John Sandford - Buried Prey

“See, this isn’t a sewer-” Russ began.

Sloan said, “It was a figure of speech. Let’s keep going, or get out of here.”

Up ahead, a dark hole.

They left two cops to guard the exit, while the rest moved on until Chip said, “Look.”

Lucas looked where he was shining his light. A thin stream of water cut across the floor, coming from who-knows-where, bordered on both sides by a half-inch of fine sand. A single set of tracks were pressed into the damp sand, heading deeper into the dark.

They went past a short shaft going straight up, like an upsidedown well. An intersecting shaft went off to the right, perhaps fifteen feet up. “If he had a rope, he could get up there and nobody could get at him,” somebody said.

But Chip said, “Yeah, but… see?” He pointed to a partial track in the sand, six feet past the intersection, going deeper into the tunnel. “And I’ve never seen a rope or anything going up there.”

They moved on, then somebody spotted a hole in a wall to the left. Lucas climbed a short slope to the hole, pushed his light in: there was a low-ceiling space, a kind of pot full of water. He could hear more running water, but couldn’t see anything inside the room except a pile of metal trash and some rotting wooden beams.

He hopped down and said, “Nothing.”

They found another hole, and this one carried a human stench. Sloan looked and he said, “Somebody’s using it as a can. Hang their ass off the wall, and let go.”

“More tracks,” somebody called, from up ahead.

Scrape was far ahead of them, carrying a cheap aluminum flashlight with a weak bulb: but he knew where he was going. He got in the main room, under the power plant, tiptoed across the wet concrete, careful not to leave footprints, boosted himself up on a damp concrete revetment, then onto a rusting steel beam that sat on top of it. Once on top, he slid down into a narrow space on the other side, and lay on top of the concrete revetment. He barely had room to move his shoulders and hips, but he was practically invisible. They wouldn’t find him unless they climbed a ladder that led up toward the power plant, and then shined a light down…

If they did that, he was cooked.

As he lay there, in the dark, listening to the cops coming down the tunnel, he began to feel his muscles clenching up and down his body, in fear and anger. If they caught him, they’d put him in a hospital, and the hospital people would do experiments on him, as they had in the past. Experiments…

He’d known when the cops released him that they’d be back. Scrape was crazy-and knew it, and regretted it, and suffered for it, nothing to be done about it-but not stupid. Once they had a taste of him, he believed, they’d be back if they didn’t find the little girls with somebody else. He was just too good a target, and in his experience, if cops couldn’t solve a bad crime, they began to look for somebody they could hang it on.

An old story on the street. Some people said it was bullshit; others swore it was true, said it had happened to them. Scrape believed it to be true. He’d been arrested too many times for nothing, for simply being there, crazy, on the sidewalk, to have any faith in the honesty or efficiency of cops.

What good did it do to take him down to court? He didn’t have any money, putting him in jail didn’t cure anything, so why did they do it?

Because, he thought, that’s what cops did. They got grades on a paper, somewhere, on how many arrests they got. He was an easy one.

The night before, he’d tricked them, sliding out a side window after dark, creeping like a shadow down the hedge and across the yard, staying in backyards for half a mile, before breaking to the river. He’d thought he’d be safe, for a while, in his tunnels, but somebody had talked…

Now they were coming for him again, and they’d put him in a hospital and they’d strap him to a bed, and they’d do more experiments; he lay behind his beam and closed his eyes and tried to pretend that they weren’t there.

That the nightmares weren’t there: but this time, they were.

While Scrape settled into his hiding place, the cops pushed on, like a National Geographic caving expedition made up of stupid people, splashing through pools of water, stumbling over debris and rotting lumber, swearing, shining their lights around. They turned a couple of corners, explored shafts going left and right. One of them showed what appeared to be an attractive, golden-brown wall. Then the wall twitched, and a cop, looking closer, suddenly back-pedaled and said, “Jesus, those are cockroaches. Millions of them.”

“Don’t mess with them, don’t mess with them…” The wall shimmered and they all backed up.

Moving ahead, they found more footprints, which Lucas now recognized from a series of round treads on the bottom-running shoes-and followed them.

Chip took them down a branch and over a wall, then through a narrow natural crack half filled with dirt. They were squatwalking now, under a four-foot ceiling, which led to a hole in the top of a dry storm sewer. They shined their lights down the hole and found another thin stream of water, and more sand, with no sign of footprints.

“He could have gotten down there, but I can’t believe he’d have landed in the water and never made a print,” Chip said.

Lucas said, “If he did, he could have gotten out, right?”

“Yeah, he could’ve walked back into town, got out at a drain, if he could find a loose one. There probably are a couple. Or, he could follow it out to the river, but the exit is barred.”

Lucas looked both ways and said, “He can’t dribble a basketball. He didn’t jump down there and not make tracks. Let’s back out.”

They backed out of the crack and found that the other cops had pushed on, down a ledge and into a cavernous room that might have been a dungeon in a post-industrial vampire’s castle. The ceiling was invisible in the murk, and the place was full of huge rusty pipes, more unidentifiable superstructure, and a couple of shafts, with steel ladders and wrist-thick ropes that disappeared into the gloom. “They go up to the power plant,” Chip said. “You can get up there, but the entrance at the top is always blocked off. Didn’t used to be, but they had some bums set up housekeeping a few years back.”

Somebody called in the dark, “I got some tracks.”

They went over and looked, and found the prints they’d been following in. They went even farther back into the room.

Sloan asked Chip, “Is there any way out of here?”

“There are some tunnels, but they’re all dead ends, and not far now. There’s a pretty good storage cave over there to the left. That’s probably where he’s hiding. Little nooks and crannies back in there.”

Sloan said, “All right, everybody, we think he’s still in front of us. Take it slow, keep your lights way out in front of you. No hurry-we take it slow.”

They spread out and checked the rest of the big room, eventually moving to a cluster in the back, around a seven-foot-high tunnel, maybe twenty feet long, that showed a black patch to the left, down at the end-a big dark space. Lucas and Sloan led the way in, and as they came up to the cave, found another smaller branch going off to the right. A uniform cop crawled down it, came back a few seconds later: “Nothing. Dead end.”

Lucas and Sloan shined their lights into the cave. As Chip said, it was deep, and fairly wide. Squared off, it had been carved into the sandstone by humans, rather than by water. They couldn’t see quite to the end of it.

“It smells awful,” a cop said.

“Like something’s been dead for a while,” Lucas said.

“Bat shit,” Chip called, from the end of the line. “Lots of bat shit. Guano.”