isn’t.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,
When Ron didn’t move, Langley added, “Chief? We on the same page here?” Langley strapped on a yellow hard hat and clipped an impressive-looking cell phone to his belt.
“Uhm, Mr. Badgett,” Knoblock said uneasily to Ron and Sandra. “I appreciate you helping us out. But it might be better if—”
“That’s okay,” the graphic designer said. “We were just leaving.”
Outside, Ron got into the car and nodded for Sandra to join him. He drove slowly up the street, away from the site of the collapsed building and the rescue efforts, the cacophony of the lights and crowds.
“Aren’t we going to stay?” she asked. “See what happens?”
“No.”
“What’s wrong?” she asked uneasily, watching her husband troll slowly down the deserted street, looking into the alleys and the vacant lots overrun with grass and filled with trash — locales scheduled to become part of NeDo in the future but at the moment nothing more than evidence of what the neighborhood had once been.
Finally he stopped, staring down at the ground. He climbed out of the car. Sandra joined him.
“What are you…?” Her voice faded. “No.”
Ron was looking at an entrance to a large drain — the one he’d pointed out on the map.
“You’re not… No, Ron, you’re not going in there.”
“Five hundred thousand dollars,” he whispered. “Where else are we going to get a chance for money like that?”
“No, honey. You heard what Greg said. It’s dangerous.”
“A half million dollars. Think about it…. You know business’s been slow. The move set me back a lot more than I thought.”
“It’ll get better. You’ll get more clients.” Her face was a grim mask. “I don’t want you to go. Really.”
Ron was staring at the grate of the drainage ditch, the blackness on the other side. “I don’t think it’s dangerous at all…. Didn’t it seem there was something weird about what Langley said?”
“Weird?”
“He didn’t even check the sluice out. But he goes on and on about how risky it is. You’re an engineer; what do you think? Isn’t this the best way to get to her?”
She shrugged. “I don’t do geologic work, you know that.”
“Well, even to
Sandra fell silent for a moment. Then she shook her head. “I didn’t really get that sense. He’s pretty arrogant and insulting. But even if what you’re saying is true, going in there still has to be risky.” She pointed toward the collapsed building. “You still have to go underneath it.”
“Five hundred thousand dollars, baby,” he whispered.
“It’s not worth getting killed.”
“I’m going to do it.”
“Please, Ron, no.”
“I have to.”
She sighed, grimacing. “I’ve always sensed there’re sides to you that I don’t know, Ron. Things that you don’t share with me. But playing knight in shining armor to save some girl? I never thought of you that way. Or is it that you’re just pissed off he insulted us and threw us out of our own building?” Ron didn’t answer. Sandra then added, “And to be honest, honey, you aren’t really in the best shape, you know.”
“I’m going to be crawling, not running a marathon.” He laughed, shook his head. “Something’s not right about this whole thing. Langley’s working some angle. And I’m not going to let him get away with it. I’m going to get that money.”
“You’ve made up your mind,” she asked in a soft voice, “haven’t you?”
“That’s one thing you
Ron reached into the glove compartment and took out the flashlight. Then he walked to the trunk and found the tire iron. “My coal mining gear,” he said with a weak laugh as he held up the bent metal rod. He looked at the blackness of the drain opening.
Sandra took her cell phone from the car, gripping it firmly in her hand. “Call if anything happens. I’ll get somebody there as soon as I can.”
He kissed her hard. And the knight — in faded jeans and an old sweatshirt, not shining armor — started into the murky opening.
The route through the drain was, in fact, much less risky than the doomsaying egomaniac Langley had predicted — at least in the beginning. Ron had about three hundred feet of steady crawling, impeded only by a few roots, clumps of dirt and sewage-related detritus, which was hardly pleasant but not dangerous.
He encountered a few rats but they were frightened and scurried away from him quickly. (Ron wondered if they were charging into the spot where the rescue specialist was now working his way toward Tonya. He had to admit he liked the idea of sharp-toothed rodents scaring the hell out of his rival — yeah, Sandra was partly right; Langley
Closer to the building, the drain became increasingly clogged. Roots had broken through the concrete walls and clustered together like pythons frozen in rigor mortis, and the way was partly blocked by piles of dried mud nearly as hard as concrete. His back in agony, his legs cramping, Ron now made slower progress. Still, he could see that — not surprisingly — Langley had been wrong. The drain walls were solid and in no danger of collapse.
Ron kept going, checking his progress by looking through the access holes that opened into basements and the old delivery tunnels. Finally he arrived at the narrow one that, he recalled from the map, led to a wooden door opening into the tunnel where Tonya Gilbert was. He put his ear to the opening and listened.
“Help me,” the girl’s muted voice rasped. “Please help me…” She was probably no more than thirty feet from him.
The opening into this side tunnel was small, but by working a few old bricks out of the wall with the tire iron he was able to create enough space to crawl through. He climbed onto the dry earth of the tunnel and, standing, shone his light around. Yes, it was the one right next to the girl’s.
He’d done it! He gotten to Tunnel Girl first.
Then he heard a noise:
What was it? Was the girl signaling?
No, the sound was coming from a different place.
Ron suddenly realized what it was. Greg Langley had arrived. He was at the far wall of the tunnel, breaking his way through another old door, which connected this shaft to the deserted basement next door. The sound of breaking wood told Ron that Langley would be inside in three or four minutes. Then the pounding stopped, and Ron heard the man’s muffled voice. Ron shut the light out, alarmed. What if Langley wasn’t alone? He walked quietly to the door the rescue specialist had been breaking through and listened. He heard the man say, “I’ll call you back.”
So, he was only on his phone. But who was he talking to? And what had he been saying? Had someone found out Ron was coming and was a threat to getting the reward?
Langley had resumed breaking through the wooden door. Ron flattened himself against the wall beside the
