“Thanks a lot. The cops tell you anything else?”
We all turned to listen to the answer. “They’ve been doing that test all day-what do you call that stuff?”
“DNA,” I said. My three favorite letters of the alphabet. The science hadn’t even been reliable enough to be admissible in any courtroom in America until 1989, when it took six months for a lab to return a preliminary result to police and prosecutors who submitted evidence to the few facilities then capable of doing the work. Now it had reached the point that we could get a positive identification by dusk on human remains found at daybreak at a homicide scene like this.
“Yeah, they’re working on those-um, those pieces of flesh in a truck down the street. It’s got to be Duke. Duke and those two guys from Tobago.”
“What two guys?” Mike asked.
George stood up and reached for a slicker from a peg on the wall. “Tough break. There’s nobody any one of our men would rather have working shoulder to shoulder with them than Duke Quillian. Third generation in the hole-a real lifer. And these other two were just kids. Cousins who came up from the Caribbean to work in London with their uncle. Did a big piece of the Chunnel dig. Moved to the States just a couple of months ago.”
“Who reported them missing?” Mike asked. “Their families?”
“Nope. Neither one had any relatives here. Shared an apartment in Queens. They were set to work the evening shift yesterday. Landlord says they never came home.”
“These guys work evenings, too?” I asked. It was hard enough to imagine being so far down in the bedrock in daylight, but even creepier to think of being in that tunnel in the dark.
“Twenty-four/seven, Alex. We’re a few years behind our due date.”
Mike followed George toward the door. “What’s the difference, Coop? There’s no natural light down there anyway.”
“You game to go down with me?” George asked, pointing a finger and sweeping it around from Mike to Mercer to me.
The answer caught in my throat, but Mike and Mercer were quick to say yes.
George stood next to the solemn group of sandhogs who had just heard the news about their Tobagonian colleagues. “I need one of you guys to take us in, okay?”
Five of them stood up as though they hadn’t heard the question and excused themselves to get out the door. The others, elbows on the table and their chins resting on their hands, ignored Golden and listened to the commercial for hemorrhoidal cream as intently as they had followed the news stories of the blast.
“Bobby-Bobby Hassett,” Golden said to the man leading the group out the door. “Be a gent, will you? One way or the other, we’re going down there.”
“Sorry, Georgie. I’ve been helping since daybreak. Got a ride home waiting for me,” Hassett said, holding the door open for some of the others and then following them out.
“C’mon, somebody step up to the plate,” he said to the ones who remained. “Give me a hand. These detectives are here to figure this out, make us safe.”
Water Tunnel #3 had been designated a crime scene for the purpose of the investigation-to determine whether the blast was intentional or accidental. Even an accident could be declared a criminally negligent homicide.
No one responded.
Golden patted the back of the sandhog closest to him. “Get your gear on and come along.”
The surly-looking workman kicked back from the table and stood up, letting his chair fall over on its side. “Not if she’s comin’ down,” he said, cutting the air with a thick brogue and a sneer in my direction.
I started to say I’d prefer to wait right here, my usual eagerness to visit a crime scene-in order to understand every dynamic and detail of it-overcome by my fear of journeying so far into the ground.
“What’s your problem?” Mike asked. “She’s been places you wouldn’t have the balls to go to if I walked in front of you with an AK- 47.”
Golden waved off the hog with one hand and pulled on the doorknob with his other.
“Ignore him, Alex. It’s an old wives’ tale. These guys all cling to their myths and their macho bullshit. Bad luck to let a woman in the tunnel.”
From the reaction Golden’s request had drawn, it was a tale that still had legs.
“’Tisn’t bad luck,” the man said to him, striding past Mike out the door. “It’s no luck. No luck at all. It’s death to us down there, Georgie. We’ve already lost over thirty men since we started the dig for this job. How many more have to die?”
12
“I’ll wait up here if we all won’t fit in,” I said.
Three wooden crates were near my feet, each stamped on the side with the words explosives-30 LBS. In front of me was an eight-foot-tall metal cage that looked like the kind in which divers are lowered into the ocean to photograph sharks. Its open grid-work was painted red, and it dangled over the top of the hole from a giant winch. The sign on its door read: DANGER: AMPUTATION-KEEP HANDS AWAY FROM DOOR.
George Golden smiled at me. “Step in, Alex. It can hold us.”
Mike nudged me in the back and I reluctantly entered the Alimak-the tiny elevator that would carry the four of us to the floor of the deep shaft below. We were all wearing the obligatory yellow slickers, plastic hard hats in a variety of primary colors, and steel-tipped rubber boots that George had appropriated from the shack. Mine were way too big, and I shuffled forward to avoid stumbling out of the borrowed footwear.
The fifth man was at the controls of the machine, which ran up and down along the inside of the gaping, thirty-foot-wide mouth. He was dressed as we were and had large plugs protruding from his ears. “Do we need those?” Mercer asked.
“Only according to the law,” George said. “The guys never use them inside the tunnel, even though they’re supposed to. In the long run, they’ll have permanent hearing damage anyway-the blasts can split your eardrums. But it’s even more dangerous to take a chance that they can’t hear what’s going on down there.”
I clasped the honeycombed grid with one hand, bracing my back against the rear of the cage. The metal box rattled and shook when Mercer and Mike added their weight to it, and then again as the chief geologist entered last.
“You look nervous,” George said to me. “There’s nothing to worry about, really. You’ve got to keep your fingers in though.”
He reminded me of the DANGER sign and I dropped my hands to my sides. Mercer took one of mine in his own and squeezed it tightly.
Mike saw the gesture and laughed. “Coop’s tribe? Let’s just say it wasn’t the Stoics.”
The operator of the Alimak flipped the switch and the machine lurched into its descent.
Golden ran a finger down the length of his nose, watching my reaction as the noisy cage picked up speed. I didn’t want his attention centered on me, so I leaned my head back, concentrating on the circle of daylight over my head.
“You can always tell when someone isn’t going to like it in the hole,” he said.
“I’ll be fine.”
“If you got room down there for a wet bar, a mirror, and a tube of lipstick, then Coop is good to go,” Mike said.
By the time we had descended a hundred feet, the opening above had narrowed considerably and I felt constricted by the thick, dark wall surrounding us. I closed my eyes and lowered my head. Pinpoints of light-probably the naked bulbs at the bottom-were all I could see through the metal grating.
“You don’t want to look down, Alex,” George said, his voice echoing off the surface of the rock, which glistened with water.
“Are there guys who have trouble working here?” Mercer asked.
“Plenty of them. It’s gotta be in the blood. There are men who come down once, realize that this creaky elevator that might squeeze eight of us in at best is the only way out from that hellhole, and that the tunnels stretch for miles in both directions, full of sandhogs. Some would crawl up the walls if they could. And then there’s the dripping. Constant sound of dripping water. That’s what gets the rest of ’em.”