forward-a sense of dread, like a soldier about to step on a land mine. He moved his foot cautiously and trained his light into the chips of broken glass where a tiny piece of gold sparkled back at him. A second later, he stood holding her earring. I’m right behind you, he caught himself thinking. Hang tough.
As he closed the distance toward that disturbed area of tunnel floor he picked up the enormous wash to his left, a hole cut out of the wall. Another tunnel? he wondered. An exit back up to the surface, or into another storm sewer?
He slipped his pistol out of its holster beneath the deerskin and quickly chambered a round. “I’m armed,” he called out, but only loud enough to carry a few yards. He contained the flashlight beneath the pistol, took three long strides, and extending both the weapon and the light, lit up the hole.
“Jesus Christ.” His stomach turned in shock at the sight of the headless deputy. It took him a moment to even locate the head lying on its side and identify it as Prair’s.
He caught himself thinking as both a cop and a psychologist.
This, too, surprised him. Escalation. Walker had sacrificed Prair for her-this he knew with all certainty. Killing the man would have been one thing; decapitation signaled a quantum shift, a different paradigm. He checked the cell phone reception yet another time-still nothing. He tried the phone’s “radio” function.
Dead as well.
Standing perfectly still as he was, he picked up the faint sound of voices. Like an insect in a dark room. He couldn’t clearly identify its direction. He took a step forward, then back.
He turned around, trying a different ear.
He left Prair behind him, back in that hole. Good riddance.
North! He had it now. Then it faded again and he couldn’t be sure if he’d had it at all. But yes. There. A woman’s voice, no question about it. Closer than he thought. He moved quickly toward that sound, staying to the edge of the narrow tunnel and out of the slop in its center, moving as quietly as possible.
It was all he could do to contain himself, to keep from shouting out her name.
Unzipping the Truth
The consumptive darkness played tricks on her equilibrium, making her dizzy. Walker directed her down to her hands and knees and they crawled under a pair of pipes that bisected the tunnel. As she stood, he pushed her forward and held her to the muddy floor. He shined the yellow light into her eyes.
“She fell,” he said. “That’s all it was: an accident.”
“An accident?” she asked. “You ran her over, Ferrell. Help me through that.”
Still straddling her, his eyes went distant and he shook his head violently. In doing so, he gave her the opening she needed, but she didn’t take it-couldn’t take it. She needed the answers. He spoke so fast, so softly that she could hardly keep up. “She pushed me … shouldn’t have done that … went off the fire escape … thought she was dead down there … had to mov e her … the car. That key … the back axle.”
“You had to move her,” she repeated, directing his focus for her own gain. “That makes sense.”
“I backed it up to get her. She was dead. And there she was … sitting up like that all of a sudden.” His voice trailed off, and she knew he was completely consumed in the memory.
“She’d say I pushed her. But it wasn’t like that. I told her to get away from me, but she wouldn’t. She smelled … of him …
of it.”
“Like the boat,” Matthews allowed.
Walker lowered his head and looked out the top of his eyes at her. He nodded.
“When I saw her sitting up like that … I knew what I had to do.”
“All this,” she said softly, “everything you’ve told me, it’s all understandable.” She left out any discussion of Nathan Prair.
“Let me help you-not like Mary-Ann had planned. Not like that at all.”
The flashlight dimmed. It had only minutes left. To attempt an escape in the dark was unthinkable. Instinctively, she shifted the grip of her right hand, exposing the glass and its razor-sharp edge.
She pushed up to one elbow. It had to be now! She wanted tears in his eyes, his vision blurred. She needed to work him like a lump of clay. “She loved you very much, Ferrell. No matter what happened between her and Neal it never came close to what you gave her. She wanted to help you because she loved you. Why else would she have kept trying the way she did?”
His face tightened.
“And you loved her too, didn’t you?”
Walker’s shoulders shook. “No one knows how much,” he said hoarsely.
The jaundice of the flashlight painted him in a milky light as he flexed his legs to stand. That was the distraction she’d waited for.
Her left hand stole the flashlight from his right, a look of astonishment overcoming him. With her right hand she pulled the curving piece of glass from collarbone to navel, like trying to open a stuck zipper.
Locked in disbelief as much as physical shock, Walker looked down at the wound as if it belonged to someone else. In doing so, he unintentionally protected his throat as her second effort failed. The glass cut his neck below his ear, but only superficially. Walker reared back, stumbled, fell to one arm, and then lifted himself to standing. He screamed like a wild animal.
Matthews struggled to her feet and ran, the light blinking on and off in her hand.
To her astonishment, she heard him clomping along, right behind her.
Echo
When Boldt heard the scream, it came so faintly that he might have mistaken it for something from the street far overhead had it not been for his musical ears. Had it not been for his heightened senses caused by being confined in a damp earthen grave.
“You hear that?” he asked Babcock.
“No … what?”
“Behind us,” Boldt said, turning and aiming his flashlight past her.
She turned to look back as well, as if they might see something more than earth and rotten timbers.
“We’re going in the wrong direction.”
“But the city … the Underground … it has to be this way.”
“We’re going the wrong way,” he said, pushing past her and starting off in the opposite direction.
Babcock stood her ground, allowing him to pass. “You’re making a mistake.”
Boldt called back to her, “It’s mine to make.”
With that, she hurried to catch up to him.
Running Below Graves
LaMoia had a cop’s eye, a cop’s nose, and a cop’s instincts, but he had the heart of a man, and when the faint voices he’d been following stopped abruptly-one now clearly a woman’s-he feared he’d lost her.
He abandoned his effort at stealth, charging up the tunnel at a reckless speed given his hunched posture. No witticism filled his head longing to escape his lips, no wisecrack; he was briefly all muscle, adrenaline, and determination.
Feelings for others often reveal themselves in strange ways.
It took a tunnel, the stench of death, and dying voices to illuminate his heart’s unwilling truth: Her life was
