“I’m just saying it’s possible. Not probable. Not even likely.”
Boldt yanked out his cell phone and then shouted at Iberson.
“I’ve got to get topside. I’ve got to make a phone call.”
Iberson flagged down the next bus that approached. Boldt and Babcock hit the surface streets less than two minutes later.
58 The Offering
The low tunnel bent around a turn, a good deal of the wooden posts and beams-old railroad ties in all probability-badly rotted. Matthews struggled to fight off the fear that wanted to own her.
Walker stopped her, instructing her to stand out of his way.
They hadn’t traveled terribly far, the going slow. She watched as his fading flashlight caught the edge of a large hole in the earthen wall. Walker stepped up to it and peered inside, and she came away with the sense that it was familiar to him.
She couldn’t see into that hole, but she prayed silently that he wasn’t going to make her go through it. It looked like one of those places a person never came out of. It failed to give her any sense of hope that it might lead to an escape route.
Walker turned and faced her, shining the light first onto her, then directing it onto himself, enabling her to see him. In a childish tone that sent shivers through her, he said, “It’s important to me you know how much I care.”
“Ferrell-”
He shushed her and said, “To understand the extent to which I’m prepared to go to help you. You found the room. It’s why …” His voice tapered off.
She worried he couldn’t hold a thought, that the synapses might be misfiring in his brain, either as a result of stress or some organic malfunction that she’d failed to identify in the course of her contact with him. That face-to- face contact had, in fact, been precious little. “Why what?” she asked.
“Well … it’s the purpose of all this,” he explained.
“So if we’ve already accomplished that purpose, Ferrell …
maybe we should head up topside together.”
“It’s way beyond that now, isn’t it?” He tried to smile, but his unwilling face would only pinch further, into a snarl. “Come look. It’s for you.”
“No, thank you.”
“Come. Look.” His hand went to the butt of the knife, and Matthews felt herself moving, as if on the ends of marionette strings.
“I’d like to go back up to the street now,” she said, pressing for his cooperation in a period where he acted at least somewhat conciliatory toward her.
He positioned her in front of that dark hole in the wall. It looked as if a course of water had ripped loose this rent some years before. The sickening smile he managed should have forewarned her. He turned slowly, training that yellow light with him.
Sitting on a natural throne carved out of the mud like some kind of shrine was a decapitated corpse of a man in a brown uniform. Matthews cried out loudly and jumped back, as the flashlight caught up to the head of Nathan Prair that sat in his own lap, his big hands coddling it.
“For you,” Walker said. “He was bothering you, right? I saw you two outside the Shelter that night we were supposed to meet.
I saw you push him. Him grab you …” His voice trailed off as he realized she was upset with this, not pleased as he’d intended.
“You were … upset … with him.”
Walker had been watching her outside the Shelter on the night they’d agreed to meet-the night Nathan Prair had arrived unexpectedly, a result, no doubt, of a phone call or message from Walker himself. She realized he must have followed her back to LaMoia’s-probably knowing about the loft already-must have gone through that window to leave the key as she’d taken Blue for a walk. He’d been playing her all along like a fisherman with a prize catch.
Her vision zoomed in on the faint edge of that light in a stac-cato way that brought everything closer to her in a series of jerky movements: Prair’s service pistol was still snapped into the holster on his work belt, now, just to the right of his ear. Next to it, an unmarked black can of pepper spray. Next to that, a Maglite.
Walker, who had shown no interest in Gaynes’s weapon, had clearly ignored Prair’s as well. It took every ounce of strength and composure she could summon, but she stepped forward, toward the shrine. “I was upset with him,” she said. “You’re right about that.” She made a point of making contact with Walker and allowing a smile to grace her lips. “You did this for me?”
Walker nodded, but his eyes ticked back and forth distrust-fully as he sought out hers, and she wondered which Walker had come out to play, the one with the boyish crush on her or the knife-wielding woman killer?
She edged yet another step closer to both Walker and that hole, wondering if she could bring herself to dive in there with that severed head, reach the gun, and still have enough time to present it as a threat. The air tasted metallic and smelled putrid.
“I wanted to help,” Walker said.
“It’s not what I expected.”
“I love surprises,” he said.
Gooseflesh chased up her arms and down her spine.
She said, “Do you? Oh, good.” With that, she recoiled, wound up, and then leaned forward, driving her weight into the shove that lifted Walker off his feet and sent him flying. She dived to her left, into that hole, slipped and scrambled up the muddy slope, facedown next to Prair’s severed head as she fumbled with the holster’s snap, grabbed hold of the weapon, racked the slide to chamber a round, thumbed the safety off, and rolled. Walker was on his feet, at the mouth of the hole, as she squeezed the trigger. Click. The trigger then stuck. She frantically tried to clear the jammed round as Walker took hold of her ankles and pulled, dropping her flat onto her back. Prair’s head rolled off of his lap and up onto her chest, and she threw it aside, screaming. She felt the weight of the gun then, and she knew: Its magazine was missing. Walker had emptied the gun.
Walker had baited her, yet again.
He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, shaming her. “Someone’s been a bad girl,” he said.
She lunged for the can of pepper spray in Prair’s belt.
“Empty,” Walker called out.
She threw the weapon at him, but he deflected it.
“I’ve never liked guns,” he said. “I feel much safer with this.”
He held the curved gray blade between them.
Bloodstained and mud-covered, Matthews took a moment to regain her breath. She had disassociated from him, a conscious effort on her part that now would not come without consequences. He had tested her, and she had been suckered into it.
And she had failed.
“It changes everything,” he said sadly. “You know that, don’t you?”
There were no words for her, only a pounding heart, a dry tongue, and the chills that came with the knowledge of what she had done. She chastised herself for that decision-she’d allowed the emotion of fear to overcome any hope of rationally negotiating her way out. Had she been outside of this, observing it, she could have identified the victim’s bad decision making at every turn. But from inside her own cloistered fear, she felt only punishment for her will to survive and the internal strength to act upon it.
“On your feet, Anna,” he said, not hearing his own slip.
Metaphorically, she saw light at the end of the tunnel. Then she realized it was for real: There was light up ahead.
“We’re going to go join your friends,” he said.
Hebringer and Randolf, the only two “friends” she could think of.
“We’re going to get to know each other.”
She needed some way to attempt to rekindle rapport, even if she played into his fantasy that she was none other than his sister. She searched wildly for a nickname a sister might have used for a younger brother at some
