Undertow (The UnderCity Chronicles) Read Online Free

Must be home, then.”
    His smile glittered. “Must be.”
    “I’ll have to remind him not to leave his door open.” She paused deliberately. “Who knows who might wander in?”
    “Yeah. Good idea.”
    Lindsay didn’t know what to do, so she pushed open the door and tried to close it quickly behind her. It took a couple of goes as the door didn’t sit square with the frame. She waited, listening for the Yeti of Bedford to follow. Nothing happened, and she turned back to the shop’s interior. Or what there was of it.
    Crumbling white plaster exposed wires, and the floor was stripped straight to the plywood underlay. A patchwork of old linoleum tiles, mud-stained carpet rolls and cardboard trailed from the front door to a reinforced metal one at the rear.
    “What the hell happened, Jack?” she said under her breath. She crossed the gutted store and knocked on the metal door.
    No answer. Lindsay went straight to the door knob. It was locked. She knocked again, harder this time. Behind her, the shop door crashed open and in came the giant.
    “You ain’t getting past that one,” he said, nodding.
    “Wha—?”
    He strolled towards her, shifting his bag to one arm, while his hand dug around in the pocket of his parka. “Locked it on my way out.” He pulled out a set of keys so full that they formed a stiff three-quarters arc and selected one.
    He stepped forward and she stepped aside.
    “You live here? Not Jack Cole, then?”
    “That the name of the friend who’s waiting for you?”
    The game was up. She sighed. “Yeah, it is.”
    Again the man’s mouth broke into an amused smile. “He’ll be back soon. You want to, you can come down and wait.” He moved sideways to hold the door open for her.
    Lindsay tried not to look as scared as she was. What the hell had Monroe gotten her into? The cop had warned her to talk to Jack herself, but hadn’t mentioned anything about his living in the basement of some abandoned building with Bigfoot. Perhaps it was a kind of test. After all, if she didn’t have the guts to go down there, how could she expect others to face New York’s real underground?
    “Sure. Sounds good.” Carefully she walked down the stairwell, him clumping behind her, filling the one escape route. They emerged into a clean, spartan apartment. No, not spartan. Spartan was its own kind of style. This was absence, the kind of deprivation found in a prison cell. There were no bookshelves, no television, no phone—not even a single picture on the cracked plaster walls. The only illumination was the weak beams of sunlight that fell through a pair of small street-level windows high on the back wall. Lindsay had no sense of Jack in the bleak apartment, nothing to make it seem as if this was where he belonged.
    The black man kicked off his boots, carpeted the floor with his coat. “Sit down. He’ll be back soon.”
    Her seating choices were two chairs, an uncomfortable-looking plastic one by a small formica kitchen table, and a worn mud-brown leather armchair pushed into the far corner. Lindsay crossed the room to take up the latter.
    “So…my name’s Lindsay.”
    The man took two cartons of eggs from the paper bag, placed one on the counter and the other in the rusted fridge. “That right?”
    Lindsay was tired of being played with. “Yeah, that’s right. Now could you stop with your I-know-something-you-don’t-know game and act like a normal human being?”
    His eyes positively gleamed. “Man, I can’t wait for Jack to come back and see what I brought home.”
    “You make it sound as if I were a bargain at a garage sale.”
    He gave a soft hoot. “More than what Jack bargained for, I’ll bet.” He turned to the sink and began washing his hands under a sputtering tap. “Reggie,” he tossed over his shoulder. “I’m Reggie.”
    “I take it you’re a friend of Jack’s?”
    Reggie dried his hands on a towel that Lindsay wouldn’t have washed her floor with and took a large frying pan