“Every Marine a rifleman.”
Bandoni snorted. “Ooh rah. We’ll take it slow and deliberate, make sure we’ve cleared each unlocked room before we move on. Craze will probably want to play jack-in-the-box, so keep your head on a swivel.” He looked me in the eyes, then leaned back in. “You got it?”
I nodded while the music screeched about violent death.
“Craze might have company. You see anything with a dick, shoot it.” He frowned. “Present company excluded.”
Again, I nodded.
My mind was slipping into the zone, shutting down the parts of my brain that were trying to tell me that going into the basement after Craze was the dumbest fucking thing I’d ever done.
“Eyes in the back of your head,” Bandoni said and pivoted into the doorway, his gun aimed down the stairs. He hit the first step and kept going. I stayed close behind. At the bottom, he cleared the immediate area and turned right.
I tucked in my elbows, Glock at the ready, and followed.
A wide concrete hallway stretched before us, maybe thirty yards long, with closed doors on both sides. The space was dimly lit by overhead fluorescents, half of which were dead.
Other than the doors, the hall was empty. Featureless. Benign.
Beneath our feet, the floor thrummed with the music. My bones vibrated.
We reached the first door. No hinges were visible, which meant it opened inward. Bandoni crossed to the far side and nodded. I put my hand on the knob, tested it.
Locked.
We moved on, hugging the wall, continuously scanning the doors, waiting for one to pop open so that Craze could take aim while we stood like targets against the wall.
But Craze, Lupita had said. He prefers the knife.
We could hope.
My heart thumped with the music, and my mouth was so dry that swallowing felt like eating sand. But a calm had descended, a form of detachment I’d adopted in Iraq where the choice was to either suck up the fear or run wailing into the wilderness.
Craze had dragged us into war. But war was what I understood.
Bring it on, motherfucker.
We reached the next door. Again, Bandoni crossed to the far side, and I grasped the knob. When it turned, I pushed on the door with enough force to open it wide.
Inside was Riley Lynch.
One glance told us he was dead.
We cleared the room. Then we turned back to Riley.
Noah’s high school friend was naked, tied hand and foot to a high-backed wooden chair. His head was propped upright by a knife embedded in his throat, his expression the kind you saw only on the faces of those whose last minutes on earth had been a nightmare.
I ignored the fracture in my heart, and we exited the room.
The next door was locked. This was the room where Lupita said they sometimes kept the women. But if Erica and Ami were inside, we couldn’t hear them over the music.
We moved on.
The hallway ended at a concrete wall on which hung the remnants of a workplace safety poster.
WORK SAFE! 0 DAYS ACCIDENT-FREE!
The zero had been written in by hand.
We started down the other side.
Bandoni had slowed. Sweat darkened the back of his skull, and the hollows in his cheeks had turned into canyons. I got the sense the only thing holding him up was willpower.
Don’t die on me, partner.
The next door opened on to living quarters. Six bunk beds. A television. A tiny kitchenette with refrigerator and stove. There were clothes on the floor, an overflowing trashcan, and the remains of a meal on the table. A pegboard next to the door was meant for keys, but it was empty.
We slipped back into the hall.
The door of the next room was covered with Markey’s pornographic art. Women doing things to men that only certain kinds of men dreamed about.
I opened the door. Bandoni pivoted into the well-named fatal funnel of the doorway, and we cleared the space.
The dimly lit room held a bed, a crude toilet, and a chair.
And a woman, curled in a fetal position on the sheets. She had long, dark hair, dark eyes, and an expression that had once been fierce.
Aminta Valle.
Ami.
I closed the door. Bandoni frowned at me, but then he collapsed into the chair and fumbled in his breast pocket for the nitro.
“Five minutes,” he said.
I turned to Ami and said her name.
She gazed past me with dull, flattened eyes. Her face was mottled with bruises. A crust of old blood ran from her swollen left eye to her ear. She wore a filthy blue bathrobe, and her hair was tangled and dirty. Her fingernails still bore traces of long-ago pink polish. A leftover from better days, when those things would have mattered to her.
“I’m Detective Parnell,” I told her. “And that’s Detective Bandoni. We’re here to get you out.”
She didn’t move. Didn’t so much as blink.
“I saw the mark you left upstairs. The letter P. Protector. You were so smart to write it on the wall.”
No response.
My eyes went again to the chipped nail polish. Strange how something so innocent, so everyday, could feel like a knife to the heart.
I said, “I have something for you.”
I pulled out the photo I’d found of her and Noah and held it in front of her eyes. She made a dry, clicking noise in her throat. I longed again for Clyde, who might have gotten through to her in a way another person couldn’t. Ami needed a hell of a lot more than dog therapy. But it might be a start.
I reached out a hand to touch her hair, but she flinched.
I lowered my hand. “We can’t stay. But we’ll come back for you.”
A tiny crease appeared between her eyes. She
