True Fiction (Ian Ludlow Thrillers #1)(14)

“Don’t be an idiot,” she said.

There were two more doors in the room. One door was ajar, revealing a cramped bathroom. She closed the bathroom door, went to the other door, slipped the bolt, and opened it, revealing a rickety set of wooden stairs descending into darkness.

“This way,” Margo said. “Hold on to the railing as you go down. I don’t want you breaking your neck before I get an explanation for everything.”

He followed her down the stairs. As they neared the bottom, Ian’s eyes adjusted to the darkness and he realized that diffused light was coming from somewhere. The air was musty from moisture and lack of circulation. It smelled like history. He made a mental note to remember that description.

Ian found himself in what appeared to be an alley between two buildings, which made no sense at all. He found it very disorienting. It didn’t help that he was sleep deprived, hungover, and crashing from the adrenaline jolt of his near-death experience.

Margo led him out onto what appeared to be an underground street that was lined on both sides with dirt-caked, cobwebbed storefronts with bricked-up doors and windows. It was like the exterior set of a Western street from an old movie that had been rebuilt in someone’s basement. The dim light that allowed him to see it all was coming from filthy glass-cubed skylights embedded in the sidewalk above their heads. The muddy ground was littered with beer bottles, soiled mattresses, and fast-food containers.

Here he was underground, with walls all around him, and yet his claustrophobia was gone. Here he felt free. Nobody could see him here.

“What is this place?” he asked.

“Old Seattle.” She hurried through the underground maze and he struggled to keep up with her. It wasn’t easy running with one arm in a cast in the best of circumstances, much less in half darkness over rutted dirt and patches of mud. “Pioneer Square is built on Puget Sound muck. It used to flood here all the time. So, in the late 1890s, the city began raising the streets.”

“How did they do that?”

“They basically built bridges on top of the old streets. The second floor of every building became the new ground floor,” she said. “But it didn’t happen overnight. For a while, people still used these underground streets to get around and do business. That’s why there’re skylights in the sidewalks overhead. Some of the homeless come down here for the night and for shelter during the winter.”

“How do you know so much about it?”

“It’s not a big secret,” she said. “There are tours of a few buried streets that’ve been ‘restored’ by repainting signage, scattering around some wooden barrels and wagon wheels, and adding a few dusty mannequins dressed in old-fashioned clothes. It’s a rip-off that caters to morons.”

But at least the air on those tour streets probably wasn’t tinged with the lingering scents of stale beer and urine. The farther away they got from the bookstore, the more the underground smelled to Ian like a public bathroom on Santa Monica Beach. Even so, he’d never seen a place like this.

“This would be a cool location for a killing.”

She gave him a look. “Isn’t that what we’re trying to avoid?”

“Good point,” he said.





CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Cross scanned the images on the big-screen wall and realized that there weren’t any new pictures from Ludlow’s book-signing event posted on social media. “When was the last time a photo was posted of Ludlow?”

“Three minutes ago,” Seth said.

That wasn’t good. Cross’ instincts were telling him something was wrong.

“Call the bookstore,” Cross said to Victoria. “Tell them you’re Ludlow’s editor and you need to share some great news with him right away.”

Victoria picked up the phone and made the call, introduced herself, and asked for Ian. Cross tuned out the one-sided phone conversation, his eyes scanning the camera feeds, looking for anything amiss. All he saw were the crowds of people in Pioneer Square going to and fro, most of them with earbuds and holding paper cups of coffee. Something Victoria said brought his attention back to the call.

“Could I speak to Margo while I’m waiting?” Victoria said, then covered the mouthpiece with her hand and informed Cross, “He’s in the bathroom.”

“How long has he been there?”

“For a few minutes,” she said. “Margo is with him, too.”

That was damn peculiar. Had they left the store somehow? Blackthorn had the block under visual surveillance from multiple angles. All the faces were being scanned by the facial recognition system so their targets wouldn’t be lost in a crowd. Cross or the system would have seen Ludlow and French if they’d emerged onto the street anywhere on the same block.

But they hadn’t showed.

Something on the screen caught his eye. Not a face, but a word. Cross tapped an icon on his touch screen and, in doing so, enlarged one of the camera feeds from Pioneer Square on the media wall. The camera was trained on the Victorian wrought-iron-and-glass cupola in the center of the cobblestone plaza. It was a bus stop. Behind the cupola/bus stop was a six-story, block-long sandstone building with a front entrance dominated by a masonry arch with PIONEER BUILDING etched into it. On either side of the arched entry were storefronts. Above one of the storefronts was a sign advertising THE UNDERGROUND TOUR.