack asked, uncertain if they’d found the right apartment in the crumbling tenement.

“That’s me.” He used his foot to hook aside a step-stool from behind the door and swung it wide open. “Come on in. It’s colder than a witch’s tit in here. Still, we can talk with nobody bothering us.”

Jack stepped inside first, scanning the tiny, dingy apartment that made his own spartan home seem like the governor’s mansion. Wallpaper the color of a rusted bucket was stained and peeling, and the green carpet was so dirt-matted it looked like turf after a game in the rain. Weighing down a tray table in the living area was a rabbit-eared television, a white-lace doily draped over it like a wig. Behind him, Lindsay emitted a descending scale of groans.

Crabbe led them over to a folding table wedged into the back of his galley kitchen, and , still bundled in outside gear, they squeezed around it. Seeing as how there were only two chairs, their host stood, which meant that they were all pretty much level with each other.

He rubbed his small square hands together. Apparently for warmth as much as anticipation. “So, not many people know about Schenley's Chasm. I’m guessing you two have been dealing with Seneca?”

“We’re not drug dealers, if that’s what you’re asking,” Jack said flatly. “We’re looking to get a person out of the tunnels. The Pits, to be specific.”

Crabbe’s cherubic face paled, and his rubbing hands stopped in a prayer-like pose. “Oh. Well, I can get you to the edge of them, but don’t ask me to take you in. Them things that live down there—”

“We know,” Lindsay interrupted. “We’re looking for someone to get us through the Chasm and back again. That’s all.”

Crabbe ran smoke-yellowed fingers over his bristly chin. “How long you going to want me to wait?”

“Two hours should do it,” Jack said. “If we’re not back by then it’s a safe bet we won’t be coming.”

“Ten grand, all in advance,” the dwarf announced, then flinched at Jack’s expression.

“That seems a little steep,” Lindsay said.

“I’d be risking my life there, lady. Two hours is a long time to be waiting around The Pits, especially if you’re going to be stirring them things up like hornets. I need some kind of hazard pay.”