Violet Darger | Book 7 | Dark Passage

by Vargus, L. T.

  She waited a second in the thick gray of this sheltered space. Blinked. Held her hand up, barely able to make out the outline of it here.

  And as she stared at those faintly grayscale fingers, the events of the past few seconds caught up with her all at once.

  She pictured Hendrix’s eyes again as he fell. The light was out in them, even before he touched down.

  He was gone.

  Her skin prickled at the thought, chest going strangely hot and cold at the same time. She backpedaled a few more paces.

  Maybe she should keep moving. Keep some distance between her and the firefight. In case DeBarge went down, too.

  She turned around. Skimmed her fingers along the wall again. Jogging deeper into the cave.

  And slowly she picked up speed. She’d eventually find help this way. Better to catch up with DeBarge later with reinforcements, if she could. There was nothing to be gained by lingering here, that was for sure.

  She didn’t see the faint silhouette of the stalactite until it was too late. The black protrusion jutted down from the cavern ceiling, just a little blacker than all else.

  She ran into it face first. At speed. Her whole body shuddering and buckling at the moment of impact.

  Bright stars burst inside her skull again, and the world ripped itself out from under her. Tilting. Fading. The blackness lurched once and swallowed her whole.

  She, too, was out before she hit the ground.

  Chapter 75

  Loshak peered down the hole in yet another basement floor. His toes edged up to the broken concrete borderline. Even with the lights on down there, he saw it as a black hole, a void, something unknowable.

  How many goddamn tunnels are there? When does this case end? Does it?

  Does it fucking ever end?

  He felt cold sweat trickle down his back, droplets streaming from his collar, tickling all the way down. It wasn’t just paranoia, he knew. The case did keep getting weirder, every step of the way.

  Finally, he looked away from the pit. Stepped away from that cratered place in the concrete.

  A few other officers milled around the basement with him. Ambrose paced among them, speaking into a cell phone.

  They were waiting on a second SWAT unit to arrive. Waiting while Darger wandered around somewhere down there.

  Loshak paced back over to hole in the floor. Gazed down into it.

  He wanted to go in now. Pursue Darger and Worm. But task force orders meant he had to wait for the backup unit to get here. The SWAT team would lead the raid.

  Of course, if this tunnel connected to the others, the SWAT officers already down there would come upon them sooner or later. Backup armed with assault rifles.

  “Agent Darger said he was unarmed, so…” Ambrose said.

  Loshak turned to see the detective holding his phone against his shoulder for the moment. His eyes flicked from Loshak to the hole and back again like he knew what the agent was thinking.

  He had been unarmed. That was true.

  Well then… It would all work out for the best. Wouldn’t it?

  Excited voices erupted upstairs, interrupting Loshak’s thoughts. All eyes in the basement tilted toward that doorway at the top of the stairs.

  “Sounds like they’ve got something up there,” Ambrose said, his voice so low it sounded more like he was talking to himself.

  Loshak could muster no enthusiasm for the development, just two words sounding inside his skull.

  Now what?

  Chapter 76

  Darger woke facedown on the cold rock, snuffling for breath like a hound, the scratchy feeling of dust in her throat. She coughed. Turned her head and sucked in a lungful of cool air. The chill of it reminded her of where she was.

  Before she even opened her eyes, a rapid fire montage of those ridged cave walls flashed through her head, the camera in her mind zooming down the center of an endless tunnel.

  Then she remembered Worm leaping for that box on the wall and shutting off the lights, remembered the clatter of gunfire ringing up and down the rock corridor, remembered the bloody jelly of brain and blood vacating the back of Hendrix’s skull, his limp body tipping toward the cave floor like a felled tree.

  It all seemed distant now somehow. Buried back in a past she couldn’t touch anymore, whether it’d been minutes or hours ago. Part of her suspected it hadn’t been so long.

  At last, her eyelids fluttered and opened. Blinked a few times.

  The darkness had returned. Total blackness hung up in all directions.

  She sat up. Peeled her body away from that cold rock slab. Propped her arms behind her to support her weight.

  Her head throbbed, felt wobbly atop her stiff neck, the steady whooshing noise of her pulse loud in her ears. She just sat there for a few seconds, breathing and letting her head get steadier.

  Then she crawled back the way she’d run. Climbed that sloped section of cave on hands and knees. Staying light and quiet.

  When she got to the top of the rise, the faintest glimmer shone on the floor ahead of her — a trickle of light spilling out from a deep black contour.

  A smothered flashlight, she thought. Hendrix’s most likely. She half-remembered it slipping out of his fingers as he fell, clattering down alongside him. She couldn’t help but wonder if the stifled lamp was being muffled against the rock or his corpse. Surely it was pressed tight against one or the other.

  She listened for a long moment before she moved again, pushing herself upright on her knees like a meerkat standing on its hind legs and tilting her ears toward that sliver of illumination, one after the other. She heard nothing, not even so much as the dripping water she’d heard back toward the lake section of the cave.

  She brought her hands back down to the stone and crawled toward the light. Palms pressing into the cold rock shelf below.

  In the dark, the light almost seemed to be moving to her rather than the opposite. Floating. Gliding through the gloom. Drawn to her like a will-o’-the-wisp.

  When she reached it, she fumbled a hand toward its half-halo shimmer. She felt something soft and cold — something wrong — her hand jerking back like she’d touched an electric fence.

  Words flashed in her head one at a time:

  Cold.

  Dead.

  Flesh.

  She heaved a few breaths before she tried again. Wetness sizzling between her teeth. It took a second for her fingers to find and grip the body of the flashlight, and then she picked it up.

  Hendrix’s shattered head came into view as the light ascended. That red canyon still yawning out from behind that flap of papery scalp, all the shadows in the crevasse shifting as the flashlight moved.

  The small tactical flashlight had been jammed tight against the frigid flesh of his neck.

  She swept the light around. Found only empty cavern stretching away in both directions, all those swirling brown and gray minerals forming knobby growths that protruded from the floor and ceiling like rotting teeth.

  DeBarge wasn’t here. Was that good or bad?

  Darger’s mind whirred again. Tried to put these puzzle pieces together. Maybe DeBarge had given chase. Pressed Worm back toward the basement on Ash Avenue. Semi-automatic weapon fire had a way of being persuasive like that.

  She swung the light back down toward Hendrix’s corpse. Let it dance over him a second, keeping her eyes away from that pitted wound, and then she smiled faintly.

  Laying the flashlight on the ground, she jammed her fingers under Hendrix’s torso and shifted his weight. One hand hefted him at the hip while the other lifted his shoulder.

  What she sought lay there, and she plucked it free, wiggling it to and fro to disentangle it from his arms.

  She clutched the assault rifle in both hands for a second before she picked up the flashlight. The AR-15 felt light in her grip. Felt good against her skin.

  A line from Die Hard sounded in her head:

  Now I have a machine gun. Ho ho ho!

  Chapter
77

  Darger clicked off her light. Crept forward in the dark, staying low.

  It felt better to embrace the darkness. To join it instead of fighting it. She kept the flashlight at the ready, and she used it periodically to get a look around, but she didn’t want it tipping her off from a distance. Stealth was everything in this place.

  She moved back in the direction of the house on Ash Ave. The quiet seemed to grow as she proceeded, its hush swelling into something bigger, something reverent, something almost religious, something that smeared icy fingers at the back of her neck, made goosebumps plump all the way down her spine.

  She traveled like that in the dark for what felt a long time. Feeling her way. Waiting for a noise or a glimpse of light up ahead. Something. Anything.

  After going around a long curve that didn’t seem familiar, she decided to try her light again, fingering the small rubber-coated button. Its click seemed louder now, something metallic and shrill stabbing at the silence, piercing that hushed awe for half a second.

  The beam of light shot through the darkness. It took a second to make sense to her squinted eyes. Everything was blurred and jumbled for a second, and then the image came clear:

  The natural rock walls stretched up around her to form the ceiling of the cave, closing in on themselves at the top where the lumpy stalactites clustered. The light glinted on the bare light bulbs as she swung it past the strand of them. She swished the light around in all directions a few times, somehow not satisfied, and then she swung it straight up toward the ceiling again. Craned her neck to look up at it.

  She had no memory of this place. Didn’t recall any section of the caves or tunnels where the ceiling had been that tall.

  But this had to be the way she’d come. Had to be.

  Didn’t it?

  Bubbles squirmed in her belly. Flitting everywhere. She imagined getting lost down here. Stuck wandering.

  She shined the light down the cave both ways, looking behind her and ahead of her. Then she shut it off and kept going. She’d trust her gut. Press on.

  The cave sloped down beneath her feet at a steeper angle now, and the air seemed to grow colder and thicker around her. The faintest tremor assailed the muscles in her shoulders and along the top of her back. She ignored it and kept moving.

  Soon that dripping sound returned. The steady tap-tap-tap of water droplets slapping at wet rock. The noise was so small at first, delicate, nearly inaudible. But it grew with each step she took until it pealed out over everything, traveled great distances, almost rolling like thunder in this quiet place.

  That was good, she thought, the familiar drip. Even if she found no comfort in thinking of the gleaming black surface of the lake somewhere ahead of her, she knew where she was now. Or thought she did, anyway. It was hard to stake all of her trust on the sound of dripping water.

  She walked for what felt like a long time. One foot reaching out in front of the other on repeat, stepping down carefully on the uneven shelf of rock. Quiet breaths passed in through her nostrils and out over her lips, easier to keep them soundless that way.

  And the sound of the dripping water changed as she advanced — the slap of the liquid hitting rock morphing into the plop of liquid hitting liquid. Each wet impact rang out a chiming tone like a struck xylophone instead of that clap against the cavern surface. Musical.

  She came around another bend, and when she turned on her light again, the lake lay before her once more. The flashlight’s glow glinted on the obsidian surface, the water as still and shiny as glass. Again, she recoiled at the sight of it, at the sight of the glistening moss hanging down in clumpy strands along one wall.

  After another moment’s hesitation, she edged into the vast chamber that contained this underwater pool. The thick air swirled around her once again, humidity brushing at her cheeks. It felt colder here, too. Open. Like she could feel the high ceiling yawning above, the cave opening itself wider here.

  Her steps shortened, each leg taking a choppy stab at the ground, toes grinding down into the rock like she needed to make sure she was still on solid ground. She wanted to be quieter now, more careful. It felt like the water was watching her, rooting for her to fall in.

  She eased down the sloped path along the water’s edge. Swung her light down toward the lowest point, at the far end of this stagnant pool.

  That was where the body lay.

  Chapter 78

  The louvered closet door had been pushed all the way open, the bifold panels pinched tightly together at the end of their track. Loshak shook his head as he peered into the cramped space beyond them.

  The body lay there, positioned with its back on the floor, both legs jutting up at a roughly 90-degree angle and resting against the wall. Pinned in place more than anything, Loshak supposed.

  This image was made all the more strange by the fact that the upper half of the body had been wrapped in what appeared to be the black plastic of garbage bags duct-taped tightly around the torso. The ratty cargo shorts look incongruous protruding from that sheening black plastic veined with the silver of the tape. The whole thing was almost comical despite the morbidity. Absurd. Like not only did this corpse not fit into the bag, it didn’t even come close.

  The blood on the shorts had gone brown. Looked like coffee or tobacco stains now. The blood smears were plentiful enough to suggest that this person, too, had met a violent end.

  “Figure this to be Cora’s boyfriend. Chase, I think she said his name was,” Ambrose said from somewhere behind Loshak.

  “That’s what I was thinking,” Loshak agreed.

  “Based on her location, it seems likely to me he would have been moved to this property. Any guesses on how this might fit in with the rest?” Ambrose said.

  The agent didn’t turn when he responded. His voice stayed even, didn’t betray the mounting frustration inside.

  “Not really. Some kind of damage control, maybe. Seems like there was a lot to cover up, so…”

  Loshak couldn’t take his eyes off the upright portion of this body left in the shape of a capital L. Those legs sticking up, leaning against the drywall.

  The skin of the calves looked pale. Milky white. Stark against the dark hair. Loshak supposed that being vertical would have drained the blood from the legs, sent it all down to settle in the lower back which probably looked dark and bruised as result.

  Another house. Another body. Christ. How many more would they find? How would they ever make sense of all the moving parts in this case?

  He shook his head again as he turned away. He couldn’t dwell on it now. He needed to get back to the basement. The second SWAT team would arrive any minute, ready to plummet into yet another hole in the ground.

  Darger and Worm were down there somewhere.

  Chapter 79

  Darger stopped. Stared into that circle of light where the dark bulk stretched out on the cavern floor.

  The prone body nestled in an indentation in the stone. Like it was cupped in a rock bowl. Face down. Back and legs curved in a semi-fetal position. It straddled the place where the larger cavern narrowed down to the mouth of the tunnel leading out of this chamber, back toward that section of cave where the moss grew thicker.

  Her eyes locked onto the torso, finding the faintly visible lines where the ribcage and abdomen connected. She watched for a twitch, a tremor, a hitch as breath sucked in, a subtle deflating as the wind vented its way out.

  Nothing. Motionless.

  A shiver climbed up the muscles in Darger’s back. Cold feelings veining through her flesh.

  From this distance, it was hard to make out details even with her miniature spotlight aiming right onto it, everything looking dark and indistinct. The angle of the face and positioning of the body, too, worked against her. Made assessing height or build impossible.

  Was it him? Or was it DeBarge? He wasn’t wearing a SWAT helmet, and she could see short, cropped hair bristling over the domed top of the skull. But that didn’t tell her much. It
looked like Worm’s hair, but she hadn’t seen DeBarge’s.

  Her mind darted through a panicked series of thoughts, mentally testing out scenarios, chaining together cause and effect explanations, crossing some out, backtracking, but none of the speculation did her any good. She wouldn’t know anything for sure until she got closer.

  She started that way, slow at first, picking out each step with care. She lifted the flashlight to her mouth and pinched it between her teeth as she moved. Wanted to have both hands on the gun now. Needed to.

  Details began to come clear on that dark bulk ahead, the downed body sharpening into focus at last. A red collar emerged atop his black t-shirt, drew a thin slash there around his neck.

  She swallowed. That was Worm’s shirt. No question about it.

  Then she saw the gun — her Glock — just beyond his outreached hand, the grip angled away from him.

  Her heart leaped in her chest. She imagined him lurching for the weapon, turning it on her.

  She stopped. Watched him for a second with the rifle aimed and ready. Her hands fidgeted against the AR-15. Felt suddenly sweaty. Clammy. Slick against the angles of the weapon.

  The stillness was immense. Somehow more total here than she’d ever experienced. Even her movements and the sound of her breathing served only to strengthen the physical presence of it. Motionless. Lifeless.

  This is a dead place.

  Still, the sprawled body did not move, did not breathe from what she could see.

  She took a deep breath and edged closer again. Those sweaty palms trembling slightly against her rifle.

  Once more, her panicked thoughts raced through chains of ideas, tried to come up with an explanation for what she was seeing. Maybe DeBarge got him and headed toward the house on Ash Avenue where the cavalry waited. That could make sense, though she didn’t like it, wouldn’t like it until she knew for sure.

  Her eyes flicked from the gun to the body as she got closer. Two marbles set in her head, swiveling back and forth and back and forth. Gaze touching the Glock and then his hand, gut clenched tight, willing both of them to stay right where they were.