He said to Sloan: “He’s behind us.”
At that moment, a cop called, “Hey, Jesus, Jesus,” and a swarm of bats flew through them, spiraling out of the cave and into the large outer room. Lucas froze, creeped out, and when they were gone, moved back to the tunnel. They’d left two cops in the outer room, and the two of them shouted warnings at each other as the bats came through.
In the main room, Scrape remained hidden until he heard what he’d feared: one of the cops said, “I think I’ll climb up there and look around. Maybe he’s in one of those crannies behind those pipes.”
Another voice: “You’ll fall on your ass.”
“Shoot, I use to climb up on top of water towers just to look around.”
“If you’re gonna do it, take the big flash.”
“Let me see… ladder feels fine.”
“Careful, there…”
A cop was climbing, and in two minutes, he’d put a light on Scrape. He was behind them, his only chance was to drop down and run for it. Maybe more guys outside, but he’d have to take the chance, Scrape thought. He shivered with fear: have to take the chance. If he just lay there, they’d get him and put him in the hospital and they’d tie him down and do their experiments…
He could hear the cop climbing up the ladder, one step at a time, the other cop shining a light up on the higher rungs. Then he could see the cop, still climbing. When he turned, with the flashlight, Scrape would be right there.
Scrape pushed himself up on his elbows, cocked his knees. When the cop seemed to have turned his head away, he pushed himself to his feet and looked down at the other cops. He was in luck: the other cop had his back to him.
He hooked a hand around a piece of rebar to brace himself, felt the rebar move; and he jumped, holding on to the rebar to keep himself upright, and hit with a thud. He saw the cop turn, and Scrape took off, the rebar still in his hand. He’d pulled it out, he realized, maybe he’d have a use for it, maybe God put it there.
He had a good lead going into the tunnel, and he knew where he was going…
Lucas was third in line again, heading back out. He said to Sloan, “Another ten million cockroaches…” Then there was a clatter, metal on metal, and one of the cops in the big room shouted, “Hey, stop, stop,” and a second later, “There he is… there he is… he’s coming out, he’s coming out. He’s coming out…”
Lucas and Sloan ran back to the big room, too late to see what had happened, but saw the two cops they’d left behind, running toward the exit, their guns drawn. They shouted again, “Watch out, he’s coming.”
Sloan said, “Oh, shit.”
And three seconds later, a single shot: BAM. The noise was muffled by the branching of the caves, but there was no question of what it was, and the cops all headed toward the exit tunnel, trailed by the sewer guys. They could hear more shouting, and two or three minutes later, back at the exit, they found four cops crouched over a body.
Lucas came up and looked down: Scrape, lying faceup, looking not so much tired, as resigned. His eyes were moving, but glazed, and his heels scraped at the sand, as though trying to push himself out into the light. He had a hand-sized patch of blood on his chest.
“Get a goddamn ambulance,” Lucas said. Lucas headed for the entrance, but another cop was there, shouting, “What? What?” and had a gun out.
“He’s dead,” said a crouching cop, from behind him. Lucas turned, took a step back, and looked again. Scrape was gone, his eyes still open, but deathly still.
Another one, the shooter, said, “Jeez, I never even aimed. He had that iron thing-”
“It’s not you, man, you did the right thing,” a third cop said. “He was coming right for you.”
A two-foot-long piece of rusted rebar lay just down the tunnel from Scrape’s body.
Sloan said, “Jesus. Okay. Freeze everything. You guys back off. We need an ambulance down here.”
“He’s dead, Sloan,” one of the cops said.
“I’d rather have a doctor tell me that,” Sloan said. “ ’ Cause if he blows a bubble five minutes from now, and the papers ask us why we didn’t get a doc on him, I don’t want to say because Larry Plant told me so.”
Lucas pushed through, squeezed past the bars, saw Daniel at the top of the bank, and shouted, “We need an ambulance. Right now.”
Daniel shouted back, “Who’s hurt?”
“Scrape. He came out with an iron bar in his hands. He’s dead, but Sloan is asking for a doc.”
Daniel nodded and hurried off, and Lucas went back into the cave.
A cop was saying, “The only bad thing about it is, we can’t ask him where he stashed the girls.”
Somebody said in a hushed voice, “Christ, remember that thing down in Florida where that girl was buried alive?”
They all thought about that and looked at the body, and then the cop who did the shooting said, “I saw him coming with the bar and I didn’t know if it was a rifle or something and he lifted it up…”
“Like a baseball bat,” said another cop. “If he’d hit you with that, that’d be you laying there…”
Daniel came down and moved them all out of the cave, except for one guy to keep an eye on the body, although there would be nobody to interfere with it, except the bats. A few minutes later, an ambulance arrived. Two medics were taken down the riverbank, and a minute later were back: Scrape was dead.
The crime-scene specialists showed up next, went down to the cave. Daniel, who’d been talking to the shooter, took Lucas aside. “How’d you find him?”
Lucas told the story about Karen Frazier calling him at home, about his interview with Millard, about hearing somebody moving in the entrance.
“You think this Millard guy is still down at the Lunch Box?”
“Yeah. I had him pretty scared,” Lucas said. “If he’s not, he’ll be easy enough to find. He’s staying at the Mission.”
Daniel slapped him on the back. “You did good on this, Lucas. I’m gonna talk to the chief. Del tells me you’re pretty hot to get out of uniform.”
“I am,” Lucas said. “To tell you the truth, I’m not sure Scrape took the girls. There are too many questions.”
“There are a few,” Daniel said. “What I need for you to do is, I need you to give a complete statement, with everything you think. I got some of it from Del, and it worries me. Don’t leave anything out.”
“If we could just put hands on this Fell dude. That’s all I want-just to talk to him.”
“What I need to do is find those girls,” Daniel said. “I’m not gonna rest right until we do it. We need to turn this cave inside out, we need to search every goddamn cave on these bluffs…
“He couldn’t get them down here without a vehicle,” Lucas said. “I keep stumbling over that. Where’s his vehicle? He couldn’t have just marched them down here.”
Daniel said, “Yeah, yeah. I need to get you back to the office. Goddamnit, too much to do. Tell you what: you go down and get this Willard guy. Is that right, Willard?”
“Millard,” Lucas said.
“Get him, and bring him back here. We’re gonna need to squeeze him. Ah, Christ, look at this…”
And here came the media: the Channel Three truck. They were quick and close, but the other stations would be right behind them.
Daniel took Lucas by the arm and steered him up the slope. “You get Millard, get him back to my office. Just sit him there. I’ll be back as quick as I can. And we’re gonna need statements. Lots of statements…”
Lucas found Millard sitting outside the Lunch Box. “They never let me sit inside, even when I got money.”
“I gotta take you downtown to make a statement,” Lucas said. “Let’s go.”
“You’re not gonna put me in jail?”
“No, no-just need a statement. No jail, as long as you keep your shit together.”
