Once I’d ticked that chore off my list, I swung by the drainage pipe I’d climbed out of. It wasn’t exactly on the way, but who was going to check up on me? Hardwicke? He was too busy being butt-hurt. I’d decided to start at the exit point since it seemed like a better option than the drain on the Air Show grounds, where I’d have to check in via security. My badge would have gotten me through, but I didn’t much feel like justifying my curiosity if someone asked questions. The more remote access point seemed like a better choice with that in mind.
I got out of my car and took a look around the exterior of the site but didn’t see anything untoward. Clear marks in the grass showed where the ambulance and responding squad cars had parked, confirming that I was indeed in the right place. But otherwise, I didn’t spot anything useful on the ground outside. Not a single informational pamphlet entitled “How to Tell If Aliens Are Here,” or even a bit of graffiti that said, “UFOs rock!” I would have gladly taken either as a sign I was on the right track, but no luck. I hadn’t expected to find anything out here since Hardwicke and co had already searched. But maybe I’d catch something they hadn’t simply because I knew one simple fact—aliens were real.
If I wanted answers, I’d have to go inside. Somewhere in those sewers sat the thing my attacker hadn’t wanted me to see. It was the only explanation for why he’d knocked me out. Maybe there was another UFO down there. Maybe something else so otherworldly that I couldn’t even begin to contemplate it. But I wouldn’t figure this mystery out by standing at the entrance and staring longingly into the dark. There was just one problem: I didn’t want to go in. I started to waffle at the very last minute.
Quite frankly, I was frightened out of my wits. I’d lucked my way out of the tunnels once before, but what if I couldn’t do it again? Or what if instead of dislocating my shoulder, I cracked my skull? Besides, the shoulder still ached badly, and Hardwicke and his crew hadn’t found anything in a whole day of searching. So I probably wouldn’t either. This whole trip had been a waste of time, and if I had any brains at all, I’d go back to the office and run this crime down the right way.
I started trudging up the sloping grass toward my car when thoughts of Ronda stopped me cold. I’d been waiting all this time for answers to why she’d died, and they were all wrapped up in this extraterrestrial business. Sometimes I imagined her restless in her grave, unable to go to whatever eternal slumber awaited her until I’d figured this damned thing out. Then her spirit would go, “Oh, so that’s what happened. Damned bad luck, if you ask me,” before it closed its eyes forever. Yes, going into this tunnel would be dangerous. But if the roles had been reversed, Ronda wouldn’t have let it go until she’d put me to rest, and she certainly wouldn’t have shirked from looking into the situation further because she was nervous or her shoulder hurt. I couldn’t cop out like that and live with myself later.
Okay, then. I squared my shoulders (with a minimum of discomfort) and put my mind to the situation. The chances of my assailant lying in wait in this particular tunnel were low, but stranger things had happened to me before, so I would be prepared regardless. I decided to enter the tunnel as if it were full of hostiles. Although that kind of thing was always better done with a partner, my training had prepared me for situations like this. I went back up to the car and left a note to inform passersby of who I was, where I’d gone, and when I’d gone there. If—the note said—I wasn’t back by 1:45, they were to call Scorsone’s number and inform him of the situation. That gave me a full half hour to get in and out, and I wasn’t intending to go far down without a map of the tunnels. But I had to take a look for myself.
Once I’d put together my impromptu life insurance, I returned to the tunnel, pulled out my sidearm, and flicked on my flashlight. My hands pressed against each other, moving as one so that the light always shone along my line of fire. My trigger finger rested along the guard, nice and relaxed. I wouldn’t put it on the trigger unless I was aiming at something I intended to destroy. The movies always got that bit of basic gun safety wrong, and it drove me batshit.
Then I stepped into the darkness.
Of course I was scared, but I had work to do. My fear could wait until later. I locked it away in a tiny little room. It would fuel me if I needed it, but otherwise? I didn’t have the luxury of indulging it. After so many years on the force, I’d gotten fairly good at locking my feelings away, letting only the barest trickle out to keep my edge nice and tight. Letting fear take over was a surefire way to get myself killed. I’d been trained well and knew it; that training had gotten me out of many a scrape, and it would do so now.
It took only a couple of seconds to give myself a mini pep talk and center myself in preparation for entry. Then I was off. My steps remained small and smooth, on soft knees, keeping my mass centered at all times. I pushed back against the wall, clearing the opposite corner with my flashlight. As I turned, my entire body moved as one, always focusing light, weapon, and eyes in the same direction. Nothing in the corner, nor on the ground, so I began to move along the wall, feeling the barest graze of it along my back. I searched with deliberate precision, unwilling to miss something important or allow some crazy snake man to creep up on me and take me unawares a second time.
Moving this way took a lot more time than simply walking down the tunnel would have, and it felt like forever had passed before I reached the first intersection. I was fairly sure that I’d come out the right hand tunnel, which sloped noticeably downward. But I took a moment to look down the left one too, just to be certain nothing was going to come up out of it while my attention was elsewhere. I wouldn’t turn my back to it completely though, because contrary to popular belief, I wasn’t a complete idiot with a death wish.
As I was looking down the tunnel, I heard something down in the depths, too deep to be seen. A scraping, dragging sound. A noise too heavy to be caused by some small animal lost in the darkness. An ominous sound that made me think of unconscious bodies being pulled along the earth. Unconscious bodies like mine had been.
I shook myself out of that line of panicked thought. If there was something down there, and especially if it was the penis pustule who’d knocked me out, I needed to track it down if possible. Bring it in for questioning. Maybe hit it a few times.
Not that I’d do that, because I had standards, but I might think about it really hard.
My anger steeled me, carrying me down the tunnel toward the sounds I could still hear. I found it impossible to tell how far away the noise was, what with all of the echoes in the rounded chambers. But I knew I was getting closer. I felt it in my bones.
I reached another intersection and paused to orient myself and figure out which way to go next. The sound had grown intermittent, and it bounced off the walls so badly that I couldn’t tell which way to go. By now, I was deep enough underground that all light from the entrance had faded into deep black. My police issue flashlight did a great job of cutting through the black, and I spared a moment to wish that I’d had it on me yesterday, but I didn’t use it often enough to carry with me when I was on duty during the day. I usually stashed it in the car just in case, for all the good that had done me. But I had it now, and that was what counted.
The intersection I stood at now looked like every other one I’d seen down here. Dank and featureless, with domed concrete above and below. But then, my eyes caught something on the floor as the light danced over it, and I bent to get a closer look. Shallow scratches were etched into the concrete, as if something heavy had been dragged across it. Unfortunately, when I tried to follow them, they disappeared within a foot or so. Perhaps they were just the marks of some animal scrabbling against the ground, but I didn’t think so. I could still hear the occasional scraping sound in the gloom, and the noise and the scratches might have just been caused by the same source. It felt possible, at least.
When I leaned down to get a closer look, my foot scuffed against the ground, sending up a cloud of dust and debris and who knew what else. Prob
ably dried out animal feces or something equally disgusting. I inhaled the whole lot of it and immediately sneezed.
I’d heard some women in the office who made a point of sneezing in this high pitched, delicate way, like even their nasal passages had attended etiquette classes and wouldn’t dream of being disruptive in public. They were the kind of women who glistened instead of sweated, pooted instead of farting. I had never been one of those kinds of people. My sneezes could have powered a sailboat. They were loud and boisterous and unapologetic. Another good reason for me to have kept my finger off the trigger, because I sure as hell would have squeezed off a shot on accident if I’d been able to. My whole body tensed when I sneezed.
The noise from down the tunnel abruptly stopped.
Now my adrenaline went into overdrive, because the noise-making thing somewhere in those tunnels might have been an alien, and it might have been a penis pustule, or even both. It might have left that Sankanium on the grounds. It might be a friend or enemy of Mr. No Mouth. I desperately wanted to apprehend who or whatever it was and find out the answers to those questions, and I just as desperately wanted to avoid getting knocked out by it. I readied myself in the most secure position possible, with my back to the wall and a clear sight on all three of the tunnels. Then I took a deep, slow breath—through my nose so it wouldn’t make too much noise. I had to listen for the sound of approach, to be ready. I would not be knocked unconscious and dragged into the deep again.
I stood that way for what felt like forever, straining to hear the sound of someone—or some thing—creeping up on me. Nothing came. I heard nothing. And eventually, I had to conclude that I’d probably frightened it off. Whoever was hiding here, it wanted to avoid discovery at all costs. It wouldn’t pick a fight unless it had to. Even after it had attacked me and had me unconscious and unable to further defend myself, it simply dumped me off where I’d no longer be a threat.
My chances of tracking it down now, without much of a trail to follow or the noise to guide me, were incredibly low. I’d likely get lost again if I went on much further. I did spend a few minutes trying to make sense of the marks on the ground, but they didn’t appear to go anywhere, and I wasn’t willing to enter either of the tunnels that led deeper into the ground. I took some pictures and marked the walls by scratching them with my multitool so I’d be able to find the place later, and then I retraced my steps back to the surface where I’d parked my car.
I emerged blinking into the sunlight. Part of me felt like the trip had been a failure, but maybe it had been worth it after all. Now I knew there was something down there—Rickroll’s monster, my penis pustule attacker—and all I had to do was figure out how to find him. Perhaps I would point the search party in the right direction, but that would require getting Hardwicke to listen to me, and that was easier said than done. But I refused to get this close to answers and allow myself to be dissuaded by my stubborn ass of a partner. I’d make him listen.
Who knew? Maybe he’d be more inclined to give me a break once I resisted my Lone Ranger tendencies and asked him for help for once. It was worth a try at the very least, and I’d promised Scorsone. With that thought in mind, I climbed into my car, destroyed the note I’d left on the dash, and headed back into the office.
CHAPTER 19
As I climbed out of my car in the staff lot, I rehearsed what I intended to say to Hardwicke. My initial approach would determine how the rest of the conversation would go. If I rubbed him the wrong way off the bat, he wasn’t going to listen to me at all. The brainstorming might have been an excellent idea, but it had the side effect of distracting me from my usual vigilance. Usually, I kept at high alert in parking lots in general and the department lot in particular. I’d put away plenty of people who would have liked to make me pay for it, and parking lots made great ambush points. I’d caught quite a few criminals in them unawares, and I knew all too well that the tables could be easily turned.
But given the crazy pace of the last few days, I couldn’t maintain my customary levels of awareness. Frankly, I felt lucky to still be on my feet and speaking words of more than one syllable. When the woman in the burka—the one I’d met in the gym about a million years ago, or so it felt—snuck up on me for the second time in as many days, I had an excuse for not noticing her until the last second and squealing like a frightened puppy when I turned and came face-to-face with her black garb and lashless eyes. It didn’t keep me from feeling like a total idiot, but at least I was a justified idiot.
“Wait,” she said, holding up her gloved hands. But the reassurance came too late; I had already backed away from her instinctively. It only took a moment before I recovered and glared at her. People who snuck up on police and military officers had no common sense. At least she seemed to realize she’d made a mistake, because her body language turned sheepish, folding in on itself. “Please. Don’t dismiss me until you hear what I have to say.”
“Lady, you’re about five seconds away from being slapped with a protective order. If you have something to tell me, you’d better make it quick.”
I had all the sympathy in the world for mental illness. Really I did. I’d spent the past few months wondering if I was losing my grip on reality, and that had been more than enough insight for me. I wouldn’t wish that kind of self-doubt on my worst enemy, but that didn’t mean I was willing to be accosted by a mental patient every time I turned around. It would interfere with my ability to do my job, and I had enough crazy of my own to deal with. I didn’t need her fuckwits and casserole pans and whatever else she’d been raving about before.
“Please,” she repeated, her lisp drawing the word out into an almost snakelike hiss. “I want to talk to you about the UFOs.”
The bottom dropped out of my stomach. “Beg pardon?”
“The UFOs. You have seen them.”
It sounded like a statement to me, like she knew about my winter encounter with the strange and unearthly whatsit that had killed Ronda. There was no question in her voice about my involvement or the reality of what I’d seen. Could she have sent my mystery email? With everything that was going on, I hadn’t had the time to look into it, but I hadn’t forgotten about it either. If so, this woman was no garden variety lunatic. I gave her a closer look, but all I could see was her eyes. They seemed clear and steady enough, locking on mine with firmness.
I began to wonder about her mental state. Perhaps I’d jumped to conclusions too quickly. Did she just sound nuts because she’d seen the aliens too? Or was she a mental patient and a witness to alien activity. Perhaps we had more in common than I’d realized.
Either way, I had to listen. I gestured to a metal bench at the edge of the parking lot, near a bus stop. It featured a small pile of garbage heaped on one end but otherwise seemed in decent enough repair. We moved toward it and took a seat. The woman in the burka sidled away from the trash like it might be infectious, nudging it away from her with the very tip of her foot.
“Okay,” I said cautiously. “What should I call you?” She hissed at me, and I said, “Come again? Was that your name, or are you shushing me?”
“It is my name.” She spelled it out for me, straining to enunciate each letter. “T-s-i-s-h-e. Tsishe.”
I figured it was a foreign name. It wasn’t too bad as far as those things went. Certainly could have been worse. One of the ladies in booking was named “Precious Joy,” and I thought her parents had been awfully optimistic when she’d been born. She was lucky they hadn’t named her “Awful Pain in the Ass.” It would have fit better with her personality.
“Okay, Tsishe. I’m Detective Vorkink. But you already knew that, right?”
She nodded.
“What do you want to tell me about the UFOs?” Now she hesitated, and the silence stretched between us into an uncomfortable length. When it became obvious that she wasn’t going to talk, I said, “So let me get this straight. You want to talk to me about this stuff, only you don’t have anything to say?”
She hunc
hed uncomfortably away from my stare. “It is…complicated.”
“Yeah, I get that.” I took a deep breath. “Okay, so let’s try and make this easier. We’ve got UFOs. We both know about those, from the sounds of it. And then you brought up…corpses. What corpses?”
“The ones in the ground beneath Toledo,” she said.
“In the cemetery? Buried?”
“No.” She shook her head. “I do not know the English word.”
I couldn’t tell whether I believed her or not. Her accented speech definitely suggested that English wasn’t her first language, but it wasn’t like she’d been forthcoming so far. Perhaps she was using the language barrier as an excuse. If so, this entire interview was a waste of my time. But I’d give her the benefit of the doubt if it meant finding out what she knew about the aliens. At least for the moment, but it was a struggle.
I took a deep breath and tried to approach the problem logically. “Okay, so what language do you speak? I’ll write it down and look it up in Google Translate.”
She shook her head wordlessly, her eyes wide.
I’d had it. When I pushed to my feet, she leapt to hers beside me. She seemed to realize she’d pushed me too far. Maybe that had something to do with the way I threw my hands in the air and growled aloud.
“I need to go to work. I can’t decide if you know something legit or if you’re just playing with me, but either way, this conversation isn’t going anywhere. If you decide you actually want to talk, you know where to find me, obviously.”
I thought about asking how she knew, but it seemed useless.
She reached toward me, and without even thinking, my hand flashed out to close around her wrist in a defensive maneuver. I had never liked being touched by random strangers, but it had gotten worse since I’d became a cop. No one put their hands on me without asking permission, even my family members. It was just safer that way for all of us.
Unidentified Flying Suspect (Illegal Alien Book 2) Page 11