Chapter 26
“Could you hear any voices above you?” Washington asks. “Arguments? Planning their next attack?”
Tess shakes her head.
“Any clues at all?”
“Nothing.”
I’m reaching, the detective knows. The bottom of the pit was forty feet down, and the killers would’ve known to hush their voices.
Tess had managed to defeat Jacob in a hand-to-hand fight, but now she faced new and urgent problems. The first was hypothermia:
immersed in cold water, a human can suffer heart and respiratory failure within an hour. She needed to keep her body out of
the pool or she wouldn’t survive long enough to face the next threat.
Washington recalls the incident commander’s grim text, now hours ago.
We’re losing her.
One relentless challenge after another.
The bottom of the Chimney breaks out into a few tertiary chambers with just enough space to slither between hundred-ton boulders or even stand uncomfortably to let her soaked clothes dry.
Maybe she’d eaten a granola bar for some quick energy.
With every passing minute, the killer—or killers, plural—plotted their next move.
Escape was impossible. Tess was twenty stories underground with a broken headlamp. She’d lost her knife and flashlight. The
only light source remaining was her pack of emergency glowsticks. In the chemical green light, her exploration of the lower
chambers would have been methodical and dangerous.
“Then,” Tess says, “I found his gun.”
Washington perks up.
Jacob’s Colt semiautomatic was sturdy and powerful—the 1911 is arguably one of the finest handguns ever designed—but the single-stack
magazine held only seven rounds. How many had he fired at her already?
“I hadn’t touched a gun in years,” Tess says. “Not since Allie’s dad took us to the shooting range when we were teenagers.”
“How many rounds were left?”
“I . . . found the button to eject the clip.”
“And?”
She shakes her head.
It feels almost cruel. After hours of fighting for her life, the embattled survivor had finally managed to turn the tables,
broken the killer’s hand, and taken control of his gun—only to find it empty and useless.
And even if it had been loaded, a gun would’ve realistically been little help in her situation.
To shoot your enemy, you must first see them.
Tess was sealed deep underground at the bottom of an unscalable pit.
Jacob would have known to keep his distance from
the edge and not expose himself.
She was sealed off with an empty gun. All she could do was wait.
Washington realizes Tess has fallen silent, disconnected. Something seems to be weighing on her. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“It’s okay if you need a sec.”
“I just . . .” The survivor chews her scabbed lip, and Washington senses their earlier conversation isn’t quite finished.
“Have you ever killed anyone?”
The question is startling in its bluntness.
She considers her answer before she speaks. “Not in the way you mean.”
“How so?”
“It means I’ve never shot anyone before. But I’ve made mistakes that have arguably contributed to people’s deaths. And more
times than I can remember, I’ve sat in a room with someone and pretended to be their best friend while helping them end their
own lives in every way that matters.”
“Is it satisfying?”
“It used to be.”
“And now?”
Washington exhales and massages her sore knuckles. “When my phone rings, it’s because someone’s daughter has been found half
buried in the woods or someone’s elderly parents were shot to death in their bed. And the best-case scenario, the happiest
news I might hope to tell a grieving family, is that we think we’ve caught the bad guy. That’s it. That’s the most I can offer
them. When someone loses their life, I come in to balance the equation by ruining the life of whoever took it, and then I
move on. Punishing someone . . . well, you quickly learn it isn’t the same thing as saving someone.”
“Maybe you are, though,” Tess says. “Maybe by catching someone who’s likely to re-offend, you’re really saving the next person.”
Washington smiles. But platitudes don’t help, and Tess can see it.
“Why do you still do it, then?”
It’s a good question. Her husband, long retired from his university job, has asked her this. So have her four adult children.
When her grandkids are old enough, they’ll ask, too. Why get up at five or earlier every morning on arthritic knees and wear
a gun? Why continue to work in a high-pressure, emotionally corrosive profession even as she feels herself slowing down?
Apple. Chair. Umbrella.
She knows her cognitive fitness test is a time bomb. Whatever the results were, they’ll find their way to her lieutenant’s
desk, and she’ll soon be having long-avoided conversations about lightened duties and end dates. In another year, the department’s
mandatory retirement age will forcibly expel her anyway. What can she possibly do?
Somewhere down the hall, a patient coughs. An ugly, wet hacking.
“The situation looked hopeless,” Tess says. “But I realized . . . it wasn’t.”
“Why not?”
“I remembered something from Allie’s little story that morning. A small detail at the time, but now critically important.
A hundred years ago when they were rescuing the trapped prospector, she described how they’d crawled down to help him from
both sides. One team rappelled down the Chimney. The other went another way.”
“Meaning?”
Tess smiles. “There’s another way.”
Yes.
“From where I was stuck, there still had to be a second route to the surface, to daylight. It’s the only way Allie’s story
made spatial sense.”
Washington nods.
Tess’s instincts were, once again, dead-on.
The eventual rescue effort would follow similar routes through the intricate labyrinth.
Even without a map, she could surely find her way back to the Upper Vault and, eventually, the surface.
It was simply a process of following the moving air and eliminating dead ends.
But first, she would need to traverse an infamous passage.
“And”—her voice hardens—“Worse Than Death would take me there.”
The rest of it lingers in the air, unspoken.
If I could survive it.
Washington knows the dynamics of the standoff were about to change. “While you formed this new plan, the other team was making
moves, too.”
The other team. Like it was a football game.
“We know Jacob spent some time up there in Razor Alley splinting his fingers, treating his wounds, taking stock of his supplies.
And then he seemed to get a new idea—or someone gave it to him. He did something unexpected.”
Tess blinks. “What?”
“He went back up to the surface, got in his Jeep, and drove away.”
Leaving Tess alone inside the cave was a massive risk—unless, of course, Jacob had left his accomplice behind to guard the
entrance.
“Where did he go?”
“A nearby town called Flour Gold.”
Flour Gold has a population of fewer than a thousand.
Being the closest settlement to the cave and having both a fire station and enough flat ground to land a helicopter, it would eventually serve as an unofficial base camp for the rescue effort.
Motel 6 would become a communications center.
The Sasquatch Diner would generously deliver Styrofoam containers full of hash browns and eggs.
Residents would donate their four-wheel drives and help ferry supplies and personnel to the cave.
For hours today an entire town held its breath, everyone equally invested in the rescue of this poor, embattled woman deep underground.
But that operation wouldn’t begin for at least six more hours.
Tess appears unsettled. “Are you sure he drove into town?”
“We have him on security camera. Twice.”
“That’s strange.”
“Why?”
“Letting himself get caught on video just seems . . .” She shrugs. “Sloppy, I guess.”
“Everyone gets videotaped every day.” Washington hates to give Jacob Herman credit, but there was a clear logic at work. “He
would’ve been just one guy in a thousand filling his tank on some gas station camera. It would only matter if we already knew
who we were looking for. In other words, Tess, if you survived to tell your story.”
“So he stopped for gas.”
“Yes.”
Tess tilts her head. “And . . . his second appearance?”
“Admittedly, this one is different.”
“How?”
At the end of the town’s main drag stands Flour Gold Hardware, a water-damaged building with a gravel parking lot and a QAnon sign in the window.
After questioning the manager this morning—a bit of a moron, to be polite—Washington had pulled footage from the store’s single interior camera.
It confirmed Jacob Herman entered the store just after four p.m., noticeably hiding his splinted fingers in his pocket.
Even in grainy playback he’d looked like hell, sweaty and wincing.
He’d avoided both clerks and walked straight to the lawn and garden section in the back.
He’d known exactly what he was there for.
A weird shopping list, the manager had said. I mean, really weird. And it would seem to be, unless you knew what came next.
“With cash, he bought a wrench and two rolls of heat-resistant tape,” Washington says. “And every garden hose they had in
stock.”