Ally shrugged. “One, yeah.”
“Where”
“Northwest.”
“Outside the property”
“In the woods, uh-huh. Who cares”
“We do.” Trish holstered the Glock to free her hands. “Because we’re getting out that way.”
Ally raised her head. “Getting out”
“Help me get the cover off.”
They tugged at the large square panel, Ally squatting by Trish’s side, the flashlight resting on the floor between them, washing their faces with an eerie upward shine.
“What do you mean, getting out” Ally whispered. Something more than tears glittered in her eyes, something like hope.
Trish spoke through clenched teeth as she struggled with the board. “There was this abandoned farm in the town where I grew up. I used to go there with … with a friend.”
“So”
“Behind the house was a dry well like this one. We climbed down in it once. Looked through the drainage grate.” Exertion squeezed drops of sweat from her forehead. “There was a cave.”
“Ground water.” Ally understood. She scrabbled at the panel with the frenzied desperation of someone buried alive struggling to dig free. “It hollows out passageways. And since there’s another cave near this one-“
“Passages might … connect.” The board groaned, sliding free.
“You’re right, there could be a whole cave system.” Ally coughed as unsettled dust flew up from the dislodged panel. “The bedrock here is limestone, great for caves. Limestone’s mostly calcium carbonate, which dissolves real easily in carbonic acid-that’s just water mixed with carbon dioxide gas. The karst process, they call it.”
Gasping, Trish hauled the board away from the frame. “Where’d you learn all that”
“I’m into anthropology. Digging. You know.”
Trish beamed the flash into the well. Twelve feet deep. Round walls, studded with rocks of all shapes and sizes set in troweled cement. A grate at the bottom, big enough to imply a negotiable sinkhole.
Maybe. Or maybe there was no sinkhole, no network of tunnels, no last chance.
Think positive, Trish.
Overhead, the sudden pounding of footsteps. The killers, approaching the cellar once more.
She waved Ally forward. “Down you go.”
The girl descended, finding ready handholds and footholds among the larger stones. Trish tucked the flashlight under her belt, the beam angled downward, and followed.
The handcuffs made it hard for her to maneuver. She lowered herself by slow degrees.
“Take off the drain cover,” she gasped to Ally, already at the bottom.
“It’s stuck.”
Trish glanced down at the grate, splashed by the flashlight’s beam. Iron bars crosshatched in a square frame. Rusty and old, like a relic from a shipwreck.
“It’s just heavy,” she told the girl. “Get some leverage.”
No further noise upstairs. The deadly silence of a snake poised to strike.
Cain reached up and wrenched the smoke detector out of the kitchen wall, snapping the wires. It dropped on the floor, a useless thing.
Tyler, Gage, and Lilith waited by the side exit. Cain ushered them out. Lilith was last to leave.
“Looks like you get to spread that little girl’s legs after all,” she said playfully.
“Do I”
“Yeah.” Giggle. “Spread ‘em all over the ceiling.”
She kissed him, a hot, probing kiss that shot a thrill of excitement through his groin, then hurried outside to take cover by the garage.
Alone in the hallway, Cain turned toward the cellar door.
The M-80’s fuse was too long. He took a moment to trim it to a blunt, lethal stub.
Robinson and the girl would barely have time to scream.
Trish dropped to the bottom of the well. Crouching beside Ally, she hooked her fingers around the drain cover’s iron grillwork.
Muscles popped in her back as she strained to lift the heavy grate. Irrelevantly she thought of blasting her lats on the rowing machine.
Ally pulled with her upper body, bending backward at the hips. Her face reddened, freckles standing out.
Together they dragged the grate clear of the opening. It clattered heavily on the well’s cement floor.
Through the aperture, some sort of cavern was visible. Chalky walls. Rough floor. White encrustations of stalagmites.
Overhead, in the dark-a squeal of hinges.
The cellar door was open.
Leaning through the doorway, Cain lit the fuse and pitched the bomb like a softball in a looping underhand throw.
He had a momentary impression of red spirals traced in the dark as the bomb flew over the banister into the center of the room.
Slam.
The door had closed.
An instant later-thump of impact, jingle of loose metal.
Keys, coins, something like that.
Whatever it was, it had landed near the well.
“Go!” Trish screamed.
Ally wriggled feet first into the hole.
Trish swung both legs over the side.
And the world exploded.
41
Cain flung himself outside, onto the paved path between the house and the garage, and a shock wave shuddered through the yard in time with a bellowing blast.
He looked back. The house’s exterior wall flexed, networks of veins crisscrossing the puckered stucco. Windows cracked in the dining area, the living room. The side door was wrenched off its hinges in a cloud of greasy black smoke.
“Cain!” From somewhere far away, Tyler’s yell rose above the roar. “God damn it, I knew you used too much!”
Wild slide through a limestone funnel, rough rock chafing her exposed skin, then another hard landing, a blade of pain knifing her ankle.
Trish hardly felt it.
Over the echoing thunderclap of the blast she heard something like hailstones pelting the well, ringing on the rocky walls and cement floor directly above her.
She dived clear of the sinkhole. Behind her, a sudden metallic clinking.
Some of the hailstones-whatever they really were-had ricocheted into the cave.
Sprawling on her stomach, she fumbled the flashlight free of her belt.
The beam found Ally huddled in a corner. Trish threw herself at the girl and covered her protectively as the
