“How’re you holding out?”
I could barely hear him. “Not good.”
I straightened myself out against the concrete, putting the rope between me and the rough surface, wincing at the friction burns that now covered both my hands. Slowly, I wriggled my way up, improving as the slope lessened, until I could gather my feet beneath me and half walk, half pull myself level to the wounded man.
Once there, I wrapped the line several times around my middle, anchoring myself, and then looped the end of it under his armpits.
“What’s your name?”
“Frank.” His voice was a whisper.
I snugged the loop up and tied it off. “Do you know where you’re hit?”
“The chest, I think.”
I gestured to the wooden taintor gates that controlled the amount of water pouring into the spillway during flood season. “I’m going to go up there, secure this line, and pull you up after me. Okay?”
Frank barely murmured his assent.
Using the rope hand over hand, I step-walked the rest of the way to the edge of the Glory Hole, almost to flat footing, and carried out the anticlimactic conclusion to my almost fatally flawed plan, wondering whether Sammie would have done a better job or ended up dead at the bottom of the drain.
I pulled Frank up to me like a deer carcass and then carefully rolled him onto his back. The front of his khaki uniform was drenched in blood. “How’re you doin’?”
He blinked up at me several times, as if trying to decipher my words. “I feel kind of numb.”
“Can you wiggle your hands and feet?”
“I guess.” He moved his extremities very slightly.
“How’s your breathing? Any pain?”
“Not much,” he murmured.
“When did you get hit?”
“I don’t know-maybe twenty minutes ago.”
That caught me off guard. “Why didn’t you answer your radio? They’ve been trying to raise you for hours.”
“It stopped working after I headed out this morning.” He gave me a weak smile. “That’s why I was going to the shed-to report in.”
I shook my head at the providence of pure luck and finally pulled the radio from my pocket. “Sammie-you there?”
“Jesus Christ, Joe. Where the hell you been?”
“Busy. This guy’s secure now, but he needs help fast.”
“The ambulance is here, but we still don’t know if the scene’s safe.”
“Hang on.” Ignoring the pain in my hands, I reached up and grasped the edge of the circular dock above and chinned myself up until I could look along the length of the second catwalk to the remnants of the shed on the access tower. The damage was extensive, a good part of both shore-facing walls tattered and torn enough to threaten the whole structure. I could see into it, however, thanks to all the extra impromptu windows, and could even see through it to the daylight on the far side. It looked completely empty.
I dropped back down and retrieved the radio. “Sam, I think you can go ahead. He must’ve ducked below surface. Send a recon team in to secure, though. He may be setting us up.”
“Can you give us cover?”
“Negative. I lost my gun. Bring me a backup, will you?”
“10-4.”
Frank was weakly tugging at my pant leg. I squatted down to hear him. “He can get away.”
“How?”
“Through the spillway tube-the outlet’s a half mile from here. The tower has its own tunnel, leading to a bypass chamber. That used to be it-a dead end. But we cut a connector passage from the chamber to the spillway tube just last week. It hasn’t been sealed yet. He’s got a clear shot.” He stopped and breathed heavily, catching his breath, wincing with the effort.
A shiver of adrenaline tickled the nape of my neck at again losing the man who had both raped Gail and now tried to kill me. “Okay, don’t say any more. We’ll get him.”
I could hear the recon team approaching cautiously along the first catwalk, so I chinned myself up again and swung one leg onto the dock to save my strength.
Sammie saw me and hurried forward, her eyes glued to the shed. She squatted down next to me and helped me up with her free hand. “How’s the guy doin’?”
“Hanging on by a thread.” I took the gun she handed me. “We’re going to have to go after the shooter.”
She looked at me, surprised. “Why?”
“Because he’s got an out. There’s an underground connector to the spillway outlet about a half mile away.”
“Shit,” she muttered, and moved as quickly as a panther across to the second catwalk and up to the shed, her shotgun held at the ready, the two other men and I in her wake.
The shed was empty and in the center of its debris-strewn floor was a trap door leading to a steep metal ladder. Damp, cold air drifted up out of the opening like the mist from a fresh grave.
I turned to one of the officers who had accompanied Sammie-a state police sergeant from the Brattleboro barracks. “You know where the spillway outlet is?”
He shook his head. “But there’s a power-company rep on the dam.”
“Good. Get him to show you and seal it off. Better yet, if you have the manpower, seal it and send a team in to meet us partway. Sammie and I’ll be heading down from here. If this guy feels he’s being pinched in the middle, he may chuck it in-assuming he’s not already gone.”
The sergeant left, stepping around the medical personnel on the curved dock, who were already beginning to lift their back-boarded patient up over the railing.
I turned to the remaining officer, from the Dover Police Department. “You have a flashlight I can borrow?”
He pulled a heavy brain-basher from his belt and held it out to me. “What’d you want me to do?”
I glanced over at Sammie, who was standing grim but ready at the edge of the black rectangular opening-a mirror to my own eagerness to get this done, once and for all. “Stay here and keep in touch by radio. And do what you have to do if he gets by us and doubles back.”
A young man with probably no more than a year on the force, he looked at me with wide eyes. “Could he do that?”
“He could if he kills us both,” Sammie muttered.
14
I stood next to Sammie, eyeing the narrow opening to the vertical shaft of the maintenance tower, a few remaining notes of caution struggling to be heard in a tired, overworked mind. “Wish I knew what we were getting into.”
She kept watching the entrance as if it might suddenly come to life. “According to the power-company guy I was talking to on the dam, we’re now standing on top of something like a hundred-and-seventy-foot-tall underwater missile silo-a twenty-foot-wide cement tube sticking straight out of the mud with a zigzag ladder running down one of the inside walls.”
“What’s at the bottom?”
She shrugged. “Beats me-that was about the whole conversation right there.”
“Well,” I gave in, “guess we better get to it.” I stretched out on my stomach, poked the powerful flashlight beam over the edge of the hole, and after a slight pause during which no bullet came flying up to blow my hand off, I cautiously stuck my head over. Sammie joined me.
Below us-indeed, beneath where we lay-was a seemingly bottomless, smooth-walled, misty pit, the dampness of which formed a slight fog, thick enough to defeat the flashlight’s ability to reach the bedrock. The ladder was fastened to one glistening side, zigzagging back and forth at sharp vertical angles from one narrow platform to the next, like some misplaced urban fire escape. It appeared almost puny in comparison to the void all around it. The whole thing gave me vertigo, a feeling enhanced by the realization that the thin metal flooring I was stretched out on was all that was saving me from a free-fall into the void.
“How the hell’re we going to make a safe approach into that?” Sammie asked softly. “Put down some covering fire and follow it in?”
I’d never been a big one for fireworks, especially if I had no idea where they were landing. “No. In the dark,” I countered, switching off the light and swinging one leg over the edge, “and in silence.”