“Go to hell,” Blankenship said. “I’ve no more interest in verbal games with you than I ever had. I want to see some cave maps. Immediately.”
“Why?”
“Because nobody can find the son of a bitch, and you’re the one who knows that cave.”
Novak was off the maps. Interesting. Trapdoor was up to something. Trapdoor had come alive again. Ridley shouldn’t have been surprised by this, but he surely needed to respect it. Trapdoor had responded to Novak. Ridley had hoped for as much, but he’d thought it would be a long process. He hadn’t anticipated that the cave would show her power so swiftly to an outsider. Still, it had been quite some time since she’d had visitors. Maybe she’d gotten lonely.
“He was just supposed to sit there and think,” Ridley said.
Blankenship’s eyes hardened. “You knew Novak was headed into the cave?”
“I’m the one who told him to go. I didn’t expect he’d make such an effort, frankly. But he seems resourceful. She’s more resourceful, though. He probably didn’t count on that.”
“She?”
Ridley ignored that and said, “You’re going to need me in there.”
“I don’t think that idea will be real popular.”
“If you think he’s actually in there, you’re going to need me.”
“To do what?”
“Find him. Let me guess, you’ve called Anmar Mirza already, haven’t you?”
“He’s on his way from Bloomington.”
“Sure he is. And he’s good. But he doesn’t know that cave like I do, and he’d be the first to admit it.”
“I don’t need Mr. Mirza’s opinion of you, Ridley. And I’m not about to grant you access to Trapdoor. What we’re going to do is talk about Mark Novak.”
“Not enough time for that.”
“No?” Blankenship tilted his head back. “Funny observation. You seem to know he’s at risk.”
“If the man’s naked and in Trapdoor, he’s at risk.”
“Naked?” Blankenship echoed in that stupid cop voice that suggested he thought he’d caught Ridley in a slip because he was some sort of master interrogator.
“You were the one who said they found his clothes, Sheriff.”
“Could have been his jacket. Could have been his belt. I don’t recall any specificity.”
“Well, was it?”
“I’d have to check my notes.”
“You’re doing the same thing you did last time. You’re asking the wrong questions of the wrong people, killing time above the surface while somebody does real killing down below.”
“Who did that killing down below?”
Ridley didn’t answer.
“Right,” Blankenship said. “That shuts your mouth pretty fast every time, doesn’t it? Well, we don’t need to worry about what happened in the past—”
“The past is the reason he’s here. It’s the reason he’s in that cave. You might not want to admit it, but your past is now your present. Any other notion is wrong. And you can’t afford to be wrong, Sheriff. Not again. You think about that. You think about what happens if you pull another body out of there.”
For an instant, Ridley thought that Blankenship might hit him. All he did, though, was say “You pulled the body out” through clenched teeth.
“I sure did. Maybe I wouldn’t have had to if you’d gotten me down there earlier. So now I’ll make you an offer. I’ll go into that cave, but this time it’ll be different. This time, I’ll make a concession. I’ll keep you right by my side.”
Blankenship stood silently in the snow, and his silence made Ridley’s pulse race. The sheriff was considering it. He was actually considering it, which meant only one thing: he wanted to track every move Ridley made in the cave in the hope that it would tell him things about the past, because the sheriff had never gotten over the lack of answers to what had happened in Trapdoor ten years earlier. And that meant only one thing to Ridley: a chance to go back into the cave. If he played this right, he was going to get to see her again.
“Scared to go down there with me?” Ridley said. “Scared of being alone in the dark with me, Sheriff?”
“You’re a sick son of a bitch.”
“That isn’t a fresh verdict.”
“You’re not going back into Trapdoor. We saw how that turned out last time.”
“We sure as hell did. You let the girl die,” Ridley said, and Blankenship swung on him then, hit him with an open palm but a damned big open palm; it knocked him back a step and brought blood to his lips. Ridley touched his mouth with his hand, looked at the blood, and shook his head.
“I am growing tired of getting hit today.”
“You’re going to—”
“Have some fun with a police-brutality charge, if I want to. But I don’t. What I want to do is what you need to do: pull that Florida boy out of Trapdoor while he still has a pulse. I’ve already said I’ll keep you or any of your deputies at my side. The choice is yours, Sheriff. Remember that you had the chance to make it. Remember how things might have gone if you’d made a different choice ten years ago.”
“There’s a special hell for you,” Blankenship said. His voice was choked. “There just has to be.”
“We’ll find out one of these days,” Ridley said, but in truth he’d already found out. “Back to your choice, Sheriff. Time’s wasting. Decisions need to be made, and you’re the man who has to make them. The good people of Garrison County have voted on that. Make your choice.”
“I don’t need you, Barnes. I just need the maps.”
Ridley smiled and tapped his temple with his index finger. “I’ve got them archived.”
Blankenship’s jaw worked and he turned away from Ridley so he wasn’t facing him when he said, “Get your damn gear, then. Let’s you and me go for a ride. I’ll be curious to see how being back in that place works on you, Ridley. Might just sharpen a few of those memories you claim to have lost.”
Ridley managed to smirk at that, but he, too, was wondering how being back in that place might work on him. He’d suggested going in with the sheriff because he knew it was the only chance he had of getting in. Inside Trapdoor, though, back there in the dark, the sheriff might end up regretting being at Ridley’s side. Depending on how the cave worked on Ridley, that might wind up being a very poor decision indeed.
17
Mark’s technical understanding of hypothermia came from diving courses, but his visceral understanding of it came from memory, of carrying his mother over his shoulder, trying to rub warmth into unresponsive flesh. It was on that long walk that he’d sworn he would never return to the Rockies, that when he died, it wouldn’t be in the cold.
Now here he sat, half naked and shivering, remnants of an unknown drug from an unknown needle in his bloodstream. He’d become his mother.
You can’t run away from your family, she had told him when he’d left for the bus station, and maybe she had been right.
Then again, she’d survived the cold that day.
He started to laugh and when the echo returned it to him, the laugh sounded deranged. Sounded, in fact, like his mother’s.
“Get it together,” he whispered. “Keep your head.”
He thought that he should have reached the place he’d started from by now; he had been crawling away from the cliff for a long time, longer than it had taken him to reach it. Or maybe not. Time and distance were hard to judge in the blackness.
Getting cold. You are getting too cold.
The cave wasn’t frigid, it wasn’t the sort of alarming cold of the snowstorm above, but it could be just as deadly. Your core temperature came down slowly but steadily. You had to be aware of all the ways you might lose heat. Down here with no supplies and no clothes, Mark couldn’t fight many of them. Something as simple as keeping his skin from making contact with the stone was impossible. The only way to stay warm was to keep moving, and there was some danger in that as well. The more he moved, the more likely he was to sweat and breathe hard, which cost him heat, and the more he moved, the more glucose he sapped from his bloodstream. He needed the glucose, his essential fuel. All of this he had written in notebooks when he was studying for a diving-instructor certification, a course that he’d never finished. After Lauren was killed, he’d never gone back into the water.