Shadows Fall (41 page)

Charlie slid his small utility backpack off his shoulders and pulled out his flashlight. He’d filled the pack with anything from his trunk that he thought might be useful to them, including flashlights, glow sticks, road flares, and rope. He shone the flashlight down into the shaft to check out the integrity of the inner walls. Those walls were concrete and looked to be in decent condition. Ladder rungs made from molded rebar had been drilled into the concrete, looking like giant staples.

“Looks secure enough, but I’m going to go down first and check it out.” If the rungs didn’t collapse under his hulking frame, they’d hold up for Hester. “I’ll climb down and give you the all clear once I’ve reached the bottom. You sure you want to do this?” he asked, meeting Hester’s rheumy stare.

She shrugged, causing her long hair to fall over her shoulder. Reaching behind her, she began to braid it. “I been in worse places,” she said, as if that explained everything.

“Okay then.” Charlie got out a glow stick before shouldering his pack. He cracked it and tossed it down into the shaft, hoping it would light his way since he couldn’t climb with the flashlight. As gently as possible, he lowered himself to the edge of the concrete shaft, with his feet dangling down inside. He extended his leg until his foot reached the closest metal rung.

When it didn’t immediately collapse under him, he eased his other foot down and ever so slowly gave it all of his weight. He turned around and looked up at Hester. “Seems pretty solid so far. We’ll see if I don’t break my neck.”

In the diffuse glow of some far off streetlamps, he saw her mouth turn up in a smirk. He’d never be sure if she was smiling at his joke or imagining him breaking his neck. Right then, he needed to concentrate on his descent. Looking down between his arms, he could barely make out the rung below, thanks to the pale radiance of the glow stick. He closed his eyes in a silent prayer before transferring his weight to the next metal bar.

The steady dripping of the rain was a bit of a concern, because it made the rebar nice and slick. He had a few nerve-wracking slips on his painstaking climb down. When his feet finally touched solid ground, he had to wipe the nervous flop-sweat from his face. Though he had managed to get to the bottom without incident, he had his doubts about Hester being able to make the climb safely.

Cupping his hands around his mouth, Charlie called up toward the shaft opening. “I’m on the ground. The ladder is solid, but it’s
very
slick. I’m serious now, you should wait for me up there.”

The scrape of boots on concrete, the tang of metal when soles met rebar, and faint grumbling from above him told Charlie that Hester didn’t give a fuck what he thought she should do.

“Oh, for the love…” Charlie muttered. He raised his eyes skyward and shook his head as he watched the dark form of Hester making her way down towards him. She was agile, he’d give her that. She was lighter than him, so she had that on her side. Much to his surprise, Hester actually slipped fewer times than he did.

When she hopped down from the last rung, she gave him such a gloating sneer that he just had to chuckle. “I stand corrected, Madam.” Just to tick her off, he stuck out his elbow and inclined his head in a slight bow. “Shall we?”

She snorted and rolled her eyes in true Titus fashion, reminding him exactly why they were down in that underground hell. “Stop wasting time. This way,” she said, and took off past him down the pipe.

“Jesus, wait! I need to pull up my GPS so I can keep track where the hell we are.”

Hester gave him a look that suggested he was a few croutons short of a house salad. “We don’t need to know where
we
are, we need to know where
he
is. Your fancy gadget won’t tell you that.”

“It’s not a fancy gadget, it’s a phone,” Charlie grumped, because in a way, she was right. “I just think it will be helpful to see what we’re underneath, especially if we have to call for help. Relax, I’ve got it up now.”

She took off again, striding purposefully through the accumulating water. Charlie wished he’d had time to grab some galoshes or waders—or a goddamn wetsuit—but alas, it hadn’t been in the cards. He winced as water squelched into his trainers and rapidly soaked his feet. Hester at least had her Gore-Tex boots to keep her feet dry.

She stopped so suddenly that he almost knocked her flat. She looked down at the water, then back at him. “This going to be a problem?”

Charlie shook his head. “I doubt it. At the most, it won’t get deeper than a couple of feet, and it would have to rain a lot harder to reach that. Let’s strive to be out of here before it gets to that, just in case.”

Hester nodded and started to walk away.

“Wait,” he said. She stopped and looked back at him. “I’ll go first. You can tell me which way to go. Titus would kill me if I let you get hurt.” He winced at his unfortunate word choice, but didn’t back down.

Finally, she held out a hand, indicating the dark tunnel. “Lead the way, officer.”

“Detective,” Charlie grumbled as he pulled out his flashlight again. Since they’d made it safely down into the main storm water channel, his adrenaline was beginning to spike again. While uncomfortable, he knew the urgency pounding through his veins was probably the only thing keeping his claustrophobia at bay as the slick tunnel walls threatened to close in on him.

That didn’t matter though. Titus was down there somewhere, he could feel it. He had no proof, and he could be jailed for a number of things he’d done that night, but it would all be worth it if they found Titus alive.

After sloshing through the water for about five minutes, they came to a junction in the tunnel—a larger open area that fed three different outfalls. There, the water was up to their ankles. Thank God they were already into Charlotte’s hot season, otherwise they’d have hypothermia to deal with.

“Well…” he started, looking at Hester. “Which way?”

Her eyes did that thing where they were swallowed by black, and she stared off at some indefinable object for a moment, before pointing to the tunnel on the far right. “That way.”

Charlie had been discreetly tracking their progress on his phone’s GPS, because he wanted to make sure they were still headed in the relative direction of the storm drain near Starbucks, which Hester had been so sure that Titus was near. They were indeed heading the right way, so he decided to let go and trust Hester and her ‘spirit guides.’

Time stretched out until Charlie had no sense of how long they’d been underground. Without the clock on his phone, he would have been lost. He gave an unmanly shiver when a rat squeaked by their feet. He hated the damn things. Just because he could, he lit a road flare and carried it for a while to scare them away.

Then things all seemed to happen at once. Hester gasped, the flare sputtered and burned out, and the flashlight died, plunging them into impenetrable darkness. Somewhere in the dark web of tunnels, a scream echoed off the walls.

Chapter Thirty

His scalpel was poised at the corner of my eye. I opened my eyes because I wouldn’t allow myself to hide from death, and I wouldn’t allow David to hide from me. If he was going to kill me, he’d have to do it with me staring him down.

He pressed down ever so slightly, just piercing the skin and drawing a perfect line of blood from the corner to the top of my eyebrow. The pain took my breath away. He readjusted his grip and started toward the center of my eye. I gathered all the breath in my body and screamed as loud as I could.

And then I shouted at him, “Get away from me!”

He was actually startled enough to scramble away. I knew the time for talking him down, for convincing him to spare my life, was over. All I could do was get him to stop torturing me. With blinding pain ricocheting like a stray bullet through my body from a hundred different wounds, I was just ready for it to end. I’d had enough of pain. Of course, I was scared of ending up like Brandon and the others—with nothing but a rock in some boneyard and an eternity to wander aimlessly while others lived their lives.

Even that was better than the agony I was feeling as my life slowly bled out of me.

David seemed to be regrouping, reorganizing, when deafening thunder clapped, lightning flickered down into the tunnel from a nearby drain, and the rainstorm upped itself to monsoon status. The deluge stunned David again, and he cast a nervous glance upward. Water that had once been trickling in from a dozen different places had begun to pour. I could feel it touching my fingertips where my hands hung over the edge of the buckets.

I realized with a start that the tunnel was flooding and there I was, not only poisoned, bled, and unable to move a muscle, but tied down as well. It wouldn’t be long before I was completely submerged. However David decided to dispense with me, it would happen, and happen soon.

“You know what’s coming, David,” I whispered. My last scream had stolen what was left of my breath. “You have to end this. In a matter of minutes, this drain will flood with storm water and you’ll be forced to leave or drown.

“Either kill me and take my eyes as trophies, add me to your dead pool, or just leave me here and let the water do what it does. You can keep your perfect record that way. Your pattern of clean, righteous kills.” It put a bad taste in my mouth to call them that, but I wanted him to choose drowning over cutting without it seeming like I had a preference. If there was nothing left that I could control except for the method of my own death, then I wanted that.

I could see him struggling. His dark, dark eyes flitted from me to the bend in the tunnel which I assumed led to the way out. His fingers curled as if he itched to flay my flesh from my bones just for existing. But eventually, he made his choice.

He scrambled around, packing up everything that mattered—or could be used as evidence—and left the rest to be washed away. He took one last look at me, then turned his back to leave me there.

“David,” I whispered.

He turned his head, staring at me out of the corner of his eye. He looked almost normal then, like the David I met in Karen’s lab rather than the raving psycho I’d just spent an indeterminate amount of time being tortured by.

“Untie me. Please. That way, at least my body will get washed down to some outfall, and my friends will eventually know what happened to me. Please.”

“Why should I?”

And fuck if I wasn’t back to negotiating with a serial killer. “Look at it this way… if by some miracle, someone finds me down here and my corpse is tied up, they’re going to start looking for a murderer. On the other hand, if I wash up somewhere dead, maybe I just had a terrible accident. Ya know?”

It felt like ages that he stared at me, weighing his options. The water level was rising and I hadn’t much time left. I didn’t want to spend any more of it talking to him. Obviously making a decision, he walked over and released the bindings on my arms and legs.

He stuffed the ropes back in his pack and slipped his arms through his straps. He pulled the hood of his sweatshirt up, and it mostly obscured his face. He gave me one last glare over his shoulder, and I realized the one thing that had eluded me until then. Standing in front of me in his black hoodie, I recognized him as the man who’d run into me on the street just before I found Brandon Meyers’ body.

Another rush of water came through, another clap of thunder shook the tunnel. I closed my eyes when I heard it, and when I opened them, David was gone and gentle ripples of water were tickling my ribs.

Chapter Thirty-one

“We’re close.”

Charlie looked behind him at Hester. She’d quickly taken to walking with her eyes closed. She preferred to use her ‘second sight’ instead of the measly gleam of the glow sticks. Once the flashlight had gone out, Charlie had taken his three remaining sticks, cracked them, and hooked them on his badge chain. The light was barely adequate, but at least they weren’t flying blind. Well, he wasn’t.

“The scream,” he asked, though he didn’t want to know. “Was it—”

“Yes.”

That dispelled any doubt in his mind that Titus was down here with David Sever, somewhere in the maze of tunnels. Screaming. Charlie couldn’t think too hard about that; he would lose his damn mind. He had to concentrate on what needed to be done, then he could fall apart later.

Suddenly, he heard a rushing sound from farther down the tunnel. It sounded ominously like a waterfall. Shit, they were—

“We’re running out of time,” Hester whispered.

Fuck if it wasn’t creepy that she seemed to be reading his mind. Of course, in actuality, she had probably just come to the same conclusion, that the tunnels were flooding. “We need to pick up the pace.”

As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he registered the sound of frantic footsteps, and they were getting closer, quick.
Please God let him have gotten away
, Charlie thought. “Stay here,” he hissed and took off at a slow jog toward the noise. Hoping it was Titus but knowing it could be anyone, he unsnapped the buttstrap of his holster and let his fingers hover over the gun. He came to a bend in the tunnel and as he rounded the corner, a wiry figure barreled into him, sending him careening against the stone wall and down to the ground.

Charlie was momentarily stunned as his skull broke his fall, he had to get up. He had glimpsed enough in the low light to know that it wasn’t Titus. It was David Sever, and he was headed right towards Hester. His head spun and nausea washed over him as he climbed to his feet, but he limped back in the direction from which he’d come. The tunnel wasn’t that wide, so moments later he heard the inevitable collision—a scream from Hester, a grunt from David, and a sickening thud.