Steven Havill - Bitter Recoil

For the first thirty feet the drift was as securely timbered as the main shaft. But forty feet back the drift elbowed to the left and the timber supports ended. I couldn’t see around the bend. The place made my skin crawl.

Rotten and water-soaked as the timbers were, they gave the illusion of strength and support. In the drift they gave way to something that looked like monstrous cobwebs, with patches of the material hanging down from a ceiling of jagged rock. It was some sort of fabric, bolted right to the face of the shaft.

In dozens of places rock fragments littered the floor of the drift where the old fabric had pulled loose, and off to the left, just visible before the drift turned out of sight, an entire section of wall and ceiling had slumped, filling nearly a third of the tunnel.

I swept the light carefully, looking for movement.

“Finn?” I said. My voice echoed down the shaft. The dust of the years had padded the floor, and the fresh tracks were as clear as if they had been painted on a sidewalk with Day-Glo paint. And the prints came in two sizes.

“Finn, are you in there?” Again my words rattled around and died with no response. I ducked my head and looked down the main shaft. Ten feet below the drift, the iron supports that held the ladder had pulled loose…or rusted through. The section of ladder was twisted away from the wall and hung off at an angle. Finn had to be in the drift.

I reached for the second flashlight, adding its beam to that of my helmet. I saw that with just a slight stretch I could plant my feet on the lip of the drift’s shaft and grab one of the wall timbers with my left hand. With some slack in the rope I could pull myself into the tunnel.

If I slipped and fell, it would hurt like hell, but the rope could be trusted. That’s what the deputy had said.

“Turn off your light,” Finn said. His voice was quiet and conversational.

Out of reflex I swung the lights toward the sound of his voice. Nothing. I snapped off the flashlight and let it hang, then reached up and turned off my helmet. The blackness was oppressive…the spotlights above at the shaft mouth served only as a beacon in the distance. I reached up and touched the small, reassuring pistol grip of the Colt under my arm sling. I waited.

“Sheriff, you copy?” The crackle of the damn radio sounded like a string of firecrackers.

I keyed the mike and snapped, “Stay off the air.”

“Ten-four.”

I took a deep breath, my fingers still covering the lump that was the automatic. “All right, Finn. What do you want?”

Unless Finn had developed sonar, he could see no more than I. His light exploded out of the darkness, and I jerked my head back in surprise.

“Get that goddamned thing out of my eyes,” I snapped, but he took his time. Finally the light slipped away and I cracked an eyelid. The beam was centered on the thick bandage that bound my right arm and shoulder. My right hand stuck out of the linen and lay flat against my belly, useless. Finn played the light this way and that, examining me and my equipment.

“Turn around,” he said and watched as I touched the shaft wall with my fingers and gently pushed myself so that I rotated on the rope. The wash of his light cast a fat shadow of me on the opposite wall of the vertical shaft. As I rotated back around, he turned off the light. I blinked my eyes, trying to put out the yellow sunbursts that remained.

“So,” he said.

“Are you through playing games? Where’s the child?”

“She’s asleep. And you’ve managed to make quite a name for yourself, haven’t you? I underestimated your tenacity.”

I was in no mood to exchange compliments. “You have to let us bring her up. Nobody’s going to hurt her…or you.”

Finn chuckled. “I can imagine.” The harness dug into my crotch and belly, and my right leg was falling asleep. Finn knew he had all the time in the world. I didn’t if I was going to be worth anything.

“I was surprised that you had put it all together, Sheriff,” he said. I tried to picture where he might be standing.

“Sometimes I get lucky.”

“Yes,” he said. “Had your truck not let me down, we wouldn’t be having this conversation now.”

“What do you want, Finn? What do you think I can do for you?” I was tired of hanging like a goddamned potted plant.

“I saw the newspapers under the seat. You’re a clever man, to make the association. I’m curious why you didn’t call in any of the other authorities earlier.”

I frowned and said, “What do…” when what he’d said hit me like a sledge, smashing open the doors of my rusty memory. The newspapers. My notes. Until this day, I’d last seen the papers Friday night when I parked at the campground. The two-week-old papers, one of them with the front page headline…my notes in the margin.

I breathed a silent curse. We’d received the bulletin from Washington State along with a thousand other law enforcement agencies. We were close to the border. It made sense.

H. T. Finn had seen the newspaper when he’d stolen the radio-the headline and my notes. He had assumed that I’d made the connection, knew who he was, what he’d done.

“Arajanian did those hits for you, too,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm and hoping that he didn’t recognize the guess.

“He learned well,” Finn said. “He would have been of great use to me.”

My mind raced. “No, he did just what you wanted,” I said. “It worked out better the way it was…you left the rifle with him for the police to find. It’s probably the same rifle you had him use on the governor of Washington and the prison warden, isn’t it? If there was a matchup, it’d tie those shootings to the kid, and you’d be long gone. No witnesses to say otherwise after you shot us…and set the mountain on fire.”

“Cleansing fire,” Finn said softly, and his voice drifted off as he recited, “‘And the fire shall cleanse the evil from the earth and…’” His voice became indistinct.

“And they don’t know you as Finn in Washington, do they?” I said, but he refused the bait.

Finally he said, “You will make arrangements, Sheriff. Listen carefully.” I wasn’t in a position to do otherwise, but I wanted answers to a flood of questions. Finn continued, “I want a fully fueled helicopter. The television station has one. The helicopter, one reporter, and a pilot. That’s all. It will land immediately beside the mouth of the shaft, close enough that I can see the flash of its blades over the opening.”

I sighed. Why was an aircraft always such magic to these fruitcakes? Where would he go, other than Mexico? And what made him think Mexico would want him? He wanted a reporter, and that meant he thought the world would be interested in hearing his sorry tale.

My eyes ached with the strain of trying to see him in the darkness, and my finger itched to reach for the Colt automatic. But he had the girl, and we would play his game until the time was right.

“That’s all?”

“As a beginning, yes.”

“You’ll let them send down two more ropes, one for the girl and one for you?”

“No!” he said sharply. “Ruth and I will use the ladder. We will go out the way we came in.” He laughed softly. “You’d like me in harness, helpless. You’d like that, wouldn’t you. Oh no. That’s how they killed my Ruth. It won’t happen again. Never again.”

Another Ruth. But now it was the little girl I worried about. “It’s a long climb. I was just trying to make it safe for Daisy.”

“You don’t need to be concerned. Just do as I say.”

“All right.”

“Talk to the ones on the surface now,” he commanded. I keyed the mike. “Gastner here.”

“Go ahead, Gastner.”