“We’re looking for cables in dark places.”
“Excuse me?”
“Go with me on this,” Vail said. “Don’t think too hard. Just-whatever comes to mind first.”
Cooper shrugged and said, “Well, there are the tunnels…that’d be the most obvious.”
Vail swung and looked around. Large form machinery, humongous spools of thick, stranded cable and spare brakes and gears filled the space as far as she could see.
“Tunnels,” Vail said. “Where?”
Burden scrunched his face. “Tunnels?”
“Yes,” Vail said. “Cables in small dark places. From the note.”
Cooper looked from Vail to Burden and back to Vail. “And then there are the blind channels.”
“What are they like?” Dixon asked.
“Long tunnels. The sheaves run through them, carry the cables under the street.”
Burden’s chin jutted forward. “The what? Shivs?”
“Spelled s-h-e-a-v-e-s, pronounced shivs. Large spool-type pulleys that keep tension on the cables. They enable the cars to change direction, like around curves. C’mon, I’ll show you.”
“Shiv,” Burden said to Vail. “Prison weapons are called-”
“I know. Something tells me we’re on the right track.”
Dixon looked at Vail. “Is that a joke?”
Cooper led them through, and past, what appeared to be a maintenance and repair facility. Industrial grinders, saws, drill presses-a gearhead’s dream.
Ahead, four lengths of cable crossed above their heads from one end of the long room to the other. To the extreme left, eight large-spoked wheels driven by massive General Electric engines spun in unison, feeding the thick woven wire across the large, rectangular expanse that stretched about seventy-five yards to their far right.
“Those the sheaves?” Vail asked, pointing at the wheels as they walked past them.
“Some of them,” Cooper said. “That whole thing-the sheaves, the engines, and the gears-it’s called the winding machine.” She continued across the wood plank and cement flooring, beneath the moving cable, to a series of window-fronted rooms.
“This is the control room,” Cooper said, then knocked on the glass. “The engineer’ll take you into the Sheave Room.”
A man waved at her through the window, then opened his door. His tightly cropped afro was highlighted with a sheen of silver at the temples and sides of his head.
“This is Jerry Haywood,” Cooper said, then turned to her engineer. “FBI Agent Vail, Inspector Burden, and Detective Dixon.”
Haywood gave a stiff nod at them. “Sumthin I cain hep you with?”
“Take them down to the Sheave Room, will you, Jerry? To the channels.”
Haywood bobbed his head, then took off down the hall. He was football player large, but walked with a substantial limp, which appeared to be due to one leg being noticeably shorter than the other.
“Thanks,” Vail called back to Cooper.
Burden looked around as they walked. “What is this place?”
“This here building?” he asked over the din of the large machines, which were now directly to their left. “Car barn up top, powerhouse here and below us. See, there are four lines. Used to be twenty-two, but you know how that goes. Progress.” He led them past the lunch room, to a locked door; he opened it and directed them down a staircase.
“Each line’s a closed system run by a loop o’ cable. The cable runs all the time down under the streets, below them rails. The cars grip the cable and ride it. Piggyback. That’s how they move. The cars ’emselves don’t have no engine. When the gripman releases the grip’s hold on the cable, the car slows and stops.
“The cables, they have pine tar all over ’em, kind a like an oil. It liquefies and vaporizes from the heat, smoothes out the metal rubbing on metal. Follow me?”
“We follow you,” Burden said, sticking close behind Haywood, who apparently moved well despite the limp.
The engineer reached the bottom of the stairs, and then led them into a long basement-style room that contained several pedestal-mounted horizontal and slanted sheaves, spinning and guiding cable into and out of the room.
“The cable runs in a loop below ground and ends up down here. This here’s the Sheave Room. You saw them huge gears up there on the floor. The cables go from them winding machines to this here room, where they change direction and go out to the streets to run each of the lines.”
Vail turned her body in a circle. “We’re looking for a place where a man could hide down here. Someplace dark, where there’s cable.”
Haywood laughed. “Lots a places here like that. You described juss ’bout every inch of the cable car routes.”
Vail looked out into the darkness ahead of her, where a fifteen-foot grooved metal wheel was rotating, serving cable into the darkness. “Ms. Cooper mentioned tunnels. Is this one of them?”
“It ain’t no tunnel, it’s a blind channel. Actually, we now call it The California Conduit. ‘Blind’ ain’t po-litically co-rrect.”
“Looks like there are two,” Burden said. “Two blind-two conduits.”
“Two. Yeah. This here one,” Haywood said, pointing to the far end of the room, “it’s California-Mason. Goes ’bout two blocks down, and the other, Washington-Powell”-his hand slid to the side, as if turning left-“it go ’bout a block.”
“How big-how tall is this conduit?” Dixon asked.
Haywood led them to the end of the Sheave Room and gestured with his head at the dark area in front of them. “This the biggest it gets. Farther you get, smaller it get. Down to ’bout two and a half feet. You don’t wanna be going that far.”
“Yeah,” Vail said. “I don’t want to be going at all into either of them…” She stood at the mouth of the tunnels, which sat at ninety degrees to one another, and felt an unease fill her chest. She forced air into her lungs and said to Burden, “You go. I’ll wait here. Coordinate.”
“Coordinate what?”
“She can’t go in there,” Dixon said. “Claust-”
“I forgot. Fine. Roxxann, you take the Washington-Powell tunnel, I’ll take the California-Mason conduit. Karen, you stay here and…” He shrugged. “Go coordinate yourself.”
“Take these,” Haywood said, reaching to a nearby box and pulling out two helmets with attached headlamps. “Stay clear of the cable. Plenty a room in there. Plenty a room. Just keep away from the cable.”
Dixon and Burden fixed the helmets to their heads, then stepped in.
Vail turned to Haywood. “Do people go in there a lot?”
“People? Yeah, as in maintenance workers and engineers. People like you? Nope.”
Vail looked in and watched as Dixon disappeared into the darkness. Vail took a step back then cricked her neck toward the engineer. “Anyone ever get crushed?”