It was all he could do to contain himself, to keep from shouting out her name.
Unzipping the Truth
The consumptive darkness played tricks on her equilibrium, making her dizzy. Walker directed her down to her hands and knees and they crawled under a pair of pipes that bisected the tunnel. As she stood, he pushed her forward and held her to the muddy floor. He shined the yellow light into her eyes.
"She fell," he said. "That's all it was: an accident."
"An accident?" she asked. "You ran her over, Ferrell. Help me through that."
Still straddling her, his eyes went distant and he shook his head violently. In doing so, he gave her the opening she needed, but she didn't take it-couldn't take it. She needed the answers. He spoke so fast, so softly that she could hardly keep up. "She pushed me ... shouldn't have done that... went off the fire escape ... thought she was dead down there ... had to move her ... the car. That key ... the back axle."
"You had to move her," she repeated, directing his focus for her own gain. "That makes sense."
"I backed it up to get her. She was dead. And there she was ... sitting up like that all of a sudden." His voice trailed off, and she knew he was completely consumed in the memory. "She'd say I pushed her. But it wasn't like that. I told her to get away from me, but she wouldn't. She smelled ... of him ... of if."
"Like the boat," Matthews allowed.
Walker lowered his head and looked out the top of his eyes at her. He nodded.
"When I saw her sitting up like that... I knew what I had to do."
"All this," she said softly, "everything you've told me, it's all understandable." She left out any discussion of Nathan Prair. "Let me help you-not like Mary-Ann had planned. Not like that at all."
The flashlight dimmed. It had only minutes left. To attempt an escape in the dark was unthinkable. Instinctively, she shifted the grip of her right hand, exposing the glass and its razor-sharp edge.
She pushed up to one elbow. It had to be now! She wanted tears in his eyes, his vision blurred. She needed to work him like a lump of clay. "She loved you very much, Ferrell. No matter what happened between her and Neal it never came close to what you gave her. She wanted to help you because she loved you. Why else would she have kept trying the way she did?"
His face tightened.
"And you loved her too, didn't you?"
Walker's shoulders shook. "No one knows how much," he said hoarsely.
The jaundice of the flashlight painted him in a milky light as he flexed his legs to stand. That was the distraction she'd waited for.
Her left hand stole the flashlight from his right, a look of astonishment overcoming him. With her right hand she pulled the curving piece of glass from collarbone to navel, like trying to open a stuck zipper.
Locked in disbelief as much as physical shock, Walker looked down at the wound as if it belonged to someone else. In doing so, he unintentionally protected his throat as her second effort failed. The glass cut his neck below his ear, but only superficially. Walker reared back, stumbled, fell to one arm, and then lifted himself to standing. He screamed like a wild animal.
Matthews struggled to her feet and ran, the light blinking on and off in her hand.
To her astonishment, she heard him clomping along, right behind her.
Echo
When Boldt heard the scream, it came so faintly that he might have mistaken it for something from the street far overhead had it not been for his musical ears. Had it not been for his heightened senses caused by being confined in a damp earthen grave.
"You hear that?" he asked Babcock.
"No ... what?"
"Behind us," Boldt said, turning and aiming his flashlight past her.
She turned to look back as well, as if they might see something more than earth and rotten timbers.
"We're going in the wrong the direction."
"But the city ... the Underground ... it has to be this way."
"We're going the wrong way," he said, pushing past her and starting off in the opposite direction.
Babcock stood her ground, allowing him to pass. "You're making a mistake."
Boldt called back to her, "It's mine to make."
With that, she hurried to catch up to him.
Running Below Graves
LaMoia had a cop's eye, a cop's nose, and a cop's instincts, but he had the heart of a man, and when the faint voices he'd been following stopped abruptly-one now clearly a woman's-he feared he'd lost her.
He abandoned his effort at stealth, charging up the tunnel at a reckless speed given his hunched posture. No witticism filled his head longing to escape his lips, no wisecrack; he was briefly all muscle, adrenaline, and determination.
Feelings for others often reveal themselves in strange ways. It took a tunnel, the stench of death, and dying voices to illuminate his heart's unwilling truth: Her life was precious. She was to be saved at all costs.
The tunnel looked ready to come down in places, the century old railroad ties bulging under the weight and pressure of a city built atop them. He passed through sections of warmth and then cold, of foul odors followed by none at all. Graves were dug shallower than this. He was running below graves.
A wall of pipes up ahead briefly appeared to seal off passage, and he thought, to have come all this way only to find it blocked. But as he approached, the light revealed the illusion-there was plenty of room to duck beneath the lowest.
Tucking himself through this space, LaMoia heard a scream-a man's scream-a scream that was the result of physical pain, not anger.
And then, the wet slop of running. Not one person, but two, the detective ascertained. Not toward him, but away. From himself? he wondered. Had Walker seen the beam of his flashlight, heard his approach?
Or was it, more likely, Matthews running away from Walker, as that scream he'd just heard might suggest? He broke into a sprint, tempted to call out but afraid of giving himself away.
When his halogen bulb caught the blood-red rag and the jagged piece of glass it contained, he didn't cringe but warmed with hope. Was Walker clever enough for that? He thought not. Had Walker severed a head with a piece of glass? He thought not.
She'd tricked him. Goddamn it-she'd tricked him!
Rotten Luck
A fantail of the faint yellow light indicated either a sharp turn up ahead or the tunnel's dead end. Her mind stuck on that thought: dead end. Had Walker ever intended to kill her, or only to present her with the body of Nathan Prair as his "peace offering"?
Had she brought all this upon herself by going for Prair's gun?
Her next thought was that Walker, cut badly and desperate, had purposefully allowed her to charge ahead because he knew she was boxing herself in. At once, the flashlight failed. Shaking it did nothing to revive it. She worked off the last image she'd seen, now fading off her retina like a projector's bulb going dim. A pile of debris a few yards ahead and to her right. Walker, too, had slowed, the moment the light died, probably suspecting a trap. She eased ahead, hands stretched in front of her. Slowly the absolute black lost a tiny amount of its edge. A faint amount of light was coming from somewhere up ahead-not yet enough to see by, but enough to give her hope.
She knelt and felt around and formed her fingers around a brick. Holding it tightly, she turned and pressed her back against the cold mud wall alongside what she felt to be the post of a rotting, crumbling, vertical railroad tie.
No means of death frightened her more than the idea of being buried alive. She tried to slow her breath to hear better, but the blood pounding in her ears blotted out all sound.
She could imagine him approaching but could not see him or sense him. Her eyes adjusted further and she could make out the silhouette of the post she hid against. Light meant air. Air meant the surface.