Maybe I didn’t have to get that close. Maybe I just had to get to the wires.
I clutched the carving knife tighter in my right hand and started crouch-walking into the dark of the tunnel. As an afterthought, I reached down and picked up the duct-taped timer bomb with my left hand.
Frickin’ Rambo.
The dry air stank of something acrid, something old, trapped long ago. It smelled like death. I wanted to run forward, find the wires, but he might hear me. I moved forward slowly.
Every few paces, I stopped to look back, to make sure I could still see the green light. When it came time to run, I was going to need that light.
But after twenty-five or thirty paces, the green bulb had disappeared in the darkness behind me.
A faint speck of light appeared in the darkness ahead. I moved closer. It was the same green as the bulb by the tunnel entrance, but this was softer, more diffused. When I got within fifty feet, I dropped down and started crawling on my knees and elbows, the knife still in my right hand, timer bomb in my left.
At twenty feet, I stopped. The light was coming from the left side of the tunnel ahead. I shut my eyes tight, opened them after a minute, and made out a wall straight ahead. My tunnel was dead-ending into a cross tunnel from another house.
And then I saw it, lying on the floor of the cross tunnel, to the right, directly across from the green light. I crawled forward, ten feet, five feet, and then stopped. It was a boot, a dusty, dirtclumped boot, poking out from denim jeans. It didn’t move.
I set down the knife and the timer bomb and crawled forward. “Stanley,” I whispered. “Stanley.”
I shook the boot. It was rigid, immobile. I slid forward on my left side, all the way into the green light at the intersection of the cross tunnel.
White halogen light hit me from behind. In the sudden glare, the shrunken, bearded face with wild dark hair stared at me from empty eye sockets, screaming noiselessly from an open, dead mouth. His tobacco-colored flesh had pulled taut against his skull, mummified from the dry air in the tunnel. A foot below his chin, three black bullet holes had pierced his chest. Below his wounds, the yellowed T-shirt was stained with a long-dried torrent of crusted blood.
“I stopped him,” the calm voice said.
I rolled over to face the blinding light coming from his end of the cross tunnel. I couldn’t see him in the glare.
But I knew the voice.
Twenty-eight
“He was no good, Mr. Elstrom.” He angled the super-white beam of the handheld spotlight off my face, down onto the cement floor ten feet in front of me, but still I could not see him.
Suddenly I was tired, bone-heavy from being too stubborn to accept what my mind had been tiptoeing around since-hell, since the beginning. I pushed myself up to sit against the wall of the tunnel, two feet from Michael Jaynes’s dead foot.
“I knew him from working security those nights.” Stanley spoke conversationally, his voice almost lazy behind the light. “Michael always stayed late, checking the work, I thought, and we’d get to talking when I came by on my rounds. He was your basic liberal lefty, but he seemed like a dedicated Joe on the job, working overtime after his boys had left, making sure things were being done right. We got along.”
Clipping noises came from Stanley’s end of the cross tunnel, and above my head, something stirred. I looked up. Red wires, black wires, and white and green wires were vibrating an inch below the cross-tunnel ceiling. He was snipping at those wires with a wire cutter, attaching them in some lethal combination.
“That April night in 1970,” he went on, “after I’d dropped off the ten thousand behind the restaurant, I came back to make my rounds. I got to the Phelps house, though it wasn’t yet called that, and went down to check the basement. I checked all the basements those nights, for kids at first, but then extra careful after the two letters. Anyway, somebody had pulled away the concrete forms from the tunnel entrance. It was odd, because they were scheduled to seal up those entrances the next day. I looked inside the tunnel, saw a faint light from far in. I supposed it was a worker making sure everything was ready, but I figured I ought to check to be safe. I crawled inside. That’s when I saw Michael, sitting right where he is now, working with some wires.”
“‘What are you doing?’ I asked, thinking it was no big deal. But Michael smiled the sickest smile you’d ever hate to see, and I noticed his eyes were all sparkly. ‘Fixing things,’ he said. ‘What things?’ I asked. ‘They made a mess with their greed, Stanley: Vietnam, ghettos in the cities, rural poor. Everything is being bled to make rich people richer. Ordinary folks can’t do much. They march, they sing their songs, and the angriest of them riot and burn. None of that stops the greed, of course, but it does make rich people nervous enough to build places like this, thinking they can protect themselves from what they created.’”
Stanley clipped faster behind the bright light. “It sounded like crap to me, Mr. Elstrom. I told Michael he was making up phony baloney just so he could get ten thousand dollars. Michael laughed at that. ‘The ten thousand is still in the Dumpster, Stanley. I’m just going to show those rich bastards they can’t hide in a place like Crystal Waters. They’re going to pay, more and more, but this place is still going to disappear, one house at a time. And when the last house is gone, they’ll realize that no amount of money can protect them behind their fancy walls, and they’ll act better.’”
The wires above my head danced.
I snuck a look down the main tunnel to Amanda’s basement.The knife I’d dropped next to the timer bomb was only a couple feet from my shoe.
“So you shot him, Stanley? Just like that, you killed him?”
“Small cluster right to the heart, as you can see.” He sighed. “He couldn’t let me get away. I knew too much, and I would stop his grand plan for world peace. So yes, I shot him, and the letters and explosives I found down here afterward would have justified it.”
“But you didn’t report it.” I’d have no chance if I just took off. The tunnel to Amanda’s basement was too straight. He’d come to the tunnel intersection, find my back with his spotlight, and pump a few rounds into me before I was fifty feet down.
“Report it, Mr. Elstrom? Why stir up a ruckus? If this place were known to be full of D.X.12, none of the Members would have moved in. They wouldn’t have gotten their money back, either, because the developers would have gone bankrupt. The town of Maple Hills would have lost, too-a sorely needed source of new income. Everybody would have lost.”
“And you would not have become security chief,” I said, while I thought about what I could do.
The snipping stopped. “I was not thinking of myself, Mr. Elstrom.” There was an edge to his voice. It was good. He was getting mad, maybe enough to distract him, from the wires, and from my legs. I’d started pulling my feet up under me.
“Of course not, Stanley.” I laid it on thick enough so he couldn’t miss the derision in my voice. “Just like I’m sure you left that ten thousand in the Dumpster to get picked up as garbage.”
“I went back and retrieved the money, sure, but it’s still in my garage, untouched after all these years.”
The clipping began again.
“Sounds like what you call phony baloney, Stanley,” I said to the glare. My feet were up under me, my knees high.
“I told you. Michael Jaynes was going to keep blowing things up.”