Т Паркер - Where Serpents Lie

Johnny helped me through to the other side. I looked back and saw a small dog scratching up against the glass, trying to reach the hole I’d made. Johnny reached in and scooped it out.

Two paramedics rushed through the doorway, then ran to Frances. One of the deputies charged in right behind them with his shotgun lowered and I thought for a second he was going to blow everyone there to smithereens. “House is empty, sir. Grounds, too. There’s nobody here but us.”

“He’s in the neighborhood,” I said. “Everybody door to door.”

“You’re bleeding,” said Johnny, and when I looked down at myself I could see the slick red soaking my shirt and pants. I felt like I’d been punched in the ribs. In fact, I felt great because I knew I’d just done a good thing, whether the girl made it through or not. I felt lucky.

Louis pushed his way past the uniform and held up his radio. “Terry, he’s down in the flood canal behind the street. Stansbury was strafing south with the light — guy wearing something shiny was hauling ass north. Suspect stopped under the bridge and hasn’t come out.”

I heard a gasp, then a gentle male expletive from the other side of the room. Frances looked up at me from the paramedics. “She’s breathing.”

I approached and looked down at her, a skinny little girl wrapped in a blanket. Her eyes were terrified, but she was drawing breath deep and fast. Someone had gotten the tape off her mouth. I took a flashlight from one of the uniforms.

“Let’s go get him.”

The flood control channel ran behind Hurst Street. Louis kept up radio contact as he led us through a backyard and over a cinder-block wall. The lights in the houses were coming on and I could hear dogs barking from the yards on either side of us. A quarter mile south I saw the chopper hovering and a bright cone of light flaring down to earth. We climbed the chain link and landed heavily on the other side.

In the dim moonlight I could see the ditch was deep, with high, sloping, concrete walls and a flat bottom to carry the floodwaters out to the Pacific. Stansbury held the helo low over the street, a few hundred yards away. It looked like the bird was held up by the stanchion of its own white light. I heard Stansbury’s voice rasp over Louis’s radio: “ still under the bridge here, haven’t seen him move in over a minute ... I’d get on him if I were you flatfoots ...”

“Johnny — can you make it down, then up the other side?”

“Done.”

“I’ll take the center. Louis, take this bank.”

In an instant Johnny was down to the bottom, through the slick of water, then scuttling back up the far side. The last twenty feet of embankment was dirt, not cement, and for a moment he was tearing at it with all fours but sliding down at the same time, going nowhere. Then he found a foothold, got himself moving and made the top. He righted himself, flicked his flashlight beam once and drew his gun. I slid down the dirt on the soles of my shoes, and when I hit the rough cement I leaned back further and rode it down. When I hit bottom I was moving fast but kept my feet under me, ran up the other side a few steps to slow down, then started trotting through the brackish stream toward the chopper. I wedged the flashlight under my left arm, brought out my .45 and reached it around to my left hand, chambering the first round.

The middle of the channel was slick with mud and algae, so I tried to stay left or right. The bridge came at me out ahead, illuminated by Stansbury’s fierce spotlight, and I could see the shining sides of cars parked on the overpass behind the fence. The pale concrete of the channel narrowed, then lowered in perspective, disappearing into the darkness under the bridge.

I stopped about thirty feet short of the entrance. Even from there I could hear the sounds from inside: the lazy chime of running water; the clear and surprisingly loud doink, doink ... doink, doink of a drip that must have had its source high up; and the strange, metallic whomp of the chopper condensed in the tunnel then echoing out at me in odd angles from the darkness. Louis stood to my left, above me, and looked down. Turning the other way, I could see Johnny in a crouch, waiting for me to call the play. I wasn’t sure. It looked like a good way to get shot, if he was armed. I wanted him. I wanted him for myself, almost as bad as I’d ever wanted anything in my life. He was mine and I was going to take him. I looked in front of me to the dark yawning mouth of the overpass, moved to the far left side so my gun hand would be free, turned on my flashlight and looked in. As soon as I put my head into the opening, the echoes of the rotors hit me not only from both sides, but from ahead and behind, too. It was like having four ears. But I could navigate the invisible world of sounds by the steady doink and the minor sibilance of the running water.

The shiny little creek meandered along the bottom. There were large concrete blocks set in the floor of the culvert, just a few feet apart, to keep the large storm debris from going further downstream. Each one was almost a yard high and a yard wide — just big enough to hide a man. Three rows of three. I ran the light around them: branches caught lengthwise, mud and trash, a car tire. I held the beam just over each block and looked for shadows on the water. For movement. For a shape. For anything not quite right. Nothing. Nothing but the thump of the helo above.

I stepped back out of the tunnel and waved Johnny to go across the street, then back down again. He nodded and sprung onto the fence. Less than a minute later I saw the beam of his flashlight coming toward me from the other end of the tunnel. I waited until he was near the opening, then started in. Three steps. Four. I remembered something that Joe Reilly had once told me — always look up. So I aimed my beam to the ceiling and followed it up with my eyes. Ruststained concrete walls. Steel girders supporting the street from below. Bird nests and the dusty remains of spider webs long tattered and unused. I ran the beam down the wall to my left. It was sheer and clean except for the runoff tunnel that slanted up gently through the wall toward the street. The opening was about four feet off the floor of the channel and just big enough for a man to crawl into. There was another runoff line opening on the same side, about twenty yards further down toward Johnny. On the wall to my right I could see the black openings of two more, directly opposite.

Hypok lay in the cool barrel of the runoff line, feet slanted above him in the gentle uphill rise, both arms extended with the .44 firmly in grasp, barrel resting in a pile of debris through which he could easily see, elbows braced, his face recessed within the tunnel but his line of sight quite clear and unfettered. The nice wad of pine needles, leaves and trash not only hid him from flashlight view but gave him a steady brace for the gun.

His sores burned beneath the fresh skin. But he could scrunch backward into the deeper darkness of his hole, or forward toward the opening rather easily, using his elbows, knees and toes. He was tubed. It was like being born. Or like hunting if you were a snake, deeply penetrating the space of your prey, stealthy and silent, cunning and deadly. He rested his chin on the cold concrete and gazed down the length of his fine-scaled arms luminous in the near dark, to his pearlescent hands wrapped devoutly around the fat grips of the .44, then down at the shiny blued barrel waiting in the loose barrier of detritus. He could see the white post of the front sight and the generous rear notch into which you must center the post before you place it upon the target, pull the trigger and blow a hole the size of a softball out of any living thing on earth. He’d gotten the cop killer ammo, of course, Glaser Blues with the compressed #12 shot and the plastic, round-nose design. Guaranteed full knockdown on any hit or your money back.