Page 23 of Roma King
I shake my head. “Rochester Park’s a ghetto. There aren’t even any gas stations, let alone home hardware places.”
“All right, then. Maybe we can call a locksmith. They’ll open the lock for us and let us down there if we pay them.”
“They’re not allowed to just open locks and give people access to places whenever they feel like it. You can only have the locks on your own legal property opened. They ask for proof, your ID or whatever, and we can hardly pretend to own this massive hole in the ground now, can we?”
Sarah scowls. She doesn’t want to hear problems; she only wants solutions. “Do you remember why we came here in the first place, Zara Llewelyn? You dragged us here, so we could find that little boy, and now all you’re doing is throwing up roadblocks.”
“I didn’t want to come here! I wanted to leave this to the cops.Youtalked me into this!” I object. “I’m also not throwing up roadblocks. I’m just pointing out the obvious. And besides, have you thought about what we’re going to do if we manage to break the padlock of this thing, get down into the subway, search through a system of dangerous tunnels in the pitch black, and wedofind someone down there? A man capable of potentially killing a teenager, and then taking a little boy? What are we going to say to him? ‘Oh, hello there, sir. We know you probably have plans for Corey Petrov, but we were wondering if we might just take him home now. His folks are mildly concerned about his whereabouts.’You think that would work?”
“All right, all right. No need to get tetchy.” Sarah narrows her eyes at me. “When we go and buy something to cut the chain, we can arm ourselves, too. A couple of axes. Maybe a baseball bat.”
“Oh, sweet Jesus.” I spin around, looking up at the sky. Where the fuck are they? There has to be a couple of hidden cameras around here somewhere. This is all one big, terrible, tasteless joke, and whoever has set this up must have paid Sarah to pretend she’s lost her fucking mind.
It’s beginning to rain; I feel the light kiss of drizzle on my cheeks. Spokane doesn’t do weather by halves. It’s either hammering rain, or it’s bone dry. It’s either blazing hot, or blisteringly cold. We have about five minutes to get inside, or we’re going to get soaked to our skin when the heavens inevitably open.
A guy wearing a bright orange jacket hurries across the street, tucking what looks like an old school CD Discman into his pocket. He’s young, maybe only seventeen, his hair a riot of dark curls. I think for a second that he’s going to walk right into me—he hasn’t looked up once as he crossed the road—but at the last minute, as he steps up onto the curb and veers around me as if he’s known I was there all along.
He walks right up to the grate covering the disused subway station entrance, and that’s when he finally peels his gaze from the floor. His eyes are cornflower blue, the color of bright spring mornings and the ice over a frozen winter lake.
“Wouldn’t stand here if I were you,” he says, his voice carrying the words on a strange, lilting accent. Sounds almost Irish, but not quite. “Tonight’s a busy one. Gotta keep the way clear, y’know?” He’s wearing in-ear headphones, and the cable that comes down from the ear pieces themselves, plugging into the Discman sticking out of his pocket, is stripped of its plastic in at least three places, revealing the frayed copper wires inside. There’s no way they work.
“I’m sorry. A busy one?” I ask. “What’s going to be busy?” Rochester Park is bustling, sure, but the intersection of Cross and De Longpre is actually pretty damned deserted.
“The fair, stupid,” the boy answers. “What time is it?”
“What?” Sarah seems stunned by the boy’s very existence.
“What time is it? Right now?” he repeats. “I forgot to put my watch on before I left. Patrin’ll kill me if I’m late.”
I check my cell phone, while Sarah and Garrett eye the boy suspiciously. “It’s eleven twenty,” I tell him.
“Right, then. I mean, youcanwait here forty minutes, then you’ll be first in. It won’t be worth it, though. Patrin always overcharges the first bunch of people down the stairs, and he’s in a shit mood tonight. He won’t be nice to any of you. Better to go off and get yourself a drink somewhere and come back in an hour. He’ll have remembered how to smile by then, and you might save yourselves a bit a’ money.”
Blinking, I try to process the boy’s words. His accent isn’t that strong, in fact it’s quite lovely and melodic, but I still can’t understand what he’s saying to us. “I’m sorry. But, are you trying to tell us thata fairwill be opening up down there?In forty minutes?”
The boy releases a bark of laughter. “Aye, that is what I said.” He rummages in his jeans pocket, producing a bunch of keys. Quickly, he has the padlock open, the grate lifted high enough for him to slip down the dark stairway beyond, and to drop it closed behind himself. We watch in surprised silence as the kid slips his hands back through the grate’s bars and closes the padlock up once more.
“Remember,” he calls up to us. It’s so dark down there, I can barely make out the shape of him; only his blue eyes, his pale, white face, and his orange jacket are visible amongst all of the black. It looks as though the shadows are eating him alive. “Your fancy plastic money won’t work down here. We do not accept PayPal, Venmo, and no Apple Pay, neither. What I’m tryin’ to say, as politely as possible, naturally, is that you better line those pockets a’ yours with some green paper, otherwise Patrin’s gonna get himself all worked up again, and, well…I suppose he’s just an angry man all round, really. But still, better to come prepared! Never know. You might see something that takes your fancy!” His words echo as he descends down the stairs, until he’s finally gone. Sarah, Garrett, and I all bend over the grate, peering down into the darkness, squinting after him.
“Well, that was strange,” I say. “A fair in a disused subway station.A fair.They can’t have any rides. There can’t be enough space, surely?”
“I don’t know,” Sarah mumbles.
“A fair’s a hell of a lot safer than a bunch of empty, rat infested, dark tunnels, though. I think it’d actually be smart to go down there now. It’d make sense to go ask the people who work down there if they’ve seen Corey.”
“Nope.” Sarah stands up, turns, and begins to walk off down the street, away from the corner of Cross and De Longpre.
I exchange a confused look with Garrett. “Did she just leave?”
He shrugs.
“Sarah! What the hell!”
She doesn’t turn back, and she doesn’t stop. She’s a block away by the time we catch up with her. “Sarah! Why the hell are you fast-walking down the street like you need to find a public restroom?”
“I can’t go down there,” she says.
“It’s just a fair, Sarah. You’re not scared of clowns, are you?”
