Out Of The Deep I Cry (44 page)

She held her phone up like a mike. “He’s going through the cemetery.” She dropped it again and charged ahead, the water splashing up her coat with every stride, so that she was more wet than dry. She ducked through the cemetery’s low brick entrance, dashing rain out of her eyes to keep the fleeing figure in sight. Please don’t let him hide in the mortuary, she thought. The winter dead of Millers Kill had to wait for their burials until April; the long semisubterranean mortuary would be full right now.

But whoever it was showed no signs of stopping. The pinwheel rain hat bobbed in and out of Clare’s view, pedaling headlong toward the cemetery’s side entrance. She pelted over walkways turned to stony brooks and graves where the spongy earth sagged under her bootfalls. She zigged and zagged past fenced-in family plots and curved stone benches. The figure vanished through a screen of trees. Sprinting to catch up, Clare dodged a Civil War-era oak and found herself one footfall away from James and Nancy McKeller, husband and wife. She hurdled their stone with a wild launch into the air and came down hard, stumbled, recovered, and dashed through the side entrance.

A muffled voice was coming from her pocket. It took two tries to grab the phone, her wet fingers slipping over its plastic case. “Where are you?” Russ was asking.

She glanced up at the dripping street sign. “Second Avenue.” A grandiose name for a single block of one-and-a-half-story houses. She jogged down the sidewalk, the phone pressed against her ear. “Where are you?”

“On Lower First Avenue. I figure he’s headed for the old chandleries.”

“The what?”

“I’ll tell you later. Is he still in sight?”

She glanced between the houses as she jogged past. “No. I think he went to the end of the street, but I don’t know which way he turned.”

“He couldn’t have gone to the right.” She reached the end of Second Avenue and saw what Russ meant. The street petered out into a marshy tangle of elephant grass and cattails. “All these streets dump into First Avenue, and that’s-”

She swiveled and ran to the left. One house, two houses, three, and there she was, at the intersection with Upper First Avenue and Lower First Avenue. She heard a shout, muffled and distant from down the street, echoed over the phone.

She pounded down Lower First, a street as much a mausoleum as that in the cemetery. Low, shuttered buildings with spray-painted doors and rusting hulks of unidentifiable origin in their yards. A two-story inn untouched so long that its paint had peeled totally away, leaving it raw, gray, and warping. A series of store-fronts, roofs rotting, porches leaning, windows boarded with plywood turned silver with age. And there, crutching toward the last building in the row, Russ.

His mother’s car, windows steamed, lights off, was parked at the street’s terminal point, where the pavement ended and a tumble of boulders sloped down into the Millers Kill. It looked as if a pair of lovers had driven down to enjoy some privacy and a view of the fast-moving, snow-charged river. The bike was overturned in the middle of the street, its rear wheel still spinning.

“What happened?” She skidded to a halt in front of him, sucking breath to speak.

He balanced between his crutches, one hand awkwardly pinching his gun to the palm rest. “I was talking to you on the phone and I saw the guy.” Rain was rolling down his hair, dripping off the ends. “I opened the car door and swung my gun out and ordered him to stop. He dumped the bike and ran in there.” He pointed to the decrepit wooden building squared between the street and the river. Rotting stumps of pilings ran along its waterfront side. “Here, take this,” he went on, handing her his gun. She took it stock down and automatically checked the cartridge and the safety.

“I’m not going to use this on anyone.” She wiped her forehead in a useless attempt to keep the rain out of her eyes.

“I’m not planning on using it on anyone, either. It’s too damn hard to move while holding on to it, and if I stick it back into my belt holster it’ll take me too long to get it out. Goddamn broken leg. Pardon my French.”

He crutched toward the door. “Stay behind me, and when I say gun, put it in my right hand.”

She fell in behind him. “You’re not ordering me to stay in the car?”

“Would you listen if I did?”

“No.”

“Okay then. May as well take advantage of you.”

There was no porch fronting the building, only two granite steps leading up to a gaping doorway. Clare looked up to the second story, where shattered windows stared endlessly into the past. “What is this place?” She pitched her voice low.

“It was a chandlery about a hundred and eighty years ago. A ship’s provisioner. This is the oldest part of the town, from back in the seventeen hundreds when everything moved in and out by boat.” She heard his crutch tips thunk wetly on wood, and then she stepped through the doorway, careful to stay at his back.

“Good God.” She had to fight not to gag. The dark empty space reeked of urine and human waste.

“I know.” He shifted forward into the darkness, thump-step, thump-step. The wooden planks beneath them were uneven, swollen with age and soaking up things Clare didn’t want to imagine. “This is one of the hidey-holes for the hard-core homeless in the area. Every six months or so, we come in here, roust everybody out, and cart them off to shelters or the hospital. It’s useless, of course. There aren’t enough beds in the addiction unit or the mental-health facility for people asking for help, let alone for these guys, who don’t want anything to do with it. We only round ’em up because the aldermen are scared someone’s going to wreck himself up here and sue the town.”

There was a creak ahead of them and Russ froze. Clare stood still behind him, letting the rain drip off her. “C’mon,” he said.

“There doesn’t seem to be anyone here now,” she whispered.

“We were down here in early March. There’d been a fight, and one guy cut another one up real bad. We had the ambulance, a fire truck, the works. Usually they stay away awhile after something like that. They don’t want to get caught if we show up again.”

“What happened to the man?”

“Which one?”

“The one who was hurt.”

“He got patched up in the ER and then hung around town for a while. He had some sort of chronic illness. TB? He hung around the clinic for a while, getting treatment. Yeah, it must have been TB. Of course, as soon as he was well enough, he vanished.”

They came to an open doorway. The waterfront wall to their right was pierced with glassless windows, but the rain and the hour seemed to slow the gray light, so that it sluggarded across the floor and died before it reached the middle of the room.

“I’m going to go through that door and back up against the wall on the right-hand side.” He pitched his voice just above a whisper. “I want you to point the gun in front of you right after I’m out of the way, then step in beside me. Got it?”

“Yeah.”

The handle of the gun was slippery in her hands, from rain and nervous sweat. Russ thudded through the doorway and sideways, the rubber crutch-tips squeaking in protest, and she braced the gun and stepped forward, sweeping it in front of her, lurched to the side, and slammed against the wall, jarring loose a powdery shower of dried birdshit on both of them.

“I bet you watched
Starsky and Hutch
when you were a kid.” His voice was dry. “C’mon, there’s no one in here.”

They crossed the warped, bulging floor to the next doorway. Russ peered around its edge. “End of the line,” he said. He held his right hand out. Clare gave him the gun. Russ crutched through first, Clare tight behind him. Where the other rooms had soared high into the musty darkness, this ceiling was barely high enough for Russ to pass without ducking. Open-case stairs pierced the low ceiling on the left-and right-hand walls. Below each stairway, trap doorways yawned, revealing two other stairs, leading to the cellar. From the amount of mouse droppings and dirt encrusting the doors, Clare suspected they had lain open a long time.

“Police,” Russ said, in a voice that cracked with authority. “Put your hands up in the air and walk out into the open.”

Silence.

“He has to be here, right?” Clare whispered. The glass was broken out of the windows tucked near the stairs, but the narrow wooden crossbars, the lights, were intact. The wall opposite them was solid, featureless.

“No other way out.” He pointed toward the room overhead. “A couple of vents under the eaves up there. Too small for a human. Cellar down there’s beneath the stone foundations.”

“What are we going to do?” She looked at Russ’s cast.

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to go dashing up after him.” He glanced at the dark rectangle swallowing the cellar stairs. “Or down.”

There was a splash. Clare swiveled toward the right-hand stairs. “What was that?”

“Sounded like something in the cellar.” He crutched closer, until he stood next to the long side of the open trap door, like a graveside mourner. “It’s well below the waterline. Probably pretty wet down there.”

Another noise. Sloshing. Movement.

“You there in the cellar,” Russ shouted. “Come to the foot of the stairs with your hands up. There’s no way out.” His voice warmed a shade. “I can promise you it’s a hell of a lot warmer and drier at the station than it is here.”

Clare went around him and squatted at the head of the stairs. She could see them descending straight down into the gloom of the cellar. Like the other stairs in the building, these were open case, simple boards nailed to risers, no railing. “You can tell they constructed this before OSHA was around,” she said. In the single patch of gray light that made it to the bottom, she could see a flash of black water and the skeletal remains of a barrel. “Do you want me to go down? There’s no way you can maneuver those stairs.”

He stared at her. “You’re kidding, right?” He shook his head. “You’ve read too damn many Nancy Drew mysteries. No, you don’t get to go down into the creepy cellar where the bad guy lurks. Alone, unarmed, and without a light. Don’t be an idiot.”

More splashing. Rhythmic. Not like someone walking through water. The sound of something slapping against the water. Dropping into it.

“This is the nonidiot way to get the bad guy.” Russ kept his voice casual, but he moved closer to the edge of the opening, his crutch tips bracing against the hinges of the trapdoor. He watched the darkness below as he spoke. “I’m going to stand in the door to this room with my gun out and ready. You’re going to go back to the car, call the station, and have them send a couple units out here. Then you’ll stay in the car until they arrive.” She opened her mouth, but he cut her off. “It’s not just to keep you safe. If anything happens to me, or if the suspect gets past me, you’ll be able to see where he goes and call for help.”

She reached into her pocket and pulled out her cell phone. “I forgot all about it.” She grinned up at him. “I’ve still got your phone on the line. I’ll be using up my minutes-”

The sound was like the ceiling falling in, rumble, pound, bash, and she swung her head and saw the man, already halfway across the room, hat tumbled off in the rush, hard-soled shoes slicing the floor, and Russ twisting around, tangled in his crutches, raising his gun, and she was rising from her crouch shouting, “No!” and the man leaped, he bounded, his arms crossed before him, smashing into Russ, the crutches clattering away and Russ was falling into the tomb-shaped opening, and she dove forward without thinking, to block his fall, to catch him, her fingers closing on his arm and she was yanked off balance and it was too late. Let. Go, her brain said, but in the time it took to flash the message to her hand she had smashed shoulder and hip against the stairs and hit the floor with the force of a car wreck, icy cold water parting beneath the slap of her body, then clapping over her, soaking her to the bone in an instant. The blow knocked the breath out of her, and she inhaled too quickly, panicking, swallowing more of the scummy water, choking and sputtering. She jerked upright, hacked, and gasped. Above her, the rectangle of gray narrowed. She looked up. The trapdoor was ready to drop, propped up by the man’s stiff and trembling arm. It was too dim to make out his expression. Only the pale whiteness of his face.

“No!” she cried. “Don’t!”

“I’m sorry,” Allan Rouse said. Then he dropped the door.

The darkness clapped shut over them like the lid on a coffin. There was a thunk as the bolt slid home, locking them in. The raw horror-story sound of it pulled an involuntary whimper out of her throat. Then Rouse’s footsteps crossed the floor overhead.

The other stairway. She exploded out of the water, seeing, now, with precious seconds wasted gaping at the dark, the pale rectangle that was the other overhead door. She ran for the other stairs as if running in a nightmare, legs dragging through shin-deep water, damp cobwebs curling across her face, barely outlined brick support columns looming in her way. She was halfway to the stairs, splashing and gasping, when she heard the complaint of rust-eaten hinges.

“Dr. Rouse!” she screamed. “Don’t do this! Don’t leave us down here!”

“I’ll send someone,” he said, his voice hollow. “When it’s safe.”

“For God’s sake!” The door kachunked closed, and the pressure wave flattened the air around her, thinning her voice, pushing it into the far, unseen corners of the cellar.

She shivered violently, hot and cold all at the same time.

“Clare?” Russ’s voice, rough and waterlogged, brought her back to herself. He coughed and retched, and stirred in the water.

She slogged toward the sound. “Keep talking,” she said. “I can’t see anything.”

“Are you all right?” His words induced another round of coughing.

“I think so.” She slammed into a brick column and reeled backward. “Or I will be if I don’t knock myself out,” she wheezed. She slowed down and let her outstretched hands take the lead. “You sound terrible. How’s your leg?”