Grisnik clasped his hands into a single fist and slammed them down into the center of my spine, putting me on my knees, then grabbed my jacket, yanking me to my feet, and giving me the momentum I needed. Grasping the?ashlight, I speared the underside of his chin with the lens, snapping his head against the rock. He let go of my jacket and slid to the?oor. I didn’t know whether he was down or dead.
The lens on my?ashlight was gone, the edges jagged and sticky with blood. I felt around his neck for his night-vision goggles, pulling them over his head and trying them on, throwing them aside when they didn’t work.
The darkness was disorienting. I crawled to my right until I found the water, then stood and turned my back to the lake. With my hands stretched out like curb feelers, I walked toward where I hoped I would find the ladder. I missed it the first time, tripping over the stack of boxes from the bar. Coming back, I was certain I’d end up in the water until my left hand bounced off the bottom rung.
I grabbed the highest rung I could reach and pulled myself up. Once my feet made it to the bottom rung, I climbed as fast as I could, knowing that if I stopped moving, I would start shaking and lose my grip.
The first shot came when I was halfway up the ladder. It missed wide, ricocheting off the cavern wall, the sound deafening. My feet slipped and I caught myself after dropping a couple of steps. The red dot from the laser sight on Grisnik’s gun searched the cavern for me.
“I know you’re on the ladder,” Grisnik said. “Guys like you always run.”
He fired again, closer but still wide, the air hot with cordite. I started climbing again, the ladder creaking against its shifting anchor bolts. The next shot hit several rungs above me, the steel sparking.
“Getting closer, Jack! I can hear you on the ladder. I’m coming for you!”
Climb and he’d hear me. Hang where I was and he’d find me. I said a prayer to the god of darkness to hide me and climbed, almost losing my grip when Grisnik grabbed the bottom end of the ladder and rattled it.
“Gotcha!” Grisnik said.
I swung to the outside of the ladder, climbing it like a rope, hoping he’d shoot through the center. Four more shots?ew past and I was at the mouth of the shaft. I hung on to the outside of the ladder as he kept firing, swinging back to the center when I heard the dry click of an empty magazine, wondering whether he was reloading. The answer came when I felt the ladder sag with his weight as I climbed into the shaft.
“You’re a dead man! I’m coming for you!”
I held on to a rung on the shaft wall, my feet on the top step of the ladder. I locked my feet around the inside edges of the top step on the ladder and started rocking it back and forth. The anchor bolts rolled around inside the crumbling concrete, the ladder groaning against their loosening grip.
I looked down. Grisnik was invisible in the dark, but I heard his heavy breathing and felt him getting closer. He’d stopped threatening, not wanting me to know how close he was.
Sweating heavily, my muscles trembling, I drove my legs harder, the ladder now swinging freely in a growing arc. I pulled my feet back on the rung so that they wouldn’t get caught if the ladder came out of its mooring, and locked my left arm around a rung level with my chest. I then leaned away from the wall, bent at the waist, and drove my legs back and forth like a child on the swing set in the park.
Grisnik grabbed my ankle as the anchor bolts slid free. For an instant, he and the ladder were suspended in midair, my shoulder wrenching nearly out of its socket as I clung to the rung on the shaft wall. I kicked loose of his grip and a second later heard the ladder crash onto the cavern?oor. He never made a sound.
My left shoulder was ruined, my arm useless. I climbed one handed, keeping my vision focused on the dim point of light at the top of the shaft, watching it grow bigger and brighter until I was near the surface and someone reached down to lift me up, eclipsing the light.
“Lend you a hand?” Ammara Iverson asked.
Chapter Seventy-two
On the way to the hospital to have my shoulder repaired, Ammara told me that the Wyandotte County Surveyor, the District Attorney, and their husbands were having dinner together when she caught up to them. The surveyor started to give a history of the county’s mines when the D.A. remembered a case involving the Argentine Mine, explaining that it became a thirty-four-acre underground cave when the mine closed. When a killer was rumored to have dumped his murder victim in the lake, the surveyor led an expedition into the mine through the shaft in Matney Park to search for the body. Detective Martin Grisnik was the lead investigator on the case. The surveyor and the D.A. were there when Ammara helped me to my feet.
I missed my appointment on Monday with the neurologist since I was recovering from surgery to repair the wreck I’d made of my shoulder. Joy postponed the hearing finalizing our divorce. She brought Ruby with her when she visited after I came home from the hospital. The dog raced through the dining room and into the kitchen before jumping onto my easy chair, marking her territory with a wagging tail.
“I don’t think there’s a future for us,” Joy said. “But I’m not in such a hurry for the future, either.”
“Maybe it would be better for the dogs if we waited,” I said.
She shrugged, giving me a sad smile. “Not too long. Just until we’re sure about Wendy.”
Despite a massive search of the Missouri River from Kansas City to St. Louis, Wendy’s body was never found. The FBI, the police, and scores of volunteers searched the woods in Matney Park and behind the rail yard but there was no trace of her. Joy even hired a psychic, who claimed he saw Wendy’s aura in a dozen different places, none of which yielded her body.
I wasn’t surprised. At least five times a day and more during the night, I saw Colby’s face when he said that she was dead. His micro expression with its asymmetrical, lopsided grin was enough to convince me he hadn’t killed her, that he’d lied to protect her from Grisnik, a last grasp at redemption.
Kate said it was possible, but it was also possible that I was finding hope wherever I could. Either way, I said, I’m not giving up on Wendy. We talked about it over dinner, this time at the rotating rooftop restaurant at the Hyatt Hotel, the 360-degree view of Kansas City a more romantic backdrop than the view at IHOP.
Kate was slowly recovering her capacity to read micro expressions. A lot depended, she said, on letting it happen rather than forcing it.
“It’s the same with you and me,” she said. “We have to let it happen.”
“You won’t mind if I give it a kick in the ass every now and then.”
“Can’t see how that would hurt,” Kate said, taking my hand in hers.
Tanja Andrija won the confessional race, offering up her brother and her New York connections that had supplied her with drugs for her retail outlets in return for a new life for her and her parents in the witness protection program. I sat in the back of the courtroom the day she entered her plea. The judge, a white-haired gentleman old enough to know better, did everything but ask for her new phone number. Tanja was a woman of considerable talent.
I eventually made it to the neurologist, who said that he’d never seen a case like mine in forty years of practice, as if I should be pleased to have broken his streak. He declined a diagnosis, sending me to a specialist at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona. The doctor, a lanky, quiet, and compassionate man, stuck electrodes to my skin and monitored my involuntary movements, telling me with more certainty than hope that I had tics, a childhood disorder that disappeared in adolescence and almost never appeared for the first time in adults although, in my case, it had.
It was, he said, one of the nervous system’s unexplained defects, for which there was no known cause or cure. Though he assured me it would neither threaten nor shorten my life, he also conceded it was unlikely to disappear.