Ridley Pearson - The Art of Deception

A voice shouting came from far away down the tunnel-barely audible. This voice was male.

Ferrell Walker.

LaMoia’s chest tightened painfully. He trained the Maglite into the dark. He ducked through the hole and stepped inside that tunnel. It smelled familiar-like death, he thought.

“I’m coming,” he whispered under his breath, already moving quickly into the dark.

In all his visits to Mama Lu, Boldt could remember seeing her out of that rattan throne only twice, surprised once again by how short she was. Not small, he thought, but short.

“I appreciate this, Great Lady,” he said. He and Babcock, Mama Lu and her two trained polar bears in the black garb stood behind the butcher’s meat counter where a crippled stairway led down into the glare of overhead bare bulbs. The Korean grocery smelled of fresh ginger and exotic spices. Korean talk radio played from a nasal-sounding AM radio behind the cash register at the other end of the room.

“This been family secret many generations, Mr. Both.”

“We understand.”

“You, I know, I trust. Yes. But woman? Mama Lu no know.”

“You’ve nothing to worry about,” Babcock said.

“I give you my word,” Boldt said, knowing the commitment that statement represented.

“Police no know this. Nobody know.”

Boldt said, “Understood.”

“Only because this friend of yours.”

“Matthews,” Boldt said.

“I do this only for you. For her. You good man, Mr. Both.

You clear Billy Chen’s good name.”

He didn’t want to have a twenty-minute discussion about it, but he knew her ways. “We’ll eat a meal together,” he said.

“We’ll celebrate.”

She grinned across lipstick-smeared teeth. “But later.”

She knew him better than he thought.

“Yes, later.”

“Show them,” she said to the larger of her bodyguards. To Boldt she said, “Saved my life three times, this secret. Maybe save your friend, too.”

Boldt nodded, a frog caught in his throat. “Thank you,” he said. He ducked his head, and the three descended the cramped stairs to the storage room below.

“This is old,” Babcock informed him excitedly, well before the bodyguard pulled on the gray boards of built-in pantry shelves, opening and revealing a narrow passageway into darkness. “This is it.”

Boldt nodded to the big man and led the way through to the damp smells and pitch-dark. “Let’s hope so,” he heard himself say.

Sitting on a damp ledge in total darkness, Walker having turned off the flashlight to save batteries, Matthews adjusted the broken piece of bottle glass in her left hand. To make the laceration count she would need a good deal of pressure, and this made her realize she needed her own hand protected or she might let go of the glass as it also cut into her.

Walker turned the light back on, surprising her, and took her right hand in his, examining her cut. “It’s not so bad,” he said.

He pulled a soiled rag out of a back pocket-she didn’t want to think where it might have been-and he stuffed it into the hand to stem the bleeding. Without knowing it, he’d just passed her a shield for her piece of glass.

She tried to understand his patience. Why wasn’t he in a hurry? Did he fail to realize that half the city’s police department was by now out looking for her? Or was it simply that he trusted these tunnels-virtually untraveled by all but the homeless for the past hundred years-to protect him from discovery? Or was it something much worse, that he wanted to put off what he had in mind for her for as long as possible?

Hostage negotiators never pushed the abductor into making hasty decisions. Walker’s obvious patience came to her as a blessing. He might know the tunnels beneath the city, but she knew the tunnels of the human mind.

Consumed in total darkness once again, she prepared to move the chunk of glass to her right hand. “How did it start … the idea of him having an accident?”

“Leave it.”

“That’s not something that comes out of nowhere. That builds over time. What was it: He criticized you? Thought he’d taught you to be a better fisherman than you were? Something like that?”

“You don’t know anything.”

“But isn’t that why we’re here?”

“We’re here because I wanted you here,” he said. “We’re here because I helped you and I wanted to show you-”

She cut him off. “No, you wanted to test me.”

“And you failed the test.”

“I’m here because I understand you, Ferrell.” She got the glass set in her right palm. “Take a good long look at your reasons, because that’s why I’m here. It was your decision, not mine, and you need to face this.”

She allowed the resulting silence to settle around them, like listening for animals in the woods.

“Was it Mary-Ann?” she asked in a whisper. “Something he did to Mary-Ann?”

The flashlight popped back to life. He scooted away from her, and she resented not having taken a swipe at him while she’d had the chance.

“Something you saw him doing to her. Something you heard him doing to her. What? Out on the boat, where you couldn’t escape it? Where she couldn’t escape it?”

No indignant rage, no shouting protestations. Ferrell Walker looked over sadly in the dull yellow of the weak light and she knew she’d scored a hit.

“Let’s go,” he said, waving her up.

“Where to?” She would need that flashlight of his after she cut him. If she lost it to the mud … Without the flashlight she’d be lost down here, forever banging into the mud walls and rotting timbers.

“What you’re feeling, Ferrell … it isn’t something you can escape through a few tunnels. Hurting me is only going to make it worse.”

“You betrayed me,” he said far too calmly, too sadly. “You both betrayed me.”

“You want to talk about both of us? Answer me this: How would Mary-Ann have felt if you’d put her in this same situation? Dragging her through the mud. And for what? To play some game of yours that’s supposed to justify what you did to your father? Would she have played along, Ferrell?”

They moved in the same direction, heads ducked beneath the sagging timbers. She guessed north, back toward the heart of downtown. The Shelter? That room where Vanderhorst had hung the bodies? Where?

“You saved her, didn’t you?”

“Shut up.”

“Saved her from him, and I don’t mean Lanny Neal.”

“You don’t know anything about it.”

“Don’t I? He would drink himself blind, wouldn’t he? Criticize your handling of the boat, of the fish, when all along it was his incompetence that hurt the catch. His, not yours. And then Mary-Ann grew up, developed into a beautiful young woman, and the three of you out on the boat. He took advantage of that, didn’t he? Advantage of her. Drunk as he was. And you on the other side of a bulkhead were made to listen to the whole demeaning thing. And the next morning, that dead look in her eyes, and you with a rage you’ve never felt. But he’s a big, ornery man, and you aren’t about to cross him. You even suggest something and he hits you upside the head. You both carried bruises, you and Mary-Ann, didn’t you? Badges of honor, those bruises. How long did it go on, Ferrell? Months? Years?”

She paused, realizing he’d stopped several paces behind her, his small light aimed down at his feet, head hung in defeat.

She’d scored another direct hit. She capitalized on it, taking a step back toward him, careful to conceal her weapon. “Someone had to do something to stop it. You only did what was necessary.” She hesitated, this the most dangerous ground of all. “The only reason it tore you up inside, Ferrell, the reason it wouldn’t go away, kept coming back to haunt you, is because you’re a good person. The bad people don’t feel anything. But you felt bad for what you’d done, despite the fact it helped her, despite the fact you saved her.” Amid the silence, a steady drip of water somewhere off in the dark. “And of all the ungrateful things, the minute you save her, she leaves you.”