Chapter 6 #4
“No, but you’re not much better, not unless you’re out there making a decent living, not just preying on everybody else. So, I can’t trust you. You might as well just head on home.”
Rory stared at him, not sure what to do.
Riley moved a little bit closer and asked, “Did you hear me?”
“Yeah, but I don’t take orders from you,” Rory snarled.
“No, you don’t,” he noted, “which is another reason why I’ve already sent out an alert to law enforcement about you.”
“About me?”
“Yeah, about you,” he confirmed, staring at him. “I mean, when scum of the earth is doing scum-of-the-earth jobs, you’ve got to deal with it.”
He knew he was pushing the kid’s buttons, but somebody needed to because something was going on here that absolutely had to break, and it would take a whole lot more than what anybody here was currently dealing with to make it happen.
Rory took a moment, then, pissed off, muttered, “Fine. I’ll leave you. And don’t worry. I’ll come back and get your old bones in a few days.”
Riley nodded. “You do that.”
Rory seemed startled, then turned and walked away.
Riley waited until he heard enough to know that Rory had actually left.
Then he sent text messages, knowing that underground, where he was, chances were good that nothing would go out, but the cops would get Rory soon enough.
If anything did happen, the texts would surface in time.
Even if his phone was destroyed, the messages would still be around for the forensic team to find later.
He didn’t know what was going on here, but he knew something was incredibly wrong, and he was not good with that.
He kept moving, now at a much faster rate, also thinking about what avenue he would take to leave the tunnels because no way he would go back out through the same door. He’d hoped that he could trust Derek, but Riley absolutely could not trust that kid Rory and whoever the kid was working with.
In the distance, he stopped and cocked his head to the side.
There it was, something like a yelp but not quite.
He moved faster, knowing that time was of the essence.
If any help was to be had, it would be that War Dog, preferably finding Cain before these assholes—whoever was causing trouble down here—came after him.
Riley let out a long, slow, sharp whistle.
In the din, he heard the dog going crazy, calling out, letting him know exactly where he was.
Riley moved swiftly in the darkness, keeping his flashlight handy so he was never quite without light, but kept it on, off, on, off, just so he could see where he was going.
When he came to another corner, he froze, turned left, then right, not sure which way he was heading from here.
He let out another long whistle, knowing that he was taking a chance with that because, if anybody else was down here, they too would hear him coming. But he heard the dog again, and, with that, he picked up the pace, moving quickly.
As soon as he got around the corner, he stopped at a brick barrier. He studied it closer, noting these bricks were a recent addition. It was an old trick commonly used in this area to make people think that the road ended or the path was one way and one way only.
It was also a trick to make sure that people who were not wanted were sent in a particular direction, and he could not take the chance of getting caught up in that misdirection.
Now that he realized what was going on, he needed a whole lot more understanding of who was involved.
It took another ten minutes to get the brickwork open so that he could step inside.
He needed it big enough for his body, but not any bigger, so that somebody larger than him would have to do more work to follow his trail, which would slow them down.
Within just a few seconds he smelled fresh air and realized that he was near one of the open areas to the river. And here, without warning, he heard something heavy moving toward him, and then he was jumped by something very large, very furry, and very happy to see him.
He laughed as he held the dog in his arms, even as it tried to jump up and down and around. This was the dog from the picture in the file—a beautiful all-black Malinois, and the only thing he could easily see here was his teeth when he grinned. “Easy, Cain. Easy, big guy.”
But Cain was having none of it. Riley didn’t know how long the dog had been kept down here. The fact that it was bricked up revealed a lot, but he didn’t think they were deliberately keeping the dog bricked in, as much as they were deliberately keeping certain people out.
As soon as he got the dog calmed down, he turned around and spoke, “Okay. We have to make our way back before anybody else gets down here.” He already knew heading back to the pub via the tunnels would be a lost cause.
For that reason alone, he stopped, took another look around, and realized he needed to get out through the other end of this area.
He looked at the dog and asked, “Shall we?”
With a bark of joy, Cain turned and raced in the other direction. Riley followed him closely, knowing that they would get so far, and then the dog himself would probably not move.
And then, sure enough, as he got to the other end of this maze of tunnels, he saw the glistening water, and, joy of joys, he also saw a small Zodiac tied up on the side.
He smiled, then checked the Zodiac for gasoline, and there was some, indeed.
With great difficulty, he shifted it into the water, and, with the dog jumping in immediately, he laughed.
“How many times have you been out here already, huh?”
He made his way into the dinghy, settled down, and, with the dog at his side, moved at a slow putt-putt speed from underneath the caves.
These tunnels had been called Shanghai tunnels for a reason, and anybody who managed to get out of these intact without getting captured and boarded onto a sea-going ship must have had the devil’s own luck, he decided.
Meanwhile he moved slowly on the waterways.
Some of these tunnels provided from one area to the next, making it out to the true waterway, the Willamette River.
It didn’t take him very long to hit the wind or to feel the pull of the river itself in his little Zodiac.
Plus, it had been a while since he had been in one of these.
So, he had to quickly sail alongside the waterfront, until he found a safe location to dock this thing.
As soon as he was out of danger, and they were safely down the river ever-so-slightly, he pulled out his phone. His earlier texts had already gone through to Badger, it seemed. So Riley phoned him.
“Where are you?” Badger asked, his tone harsh. “You in trouble?”
“Yeah, well, you could say that. I’m just out of the tunnels.”
“Which ones?”
“Shanghai tunnels,” he said, followed by a laugh. “I mean, this place is quite a maze.”
“How the hell did you end up down there? Many a man has died in those tunnels,” he declared. “Are you mad or something?”
“Yeah, … something. Particularly when they use bricks and boards to make walls to keep dogs on the other side.”
“Shit, really?”
“Yeah, this lovely dog, Cain, was in another section of the tunnel, and they had put up fresh brickwork to make it look like the passage was closed up and was no good.”
“And of course you didn’t fall for that.”
“No way,” he noted. “It might have fooled a lot of people but not me. I’ve done so much renovation and yard work for fun, so, seeing fresh brickwork like that? Hell no, that won’t stop me. I didn’t knock it all down. I just took out enough to get myself quickly on the other side.”
“And why quickly?”
“I’m not exactly welcome in a lot of places right now.”
He snorted at that. “Of course you’re not. How many people have you pissed off?”
“Oh, quite a few. Definitely something is going on down here,” he shared, “and I’m not sure what it is. I don’t like very much about it. I don’t know that old man Derek himself is part of it, but I think the Beltran family around him is.”
“Explain.”
He shared his intel with Badger over the next fifteen minutes, as he and Cain motored along the river until he came up to a small wharf that looked like he could possibly get off there. As he pulled in, he said, “I’m sending you a picture of where I am.”
“Don’t bother. I’ve already got you on GPS. These jobs are just something else,” he muttered.
“Yeah, well, once you get greed involved—”
“And what’s any of that got to do with the dog?”
“I’m not sure yet, but I highly suspect that the kid who owns the dog lost him because Timmy may have seen something in the tunnels that he shouldn’t have just because he’s part of the pub family above the tunnels.
The rest of the family found out recently that he would inherit the whole shebang at his grandpa’s passing.
Either this news may have had something to do with that or the kid himself had seen something illegal down there.
Anyway, I think the dog was taken as a warning first, and then Timmy was almost drowned in the tunnels. ”
“And when the first warning didn’t work—”
“I think it’s obvious enough that taking the dog didn’t work. Timmy went searching for Cain,” Riley stated. “I believe the next warning was the fact that Timmy’s now in the hospital and may or may not be recovering.”
“When you say may or may not, what does that mean?”
“I mean it’s a fifty-fifty chance, if that,” he shared. “He was in the tunnel water suspiciously too long, so they’re waiting for him to wake up.”
Badger snorted. “If he ever does.”
“Yeah, they’re trying to tell everybody that he was without oxygen too long. So, whether that is true or they’re just spinning a tale, I don’t know.”
“Give me the name,” Badger snapped. As soon as Riley provided Timmy Beltran’s name, Badger handed it over to someone else. “I’ll get the ins and outs on that one. We have a lot of medical connections,” he noted, “and, if anything can be done, we’ll see that it happens, or heads will roll.”