I considered the rock wall facing me. “Hell, Art, I can’t climb this. I can’t believe you could.”
“My wife gave me some visits to a climbing gym last Christmas. I think she was hoping I’d get hooked on climbing and fall off a cliff somewhere.”
“Well, unless there’s a ladder up there you can send down—or unless you want to trade places and push me up—you might have to go on without me after all.”
“And break up this winning team? No way. How big’s your waist?”
“Thirty-four. No, more like thirty-six these days. What’s that—” A glimmer of understanding began to dawn on me. “How ’bout yours, Slim?”
“None of your business. But throw me your belt and we’ll see if we’re fat enough.” I took off my leather belt, refastened the buckle to make a hoop, and tossed it upward. Art snagged it, then disappeared. When he reappeared, he had fastened the tapered end of my belt into the buckle of his own. As he lowered one end of the linked belts, I saw that they added up to a good six feet long.
“Let’s hope that buckle holds,” he said. “The rivet looks pretty stout, but then again, so do you.”
Art sat on the lip of the circular opening, bracing his feet on the opposite edge. Wrapping a loop of leather around one wrist, he gripped the strap with both hands. “Try to feel for footholds,” he said. “I’m not sure I can deadlift you all the way up.” I nodded, climbing onto the evidence kit. Standing on tiptoe, I could reach just enough of the strap to take a turn around one wrist, as Art had done. He nodded. “Ready?”
“Ready. No, wait. Shouldn’t we bring the evidence kit?”
He considered this. “We’ve got bigger problems now than evidence gathering. Besides, I don’t think we can—you’re gonna need both hands to get up.”
“Yeah, but we might need to stand on it again. Lucky you’re trapped with a Ph.D.” Stepping down off the case, I bent down and unlaced both of my hiking boots. Splicing the two laces together gave me a piece of cord nearly ten feet long. I knotted one end to the case’s handle and hitched the other to one ankle. Then I climbed back up, put my flashlight in my pocket, and took hold of the dangling belt again. “Heave-ho,” I said, and he did.
Much grunting and scrambling later, I felt one of Art’s hands grasp first one wrist, then the other. He hauled me through the opening and landed me like some giant fish, thrashing and gasping. I undid the loop of belt from my nowpurplish hand, fished out my light, and set it beside me, pointing upward. As I reeled in the evidence kit, I surveyed my new surroundings. We were in a disappointingly small chamber, narrow and low-ceilinged. I looked at Art. “You sure this is progress?”
He was wearing his poker face, but I thought I saw a trace of a smile at the edges of his mouth. “Let’s take a look around, see what we see.”
It didn’t take long to spot what he was smiling about. “Okay, I see footprints going around that bend in the wall. But do they go anywhere besides a dead end?”
“What do you think? Study the tracks, Sherlock.”
I did. “Okay, I see prints going in both directions. But the last ones are leading away from here.”
“Which means…?”
“This must go somewhere.”
“Bingo. Unless, of course, we find Injun Joe’s shriveled corpse wedged in a culde-sac up ahead.”
“Or Lester Ballard’s lying in wait to have his way with us.”
“Lester? I thought Lester only had a thing for the female body.”
“These days,” I said, “you never know. Forensics makes for strange bedfellows.”
CHAPTER 25
WE DIDN’T FIND INJUN JOE or Lester, but it wasn’t long before we came to a cul-de-sac, or at least a crevice we couldn’t fit through. The tracks we’d been following led straight through it, so it wasn’t as if we’d missed a turn or side passage. There were none to miss in any case—we’d kept one pair of eyes on the tracks and another on the walls and roof of the passage. From the opening in the top of the quartz grotto, it led here and only here. It had seemed to be sloping upward, too, which had given us hope that we were slanting toward the surface. For all we knew, at this moment we might be standing within a hundred yards of an exit—but it might as well have been a hundred miles.
“Well, one thing’s for sure,” said Art glumly. “We know these aren’t the sheriff’s tracks. At least, not unless he passed through here about eighty pounds ago.”
“So now what? Do we go back down and try to dig our way out to the church, or do we dig for the back door, or just stay here till we get skinny enough to squeeze through?”