The Reckoning (4 page)

Niceville PD had a cruiser parked sideways across the intersection of the Mile and Scales, its roof rack churning red and blue and white, a blurry shimmer in the rain as Nick and Lacy came down past the MountRoyal. Traffic was at a standstill, jammed up like hogs in a pen, horns and angry voices. Despite the rain, people were lining the sidewalks and staring out from upper windows all along the street. There were a few lights on in the MountRoyal. Nick could see the shadow of a tall man standing in a third-floor window. From the angle of his head, he was staring down at Nick's car—a big man, broad-shouldered, with long hair. His face was in darkness.

Something about his shape went
click
in Nick's mind, as if he might know the guy, but he had other things to think about right then.

They rolled up with their own lights going, and a Niceville harness cop wrapped in a big yellow rain slicker and wearing a stupid rain hat like a clear plastic bonnet over his cap stepped up and leaned down into the window. It was some new kid, big as an RV, with a broad jovial face and small blue eyes.
WOJECK
, from his name tag.

“Detective Kavanaugh?”

Nick had his badge out, although the car made that a tad redundant.

“Yeah.”

“Staff Sergeant Crossfire said you'd be coming. She's at the scene.”

Wojeck moved his cruiser and Nick pushed the unit slowly through a cordon of uniform cops, all in yellow slickers and those stupid rain bonnets, all of them staring at the unmarked Crown Vic as it made the corner at Scales and eased into the laneway.

Fire and the EMT guys had rigged a tent over the parkette at the far end of the lane, and they had arc lights set up all over the place. The big tent glowed like it was on fire. A flatbed truck with
Niceville Utilities Commission
on the side was parked at the fence, a big John Deere generator on the truck, rumbling and popping, bright blue power lines snaking out of it and running into the tent.

Nick parked as close as he could get and they got out, heads bent, running through the rain. A large figure, dark against the light from inside the tent, was filling the entrance: Mavis Crossfire, a red-headed pale-skinned Valkyrie, in a navy blue Niceville PD uniform with the gold chevrons of a staff sergeant on her sleeves. Nick could see her face as he came up. Mavis Crossfire usually radiated easy grace and a dry wit. Not tonight.

“Hey, Nick, Lacy. Get inside, we have coffee.”

They came in out of the rain. The tent completely covered the parkette, strung from the tops of the palms, held down with ropes and pegs. The EMT and fire guys had set up a kind of field kitchen, and maybe three men and two women, all in heavy-duty rain gear and rubber boots, were standing around in the crowded space, drinking coffee and staring down at a video image on a screen. Mavis led them over, cleared a path around the laptop.

The closed circuit video feed was color, shaky, full of static lines. Nick assumed, correctly, that it was video of the scene down in the tunnels. There were people down there: a Niceville cop that Nick recognized as Frank Barbetta: two EMTs, a guy and a girl, backs turned but they looked familiar: and a firefighter with a breather tank. They were in some kind of cave area—dank, rough-cut stone walls, brick floor. The cave was full of steam and harsh white light from the arc lamps.

In the middle of the screen was a big blond kid, battered but conscious, staring out into the camera. His mouth was working but no sound was coming out. His teeth were red with blood and the tendons on his neck had popped out like wires.

Frank Barbetta was crouching next to him, looked like he was trying to comfort him. The video sound was full of beeping machinery, electric hum, and muted voices, and under it a kind of high-pitched sizzling whine—faint, but cutting, like a diamond drill.

When one of the EMT techs moved out of the way of the camera, they saw that the boy was literally trapped in some kind of fissure or rock seam. His upper body was free, but from his waist down he was buried in stone. Like the rock face had opened up its mouth and bitten down on him.

Lacy looked at him for a while, her face white and her lips blue.

“Jordan Dutrow,” she whispered.

“That's him,” said Mavis.

Nick looked across at the hole in the middle of the saw grass ten feet away, surrounded by tarps. Power cables were running down into the shaft, and noises were rising up, the tinny crackle of radios and the echo of voices from the bottom of the shaft. That diamond-drill buzzing noise, faint but everywhere.

“So that hole's where he got in?”

“They think so,” said Mavis.

She led them over to the edge of the shaft. It was the mouth of an old storm drain, as far as Nick could make out. Steam was rising up from it in a wavering ghost shape.

“What the hell is this thing?” Nick asked.

Mavis glanced in the direction of one of the guys standing by the coffee table, caught his eye.

He came over, a seamed and weather-beaten older guy wearing a faded denim work shirt and hip waders. He had a thick neck and heavy shoulders, the build of a man who has worked against the weight of things all his life.

“Guys, this is Arnie Driscoll. Arnie, this is Detective Nick Kavanaugh, and Lacy Steinert here is Jordan Dutrow's probation officer. Nick's asking about the storm shaft here. Can you fill him in? Arnie's with Water and Power.”

Arnie gave them a quick appraisal.

“Forty-eight years crawling around in Niceville's basement,” he said, shaking hands. “By now I'm more cave troll than human. I know every bit of what lies down there. What can I tell you folks?”

Nick looked back at the video screen and then at Arnie.

“It looks like the wall just opened up on the kid and snapped down. Like a cave-in? Is that what happened?”

Arnie frowned, working out a reply. “Yeah, in a way, it sorta is. I went down there to check it out, see if the rock face was stable. I got a good look at his…situation.”

“And…”

Arnie rubbed his cheeks with big blunt hands. His wrists were as thick as live oak branches and were coated in oily dirt. His pale gray eyes stood out against his oil-stained cheeks like quartz crystals in a mudbank.

“I can give you the four-hour lecture or the two-minute lecture.”

“They'll take the two-minute version,” said Mavis.

“Okay. Basically the whole valley of the Tulip River, from north of the Belfair Range on down to Cap City, is a few hundred feet of red dirt piled up on a geological formation known as karst. Kentucky is almost forty percent karst, why it has so many caves, and our state is maybe fifteen percent karst. Karst means the sublayers are water-soluble, either limestone or gypsum or dolomite. We've got a gigantic limestone shelf. Which means water can carve channels in the slope because limestone is softer than other rock and porous. Most of your big cave formations in the United States are limestone caverns, sinkholes, like Crater Sink, that kind of thing, and they happen because water makes holes and channels in the rock.”

“Tallulah's Wall is limestone, isn't it?” said Mavis. Tallulah's Wall was the massive cliff that towered above the northeastern part of town. Crater Sink was the thousand-foot-deep well at the top of the cliff.

“Yep. Tallulah's Wall is now a limestone cliff, but it
used
to be a flat slab. Then some geological shit happened like a zillion years ago and it got tilted up straight, so it looks like it does now. But the rest of the Niceville valley is still more or less flat, sloping away to the southeast toward the sea. About two thousand feet under us right now is a big lake, more like an underground ocean, called the Sequoyah Aquifer. This aquifer is big, starts the other side of the Belfairs, and goes all the way down below Cap City. Cap City gets most of its water from the Sequoyah Aquifer. You good so far?”

“We are,” said Nick. “So Crater Sink is part of this aquifer?”

“Not in the beginning. Crater Sink is what you call a limestone sinkhole. Softer than the stone around it. Long time passes, water working on it, it slowly sinks down. Sinkholes are usually circular, like Crater Sink. Ever wonder why the water in Crater Sink never drains away?”

“Yeah,” said Nick. “I have.”

“Couple hundred thousand years go by, Crater Sink finally works itself all the way down to the aquifer. Breaks through, taps into it. Boom. Maybe went up like an oil gusher, maybe just filled up slow over hundreds of years. Now it's stable. Pressure from the aquifer way up the valley keeps it that way. The Sequoyah Aquifer is why we have this shaft here.”

It was obvious to them by now that Arnie really didn't have a two-minute version.

“The shaft is what's left of a public works operation. A hundred years ago the city decided to tap into the Sequoyah Aquifer, just like Cap City, and use the water pressure to generate hydroelectric power. Like they do at the Hoover Dam or up there in Niagara Falls. This here shaft was part of that construction. Only things didn't turn out so good.”

“Which is why we've never heard of it?” said Mavis. Arnie nodded, his mood shifting, going dark.

“Yeah. My granddad worked on it. Saw some bad things. Wouldn't say much, but you could see it in his face. There were cave-ins, hot spots, gushers, explosions—all sorts of shit. Some unstable areas right down there where your guy is now. The limestone is fractured; huge slabs of it would just drop down, like a chop saw, like an ax. Shored-up sections would just crack and come down on a crew. Lotta workers died, a few went pit crazy—”

“Pit crazy?” asked Lacy.

“Happens to coal miners, tunnel crews, people who work deep down in the earth or inside those pressurized hulls they used to build the Brooklyn Bridge foundations. Maybe it's the atmospheric pressure, like the bends that divers get. On this job here, eleven different guys went pit crazy, went home after the shift and killed their families. Buncha other workers simply disappeared, like they just got swallowed up. After a while, end of the First World War, the city said hey, fuck this, too much grief and trouble. Everything got sealed up. Looks like your guy down there, Dutrow, he managed to get into the system somehow. Poor bastard, no way he should have known about this old shaft—”

“He was on a school tour,” said Lacy. “Through the system. Maybe he learned about it then.”

“I heard about that. Dumb-as-dirt idea. These old tunnels, the water mains, there's no way they should be dragging a bunch of high school kids through all that. Too damned dangerous.”

“He didn't like it,” said Lacy. “He thought it was nasty. Full of whispers.”

Arnie gave her a sharp look. “He
said
that?”

“Wrote it, actually. In his school notebook.”

“Well, there are places down there, you hear sounds, like whispering, hissing, and there's always this high-pitched whine, real faint. It was there when my granddad was working here. He said the trick was not to listen, because if you did you'd hear, like, words, voices and shit.”

“Do you?” asked Nick. Arnie seemed to go inward, thinking about that.

“No. Crazy talk. People like to scare themselves with bullshit stories. Ghosts and crap like that. But the kid is right, about it being a nasty place to wander around in. Kid must have stepped into a fissure, a crack in the walls, some kind of weak spot ready to drop, a big slab of rock breaks away, comes down on him, and now you got what you got down there.”

“Which is what?” asked Lacy.

Arnie's smile went away completely and he shook his head. “You got a big strong guy stuck under a sharp-edged slab of limestone. And it's slowly cutting him in half.”

Nick and Lacy took that in.

“They going to get him out?”

“Oh, they'll get him out. Just not in one piece. That's why there's nobody down there with a jackhammer. Once he's gone, we'll shore up the cave and chip his body out of there, but there's no rush. What's keeping him alive is
the pinch
. Seen it before. Nothing to be done. Too bad, but there it is.”

Arnie gave them each a significant look, his face solemn, and then he walked away. Mavis let the silence run, out of respect for the image they all had in their minds.

“Okay. Now, what do you want to do, Nick?”

“Can he talk?”

“Yeah. The thing he's caught in, like Arnie said, it's pinched him just below the waist. The EMTs have doped him up, but if they manage to get him out of that cleft—hole, gap, whatever—they're pretty sure that blood and viscera will pour out of him like from a tipped-over bait bucket. He'll be gone in a couple of heartbeats.”

Nick had seen something like that with Special Forces in Basra, after an Iranian IED had flipped over an Abrams, trapping one of the tank crew halfway out of the turret.

He looked at Lacy. “I gotta go talk to him.”

Lacy glanced at the shaft and then back at Nick. “You're gonna go down
there
?”

“Yeah. I am.”

“Nick,” said Mavis in a warning tone. “He's not gonna be up to answering any questions. And you heard Arnie. It's not safe down there. If you want to try to talk to him, Frank Barbetta has his radio. It's not working real good—some kind of radio interference; it's all buzz and static—but you could try.”

Nick took that in, registered it, noted it, filed it, and shook his head.

“No. He's gonna die down there. I want to see him face-to-face.”

Lacy saw that he was dead serious. She swore softly to herself. “Okay. Me too.”

Mavis just shook her head and looked away.

Getting down there was ugly, even with the protective vests and boots the fire guys lent them. The rungs on the shaft ladder were slick and wet, and as they got farther down the shaft, the steam and the smells got worse. It was like crawling down the throat of a big carnivore.