Chapter 18
Thirty thousand dollars is a lot of money, but weighed against the risks of murdering a woman, it’s not a lot of money. Sometimes Jacob felt he should’ve been insulted by the lowball compensation, but in the end he’d still agreed to
it.
Time isn’t money. Money is time.
Money is gas in the tank and fuel in the stove. Jacob was finished pressing aluminum—he’d long ago sworn he’d never work a
regular shift again—but odd jobs are intermittent and his lockbox was thinning out. He knew he was liable to put his 1911
in his mouth when his reserves hit zero, and a fresh infusion of thirty grand kicked that unpleasant can down the street for
at least another year. He’d already watched the strongest man he ever knew melt into his own bedsheets like a rotting pumpkin.
Jacob understood better than most that all time is borrowed, and once you’ve made your peace with that, life opens up significantly.
Every day 150,000 people die around the world. That’s 6,250 every hour, 104 every minute. Every second, somewhere on this
blue marble, two strangers breathe their last and croak. Sometimes he correlated this with the amount of time he spent performing
routine tasks. Taking a leak, for example, is roughly thirty seconds from start to finish. That’s sixty people dead while
Jacob Herman pissed on a tree.
And that’s only an average. Consider wars and atrocities, the hundreds of thousands of lives lost in Ukraine and Gaza.
Or over a half million dead in the Syrian and Ethiopian civil wars each.
Industrialized death on a scale hard to fathom.
Against such overwhelming numbers, what difference could Jacob possibly
make? That’s the big secret. In some cave up in the hills of the Pacific Northwest, one more dead woman hardly matters.
Nonetheless, this was turning into the hardest money he’d ever earned. She was not giving up. She’d escaped his ambush. She’d dodged his gunfire and turned what should have been an execution into a crawling,
close-quarters chase. She’d improvised and used the hostile environment against him to neutralize his advantages—his size,
his strength, his weaponry.
But Jacob could improvise, too.
He’d already worked it out in his head. To fire his pistol inside the Drainpipe, he needed to solve two problems. First, how
to protect his hearing from the magnified blast. He’d cover his left ear with one hand, and if he braced his head against
his right shoulder—while aiming the gun—he could protect his right ear, too. He might come out of this without hearing aids.
Second, the risk of a deadly ricochet. After his jacketed round blew through the woman’s skull, it was likely to hit rock
and come back at him. In this confined space, he imagined bullet fragments zinging around like a bouncy ball thrown inside
a phone booth.
But . . . if his aim was precise, and he shot the woman at the correct downward angle, the slug wouldn’t exit her head at all. Instead
it would tunnel down her neck and, in theory, be absorbed by the rest of her torso.
Yes.
Yes, that just might work.
But he would need to choose his moment carefully. Drawing his gun would be awkward from this position. He’d be vulnerable
to her counterattack.
“What’s your plan?” he asked her, his vapory breath misting in the red light. “Just keep crawling deeper and deeper until one of us gets stuck?”
“My money’s on your big ass.”
“If I get stuck, you’ll be sealed in, too.”
The woman’s foot slipped behind her with a gritty scrape. The tunnel floor was slanting downward, slick with watery clay.
This was good.
“Careful,” Jacob said with a grin. “Wouldn’t want to fall.”
The rock faces were smoother down here, cut in uniform ripple patterns like the choppy surface of the ocean. He’d never known
stone could look so liquid. Every now and then he’d even glimpse a straight line too perfectly straight to be natural, as
if sliced by a laser. It stuck in his mind, refused to fit. This was a new world with new rules.
And it was now impossible to ignore: the tunnel’s decline was steepening. As he forced this woman deeper into the earth, her
muddy boots were losing traction, and she had to arch her back to keep balanced. Centuries of erosion had wiped away all handholds
and footholds.
He could see the calculations running behind her eyes—to retreat any deeper down the slippery tunnel, she would need to use
both hands to grip the curved walls. She’d be unable to counterattack with her knife. Not without sacrificing her hold.
One scorpion won’t be able to sting. This was about to become untenable for her.
He pressed: “Do you even know what’s down there?”
She said nothing.
“You seem like a smart girl.” Jacob watched her. “You would’ve done your homework. You must already know about Razor Alley
and the Chimney. And, of course, you know what else is down there, right?”
Still nothing.
“I read that a guy, a gold miner or something, died after being trapped down there for a week. Can you even imagine what that’s like?
Being alone, no light, unable to move, squashed inside a tiny little tube with solid rock on all sides.
It’s got to be one of the worst ways to die.
Being disemboweled or burned at the stake would hurt like hell, but it’d be over in a few minutes.
Imagine this physical sensation spread out over hours, or days, or weeks, crammed so deep and so tight that the only way they can get you out is if they first break your legs with a hammer. That
poor bastard probably wished he were dead long before they reached him. And even after he suffocated or his heart failed,
they still couldn’t hoist his body up to the surface for a Christian burial. They had to cut his arms and legs off and pull
him up piece by piece.” He whistled. “I mean, holy shit, can you imagine that?”
She didn’t blink.
“Down there, the tunnels are barely wide enough for a human to fit. You won’t be able to crawl on your hands and knees, like
we are now.” Jacob scraped the smooth ceiling with his knife. “You’ll have to slither on your belly like a salamander. You’ll
have to take off your helmet and shoes, probably, to even fit. In the narrowest spaces, it’s only ten inches wide.”
He held out a gloved hand, measuring the distance between the walls.
“Even worse, the narrow tunnels change direction, too. Ninety-degree turns. You’ll have to twist your entire body to squeeze
through. If your legs are too long or your hips can’t twist just right, or if you get your body wedged into an angle you can’t
recover from, you’ll get stuck and die just like he did. Way too slowly.”
Ten inches. Much tighter than the Drainpipe. Just thinking about it caused the hairs on Jacob’s forearms to prickle.
He grinned. “Hence its name.”
He didn’t need to say it. She already knew.
Worse Than Death.
Gripping her survival knife with pale knuckles, the woman moved again, scooting her body away from him. She was right at the
precipice now, an inch from letting go. She kept her eyes locked on him, spotlighted in his red headlamp as she finally spoke.
Her teeth chattered, her voice trembling—“I’m . . .”—but gaining strength:
“I’m going to make you chase me through it, asshole.”