Roach stiffens, too scared to breathe.
“Who has her?” I ask again. Neon glints off the naked blade.
Roach’s eyes swivel toward either end of the alleyway. He whispers like he’s afraid of his own voice.
“The Man…” he stutters, coughs. “The Man in the White Limousine.”
I put the knife away, let him fall back into the mire.
“You stupid waste of skin,” I tell him. “Now you better run.”
He takes my advice, scurrying like a rat into the shadows and piles of trash.
When I leave the alley there’s a boy with a sideways face picking up bottles in the street. He looks at me like I’m a tasty morsel, flashes the fangs lining his vertical mouth. I pull out the hand cannon, let him see the glimmer of its metal. He hisses at me, moves on down the road, disappears among a jumble of rusted-out vehicles.
I stand for a moment in the street, getting my bearings. The White Limousine never comes to this part of town. I’ve got some walking to do. Maybe I should just go home, forget about Dorothy McIntyre, write her off as another unsolved case. Just another victim of the city.
I take a good shot from the flask and look at her picture. She comes from a world of sunlight. And now she’s lost in darkness. The rain picks up, turning from steady drizzle into dedicated downpour. Warm and oily. Like blood.
Damn it.
I shove the picture back into my pocket, turn up my coat’s heavy collar, and start walking.
On 459th street I pass the Man Who Speaks With Shadows. He’s always there, like a phantom shaman who haunts the block. He stands on a pyramid of rusted shopping carts, waving his arms in the rain and muttering gibberish. His face is black with grime and madness, his gray beard a tangled crow’s nest. His long robe is a stitched-together quilt of every color that has faded to no color at all. I pass by as far as possible. I can only reach the River District by going down 459th. All the other streets heading this direction are blocked by toppled skyscrapers, mountains of scrap, or barriers of rubble.
“The River flows to Nowhere!” shouts the old man. He’s looking down at me now, bathed in the orange flicker of alley-fires. “To Nowhere!”
I keep walking. He’s harmless.
“Give up the skin and you give up the heart!” he bellows. “What are we without hearts? What are they? The current carries us all toward oblivion! The River flows to Nowhere!”
Farther down the road I can’t hear his ravings anymore. The rain lightens up, but the road is still waterlogged. Steam rises from grates, along with hollow moans of agony. I hear screaming somewhere down below. The city sewers are another world altogether. Couldn’t pay me enough to go down there.
This close to the river nature has started to take back the city. Green vines with black leaves crawl up through the pavement to hug the facades of dead towers. Weeds grow waist-high from cracked asphalt, and sheets of purple fungus smother the concrete. Sometimes things like bloated eels crawl out of the sewers and go hunting up here. They feed on each other when they can’t find rats or stray junkies.
Now I turn off the main avenue. The snipers up ahead will spot me soon if I keep going that direction. The only way I’m going to get close to the Man in the White Limousine is by navigating the Intestinal, a maze of alleys that leads eventually to the River District. I take out the hand cannon. The weight of it in my hand makes me feel a bit safer in the dark and narrow places. A bit.
Bits of bone and fabric line the alleyway, broken glass, the occasional skull, sometimes a gnawed skeleton. Two-headed rats skitter away at my approach, then reconvene to finish their feast when I pass. I take a right, a left, then two more rights, following tiny signs graven into the brickwork. Anybody else would be totally lost in here. Knowing these kinds of things is why I get paid so well.
Eventually I come to the Alley of Ecstasies. The girls here crawl like serpents across the slimy ground. Forked tongues flicker from their bright red lips, and they whisper filthy secrets. They offer me obscure pleasures as I step carefully between them. Their heads twist to follow me. Their bodies are covered with mud and green-gray scum, but otherwise perfectly proportioned. They’re not exactly human, despite their spot-on female anatomies. My stomach turns as they caress my thighs with their long fingers, begging for my favor.
I stop right in the middle of them when I see the man lying at the far end of the alley. Two of the girls crawl across his naked body. His mouth hangs open, head resting on a pile of cast-off clothing. They do unspeakable things with his body, contorting him like a rag doll. He moans and cries out. I turn away, take out the picture of Dorothy and stare at it until the moaning stops. The man stands up, pulls on his clothes, and looks at me with naked embarrassment. He runs from the girls hissing at his feet.
They’ve given up on me, sensing I’m somehow immune to their charms. They bare yellow fangs, warning me to beat it. I drop a few bucks into the slime and make my way quickly to the alley’s end. The maze continues, only now there is a second maze of conjoined fire escapes rising above me. I’ve reached the part of the Intestinal where the buildings still support life. Hunched figures move and scramble through the network of back iron, like fat spiders in a web. Sometimes garbage drops into the allies from above. I watch my step.
I follow the hidden signs, the ones I learned long ago when I was young and reckless. Back then I saw the city as a challenge, an adventure. I owned nothing back then, and so I had nothing to lose. I spent years in this place before I discovered a way out.
Something to live for besides hustling.
Her name was Carolyn.
On my way out of the Intestinal I see the woman with the black suitcase again. She sits on a pile of crumbled stone, cradling the suitcase, watching me pass into the River District.
“Do you know where you’re going?” she asks in that rasping, scarred voice.
I pause, for some reason I can’t name. Maybe the urgency of her question.
“Yes,” I tell her. “I know.”
And she laughs at me again. I leave her laughing as I walk into the road beyond the maze.
The streetlights glow white and orange, rising on iron poles from the avenue at regular intervals. The folk here wear dark clothing and heavy cloaks. Their skulls poke through the skin of their faces like fingertips through worn-out pairs of gloves. They shamble about drawing rickshaws or hand carts loaded with cages full of chickens, hairless cats, or snuffling mutant things without names. The people of River District are meat-eaters.
I blend into the crowd along the Street of Succulents, moving between the stalls where hocks of pink meat glisten on hooks. Hooded vendors shout the merits of their products. The smells of animal shit and barbecue smoke fill the gloom. A couple of stands offer tentacled creatures pulled from the river, and a few even display old-fashioned fish with silver scales. Gourmet food.
Several of these places offer fresh human limbs for those with truly discriminating tastes. I might look into these places in my search for Dorothy McIntyre, but I knew better. If the Man in the White Limousine had bought her, she wouldn’t end up in someone’s stew pot. She’d be in for something far worse than a slaughterhouse death.
The crowd here reminds me of Frankie’s Utopia, but without the blaring lights and noise. And there’s no joy here, not even the simulated kind that junkies are always chasing. No, here the citizens speak in hushed voices, until an argument breaks out and someone gets stabbed or strangled to death. An undercurrent of rage and fear runs through the lives of everyone who lives in the River District. They know who their masters are here, and they’re closer to them than anybody else in the city. They have good reason to be afraid.