by Mason Cross
Finally, closer to him, he heard the sound he had been waiting for. The soft clapping noise of palms wrapping around steel rungs, and an answering tap as feet joined them on the lower rungs.
Gage stepped around the corner and through the circular mouth of the tunnel into the wider shaft. Rungs bolted to the wall led up into a narrow shaft in the tunnel ceiling. He cleared his throat and stepped forward. A small amount of light was coming in through the gaps around the hatch at the top of the shaft. Carol was about fifteen feet up the ladder, her gun tucked into the back of her belt, and both of her hands gripping the rungs. The backpack hung around her shoulders. She stopped and looked back and down to see him training the gun at the small of her back. He couldn’t see her expression, only a slight slump in her posture as she realized she had made a critical mistake.
“Nice try.”
Carol let out a sigh and started to descend.
Gage told her to stop, and to remove the gun with her left hand and drop it. She did so, and it dropped straight down and clattered to the floor. The sound of the metal on concrete echoed in the shaft. Gage picked it up and put it in his pocket. She climbed down the rest of the rungs and dropped the pack. The two of them stared at each other for a moment, both of them understanding that this was it; it was over.
“Where are Sarah and Blake?”
“Dealing with Grant. Costigane, whatever his goddamn name is.”
“Who is he, anyway?”
“A dirty cop. One of Walter’s men. A pain in the ass for all of us.”
“Walter hired you too, then,” she said. “How much is he paying you?”
Despite the pain in his shoulder, he smiled. “Not enough for me to give him these back.”
Gage picked the bag up with his left hand, keeping the gun on Carol. He realized he couldn’t leave her down here. Not alive, anyway. Climbing that ladder was going to be a big ask with a shot shoulder, and he knew better than to turn his back on this woman.
Carol sighed. “I don’t suppose we can make a deal.”
Gage stepped forward. He felt a tug of sadness as he shook his head.
He raised his gun and pointed it at the center of Carol’s forehead. Her eyes widened as she realized that this, finally, was the end of the road.
69
The key clicked home and Sarah’s cuffs sprang open. “Are you okay?” I asked. My own words sounded like they were coming from far away, after the loud gunfire in a confined space.
“Yeah,” she replied, her voice only a little shaky. “You?”
I gave myself another look over, just to make sure. “No new perforations, thank you.”
She smiled, and then her face changed in the dim light from the phone as something occurred to her. “Where’s Carol?”
Before I could answer, three more shots rang out from deeper in the tunnels. I froze. Gage had found her.
70
Gage was already squeezing the trigger when something took the breath out of his lungs.
Someone moving fast had slammed him against the side of the tunnel wall. Not someone, more than one someone. Three guys at least. No, five or six. More. He struggled, pushed two bodies back hard, and then more swarmed him.
“Take him down!”
He heard yelled curses, fingers around his hand and on his gun. He turned the gun and fired, the muzzle flash lighting up hands and eyes and teeth. He wanted to tell them to keep back, explain to them that this was no damsel in distress, and none of their damn business. But it was too late for that, because he had already killed one of them.
Still more figures joined the fray. The stench of unwashed skin and moldy clothing and cheap wine filled his nostrils. He tried to pull the trigger again and felt the gun being pulled from his grasp. Fingers clutched at his shoulder, digging into the wound and making him scream out in pain. Other hands gripped at the backpack and tugged it. He gripped it harder and harder as the blows rained down on him. It felt like being at the bottom of a football scrum. And then the world lit up again once, twice. He saw dirty faces, yellow teeth. Before he felt the pain in his abdomen, he realized his own gun had been used against him. As he felt the burning pain in his chest, he heard a rip as the canvas of the backpack gave way, and then a sound like a hundred windows breaking.
71
The acoustics of the tunnels made it impossible to get a read on how far away the gunshots were. I started down the tunnel in the direction of the noise and stopped when I saw Sarah was following me.
I opened my mouth to warn her, but she got in first.
“Let me guess: ‘too dangerous.’ Are you kidding me? Like staying put down here is safe?”
She had a point. I activated the flashlight app on my phone and lit up our immediate surroundings. I handed the phone to Sarah.
I led the way, gripping Costigane’s gun as we approached each corner. A minute or two after the gunshots, Sarah flinched as we heard a sudden, sharp clang, as though someone had dropped a heavy piece of metal. The sound came from ahead of us. We were going in the right direction. I heard approaching footsteps and a shape emerged from the darkness into the beam of our flashlight. The figure froze as he saw my gun and I saw it wasn’t Carol or Gage.
It was an old homeless man, dressed in a ripped Houston Rockets basketball jersey and a wool hat. He had a straggly beard and was cupping something in his hands.
“Don’t shoot, man. I’m a Christian.”
“I’m not going to hurt you,” I said. “Anybody back there?”
“I’m a good Christian,” he repeated. “Don’t want no trouble.” He blinked twice and took a nervous step forward, clutching his burden to his chest. I waved him on his way. With a look of intense relief, he stepped out of the flashlight beam and disappeared back into the comfort of the darkness.
A minute after that, we came upon a fork in the tunnel. The main shaft continued ahead, and a smaller, circular tunnel led off into even greater darkness. I heard more movement all around us, and wondered if all of the denizens of the tunnel were as harmless as the good Christian we had encountered.
“What do you think?” Sarah whispered.
She cast the beam of the flashlight around inside the smaller tunnel. It extended for twenty feet before curving off to the left. I stepped into the tunnel and moved along about ten feet. I was approaching the bend when I heard it.
A quiet, rasping noise. You could almost have mistaken it for someone sleeping, snoring softly.
I exchanged a glance with Sarah. She motioned for me to go ahead, not arguing about waiting this time. I saw that the tunnel extended another forty feet or so before terminating. I could see a little farther than the field of the flashlight’s beam should have allowed me to. I turned the light off and the passage around us was plunged into black again. I could still see a very faint light at the far end. A way out? I felt Sarah’s fingers grip my upper arm.
“Be careful,” she whispered, so softly that I barely heard it.
I gripped the gun and held my breath, following the curve around until it straightened out. As my eyes readjusted, I could make out the circular opening at the far end of the tunnel: a shape of slightly less-dark darkness. The raspy snoring sound was closer. I forced myself to go slow, to keep my footsteps as soft as possible on the molded concrete. I tried not to think about exactly what, or who, was ahead of me. Instead, I was thinking about reading Tom Sawyer as a kid. About Injun Joe, sealed up in the caves, found dead among the remains of the candles he had eaten. That detail about the candles had stayed with me. Maybe that was why I had never liked being underground.
I felt a chill as I saw a body lying face down ahead of me. Slight build, with long hair. As I got closer I realized it was a man. Another homeless man, by the looks of his hair and clothing. I reached the mouth of the tunnel and saw another body slumped against one wall in the murky light. I held my position, made my eyes work to discern if there was anyone else in the space at the end of the tunnel.
It was like trying to
teach my eyes how to see again, translating the vaguest sensory input into a sense of the space in front of me. It was the bottom of a shaft, about fifteen feet square. Irregularities in the far wall arranged themselves into a meaningful pattern after a few seconds: steel rungs bolted into the concrete. A ladder. The floor was clear apart from the body. I turned my gaze upwards and saw the rungs led up the shaft, which was thirty or forty feet high. It got lighter toward the top. I stepped fully into the space and saw a razor-thin square of bright light at the top of the shaft; the source of the faint illumination down here. A closed hatch, or manhole. Someone had opened and closed it recently, explaining the clang we had heard a little while after the gunshots.
Steeling myself, I turned my attention to the body on the ground. I knew I was alone now, so there was no harm in turning the flashlight on once more.
To my surprise, I felt no sense of relief when I saw that the figure on the ground was Trenton Gage. The shoulder wound he had taken earlier had bled profusely, covering the sleeve of his shirt. There were more wounds to go with it in his chest. I swept the beam around and saw the ripped tattered remains of the canvas backpack and the diamond case smashed open on the floor, and knew at once what the Christian had been carrying. I wondered where the rest had gone. I saw the gun lying by Gage’s outstretched hand.
As I knelt down to pick up the gun, Gage spoke.
“Looking ... fr your ... girlfriend?”
He was still alive, just. And having great difficulty getting the words out.
I crouched down on one knee and looked into his halfshut eyes.
“She’s not my girlfriend.”
I shifted my gaze down and examined the bullet wounds in his chest. He had lost a lot of blood. He wasn’t leaving this place.
“Not ... good ...” Gage rasped. His chest was rising and failing with what looked like an immense effort. It would flutter up and down quickly, and then stay still for moments, as though he was holding his breath.
I shook my head, agreeing with his assessment.
I glanced upwards, estimating that it would take me at least a couple of minutes to scale the ladder. Carol had a big head start.
“Where’s she going?” I wasn’t really sure why I asked.
Gage’s lips pulled into a half-smile. He winced, as though it caused him additional pain. I could see pink foam at the corners of his mouth.
“That’s ... sixty-four-thous’n ... quesshun.”
His eyes took on a look of sadness as he said that, as though he were mourning for someone else. He moved his head slightly so he could look down at the gun. I tensed, ready to kick it out of his reach, and then relaxed when I saw he was just contemplating it like an artefact from some long-ago life.
“Can’t ... complain,” he said, and then coughed weakly. “That’s ... way it ... goes.”
I heard an intake of breath from behind me and looked back to see Sarah. I had forgotten all about her. She had a hand over her mouth as she surveyed the scene.
“Is he?”
I turned back to Gage again and saw that he was. He had died in the time it took me to look back at Sarah. His eyes were still open, but the rasping noise had stopped, finally.
I was still holding on to Costigane’s gun. I tucked it into my belt. The square of illumination burned away, forty feet above us. Sarah looked down at Gage’s body, and then at me, and then up at the square of light.
I let her go first and followed when she had scaled the first half-dozen rungs. My arms were aching by the time Sarah reached the top. With a pained grunt, she managed to push the manhole cover open, letting the sunlight flood down on us.
72
We emerged at a strip of derelict land adjacent to a freeway overpass. Sarah climbed up the verge for a better view, oriented herself by the Stratosphere Tower and worked out that using surface roads, we were about a mile and a half from the place where we had entered the tunnels. By the time we made it back there, Costigane had gone. There was a bloodstain on the floor where he had lain, and intermittent drops heading back outside. No way he had scaled the fence with both hands behind his back, so he must have managed to signal someone for help. He was still a cop, of course.
We found no trace of Carol’s car, and the cell phone she had been using was switched off. I knew she would have dumped it somewhere as soon as she left the tunnels.
Sarah called her cop friend Kubler and he sent a car to pick us up. It took us to the headquarters of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department on South MLK Boulevard. Sarah hadn’t been exaggerating about him being high up in the department. He held the rank of Undersheriff, which was one below the big cheese. I became even more appreciative of what he had done for us so far, and how effectively he had kept his contributions to our search quiet.
Sarah told Kubler about what had happened in the five days since she had found Carol’s notebook. We told him almost everything: her neighbors’ connection to the Ellison heist, Walter and his men, Gage, Costigane, the diamonds. There was no point keeping much of it back. We didn’t know where Carol had gone, and by the looks of things, the Ellison diamonds had been equitably distributed among Las Vegas’s homeless population.
Kubler didn’t take as much convincing as I had expected. He made a couple of calls to some of his people, and nobody told him they were too busy right now. Costigane proved easy to find. It turned out he had managed to get out of the tunnel before collapsing with a concussion by the fence. A public-spirited passer-by called an ambulance and made sure he got to Desert Springs Hospital, where he was under sedation when his colleagues arrived to arrest him. By the time he regained consciousness, they had enough evidence from his apartment and his personal cell phone to raise some very serious questions about his conduct over the past few weeks, and his investigation of the Ellison heist. It looked like the man Carol had mentioned, the one who had planned the operation, had reached out to Costigane as the lead investigator on the case and convinced this gamekeeper to turn poacher. It was an ignominious end to a solid thirty-year career. I thought about all of the people who had been consumed by a kind of insanity when it came to the diamonds.
As for the diamonds themselves, the CSI team processing the tunnels and the bodies of Gage and the unidentified homeless man found only two of the stones from the case. There was no trace of the rest. Or of the woman who had lived at 32 West Pine Avenue under the name Rebecca Smith. When Kubler asked what we knew about her, we told him some of the names she had used, but that we couldn’t be sure if any of them were real. Sarah exchanged a meaningful glance at me as Kubler looked away.
By the time the police told Sarah it was okay to go home, it was late evening. I drove her the ten miles back to Summerlin. We passed most of the journey in silence. We had come a long way together over the past three days, but it seemed like we had wound up with more questions than we started out with. Sarah suggested we stop and get coffee at a place on the outskirts of Summerlin. I pulled into the parking lot and we went inside, took a booth and ordered.
“I bet you wish I had never sent that damn email,” Sarah said. “Seems like nothing good came of it.”
“Who can say?” I said. I had been wondering about that myself. Maybe we had saved Carol’s life a couple of times, allowed her to get away. On the other hand, maybe she wouldn’t have needed us to save her.
“Well at least I know one thing. I know Carol will be okay.” She said it like it was a grim joke. She gazed out at the parking lot. The landscape was flat, and the stars were shining brightly in the clear sky above the Spring Mountains. “I was so worried about her. Now ... part of me is mad at her, part of me is relieved. I don’t know what to feel right now.”
I didn’t have anything to add to that, so I just sipped my coffee. It was hot and strong, just what I needed. My stomach rumbled appreciatively as the liquid hit it, and I realized this was the first food or drink that had passed my lips in hours besides the water I had drunk at the police station.
Sara
h added some milk to her own coffee and gave it a little stir with the spoon, studying the whorl of milk as it spun around in the cup like a miniature galaxy. She raised her eyes to look at me. “How about you?”
“What about me?”
“Are you okay? I know you wanted to find her, make sure she was safe. I guess this wasn’t what you were expecting either.”
“Always assume trouble,” I said. “Maybe I should try listening to my own advice.”
She smiled. “Was it worth it? Finding her at last?”
I thought about it and realized that Sarah was proceeding from a false assumption. We hadn’t found her. We had tracked down a person who looked like the one Sarah knew as a neighbor, the person I had loved six years ago, and yet we had both found somebody else.
“I don’t know,” I said at last. “I think ...” I stopped and tried to form the thought into words. “I think some people you can’t find.”
She thought about that for a second, and then looked away from me, in the direction of the window in the wall dividing the restaurant from the kitchen. A few plates were awaiting an available waiter under the heat lamps.
“The steaks are good here,” she said. “You want to have dinner?”
I was grateful for the change of subject. I put the big questions of love and loss and human nature out of my mind and turned my attention toward the here and now and two of the rare things in the world that were knowable and constant: good food and good company.
“Why not?”
EPILOGUE
TWO MONTHS LATER TRONCONES, MEXICO
The woman with short blonde hair who now called herself Alexandra Loomis smiled at the receptionist as she passed through the tiled foyer of the Casa Negra hotel.
