45
Activating his flash, Tyler followed Gage into the cellar.
The concrete staircase, though cracked and chipped, was intact. Ragged stumps were all that was left of the banister. The wall bristled with bundled spikes of wood splinters, sharp as porcupine quills-bits of the railing driven into the hairline fissures between the cinder blocks by the sheer force of the blast.
Below lay hell in miniature.
Flashlight beams played over a waste of rubble, the funneled light fanning through a sooty mist. Spot fires glimmered in dark corners. At the rear of the cellar, water sheeted down from a broken plumbing pipe.
Cain and Lilith combed the wreckage, shadow figures amid the smoke.
Ghosts, Tyler thought with an irrational chill. Demons.
“Hey, boss,” he called, feeling a sudden need for noise in this silenced place. “Next time you kill somebody, could you make a more serious effort”
Cain glanced up at him. His eyes glinted through slits in the ski mask. “They did go out with a bang, didn’t they”
Tyler nodded. “Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am.”
Eyes burning, he reached the bottom of the stairs. Lilith’s extinguisher hissed, the hose a lashing snake, as she smothered a smoldering pile of debris.
With his flash Tyler found the blast crater in the center of the room. At the deepest point, a great slab of the concrete foundation had been blown free, exposing raw bedrock like an open wound.
So much for percussion. As for fragmentation …
He read that story in the shrapnel glittering around him, the thousand shards of cutlery strewn on the floor and studding the wreckage.
The destruction was total. Those two charming ladies must have been killed a hundred times over.
So where were they
Panning the cellar with his flash, he saw no splash of maroon, no body parts, not even a forlorn shoe or a scrap of the cop’s uniform.
He beamed his flashlight at the crater again. Maybe the two of them had been standing right over the bomb when it blew. Maybe they’d been atomized-nothing left but dust.
Was that possible He didn’t think so.
The beam wavered, searching the floor, and found a second hole, this one at the lip of the blast crater.
But this hole hadn’t been made by an explosion.
It was round, perfectly round.
“Cain.”
The way Tyler said it, low and tense, made the older man turn instantly in his direction.
Cain’s gaze followed the beam of Tyler’s flash. He saw the hole, made a noise. A slow shuddering exhalation like a death rattle.
“Christ …”
Then he was crossing the room, circling the crater, peering into the smaller hole. Tyler joined him.
It was a well. A dry well, the drain uncovered, a sinkhole dropping into subterranean darkness.
“They got away.” Cain stripped off his mask, heedless of smoke and dust. Fury purpled his face. “Robinson and the kid-they got away.”
46
Flat on her belly, working by feel in the absolute dark, Trish wriggled along a narrow tubular crawlway.
Ally was somewhere ahead, but the glow of her flashlight had vanished when the girl disappeared around a bend. Hampered by the handcuffs, Trish was finding it difficult to keep up.
By slow degrees she advanced, head hunched tortoiselike between her shoulders to avoid limestone overhangs. The walls and ceiling were coffin-close. Despite what she’d told Ally, she felt stirrings of claustrophobia.
A shiver racked her. The caverns were chilled by the perpetual absence of sunlight and damp with percolating ground water, dripping like a thousand leaky faucets, coating walls and floors with filth.
She crawled onward, indifferent to the complaints of her palms and elbows, buffed raw by abrasive rock.
Never had she endured such sheer physical discomfort for so long. The most grueling drill at the academy, the most pitiless hike, the worst camping trip of her life had been exercises in shameless self-indulgence compared with tonight’s ordeal.
She rounded another turn in the passageway, and the glare of the flash swam into view again.
“It’s opening up.” Ally’s voice, high and shaky, echoed down the tube. “I see light.”
The other well. Had to be.
And if starlight was visible, the well head must be uncovered.
Trish crawled faster.
Ahead, Ally scrambled into a grotto, then stood, beaming the flash upward. “We found it!”
“Thank God,” Trish gasped.
With a last effort she emerged from the crawlway and staggered erect, coughing on stone dust. Her sore ankle throbbed, and her shirt and pants, encrusted with muck, clung skin-tight to her body.
“Guess we won’t need this anymore.” Ally gave back the compass. “It was a life saver, though.”
Trish pocketed it. “You can thank your folks for packing supplies on their boat.”
“My mom never goes out on the lake. It’s my dad I’ve got to thank.”
Her dad-the man who’d signed a death warrant on his wife and daughter.
Soon Ally would learn exactly how much she had to thank her father for. Trish felt a cold queasiness at the thought.
She turned away, studying the gallery in the flashlight’s ambient glow. The walls were hung with limestone curtains, the floor scattered with elfin bones. Over the years birds and small animals must have fallen down the well and died, their skeletal remains later washed by rainwater through holes in the drainage cover into the cave.
A miniature skull caught her attention. Rabbit Could be.
Maybe a hunted rabbit-like her.
She raised her head, peering upward at a long and treacherous sinkhole. Set in the far end of the vertical shaft, at what must be the bottom of the well, was an iron grate, a twin of the one in the cellar.
Reaching that grate posed a considerably greater challenge than climbing down the well in the cellar. There she had used the fieldstones studding the shaft as handholds and footholds. Here she would have to chimney her way up, advancing in fits and starts like an inchworm as she groped for any available crevice.
The task would be difficult under any circumstances-impossible when handcuffed.
“Think we can make it” Ally whispered anxiously, following Trish’s gaze.
Trish nodded. She knew what had to be done. “Set down the flash.”
Ally propped it in a corner, the beam casting a faint flush of color, soft as candlelight, over the cryptlike chamber.
“Okay.” Trish took a nervous breath and unholstered the Glock. “Now … now help me get these cuffs off.”
Ally was mystified. “I haven’t got a key.”
“Yes, you do.” Her face was expressionless as she handed over the gun. “This is the key.”
Ally stared at the pistol, sleek and black and lethal, and she understood. A blink of her eyes, a sudden trembling of her shoulders.
“No …” More moan than word.
“I need my hands free in order to get out.” Extending her arms, Trish braced both palms against a rock outcrop in the cave wall. “Put the muzzle close to the chain.”
“If I miss …”
“You won’t.”
“Oh, God. Oh, my God.”
Hesitantly Ally aimed the Glock at the handcuff chain, pointing the muzzle away from Trish.