Chapter 28
“What if the hoses melt?”
“They won’t,” Jacob told her as he worked.
Removing the Jeep’s catalytic converter had taken longer than he’d expected. The bolts were all caked with crud, and his right
hand was splinted into a clumsy lobster claw. But he managed. He remembered that thief who’d tried to remove this very same
part from his dad’s truck over twenty years ago. Was the guy still alive? Probably not, but Jacob hoped so as he wrapped loops
of adhesive tape around the exhaust manifold to join the first hose. Every seal would need to be airtight and resist several
hundred degrees of sustained heat.
He stood up and pointed at the stack of hoses. “Help me carry those.”
“I can’t touch anything.”
“You have gloves.”
“Rubber leaves prints, too. And they can be matched.” She looked at him, her eyebrows raised like he was five years old. “You’re
the bad guy, remember?”
Jesus Christ, Babygirl.
For all her ingenuity, she was still hopelessly deluded.
Even after everything that had gone wrong today, she still believed it was somehow possible to walk into a police station and spin her best friend’s death as a random attack.
How, exactly, would she explain a daylong standoff, several hundred feet of garden hose, and a murder by carbon monoxide poisoning?
She was a hell of a gifted liar, maybe the best he’d ever seen, but this was simply impossible.
“Fine.” He was too exhausted to argue, and he’d learned when to simply let her be. Without her help, he’d just make multiple
trips.
Maybe people like her could will the universe into rearranging itself if they wanted it badly enough. She’d certainly succeeded
at turning Keep Calm into her own secret digital piggy bank. But Jacob worked with his hands. He traded in real things, sweat and blisters and
sleeping hard. He used his body. Sometimes he found her unsexy, even pathetic in a childlike way, her too-small features and her soft hands and
her stolen, pampered life. She’d seen enough of the world to have her opinions, too, especially about poor people. She’d go
on unprompted tangents about how wealthy places were unquestionably better: better houses, better bars and food, better people.
She’d list off all the things she’d hated about her childhood, the bargain-bin DVD stands and potholed parking lots and wilted
grocery produce. She loathed how stupid poor people were, how proud they were of their own stupidity, how they’d vote for
any politician who spoke their stupid, simple language. Get her going and she’d never stop.
Jacob looped the first hoses under his arm and unspooled them foot by foot into the darkness. He retraced the cave’s familiar
tunnels and took shortcuts wherever possible—the Upper Vault, the fixed rope at the Great Wall, the smothering hands-and-knees
crawl of the Drainpipe—and stopped to join each threaded aluminum socket with more generous loops of tape. He laid the hoses
carefully, ensuring they wouldn’t rub against any sharp rocks.
After an hour of sweaty work in the red glow of his headlamp, he was midway down the Drainpipe and attaching his last remaining hose. This daisy chain of death ended just a few feet short of the Chimney’s edge, just forty feet above the captive woman.
“Perfect.” He couldn’t have done it better if he’d measured it.
This was far from the clean little murder he’d been promised weeks ago under a starry sky, but there was a blunt-force certainty
to this new plan that Jacob liked. This tough, resourceful woman had escaped their ambush, dodged his bullets, and turned
the cave’s hostile geography against him. But she still needed to breathe like any other creature.
Everything left here would be forensic evidence. He needed to find his first aid kit and recover his pack. As he crouched
under tendrils of wormy rock to gather his things, he couldn’t resist shouting into the darkness: “Plot twist, bitch. My Jeep is parked up top with a full tank and five hundred feet of brand-new garden hose. All I have to do is turn
a key.”
God, it felt good to hold the power again.
“But you never know, right?” He held back a guttural laugh. “Maybe, if you apologize, I’ll still change my mind.”
“So,” Washington summarizes, “you were cornered at the bottom of a deep vertical pit, twenty stories underground.”
“Yes.”
“You were injured and hypothermic.”
“Yes.”
“He was about to flood the cave with carbon monoxide.”
“Yes.”
“And all you had left was”—she lifts a page on her notepad—“three glowsticks, a water bottle, a granola bar, and an empty
gun.”
Tess hesitates. “Not exactly.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s . . . something I didn’t mention.”
Washington leans in, now curious.
“I realized I’d forgotten something,” Tess says. “Guns were always Allie’s thing, not mine. It’d been years since her dad
took us to the range together, and I’d forgotten almost everything. But one little detail had stuck in my mind.” She smiles,
a dawning realization. “When I’d picked up his gun, I’d checked the clip for bullets and found it empty.”
But . . .
There are many public misconceptions around firearms—like Tess’s common error in calling a magazine a clip—and Washington knows a semiautomatic’s operation by muscle memory. Some safety fundamentals are drilled in so deeply that
they can never leave your brain, no matter how many years it’s been. A magazine can be empty, the magazine itself can even
be removed, but the weapon is still live—because if there’s one final cartridge left, it simply won’t be in the magazine anymore.
The detective grins. “You didn’t clear the chamber, did you?”