She sighed. “Well, congratulations, Joe. You must feel a thousand pounds lighter.”
I chuckled. “Hell, no more than you. By the way, you might find certain changes on the board; no guarantees, but I’d lay money on it.”
I’d rarely heard her so elated. “Jackson?”
“Yup. Closetful of skeletons; keep Katz busy for a week. I had the distinct pleasure of feeding him some of his own medicine.”
“My God. Tell me more.”
It wasn’t the right thing to do. Indeed, it emulated the very same nasty habit I bemoaned in my fellow police officers, but for the next fifteen minutes, I gossiped. I told her of all our pitfalls and false trails, of all the people we’d suspected of one crime or another, from Paula Atwater, who’d told Dunn she would turn state’s evidence against Hanson, Cappelli, and the smooth-talking Kenny Thomas, to the Wentworths, father and daughter, once so high on the list, who I imagined would continue sharing breakfast in isolated splendor.
I hypothesized that Arthur Clyde would be forced to tend to his wife’s garden, that Rose Woll would find some other human island to latch onto like a shipwreck survivor, and that James Dunn would do everything in his power to throw the book at Luman Jackson. Fred McDermott, I thought, although momentarily startled by what had happened, would plod on toward retirement and pension like the desk-bound soldier he was.
I’d been looking out the window, at nothing in particular, enjoying the sound of Gail’s laughter in my ear, when a slight sound at my door shifted my attention. Standing there, his clothes dark with sweat, his face unshaven, his eyes bloodshot and narrow with fatigue, was Buddy Schultz. He was holding a Colt.45 on me, its barrel looking big enough to stick my thumb in. He nodded at the phone.
“Got to go,” I said, and hung up on Gail in mid-sentence, hoping to hell she’d guess something was wrong.
“Get up. We’re going on a short walk.”
My feet were still on the table, so I had to shift around a bit to do what he asked. In the process, my left hand dropped to the arm of my chair. The sudden pain in my hand reminded me of the deep cut I’d suffered pursuing Jackson through the classroom window. Instinctively, not knowing precisely why, perhaps thinking of Ron’s imminent arrival at the office, I ground my palm down hard on the point of the chair arm, reopening the wound and causing a small trickle of blood to course along my little finger and drip onto the floor. Buddy didn’t notice.
“What’ve you got in mind, Buddy?”
He smiled that absurdly friendly smile, all the more bizarre etched across that now blighted face. “I thought I’d kill you first, and then worry about my next move.”
“Why?” His answer was so senseless, my curiosity almost overtook my rising fear, but not quite.
“You messed me up, man.” He moved next to me, grabbed my left elbow like an escort, and began steering me toward the door. His gun was half buried in my back, making any evasive move a suicidal gesture.
“Buddy, you messed yourself up. You should have just killed Charlie and made his body disappear, instead of trying to pin the murder on John.”
He swung me left, away from the tiny corridor leading to the exit, and toward the dead-end conference room.
“Where’re we going?”
He stopped me in front of the row of cabinets at the back of the conference room. Manipulating some mechanisms in the small gap between the cabinets and the side wall, he caused an upper portion of one of the cabinets to swing open on invisible hinges, like the top half of a three-foot-thick Dutch door. Behind it, instead of unpainted wall, there was a man-sized hole revealing a huge vertical air shaft, a remnant of the old building’s original heating system. A wave of hot stale air poured over us, a bottled up memento of the past week’s hellish weather.
“Climb up.”
“How? That’s a four-foot threshold.”
He kicked over a chair, as I’d hoped he might. I positioned it against the lower cabinet, let a surreptitious drop of blood hit the seat, and immediately put my shoe on it as I stepped up. I put my knee on the edge of the square opening, smeared a tiny bit of blood where it could be seen once the secret door was shut again, and crawled halfway in.
He had climbed up behind me to keep me going, not taking time to look around at the trail I’d left behind. “Keep moving.”
“It’s hard to see.” That part was true. Beyond the hole at the end of the three-foot tunnel, it was just a dim void with an odd, empty resonance to it.
“Put your leg over and reach down. You’ll find the bottom; it’s even with the floor.”
I did as instructed. As soon as I gained solid footing, I turned to see if I could catch him off guard, but he was already next to me, having closed the cabinet behind us and leapt down in one easy, practiced movement. Again, I felt the gun’s hard nose nuzzle my spine.
“Straight ahead, there’s a ladder.”
The air was suffocating, as bad as the heat wave of the past week-worse in the total blackness surrounding us. There was a rancid odor of decay, and of something akin to old, moldy wool. My bloody hand located the rungs of a ladder.
“Start climbing, and don’t try to hit me with your heels. I’ll be out of the way.”
The thought had crossed my mind, along with dozens of others. I had seen situations like this in the movies, and I, along with everyone else, had been critical of the hero for not being more aggressive. After all, I’d always reasoned, you’re dead anyway, why not fight for your life?
The problem with all that, I now knew, was that you didn’t really believe you were dead anyway. Despite what he’d told me, I knew there had to be a way out of this; it became too irrational otherwise. I started climbing.
“Where’s this lead?” I asked.
“Up.”
We’d been trained about hostage situations, about creating a bond with the kidnapper, making it harder for him to kill someone who was hell-bent on becoming a friend. But I knew it wouldn’t work on Buddy.
“How far up?”
“You’ll know.”
I had no feeling of my surroundings. I might as well have been climbing into the night sky above a boiling cauldron, swathed in its cloying, invisible steam. I tried focusing on something more tangible. I knew I was climbing one of the four air shafts; there were no other available empty spaces in the building. During the remodeling, there’d been some discussion about taking over the hundred-year-old shafts to create more floor space, since their original purpose had been replaced by modern, less cumbersome technology. But the engineers had vetoed the idea-something about structural integrity. The shafts had stayed.
“You do this during the remodeling? Cover your noise with the carpenters?”
There was no answer. Despite his warning, I tried kicking back with my heels a couple of times, but all I hit was air. I was sweating profusely, not only from the heat, but from the exercise. I felt I’d been climbing a half-mile straight up.
Suddenly, I ran out of rungs. My hand reached up in what was becoming an automatic grasp, closed on nothing, and threw me completely off balance. My foot, in midair, hesitated, missed its placement, and rattled by several rungs as I almost fell backwards into the darkness, arrested only by my throbbing left hand. I heard Buddy grunt below as he ducked to avoid my swinging, kicking feet.
I latched back on and rested, panting hard.
“Reach the top?” Buddy’s voice was· sarcastic.
“What the hell was that? You gonna drop me into a goddamn black pit?”
“I have something better in mind for you. Know where we are?”
I looked around, feeling aimlessly for something solid with one outstretched arm. “The attic?”
“Yeah, the bat cave. That’s what we call it in maintenance. Climb to the top, take one step forward, and freeze. It’s not all floor, so don’t get fancy.”
I stepped off the ladder, but then immediately turned and waited, all my energy directed at sensing when Buddy would come even with the floor so I could kick back at his head.