“Make it a square knot. Don’t want no sneaky taut-line hitch. I know my knots — scout’s honor. You know your knots, Cassie?”
I nodded. I’d earned that badge. I tied Walter’s wrists with a true square knot but I looped it loose.
Hap moved in to check. He slid a finger into the knot. “Aw Buttercup.” He shook his head and laid the gun butt across my back.
The blow knocked me to the floor.
Walter swore.
There was a thud and a grunt and Walter came down beside me.
I lay stunned, as much from the shock as the pain, because against all good sense I’d held onto the idea that a man who’d run saline through my veins had a strain of humanity running through his, that Hap would not penalize us for trying, but I came to my senses and saw there was no scout’s honor here.
Hap climbed onto my back and tied my wrists with a boyishly brutal knot.
Then he moved to Walter.
I kept stupefied watch. This EMT runs terror through the veins and cuts off oxygen to the brain. I feared the effect on Walter. Another mini-stroke. And then Walter, like Oliver, could not be carried.
42
Hap had to help Walter to his feet.
We went single-file, first Walter then me then Hap. Hap had retrieved Dearing’s subgun and he wore it slung across his back. Oliver’s subgun rode in his hands, as I discovered when I slowed and its hard mouth bit into my spine.
Walter stumbled once but all Hap said was “watch your step.”
We came to a junction and bore left into a larger tunnel, a tunnel with a cathedral ceiling and four-square timbering and intact rails. An important tunnel.
I oriented myself. There was daylight at the far end. We were on level two, heading for the exit where, beyond the locked gate, was the rubble pile, and beyond that was the path leading down to level one and the valley, and beyond that the ridges and then Cherokee Canyon and our waiting vehicles. And beyond that, the way back to the Inn to find Soliano and then soak our feet.
I fought down the vision.
We nearly made it to the exit. Hap stopped us a dozen yards short, where a side tunnel branched off. It was gated. I angled my headlamp to illuminate the metal sign wired to the bars: No entry. Hazardous. Deteriorating explosives. Broken machine parts. Hap stood us against the far wall. He brought out a keyring from his capacious pants pocket.
I focused on the problem of the locks, desperate to occupy my mind. Hap or Roy had changed the Park Service locks because they did not want any patrolling rangers to come in here and find their stash. But Chickie turned up instead, come to find out what Jardine had been hiding, come to get in on the blackmail. Single-minded in her greed. Methodically, I ticked off the gates we’d seen, the locks we’d tried. Two entrance gates had been locked. The top-level gate had been unlocked. Either Chickie had picked that lock, or Hap or Roy had been sloppy. I didn’t much care. I cared about this gate, this lock, and what lay beyond.
Hap didn’t need his key.
The side tunnel was unremarkable until we passed an alcove containing a winch and a spool of neon purple cable, both on wheeled dollies. The growing knot in my stomach tightened. Up ahead was a larger intersecting tunnel. Some kind of fat snake crawled out of that tunnel, into ours — and Walter stiffened — but as we drew nearer I identified the snake as a bundle of wires. The bundle ran along our tunnel wall then snaked to the right, into a room.
Hap directed us to follow the bundled wires.
It was a cavernous room filled with rusting machinery. It took me some moments to sort the tangle by the light of our headlamps. I identified the twin flywheels of an old drum winch. A cable spool lay flat with its guts unwinding. Wheels and gears were scattered about, like the sprung works of a giant wristwatch. Hap followed the bundled wires to the corner where a small generator sat. It too was rusted but Hap brought it to life, illuminating a string of bare light bulbs.
I had to squint.
Hap directed us across the room. We skirted crates of supplies no miner would have dreamed of: bottled water, freeze-dried food, sleeping bags, hazmat suits and SCBA gear. And then there was a box of putty-like cylinders that any modern-day miner would presumably recognize. I thought, so that’s what plastique looks like — play-dough, like Chickie said. It should look scarier.
Hap told us to take a seat on the cable spool.
He turned to the splintery table against the wall. He removed a rotting burlap sack to reveal a machine no miner would have dreamed of: a laptop computer. Its cable joined the wire bundle. He switched on the machine. He sat on a crate in front of the table and rested Oliver’s submachine gun across his lap, snout to us. He tapped the keyboard. He angled the monitor. “Look around the corner.”
The creepy thing was, we could.
Around the corner was the large tunnel. The picture on the computer screen was a long shot, looking uptunnel, which was lit by bulbs that hung like bats from the ceiling. The camera, as well, must have been ceiling-mounted because we had a gods-eye view. I oriented myself, first, by locating the wire bundle which powered the room. Traversing the tunnel were rusting rails where ore carts used to run, but clearly Hap had no need for carts to haul his loads. A beastly telehandler squatted beside an ore shaft. Attachments were at the ready: tools to unbolt and detorque the cask lid, invertible forks to hook into the cask lifting lugs. The telehandler was ready to empty the next load of resins, but the swap had ended. The stockpile was, de facto, complete.
My attention shifted to the ore shaft.
As if Hap understood, he changed the picture. The gods-eye view closed and then a new window opened onscreen. It was a view inside the shaft, a view that brutally tied off the knot in my gut.
Resin beads filled the shaft, lapping nearly to the top. So that’s what they look like. I’d seen them in the borax tunnel but they’d been coming at me like cannon-fire and I hadn’t paused for a good long look. I took it now. Looked more like sand than beads. Or, even, bath salts. They gave off a warm amber glow. They should look scarier. They should sound scarier—beads was too benign a word. There should be better words. TripleX shitload of mayhem carrying cell-destroying gentlemen.
There were no words. There was only fear.
I averted my gaze from the screen. It fell on the crate of hazmat gear, next to Hap. The lid was propped open but I guessed it had been closed when Chickie found her way in here. I guessed she’d had to fight the latches to open the lid, picking up the grains of rust I’d scraped from beneath her nails. Here’s where she’d found her moonsuit. And then, suited up, believing she was good to go, she’d gone looking for Jardine’s cache. And there, in the shaft, she’d found it. She’d known we were hunting for it, and now she could take a pack full of beads to show Soliano she’d found it, and bargain for her million-dollar reward. She certainly worked hard for it. It must have been an awkward job. She must have been on her hands and knees, reaching down into the shaft to scoop enough to fill her pack. Maybe she stirred up the beads enough to go aerosol, and if her facepiece wasn’t snugged up real tight, maybe she breathed in the murderous dust. I hoped not. From what I’d seen, she was already paying dearly for her crime.
I whispered to Hap, “What do you want?”
“Compensation for my hard work.” He swiveled to face us. “Speaking of which, you can’t get good help any more, can you?”
I could not think what to say. Yes? No? I could feel well enough — the rough wood biting into my backside, the shirtsleeve throttling my wrists — but I could not think which answer would satisfy Hap. Nor, evidently, could Walter.
“This tying your tongues?” Hap hefted the subgun. “We’re just going to talk. About lousy help. You paying attention?”