The deputy had his hand on my left elbow while another adjusted a set of heavy edge rollers to guide the rope. I waited patiently, my pulse pounding in my ears.
“Just trust the rope,” Burns said.
“Do I have a choice?” I replied.
“Really, it works easy as can be. Now, just step down. Real easy. Leave it up to the rope.” I did so while he orchestrated. The ladder flexed and I stopped. “Go on down until you can hang onto the top rung,” he said.
One awkward step at a time, I backed down the ladder. After four rungs, I grabbed the ancient rust of the top rung in my hand.
“Now just relax for a minute and sit in the sling.”
He switched his light back and forth, checking ropes. The weight was off my feet, and with a twitch of the hand I could have spun around like a kid on one of those swings made out of an old tire. I kept my feet on the ladder rungs and my hand in place.
I twisted my head and looked down. The pencil beam from my helmet light shot down into the darkness. I looked up and squinted against the glare of the spotlights. Pat Tate was standing close by, as was Sterns. Both of them had that look on their faces that said, “Better you than me, kid.”
I took a deep breath. “All right,” I said. “Let’s get this over with.”
Chapter 31
Six feet at a time, I sank into the earth. I kept my feet free of the ladder, learning to trust the sit-harness. The ladder’s iron side rail slid through my left hand. That small contact was my anchor.
The vertical sides of the shaft were timbered, and in more than one spot water dripped down the face of the wood. The timbers smelled musty. I wondered what pockets of gases waited down below, trapped by the years of stagnation. I’d heard stories about miners walking into shafts where they took a breath and keeled over before they had time to turn around. That couldn’t be the case here…Finn had no shortage of breath.
As the bright light of the entrance drifted up and away, the shaft seemed to narrow with me at its focus. My mind played games with the perspective. When I was fifty feet down, the deputy touched me with the beam of his flashlight.
“Any problems?” he asked. He didn’t bother with the radio.
“No,” I said. The rope played out again. The next time I looked up, I flinched. I could have covered the opening of the mine with the palm of my hand. Looking down, I saw the beam from my helmet light stab into nothing. No bottom. Just wooden timbers and old iron.
I avoided looking at the rope. What on the surface had looked stout and unbreakable in its coil now stretched out above me thin and gossamer. Every time the deputies reached the end of a pulley bite and the drop stopped, the rope twanged from side to side slightly.
On impulse I reached up and turned off my helmet light. The blackness of the mine was complete, the entrance above nothing but an insignificant postage stamp of artificial light. I caught my breath as the rope descended again. The light had been my lifeline to equilibrium and I turned it back on.
The side tunnel, what Stubby Begay had called a drift, took me by surprise. The side of the shaft had been passing by my left shoulder as I descended, a steady, unchanging parade of old wood timbers, dripping water, and abandoned iron fittings. I hadn’t used the side of the shaft for support. Nevertheless, when it suddenly shelved inward, away from me, my stomach tightened. The rope dropped me far enough that my light shot into the tunnel.
The drift was nearly as large as the main shaft. I breathed in relief at seeing something substantial and horizontal.
I turned my head slightly, keyed with my left hand, and spoke into the hand-held radio’s mike that was clipped to my shirt collar.
“Stop,” I said. “I’m at the drift.”
“Affirmative.”
I pushed away from the ladder, rotating to face the drift. The floor of the tunnel was littered with junk-old sections of pipe, fittings, various lengths of wire and cable. The light illuminated heavy timbers and a series of three small concrete pads, each two feet high. Rusted bolts thrust up from the concrete where at one time machines had been secured.
Stubby Begay had called it a pump station. The miners hadn’t left much behind…just enough scars and litter to puzzle archaeologists in another thousand years.
For the first thirty feet the drift was as securely timbered as the main shaft. But forty feet back the drift elbowed to the left and the timber supports ended. I couldn’t see around the bend. The place made my skin crawl.
Rotten and water-soaked as the timbers were, they gave the illusion of strength and support. In the drift they gave way to something that looked like monstrous cobwebs, with patches of the material hanging down from a ceiling of jagged rock. It was some sort of fabric, bolted right to the face of the shaft.
In dozens of places rock fragments littered the floor of the drift where the old fabric had pulled loose, and off to the left, just visible before the drift turned out of sight, an entire section of wall and ceiling had slumped, filling nearly a third of the tunnel.
I swept the light carefully, looking for movement.
“Finn?” I said. My voice echoed down the shaft. The dust of the years had padded the floor, and the fresh tracks were as clear as if they had been painted on a sidewalk with Day-Glo paint. And the prints came in two sizes.
“Finn, are you in there?” Again my words rattled around and died with no response. I ducked my head and looked down the main shaft. Ten feet below the drift, the iron supports that held the ladder had pulled loose…or rusted through. The section of ladder was twisted away from the wall and hung off at an angle. Finn had to be in the drift.
I reached for the second flashlight, adding its beam to that of my helmet. I saw that with just a slight stretch I could plant my feet on the lip of the drift’s shaft and grab one of the wall timbers with my left hand. With some slack in the rope I could pull myself into the tunnel.
If I slipped and fell, it would hurt like hell, but the rope could be trusted. That’s what the deputy had said.
“Turn off your light,” Finn said. His voice was quiet and conversational.
Out of reflex I swung the lights toward the sound of his voice. Nothing. I snapped off the flashlight and let it hang, then reached up and turned off my helmet. The blackness was oppressive…the spotlights above at the shaft mouth served only as a beacon in the distance. I reached up and touched the small, reassuring pistol grip of the Colt under my arm sling. I waited.
“Sheriff, you copy?” The crackle of the damn radio sounded like a string of firecrackers.
I keyed the mike and snapped, “Stay off the air.”
“Ten-four.”
I took a deep breath, my fingers still covering the lump that was the automatic. “All right, Finn. What do you want?”
Unless Finn had developed sonar, he could see no more than I. His light exploded out of the darkness, and I jerked my head back in surprise.
“Get that goddamned thing out of my eyes,” I snapped, but he took his time. Finally the light slipped away and I cracked an eyelid. The beam was centered on the thick bandage that bound my right arm and shoulder. My right hand stuck out of the linen and lay flat against my belly, useless. Finn played the light this way and that, examining me and my equipment.
“Turn around,” he said and watched as I touched the shaft wall with my fingers and gently pushed myself so that I rotated on the rope. The wash of his light cast a fat shadow of me on the opposite wall of the vertical shaft. As I rotated back around, he turned off the light. I blinked my eyes, trying to put out the yellow sunbursts that remained.