Ridley Pearson - Chain of Evidence

Zeller managed to open the grate without being heard over the rumbling of the dryers. He signaled Dart, and Dart limped over to him, pocketed his sidearm, and slipped quietly down the steel tube, using hand and foot grips welded into its wall, his ankle screaming. Zeller passed him the shotgun and followed, easing the grate down into place above him. Flashing sparks indicated that Alverez had seen them. A spray of bullets skimmed off the grate throwing fireworks overhead.

Zeller winced and buckled on his way down the ladder, and though Dart did not see the man’s blood spilling from his shoulder, when Zeller reached out and accepted the shotgun, Dart knew that he’d been hit. Zeller switched on a small penlight as he came off the last rung and pointed down the storm sewer-a cement pipe perhaps four feet high. He signaled for Dart to defend their backside, then crouched and lead the way into the claustrophobic tunnel. The bottom of the pipe was dry. After only a few feet, when a spray of bullets echoed back at the base of entrance tube, Zeller switched off the light. Alverez had fired a volley down through the grate in defense.

The grate banged on the cement floor, above and far behind them.

Alverez was inside.

Zeller allowed Dart to run fully into him, stopping him. He grabbed for the detective’s hand and pulled it down to a cold metal grip. Dart tested his toe forward and felt it slip out into nothingness. This pipe ended here. He crouched and began to descend, using the ladder of grips that Zeller had indicated. At the last rung, he stepped off into water so cold that it caught his breath. The sergeant flashed his penlight only once, aiming it down a large, arching stone ceiling that was dripping water and coated in a green slime. The water in which they stood was pitch black. Dart heard the distinct sound of scurrying rats but ignored it-he didn’t want to think about being in a storm sewer with a few hundred irritated rats at his feet. Zeller pulled on Dart, and led the way.

From behind them came the unmistakable sound of shoes scraping on cement.

With his left hand held out against the tunnel’s wall as a guide, Dart followed the sound of Zeller’s splashing. The sergeant had clearly practiced this escape, for he moved knowingly in the darkness. Dart’s ankle, chilled by the water, felt a little better.

When they were a good twenty yards down this tunnel, Dart heard Alverez spit out the single word “Shit!” followed by the sound of a falling man landing hard-he had gone off the end of the pipe into the larger tunnel. The man fired off a stream of semiautomatic weapon fire in anger, made apparent to Dart only by a terrifying whistling in the air around him.

Alverez was coming after them with a vengeance. Dart’s hope that he might be too injured to follow were dashed.

Dart’s left hand went into space as the wall ran out.

“Sssst!” Zeller said, to his immediate left.

Dart blindly negotiated the turn into a similar tunnel, and they started off again. He realized that the intersection was yet another of Zeller’s ploys. Alverez would be forced to make a choice-hopefully the wrong one.

He and Zeller stayed in this connecting tunnel for several minutes before taking a right; they were following the layout of the city blocks overhead. By all indications, they had lost Alverez-ten minutes later, Zeller stopped them, and they listened intently. There were no sounds from behind. Only rats. Dart’s feet were numb, and he could feel the chill spreading up his legs and into his bones. Zeller led on.

They took one more right and walked through shallower water for another fifteen minutes, at which point Dart heard a small waterfall ahead of them. Zeller allowed the detective to bump into him once again. As he stopped, he heard a deeper sound beyond the small waterfall, and for the first time his eyes sensed a distant circle of gray at the center of the black in which he had lived for the past eternal forty minutes.

They then reached the source of this gray. The water that held them spilled from the end of the storm sewer falling to a mass of ice below. The river spread out before them, etched with the bare branches of dormant trees, reaching into a canopy of low clouds that reflected back the dull amber glare of the sleeping city.

“We can’t take a taxi. They might think of that, they might even be listening in on a scanner. It wouldn’t take a genius to guess that a pickup down by the river, at this time of night, would be us.” Zeller led Dart along the river’s edge. Dart’s ankle felt almost normal.

“It was you up on Charter Oak Bridge,” he said to the man in front of him.

Speaking back as they walked, Zeller said, “Yeah. I had to know what you were up to. And then Ginny was involved, and that other woman-Lang-and I realized we had problems.”

“Alverez?”

“An out-of-towner. A guy hired to break my knees-yours too by now. Convince us to shut up.” He led through some shrubs that tore at Dart’s clothing, and then along the river’s edge again. “I’ve been avoiding him for months. But with you in the picture, I imagine they’ll bring in more help.” He said in a troubled voice, “I heard a rumor a shooter’s been hired.”

“That’s hardly breaking knees.”

“The difference between a spot fire and a range fire is getting an early jump.”

“Hired by whom? Proctor?” Dart asked.

“One thing I’ll say about you, Ivy-you do your homework.”

They walked in silence past the glaring lights of the power plant until they reached Charter Oak Bridge. They climbed the same steps where Dart had seen Zeller standing, and in minutes were up on the bridge.

“My car’s back in the south end,” Dart reminded wistfully.

“He’ll watch it after he realizes we lost him. Stay away. Same with your apartment. Same with Jennings Road. He’ll look for you there. In his eyes you’ve hooked up with me, Ivy. You’re fucked. They have a hell of a lot to protect. They’ve been trying for me for months. Even if you hadn’t stirred the nest by going to Roxin, you’d be on their list now anyway.”

“You know about my visit?” Dart asked, astonished.

“Ivy, I know fucking everything. How quickly we forget.”

“But they need me,” Dart protested. “They need me to bring you in for the murders. They should be helping me.”

“Don’t you get it, Ivy? Are you that fucking ignorant?”

“Maybe I am.”

Zeller stopped and turned around. Dart could barely make out the man’s face in the ambient light. As a car passed and Zeller was caught in the headlights, his eye sockets filled with black shadow. He said, “The Laterin doesn’t work .”

“Laterin?”

“The drug they’re testing,” he said condescendingly. “It doesn’t work.”

Dart ruminated on this. Zeller seemed to be making one last bid for innocence.

“Listen. How do you monitor whether or not a drug aimed at sex offenders works? This isn’t cancer-you don’t take an X ray,” he said condescendingly. “You keep the guy under surveillance-you monitor his every move.” Zeller spoke slowly. “Proctor Security had the contract to keep these creeps under surveillance. I was working for them. And what did I find out? A full half of these assholes repeatedly reoffend. They’re no better than they were.” His jaw seemed to move mechanically, inhumanly. Dart couldn’t catch his breath. “And Martinson, or someone over there, skewed the findings, and I, without meaning to, caught on. I got pissed off at Proctor one day and he made a boo-boo and hinted at something he shouldn’t have. I got a look at some files and turned up altered reports-Proctor was giving them the results they wanted. So what was my next step?” the teacher asked.