Catacombs

by Mary Anna Evans

  “Give me the hacksaw. Or the bolt cutters or whatever you used to destroy that padlock.”

  Faye reached into the shadow where Cully waited and picked up the bolt cutters, throwing them through the open door.

  As she stood waiting for Kaayla to force Grace and Lucia through the door, she saw her drop the gun to her side, releasing Lucia. The two maids stood free at her side as Kaayla began shoving the heavy door shut. Her laugh echoed in the small room where Faye stood and in the large room on the other side of the closing door. Finally, Faye understood.

  “Your sisters. They’re your sisters and they helped you kill your father.”

  Kaayla didn’t answer her. She just laughed until the closed door damped the sound, changing it into something quiet and chilling.

  Faye signaled to Cully that he shouldn’t speak, pantomiming that Kaayla had a gun. The old door was solid, but it didn’t block all sound. She waited until she heard the footsteps fade into nothingness before she said, “His daughters killed him. All three of them. Kaayla, Grace, and Lucia.”

  She turned her eyes to the walls, covered with paintings of Lonnie and his family that Kaayla had never bothered to destroy because she thought they’d never be seen. Now Faye saw them for who they were.

  Kaayla, the oldest, leaned against her mother’s knee or stood at her father’s side, watching the younger children. Lucia, with her prominent cheekbones, was easily distinguishable when Faye knew how to look, and she was discernible in many of the paintings as a small girl standing beside the slightly older Grace. The babies’ identities shifted, but Faye could usually tell by the context whether she was looking at Grace or Lucia or one of the frail boys. The doomed family’s history was splattered all over these walls. No wonder Kaayla had wanted to obliterate it.

  “Are you finished looking at the pretty pictures?” Cully whispered. “Because we need to get out of here.”

  Faye looked at the door’s iron hinges. They might be able to cut leather straps with Cully bolt cutters, but they would be no match for the stout ironwork.

  “Not that door,” Cully whispered. “The other one.”

  His eyes traveled to the little metal door in the wall that led into the storm sewer that would take them to the river and safety.

  “You already cut the padlock,” she said. “I saw you.”

  “Yep. ’Cause a smart man never lets himself get bottled up in a box canyon.”

  * * *

  Ahua stood behind the South Tower on a public sidewalk that offered no clue to where Faye was. He wished he was standing in a deep quiet forest, where her path would have been marked by scuffled leaves and mucky footprints. Instead, he had a concrete sidewalk, a heavily traveled city street, and a nearby alley paved in asphalt.

  Thanks to Faye, he had the name of the person responsible for the bombing, presuming that she was right about that, and Faye Longchamp-Mantooth had not struck him as a person who would claim to know something unless she was absolutely sure. She had also given him a lead on Stacy’s location and, even better, she had given him real hope that Stacy was alive.

  But had Faye given him enough information to ensure her own safety? It didn’t seem so, and that made him want to break something.

  “You,” he said, pointing at the agent nearest him. “Find out where the call that just came to my number originated.”

  That would be useful information but getting it would take too long. Faye had been taken by a known killer. He had to do something quickly, but what?

  Faye had said that Stacy Wong was underground and now Faye, too, had vanished. Maybe she was underground now, too. If so, Ahua only knew one way to get there, down a staircase in the bombed-out lobby of the historic Gershwin Hotel.

  “Come,” he said, taking off down the sidewalk, trusting that the three agents who weren’t working on tracing the location of the killer’s phone would follow in his wake. They did.

  * * *

  Joe couldn’t think of any more places in the Tower Annex where he wasn’t supposed to be. He had snooped into all of them. He couldn’t think of any more places to look for Faye, but he was undaunted because Faye was hardly ever where anybody would expect her to be.

  Thinking that maybe she was hanging out on the loading dock or beside the dumpsters—because why not?—he slipped out a door labeled “Employees Only” to take a look out back. Faye was not there but four FBI agents were, and they looked totally stressed as they ran past him. One of them was Ahua and another was Bigbee.

  Joe called out to him, “Have you seen my wife?”

  Ahua said only, “No,” but Bigbee managed to convey the truth to Joe with eye contact, a cocked head, and raised eyebrows. Joe followed them at a generous distance, figuring that it was a free country and he could jog where he pleased. If Ahua noticed, he didn’t let it show.

  * * *

  I linger outside the door to Stacy’s cell, listening to Faye and Stacy whisper. They are certainly talking their way through a set of options that are uniformly poor. I’m not crazy about my options, either.

  I have to kill them, of course, but the idea that Lonnie is reaching back from the grave to destroy two more lives makes me incandescent with rage. Stacy and Faye have done nothing wrong, but their continued existence will violate the only rule that Lonnie got right: Protect family at all costs.

  I have to protect Grace and Lucia. They have nobody and nothing but me. Because of Lonnie’s paranoia about the government, they don’t actually exist on paper. They have no legal identification beyond the fake passports I had someone forge to make it possible for me to hire them. Those passports could never stand up to the scrutiny of immigration agents. We were all homeschooled, but their birth mother, Sandra, never finished elementary school and her first language wasn’t English. Despite my best efforts over the years since I moved them into my apartment and set about helping them build lives in the real world, they are still functionally illiterate.

  My birth mother, on the other hand, was a high school math teacher and she taught me well. A GED and community college were options for me, but not for my sisters. If I were to go to jail—or to the electric chair, and I don’t much care whether it is one or the other—my sisters would immediately be jobless and soon homeless, and they would be vulnerable to deportation to…somewhere. There was once a time when immigration officials could have been made to understand my sisters’ situation, but that time is not now. Where does the U.S. send people these days when they quite literally have no country?

  The gun is heavy in my shaking hand. I don’t want to shoot Faye and Stacy. I don’t want to see the looks on their faces when they realize what is about to happen to them. I don’t want to see the spraying blood. I don’t want to hear them scream or groan or gurgle, but I don’t have it in me to let them starve to death. I need to think of something quick and painless.

  As I linger outside the padlocked door for a long time, my head is bowed and my eyes are closed as if I am praying over the matter, but I am years past being able to pray. My sisters keep saying “Kaayla?” in those soft, sweet, dependent voices that I love so well, despite the terrible burden that comes along with them.

  Finally, the answer comes and it is poison. Surely there is something in the hotel’s maintenance closet that will solve the problem of Faye and Stacy. Rat poison? Maybe. If the two women get hungry enough, they will eat what I give them. Their bodies will stay where they are and my sisters will finally be safe. In a way, their corpses will mirror my three little brothers’ bodies, resting for decades. Even if they are found, they will be found too late for their killer to be found and punished.

  My cherished sisters will only be safe when Stacy Wong and Faye Longchamp-Mantooth are silenced, so that is what I will have to do.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Cully eased Stacy to her feet and the chain that had held her clattered to the floor.
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br />   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 Fa
ye’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.