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want to do?”
    She thought for a long moment. “Let’s follow him,” she said finally. “See where he goes.”
    “What for?”
    “I don’t know,” she snapped. “Let’s just do it.”
    “Hey, lady…I’m just a cabdriver. I’m not good for any of that…”—he used his fingers to make quotation marks in the air—‘follow that car’ stuff. I’m just tryin’ to make a living here.”
    Dougherty leaned forward. Put her face in his. “I’m freaked out here, Stevie. I don’t know what to do.” She made eye contact. “Please. Help me out.”
    A van’s headlights came on. They sat in silence, watching as the van pulled up to the intersection, turned right and disappeared down Mercer Street.
    “Come on, Stevie,” she pleaded. She pointed at the meter. It read nine dollars and seventy-six cents. “I’ve got ninety-three bucks to go.”
    “Okay, lady,” he said finally. “If you put it that way.” He put the cab into gear and roared down the street, headlights off, poking the hood out into Mercer Street just in time to watch the van’s taillights turn left and disappear from view.
    “But…you know…like no car chases or nothing like that.”
    “Just drive.”

6
    A t first, he’d attributed the sound to echoes. Told himself the noise was nothing more than the ricochet sound of his own feet bouncing around and around the tunnel walls. Or maybe something mundane like the rush of traffic overhead. Or something organic and benign like the settling of the earth. He’d successfully held that thought until the first time he’d had occasion to come to a full stop. At that point…despite his fervent wish that it not be so, he’d been forced to acknowledge that what he’d been hearing was the skitter of claws along the stone floor.
    He winced, took a deep breath and reached above his head, grabbing the metal cage surrounding one of the thousands of lightbulbs festooning the ceiling of the tunnels. He tilted the light in the direction of the noise. The sight of a trio of harbor rats, their narrow eyes gleaming red in the beam, sent a steel shiver rolling down his spine. “Shoo,” he rasped. And then again…louder. Nothing. Not only didn’t they scurry off, but the largest of the three stood on his hind legs, bared his long yellow teeth and grunted out what Corso felt certain was a challenge.
    He left the overhead light swinging to and fro as he hurried down the tunnel. Moving north toward Yesler Street, he focused on the corridor ahead and whistled out of tune as he walked along, filling his mind with thoughts of how nearly every city denotes the place where the community was first settled. About how they always seemed to give it a quaint-sounding name. Old Town, the Gaslight District, the French Quarter, the Mission District, or, in Seattle’s case, Pioneer Square. Soon as they got it properly named, seemed like they immediately turned it over to the tourist trade, before moving on to newer and greener pastures.
    Corso was still pondering this historical anomaly when he came to a three-way junction in the tunnel. On his left lay the tattered remains of a turn-of-the-century dry goods store. The broken sign read: Jensen’s Pr —…its counter was empty and expectant, its shelves toppled down, rolling a collection of cans and bottles haphazardly out onto the floor. That the cobwebs were plastic and the cans crude reproductions mattered not a whit to the foreign throngs who flowed through these dank tunnels six days a week, year-round, hearing the story of how, after the city burned down in 1898, they’d rebuilt Pioneer Square from the second floor up, thus providing some measure of relief from the omnipresent dampness and ensuring that their newfangled flush toilets would operate as designed, a fateful decision which had simultaneously improved sanitation and interned a ghost city beneath eight square blocks of south Seattle.
    Ahead a steep set of stone stairs led up to the street. On the left,