“Luckily for you, I came prepared for covert ops.” George wriggles around in the backseat.
“You justhappento keep a fake mustache and bag of disguises in your car?” I peer at the pile of clothing strewn across the backseat.
“Duh. I’m a true-crime podcaster working at a vintage clothing store. Of course I do.” She emerges holding a pinstripe suit with enormous ’70s lapels. “Tada!”
“I’m not wearing that. I’ll look like a pimp.”
“It’s better than looking like a hobo.” George tosses the suit toward me.
I sigh. She has a point. I peel off my hoodie and tug on the suit, while George wiggles into a skintight red bodycon dress, tucks her hair beneath a platinum blonde wig, and winds three strings of pearls around her neck. She looks completely ridiculous with her cutesy tattoos on display, but she must’ve thought of that, too, because she wraps a fox fur stole around her shoulders. “I’m ready. Let’s go.”
We link arms and run back around the corner to the Chevy. Claudia and the guys are gone, but we spy a couple of other people heading between a gap between the warehouses. We follow them at a respectable distance and see them heading through an open gate in a high chain length fence into the abandoned railway yard.
“What is this place?” George peers around her as we hike along a torn-up track bed toward the towering roundhouse at the far end of the lot.
It’s a train graveyard. Train cars line the tracks on either side, their hollowed bodies rusting in place, empty cabs like soulless eyes watching our journey to the underworld. In places, the tracks have been yanked from the earth, probably by the earthquakes that regularly shake the city. George pulls her stole tighter around her shoulders and stares at me with those giant eyes of hers.
People mill around the narrow entrance into the roundhouse – four lanes of track approaching the turntable around which the sheds housing the locomotives are arranged. I can’t see over their heads into the space beyond, but lights and music reach across the desolate yard, drawing us in. As we get closer I notice the people around us dressed to the nines, gold and diamond jewelry on display. Black-clad bodyguards survey the crowd, fingers toying with guns on their belts. My pimp suit fits right in.
We step into the crowd and approach one of the broad-shouldered guards who are nodding people through to the roundhouse. “I’ve never seen you around here before.” He narrows his eyes at me. “This isn’t a frat party. It’s invitation only.”
Fuck.
George throws herself in front of me. “But you remember me, don’t you, sugar?” she purrs.
The guard stares at her, licking his lips. George tilts her head to the side, her fingers running along his muscular arm as he taps his pistol. I’m forgotten as he leers down at her. “Why don’t you jog my memory?”
George doesn’t hesitate – she reaches up and kisses him. He holds her roughly, plunging his tongue into her mouth. He’s seven feet of pure muscle and he can break George in half like a twig. When he finally sets her down, George’s eyes are as wide as the moon. She staggers a little in her heels but manages to blow him a kiss as she drags me past.
“I’ll see you around, sugar,” she calls to her new friend. Her nails dig into my arm as she drags us along with the crowd. She wipes the smudged lipstick at the corner of her mouth.
“You told me you’ve never been here before,” I hiss.
“I haven’t.” She grips me harder, and I feel that she’s trembling. “But look around. This place is a den of sin. The whole reason that guy works here is so he can make people bleed and get all the pussy he wants. He doesn’t remember me, he just thinks he’s getting lucky. Now, comeon.” She tugs me into the fray. “I want a seat near the front.”
George is a constant surprise.
As she makes her way through the crowd, I can’t help staring around us. When Claudia mentioned Antony’s club, I pictured some shitty old warehouse with bad lighting and even worse people. But this… this is anotherworld.
The roundhouse surrounds us on all sides – a high building of steel with at least forty open bays. Some still contained rusting locomotives, their noses pointed toward the turntable, but most are filled with people. Women swing from the locomotive skeletons and dance on the gangways. As we pass one bay, I see the inspection pits beneath the tracks have been covered with glass, and couples fuck on piles of snow white cushions while people watch from above.
In the center of the circle, open to the elements, is a round pit that once housed the locomotive turntable. It had been made deeper with concrete walls and enclosed by a steel mesh cage. I notice a trapdoor in the floor of the arena, and a gangplank stretched over the center, hung with a professional lighting rig and a series of hooks and ropes and pulleys. Two large water tanks hooked up to a squat building decorated with three distinct insignia – a sword encircled with a laurel wreath, an eagle, and a she-wolf howling at the moon.
The Triumvirate.
My blood chills. This is Claudia’s world – the secret underbelly of Emerald Beach, the dark heart that beats at the center of the city, with a constant flow of blood needed to keep it pumping. I know I don’t belong here and yet, after what George found out about Dad, I realize how my own comfortable life has flowed directly from this source. My hands may be clean, but my bank balance sure isn’t.
Bleachers have been built into the sloping ground, and closer to the stage are collections of tables. On the other side of the arena, a disused train car serves as a bar. A roped-off area on a raised platform fills up with people dressed to kill –literally. I see weapons peeking out from every belt on holsters hidden under expensive furs. This roped-off area has its own bar – a small switcher engine – and appears to be the VIP section. My heart pounds as I recognize Nero and my mother at one of the tables, and I whip my head away, hoping they won’t recognize me in this getup.
George pulls me toward the tables near the arena. There don’t seem to be designated seats, so we slide into one right next to where the action will take place. A waiter appears almost instantly and I empty the cash from my pockets to get us a couple of drinks. I’m jittery enough without adding alcohol to the mix but I’m not about to ask for an orange juice in this place.
At the table next to us, two men in Armani suits snort cocaine off a woman’s exposed breasts. Beyond them, a woman crawls on her knees underneath a table, wearing nothing but a diamond-studded collar around her neck. She kneels in front of one of the men sitting there and unzips his fly. A waiter approaches their table and offers the men a tray containing small rocks of what looks like cement. “Compliments of the boss.” The men use tongs to pick up the tiny rocks and drop them into a glass pipe.
“Holy shit, that’s grey death,” George whispers. “I’ve been reading about it. It’s a synthetic designer drug containing heroin and a cocktail of opioids. It’s so potent you can overdose just from touching it. I read it was only in Georgia and Alabama, but I guess someone has brought it to Emerald Beach.”
“How do you know this stuff?”
“The wonders of the internet.” George nudges me. “There she is.”
