She turned toward Perez, keeping her gaze from the white marble flesh. Rain dripped down her neck, trickled down her spine.
“We’ve got to go,” she urged. “This water is rising fast. We can wade it here in the Wreck Room, but down below—”
“Give me your pack.”
She shrugged it off. He opened it and started tossing everything from her knapsack into his daypack: radio, keys, wallet, and phone tumbled in with a clatter.
“Hey!” she yelped, clutching the camera to her chest.
“Your pack’s bigger than mine.”
“So?”
He spied one of the folded garbage bags she carried, grabbed it from the top of the heap. “We’ve got to take him with us. Otherwise the body may never be found.” He spread the garbage bag on the rocks. “Hold this open.”
She pushed the camera into his daypack with her other gear, then knelt and held the thin sheets of plastic apart. When he reached for the corpse, she turned her face to the ceiling, watched the curtain of rain shimmering down from the skylight. A couple of small pebbles, loosened from the overhang, bounced off the rock pile a foot away. “We’ve got to get moving, Perez. The whole overhang could collapse any second.”
The putrid odor of decay increased in intensity, and Sam tried to inhale as little as possible. Wet clothing brushed against the skin of her wrists. The cold kiss of clammy flesh. Oh, Zack. Why didn’t real life have happy endings?
“Okay,” Perez murmured. She released her hold and backed away, then stole a look. The tips of two tiny white fingers protruded from the opening of the sack.
Perez pulled up the plastic. The fingers slid out of sight. He tied the attached handles together, then lifted the black mass into the knapsack, pressing down a little to get it in. He stretched the top flap over and tied it down. Not much to pack away, really. Sad, sad thought.
“I’ll carry this,” he told her.
This, not him. She shuddered and reached for Perez’s daypack. She’d never use her knapsack again. She adjusted the straps of his pack to fit her smaller frame.
Another pebble pinged down beside them. A shower of red dirt fell into Perez’s raven hair. “Let’s go,” he said, raking out chunks with his fingers.
Stepping off the rock pile, she gasped at the chill. The water now swirled above her knees. The current threatened to sweep her feet out from under her. She had to focus on the present. Zack’s fate had already been decided; now she had to look out for herself and Perez. “Wade over to the right side—it’s shallower there.”
They felt their way cautiously around the edge of the room, bracing themselves against the rock wall. As they neared the stream’s outlet to the next chamber, the water deepened. The roar ahead was ominous.
“How many more levels?” Perez shouted.
She turned her head toward him so he could hear. “Two. The Play Room—the next chamber—is wider, so maybe the water won’t be as deep. There’s a pretty big drop down to the last chamber. Then we have to get out onto the cliffside.” Making sure that we don’t plunge the last seventy feet over Village Falls, she added mentally. She’d warn him about that when the time came.
The creek, now more a river, roared through the ten-foot-wide opening in the rock wall and dropped six feet into the next chamber. The swiftness of the water was frightening. She’d never been in a slot canyon during a flash flood, but she’d seen the wreckage left behind—debris that included the bloated, broken bodies of rabbits, lizards, even deer trapped by the rising water.
Mist from the roiling stream filled the chamber beyond, creating an otherworldly atmosphere.
“Dungeons and dragons,” Perez bellowed in her ear. “Through the porthole to the next dimension!”
Dead children didn’t faze Perez. Threats of drowning or dying in a rockslide didn’t even slow him down. She grabbed his jacket sleeve. “This is real, Perez. We could die in here.”
She had to make him understand. “Hold on to this wall as you step through the opening,” she shouted into his face. “There’s a ledge to the right—try to end up there.”
He nodded. A drop of water fell from the tip of his nose into her eye. Blinking, she turned back toward the surging stream. She took a ragged breath, plunged a foot into the torrent, and ducked through the opening.
The water was nearly waist deep at the top of the drop. The current was tremendous. It took all her strength just to keep her feet beneath her. She wedged her boot between two rocks. A mistake. As she tried to pull herself around the rock wall, she couldn’t get her foot free. Wonderful; her ankle was going to break. As momentum carried her forward, she waited for the pop of breaking bone.
Suddenly her foot slid free. Her shins banged against underwater rocks. Pain ricocheted through her body. She nearly fell to her knees. It would be suicide to go down like that. Barely managing to stay on her feet, she groped for a rough knob of rock jutting out from the wall. A lifesaving handle.
Panting from exertion, she was able to pull herself up onto the rock shelf that lay only a few inches under the water. Concentrating on keeping both feet on the ledge and both hands behind her on the wall, she sidestepped away from the opening and stopped to wait for Perez.
He faced her as he stepped through, trying to hug the wall as he swung around into the chamber. The water came up only to his thighs, but he had the disadvantage of a higher center of gravity. Arms stretched out, he searched for something to grab hold of.
Then he slipped, crash-landing on his hands and knees. The water rushed around his shoulders and chest. The torrent tipped him sideways. Sam’s heart thumped like a freight train. His pack, now filling with water, would surely pull him under.
“Chase!” She stretched out a hand. At least a yard separated them. The muscles corded in his neck as he strained to hang on to something underwater. His lips moved. She couldn’t hear his words above the roar of the falls. He was probably cursing. She certainly would be.
He reached for a rock that spiked up from the water near the wall. His fingers, white at the tips, curled around the jagged stone. The water geysered up in front of his chest, splashed into his face. His hand slipped from the rock and he fell back. His head went under.
Oh hell. She plunged one foot into the current and stretched to grab his upper arm. Her fingers didn’t quite encircle the hard bicep under the slick nylon. The water surged coldly around her crotch and buttocks. She leaned back and pulled with all her might, sat down hard against the underwater ledge. She’d have bruises the size of Seattle on the back of her thighs. Something in her pack thunked against rock: she prayed it was not her phone or camera, then wondered how she could possibly be worrying about equipment at a time like this.
Perez slid less than a foot in her direction, but it was enough. He got a firm grip on the rock spike and crawled back to his feet again. She let go of his arm and pulled herself erect on the ledge.
Water gushed out of his backpack and streamed down the back of his legs. He raised a hand toward her, knuckles bloody from scraping rocks. “Thank you, Wilderness!”
She heaved a sigh of relief. “Welcome to the Play Room, Starchaser. I thought you were a goner there for a moment.”
“I’d never hear the end of it if I drowned in some backcountry canyon in Utah. The FBI gets gunned down by vicious criminals or we don’t die at all.” He squeegeed water from his hair with dripping fingers.
She smiled weakly, the muscles in her face stiff. The cold and wet was getting to her. The temperature inside the Curtain was never more than sixty; the water was colder. Before much longer, hypothermia would claim them both. They had to keep moving; keep the blood circulating. The exit wasn’t far now.
Her wristwatch, amazingly enough, was still working. It was nearly ninety minutes since they’d begun their descent, more than an hour since it had begun to rain. She took a deep breath, clutched at his arm again. “Look, Chase, I’ve got to tell you about the waterfall at the end. I didn’t want to scare you, but after t
hat last stunt—”
“Mommmyyy!” A thin little cry floated in the mist.
She gasped and turned her head in the direction of the sound.
“After that last stunt?” he prompted.
She turned back to him. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“Mommmmyyyyyy.”
“There! I just heard it again. A child calling for Mommy.”
“I don’t hear anything but water.” He gently tipped up her chin with a cold finger and gazed into her eyes. “Neither do you, Summer. Remember, I’ve got the kid. In my pack.”
The words hit her, a hard blow to the heart. He was right. The search was over; Zack was dead. Like the echo she’d created while rappelling into the first chamber: dead, dead, dead.
Were auditory hallucinations a symptom of hypo-thermia? She couldn’t remember. Hypothermia muddled thinking, and hers was getting muddled fast. She had to focus. She’d gotten them into the Curtain; she had to get them out.
“Summer?” He stared at the center of the chamber. “How do we get out of here?”
The creek had completely flooded the chamber. Water lapped at the walls that rose in a waffle pattern up to a slash of sky at the top of the crevice. The pockmarks in the rock walls, she now realized, were erosion scars from floods like this over the centuries. The water swirled around the chamber in a sluggish spiral, a dirty whirlwind at its center.
“Good Lord. The Slide’s underwater.”
He waited for her explanation, a grim set to his jaw.
“This chamber tilts downward about fifteen feet or so. The bottom is smooth; it dips abruptly toward that side.” She pointed to the far wall. “To get to the next level, you pass through a hole about four feet in diameter. Normally you can sit down in the water and glide over the smooth rock, like a water slide. Sort of an Alice in Wonderland experience, going though the rabbit hole.” She stared at the swirling gray water where the hole should have been. The corpse of a small furry animal—a rat?—was sucked into the vortex as she watched.
“Can we go back?”
She shook her head. “The drop from the Wreck Room will be impassable now.”
Perez studied the waffled rock walls. “I don’t suppose we could go up.”
Sam took note of how the water-slick walls slanted inward over their heads. Impossible.
“Wilderness Westin could climb out of here, couldn’t she?” Perez asked. “I’ve heard she’s superhuman.”
She gave him an exasperated look. How could the man think of joking now? “Don’t believe everything you read.”
Lightning flashed, its brilliance mirrored for a second in the pool’s surface. Thunder rumbled loudly over the roar of the water.
Perez had been right when he’d described the Curtain as a gigantic beast. It had swallowed them alive, and now it was going to digest them.
23
Perez placed a hand on her shoulder. “No worries. I swim like a fish.” He gave her a reassuring smile, then amended, “Correction. I do need to breathe. I swim like a dolphin.”
Then go for help, Flipper, she wanted to say. She swallowed hard, then told him, “The next chamber opens up like a cathedral. There’ll be plenty of air there.”
He leaned out toward the water. “Let’s do it.”
“Wait!” She grabbed his sleeve. Beneath the wet cloth she could feel him shivering. “Remember the waterfall down the side of the cliff? The one I told you about this morning?” It seemed so long ago. “Just below the ruins?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Are you telling me that’s the exit from the next chamber?”
“Bingo.”
His eyes narrowed, making her wonder what was going on inside his head.
“The waterfall comes out of a slit there, only a couple feet wide. We should be able to hang on to the rock there and climb out.” Please, God, make it so.
“Sounds easy enough.” He faced the whirlpool again.
Did he really grasp the danger? He didn’t know what he was getting into. She clutched a larger handful of sleeve, pulled him toward her. “Once we’re through the Slide—the hole at the bottom of this whirlpool—get to your feet, Chase. Village Falls is a seventy-foot drop. You’ve got to hang on to something or you’ll go over.”
He gently detached her fingers from his jacket, bent down to bring his eyes level with hers. “Summer, I hear you,” he said earnestly, still holding her hand. “Believe me when I say that I’ll be doing my best. I trust you’ll be doing likewise. Ready?”
“Mommmmyyyyy.”
That ghostly cry—was it louder now? Sam squinted, peering through the mist, her eyes searching the pockmarked walls for the source of the sound. She clutched at Perez again, this time grabbing the front of his jacket.
“Now what?”
Raising a shaky finger, she pointed to a pocket in the chamber wall ahead. “Chase, tell me that’s a hallucination.”
Through the mist, a pair of round blue eyes peered back at them.
* * * * *
His hands gripped the wheel and his eyes searched the campgrounds, but Rafael Castillo’s mind was on his nine-year-old daughter beside him. With her ivory skin, curly black hair, and warm caramel eyes, Rosa was going to be a knockout, just like her mother. They grew up so fast.
“Did Grandma’s friend, Mr. Wilson, ever . . . touch you or the other kids?” There. He’d finally gotten the words out.
One of those strange plastic clamps gripped her hair at the crown. Didn’t little girls wear ribbons anymore?
“He shook my hand once,” she told him. “He didn’t really pay much attention to me or to Christy. He wanted to play with Rique and Katie. He was always hugging and kissing on them.” She thrust her chin out. “But Christy and me . . . we don’t like him, anyway. His neck waggles like a turkey.”
“Christy and I,” he corrected automatically. Damn that man! And damn his mother-in-law for dragging the miserable excuse for a human being into their house. Wilson’s camper and Wallace Russell had disappeared from the campground. He’d asked the local cops and Highway Patrol to keep an eye out for both vehicle and man.
The rain drumming on the windshield was mesmerizing. Dios mio, he was exhausted. Good thing he hadn’t been sent up to the plateau: he could barely stand up. He prayed that Zack would still be found safe, but it didn’t sound good—if Fischer would use his little boy to get money, what else might he do to that child?
Although all clues pointed to Fred Fischer, apparently Thompson was going to let the cougars be killed, anyway. Did his boss have any sense of justice whatsoever?
He pulled his hat on, then wearily pushed open the door of the truck. “Stay here,” he told Rosa. “I’ve got to collect the camping fees. Then we’ll get you to your dentist appointment.”
He’d only gone a few steps when Rosa called him back. “They’re calling you on the radio, Dad.” She held it out the window to him. So grown up, so Anglo now. She rarely called him Papi anymore like the other kids did.
He pressed the Talk button. “Three-eight-six.”
Leeson was at the other end. “Castillo, you lookin’ for a big beige Wanderer?” He rattled off the license number.
Rafael’s pulse quickened. Wallace Russell/Orrin Wilson’s camper!
“It’s stuck in the mud here on West Side Road. Driver says the tow truck’s on the way.”
“Keep it there until I arrive. Don’t let the driver know I’m coming. I’ll be there in fifteen. Over.”
Rafael jumped in the truck, tossed the radio onto the seat. “Buckle up, Rosa,” he told his daughter. It’d be rough, but he’d take the gravel-road shortcut just in case Russell got antsy.
He fingered his holster, unsnapped the restraining strap over his pistol. As he neared the West Side Road, he imagined what it would feel like to rid the world of a worm like Wallace Russell.
* * * * *
The mist was thick in the Play Room. Sam could barely make out the apparition through the fog.
“Mommyyyy!” the little boy screamed.
Perez’s mouth fell open. “I’ll be goddamned—”
Sam stumbled toward the child, pushing a wave of water in front of her. As she neared, she could see that he knelt on the floor of a large water-smoothed pocket in the chamber wall. There had to be a way to climb the few feet up to the toddler’s position. She put a foot up on a protrusion to lift herself, then reached her hand up to him.
He spread his stubby fingers out to meet hers. For a second she felt his touch—feather-light, warm, a butterfly kiss—and then she slipped back down with a splash. A live little boy. He stood up and put a thumb in his mouth, looking down on her with a puzzled expression.
She forced warmth into her voice. “Zack?”
His face crumpled. “Coug-kittyyyy,” he whimpered.
“That’s right,” she told him. “Come to me, Zack, and we’ll go look for another picture of a kitty.”
He remained a yard beyond her reach. “I want Mommy!”
She tried again, finding inch-wide grips for her boots, clinging to the wall, stretching hard. The yellow-haired child wore the sodden Pooh Bear sweatshirt, the same torn red sweatpants he’d had on at the trailhead, one tiny red tennis shoe. Pushing her pack onto the ledge, she tried again to climb up, gaining a few inches. It still wasn’t enough.
“Come here, Zack,” she coaxed, patting the lip of the pocket. “Sit down. Scoot out where I can reach you. I’ll take you to your mommy.”
The child regarded her uncertainly for a second, then took a hesitant step toward her. Yes, Zack, yes! She impatiently patted the rough stone.
A dark shape leapt from the shadows behind the child. A large hand clamped down over Zack’s chubby wrist and jerked the toddler back. Zack shrieked.
The man was thin, his ribs prominent above the worn leather belt that held up his ragged jean shorts. His cheeks were darkened with stubble, not clean-shaven as she’d seen him before.
Endangered (A Sam Westin Mystery Book 1) Page 25