Buried Prey p-21

by John Sandford

  “Oh, it’s way deep,” Millard said. “You can go all over the place, in there. It’s like a big cave. There’s like water in there; you don’t want to be in the deep part when it’s raining-it fills up.”

  “All right. You sit tight.”

  “You got a couple bucks for a coffee?” Millard asked. “I’ll just go to the Lunch Box.”

  Lucas considered cuffing him to the bumper of the Jeep, but the guy might freak and scratch up the truck. So he fished in his pocket, came up with a ten and a twenty, looked at them for a moment, then gave the ten to Millard and put the twenty back in his pocket. “You hang at the Lunch Box. If I need you, you better be there.”

  Lucas walked back down the riverbank, looked in the entrance to the drain, shouted, “Scrape? Don’t make me come in there…”

  He was trying to push Scrape back into the drain, to let him know that there was still somebody waiting, while he found a phone. That done, he climbed back up the riverbank, saw Millard a block away, headed toward the Lunch Box. He jogged across the street to Jay’s Electronic Salvage. A half-dozen people were browsing through racks of electronic circuitry. Lucas went to the back, showed his ID to a clerk, and got the phone.

  Daniel was at his desk. Lucas said, “I got a line on that Scrape guy. He’s in a sewer.”

  After a moment of silence, Daniel said, “Sewer?”

  “Yeah, he’s hiding in a big sewer pipe south of the Central Avenue Bridge, by that power thing. I guess it goes back into some kind of cave. We’re gonna need some lights. A lot of lights.”

  “A cave? Is it too much fuckin’ trouble to find him in a supermarket or something? What’s this cave shit?” But Daniel sounded happy.

  “I guess there’s some water in there, too,” Lucas said. “Probably gonna need some boots. And some sewer guys. Guys with sewer maps. You know. That kinda stuff.”

  He gave Daniel the details, and in the next hour, got six cops and four sewer guys, in boots ranging from green-rubber Wellingtons to buckle-front galoshes. Daniel was there, in a suit, and had no interest in going into the cave. Instead, he went down and looked at the entrance. “I’m more of an administrator,” he told Lucas. “You’re more of a guy who totes the barge. And goes into dumpsters and sewers and so on.”

  One of the sewer guys had an extra pair of Wellingtons that were too large for Lucas, but better than nothing. Sloan showed up with a pair of galoshes; the sewer guys had work lights, instruments for detecting lethal gas, and maps.

  One of them, named Chip, laid the maps out on the hood of Lucas’s Jeep. “This isn’t actually a sewer. It used to be part of a drainage system for the old power plant. It’s been closed up for years.”

  “If it’s not a sewer, how do you know about it?” somebody asked.

  Chip said, “There are some connections between the storm sewers and the tunnels, caused by erosion. We’re planning to go in there, when we can get the money, and block everything up. We’ve had bums work their way a half-mile from the river, and come popping up through a manhole in the middle of a street.”

  He began tracing the sewer routes out of the city down to the river, with the cops looking over his shoulder. “The power plant part is pretty much in this area,” he said, tapping the map with an index finger. “And there are a couple of different levels and some old abandoned machinery. Your guy could be hiding in there-we’ve found campfires and litter and stuff in there. But there’s also a broken-down abutment and a crack in the rock that breaks into the sewer system… here.” He pressed a thumbnail into the map. “If he’s gone through the crack into the sewer system, then he could get quite a way back, and maybe up through a loose manhole somewhere.”

  “What’s the floor of the sewers like?” Lucas asked. “Is there sand, or water, or what?”

  “Some water, and there’s always some sand… It hasn’t been raining, so there’ll be quite a bit of sand, a thin layer on the bottom.”

  “So we’ll be able to track him,” Sloan said.

  “If he’s in the sewer, you can do that. He’s really got no way out and no way to cover his tracks. Though, in some of the older sewers, there are also erosional features… holes and gaps and little caves… where he could hide. But there’ll be tracks leading up to them.”

  “What about the smell? Are we gonna be wading in shit?”

  “Nah, not so much,” Chip said. “The first part is the power plant, and that’s just damp. The sewer part is storm sewers, not sanitary sewers, and they’re not so bad right now.”

  They looked at the maps for another couple of minutes, then Daniel said, “Let’s get the show on the road. And, the most important thing, nobody gets hurt. Okay? Watch for this guy, we know he carries a knife. Take him down easy, don’t get yourself hurt.”

  Everybody nodded, and Chip said, “Check your lights,” and they all checked their lights, and then Daniel said, “Altogether now, what’d I say was the most important thing?”

  Somebody said, “Don’t get hurt.”

  9

  Chip led the way down the bank to the entrance. There were nine of them, sliding down the dirt track, seven cops including Lucas and Sloan, plus Chip and one more sewer guy, everybody with flashlights, Chip and the other sewer guy carrying heavy battery-powered work lights. They spent a moment pulling back the metal grate, then squeezed through the enlarged opening.

  Lucas was the third man through, into the dark, damp air, smelling of wet sand, dead fish, old concrete, and an undertone of sewage.

  “Been somebody here,” one of the leading cops said, shining his light toward the ceiling. There were bench-like shelves at the top of the concrete walls on either side of the entrance. A plastic garbage bag, fat with weight-clothing, apparently-sat on each of the walls. The floor was littered with paper, some old, some new: wrappers from packages of cookies, crackers, candy bars, along with plastic wrappers for fast-food meat, wieners, sausages, adding their own rank, rotten-grease odor to the underground melange. A few steps inside, the concrete ended, and the walls became cave-like, cut through natural rock.

  They edged inside, slowly, climbed a cave-in, found themselves in a wider section with a rusted metal superstructure overhead, its use obscured by the rust and damage. They played their lights over it, and something flapped past them, and they all ducked, and the second sewer guy, whose name was Russ, said, “We got bats.”

  “Scared the shit out of me,” one of the cops said.

  Somebody else said, “You fire a gun in here, it’s gonna ricochet all over the place.”

  “So don’t be shootin’ any guns,” somebody else said.

  “We oughta be armed with tennis rackets,” said a fourth voice.

  Chip said, “Bats can have rabies-let them go, don’t mess with them.”

  Sloan, who was a step behind Lucas, said, “This is a good afternoon. I’m chasing a bum through a sewer filled with rabid bats. I can’t wait to tell my wife.”

  “See, this isn’t a sewer-” Russ began.

  Sloan said, “It was a figure of speech. Let’s keep going, or get out of here.”

  Up ahead, a dark hole.

  They left two cops to guard the exit, while the rest moved on until Chip said, “Look.”

  Lucas looked where he was shining his light. A thin stream of water cut across the floor, coming from who-knows-where, bordered on both sides by a half-inch of fine sand. A single set of tracks were pressed into the damp sand, heading deeper into the dark.

  They went past a short shaft going straight up, like an upsidedown well. An intersecting shaft went off to the right, perhaps fifteen feet up. “If he had a rope, he could get up there and nobody could get at him,” somebody said.

  But Chip said, “Yeah, but… see?” He pointed to a partial track in the sand, six feet past the intersection, going deeper into the tunnel. “And I’ve never seen a rope or anything going up there.”

  They moved on, then somebody spotted a hole in a wall to the left. Lucas climbed a short slope t
o the hole, pushed his light in: there was a low-ceiling space, a kind of pot full of water. He could hear more running water, but couldn’t see anything inside the room except a pile of metal trash and some rotting wooden beams.

  He hopped down and said, “Nothing.”

  They found another hole, and this one carried a human stench. Sloan looked and he said, “Somebody’s using it as a can. Hang their ass off the wall, and let go.”

  “More tracks,” somebody called, from up ahead.

  Scrape was far ahead of them, carrying a cheap aluminum flashlight with a weak bulb: but he knew where he was going. He got in the main room, under the power plant, tiptoed across the wet concrete, careful not to leave footprints, boosted himself up on a damp concrete revetment, then onto a rusting steel beam that sat on top of it. Once on top, he slid down into a narrow space on the other side, and lay on top of the concrete revetment. He barely had room to move his shoulders and hips, but he was practically invisible. They wouldn’t find him unless they climbed a ladder that led up toward the power plant, and then shined a light down…

  If they did that, he was cooked.

  As he lay there, in the dark, listening to the cops coming down the tunnel, he began to feel his muscles clenching up and down his body, in fear and anger. If they caught him, they’d put him in a hospital, and the hospital people would do experiments on him, as they had in the past. Experiments…

  He’d known when the cops released him that they’d be back. Scrape was crazy-and knew it, and regretted it, and suffered for it, nothing to be done about it-but not stupid. Once they had a taste of him, he believed, they’d be back if they didn’t find the little girls with somebody else. He was just too good a target, and in his experience, if cops couldn’t solve a bad crime, they began to look for somebody they could hang it on.

  An old story on the street. Some people said it was bullshit; others swore it was true, said it had happened to them. Scrape believed it to be true. He’d been arrested too many times for nothing, for simply being there, crazy, on the sidewalk, to have any faith in the honesty or efficiency of cops.

  What good did it do to take him down to court? He didn’t have any money, putting him in jail didn’t cure anything, so why did they do it?

  Because, he thought, that’s what cops did. They got grades on a paper, somewhere, on how many arrests they got. He was an easy one.

  The night before, he’d tricked them, sliding out a side window after dark, creeping like a shadow down the hedge and across the yard, staying in backyards for half a mile, before breaking to the river. He’d thought he’d be safe, for a while, in his tunnels, but somebody had talked…

  Now they were coming for him again, and they’d put him in a hospital and they’d strap him to a bed, and they’d do more experiments; he lay behind his beam and closed his eyes and tried to pretend that they weren’t there.

  That the nightmares weren’t there: but this time, they were.

  While Scrape settled into his hiding place, the cops pushed on, like a National Geographic caving expedition made up of stupid people, splashing through pools of water, stumbling over debris and rotting lumber, swearing, shining their lights around. They turned a couple of corners, explored shafts going left and right. One of them showed what appeared to be an attractive, golden-brown wall. Then the wall twitched, and a cop, looking closer, suddenly back-pedaled and said, “Jesus, those are cockroaches. Millions of them.”

  “Don’t mess with them, don’t mess with them…” The wall shimmered and they all backed up.

  Moving ahead, they found more footprints, which Lucas now recognized from a series of round treads on the bottom-running shoes-and followed them.

  Chip took them down a branch and over a wall, then through a narrow natural crack half filled with dirt. They were squatwalking now, under a four-foot ceiling, which led to a hole in the top of a dry storm sewer. They shined their lights down the hole and found another thin stream of water, and more sand, with no sign of footprints.

  “He could have gotten down there, but I can’t believe he’d have landed in the water and never made a print,” Chip said.

  Lucas said, “If he did, he could have gotten out, right?”

  “Yeah, he could’ve walked back into town, got out at a drain, if he could find a loose one. There probably are a couple. Or, he could follow it out to the river, but the exit is barred.”

  Lucas looked both ways and said, “He can’t dribble a basketball. He didn’t jump down there and not make tracks. Let’s back out.”

  They backed out of the crack and found that the other cops had pushed on, down a ledge and into a cavernous room that might have been a dungeon in a post-industrial vampire’s castle. The ceiling was invisible in the murk, and the place was full of huge rusty pipes, more unidentifiable superstructure, and a couple of shafts, with steel ladders and wrist-thick ropes that disappeared into the gloom. “They go up to the power plant,” Chip said. “You can get up there, but the entrance at the top is always blocked off. Didn’t used to be, but they had some bums set up housekeeping a few years back.”

  Somebody called in the dark, “I got some tracks.”

  They went over and looked, and found the prints they’d been following in. They went even farther back into the room.

  Sloan asked Chip, “Is there any way out of here?”

  “There are some tunnels, but they’re all dead ends, and not far now. There’s a pretty good storage cave over there to the left. That’s probably where he’s hiding. Little nooks and crannies back in there.”

  Sloan said, “All right, everybody, we think he’s still in front of us. Take it slow, keep your lights way out in front of you. No hurry-we take it slow.”

  They spread out and checked the rest of the big room, eventually moving to a cluster in the back, around a seven-foot-high tunnel, maybe twenty feet long, that showed a black patch to the left, down at the end-a big dark space. Lucas and Sloan led the way in, and as they came up to the cave, found another smaller branch going off to the right. A uniform cop crawled down it, came back a few seconds later: “Nothing. Dead end.”

  Lucas and Sloan shined their lights into the cave. As Chip said, it was deep, and fairly wide. Squared off, it had been carved into the sandstone by humans, rather than by water. They couldn’t see quite to the end of it.

  “It smells awful,” a cop said.

  “Like something’s been dead for a while,” Lucas said.

  “Bat shit,” Chip called, from the end of the line. “Lots of bat shit. Guano.”

  “If he’s in there, and he’s got a gun, we’re done,” one of the cops said.

  “I don’t think he’s ever had a gun,” Lucas said. He turned: “Hey, Chip, Russ? Could we get those lanterns up here?”

  The two sewer guys came up, and the extra light was enough to show them the end of the cave. There was no sign of Scrape, not even footprints. Lucas pointed at a band of sand ten feet in: “He either flew over that, or he’s behind us.”

  Russ the sewer guy said, “There’s a small side room down to the left. He could be in there-it’s about the only place left.”

  Lucas nodded, moved ahead with the light. Another cop pulled his gun and said, “If he comes after you with something, just get flat and out of the way.”

  Lucas went in, saw the side hole, again as a patch of black. He edged up to it: “Scrape? Hey, Scrape? We don’t want to hurt you, man. Come out of there…”

  Not a sound. He stuck his head around the edge of the hole, shined the light in. Empty. There seemed to be a cavity in the roof. He got on his knees, crawled inside, and shined the light up the hole: just enough space to stand up in, and it was empty, and smelled of water and something else, like clothes left too long in a washer. And the wall moved, and he realized his face was inches from another school of cockroaches, or whatever they were. He quailed, and knelt, and got out.

  He said to Sloan: “He’s behind us.”

  At that moment, a cop called, �
�Hey, Jesus, Jesus,” and a swarm of bats flew through them, spiraling out of the cave and into the large outer room. Lucas froze, creeped out, and when they were gone, moved back to the tunnel. They’d left two cops in the outer room, and the two of them shouted warnings at each other as the bats came through.

  In the main room, Scrape remained hidden until he heard what he’d feared: one of the cops said, “I think I’ll climb up there and look around. Maybe he’s in one of those crannies behind those pipes.”

  Another voice: “You’ll fall on your ass.”

  “Shoot, I use to climb up on top of water towers just to look around.”

  “If you’re gonna do it, take the big flash.”

  “Let me see… ladder feels fine.”

  “Careful, there…”

  A cop was climbing, and in two minutes, he’d put a light on Scrape. He was behind them, his only chance was to drop down and run for it. Maybe more guys outside, but he’d have to take the chance, Scrape thought. He shivered with fear: have to take the chance. If he just lay there, they’d get him and put him in the hospital and they’d tie him down and do their experiments…

  He could hear the cop climbing up the ladder, one step at a time, the other cop shining a light up on the higher rungs. Then he could see the cop, still climbing. When he turned, with the flashlight, Scrape would be right there.

  Scrape pushed himself up on his elbows, cocked his knees. When the cop seemed to have turned his head away, he pushed himself to his feet and looked down at the other cops. He was in luck: the other cop had his back to him.

  He hooked a hand around a piece of rebar to brace himself, felt the rebar move; and he jumped, holding on to the rebar to keep himself upright, and hit with a thud. He saw the cop turn, and Scrape took off, the rebar still in his hand. He’d pulled it out, he realized, maybe he’d have a use for it, maybe God put it there.

  He had a good lead going into the tunnel, and he knew where he was going…

  Lucas was third in line again, heading back out. He said to Sloan, “Another ten million cockroaches…” Then there was a clatter, metal on metal, and one of the cops in the big room shouted, “Hey, stop, stop,” and a second later, “There he is… there he is… he’s coming out, he’s coming out. He’s coming out…”