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But where to go?
Neddie knew the vast network of underground spaces beneath San Francisco as if he’d designed those secret places himself.
For one thing, there were the former speakeasies that had been the major entertainment during Prohibition. Along with the speakeasies there had been brothels galore, many of them underground and connected by secret passageways.
Many or even most of the older buildings from that time had storage rooms that went out under the sidewalks and sometimes under the streets, too.
Even ships were buried downtown, and Neddie had seen them, walked through and over them. It was just fantastic. He’d even been to a place under a saloon where sailors had been shanghaied, sold to merchant ships. And then there was the entire Embarcadero, with its wide sidewalk built over a beach and a bay.
It was all true.
Neddie knew where these secret rooms connected and where the tunnels surfaced. He had his own private runways and escape hatches under the buildings and pavement. He had done the cartography in his mind. He’d done it himself.
He was not as dumb and crazy and brain damaged as he appeared to be in the files and folders about him, in the books that the shrinks wrote about their patients, labeled with numbers instead of names, in his reflection in the glassy eyes of the nurses who hardly thought of him at all.
He tickled the feet of the
man sleeping in the bunk next to his.
“Mike-Mike-Mike.”
“What, Neddie? What do you want now?”
“I can’t keep you safe from Meanies tonight, Mikey. I have to fly.”
“Go, Neddie. I’m strong. Loud Mike can take care of himself.”
Yesssss.
Neddie Lambo, Space-Time Traveler, King of the Underground.
Where should he go tonight?
CHAPTER 58
IT WAS AFTER 9:00 p.m. when Neddie took the stairs down from Ward Six to the basement-level tunnel, which was the corridor to many service rooms, including the kitchen and the laundry. It also ran between the Loony Bin and Saint Vartan’s Medical Center.
Neddie wore a black hoodie under a hip-length denim jacket. His weapon of choice was in his pocket, and his most serious running shoes peeked out from the legs of his jeans.
Dodging the few orderlies and maintenance workers using the underground tunnel at that hour, Neddie stuck to the shadows, then exited through the medical waste room under Saint Vartan’s and walked a block and a half overland to Jones Street.
Jones had once been a hive of speakeasies with escape hatches into underground hidey rooms, and Neddie knew the whole subterranean network better than anyone.
There, in front of the Wainscot, was one of Neddie’s best portals. He sat on the curb and had to wait only a minute for a burst of traffic to pass before removing the storm drain cover at his feet and climbing inside. He smoothly replaced the cover and began his descent down the metal ladder, his eyes quickly adjusting to the dark.
Once he reached the bottom of the ladder, it was an easy sprint along the old speakeasy connector to the manhole at Sixth and Stevenson. Neddie was not only swift, he was nimble. He made the short hand-over-hand climb, listened for a break in traffic, then shouldered open the heavy lid capping the entrance to the tunnel.
Aboveground again, Neddie walked in darkness, making turns along well-traveled streets into narrow alleys, passing strollers and dog walkers in ones and twos in Sue Bierman Park. He kept his hood up, his hands in his pockets, his eyes down, finally taking a pathway at the end of Drumm to the Embarcadero.
Neddie found the Embarcadero, that superwide avenue running along the bay, exhilarating. There was so much traffic here, both car and pedestrian, that no one noticed him.
Several months ago he had made a perfect kill beside the Waterside Restaurant. The Beige Woman. But before he’d been able to see and really feel the thrill of her death, something unimaginable had overshadowed his own sweet success.
He’d been cheated.
Tonight he would take back what had been so rudely stolen from him. Tonight belonged to Neddie Lambo.
CHAPTER 59
