The smile spreading over her face was pure evil. “In that case, put Maddie’s name at the top of it.”
13
Tyler
You’re still good to pickme up at six?Stella’s text read.
Yes,I wrote back.
The party starts then, but it’s better to be a little late to these things. Trust me.
Ha. Unlikely.
“Are you ready?” Dean asked.
I looked up from my phone. “Yeah.”
Dean and his fellow urban explorer, Aubrey, stood shoulder-to-shoulder across from me at the bottom of a narrow shaft fifteen feet below a Thai restaurant. To our right was the crumbling ladder we’d descended. To our left, the dark maw of a tunnel.
“Is there another entrance?” I asked. Multiple avenues for escape were a must in my line of work. This singular point of entry was too tight and too obvious to funnel everyone through. I’d need to split the crowd to keep them from drawing attention.
Dean, nodded, his red hair flashing in the dim light. “Yeah, there’s at least one more over on Eleventh. The entrance is more discreet, but it’s a trickier route down.”
I made a contemplative noise, eyeing the tunnel branching away from us. It could work. I could send the younger, fitter clients to that one, and everyone else here. I’d also need overhead lighting along both routes, which meant paying my shady electrician to tap into a nearby line, but that discussion was over the explorers’ pay grades. Their only purpose was location scouting, and I paid them well enough to keep from getting nosy about what, exactly, they were scouting for.
“Then let’s go,” I said.
Together, the three of us turned our headlamps on and moved deeper into the tunnel. Dean took point, followed by Aubrey. I brought up the rear, studying our surroundings as we traversed the gloomy depths of the undercity. The floor beneath our feet was paved with hundred-year-old concrete, cracked and buckled in places, and I made a mental note to get someone to spray-paint the tricky areas in a neon, glow-in-the-dark color so no one tripped.
At least it smelled better than the freight ship had initially, but that wasn’t saying much. There was a rank, fetid note to the air that spoke of decay, like it probably wasn’t safe to breathe for that long. Around us, the walls crowded close, and the ceiling hung low overhead: a claustrophobic’s worst nightmare. The entire tunnel was damp and moldy, green algae blooming along the seams, like it was seeping in from the bedrock. Yes, it was in rough shape now, but I could already see the potential.
Up ahead, Aubrey glanced back as if to reassure herself that I was still there, and Dean, who had explored half this goddamn city with me, was quieter than usual. I was pretty unflappable, but even I could admit that there was something unsettling about this place, disquieting. Maybe that was because of the slight breeze, punctuated by an intermittent gusty sigh that made it sound like the tunnel wasbreathing.
Or maybe I was biased because I knew about its dark history. How Al Capone and his fellow gangsters had run their bootlegging enterprises through here during the Prohibition years. And that wasn’t all. Guns, girls, drugs—these tunnels had served as the primary means of transportation for a lot of unseemly shit, and more than a few people had fought and died in them. The proof could be seen in the bullet holes we passed, some with the contorted remains of lead still stuck in the walls.
Finally, the tunnel opened up, and we stepped into a cavernous, stone-lined room filled with towering brick columns. Originally, it had been the nineteenth-century basement of a bank, reinforced to hold the astronomical weight of the building above it, but in the 1920s, it was transformed into a warehouse for illicit liquor, right up until the Feds caught wind of it and conducted one of the largest raids of the entire Prohibition. Even now, there were signs of its shady past scattered throughout the room: wooden racks rotting along a far wall; the shattered remains of barrels splintered across the floor; old copper pipes that were probably part of a makeshift distillery; still more bullet holes riddling the walls.
It didn’t look like much, but I had enough imagination to be sure it could be transformed into something spectacular. Candles in the alcoves, soft pendant lighting. In my head, I envisioned something a little like the Italian restaurant where Stella and I shared our first “date.” The bar would sit to the right, poker tables to the left, blackjack, craps, roulette, and baccarat filling the space in between. I could really lean into the Gatsby vibes here and hire a jazz band to perform, giving my clients an excuse to dress up for the occasion.
It was fucking perfect.
Not wanting to give myself away, I waved Aubrey and Dean onward. “Let’s see the other entrance.”
¦ ¦ ¦
Two hours and one of the longest showers of my life later (the underground of this city was disgusting), I was dressed in a suit Stella had recommended. It was a deep navy, lightweight, and expertly fitted since I’d managed to get it tailored in record time. Beneath the jacket, I wore a crisp button-down, sans tie. My belt and shoes were a warm brown that Stella had also picked out, and seeing myself in the mirror, I had to give it to her: I looked good. Not just dressed, but styled. Which meant she hadn’t been lying—she knew about fashion, but for some odd reason chose to clothe herself in Bela Lugosi’s castoffs.
I half turned away to inspect myself from another angle. Suit jackets tended to look comical on me because of my size, but Stella managed to find one that seemed to be designed with weightlifters in mind. It accentuated the breadth of my chest, but because there weren’t any shoulder pads, it didn’t make me look overly bulky, and the cut made my waist appear trim by comparison. I’d never admit it to her, but later tonight, I was going online and ordering it in every other color they carried.
I snagged my burner phone, wallet, and keys, and left the apartment. The humidity slapped me in the face the second I stepped outside. It made me glad the suit was so lightweight; anything heavier and I might have broken out in a sweat. Cicadas called from the trees around my apartment complex, and the air was heavy and dense, like another storm was rolling in.
I got into my car and headed toward Stella’s shop, spending the drive contemplating logistics for the new location. I’d need to contract a lot of people for the event, more than I had for the last one on the freight ship, and that gave me pause. The more people involved in what I was doing, the higher the risk of someone talking, and even though I only ever told employees what they needed to know to do their job, I was still paranoid about someone saying something to the wrong person. I’d need to get Tim, my lawyer, to draft a stronger NDA. I’d also need to make a point of implying there would be more than justlegalconsequences if it were broken.
Luckily, those I worked with had experience keeping their mouths shut. My carpenter was a convicted felon who’d gone straight, my plumber used to break kneecaps for the Bratva, and even the catering company I hired was corrupt, so I had a feeling it would all work out just fine.
Traffic was lighter than I anticipated, and I got to Stella’s earlier than planned. I parked half a block away, in the first open spot I could find, and hoofed it back to her shop. The second I stepped into the tattoo parlor, stimulus overload hit. God, there was so much stuff in here. Like a morbid granny with a hoarding problem had donated her most macabre garbage to Stella. Seriously, why was there a mummified hand floating in a jar of...somethingsitting right there on the check-in counter?
I glanced around and saw more creepy shit. They were practically askingto be haunted. And don’t even get me started on all the weird crap cluttering the shelves or hanging on the walls. The “décor” was so busy that it made me want to pull on a pair of gloves and start clearing it out, and I was far from a clean freak. Josh could never come here. He used to throw my socks away if I left them on the floor of my own bedroom; he’d break out in head-to-toe hives if he saw this place.
