Chapter 25
Jacob would never admit it, but he’d always been a little afraid of her. It was in her eyes, maybe. The muscles in her face
smiled and smirked, but those eyes never lost their clarity or focus, searching, scanning, judging.
I’m a bad person, she’d sometimes lament. I think something is wrong with me. Like I’m broken, missing a part everyone has.
It was true that his girlfriend could be a bit of a basket case, moody and obsessive, deeply lonely inside her own mind. Most
guys would find this exhausting, but most people are boring. Jacob loved her for her hidden complexities, and when she suffered
from these spells of melancholy, he’d always reassure her with the same monologue: that everyone is a bad person. Everyone. It’s the way of things. The natural order is built on survival, self-interest, discharging strength.
This wasn’t quite Nietzsche but more of a Jacob Herman original—he’d always invite her to think of the most altruistic people
in the world: the charity workers, preachers, teachers, and volunteers. They’re generous, yes, but only because doing the
right thing makes them feel good. They’re still satisfying a need like anyone else. Selfless people are selfish, too. They
just get off differently.
I’m a bad person, she’d repeat.
Maybe. He’d kiss the top of her head. But you’re my bad person.
Earlier today he’d been thinking about this conversation while he spent almost an hour following the two women into the cave.
He’d listened to them prod and encourage each other, the rattling of their gear and shared water bottles, their laughter ringing off wet limestone.
It had all sounded so authentic. He could never occupy two headspaces like that, smiling and bonding with your best friend while secretly luring her to the site of her planned death.
And now that plan had badly deteriorated.
“This is bad.” Jacob winced as he peeled off his glove. “She’s too far down.”
“So follow her,” she said.
“My hand is wrecked.”
“She’s half your size.”
“She’s tough.”
“You have a gun.”
“I can’t rope down there and hold a gun with one hand.” He pointed over the edge. “I’ll be vulnerable. If she jumps me again, she’ll win.”
Those clear eyes glared, focused enough to melt steel. Babygirl was used to getting her way, like she had all her privileged
life—but she was also cunning enough to know when to pivot. She never committed to losing battles.
“So we change the plan, then.” She stood up and paced around the jagged, plantlike rock structures. “We just camp out here,
in the cave. We wait for her to die down there. She has, what, three days until she dehydrates?”
“There’s water down there.”
“Can she drink it?”
“The microbes might give her the shits, but it’ll keep her alive.”
“We’ll seal her down there, then.” She pointed at the ramped slope leading back up the Drainpipe, the peanut-butter-colored
rock glistening wetly in her headlamp. “We’ll stack every boulder we can find and block it. She’ll starve to death.”
“That’ll take weeks.”
“I know.”
“We don’t have weeks. We have two, three days at most.” Jacob wished he hadn’t already smashed the two phones—they were committed to their
alibis now. “And even if we had more time, this is a popular cave. We can’t just leave her. More groups will come by. They’ll
see a big stack of rocks and wonder what happened.”
She’d gone blank. Out of ideas.
The true danger was now sinking in. What would happen when the next group of cavers arrived here with their ropes and jingling
gear, trogged up and ready to explore the Devil’s Staircase? How long could his Green Ridge cover story hold these new witnesses
back without raising suspicion? The trapped woman’s screams might echo up the tunnel. It would take only a single 911 call.
Cave water dripped somewhere, a slow metronome. Tick. Tick.
Something about this place made Jacob viscerally uncomfortable. More tendrils seemed to gradually sprout at their feet as
they spoke. The walls and ceilings were covered with wriggling creatures all frozen into stone, blazing red in his headlamp
like a life-sized Hieronymus Bosch painting. He wanted to leave. Badly.
“She’s your friend, Babygirl.”
“Stop calling me that.”
“I’m just saying, maybe you should be the one to—”
“I can’t touch her.” She jabbed a gloved finger into his chest, her voice a breathy hiss. “Everything here has to show she
was murdered by someone else, someone bigger and stronger than me. I can’t have any trace of it on my body. No gunshot residue,
no suspicious bruises. None of her blood. Every inch of what happens here needs to be airtight.”
He knew they were a hell of a long way from airtight.
At this point, was it even possible to cover their tracks?
He’d scattered Razor Alley with brass casings and bullet fragments and even some of his blood.
The unplanned chase could have already left behind something damning, something that put Jacob Herman squarely in the sights of investigators.
“You know her inside and out, right?” He nodded toward the edge, keeping his voice down. “Why don’t you just try and talk
her into coming back up? Drop a rope down, feed her some horseshit about how you miraculously survived the bad guy’s attack
and how you’re pretty sure he’s given up and gone home. Then you’ll guide her up the rope to us, and I’ll be waiting right
here.” With his good hand, he made a stabbing motion.
“Won’t work. She’s too smart.”
“Or you could make a deal with her.”
“We’re past that.”
Both sides of this standoff were working against the clock—so whose time would run out first? Arguably, the desperate woman
cornered at the bottom of the underground pit might even be in the better position. It made him sick.
The droplets kept counting. Tick. Tick.
“Whatever.” She pouted. “I’m sick of waiting up here. This has gone on for hours already. I’m sorry you’re hurt, Jacob. I’m
sorry she kicked your ass, but you need to put on your big-boy pants and go down there and shoot her in the head.”
She didn’t know yet.
And he didn’t want to say it. But he couldn’t hide it any longer.
She sensed his discomfort. “What?”
He’d been avoiding this conversation. Saying it aloud would make it real, a solid and objective problem. For the past twenty
minutes he’d searched every inch of Razor Alley with his headlamp and flashlight. Behind every radiant growth of alien rock,
inside every crevice, under every shadow with rising dread. He couldn’t find it.
“I dropped my gun,” he said.
“You what?”
“When her rope broke my fingers, it ripped the gun out of my hand. I know it landed somewhere. But it’s . . . it’s not up
here.”
Her mouth opened. “Where is it, then?”
Jacob pointed over the edge, into the darkness below. “With her.”
The more Jacob thought about it, the worse their situation was. It felt like an impossible riddle: How do you kill a woman who’s wedged herself hundreds of feet down a tiny crawlspace?
He sighed.
And she stole your gun?
With that gutsy rope stunt, she’d managed to both injure Jacob and disarm him. He had to assume the firearm was in her hands
now. Confronting her directly was out of the question. Forget scorpions in a bottle—she’d outwitted him and turned this into
a true stalemate. She couldn’t climb the slippery walls of the Chimney to escape, and Jacob didn’t dare go down to face her.
Both sides were now paralyzed, unable to make a move.
“Whatever happens, we can’t leave this cave until she’s dead,” Jacob said. “If she survives to talk to the police, you and
I go to prison.”
“That won’t happen.”
“So how do we fix this?”
“I’m thinking.”
“How do we kill someone we can’t even reach?”
“I’m thinking,” she said. “Let me think.”
She was always thinking. That was her problem.
Even the day they’d met, when Jacob first spied her across the tiny margarita bar by the airport, she’d been absorbed in her laptop and oblivious to the world.
Of course he’d noticed her legs first. He’d glimpsed palm trees on her computer screen and wondered what she did for work—it looked like something called Keep Calm, involving vacations or travel?
It seemed glamorous. He’d wanted to talk to her, but he hadn’t known how. She wasn’t just
out of his league; they weren’t even playing the same sport. What could he possibly offer her? And apparently he wasn’t the
only one who’d noticed those legs—some drunk guy in motorcycle leathers took the liberty of sitting by her. She kept politely
declining his advances. He kept pressing. At one point he waved his hand in front of her laptop screen, trying to get her
attention. Finally she’d paid her tab and left her beer half full.
Motorcycle Guy slurped the rest of it and followed her into the parking lot. She speed-walked. Then she ran. By her car, he
grabbed her wrist.
She screamed.
The man’s exact intentions remain unknown to this day, because Jacob Herman had silently followed and delivered a single,
precise haymaker to the back of his skull. It’s actually possible to punch someone in the head so hard that an eyeball pops
out. This is a fact supported by science and confirmed by his own firsthand (pun intended) experience. The physics of it are sickening and so much worse than he’d intended. Motorcycle Guy was instantly incapacitated,
crying and cupping his hands to his face with one soggy red eyeball bulging from its socket.
Every great love story begins somewhere, right?
Jacob wasn’t stupid. He knew he wasn’t a catch in the conventional sense.
But he was a type of man from a bygone era, rare now—a man who could get things done, a man who could hunt food and make fire with only sticks.
Enlightened liberals liked to pretend men like Jacob weren’t needed any longer, right up until the electricity went out and the supply chains failed. He understood his value.
Even now, who really needed who?
“You’re in over your head, Babygirl.” It felt good to unload a few things. “You always were from the very start, because you
can’t stand to get your hands dirty. You need someone else to do the real work for you. You don’t want to see it happen or
even listen to it. You just hang back in the shadows and hide.”
She stared at the ground, still lost in thought. Ignoring him.
“Go on. Say something.”
Nothing.
Jacob winced as he wrapped his fingers with medical tape. This was, romantically enough, the second time he’d broken his hand
for her. His ring finger was merely dislocated—he’d already managed to reset it with a rubbery, eye-watering pop—but his pinkie
finger was clearly fractured. The rope had hooked under his fingers when it tore the gun away, peeling them ninety degrees
backward. His entire hand thrummed with radiating pain, almost electric, like his bones were vibrating on a strange frequency.
Christ, he didn’t want to be down here, squatting in a gloomy, damp place that looked like the inside of Cthulhu’s asshole
and bickering with his girlfriend. He didn’t even care about the thirty grand anymore. Money is only time, after all, and
time was running out.
“Will you please say—”
Something, he was saying, when she leaned in to kiss him, the unexpected stir of her tongue on his lips. It startled him, like touching
a snake. She’d always thrived on surprise.
“Jacob,” she said, “I know how we’ll kill her.”