Forever Odd

Page 10

If this man had not died accidentally, if he had been murdered, surely Danny Jessup had not killed him. Which seemed to leave only the possibility that he had been offed by one of his associates.
After retrieving my backpack and shrugging my arms through the straps, I continued in the direction that I had been headed. Several times, I glanced back, half expecting to discover that he had risen, but he never did.
SEVENTEEN
EVENTUALLY I TURNED EAST-SOUTHEAST INTO ANOTHER tunnel. This one was dark.
Sufficient light intruded past the intersection to reveal the GFI switch on the wall of the new passage. The stainless-steel plate was set at six feet, suggesting the designers of the flood-control system had not expected water ever to rise within a foot of that mark, confirming that the volume of the drains was far greater than a worst-case storm required.
I flicked the switch. The tunnel ahead brightened, as perhaps did other branches related to it.
Because I now proceeded east-southeast and because the storm was evidently coming in from the north, this new passageway brought no water toward me.
The concrete had nearly dried from its most recent soaking. The floor featured a skin of pale sediment littered with small items that had fallen out of the last spate of runoff from a previous storm.
I looked for footprints in the silt, but saw none. If Danny and his captors had come this way, they had stayed on the elevated walkway that I used.
My sixth sense compelled me forward. As I walked somewhat faster than before, I wondered…
In the streets of Pico Mundo are manhole covers. Those heavy cast-iron discs must be disengaged from integrating latch slots and lifted with a special tool.
Logic argued that the conduits belonging to the department of power and water and those under the authority of the sewer department must be systems separate from—and much more humble than—the flood-control tunnels. Otherwise, I would by now have encountered numerous maintenance shafts with stairs or ladders.
Although I had walked miles in the first tunnel, I had not seen a single service entrance after the one through which I had arrived. Less than two hundred yards into the new passageway, I came to an unmarked steel door in the wall.
The psychic magnetism that drew me toward Danny Jessup did not pull me toward this exit. Simple curiosity motivated me.
Beyond the door—heavy to the point of massiveness, as had been the two through which I had entered—I located a light switch and a T-shaped corridor. Other doors stood at the ends of the short arms of the T.
One of these revealed a vestibule where an open spiral of metal stairs led up to what was clearly another slump-stone shed like the one into which I had broken, property of the Maravilla County Flood-Control Project.
At the other end of the T, a door opened into a high-ceilinged transition space that housed a steep flight of conventional stairs. They rose twenty feet to a door marked PMDPW.
I interpreted this to mean Pico Mundo Department of Power and Water. Also stenciled on the steel was 16S-SW-V2453, which meant nothing to me.
I explored no farther. I had discovered that the subterranean systems of the department of power and water interfaced with the flood-control-project tunnels at least at a few points.
Why this might eventually be useful information, I didn’t know, but I felt that it would.
After returning to the drain and discovering that the white-eyed snaky man was not waiting for me, I proceeded east-southeast.
When another tunnel met this one, the elevated walkway ended. In the powdery sediment below were footprints crossing the intersection to the place where the walkway resumed.
I dropped two feet to the drain floor and studied the prints in the silt.
Danny’s tracks were different from the others. His numerous fractures over the years—and the unfortunate distortions in the bones that often accompanied healing in a victim of osteogenesis imperfecta—had left his right leg an inch shorter than his left, and twisted. He hobbled with a roll of the h*ps and tended to drag his right foot.
If I was also hunchbacked, he had once said, I’d have a lifelong job in the bell tower at Notre Dame, with good fringe benefits, but as usual, Mother Nature hasn’t played fair with me.
In keeping with his diminutive stature, his feet were no bigger than those of a ten- or twelve-year-old. In addition, his right was a size larger than his left.
No one else could have made these tracks.
When I considered how far they had brought him on foot, I felt sick, angry, and afraid for him.
He could take short walks—a few blocks, a tour of the mall— without pain, sometimes even without discomfort. But a trek as long as this would be agony for him.
I had thought Danny had been taken by two men—his biological father, Simon Makepeace, and the nameless snaky man, now deceased. In the powdery silt, however, were three additional sets of footprints.
Two were the prints of grown men, one with larger feet than the other. The third appeared to have been made by a boy or a woman.
I tracked them across the confluence of tunnels to the next section of walkway. Thereafter, I again had nothing to follow except my uniquely intense intuition.
This dry section of the labyrinth lacked even the silken whisper of shallow water flowing unimpeded. This was deeper than a silence; this was a hush.
I have a light tread; and having proceeded at a measured pace, I was not breathing hard. Even as I walked, I could listen to the tunnel without masking any noises my quarry might make. But no telltale footfalls or voices came to me.
A couple of times, I halted, closed my eyes to concentrate on listening. I heard only a deep hollow potential for sound, and not a throb or gurgle that wasn’t internal to me.
The evidence of such profound silence suggested that somewhere ahead, the four had departed the flood tunnels.
Why would Simon have kidnapped a son he didn’t want and whom he refused to believe he had fathered?
Answer: If he thought that Danny was the offspring of the man with whom Carol had cuckolded him, Simon might take satisfaction in killing him. He was a sociopath. Neither logic nor ordinary emotions served as a foundation for his actions. Power—and the pleasure he got from exercising it—and survival were his only motivations.
That answer had satisfied me thus far—but no longer.
Simon could have murdered Danny in his bedroom. Or if my arrival at the Jessup house had interrupted him, he could have done the job in the van, while the snaky guy drove, and would have had time for torture if that was what he wanted.
Bringing Danny into this maze and hiking him through miles of tunnels qualified as a form of torture, but it was neither dramatic enough nor physically invasive enough to thrill a homicidal sociopath who liked wet work.
Simon—and his remaining two companions—had some use for poor Danny that eluded me.
Neither had they come this way to circumvent the roadblocks, nor the sheriffs-department aerial patrols. They could have found better places in which to lie low until the blockades were removed.
With grim expectations, I walked faster now, not because psychic magnetism pulled me more effectively, which it did not, but because at each intersection, I had the confirmation of their footprints in the silt.
The endless gray walls, the monotony of the patterns of shadow and light thrown by the overhead lamps, the silence: This might have served as Hell for any hopeless sinner whose two greatest fears were solitude and boredom.
Following the discovery of the first footprints, I hurried along for more than another thirty minutes, not running but walking briskly—and came to the place at which they had exited the maze.
EIGHTEEN
WHEN I TOUCHED THE STAINLESS-STEEL SERVICE DOOR in the wall of the tunnel, a psychic hook bit deep, and I felt myself being reeled forward, as if my quarry were the fishermen and I the fish.
Beyond the door, an L-shaped hallway. At the end of the L, a door. Pushing through the door, I found a vestibule, spiral stairs, and at the top another slump-stone shed with tool rack.
Although the February day was pleasantly warm, not blistering, the air in here was stuffy. The smell of dry rot settled from the rafters under the sun-baked metal roof.
Apparently Simon had picked the lock as he had done at the first shed off the alleyway near the Blue Moon Cafe. Leaving, they had closed the door, and it had latched securely behind them.
With my laminated driver’s license, I could spring a simple latch, but although cheap and flimsy, this model would be impervious to a plastic loid. I retrieved the pair of locking tongs from my backpack.
I was not concerned about the noise alerting Simon and his crew. They would have passed this way hours ago; and I had every reason to believe that they had kept moving.
As I was about to apply the tongs to the lock cylinder, Terri’s satellite phone rang, startling me.
I fumbled it from my pocket and answered on the third ring. Yeah?
Hi.
From that single word, I recognized the smoky-voiced woman who had called while I’d been sitting under the branches of the poisonous brugmansia behind the Ying house, the previous night.
You again.
Me.
She could have obtained this number only by calling my recharged cell phone and talking to Terri.
Who are you? I asked.
You still think I have the wrong number?
No. Who are you?
She said, You have to ask?
Didn’t I just?
You shouldn’t have to ask.
I don’t know your voice.
So many men know it well.
If she wasn’t speaking in riddles, she was at least being obscure, taunting.
Have I ever met you? I asked.
No. But can’t you dream me up?
Dream you up?
I’m disappointed in you.
Again?
Still.
I thought of the footprints in the silt. One pair had belonged to either a boy or a woman.
Not sure of the game, I waited.
She waited, too.
In most of the rafter junctions, spiders had spun webs. Those architects hung, glossy and black, among the pale carcasses of flies and moths on which they had feasted.
Finally I said, What do you want?
Miracles.
By which you mean—what?
Fabulous impossible things.
Why call me?
Who else?
I’m a fry cook.
Astonish me.
I sling hash.
She said, Icy fingers.
What?
That’s what I want.
You want icy fingers?
Up and down my spine.
Get an Eskimo masseuse.
Masseuse?
For the icy fingers.
The humorless always need to ask, and she did: Is that a joke?
Not a great one, I admitted.
You think everything’s funny? Is that the way you are?
Not everything.
Not very much at all, as**ole. You laughing now?
No, not now.
You know what I think would be funny?
I didn’t reply.
What I think would be funny is I take a hammer to the little creep’s arm.
Overhead, an eight-legged harpist moved, and silent arpeggios trembled through taut strings of spider silk.
She said, Will his bones shatter like glass?
I didn’t at once respond. I thought before I spoke, then said, I’m sorry.
What’re you sorry for?
I’m sorry for offending you with the joke about the Eskimo.
Baby, I don’t offend.
I’m glad to hear that.
I just get pissed off.
I’m sorry. I mean it.
Don’t be boring, she said.
I said, Please don’t hurt him.
Why shouldn’t I?
Why should you?
To get what I want, she said.
What do you want?
Miracles.
Maybe it’s me, I’m sure it is, but you aren’t making sense.
Miracles, she repeated.
Tell me what I can do?
Amazements.
What can I do to get him back unhurt?
You disappoint me.
I’m trying to understand.
He’s proud of his face, isn’t he? she asked.
Proud? I don’t know.
It’s the only part of him not screwed up.
My mouth had gone dry, but not because the shed was hot and layered with dust.
He’s got a pretty face, she said. For now.
She terminated the call.
Briefly I considered pressing *69 to see if I could ring her back even though she had a block on her caller ID. I did not do it because I suspected this would be a mistake.
Although her cryptic statements shed no light on her enigmatic agenda, one thing seemed clear. She was accustomed to control, and at the mildest challenge to it, she responded with hostility.
Having assigned to herself the aggressive role in this, she expected me to be passive. If I star-sixty-nined her, she would no doubt be pissed off.
She was capable of cruelty. What anger I inspired in her, she might vent on Danny.
The smell of dry rot. Of dust. Of something dead and desiccated in a shadowy corner.
I returned the phone to my pocket.
On a silken thread, a spider descended from its web, lazily turning in the still air, legs trembling.
NINETEEN
I RIPPED OUT THE LOCK CYLINDER, SHOVED OPEN THE door, and left the spiders to their preying.
So otherworldly and disturbing had been the flood-control system, so eerie the phone conversation that followed, had I stepped across the threshold into Narnia, I would not have been more than mildly surprised.
In fact, I found myself beyond the limits of Pico Mundo, but not in a land ruled by magic. On all sides lay desert scrub, rocky and remorseless.
This shed stood on a concrete pad twice its size. A chain-link fence enclosed the facility.
I walked the perimeter of this enclosure, studying the rugged landscape, seeking any sign of an observer. The encircling terrain offered no good hiding places.
When it appeared that retreat to the shed, to avoid gunfire, would not be necessary, I climbed the chain-link gate.
The stony ground immediately before me took no impressions. Relying on intuition, I headed south.
The sun had reached its apex. Perhaps five hours of daylight remained before the early winter nightfall.
To the south and west, the pale sky looked three shades short of the ideal blue, as though it had been faded by millennia of sunshine reflected upon it from the Mojave.
In contrast, behind me, the northern third of the heavens had been consumed by ravenous masses of threatening clouds. They were dirty, as they had been earlier, but now also bruised.
Within a hundred yards, I topped a low hill and descended into a swale where the soft soil took prints. Before me again were the tracks of the fugitives and their captive.
Danny had been dragging his right foot worse here than in the flood tunnels. The evidence of his gait suggested acute pain and desperation.
Most victims of osteogenesis imperfecta—OI—experience a marked decrease in fractures following puberty. Danny had been one of those.