I tried fitting through the gap, with laughable results. I pulled off my coat and sweater and tossed them through ahead of me. If I didn’t make it this time, I’d freeze to death-the ultimate diet. I did make it, though, at the cost of several buttons, and quickly put my clothes back on.
The footprints immediately vanished to the side of the road, back to the safety of the brush, so I stuck to the road, going on the hunch that whoever had come this way had paralleled my route. I knew this still qualified as a wild-goose chase, but my interest was now no longer idle.
Kids on a dare usually travel in packs; it helps holster the courage and affords ready witnesses for later bragging at bull sessions. This had been very clearly one set of tracks, and that, for obvious reasons, was intriguing. Furthermore, I could still hear my colleagues, though faintly, and they sounded like they, too, were headed in roughly the same direction.
About a half mile later, I came to a clearing, bordered by buildings ahead, and trees on either side. It was a large area, big enough to easily turn an 18-wheeler without going into reverse. Yielding to impulse, I walked over to the edge of the gravel and began looking for the footprints to reappear. I followed the perimeter of the parking area to the most distant spot from the buildings, and there I found them again. I began to feel like a bloodhound myself, it didn’t much matter that I probably would end up finding some teenager smoking pot.
There was a large pile of dusty, broken granite blocks that met the bordering trees at a ninety-degree angle. The tracks led me up the pile and over to the other side, and there, glowing slightly in the dawn’s struggling half-light, was a sight that damn near made my heart stop.
It was a huge, round pit, the size and depth of a small canyon, about one thousand feet across, and some four hundred feet deep, yawning and utterly silent. The walls were a series of fifty-foot wide, vertical grooves, interspaced with similarly wide buttresses-what mountain climbers call chimneys and ribs. At twenty-foot intervals, roughly a third of these chimneys and ribs were cut with narrow horizontal terraces, on which ladders had been placed as escape routes so the granite workers could use them in emergencies. Some of the %242
terraces interconnected, but most did not. Here and there, usually in the grooves, especially deep terraces had been cut to allow for the placement of large pieces of equipment-generators, winches, elevator boxes for workers to ride up and down, a*id small wooden foremen shacks.
For the most part, however, the terraces were as narrow as ledges, barely five feet wide.
Around the pit’s edge were about ten towering pole cranes, all harnessed to each other by an overhead spider’s web of steel cables. It gave me the creepy feeling of having an oppressive presence bearing down on me, like a huge, half-seen hand ready to flatten me and flick me into the hole. Instinct told me to quickly extinguish my flashlight and to move as quietly as possible. I crawled down the other side of the pile and reached a broad strip of flat rock that marked the edge. Moving slowly, a foot at a time, sensing my way partly by the growing daylight and partly by feel, I moved toward the pit. The edge, when I finally got there, was as sharp as a knife-one inch beyond where my shoe rested on flat granite, the cliff dropped to some barely visible milky green water about four hundred feet below. The sight was so destabilizing I had to quickly sit down to regain my balance. My stomach was slightly queasy.
Getting onto my hands and knees, I forced myself to look over the edge.
Some twenty feet below me was the first of the narrow ledges, but its ladder was lying flat, instead of connecting it to where I was. It had either fallen with amazing precision, or it had been taken down to prevent pursuit.
I scanned the walls for any activity, but there was nothing. The water-streaked pale gray rock, utterly motionless, seemed to let off a light of its own. This apparent inner glow was in gloomy contrast to the line of dark trees above, and the opaque green water far below. The place was as still as the graveyards it supplied.
Why come here? I thought. I looked to my right, to where the sun was trying to assert some presence. This wasn’t an entirely enclosed circular pit-to the east was a narrow opening to the valley below. If someone had been forced to stop here, say by a blown radiator hose, escape by road would be highly risky, especially so near to a vehicle being sought by police. Similarly, cutting across country wouldn’t work too well; the woods were thick and, conversely, the area was much more populated than the Northeast Kingdom.
But here was a sort of deranged logic-you could scale down the sides of the pit, dumping ladders as you went, and leave through the opening to the east. Progress would be rapid, direct pursuit would be severely handicapped, and you’d end up miles away by road from where the incriminating vehicle had been left. If the bus was found quickly, %243
the warm engine would actually be an asset, implying you were close, and thus encouraging the police cordon to be so tight that it might even exclude you.
I smiled at the thought. There was one problem, though. Bishop, the dog, and everybody else were hot on Julie’s trail, or of someone wearing her clothes. They were way the hell and gone-from what I could hear-on another quadrant of the pit. If they were on the right track, Julie’s track, then who the hell was I following? And if she and my guy were associates, why had they taken separate paths? The first theory-using the pit as an escape route-appealed to me; the second theory had me worried: You don’t split up forces if you’re running for a narrow exit.
But you might if you’re setting up an ambush. I looked at the forbidding walls below and opposite me, visualizing what a perfect target a man would be as he slowly climbed down those ladders.
I shook my head. It didn’t make sense. You don’t ambush the State Police. It would be suicidal; the best you could hope for, even in a perfect spot like this, would be to delay things for a while. I chewed on that for a bit, and finally snapped my fingers silently: That was the whole point-to delay things and attract attention, divert the chase long enough for one of them to get away. A lover’s leap. That’s when I heard the stone fall from somewhere below me. It rattled and bounced and ended as a tiny, distant splash.
I began listening so hard I almost stopped breathing. The escape gap was to the east. I was to the southwest. From what I could guess, the others with the bloodhound would appear to the southeast, or right between me and the escape gap.
Swallowing hard, I leaned out as far as I could without losing my balance. I was at the top of one of the buttresses, or “ribs.” The ledge below, as narrow as it was, still blocked a full view of the one farther down, which in turn totally hid the rest. I checked to both sides of me, hoping I could get over enough to see the cliff face from another angle. The trees growing out to the edge ruled that out-it would take me too long and I would make too much noise trying to gain a proper viewpoint.
Across the pit I could see tiny pinpoints of light flashing among the trees. The search party would soon become a climbing party-and target practice for whoever was below me. If I shouted or fired my pistol to warn them, I’d lose the advantage of surprise and I might scare off my prey: After all, I was just assuming he was boxed in. It was possible he had an escape figured out other than the obvious one of merely climbing back up his set of ladders.
I backed away from the edge and trotted over to the small build %244
ings, looking for something that might help me reach that first ledge.