“What's happening?” Dan asked.
“If they needed to talk to me, they would've talked to me.” Chuck jerked his thumb towards a ladder leading down on the north side of the freeway. “Go on. Get moving.”
“Okay. Uh, yes, Sergeant.” Dan corrected himself in a hurry. Chuck didn't even growl at him, which proved things were weird.
When he got to the bottom, he wasn't astonished to see the dog handler and the other sergeant he'd spoken with before. He was surprised to see a captain with them. He came to attention and saluted. “Musketeer Dan, reporting as ordered!”
“At ease.” the captain said, and Dan let his spine relax. “ Max and Mike here”-the captain pointed to the two sergeants-”and your Chuck say you probably know more about the traders on Glendon than anybody else from the Valley does. Is that the straight skinny?”
“I have no idea, sir,” Dan answered. “I mean, I was over there a few times, but that's all.”
“You liked the girl.” The captain didn't make it a question. Dan nodded-it was true. He hoped it didn't land him in trouble. The captain said, “''Well, that puts you one jump ahead of everybody else.”
“Yes, sir,” Dan said. When you were a common soldier, that was always the right answer to give an officer.
“Come on, then,” the captain told him. “Maybe you'll be able to help us figure out where the devil they've gone.”
“Gone?” Dan felt like somebody trying to play a game whose rules he didn't know. “I heard some gunshots last night…”
“That was us, when we caught that so-and-so of a Luke,” the captain said. “ Max got him right where he won't sit down for quite a while.” The sergeant who was usually in charge of the bloodhounds looked proud of himself. The captain went on, “Then we went and broke down the door to the Mendozas ' house. They were in there-we could hear 'em talking to each other.”
''They were-and then they weren't.” Sergeant Max snapped his fingers. “Gone. Like that.”
“Where’d they go?” Dan asked. “Did they have some secret way out?”
“Well, we turned Rocky and Bull winkle loose in there to see if they could find the freshest trail.” Max looked unhappy.
“What happened? Did they disappear into a wall or something?” Dan thought such things were impossible. He thought so, yeah… but you never could tell.
“Almost,” the dog handler answered. “The hounds went down to the basement, and they just kind of parked there, right in the middle of the floor. And there's nothing there. So maybe the mutts are wrong. It can happen, I guess. But I sure don't know where else those people could've gone.”
“They didn't get out the back door,” Sergeant Mike put in. “'We had somebody posted there, and they just didn't. Besides, that door's still barred from the inside.”
“Was Luke in that house, sir? Did he have a hiding place there?” Dan asked the captain.
“We talked to him about that. He finally told us where it was at,” the officer replied. Dan wondered how they'd persuaded Luke to talk. Some things, he decided, he might be better off not knowing. The captain still didn't look very happy. “We found the hideout. We could have looked for a month if we didn't know it was there, and we never would have. No sign the traders had used it, though.''
“Oh.” Dan chewed on that. “Where'd they go. then?”
“Good question.” The captain looked hard at him. “C'mon back to the house with us. If anybody on our side has a chance of figuring it out. you're the one.”
“Yes. sir. I'll try, sir.” Dan felt he had to add. “I don't think I can promise you anything.”
Lp Westwood Boulevard he went with Sergeant Max and Sergeant Mike and the captain, whose name he still didn't know. Some of the other Valley soldiers on the street gave him stern looks, others stares full of sympathy. He felt embarrassed. A common soldier in the company of two sergeants and an officer almost had to be in Dutch.
Well, maybe I am, Dan thought. Maybe I just don’tknow it yet.
They turned right on Wilshire and went over to Glendon. which was the next street east. Then up a couple of blocks towards UCLA, and there stood the house, with soldiers outside the front door. They saluted as the captain approached.
If they couldn't find Liz and her folks, how am I supposed to? Dan wondered. / don't know where they're hiding. Maybe they really did work magic and disappear. He shrugged. He had to try.
He went inside with the officer and the underofficers. Everything was familiar, but everything was very quiet. The captain took him to a ladder leaned up against the inner courtyard wall. “Go on up,” the older man said. “Have a look.”
“Yes, sir.” Dan said, and he did. Sure enough, it was a hiding place, about as comfortable as a cramped one could be. “This is where Luke was?” he asked.
“He says so,” the captain answered. “Do you know about any others?”
“No, sir. I didn't know about this one,” Dan said. “I guess the only way to find others would be to take a close look at all the walls and ceilings.”
“We'll do that… eventually.” The captain didn't sound thrilled about it. Dan had trouble blaming him. He went on, “Now come down from there and have a look at the basement.”
““Yes, sir,” Dan said again, and descended. He followed the captain and Mike and Max downstairs to the below-ground level. It held crates full of trade goods and sacks of beans and barley and parched corn-about what he would have expected.
Sergeant Max stepped on a flagstone. “This is where Rocky and Bullwinkle think they went,” he said. “But it's just floor.”
“I guess.” Dan got down on his hands and knees. Only a couple of lamps burned in there. “Could I have one of those?” he said. Even though he forgot the please, Max handed him one.
The smell of the hot olive oil took him back to when he was a little tiny kid. He held the lamp as close to the floor as he could.
“What are you looking for?” Max asked.
“Beats me. Anything, really.” Dan held his nose as close to the floor as he could, too. He squinted, staring as hard as he could. His sight hadn't started to lengthen, so he could peer closer than the captain or the sergeants could. He tried to stick his fingernail into a crack between flagstones. Then he thrust the blade of his belt knife into the crack. Excitement surged in him. “The dogs are right, I bet. This looks like a doorway, see?” He traced a rectangle with the knife. “And the cement here isn't just like the rest of it.”
The captain stood on the rectangle and stomped hard. He cocked his head, considering the sound. “Might be something hollow under there. What do you boys think?” The question included the sergeants. It plainly didn't include Dan.
Mike stomped, too. He was a big, heavyset man with a lot of weight to put behind his boot. “Dog my cats if there isn't, sir. Now how do we go about prying it up?”
They tried the most basic way first: they wedged another knife in there and used it for a lever. The blade promptly snapped. It was Sergeant Max 's knife. He had several unpleasant things to say.
They ended up needing army engineers. The engineers had trouble getting the door up, too. They dug up a flagstone beside the door, only to discover concrete beneath it. “Something funny's going on here,” one of the engineers said. “I wonder if this is an Old Time fallout shelter.”
Dan shuddered at the thought. Fallout was poison-he knew that much. Nobody in the Valley knew much more.
“If it is, it would make a perfect hiding place now, wouldn't it?” the captain said.
“'Sure would,” the engineer agreed. “I bet there's a lock on the other side of that trap door. Gonna take some work to break it. But with that other stone gone, we've got more room to pry.”