Concrete Underground by Moxie Mezcal (most important books of all time txt) 📕

overpowering agony.

I looked at my reflection in the small handheld mirror and thought for a moment that the sadistic fuck of a doctor had replaced the glass with a photo of ground beef left out to sit for a week.

There were three large, ragged lacerations stitched up haphazardly amid a lot of swelling and bruising. One was a giant gash above my right brow, another was a smaller crescent around the ridge of my left eye socket, and the third was a split in the side of my left cheek. My nose had also been re-broken, sloppily reset, and taped up.

I lifted a hand to trace the swollen, discolored contours of my face and had to actually fight to choke back a hysterical burst of tears.

"Don't touch your face, you'll upset the stitches," the doctor admonished as he bent over the mildewy sink and washed an alarming amount of my blood off his hands and instruments.

Across the makeshift operating room, the metal door swung open again, and Max poked his head in.

"How's he doing?"

"He'll live," the doctor replied as he sparked up another cigarillo. "Although you'd never believe it from the way this little sissy has been carrying on."

Max chuckled and cut across the room. He was pristinely groomed and dressed in a classic black tuxedo with full-length coattails. I strained to hop off the table and groaned as I reached out to grab my shirt off a nearby chair.

"Here, I brought you a get-well-soon gift," Max said and tossed me a little white pill bottle. "Be careful with these, you don't want to take more than one or two a day."

I shook four out onto my palm and tossed them into my mouth.

"I hope you didn't have any plans tonight," Max chided as he lifted my jacket off the back of the chair and helped me put it on. He straightened the lapels and then ran his hands down my front to smooth it out. While he did, he found the Abrasax badge sticking out of my pocket and held it up for me to see.

"You're lucky they found this on you. Otherwise you'd be sitting in an interrogation cell right now instead of in the good doctor's operating room." He tucked it back into my coat and patted the pocket, indicating that it was safe and secure.

"Seems like an overreaction for simple trespassing."

He grinned good-naturedly and explained, "They are pretty paranoid about security. Most of the records Asterion keeps up here come from major clients who are worried about corporate espionage and willing to pay top dollar to make sure their trade secrets stay just that. Now admittedly, what happened to you is on the extreme end of things, but you seem to have that effect on people."

"No fucking kidding," I spat back. "Seems like every time I turn around there's someone waiting to kick my face in. It's like my life has suddenly become one of those old pulp detective novels."

"Hipster Philip Marlowe," Max added with an amused snort.

"Yeah, well, it's not a fucking joke, it's my life. And it's getting really fucking old, really fucking fast," I snapped and buried my face in my hands. "It feels like everything is falling apart. Like I'm being disassembled piece by piece, physically, mentally, emotionally. And now I'm so fucking disfigured I can't even recognize myself in the mirror. I'm just so fucking tired of it all."

"Hey, I told you not to touch!" the doctor chastised as he reached out and swatted me in the back of the head, hard.

My face instinctively twisted into a sneer, but actually his blow was just the thing I needed to jolt me out of the emo self-pity-party I was slipping into. I turned back to Max and asked, "Where's Columbine?"

"She's fine - she's waiting outside. She explained what happened, how you were digging up the dead body that you thought was Lily." He paused, then added, "It's not, incidentally. That was just a routine chore I asked Saint Anthony to handle for me, nothing to do with your assignment."

"Wait, what?" I said, and pulled out my notebook as if I had somehow missed something. "So you're the one who set up that whole meeting? Does that mean the guy who drives that old blue Chevy works for you, too?"

There was no hint of recognition in Max's face as he shook his head. "What blue Chevy?"

"The guy who drove McPherson out to meet Anthony at the graves."

Max looked at me silently with no reaction, his face remaining completely stoic and unchanged. And yet, there was something palpably different, possibly a nearly-imperceptible stiffening of his posture, or maybe even just a darkening of his aura, and I knew that he was both surprised by what I said and not a bit pleased.

Apparently, Columbine hadn't been completely forthcoming with her account to him.

"You didn't know McPherson was out there while Anthony buried them," I crowed triumphantly.

I stared at Max, hoping for some kind of reaction, some flicker of frustration or anger to validate the fact that I'd finally been one step ahead of him for a change.

Suddenly, though, my vision started to blur, and I felt dizzy and light-headed. I reached out to brace myself against the back of the nearby chair, but my weight made it topple backwards, collapsing me to the ground. Max bent over to help me up, his stone visage finally cracked into a broad grin.

"I told you not to take so many of those pills."

21. The Existential Hitman

Max and I staggered clumsily into the main lobby of the Asterion building like a pair of doped-up conjoined twins, my left arm slung over his shoulders, his right arm wrapped tightly around my midsection, and our four legs tripping and tangling over each other.

Columbine and Saint Anthony were waiting to meet us. Anthony rushed over to help with his boss's burden, gripping me roughly and letting me slump my weight against his sturdy frame.

"What the hell's wrong with him?" Anthony asked.

Max mimed popping pills into his mouth.

Columbine also came over to join us, unable to hide her shock at seeing my face.

"I know," I slurred. "I look totally hardcore."

Columbine offered a weak smirk that nearly avoided looking patronizing. "No, you look like you got your ass kicked. Hardcore would be if the other guy looked like that."

Max leaned in to Anthony and softly said, "I need to talk to you."

They propped me up against the reception desk and walked off to speak privately in hushed tones.

I craned my neck to look around the rest of the lobby, which was basically a cavernous, unadorned concrete bunker. The large open space off to one side suggested it had been intended as a waiting area, but there were no tables or chairs of any kind. In fact, the only furniture at all was the tall reception desk that I was currently leaning on.

Behind it sat an elderly woman, presumably the receptionist, passing the time by knitting with blue yarn. She never once bothered to look up from her work to acknowledge our presence, and I wasn't entirely convinced she was even aware that we were there.

The wall behind her was covered with a large bank of small closed circuit TV monitors. It reminded me somewhat of the setup at the Labyrinthine party, but much larger. The images on the screens appeared to be feeds from surveillance cameras throughout the storage facility, and each one had a five-digit number displayed at the bottom-right corner of the screen.

The images changed to a new feed every thirty seconds, and the sequence of the feeds was completely random and not related the the numeric identifiers.

"What do you think they're talking about?" asked Columbine.

"Huh?" I said, pulling myself away from the videos. I followed her gaze over to Max and Anthony. "Oh, well I let slip that your father was out there when Anthony was burying those bodies, so I imagine the 'Saint' has some explaining to do."

The two men suddenly broke into laughter and Max patted Anthony's shoulder affectionately before they started back to us.

"Oh yeah, you can tell how much trouble he's in," Columbine added sarcastically.

I was about to say something snappy back, but my attention was drawn away by a video appearing on one of the screens. It showed a man sitting on the edge of a bed in a small, empty room. The image was washed in blue, and the number on the bottom of the screen read: 00033.

"How're you feeling, still dizzy?" Max asked as he slid in next to me against the desk.

"Those numbers on the screen..." I asked, "do they correspond to the numbers of storage units here?"

Max looked over the monitors and nodded.

"Then what's in that one, number 00033?" I asked and pointed out the screen where I'd seen the blue room, but it had already changed over to a different feed.

Max and Anthony exchanged a couple of looks that could only be described as significant.

"Anthony, would you mind giving our friend a ride home, since he's obviously in no condition to drive himself?"

Anthony nodded at his boss's request, then hooked a large meaty arm around me and dragged me along as the four of us exited the lobby.

There were two cars parked outside - the Porsche and Max's limo. Max took Columbine's arm and led her to his car, where the driver was waiting with the door already open. She looked hesitantly from Max to me, but even though Max was just grinning pleasantly, there was something in his eyes that told her this wasn't up for debate. So she got in.

Meanwhile, Anthony tossed me into the Porsche's passenger seat like a sack of laundry, then circled around to get in on the driver's side.

"You're not in any particular hurry to get home, are you?" he asked while firing up the engine.

I shook my head weakly, the motion causing tracers to blur across my vision, and I felt a distinctly unsettling sense of déjà vu.

I slumped back into the blood red vinyl couch and let my head fall over to one side, then felt a profound sense of relief as the darkness closed in on me.

SNAP!

I jerked my head up and opened my eyes to find Anthony's hand hovering inches from my face, his thick meaty fingertips snapping together angrily.

"Keep your eyes on the prize, D," he admonished and pointed his middle and index fingers at his own eyes, then rotated his hand so that they pointed at the blonde straddling my lap.

"And watch that you don't spill your drink, man. You've been milking that same fucking glass for the last hour. Just cowboy up and pound the sumbitch."

I looked down and saw that I was in fact holding a glass in danger of tipping out of my hand and spilling both scotch and mostly-melted-rocks all over the vinyl couch.

I snapped my head back and downed the last watered-down dregs from it.

"Oh good, your hands are free," said the blonde, who was wearing a white dress like Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch. She climbed off of me and turned around, then unfastened the halter of her dress, allowing the top half of it to fall loosely down to her waist. As she