P Deutermann - Darkside

“Hate this shit,” Bagger muttered. “Don’t like being underground.”

“Can you imagine working down here all the time?” Jim said, unlocking the door. They stepped through, and Jim closed the door behind them.

“How far to the ee-gress?” Bagger said in reply, and Jim detected some real anxiety in the man’s voice. He took him down the King George Street leg and up the sloping tunnel to the grate on the St. John’s campus. Two more doors and they were sticking their heads up into the cool night air. Bagger shrugged out of his backpack and wiped perspiration off his forehead.

“Better,” he said. “Much effing better.”

Jim grinned. “What’s not to like?” he said. “Nice wall art, fireworks, the sweet sound of sewage gurgling beneath your feet.”

Bagger shook his head and then looked around as if checking for rockets. “I could use a drink,” he said.

“Let’s hit that Irish pub on Maryland Avenue,” Jim suggested. “It’s only two blocks away.”

They drew some stares from the college kids when they came in wearing jumpsuits and carrying backpacks, but not for long. The singer, an anorexic-looking blonde whose lank hair mercifully hid most of her face, was wailing something about Celtic dreams as she plunked on a much-abused guitar. They squeezed into a tiny booth at the other end of the narrow barroom.

“So what makes it an Irish pub?” Bagger said.

“Fresh Guinness on draft, for one thing,” Jim replied. “Never been here?”

“Not exactly a homie place,” Bagger said, looking at the small sea of white faces. “And what’s a Guinness?”

The bartender, a loudly cheerful Irishman in his forties, took Jim’s shouted order for two stouts from across the room. The singer shot them both a hurt look.

Jim nudged Bagger’s knee under the table and pointed with a lift of his face over the agent’s shoulder. Bagger casually turned around. In another booth halfway down the long, narrow barroom were three girls dressed all in black clothes. They looked to be of college age, although it was hard to tell because of their bizarre makeup. Bagger turned back around.

“Crabtown Goth posse?” he asked.

“Local cops said there were three of them, probably Johnnies. This place is a Johnnie hangout.”

The bartender brought two pints of glistening black Guinness stout. Jim dropped a twenty and the bartender left to make change. Bagger tried some and nodded approvingly. The singer gave up her dirge, to the visible relief of most of the patrons. The bartender immediately turned up some Irish background music, and the noise level in the bar went up pleasantly. He brought Jim his change and told them that the kitchen was closing in thirty minutes, if they wanted any food.

Bagger, who had been examining the table menu, ordered a Reuben. Jim said no, but then he asked the bartender about the back-in-black coven three booths over.

The bartender, who recognized Jim as a sometimes regular, laughed softly. “Call themselves Goths. They’re harmless. They come in here on slow nights, usually order coffee, and then sit there for hours, trash-mouthing all the straights. Freak show.”

“They ever pick up guys?” Bagger asked casually.

“I-don’t-think-so,” the bartender intoned, rolling his eyes. “I wish a crowd of real Goths would come in one night. You know, those guys with the long hair and horns on their helmets? Bet they’d know what to do with that lot over there.” Then he went back to the bar.

“Heard that,” Jim muttered. One of the girls might actually have been attractive, but the other two were decidedly dumpy. But with their white-to-pink painted faces, black-rimmed purple lipstick, double lashings of mascara, top and bottom, they looked like vampire mimes taking a break. One of the plain ones had seen him looking and was now whispering to the other two. Jim concentrated on his Guinness to avoid eye contact.

“So, what do you think of the Guinness?” he asked Bagger.

“Ain’t half-bad,” Bagger said, taking a substantial hit.

“You guys getting anywhere with that suicide?” Jim asked as casually as he could.

Bagger drained the remainder of his Guinness and wiped his lips. “Branner had to go up to DC for a meeting on it. NCIS brass and reps from the SecNav’s office. The ME’s report raised some questions. Bruising indicates the kid’s arms were pinned, which is weird. Navy staff told Branner to go through the motions of a homicide investigation, but more like to rule out murder. Then they’ll decide between DBM and a suicide ruling.”

The attractive Goth girl had turned sideways in the booth so that she could fiddle with the laces on her witch boot. She wore a studded dog collar around her neck. “I guess a homicide would be tough to prove,” Jim said, watching her out of the corner of his eye. “I mean, there’re three thousand upperclassmen who have a duty to make life miserable for the plebes for the entire year. Where the hell would you start?”

The girl raised her knee to get a better grip on the laces and her dress parted, revealing a breathtaking length of thigh dressed up in shiny fishnet stockings. Jim tried not to stare, because it had been a very deliberate move. “We start with the girl whose underwear he had on,” Bagger said. “Man, what are you looking at?”

The girl put her leg down, slid a seductive smile on and off through all the heavy makeup, and turned back around. “Goth girl putting on a little leg show. Part of the act, I suspect. ‘You straight guys all think we’re beyond weird, but we can still make you look.’”

“They can all make me look,” Bagger said, lifting his empty glass so the bartender could see it.

Jim wondered if he should caution Bagger on the alcohol content of the Guinness. “That girl today, the midshipman, I mean, she was pretty damned good-looking,” he said. “Maybe the Dell kid was in lust.”

Bagger nodded. “She was okay, nice rack an’ all, but I was diggin’ that slick little lady lawyer, sexy legs right up to there, phone-sex voice, definitely old enough to know how. You probably noticed-Branner hated her, naturally, but I was being nice as I could be.”

“Bet you pulled the wool right over her eyes, huh?”

“Oh yeah.” Bagger laughed. “Must have taken her, oh, two, maybe three seconds to see right through my insincere ass. But still. That interview today with Markham? Lady mouthpiece walked all over Sugar Britches.”

Jim grinned. “Sugar Britches-that would be Branner?”

“On account of her famously sweet disposition, yeah. Comes with that red hair, I suppose.”

Jim still had warm memories of the sight of Midshipman Markham in her spray-on competition swimsuit. The possibly pretty Goth bore a faint resemblance to her, but then he realized, no, it was just those gorgeous wheels. The bartender brought Bagger’s Guinness and the sandwich. As he walked back by the Goth booth, one of the girls stopped him and whispered a question. The bartender looked back over his shoulder for a moment at Jim and Bagger, then shook his head and walked on. Jim continued to watch them out of the corner of his eye, still not wanting to make eye contact with them. They’d be just the type to set up something embarrassing in a public bar. As the Academy security officer, he didn’t need that hassle.

He wanted to ask some more questions about the Dell investigation, but he decided to let it go for the moment. He didn’t want Bagger to suspect he was being pumped for information.

“Man this is a damned good Reuben; you ought to get you one.”

“Still trying to preserve my girlish figure,” Jim said, finishing his beer. “I’m thinking of getting some motion detectors. Chief knows this guy here in town, does security equipment? Put a series down there in the tunnels, use a timer to turn them on after hours, see how much traffic we’ve got down there.”