The sergeant leaned forward. “What sewers and tunnels?”
“What sewers and tunnels, he says. Say brother, where was you when the WPA put them in? Where’d you think all those power lines went to when we took ’em off the poles? Under the streets, of course.”
Wiedenbeck hung up and stared at his fingers. The warrant for the arrest of Charles Horne lay folded on the desk before him. Dumb — just plain dumb, that was the name for Wiedenbeck. Four or five days ago he and Elizabeth Saari had discovered the assaulted janitor in the basement of Horne’s office building. The tunnel service door had been standing open. And he had thought the red-haired girl had opened it merely to tap Horne’s telephone!
Of course Charles Horne had entered that dog hospital less than an hour ago. And of course he couldn’t be found when his men had searched the place.
Wiedenbeck picked up the phone and dialed. Elizabeth Saari answered. Without explanation, the sergeant asked the doctor to meet him at the City Hall as soon as possible. Prepared for business. Dr. Saari said, certainly, sergeant, and hung up. And then he dialed another number.
A voice answered, “Boone Ambulance Service.”
“This is Wiedenbeck, police department. Go to Mulberry Street just south of Main. In a few minutes there’ll be some repair crews there, hunting a power failure. Stick with them. When they find the trouble, you’ll find a body. What’s that? Yeah — electrocution.”
He put down the phone and sat back in his chair to await the arrival of Dr. Saari.
Horne’s knees were hurting.
It was extremely difficult maintaining the pace set by the girl ahead of him but every time he dropped back the Negro viciously shoved him forward. The tunnel was low and he kept banging his head against the wires and insulated holders fastened a few inches above him.
The sharp odor of shoe polish continued strong in his nostrils.
He had given up the idea of counting to determine the distance they had traveled on hands and knees. Somewhere after the first thousand — possibly fifteen minutes — he became entangled in his own calculations and quit. They had made three turns along their route but he realized those turns weren’t necessarily at street corners overhead. He was lost after the second turn.
Surprisingly, at his request, the girl stopped to rest. There was no room in the tunnel to sit up so the three of them stretched out, head to toe.
Lying there in the confining darkness, Horne reached out a tentative hand to explore the wires just above him. There were two kinds. His fumbling fingers found two twisted cords braided about each other which were telephone lines, and a more solid, single wire. That would be the power line. The power line was thick and heavy, denoting high voltage, and there were many of them. He found time to be thankful he didn’t suffer from claustrophobia. How far were they beneath the street? Eight feet? Ten? The tunnel was like an eternal, never-ending tomb.
The redheaded girl rolled over, kicked his outstretched hand, and said “Come on, stupid.”
Behind him, Bumble had hold of his shoe in the blackness. Horne got to his aching knees and heard the Negro do likewise.
“Mind telling me where we’re going?” he asked.
“None of your damned business, Paul Pry. Your time is just about up.”
“I’m your sweetheart,” he said mockingly. “Remember?”
Her only answer was a quick, back-flung kick with her shoe. He sensed rather than saw it coming and tried to dodge. The heel of her shoe scraped his face, bringing blood.
“Baby doll!” he bit out sarcastically.
She stopped dead on the spot.
Horne tried to stop when he felt her nearness but the oncoming Negro crashed into him from behind, pitching his body forward onto her. She screamed and rolled to face him. Beneath his fingers he felt the sweater and slacks she had been wearing when last they had been together. One outflung hand landed in her face. She opened her mouth and bit down hard on his thumb.
Horne screamed in pain and tried to scuttle away.
Powerful hands grabbed his ankles from behind and hauled him backward. Frantically he tried to hang onto the girl’s struggling body. His fingers found a hold on her belt and curled around it. He didn’t remember the knife she carried until it came down in a sweeping arc past his ear and buried itself in his left shoulder. The blade bit deep, leaving him gasping with a burning pain.
His grip on the belt loosened. The strong pull from behind tore him loose from her and he was hurtled backwards, underneath the crouching body of the colored giant. Bumble clambered over Horne’s prostrate form in his eagerness to reach the girl.
Bumble lacked speech and hearing. He knew only that Horne and the girl had been fighting. He wanted to reach the girl in the quickest possible time; Horne could be taken care of afterwards. Getting past the outstretched body of the detective, Bumble scrambled up the tunnel.
Betty heard him coming in the blackness.
She screamed and drove the knife forward in a slashing blow at the Negro’s chest. Horne lay still listening to the struggle, realizing what was happening. The pain in his shoulder all but robbed him of consciousness.
Bumble reached across the fighting girl and grasped the wrist that held the knife poised for another blow. He bent the arm back and up, trying desperately to keep the girl from striking him again before she learned who he was. Panic-stricken, the girl could not notice the difference between the two men.
Bumble sent the knife hand up with a powerful thrust. The now-bloodied blade sliced through the insulation about the wire as if it had been butter. Before Bumble could stop the thrust, the knife had cut through three power lines.
After several seconds the circuit breakers in the powerhouse deadened the affected lines.
A repairman lifted the manhole cover in the middle of the street, flashed his light about in the opening, found the rungs set in the side of the well, and clambered down.
He stopped when he reached the bottom and smelled the air. The repairman stooped, flashed the light along one tunnel, saw nothing amiss, and turned to inspect a second.
Quickly he climbed the rungs to the street and sent a piercing whistle towards a knot of men some distance down the block. Faces whirled towards him. Someone on the service truck put a spotlight on him.
“Here they are!” he shouted shrilly. “Three of them!” And then he stumbled to the curb and was sick.
Fourteen
The detective lay stiffly quiet in the hospital bed, wondering how long it would take the stranger’s creeping, bandaged hand to reach the heavy water pitcher. Across the darkened room Horne could see that the fingers of that hand rested on the edge of the white-topped table beside the man’s bed.
The man’s strength had been surprising, the aim not so good. Horne nursed an aching bruise on his ribs instead of his head, where some twenty minutes ago a water tumbler had come flying across the hospital room to jar him into wakefulness.
He had one advantage over the stranger; his bed was in the corner nearest the door and thus in comparative darkness. The faint light coming through the glazed transom above the door reflected in the glaring, unwinking eyes of the man in the opposite bed. Horne had been watching those eyes and he couldn’t remember them winking once in the last twenty minutes.
He clutched the water glass in tight fingers and listened to the sounds of the hospital at night. There weren’t many. Somewhere near at hand a refrigerator was humming and on the floor below a woman was moaning with periodic regularity. He could hear no low conversations, no movement or the tiny rustling of papers which were the telltale sounds of a night nurse on duty somewhere nearby. He could hear nothing at all that gave any evidence of life in the corridor outside the nearly-closed door.