Cully eased Stacy to her feet and the chain that had held her clattered to the floor.
Faye crossed the room and opened the metal door that led into the storm sewer. She was surprised to see that the water level was less than a foot below the door opening, and she was also afraid. She hadn’t had a chance to think about what the rain that had been spattering on her head aboveground would look like down here.
“I’m not sure we can do this, Cully. There’s a lot of water and it’s moving fast. And it’s still raining up there.”
She would have added, “And it’s only going to get worse downstream. Those lateral lines are all going to be bringing in more water,” but Cully interrupted her because he didn’t want to hear it.
“We got no choice. The water might kill us and Kaayla might kill us. The difference is that Kaayla needs to shut us up. She wants to kill us and the water just don’t care.”
Stacy looked more alert. Maybe the drugs were wearing off or maybe Cully had charmed her into consciousness. He had to grasp her elbows to support and guide her, but she was walking unaided otherwise. When he got Stacy to the open door, he motioned for Faye to grab her elbows. Then he crawled through the door and stood in the water, reaching back into the room to help Stacy make the awkward climb through the portal.
It was a good plan and it should have worked. Even in the flowing water, they should have been able to make their way to the river outfall and, once there, find a way to get some help. Unfortunately, two things happened simultaneously that torpedoed the plan.
The first torpedo was launched by clouds that they couldn’t see. Those clouds erupted into the kind of thunderstorm that was a routine rain event for Oklahoma, and the stormwater control system dealt with it, operating as it was designed to operate. Unfortunately, the presence of human beings deep in the bowels of the system was not one of its design parameters.
The second torpedo was launched personally by Stacy Wong, who looked at the man trying to drag her into a confined space, pitch-dark and half full of water, and did the only rational thing. She screamed as if there were no tomorrow.
* * *
When I came to grips with the realization that two innocent women must die by my hand, I lifted my head and smiled at my sisters. Everything was going to be okay.
They must not have understood that everything was going to be okay, because they didn’t seem comforted.
“Sister,” Grace said, “what are you going to do? Those two women—”
She was interrupted by a woman screaming as if there were no tomorrow.
And then the screaming woman started shouting about how she didn’t want to go into the water. Bounding toward the padlocked door, I shook off my sisters’ hands. The most critical thing in my world at that moment was silencing Stacy and Faye before they emerged from the storm sewer outfall and started telling the world what they knew.
* * *
Joe kept his distance from the FBI dudes. They were, after all, heavily armed, and they had dozens of heavily armed friends within shouting distance. He loped behind them, wishing that Faye wasn’t involved with whatever it was that had the feds in such a lather, but knowing that she was. He had heard Ahua turn to the man beside him and say, “Make sure there’s an ambulance on its way. No, two. Either of the women might need medical care when we find them. Maybe both.”
So they were looking for two women. One of them was probably Stacy Wong. The whole town probably knew she was missing by now, but Joe had heard no news reports of a second missing woman. He did know, however, that his wife was nowhere to be found.
When Ahua and his friends barreled through the door of the bombed-out lobby of the Gershwin Hotel, ignoring the fact that it was supposed to be off-limits for everybody who wasn’t an evidence technician, Joe knew that there was a crisis happening. He took advantage of the confusion surrounding that crisis to follow Ahua and his agents right down the staircase into the underground chambers that he’d been hearing so much about.
As Joe descended, he saw Ahua take a few steps into the room at the foot of the stairs then come right back out and go through a door to the left. The other agents followed. Just a few steps behind them, Joe stepped into the first room and found himself surrounded by colorful paint in a room where his wife was not. A small metal door in the wall in front of him stood slightly ajar, as if Ahua had peeked through it before abandoning the room. Joe felt that he should peek, too, so he did.
Water lapped at the bottom of the opening, splashing over into the room. Joe looked at its dark, oily surface and thought of Faye’s mysterious trip under Oklahoma City. She hadn’t been allowed to talk to him about it, but she’d mentioned hip waders, and he’d seen the water splashed on her shirt. He had asked himself where the water came from and where it was going, but he’d never had time to think the question through. As he stared at the flowing water, he was jolted into action by the sound of a woman screaming as if there were no tomorrow.
Joe hoped and also feared that the screams came from Faye, but he saw that it wasn’t her when the rushing stormwater swept Stacy Wong past him. He was through the door and in the water in a heartbeat.
* * *
Cully had dragged Stacy through the open door before the scream was out of her throat. She had clung to him, shouting, “No, no, not the water. I don’t want to go in the water. Don’t make me go in the water,” but she had been too drugged to fight him off. She’d gone headfirst into the rising current.
And it was indeed rising. Cully had no doubt of that. He just hoped it didn’t fill the pipe so completely that there was no air left to breathe. He dragged himself back through the door into the painted room where there was another woman who needed rescuing.
Faye had lots more fight left in her than Stacy did, but Cully was bigger and he knew all the dirty tricks of two generations of stunt men and women. He dismantled Faye’s last objection by saying, “You have to get to Stacy. She’s still pretty stoned. I don’t know if she can swim.” Then he stuffed her through the opening.
A noise behind him made him turn his head in time to see the heavy door twitch on its hinges. Over the noise of the rushing water, he heard the heavy click of an opening padlock and the grinding sound of wood on brick as someone worked hard to shove it open.
He needed a weapon. The only thing he saw was the chain that had bound Stacy. Still standing against the back wall, he leaned down and picked it up.
Stacy and Faye were out of the room, and that was good. Even in a flooded storm sewer, they were safer than they would have been if they were facing Kaayla and her gun. His plan was to keep doing whatever he could to slow Kaayla down. Every second that he bought Faye and Stacy took them further from a loaded gun and closer to safety.
The chain was heavy in his hand. In these close quarters, he might be able to sling hard and connect, then keep connecting until he knocked Kaayla out or she shot him.
Out of nowhere, he felt a small, strong hand grab him by the right shoulder. It threw him off-balance and he stumbled. He would have fallen, but a second hand grabbed him by the other shoulder and guided that fall through the door into the storm sewer. He hung for an instant with the metal rim of the doorframe digging into his back, but Faye never let go. She maneuvered her feet to the pipe wall below him and pressed hard, using the leverage to pull him into the water with her. She had told him that she lived on an island. She sure handled herself in the water like an island dweller.
The current was strong. It grabbed them and pulled them downstream. They were just clear of the opening when he saw a bullet slam into the sewer wall just inches from Faye’s head. A puff of orange dust erupted from the brick that took a bullet for her.
Her name came out of his mouth, unbidden. “Faye!”
The sound of the gunshot was deafening and Cully recognized a dangerous kind of terror on Faye’s face. It was the kind of terror that could make someone do fatal things like crawl back into the room where a woman waited with a gun. He slung an arm under Faye’s armpits, making sure to keep her face above water, and making sure his footing was secure. Then he started dragging her downstream like a lifeguard saving a swimmer from drowning.
Ahead of him, he heard Stacy still shrieking her displeasure as the water washed her farther from danger. He was grateful for her shouting, because it reassured him that she wasn’t drowning.
In the darkness ahead, he heard a splash and a man’s voice, but he couldn’t spend any time figuring out who was barreling out of the other painted room, because another splash sounded, and it was much closer to him. Kaayla had come into the storm sewer, bellowing, “Grace. Lucia. Stay where you are.” More splashing ensued, so Cully wasn’t sure whether either of them followed her orders.
In the lantern light spilling out of the room he’d just escaped, he could see Kaayla maneuvering into an upright position, holding her gun above the water. If she managed to get enough traction on the pipe’s bricks to stand up straight and aim a shot properly, it was possible that she might be able to kill them before they’d made it out of range.
Cully slung the arm that was dragging Faye and he slung it hard, tossing her a few feet downstream from where he stood. He hoped she’d regained her senses well enough to swim or at least keep her face out of the water while it carried her away from Kaayla and her gun. He also hoped that Stacy, barely visible ahead of them, had been sobered up enough by the chilly water to be able to swim. By letting them go ahead, he risked letting them drown, but Kaayla and her bullets seemed like the more immediate problem. All he had to buy them was seconds for the water to whisk them farther downstream in the dark.
Dim light shone through the door of the other painted room, the one in front of him, and it illuminated a bend in the pipe. Faye and Stacy could be around that bend in seconds. So, of course, could Kaayla, but once she lost her footing, the torrent of water buffeting them would keep her from finding it again. This was her last chance to stand still and coolly draw aim, and he knew that he could stop her.
Cully admired Faye and Stacy a great deal. He figured that they each had forty or fifty good years left to them, while he had ten or twenty, tops. And that was if he was lucky. It seemed like a good trade to buy eighty or a hundred years for them with ten or twenty of his own. The characters he had played on-screen liked to think of themselves as excellent horse traders, so he was at peace leaving the earth as part of a good trade.
Cully reached down with his feet and used the rubber soles of his new sneakers to grip the bricks on the bottom of the pipe. Standing up tall, so tall that his head bumped the pipe above him, he did his best imitation of a human shield and waited for Kaayla to fire.
* * *
Ahua stood at the foot of the stairs, looking into the room to his left. The dust on the floor was still deep and undisturbed, and this is how he knew that he was looking for Stacy in the wrong place. In all likelihood, Faye was with her. And so was Kaayla, the woman Faye had accused of sending Alonso Smith to set off the bomb that killed him. If they were underground, it was in a part of the abandoned network of rooms that was accessed by another stairway. Ahua had no idea where to begin looking for it.
He was facing the futility of looking for an entrance that had been hidden for eighty years while the clock ticked on two women’s lives, when he heard a scream. The sound seemed to be coming from the painted room, so he wheeled around to step through that door. Pushing his way through the agents accompanying him, he arrived just in time to see Joe Wolf Mantooth’s bottom half disappear as the big man threw himself into the storm sewer.
Ahua was very proud to see all of his agents preparing to follow Mantooth into the water that was slopping over the bottom rim of the open door, but it made no sense for all of them to go in. Too many bodies in such a narrow pipe was a recipe for a logjam that could drown them all.
“Stand down. Nobody’s going in but me. That pipe’s not wide enough for all of us to go in.” He pointed a finger at the nearest agent. “You. Call an ambulance to meet us at the spot where this pipe dumps into the river. Agent Goldsby can tell you where it is.”
He pointed to another agent. “And you. Alert the Agent in Charge.”
As he launched himself into the water, he said to the last one, Agent Bigbee. “Find a vehicle and get yourselves to that outfall. I’m going to need backup when I get there.” He could see that Bigbee wanted to ignore the order and go after a screaming woman who might well be his friend Faye, but Bigbee was an excellent agent. He stood down and watched Ahua dive through the opening.
Then Ahua heard a gunshot and he heard Cully Mantooth’s voice bellow Faye’s name and he knew that, somehow, he’d succeeded in following her cryptic clues to the spot where he was meant to be.
* * *
Cully felt an impact when the gun fired a second time. It wasn’t painful, but it knocked him off his feet. Maybe getting shot wasn’t so bad, after all.
Then he realized that it was no bullet that hit him. It was Faye, who could apparently swim with the speed and force of a barracuda. She slung an arm under his armpits and began pulling him downstream with the same lifeguard’s technique that he’d used on her.
He was floating on his back, so he saw everything that happened upstream, dimly lit as it was by the light coming through the open metal door that he’d just passed through. Kaayla was still on her feet, steadying herself to take another shot at him, and Grace was tugging at her arms, begging her not to shoot. Kaayla pushed her away like a big sister keeping a little sister from messing with her dollhouse. Grace wasn’t going to be able to stop Kaayla from shooting to kill.
* * *
Joe could hear Stacy screaming downstream. In the darkness, it was hard to tell which way was up, but he focused on maintaining an awareness of the water’s surface. It was rising, and the time was coming when there might be only a bubble of air at the top of the pipe where he could breathe. And where he could take Stacy for air, if she turned out to be unable to do it for herself and if he could find her. Or any of the other people he heard struggling in the rushing water. After that, the time might come when there was no air at all.
Joe stretched himself to his full-length, stuck out his hand, and was rewarded by the feel of sodden leather. He grabbed the shoe and gently pulled Stacy Wong toward him so that he could help her keep her face above the surface while there was still air to breathe.
* * *
Everyone in the sewer—Stacy, Joe, Ahua, Faye, Cully, Kaayla, Grace—had been knocked off their feet by the water or by each other, and they were now helpless to slow their rate of travel. The rainfall outside had increased suddenly when the thunderstorm struck, sending a slug of water that rapidly raised the water level in the storm sewer pipe, moving them along even faster.
Stacy passed the point where two lateral lines entered the pipe first. They brought still more water into the main line, and they brought it with such force that Stacy was buffeted by turbulence. Joe, who was still clinging to her shoe, lost his grip as the water tumbled him until all sense of direction was gone.
One by one, the others passed that point and found themselves banging into the pipe’s brick walls and into each other. The remaining air at the top of the pipe was only inches deep. Each time their faces surfaced, water splashed into their mouths and noses. All their flailing to find the surface did nothing to help.
Life and death hung on the question of finding air in utter darkness while tumbling through moving water. Periodic crashes into the pipe’s rough brick walls brought blood and bruises, but nothing to breathe.
* * *
Faye took a punishing crash into the pipe wall. She had lost Cully somehow. Maybe he was ahead of her and maybe he was behind her. When the water went turbulent and they passed into a pipe that was six feet across, bodies had tumbled through the water in every direction.
She had learned the hard way that she needed to protect her skull, so she was curled into a ball with her arms and hands cradling her head and face. Soon, she would need to uncurl and find some air to breathe.
Two hands grabbed her and dragged her down, exactly like a drowning person in a swimming pool would take down anyone in the vicinity without meaning them a scintilla of harm. Only here, in this place, the concept of “taking down” someone was heavily dependent on whether either the attacker or defender had any notion of where “up” was.
The person attacking Faye was trying to walk right up her body like a ladder, digging her feet into Faye’s groin, abdomen, chest, face. Faye turned the tables by reaching up and grabbing at her attacker’s face and throat. She felt a metal name tag on the person’s lapel and long straight hair wrapped itself around her hand, so she knew she was dealing with Kaayla. What she didn’t know was whether Kaayla’s attack was a premeditated attempt to drown her or whether the woman was out of her mind with panic. Either of these things would make Faye equally dead.
She struck out at Kaayla with both hands and feet, but the woman hung on. In desperation, Faye held her at arm’s length, flailing with her feet in hopes of finding the pipe’s walls and figuring out which way was up. Her foot struck bricks with bruising force, but the pain felt good. Faye struck the bricks hard and used the force to ram Kaayla into the opposite wall. In the moment of impact, her assailant went limp.
Still longing for air, Faye used the bricks to push off again, this time heading downstream.
* * *
By the time Faye slammed me into the sewer wall, I had long since dropped the handgun. It had become a burden that weighed me down and left me only one hand to use to save myself. And to save Grace. And maybe Lucia. I have no way to know whether she flung herself into the water after us.
The gun was drowning me and I had to let it go. This might mean that Faye and Stacy will live to testify against me. It might mean that I am convicted of killing my father, which is something that I in fact did. And perhaps I deserve it. Evil must be obliterated. I refuse to call myself evil for ridding the world of Lonnie, but the things I did to Stacy and Faye…the things I planned to do them…those things are evil.
Right now, though, the question of evil in my soul does not matter.
The thing that matters is finding Grace. And maybe Lucia. Even finding air to breathe means nothing if I can’t find air for them.
In truth, my love for my sisters is all that has ever mattered. Except, of course, for obliterating Lonnie.
* * *
Cully saw daylight ahead, and this meant that he might just make it. He had no idea what had happened to Faye. Somehow, it was now Stacy’s head that he was holding out of the water. He thought, but was not sure, that she was still alive, so she too might make it. He didn’t know about the others. At some point, they had become nothing more than bodies bashing him with arms, legs, fists, feet, flailing in desperation.
Maybe some of them were still alive. He hoped so.
As this hope began to grow, Cully felt rather than saw a long, strong body leap out of the darkness. The gray light had grown just strong enough for him to recognize the man’s face and strong shoulders as Joe’s.
If Faye swam like a barracuda, her husband was a killer whale. Joe wrapped his arms around Cully and Stacy, gently guiding them toward the light. For the first time in real life, Cully understood the joy in a besieged frontiersman’s heart when the cavalry appeared over the crest of a hill, poised to sweep down and save the day. Sometimes, they even saved people like him.