Nevada Barr: Blind Descent

"I told you I thought Frieda had been murdered," Anna said lamely.

Laymon waved that away with an annoyed flick of his hand. "That's ancient history. Most of what you've told me is new. Did you work this out by yourself?"

The implied insult stung. The momentary sting of the lash covered up something else, a mild but gnawing sense of unease. Anna chose to ignore the question. "We've got to get back," she said bluntly.

"We do," he agreed, but he didn't move. He smiled. "Give an old man a chance to catch his breath. I'm an army brat, used to moving around, but I've done way too much of it these past few hours. I'm pooped."

Uneasiness grew. Half-formed ideas fluttered batwings in Anna's skull. Army brat. A fragment of casual conversation clicked in memory. During one of their meetings, Laymon said he was from the "Show Me" state. Missouri. George Laymon was from a military background in Missouri. He could easily have known of Brent's army career. Blackmail. That would account for why Roxbury, a known conservationist, might have covered up illicit drilling. One word about Brent's arrest for indecent exposure and he'd lose his little girls.

On the heels of these ugly thoughts came others: Laymon knew Oscar was heavy-footed; Holden had joked about it. Oscar might not have gone to Big Manhole on his own, but at Laymon's order. The "chewing out" Jewel reported wasn't something she'd witnessed but something she'd been told-by George Laymon. The rifle shell had been turned over to Laymon for delivery to the sheriff's office. Even the order closing the cave had come down from Laymon. Prior to the rock slide in Katie's Pigtail, Brent had spoken to someone outside the core group. Brent had placed a call on the landline. To Laymon? And Laymon had told him to finish what he started or lose his girls to Amy and her dentist?

The rapid-fire thought ended. Tired unto stupidity, Anna knew her revelations had trotted across her face for anyone to read. One look at Laymon ratified her fears. His face had changed. Charm was gone. Muscles bunched to lift him from the sitting position. There would be no playing the innocent and stringing him along until an opening for escape presented itself.

"What was in it for you?" Anna asked to distract him.

"Money. A whole lot of money."

"Oscar isn't with Curt and Sondra, is he? Nobody is."

"Smart girl," Laymon said. "Too much smarts isn't healthy in a woman."

Anna was in no position to argue the point. The cavalry had gone the way of John Wayne. The god from the machine was relegated to a line in Greek history. Screaming would be an exercise in futility. In the wake of two corpses and an elaborate cover-up, the odds of talking him into repenting the error of his ways were nil. Sixty sounded old. But Laymon was in superb physical condition. He was rested. And he was a big man.

Throwing dignity to the wind, Anna ran. Behind her she could hear the smash of his boots on the flowstone. He'd not bothered changing footwear. That in itself should have tipped her off. No point in rearranging deck chairs when you know the ship's going down. Scrambling up the slide that had gentled her into this false paradise, she passed her boots, leather sentinels at the backdoor of Tinker's Hell. No time to retrieve them.

An explosion, intensified by the closed space, knifed through her eardrums. A piece of flowstone the size of a fist vanished from the rock by her left knee. The air shivered with a faint tinkling as of distant wind chimes: crystal trees trembling in the echo of the blast, and the high-pitched singing of rock and ricochet. Laymon had a gun. That possibility hadn't crossed her mind. On the surface it would have been one of her first considerations. Firearms didn't seem part of this world. "Whither thou goest, I shall go." Anna couldn't remember who'd said that to whom, but it would have made sense had the god of war whispered the words into the ear of man.

Like Br'er Rabbit, Anna dove into the confines of the exit tunnel, her personal briar patch. She'd railed against the claustrophobic embrace of Lechuguilla's tight places. Now she welcomed them. She was small; she could move quickly. Rocks cut through the rubber slippers. Razor-backed walls scraped her elbows as she pushed with feet, clawed with gloved hands. More than once she cracked her helmet hard enough that noise pinged in her vertebrae. There was no pain. That would come later. If she was lucky.

With each movement she made came the sound of pursuit, always right at her heels. So close, she looked for Laymon's light, expected his breath on the nape of her neck. The sidepack caught and dragged. In the long belly-crawl before the halfway point, the strap snagged and held her fast. Unhooking it, she squeezed on, sans water, food, surveyor's tape, and batteries.

Gone too was the insistent shuffle of her pursuer. The sounds that had driven her to the point at which heart and lungs threatened to burst were made by the contents of her pack shifting close to her ears.

Reaching the room with two leads, where Brent had cut off Frieda's return, Anna stopped, held her breath, and listened. Though not yet on her heels, Laymon was coming. At a guess, she was sixty seconds ahead. Beyond the tunnel was Tinker's Hell. Open areas with lots of places to hide. That was the obvious gambit. She would leave him to figure it out. Taking precious seconds for stealth, she crept not out toward Tinker's but up the passage that Brent had used to get from his elevated lead down to the passage Frieda traversed.

Having squeezed fifteen feet into the rocky maze, Anna wedged herself tightly into a crack and turned off her headlamp. Covering mouth and nose, she tried to smother the rasp of her breathing. As it ebbed, she was overwhelmed by a different, greater noise. Thrumming, distant and roaring, as if a dam had broken and water poured down into the rooms and passages of the cave. Water or gas. Could Laymon's bullets have damaged the pipe, killing him, her, and the cave? The sound grew more intense, an explosion forced through arteries and veins of stone.

Caught in a terror she could neither run from nor outsmart, she waited, mind curiously blank, muscles knotted as her body readied for an impossible battle.

The bellowing rush sustained, not growing closer, not receding. Through it, she heard gasping: Laymon prying himself out of the belly crawl. With a start, she realized the roaring that had sounded like part of the earth itself was the beating of her own heart. She'd been told of the phenomenon, but didn't grasp how alien and frightening it would be. Hands clamped over her mouth, she fervently hoped the machinations of Laymon's own heart would mask the jungle-drumbeat of hers.

Furtive sounds penetrated the steady hum of blood in her ears. Whether he climbed toward her, moved on, or adjusted his pack, she couldn't tell. Inquisitive as a live thing, light streaked up the rock beyond her feet and across where the lead made a hard left creating the shelf on which she hid. The round of gold probed closer, Tinkerbell's evil twin. Cringing, she resisted an impulse to swat it away.

If the light sensed her presence, it had the good taste not to inform its master. Flickering, the gold slithered back down the rocky chute and was gone.

"Anna!"

Her name, shouted so close, startled her. Too tired for perfect discipline, muscles twitched. Gravel skittered down the rock.

Maybe Laymon heard it. Maybe he didn't.

Maybe he knew she'd caused it. Maybe he blamed the resonance of his own voice.

She waited for the noises that would set her again to running till she was gunned down, could no longer lift one foot after another, or a better idea came to her. Reprising Brent's act with the stone was her first choice, but every rock in her cubbyhole was firmly attached.

The evil Tinkerbell light never came back. Laymon's scritching and scraping grew fainter. Anna took her hands from her mouth and breathed cautiously. Her legs were cramping, her feet beginning to tingle, but she was afraid to move. Playing possum wasn't exactly an innovative tactic. If she could think of it, so could he. He might be waiting not twenty feet away, light out, breath hushed, invisible.