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“Okay, maybe not half. But three other buildings collapsed when it pulled the ground out from under ’em. There’s supposed to be controls on a portal, you know? So it don’t go crazy? Only something must have happened, because Curly’s was set on full-bore ‘let’s swallow the world’ mode and almost did!”
I thought of the grenade Dorina had thrown at whatever control they’d had down there.
Yeah, that would do it.
Although where she’d even gotten the thing I couldn’t imagine. What kind of security guard carries grenades? Even for dark mage smugglers, that seemed a little extreme.
“—looking like a sinkhole had opened up underneath it,” Ray was saying. “With the damned roof sitting curbside! It probably woulda been gone altogether, but the Circle showed up and shut it down. They’re still pawing through the wreckage—”
He paused to look around for somewhere to stash the nasty thing from his shoulder, but didn’t find anything. “You got a trash can?”
I shoved an ashtray at him, and he coiled whatever it was into it. “The audience got out okay,” he added. “Being smart enough to run like hell. But those of us still inside when that wave hit—”
He shuddered.
And, suddenly, I did feel bad, because I had barely thought of him. Not that I didn’t have about a thousand other things to think about, but still. Ray could have died.
“I could have died!” he told me, flopping down into my desk chair. “I was trying to swim out when that portal sucked the floor out from under me. I got pulled two, maybe three stories down, and couldn’t see shit, ’cause there was water and mud and furniture and who knows what else being dragged down on top of me!”
I reached over and touched his arm. “That must have been terrifying.”
“Yeah, well.” He looked slightly mollified. “You know. Anyway, I finally found a staircase—completely full of mud—and just burrowed my way up. And stepped into freaking air again, and man, you shoulda seen it.”
“Seen what?” I sat down on the visitor’s chair I kept for clients, back when I had clients, and scooted it around the desk.
Ray looked pleased to have an audience.
“The main auditorium held together pretty well, I guess ’cause the floors underneath were getting chomped on, while it was just kinda sinking. Anyway, it looked like some big, dark underground cave, full of broken shit and puddles and waterfalls pouring down everywhere. It was crazy!”
“So, that’s when you saw Curly?”
“No, that’s when I almost got scared to death. The Circle broke a hole in the roof and sent some of their boys down on ropes, only I didn’t know that, right? So there I am, freaked out, mud everywhere, including in my eyes, and there’s this mist of water in the air, making everything sort of foggy. And then one of those assholes starts running at me, and he hadda helmet with a searchlight on it, and looked like some kind of one-eyed monster—” He paused. “You know, a real one-eyed monster, not—”
“I get it.”
“Anyway, that’s when I saw Curly.”
“What?”
“Yeah. He was with one of his boys, some young, skinny guy, and they were booking it across the other side of the theatre. I called out, and I know that bastard saw me, but he just kept going. The guard shot one of those Spidey webs at the hole in the roof and they bounced.”
I thought of the young guard who had been Dorina’s ride. Maybe she’d managed to get him out, and Curly, too? But if so, where were they now?
“Beats me,” Ray said, when I asked. “We used to call him Squirrelly Curly, ’cause he runs at the first sign of trouble. He had bolt-holes everywhere, back in the day. That’s why he wanted out of the business. He don’t have the nerves for smuggling.”
“It looked like he was still in the game to me.”
“Where his precious theatre was concerned, sure. Nothing was too good for that thing. Damn, if he’s alive, I bet he’s pissed—”
“Enough to rat out the people he was working with?”
Ray stopped. “Why?”
“Something Dorina overheard.”
He scowled. “You know it’s weird when you talk about yourself in the third person, right? It creeps me out.”
“It doesn’t do a lot for me, either.”
