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The Key--Chapter 3

approximately 1550 words

Chapter Three
Tuesday, late morning

When Justin stepped out of his beat-up Toyota and into the parking lot of his apartment complex, the noontime sum slammed him like a blast furnace. Instant sweat trickled down his cheek, and the lot’s black asphalt paving seared his Reeboks and toasted the soles of his feet. At least there were only two other cars in the tiny eight-car lot. He snatched up his backpack and headed to his first-floor apartment.

Inside, the window air conditioner met him with a whine, but at least it kept the place cool. He blinked and paused while his eyes adjusted to the dim interior. The graphics workstation he’d built last year hummed away beneath his desk, and two mammoth HD screens hung on the wall behind it. The only light came from the LEDs he’d stuck on the graphics card, their glow oozing through the transparent sidewall of the case from orange to purple. Books on web design, Apache programming, and Photoshop techniques jammed the makeshift bookcase he’d constructed from concrete blocks and wood planks. Not much, but it was home.

Justin dropped his knapsack on the sofa and pulled out his head cam. He had a ton of new pix to post on his Adventure Wall above the sofa. His boss at Green Country Web Services, Mr. Chapman, had a vanity wall in his office that he’d filled with his fancy degrees and photos of him sucking up to big shot tycoons. Justin had an Adventure Wall instead. That’s how he thought of the place above the sofa where he’d thumbtacked snapshots of his excursions in caves and, more recently, in Tulsa’s tunnels. Only one of his photos featured people, though—a still of Justin and his buddy Joe sporting Looney-Toon grins when they were three miles into the Oak Creek Storm Sewer underneath midtown. That had been a long time ago. Pre-Covid. Pre-Toby, too, now that he thought of it.

Deflated by the memory of Joe and Toby the Terrible, he slipped out of his filthy Reeboks, stripped off his dusty, sweat-soaked clothes, scattering them on the floor, and he headed for the shower. He hated the mess, but for now he wanted to wash off the tunnel dust. At least there hadn’t been any rat droppings or snakes. Nothing for them to eat in that barren, dark tunnel. Anyway, he’d feel better after a shower. He’d smell better, too, not that anyone would notice. Or care. Plenty of time to pick up after he was clean.

Twenty minutes later he returned to the living room, a towel wrapped about his waist, and grimaced at the pile of dirty clothes. He grabbed a clothes basket from the bedroom and tossed them inside. He’d clean the filth off his shoes later. Right now, he had research to do.

He dug into his backpack, pulled out his notebook, and sat at his desk. While his workstation woke up, he opened the notebook to the page with his pace counts.

On the way back, he’d counted 1792 paces from the side tunnel with the locked door to the kink in the main tunnel. Another 1478 paces took him back to the manhole where he’d entered. So, working backwards and converting paces to feet, manhole to kink was about 3700 feet, and the locked door was about 4480 feet further along. He’d eyeballed the kink at maybe forty-five degrees.

That should give him enough information to approximate the surface location above the locked door.

He opened Mapitude on his workstation and used it to load the Google map for the area south of the airport. He'd already saved the GPS coordinates of the manhole, so it was easy to mark the spot 3700 feet due east where the tunnel changed directions. From there, the software gave him a drive circle with a radius oi 4480 feet. The locked door was underground, somewhere on the southeast rim of that circle, roughly forty-five degrees southeast from the center.

He chewed his lower lip and peered at the display. Most likely, the Spartan manufacturing plant had been someplace near there back in 1942, but today the circle ran through three blocks of a residential neighborhood. The angle in the tunnel had looked to be about 45 degrees, but it could have been as much as ten degrees more or less. Still, this was as good as he could get. He scribbled down the addresses of a dozen possible homes that might be over the locked door at the end of the tunnel.

Next, he used the workstation’s browser to call up the Tulsa County Assessor’s website. Geeze, what a sorry mess. They could sure use a professional web designer. This one looked like a ten-year-old had built it using notepad. A color-blind ten-year-old.

Despite the sorry graphics, the database worked. He started entering the dozen or so addresses he’d noted. Sure enough, the homes had all been built in the fifties. None of them had basements, at least according to the Assessor. That wasn’t a surprise, though. Homes in Tulsa rarely had basements due to the unstable soils. The Assessor’s photographs mostly showed small homes, roughly a thousand square feet, some with well-kept lawns, some with overgrown grass and with rusty appliances on the front porch. Based on Assessor records, the ownership of the homes appeared to be evenly split between rentals and owner-occupied. Most were privately owned, but he recognized one corporate owner, Marchon Properties, since he wrote a rental check to them every month for his apartment. There were a few similar limited liability corporations, but mostly less useful individual owner names on the form.

He chewed his lower lip and then pulled out his phone. Maybe the picture of the funky lock would reveal something. He downloaded it to his workstation and started a reverse image search.

Whether the image search turned up anything or not, he had a pretty good start on finding the location of the locked door. If any of the homes were available as rentals, he could use that as a pretext to scope out the neighborhood or even get inside of one of them. For sure, the locked door in the tunnel and the mystery woman went someplace in that neighborhood. Maybe she even lived in one of the houses.

Time for all of that tomorrow. Today, he needed to put in his hours at work. May as well see what jobs Chapman had for him.

His email contained over twenty unread messages. Damned spam filter sucked. Eighteen were clear-cut spam, most spoofing legitimate businesses like the ones supposedly from PayPal or CVS. In any case, that left him with three legitimate messages. One was an invitation to dinner on Saturday from Molly and Melinda. He jiggled the keys and contemplated a reply. They meant well, but last time they’d tried to fix him up with one of Melinda’s social worker friends, a real dweeb. He could decide later how to reply.

Another was from his mother, up in Iowa City. Mail from her was never good. He scanned it just to be sure there was no real emergency. She was back with Dad. Like that would work out. She was a physics professor at the University, and he was a playwright at the Writers Workshop, a match of opposites if ever there was one. He kind of felt sorry for both of them. On the positive side, she didn’t complain about him dropping out of pre-med to be a loser web designer.

The third was from his boss at Green Country Web Services. Damn. The key card system at the Admiral Hotel was on the fritz, and Chapman wanted Justin to check it out. In the first place, he couldn’t do that from home like ninety-nine percent of his job. In the second place, fixing a clunky database wasn’t web design, even if it did have a web interface.

He frowned and recalled the server room in the cramped sub-basement of the old hotel. The Admiral was an ancient eight-story hotel built back in the oil boom years. A decade ago, developers had refurbished what had become a run-down flophouse into an upscale, boutique hotel at the south edge of downtown. But in a hundred-year-old building, anything could be a problem for modern electronics.

This kind of trouble-shooting call may not be in his job description, but Chapman didn’t really give him a choice. A problem with the keycard system could be anything from the wiring to the interface with the reservation system, to the wireless network. It could take minutes but more likely hours to figure out. He bit his lower lip, hit reply, and typed, “I’m on it.” He pressed return, stood, and headed to the bedroom to get dressed.

The Admiral had an awesome French restaurant, albeit with prices to match. Who was the night desk clerk? He squinted his eyes. Duane. That was it. Kind of a leather bunny, as he recalled. For sure not Justin’s type, but a good guy nonetheless. Maybe Duane could finagle a free meal for him.

A good meal could turn an otherwise tedious assignment into a pleasure. Grinning in anticipation, Justin slipped on boxer shorts, black jeans and a black Oxford-cloth shirt. Then he remembered his filthy Reeboks were still in the living room. He shrugged, and put on flip-flops instead. It wasn’t like he needed to impress anyone.

He kind of looked forward to returning to the cave-like network room. He’d wanted to explore it when they'd installed it, but there hadn't been time, what with Chapman hovering over him micro-managing. Today, on the other hand, was an opportunity to explore the shadowed depths. Who knew what he might find?

When he turned to shut down his workstation, the window with the reverse image search finally showed a couple of hits. The lock was a “Polhem,” a nineteenth century Swedish design. One photo even included the key that opened the lock. It looked huge. Maybe the hand in the photo holding the key belonged to a child, or maybe the key was designed for the Hulk. Besides its size, the design was only vaguely key-like. Instead of teeth, bulky nobs jutted from each side of the haft, and the haft ended in a another, larger nob. What was a nineteenth century lock doing in a tunnel built in the forties?

Justin grinned. Incongruencies like this just made the mysteries of the tunnel more alluring.

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