P Deutermann - Nightwalkers

Some water would have been nice. Some Scotch would have been better. Some frantic tapping on the door from the other side would have been best.

I woke up and checked my watch: seven thirty in the morning, not that it was morning down in the tunnel. My watch light looked like a tiny night-light in that blackness. The shepherds stirred but didn't get up. They were completely blind in that darkness.

I pulled out my cell phone and opened it. It still had battery, light on the screen, and, of course, absolutely no signal. Tony should have been over here by now, so the fact that he wasn't led me to believe my ghost had either attacked him or somehow diverted him. I turned the phone off to conserve its battery and then used the flashlight to explore the tunnel. It hadn't changed much over the night: earthen floor, brick walls, curved, arched brick ceiling, which dusted my face with old mortar each time I looked up. The ladder at the far end was about ten feet high, and the ceiling was maybe seven feet from the floor. Had they dug a long trench, built the walls and arched ceiling, and then just backfilled it?

When I went back to the door I tried to move it again. It budged, but not much. I stubbed my foot on the iron locking bar. Four feet across, three inches wide, a half inch thick, forged iron, and weighing about twenty pounds. I thumped the door with it and made a suitably loud noise. Maybe I could batter the door down with the bar, except that the door was made of two courses of oak boards running cross-grain with one another and reinforced with iron strapping material. Then I remembered the smokehouse trapdoor, and the fact that I could move it just a little.

"C'mon, muttskis," I said. "Let's try the world's simplest tool."

I climbed the ladder, leaving the flashlight, on white beam now, on the floor pointed up. The dogs looked up expectantly, tails wagging in encouragement. I positioned the edge of the bar up against the crack, spread my legs on the ladder, and pressed my upper back against the boards. Then I heaved upward with all my strength. The trapdoor moved maybe a millimeter.

I relaxed, did some deep breathing, and this time repositioned the bar into one corner of the trapdoor. I'd tried to lift the whole thing the first time. Maybe I could lift one corner. All I needed was a half inch in which to wedge that iron bar.

One more deep breath, and push. The rung of the ladder on which I was standing cracked and then broke, nearly dumping me off the ladder and down onto that hard earth floor. I dropped the iron bar trying to stay on the damned ladder and only narrowly avoided beaning one of the dogs. Fortunately the next lower rung held, but I was now too low on the ladder to get much pushing leverage.

I went back down and retrieved the bar. The shepherds were giving me reproachful looks for throwing heavy objects at them. Back up I went, and this time to the next rung up from the new gap on the ladder. This had me bent way over, but it was the best I could do. I positioned the bar into one corner and then, using my legs this time, tried to stand up.

The hatch moved and the bar slid into the resulting crack, just barely. I heard that familiar cracking noise, so I took the strain off before I broke another rung. I relaxed with my head up against the rough bottom of the trapdoor and did some more deep breathing. There was no fulcrum on which I could use the bar as a lever, but I felt the tiniest wisp of air coming through that crack. Progress.

I went back down the ladder and did some back-straightening exercises. I had a feeling I was going to hurt in a little while. The dogs were looking at me with their good-job, now-what expression. Good question.

I turned off the flashlight and turned on my cell phone. When the screen lit up, I went back up the ladder, put the phone up against the crack, and, lo and behold, there was a single bar of signal. The bar was probably acting as an antenna. I dialed 911 and hit send. A badly garbled voice answered me, and the call went dead the moment I spoke. Then I remembered what a deaf paralegal had taught me: You can text to 911 if for some reason you can't talk.

I crouched on the ladder and thumbed in a message. Then I redialed and sent the text. Fifteen seconds later message received appeared on the screen.

I exhaled in relief and went back down the ladder. Now it was just a waiting game.

Thirty minutes later I heard someone banging on the wooden door from the basement side. I yelled back and then waited for them to do something on the other side that involved cutting metal. Finally the door pushed open in my direction and light blazed in the doorway from two powerful flashlights. As fresh air flooded in, I realized that our air supply in the tunnel had not been as good as I thought it was. The dogs went through while I was still getting my wits together.

Two deputies welcomed us into the basement and showed me the chain arrangement that had been used to keep the door from moving. They said Sheriff Walker was on his way over. I told them I was okay and did not need EMS. While one deputy canceled the EMS dispatch, the other asked what had happened. I told him I'd debrief to the sheriff and then asked if they could check on my associate over at the Lees' stone cottage.

Sheriff Walker showed up fifteen minutes later, and we met on the front porch.

"At least we know he's still in the area," he said, coming up the steps.

"And he still has the initiative," I replied, and then told him what had happened last night. We went inside to see the little speakers, but, of course, they were all gone. The second deputy came back about then and reported that Tony was not at the cottage, nor was his vehicle. The old dog in the house appeared to be fine.

I tried his cell phone. He answered.

"Where are you?" I asked.

"I'm almost to Charlotte," he replied.

"Charlotte?"

"You told me to go to Charlotte, first thing this morning, meet with some guy who oversees kennel clubs in the city, and get him to identify people who know the Doberman scene down there."

"Fascinating," I said and then told him where I'd been all night. I asked him how he received those instructions.

"Text," he said. "On my cell phone-from your cell phone."

"Turn around," I said. "That's all bogus. I never sent any text messages."

"Well, okay," he said, "but I talked to that guy in Charlotte. He's real, and he says he knows the Doberman scene. I'm almost there-what could it hurt?"

I asked him to hold on and asked the sheriff what he thought. "Why not?" he said. "We pulsed the city cops down there, but the biker world doesn't talk to cops. The dog show people might."

"Sheriff says proceed," I told Tony. "Then we have to figure out how this guy got into our comms."

"Ask Pardee," he said. "He's the data-dink."

The sheriff said they'd been tracing back on their victim and had developed a small list of known associates, but so far, no leads on a lone ranger who'd wanted two dogs. He asked about our efforts to recon the plantation.

"Interrupted," I said. "We thought we were homing in on that old coal mine tunnel until the two Dobes came down the hill and put us at general quarters."

"How convenient," he said.

"Yeah, wasn't it. Let's take a walk."

When we got out under the big trees, I told him that I thought this guy still had the house under audio surveillance, and maybe even our vehicles and the cottage. "He anticipates our every move, and he's able to deflect us at will."

"Which means he didn't run after popping the dog trainer," Walker said. "He's in the area, so he's got a base."

"That's what we were looking for, something like that old mine, or a deserted building out there in my seven hundred acres of weeds and trees."

"Maybe we should try aerial," he said.