Undertow (The UnderCity Chronicles) Read Free Page B

the slightest rustle and twisted around.
    Blackness.
    “Please. I’m no threat to you. I’ll go away and never come back if that’s what you want. I won’t tell anyone about you, promise. Please let me go.”
    Silence.
    “I only came down here to help. I’m not with the police. I’m not even a real social worker, just a student. I wanted to make the people who run this city realize that you’re down here. To make them stop ignoring you.”
    Then, a sound. It came in hushed vibrations all around her, making her heart thump wildly. From every corner of the pitch-black chamber she could hear her keepers. Ever so quietly, they were laughing.
    * * *
    The street where Jack lived was all but deserted when Lindsay reached it, the rows of cheap shops and slum housing standing stiff and battered in the chill morning. A bunch of young men gathered around a junker turned as her Lexus cruised by, their expressions sullen and calculating. All seemed too cold to do more than look.
    Jack’s address turned out to be a dilapidated grocery store, its barred windows smashed and brick facade layered in crude graffiti. Pulling over to the curb, she double-checked the address. Had Monroe played some kind of cruel trick on her? Surely to God, Jack couldn’t be living in a place barely fit for a rodent.
    She locked her car and wondered if she would ever see it again. Oh well, that was why she paid the outrageous insurance premiums. You shouldn’t have what you can’t afford to lose. It’s what her father had always said, and she’d made it her personal motto. She walked across the street and was about to step onto the curb when the heel on her right Blahnik got wedged in a pavement crack. She tugged with her foot, and nothing happened. The heel was sensible, a full inch across, and still this.
    “Fine,” she muttered. She unzipped the boot, slipped out her nyloned foot and hopped on the other as she began prying out the heel. From down the street, she heard the men snort in laughter.
    Yes, she could afford to lose her six hundred dollar boots. Her pride was an entirely different matter. She was not going to meet an old high school friend with one shoe. Besides, it was freezing. She went at it again with renewed vigor.
    The heel popped loose which sent her hopping madly about in all directions to keep her balance. The crowd laughed raucously, and Lindsay jammed her foot back into her boot, closed it with a most satisfying zip, and straightened. Then gasped.
    She was looking up at the biggest black man she’d ever seen in all her New York life. He was a tree, a building, a mountain. He wore a knit hat, a parka that could’ve covered her car, and tundra boots that had to have been custom-made to fit him. A brown paper bag full of groceries hung from his bear paw of a hand with no more effort than she’d hold an empty envelope. Down the two-lane bridge of his nose, he looked at her with the mild disdain normally reserved for pigeons.
    He took in her boots, her coat, her car, and no doubt, her skin color. “You lost?”
    Lindsay tried for a friendly, brisk tone. “Not at all. I’m meeting a friend. He lives right here.” She attempted to skirt around him. “I mustn’t keep him waiting.”
    The giant pulled a face and narrowed his eyes. “Here? What’s his name?”
    She dropped the friendly and kept the brisk. “Why would I tell a stranger my friend’s name?”
    His eyes widened and apparently conceding the point, he stepped aside to let her pass.
    “Thank you,” she said. “Have a nice day.”
    She got past him and headed up to the rusted metal door of the shop. She tapped on it, then banged on it. Nothing. Aware that her every move was being watched, she tried the handle. It was unlocked—didn’t, she realized, even have a lock. She glanced back to where the winterized wall of humanity stood watching her. He smiled, flashing a set of gold teeth, clearly not intending to walk on.
    “Uh, looks like he left it open for me.