Tossed in the Scatter

Chapter 10

Adina sat on a ledge in the yawning mouth of the giant sewer, waiting for Sam. Somehow her fingers had curled around his card and she’d dialed, hardly aware.

Now she heard his voice calling down at her through the swoosh of traffic above. She pointed her flashlight at him.

“Come on down! You’re the next contestant on the Price is Wrong!”

“You’re going to have to tell me what we’re up to.”

“You’re looking for Hannah,” she said, her voice bouncing around the dark cement amphitheater. “This place is as good a place as I can think of to get serious about it.”

“A sewer,” Sam shouted, tired.

“Have some respect. This is Emergency Watershed Viaduct 4937. But you can call her Ms. Gulch.”

“I don’t get it.”

“You’ll see. Look, I’m going. Come, or don’t come.”

He looked up and down the trough in the ambient light of the city. To the left, it ended about fifty yards west with a forty-foot cement wall, two tunnels boring into its face like eyes of a skull. Above the wall Sam could see the tops of cars and trucks rumbling by on Spencer, beyond that the university, then the Hard Rock and the Strip behind that.

To the east, beyond the bridge, it took a jog north two hundred yards up and snaked out of sight. Next stop, the Mississippi.

He looked down at the flashlight and had a feeling they weren’t going east.

“Last chance, old man.”

“That’s twice with the old man.”

“That’s twice I’ve been forced to call it like I see it.”

He turned and started down a re-bar ladder. Rust from the rods melted orange onto his sweaty hands. He moved toward Adina. At fifteen paces a thick stench hit Sam’s nose.

“Jesus, it smells like a pile of dead dogs,” Sam said. “Wet dead dogs.”

“Bet your hotel room is worse,” Adina said from the other side of a rusty fence covering the opening. She crouched, grabbed at a lower section where it met the wall and yanked, peeling back a small opening for Sam.

Adina pointed her flashlight into the darkness.

“Let’s go.”

She moved at a good pace. Their footfalls amplified in the chamber, the scrapes of their soles echoing around and coming back at them from everywhere. The flashlight traced along the square tunnel in jittery circles, revealing sign after sign of recent life in the tunnel. A mattress. Just beyond it, a shopping cart stood on three rusty wheels. In the cart was an orange blanket with an alarm clock, a couple of hypodermic needles and a faded God Bless America T-shirt.

“Not an ideal place for a nap,” Sam said.

“People don’t nap down here, they live down here.”

“What do you mean, live?”

“A bunch of folks. In the drains.”

“What do you mean, people?”

“People people. Arms. Legs. That sort of thing.”

Up ahead, the beam ended at a yellow circle as it fell on a wall. The tunnel now split into two tighter hexagon-shaped channels. On the cement buttress between them, all kinds of graffiti. Evan a poem spray painted in elaborate black cursive.

You see the new day rise

Behind death in their eyes

We walk a crooked tightrope

Our tangled web to weave

Winding ever tighter

Till the truth no longer breathes

Adina nodded to the channel on the right and they came to the entrance. The bottom of the hexagon was swamped with water. Sam looked at Adina, her face orange shadows in the black hole.

“You’re gonna get soaked,” Sam said, as he stepped into the ankle-deep water. Adina leaped to the right and onto the slanted wall stabbing up out of the water, slid along above the waterline with a ballerina’s grace, her fingers trailing along the grime of the hexagon’s vertical wall.

A few minutes more of following the light into the blackness and Sam’s initial reluctance gave way to reverence for this peculiar unknown. This childlike need for wonder, this tolerance for not knowing, had been a shackle on his career back when he was still trying for detective. Detectives need a need to know. He had always been a little too comfortable in the dark. The cool air, the lonely swish of his boots, this flitting lightning bug guiding him into the bottom of the bottom—he could feel himself becoming dislodged.

They moved forward, the beam of light continuing to catch glimpses of sad humanity as they went. A rusty car battery, a can of Arrid Extra Dry, porn flyers, moldy Styrofoam fast-food containers. The walls were wet with humidity, and it was cooling down fast. It must have been half a mile before common sense made an appearance again and claustrophobia began scratching at his throat.

What a fitting ending this would be. A filthy polyp on the bowels of Vegas.

He was about to protest again when he heard a faint rhythmic thumping. At first he thought it might be a train moving overhead. But soon melody melted into the beat, then he thought he heard voices. Laughter. Singing? A growing crackle and buzz, the hum of a crowded bar wafted from the dark. Then, around two hundred yards down, he saw a whisper of light. They walked and the light grew brighter, the music louder, and soon the unmistakable bounce of reggae materialized, Bob Marley’s voice floating above the rhythm.

“One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain...”

He swung the flashlight over to Adina’s face to find her squinting with an exaggerated look of innocence, teasing Sam like a French mime.

“Go to the light, Sam,” she said, as they walked the last twenty yards toward a jog to the right where the tunnel wall broke away into a glowing sliver of light and a carnival of sound.

“Oh, and whatever you do, don’t mention you’re a cop.”

“Wait! What? Why?”

But she’d turned the corner and he was following. The tunnel broke into a giant cylindrical chamber at least one hundred feet wide, with cement walls stretching to a concave ceiling fifty feet up like a duomo. Floodlights at intervals along the walls cast a warm art deco glow, illuminating an intricately rendered graffiti mural. Swirls of color depicting the Strip in three-hundred-sixty-degrees, albeit with strange and surprising twists at every turn.

This was a Technicolor cathedral on acid. Sam took it all in through the yellow smoke hanging in the light, the sweet scent of dope heavy in the air.

Scattered around the place in small groups were a couple dozen people, some standing, some lounging on all sorts of improvised seating—beat-up couches, wooden industrial pallets, even a seat jacked from a school bus, the green-gray vinyl of the cushion burned out in one corner, rusty springs poking out underneath like unearthed bones. As Sam tried to reconcile the dissonance, a guy in a black leather jacket, black army boots and a black top hat beelined toward them with a huge toothy smile.

“Blackbird!” the guy shouted.

“Inky!” screamed Adina, bouncing forward for a hug.

“How you been, girl? Was hoping you’d show. Missed you last week.”

“So many social engagements, so little time.”

 The two swapped pleasantries like they were in a pub.

“What’s this you brought?” the guy finally asked, with a wink and an extended hand.

“This is...” Adina paused as she looked him up and down. Sam tried to pull out of his confused daze.

“This is Professor Marvel.”

“Nice to meet you, Professor.” Inky said, with a professional stare and firm handshake Sam wasn’t expecting in a sewer.

Blackbird, Inky, Professor Marvel. Real names were forbidden, apparently. Inky turned, and with a Mad Hatter theatrical wave of his arms, shouted over the beat.

“Everyone! Everyone? Allow me to introduce Professor Marvel. Professor Marvel, welcome to the Hard Knock Cafe!”