I walked up to the creek, my shoe heels making slippy track marks in the muck.
Mr. Maris had never, after all, discovered he was being traced. He’d never found Jim Dirkson’s clunky butterfly knife in his pocket and tossed it overboard. He’d gone down to the creek, that’s all. Disappeared into a tunnel. He’d gone underground.
The water in the creek was shallow, but it was rushing, pulsing a little as it rose with the rain. I walked slowly, picking out individual rocks to stand on, till I got to the mouth of the tunnel. There I got down on all fours, feeling the creek water rush around me, swallowing my hands up to the wrists and surging around my knees and feet, and looked with narrowed eyes up that infinite darkness of pipe. A cold, wet animal smell breathed back out at me.
There was nothing left to do, right? This was it.
I shivered, fighting off a wave and then another wave of memory. They called it the shed, but it was more like a chamber. An underground compartment. More like a coffin, really, is what it was, concrete and narrow. Four hours in there for hygiene violations on the kill floor. Six hours for spillage. Overnight for Thoughts Against Good Work. Every hour on the hour a Franklin would crack the lid, shine the light in your eyes, listen for your breathing, close the lid again.
There was nothing to be done. This was it. I leaned forward and hunched my shoulders together, pushed the upper part of my body carefully forward, as a circus performer gingerly places his head into the lion’s mouth. I eased back and forth, back and forth, getting a sense for the width. Jackdaw at five eight and a buck fifty could fit in here, no problem. For a bruiser like Mr. Maris, I thought, it would be tight. But not impossible.
I got in there okay myself. Turned off my light, stuck it back in my jacket, and eased my body all the way into the hole. I splashed in the dirty rush of water, hunched forward, keeping my upper body small and bent. I walked with my hands stretched out on either side, fingertips scraping along the roughly textured walls. I walked a long time that way, bent almost parallel with the ground, genuflecting as I went, until the ceiling tapered back down and I was forced onto all fours and went awhile that way, soaking my kneecaps and my palms.
Time passed, and I didn’t know how much time, either. I just walked, an invisible man moving through the darkness.
That makes it sound like I was cool, cool as the water, levelheaded, nice and easy, but my stomach was clutching at me. This was the part of it I never had to do. This wasn’t part of my job description. My deal was, I tracked him down—him or her or they—I found the lair, and then I called in the cavalry. My job was the following of bread crumbs: I had tracked men across miles of prairie, down crooked Freedman Town alleyways, along boardwalks, out onto beaches. And every time I called Bridge to put the rest in motion, and every time I turned back into smoke and drifted away. The final part I never had to see.
One time I decided to force myself to stay. I must have been in some kind of mood. Some foul place. Because I decided I needed, for once, to force myself after calling it in to hang around and watch the denouement.
It was in Massachusetts. It was in February. A small college in the cold far west of the state, where I had followed the thread of a man to a fraternity house. They’d put him in a room in the attic, had been bringing him beer and dining-hall cereal for three days, trying to figure out a connecting flight. But there were way too many girlfriends and study buddies and drunk pledges wandering in and out of there, too many people brought up to the attic after swearing secrecy, and word was out—all over campus. All over town. Easiest file I ever closed.