On her feet again, she snatched up the tote with its precious evidence, plucked the flashlight from the floor, and switched it off. She looked back toward the dripping corridor, to the lich-gate at the farther end of it, beyond which light swept back and forth in the tomb of the innocents. Now that Hendrickson had entered the labyrinth, he was coming faster than she had hoped, with whatever fully automatic weapon he possessed.
Clicking on the light, she hurried through the remainder of the cavern. She ascended a narrow flight of low and uneven steps, across one of which slithered three translucent alabaster insects of a kind she had never seen before, each the size of her thumb, the beam of light revealing their inner organs like miniature voodoo veves in photonegative. She cautioned herself that, although haste was essential, she couldn’t afford to trip and fall. She would never escape this preview of damnation with a broken leg.
Not halfway across the upper room, Jane heard Hendrickson in the lower chamber, beyond the stepped passage. He shouted to her, boasting like a boy: “I can jump! I don’t need a plank. I can jump that far easy. I can jump!”
She dared not wait to hear him screaming in pain from the bottom of the fissure. Perhaps he could have jumped across the gap forty years earlier, as a spry and limber boy, but though he might now be regressing into some adolescent mental state, he was nonetheless a man in his late forties, with less athletic ability than in his youth. Praying for his fall, she hurried on and was spurred faster when, instead of a scream of agony, he let loose a cry of triumph at having cleared the wide fissure without any need of a bridge.
The exit passage from the current cavern angled sharply to the right. She ducked into it. She switched off her light and tucked it under her belt. Dropped the tote. Drew the Heckler. Turned to the room that she’d just left. She would kill him when he came off the steps where the ghostly insects had crossed her path. The muzzle flash of the Heckler would reveal her position, but he would be wounded or dead before he could return fire.
Jane heard him on those stairs, but there was no jiggling light by which to measure his ascent. He was coming in the dark. Suppose he had regressed to adolescence or childhood. If so, then in his diminished state, perhaps he’d found the fear-etched memory of the architecture of this stone hive, perfected through thousands of hours of blind exploration, and now had no more need of light than did the sightless insects on the stairs.
Although her heart knocked at a gallop, the pistol felt steady in her two-hand grip, and all she needed to do was listen for the change in his breathing and the difference in his footfalls when he topped the stairs. He would be directly in front of her, thirty feet away. She wouldn’t be able to put every round in the body core, but four shots squeezed off in quick succession would result in at least a couple hits, certainly one of which would wound him badly if not kill him.
Absolute darkness, without a single point of light, with no varying shades of black to give perspective, was disorienting. She held her stance and didn’t let the gun drift to one side or the other. He needed less than a minute to climb the steps, but time seemed attenuated in this total eclipse. She held her breath, the better to hear when he transitioned from the stairs. Suddenly there was only silence.
Case after case, in the Bureau and now gone rogue from it, she survived because of training and intuition. If she’d had to choose between one or the other, she would have forgone training to rely on intuition—the still, small voice that speaks out of your bone and blood and muscle.
It spoke to her now, and she knew that Hendrickson anticipated a trap. He’d come off the stairs with his breath held, careful to make no sound in his final few steps. He would start moving sideways around the chamber that lay between them, out of her blind line of fire. Hoping she had been quick enough to intuit his intent, she didn’t hesitate to squeeze off shots, although just two, not daring to expose herself through twice that many. An extra two seconds might be the difference between life and death. As she juked back into the passageway, he fired a burst at her muzzle flash, maybe six rounds. Stone cracked, bullets ricocheted with thin banshee shrieks, and even through the roar, she heard the distinct and mortal whistle of a round or two passing through the opening where she had stood.
She had to keep him guessing for ten seconds, fifteen. If she dared the flashlight, he’d follow, hose the passageway, and take her down either with a direct hit or a couple bank shots. She plucked the tote off the floor, left the flash tucked in her waistband, moving into the pitch-black passageway. She knew that in twelve or fifteen feet, it curved to the left, a ramp of flowstone, and she thought it lacked steps all the way to the top, although her memory was but a crude sketch compared to the mental blueprints he could consult.
16
They were hours late. Travis didn’t want to believe anything bad had happened to them, but they were very late.
Although he was supposed to stay away from the windows, he now stood in the living room, staring out at the highway, hoping to see the green car drive up to this little blue house, everyone safe and happy, after all.
Cars passed now and then, but never the right one.
The day someone killed his dad, he’d been playing at a friend’s house, staying overnight. He hadn’t heard about his dad until the next day.
He didn’t want to hear about Uncle Gavin and Aunt Jessie later. He wanted them to come home. He asked God to get them home.
The dogs were restless. Duke and Queenie roamed the house, not just on patrol, but as if looking for something.
Looking for Gavin and Jessie, just like Travis was. Gavin and Jessie were supposed to be there. The dogs knew Gavin and Jessie were supposed to be there, just like Travis knew.
It was time to feed the dogs. There was kibble, brought from home with biscuit treats and collars and leashes and blue poop bags.
He knew how to measure the kibble. Soon he would have to give them kibble and leash them and take them outside.
He didn’t want to take them outside. For one thing, he wasn’t supposed to leave the house. Don’t answer the door, don’t go near the windows, don’t leave the house.
Those were the rules. His mom said the best chance anyone had for a good and happy life was to play by the rules.
For another thing, he was afraid if he broke the rule about not leaving the house, he would jinx Gavin and Jessie. Then maybe they would never come back.
Duke came to his side and stood looking out at the palm-tree shadows stretching long, the sunshine, the highway. The dog made a crying sound.
17
The curving ramp of flowstone ascended without steps. Although Jane repeatedly misjudged the curve, bumping against the walls, she made it to the top, where she stood for a moment, listening to the hush below. He seemed hesitant to follow closely, as if he, too, feared being hosed in those confines.
Keep moving. Plan the action and commit. Stalking and being stalked, you’re more likely to die from lack of commitment than from taking action.
Because she had one more task than she had hands, she holstered the pistol. She carried the tote in her left hand, the flashlight now in her right, two fingers across the lens to damp the beam, so the glow might not be as easily seen around corners or from another room.
Sideways through a narrow passage, as if she were a fencer, the light her foil. Into a chamber with an open center surrounded by a peristyle of columns formed by stalactites meeting stalagmites; the atmosphere that of a temple, as if some subterranean congregation of mutant form gathered here according to a netherworld calendar, to worship gods unknown. Three passageways led out, and she took the one marked by a white arrow of paint, glancing back frequently.