Replica

CHAPTER NINE

Nate would have loved to get his trip to the Basement over with early so he could get some sleep, but he had to wait until his household quieted down for the night to reduce the chances of being seen. He kept himself awake by watching a horror movie on the net, but the ads for an upcoming news special were way scarier than the movie. The ad came up on every commercial break, showing Nate cussing out the reporter and shoving the microphone out of his face; worse, some talking head with a PhD was speculating about whether such an outburst from a former media darling meant the Replication process was flawed and had created violent tendencies. He finally quit watching the movie just so he could stop seeing that ad.

At 1:00 A.M., Nate started the laborious process of transforming himself once more into the Ghost. He was already running on fumes, and this was going to be one hell of a long night.

Yawning, Nate checked the various hiding places on his costume to make sure all the dollars Nadia had given him were secure and hidden. His conscience nagged at him for the way he’d treated her this afternoon. Now that Kurt was gone, she was the only true friend he had, and the absolute worst thing he could do was act like an asshole and alienate her. She was as alone as he was, her parents’ love tempered by expectations, her peers’ “friendship” tainted by jealousy and ambition. He and Nadia needed each other, now more than ever, and Nate was determined never to take her for granted again. That she’d stolen money from her parents for him after the way he’d acted showed just how good a friend she was, doing her all to help him find someone everyone but the two of them thought was guilty of murder.

Nate used the same escape route he’d used the night before, starting with the rather terrifying drop through the laundry chute. He had a jolt when he landed in the laundry room and found the lights on, but as far as he could tell, there was no one around. He let out a breath of relief, then made his way cautiously to the service stairs, feeling even more on edge than he had the night before.

He didn’t allow himself to relax until he was driving the purloined motorcycle out of the parking lot, opening up the throttle as much as he dared on the quiet streets. He wanted to put the little Ducati through its paces, maybe give himself a good adrenaline spike to chase away the last of the cobwebs in his head. Maybe he just wanted to remind himself that he was alive, when by all rights, he shouldn’t be. But calling attention to himself wasn’t part of the game plan.

By the time Nate arrived at Angel’s doorstep, it was past two in the morning. Prime time, in Debasement. The club was crowded, wall-to-wall people, and the predators were out full force. One pretty young hooker even tried to pick his pocket, which meant word had already spread that he’d paid the cover charge in dollars. Usually the predators ignored other Basement-dwellers and fixated on the more wealthy and less cautious Executive and Employee patrons. Nate caught the hooker’s wrist, trapping her with two fingers halfway into one of his jacket pockets. She was startlingly young, with tiny breasts barely hidden by her red halter top. Nate felt a twisting sensation in his gut. He’d seen some awfully young girls plying the sex trade at Angel’s club, but this one seemed little more than a child. Which was probably why she’d resorted to picking Nate’s pocket—she wasn’t experienced enough to stick to the lower-risk, higher-reward targets.

Nate clicked his tongue at her, still holding her wrist as she looked up at him with wide, innocent eyes. But young though she might be, it had been a long time since this girl had been innocent by any definition of the word, and Nate could see the calculation behind the expression.

“How old are you?” he found himself asking, shouting the question over the music. She looked barely past puberty, but this was Debasement, and looks could be deceiving here. He could hope she was really an adult with exceptionally good makeup and some quality amateur plastic surgery.

“What’s it to you?” she asked, dropping the innocent look for one of sulky belligerence. She gave a little tug to see if she could free her wrist, but he kept hold. Her voice was clear and high, a little girl’s voice rather than a woman’s. “You plannin’ to give me a spanking?” The girl leered at him, moving closer, pressing her body up against his. “I’ll give you a freebie to make up for the, um, misunderstanding.”

Nate suppressed a shudder. He was quite sure that even if he were really into girls, he wouldn’t be tempted by this little Lolita wannabe. But maybe he could make her life easier for her, if just for one night. Making sure her free hand wasn’t doing anything it shouldn’t while she pressed up against him, he reached under his leather jacket and opened one of the zipper compartments, pulling out a hundred dollar bill and folding it into his palm.

“I’ll let you off with a warning,” he told her, trying to smile at her while thinking how unfair it was that being born reasonably pretty in Debasement had doomed her to this fate. If she’d been born to an Employee family, would she be a perfectly respectable schoolgirl, looking forward to a safe and happy life? And if he had been born in Debasement, what would his life look like right now?

Of course, now was a shitty time for philosophical, self-indulgent navel gazing.

“You work for Angel, right?” She had to work for Angel; Angel wouldn’t let someone this pathetic set foot in her club as a patron.

The girl stuck out her lower lip, but there was a flash of real fear in her eyes. “Please don’t say nothin’ to Angel. I was just … playin’.”

“I won’t tell Angel you tried to pick my pocket,” he assured her. He clasped her hand, letting her feel the money against her palm. “I just want to have a word with Angel, and don’t want to have to spend all night looking for her. Any chance you can let her know I’m here and looking?”

Cautiously, ready to grab her and take his money back if she tried to bolt, Nate let go. She took a step back from him, keeping a wary eye on him as she glanced at the bill in her hand. Her eyes widened and her jaw dropped when she saw what she held.

“Tell Angel the Ghost wants to talk to her. I’ll be at the bar. I’ll give you another tip once I’ve seen her. Deal?”

The girl licked her lips, still wide-eyed. Maybe he’d gone overboard with his payment, but he wanted to think it was enough to give her a night or two off.

When had he decided to become a knight in shining armor?

“Do we have a deal, or don’t we?” he asked, more sharply than he intended. He didn’t like seeing the place he’d once thought of as an adult playground for what it really was, but it wasn’t fair to take it out on the girl.

She lifted her chin, and defiance flashed in her eyes. “Deal,” she said, then turned to head off into the crowd. She stuck the hand with the money in it into her tight, skimpy shorts, and he tried not to wonder how she protected her money when those shorts came off.

“Hey!” he called after her. She stopped, looking over her shoulder at him. “What’s your name?” he asked.

“Why d’you care?”

Nate wondered if Kurt had been such a hard case at that age, then shook his head, trying not to picture his boyfriend as a child prostitute. They’d never talked about it, but Nate knew Kurt had gotten started young.

“I don’t,” he said, because it was what she expected. “I’m just curious.”

She thought about it a moment, then shrugged her skinny shoulders. “Petal.”

She turned from him without awaiting a response and lost herself in the crowd. Nate hoped she was going to take his message to Angel, but she might just as easily have been making a beeline for the exit to spend her unexpected windfall.

Surprised by how strongly he wished he could just leave Angel’s and never come back, he reluctantly made his way to the bar to wait.

Nate was dangerously close to being a morose drunk.

He’d been sitting at the bar for the better part of an hour, and the longer he sat, the more convinced he felt that Petal had taken his money and run. Not that he could blame her. If he’d been in her shoes, he’d have been outta there in an instant.

How had he never noticed before how depressing Angel’s was? Sure, the Executive and Employee tourists were having a blast, getting drunk, doing drugs, enjoying the shows, and getting laid. And sure, some of the dealers and hookers probably got off on the power games they played, enjoyed being viewed as dangerous predators or seeing the sexual hold they had on such powerful people. But most were just doing their jobs, with about the same enthusiasm as a factory worker, dreaming of quitting time and hoping they were pulling in enough cash to make ends meet.

His disenchantment with the club had led him to drink more than was wise. Not that he had any choice but to order drinks while he was sitting at the bar, but that didn’t mean he had to actually drink them. But he hoped that maybe if he took the edge off, he’d see a little bit more of the Angel’s he remembered, the fun, wild, exotic club he’d so enjoyed visiting. Instead, it seemed with every sip of alcohol, he found the place just a little more depressing.

He’d gotten himself into such a nasty, broody mood that he was barely aware of the people around him as he sat hunched over his drink at the bar. He finished off the shot of insanely expensive chocolate vodka he’d ordered, barely tasting it. Nadia was not going to be happy with him for spending the hard-won dollars on liquor he didn’t really want, but maybe if he kept ordering the most expensive drinks, he’d eventually attract Angel’s attention even if Petal hadn’t bothered to take his message to her. And maybe he’d even have a few dollars left over with which to bribe Angel.

“Another!” he cried out loudly to Viper, waving his empty shot glass in the air and then turning it upside down before plopping it back on the bar.

“Fine vodka is meant to be sipped, you know,” said a voice from behind him, and Nate froze with his hand still holding the shot glass.

It showed how dangerously careless he’d become that he’d allowed the very woman he was looking for to come up behind him within touching distance without having noticed. Moving slowly, because there was something sly in Angel’s voice that jangled his nerves, Nate turned around.

Debasement was full of exotic, unusual-looking people, but even among them Angel of Mercy stood out. Nate wasn’t sure how old she was, but if he had to guess, he’d say somewhere in the vicinity of fifty. Her hair was a natural (he presumed) steel gray, cut in a six-inch-high Mohawk that made it look like she had a rotary saw coming out of her head. There were deep wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, and she had the wattled neck of a much older woman, but her boobs were high and tight (almost certainly fake), and she always displayed her cleavage to best effect. The spiky dog collar she wore around her neck might have looked vaguely submissive on anyone else, but on Angel it was a mockery. If there was anyone in the world less submissive than Angel of Mercy, Nate didn’t want to meet them.

Angel’s face was devoid of the tattoos and face paint that were so popular among the Basement’s younger crowd, but her body was a different story. The henna-colored designs started just under her collarbones and crawled down her body and arms in bands and spirals. Nowhere near as colorful and elaborate as some of the other body art Nate had seen in Debasement, Angel’s tattoos were nonetheless some of the most striking: a series of repeating, tribal-looking patterns that somehow managed to fit together perfectly, like a monochrome Persian rug woven by a detail-oriented master.

“Angel,” he said with a polite nod, while not taking his eyes off of her. “So nice to see you again.”

She smiled at him, then gave the guy sitting next to him at the bar a pointed stare. The guy was a drunk twentysomething Employee, but he wasn’t so plastered he couldn’t read the very obvious hint in Angel’s eyes, and he hastily vacated his barstool. Still smiling, Angel took a seat. Viper put a shot glass filled with viscous, crimson liquid on the bar before her. Nate had no idea what it was, and had no inclination to find out as Angel lifted the glass to her lips and drained it. It left a thick coating on the sides of the glass. Clearly, it was supposed to look like blood, but Nate was ninety-nine percent sure it wasn’t. It was the remaining one percent that made him decline when Angel arched a brow at him and said “Want one?”

“I think I’ve had enough to drink already,” he said, and wondered if he was slurring a bit. His head did feel a little fuzzy around the edges, and he hadn’t been keeping careful track of how much alcohol he was taking in. Kurt would never have let him be so careless.

“Suit yourself,” Angel said with a shrug. “I heard you wanted to talk to me. How can I be of service?”

There was a strange glitter in Angel’s eye, and Nate didn’t like the hard edge in her voice. She was possibly the most intimidating woman he had ever met, and Nate had always had a healthy respect for her, but on the few occasions when he’d talked to her in the past, she’d always seemed perfectly pleasant. She wasn’t a kiss-ass, but she did treat her well-heeled customers like honored guests, going out of her way to make sure they were having a good time, the better to make sure they kept bleeding dollars all over her club.

With the way Nate had been throwing around dollars tonight, he’d have expected her to give him the royal treatment, but she was looking at him with thinly veiled scorn. The sense of hostility Nate was picking up from Angel made him distinctly uncomfortable, but without Kurt here to help him navigate the dangerous waters, he had to just suck it up and do what he came to do.

“I’m looking for the Bishop,” he said, using Kurt’s street name. No adult in Debasement used real, honest-to-goodness names. They went by their first names as children, until they’d “earned” their street names. Many Basement-dwellers—Kurt included—didn’t even know their surnames, much less use them. Kurt had gotten a kick out of using his street name for a surname when he had registered with Paxco as an Employee. He had never explained to Nate how he’d earned that particular street name, but Nate knew it had something to do with his former profession, and his imagination provided some ideas. There were definitely some B words he could imagine Kurt being known as the Bishop of.

Angel threw her head back and laughed, the sound loud and raucous enough to draw a few stares. Nate felt the blood heating his cheeks, but he wasn’t sure what he was embarrassed about. Or what Angel found so damned funny. He ground his teeth to keep from saying something stupid and waited for her to stop laughing at him.

Angel’s laughter eventually died, though razor-sharp amusement still glittered in her steel gray eyes. “You stupid fuck,” she said, smiling like she was making friendly conversation. “Half of Paxco wants a bite of that boy. Unless you’re the Chairman in disguise, there’s at least a dozen people who could make it even more worth my while to help them find him.”

Something uneasy slithered down Nate’s spine. Nate’s first trip to the Basement in his alter ego as the Ghost had happened the week after his eighteenth birthday, and he and Kurt had been to Angel’s once or twice a month since then. Never had Angel shown the slightest hint that she might know who he really was. But there was something disturbingly sly about her words and the way she was looking at him.

Angel couldn’t possibly know, could she?

But no, that was impossible. If Angel knew who he was, she’d either be trying her hardest to get him out of her club before something bad happened to him and she got blamed for it, or she’d have sent word to the biggest, baddest power players in Debasement and gotten them into a bidding war for the right to kidnap him. He wasn’t sure anyone in Debasement had what it took to hold him without being destroyed—he wouldn’t put it past his father to firebomb an entire block to punish anyone who dared attempt a kidnapping—but there were certainly some who would love to try.

He was drunk and paranoid, Nate told himself. The only reason he was sensing something “off” about Angel was because Kurt wasn’t here with him to act as a buffer.

“You’re a mercenary,” Nate said, “but there’s more to you than that.” The Angel of Mercy moniker was mostly sarcastic, but Nate had always gotten the impression there was a hint of truth in it. She might not technically qualify as one of the good guys, but somewhere beneath her fierce exterior, she had a heart. At least, Nate hoped she did.

“The others who might pay more for the information want to arrest him,” he continued. “I just want to talk to my friend, make sure he’s all right. See if there’s anything I can do to help him.”

Angel shook her head. “What makes you think he wants your help? If he’d wanted to talk to you, he would have contacted you by now. Take a fucking hint.”

Nate couldn’t help flinching a little at the words.

“Go home, Ghost,” Angel said, her voice lower and now almost kind-sounding. “You’re already in over your head. Go any deeper, you’ll drown. Take some advice from someone who’s been around the block a few thousand times.”

“I’m not giving up,” he said, his fists clenching at the thought. “He means too much to me.” That last part slipped out without conscious thought on his part. Most likely, he was revealing more than he should, letting Angel get a glimpse of his vulnerabilities. But at this point, he wasn’t sure he cared.

Beside him, Angel sighed loudly. “Fine, then,” she said. “Come with me.”

She slipped off the stool and started making her way through the crowd without awaiting a reply. Nate blinked in surprise.

“Where—?” he started to ask, but Angel was already out of earshot.

Surprise had given her a head start, but it wasn’t hard to follow that table-saw hair. Nate received a couple of angry grunts and glares as he pushed his way through the crowd in Angel’s wake.

Angel’s club took up the first three floors of the apartment building. She’d had the apartments ripped out of the first two floors for the main body of her club, but on the third floor, the apartments had been transformed into seedy little rooms where club-goers could engage in more private indulgences. It was in one of these third-floor rooms that Nate had first met Kurt. The memory of that first meeting was seared so firmly in his brain that he knew exactly which room it was, even though all the rooms on the third floor looked identical and there weren’t any numbers or other identifying marks on them.

When Angel stopped in front of the room and looked over her shoulder at him, unease flared inside him. Why would she lead him to this room, of all places?

“Are you sure you want to do this?” she asked. “Sure you don’t want to just trust the Bishop to take care of himself?”

“What’s going on?” Nate demanded, trying not to sound as unnerved as he felt. But something was just wrong about Angel tonight. He’d never thought of her as a nice person, of course, but never before tonight had he felt this undercurrent of malice.

Angel stepped aside and made a sweeping gesture toward the room. “Open the door and find out.”

Nate swallowed hard. Every instinct in his body told him that opening the door would be a bad idea. Whatever Angel was up to, she wasn’t planning to help him find Kurt. The smart thing to do would be to turn around and march out of here. Go back home and do exactly what Angel was telling him to do: trust Kurt to take care of himself.

But letting Kurt go like that meant letting him take the fall for Nate’s murder. Not to mention letting the real killer get away with it. Whatever was going on, Nate had to see it through.

Meeting Angel’s challenging stare, Nate reached out and pushed the door open.

The lights were off inside, and the room was pitch-black. Nate opened the door wider, hoping some of the light from the hallway would spill in and brighten the gloom.

Something slammed into the center of his back, propelling him forward into the darkened room. He let out a startled grunt as he flailed his arms for balance, but he hit the floor on his hands and knees anyway. He tried to scramble to his feet, but a heavy combat boot smashed into his gut so hard he was surprised it didn’t come out his back.

The door slammed shut and the lights went on as Nate lay helplessly on the floor, arms wrapped around his middle as he tried fruitlessly to suck in some air. Another kick connected with his back, and he nearly passed out from the pain.

“I have a message for you from the Bishop,” Angel said, squatting beside him with a wicked smile and a glitter in her eyes. “This is a direct quote: ‘If I wanted your fucking help, I’d have asked for it.’”

Nate was dimly aware of three masked figures in the room. Based on their builds, they were probably some of Angel’s bouncers. One of them bared his teeth when Nate met his gaze, then delivered another brutal kick. Nate’s stomach revolted, and he puked up all the liquor he’d been drinking.

Still smiling, Angel rose to her feet. She swept her bouncers with a commanding look. “Make it hurt real good. But don’t do anything that will show.”

Nate could do nothing to defend himself. He’d never been much of a fighter, even as a kid—being the Chairman Heir meant that he never had to worry about bullies—and he was already too hurt to stand up, much less fight back. All he could do was try to protect his head.

They worked him over for what felt like about three hours. The bouncers were methodical about their work, and if they were enjoying themselves, it didn’t show. All in a day’s work was what their body language said. Angel, however, watched every blow with a satisfied smirk on her face.

When she finally called them off, Nate was convinced he was about to die of internal injuries, and there was not a drop of food or drink left in his stomach. He stank of sweat and puke, and though he hadn’t taken a single blow to the head, he was dizzy and disoriented.

Angel dismissed the bouncers with a jerk of her head, then came to squat by his head again, her voice low and almost seductive as she purred at him.

“The Bishop never wants to see you again,” she told him. “He thought you’d get the hint after he stabbed you, but apparently that was too subtle.”

Nate could hardly breathe through the pain in his gut, but he shook his head vigorously, denying the message. He didn’t know exactly what had happened here, why Angel had turned on him like this, but he refused to believe Kurt had anything to do with it.

“You think it’s a coincidence I chose this room for our heart-to-heart?”

Nate couldn’t help making a little sound in the back of his throat, a choked denial. No one but Kurt would know the significance of this room. It had to be just coincidence that Angel had had him ambushed here. Had to be.

“The Bishop told me what happened here,” Angel said. “Told me it would have special significance for you.”

“You’re lying,” Nate managed to spit out.

“Not about this. But the Bishop figured you’d be too pigheaded to take my word for it, so here’s a little more proof that I’m his messenger.”

She reached for him, and he tried to roll away. The pain of his injuries rose up in a wave so strong it took his breath away, and he practically blacked out. He felt Angel’s hand pawing at his chest, delving under first his jacket, then his shirt. He tried again to resist, but another wave of dizziness made his head spin.

His heart nearly stopped when Angel’s hand closed around the locket. He wore it under his shirt, and he’d even gone so far as to tape it to his chest to make sure it never became visible here in the Basement, where it might tempt thieves—or even serve to reveal his true identity. Angel ripped the tape off, then yanked on the chain so hard it broke.

So furious that for a moment he forgot his pain, Nate struck out at her.

“The Bishop doesn’t want you to have this anymore,” Angel said as she stood up, easily sidestepping his feeble blow. “He was through with the real Nathaniel Hayes, and he sure as shit wants nothing to do with a freak imitation of a human being like you. And if you set foot in Debasement again … Well, let’s just say you won’t like what happens.”

Angel tucked the locket into her cleavage as Nate lay on the floor and tried to comprehend what had happened, what he was hearing. Trying to find an explanation for it that didn’t mean Kurt was really behind all this. But how else could Angel know who he was, or know about the locket?

“Go home,” Angel said with a sneer. “Go stick your silver spoon up your ass and live the good life with the rest of the haves. The have-nots can get by just fine without you.”

Straightening her clothes as if she herself had delivered the beating, Angel turned her back on him and left the room.