Underground Airlines(41)

“Oh, no,” she said. “No. My supplies I brought with me. There wasn’t any…no, nothing like that.”

In her mind, she was there. The place. Lair. Hideaway. I could see her seeing it. Smelling it. I leaned in.

“What is it?” I asked. Simple and quiet. “What?”

“There was…” She nodded. Her small bird eyes narrowed, remembering. “Kind of a noise, an odd noise. A whooshing. Like pipes. Like water flowing through pipes.”

“Pipes?” I said. “So…a basement? Some sort of cellar, or—”

“Maybe. It might have been. I don’t know. That’s—I think that’s what I know. Okay? I think that’s all I can tell you.”

The doctor was done. She was casting more and more anxious glances over her shoulder at the door, as if any moment the next patient would come in, or her nurse, or Father Barton himself, glaring with those pale eyes, floating a foot off the floor, leveling a finger at her, denouncing her as a betrayer of the Cause.

“Well, listen,” I said. “I thank you so much. I really do. If I can just see his face…”

She nodded rapidly, said, “Yes, yes,” and something in the rapidness of her nodding and the way she darted her lips in and out made me wonder if it wasn’t just guilt she was feeling but fear. Who is this Barton, anyway? What kind of vengeful Old Testament father are we talking about here? I said thank you about a million times. Humbly I thanked her. Humbly I assured Dr. Venezia-Karbach that her confidence would not be betrayed. She smiled sadly, smoothed her lab coat, and put her face back on.

“Oh, actually, though,” I said, when she was almost out the door, when she had almost escaped me. “I just have one more quick question, if that’s all right.”

“No, Mr. Morton, I’m sorry. I don’t—”

“Please.”

“No more questions.”

“Ma’am? It’s just—why did he need to see a doctor?”



I did test the leash one time. Very early on, I tested it. Years ago. I suppose I had convinced myself, staring at some hotel-room ceiling in an insomniac stupor, as I had lain unsleeping so many of those early nights, almost every night in the first year of it, that the whole thing was a hoax, a con. They had drugged me, put me in a thick opioid haze for two hours, then told me on waking about the tiny computer chip they’d injected in my nervous system, right where the spine touches the brain, that it would be singing out my location from there on out.

Ain’t no way, I told myself. That shit’s impossible, and I’m a fool to believe it. So I refused to believe it.

I remember it was the first time that Bridge put me on to a woman. The service name was Darling. I traced poor Darling to goddamn Idaho City, Idaho, and I was supposed to be staking out the home of a relative, a second cousin, I believe, and instead I shoplifted a change of clothes from a department store and boarded a bus to Oregon, with a vague notion of hitching north to Port Angeles, stowing away on the ferry to Victoria. But when I got off the bus in downtown Portland, what did I see but three men in dark suits drinking coffee. All three stood up at once, and I turned around and got back on the bus and went back to Idaho and finished that job and the one that came after it. Mr. Bridge never mentioned it. Never said, “How was your trip?” That was not his way.

The chip was no joke. No hoax. Everything is possible. Everything is real.

That woman Darling, in Idaho, she wasn’t a woman. She was just a girl. She was all of twelve years old.

I remember them all.





18.



A curl of smoke was coming up out of my car. I could see it from across two lanes of 12th Street, between the spreading leafless arms of an elm tree and the bent trunk of a streetlamp. A tendril of smoke, rising from somewhere in the hood, rising and spreading and dissipating into the wan daylight like an exorcised spirit. I hustled across the street, thinking for one crazy second that something had happened inside the engine of the sweet little Altima—it had given out and burst into flames and now was sitting there smoldering.

But no, of course not. Halfway across the potholed street I slowed up. Cigarette smoke. That’s all. Of course. Someone was leaning against the car on the opposite side, smoking a butt, waiting on me.

Had to be Maris. He’d done some digging, or Barton had; they’d pushed through my backstops and figured out that there was no Gentle in Carolina, no Dirkson at all. I looked up and down the street—was it too late to run? I looked for witnesses and hiding places. I was in the middle of the street. I willed myself some courage, willed myself a gun, imagined the heavy loose weight of a Colt in the front pocket of my overcoat, jostling against my hip like a deck of cards.

It was the girl, the white girl. Martha. She had a chopstick in her hair, holding it together. She looked hesitant, half hopeful.

I was so relieved I almost laughed. It was almost good to see her—and the kid, too, Lionel in a tracksuit a size or two too big, athletic stripes on top and bottom, plugged into his music, grooving his head back and forth like a snake, bouncing on his heels beside the car. He didn’t see me coming, but Martha did, and she gave me a funny self-knowing wave and a cringing sort of smile. She was smoking one of those ugly little hand-rolled hipster cigarettes, “sourced” free-labor tobacco and all that.