Cully admired Faye and Stacy a great deal. He figured that they each had forty or fifty good years left to them, while he had ten or twenty, tops. And that was if he was lucky. It seemed like a good trade to buy eighty or a hundred years for them with ten or twenty of his own. The characters he had played on-screen liked to think of themselves as excellent horse traders, so he was at peace leaving the earth as part of a good trade.
Cully reached down with his feet and used the rubber soles of his new sneakers to grip the bricks on the bottom of the pipe. Standing up tall, so tall that his head bumped the pipe above him, he did his best imitation of a human shield and waited for Kaayla to fire.
* * *
Ahua stood at the foot of the stairs, looking into the room to his left. The dust on the floor was still deep and undisturbed, and this is how he knew that he was looking for Stacy in the wrong place. In all likelihood, Faye was with her. And so was Kaayla, the woman Faye had accused of sending Alonso Smith to set off the bomb that killed him. If they were underground, it was in a part of the abandoned network of rooms that was accessed by another stairway. Ahua had no idea where to begin looking for it.
He was facing the futility of looking for an entrance that had been hidden for eighty years while the clock ticked on two women’s lives, when he heard a scream. The sound seemed to be coming from the painted room, so he wheeled around to step through that door. Pushing his way through the agents accompanying him, he arrived just in time to see Joe Wolf Mantooth’s bottom half disappear as the big man threw himself into the storm sewer.
Ahua was very proud to see all of his agents preparing to follow Mantooth into the water that was slopping over the bottom rim of the open door, but it made no sense for all of them to go in. Too many bodies in such a narrow pipe was a recipe for a logjam that could drown them all.
“Stand down. Nobody’s going in but me. That pipe’s not wide enough for all of us to go in.” He pointed a finger at the nearest agent. “You. Call an ambulance to meet us at the spot where this pipe dumps into the river. Agent Goldsby can tell you where it is.”
He pointed to another agent. “And you. Alert the Agent in Charge.”
As he launched himself into the water, he said to the last one, Agent Bigbee. “Find a vehicle and get yourselves to that outfall. I’m going to need backup when I get there.” He could see that Bigbee wanted to ignore the order and go after a screaming woman who might well be his friend Faye, but Bigbee was an excellent agent. He stood down and watched Ahua dive through the opening.
Then Ahua heard a gunshot and he heard Cully Mantooth’s voice bellow Faye’s name and he knew that, somehow, he’d succeeded in following her cryptic clues to the spot where he was meant to be.
* * *
Cully felt an impact when the gun fired a second time. It wasn’t painful, but it knocked him off his feet. Maybe getting shot wasn’t so bad, after all.
Then he realized that it was no bullet that hit him. It was Faye, who could apparently swim with the speed and force of a barracuda. She slung an arm under his armpits and began pulling him downstream with the same lifeguard’s technique that he’d used on her.
He was floating on his back, so he saw everything that happened upstream, dimly lit as it was by the light coming through the open metal door that he’d just passed through. Kaayla was still on her feet, steadying herself to take another shot at him, and Grace was tugging at her arms, begging her not to shoot. Kaayla pushed her away like a big sister keeping a little sister from messing with her dollhouse. Grace wasn’t going to be able to stop Kaayla from shooting to kill.
* * *
Joe could hear Stacy screaming downstream. In the darkness, it was hard to tell which way was up, but he focused on maintaining an awareness of the water’s surface. It was rising, and the time was coming when there might be only a bubble of air at the top of the pipe where he could breathe. And where he could take Stacy for air, if she turned out to be unable to do it for herself and if he could find her. Or any of the other people he heard struggling in the rushing water. After that, the time might come when there was no air at all.
Joe stretched himself to his full-length, stuck out his hand, and was rewarded by the feel of sodden leather. He grabbed the shoe and gently pulled Stacy Wong toward him so that he could help her keep her face above the surface while there was still air to breathe.
* * *
Everyone in the sewer—Stacy, Joe, Ahua, Faye, Cully, Kaayla, Grace—had been knocked off their feet by the water or by each other, and they were now helpless to slow their rate of travel. The rainfall outside had increased suddenly when the thunderstorm struck, sending a slug of water that rapidly raised the water level in the storm sewer pipe, moving them along even faster.
Stacy passed the point where two lateral lines entered the pipe first. They brought still more water into the main line, and they brought it with such force that Stacy was buffeted by turbulence. Joe, who was still clinging to her shoe, lost his grip as the water tumbled him until all sense of direction was gone.
One by one, the others passed that point and found themselves banging into the pipe’s brick walls and into each other. The remaining air at the top of the pipe was only inches deep. Each time their faces surfaced, water splashed into their mouths and noses. All their flailing to find the surface did nothing to help.
Life and death hung on the question of finding air in utter darkness while tumbling through moving water. Periodic crashes into the pipe’s rough brick walls brought blood and bruises, but nothing to breathe.
* * *
Faye took a punishing crash into the pipe wall. She had lost Cully somehow. Maybe he was ahead of her and maybe he was behind her. When the water went turbulent and they passed into a pipe that was six feet across, bodies had tumbled through the water in every direction.
She had learned the hard way that she needed to protect her skull, so she was curled into a ball with her arms and hands cradling her head and face. Soon, she would need to uncurl and find some air to breathe.
Two hands grabbed her and dragged her down, exactly like a drowning person in a swimming pool would take down anyone in the vicinity without meaning them a scintilla of harm. Only here, in this place, the concept of “taking down” someone was heavily dependent on whether either the attacker or defender had any notion of where “up” was.
The person attacking Faye was trying to walk right up her body like a ladder, digging her feet into Faye’s groin, abdomen, chest, face. Faye turned the tables by reaching up and grabbing at her attacker’s face and throat. She felt a metal name tag on the person’s lapel and long straight hair wrapped itself around her hand, so she knew she was dealing with Kaayla. What she didn’t know was whether Kaayla’s attack was a premeditated attempt to drown her or whether the woman was out of her mind with panic. Either of these things would make Faye equally dead.
She struck out at Kaayla with both hands and feet, but the woman hung on. In desperation, Faye held her at arm’s length, flailing with her feet in hopes of finding the pipe’s walls and figuring out which way was up. Her foot struck bricks with bruising force, but the pain felt good. Faye struck the bricks hard and used the force to ram Kaayla into the opposite wall. In the moment of impact, her assailant went limp.
Still longing for air, Faye used the bricks to push off again, this time heading downstream.
* * *
By the time Faye slammed me into the sewer wall, I had long since dropped the handgun. It had become a burden that weighed me down and left me only one hand to use to save myself. And to save Grace. And maybe Lucia. I have no way to know whether she flung herself into the water after us.
The gun was drowning me and I had to let it go. This might mean that Faye and Stacy will live to testify against me. It might mean that I am convicted of killing my father, which is something that I in fact did. And perhaps I deserve it. Evil must be
obliterated. I refuse to call myself evil for ridding the world of Lonnie, but the things I did to Stacy and Faye…the things I planned to do them…those things are evil.
Right now, though, the question of evil in my soul does not matter.
The thing that matters is finding Grace. And maybe Lucia. Even finding air to breathe means nothing if I can’t find air for them.
In truth, my love for my sisters is all that has ever mattered. Except, of course, for obliterating Lonnie.
* * *
Cully saw daylight ahead, and this meant that he might just make it. He had no idea what had happened to Faye. Somehow, it was now Stacy’s head that he was holding out of the water. He thought, but was not sure, that she was still alive, so she too might make it. He didn’t know about the others. At some point, they had become nothing more than bodies bashing him with arms, legs, fists, feet, flailing in desperation.
Maybe some of them were still alive. He hoped so.
As this hope began to grow, Cully felt rather than saw a long, strong body leap out of the darkness. The gray light had grown just strong enough for him to recognize the man’s face and strong shoulders as Joe’s.
If Faye swam like a barracuda, her husband was a killer whale. Joe wrapped his arms around Cully and Stacy, gently guiding them toward the light. For the first time in real life, Cully understood the joy in a besieged frontiersman’s heart when the cavalry appeared over the crest of a hill, poised to sweep down and save the day. Sometimes, they even saved people like him.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
The gushing water at the storm sewer outfall wasn’t quite enough to carry Joe all the way to the Oklahoma River. He crashed and rolled along the cement ditch and into the riprap at the water’s edge, releasing Cully and Stacy from his fierce grip. The water was still carrying him riverward. He was accumulating scrapes and bruises over his entire body but he didn’t care because he could breathe.
There wasn’t much left of the rainstorm that had nearly drowned them all, only scattered raindrops and a steel-gray cloud moving away from them toward the eastern horizon, so there were no raindrops in the air he was sucking into his lungs. The air was fetid with the odors of everything that the storm had washed off Oklahoma City streets, but it tasted glorious.
Cully lay in the ditch a few feet away. Joe crawled over to make sure he was breathing. He was.
Where was Faye?
He found her in the river, bloody-faced but alive. She was treading water and dodging floating logs and trash, cradling an unconscious Stacy’s head above the surface.
Kaayla was an arm’s length from Faye. She was near-drowned but unwilling to save herself by letting go of Grace’s limp body. Time and again, she struggled to the surface, bringing Grace with her.
“Breathe! You have to breathe. Sister. Please breathe.” Again and again, she pleaded with her sister to breathe and begged anyone who could hear her to look for Lucia, but Grace was beyond hearing and Lucia was nowhere to be seen.
Ahua was staggering along the grassy shore, waving his arms and calling out to an ambulance that was just coming to a stop, sirens blaring. Two agents ran to his side and one of them caught him before he dropped.
“Arrest the woman in the water” was all he could say, but there were three living women in the water and one dead. Ahua couldn’t answer their questions, so he’d been reduced to pointing a hand of judgment at Kaayla.
Another car skidded to a stop behind the ambulance. Liu was out of it in the same instant that she slammed it into park. She ran past Ahua, full-throttle into the neck-deep water.
Joe thought that Liu was going to grab Stacy Wong hard enough to hurt her, until she stopped stock-still. Her whole body relaxed at the sight of Stacy, relaxed, unharmed, and not dead.
“May I?” she asked Faye.
Faye released Stacy and stepped away as Agent Liu wrapped both arms around her, gentle but firm, and pulled her toward shore. She eased Stacy up onto the riverbank, lifted her over the riprap and onto the grassy shore. Then she laid her head on the groggy woman’s shoulder and wept.
“I’m so happy you’re alive, Stacy,” she said between great shuddering sobs.
When Joe finally got to Faye, he wrapped her in both arms, holding her just as tight as Cathy Liu held Stacy Wong.
She was weeping, which was not unexpected. Joe had been through the same nightmare as Faye and he knew exactly how bad it had been. He asked why she was crying anyway.
“Grace. Oh, Grace. She never had a chance.”
Joe didn’t know exactly what she meant. Maybe she meant that Grace had never had a chance to avoid drowning and that may have been true, because Kaayla was wailing, “Why did she do it? I told her to stay. She can’t swim. Neither of them ever learned to swim.”
But Joe thought that Faye meant something more. She knew more about Grace’s life than he did, because she took it seriously when the FBI told her not to tell a soul, but Joe saw how it was. Being a hotel maid was one way not to ever have a chance in the world. Having a sister who was a stone cold killer was another.
When Faye said “Poor Grace” again, he kissed the top of her head and held her even tighter.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Cully didn’t want to be alone. Faye understood that.
When he’d invited Joe and Faye to come up to his penthouse with him, she knew that the only kind thing to do was to say yes. They had showered and come right up. Now they were sprawled across one of the penthouse’s expensive leather couches. Part of her would rather be resting in their own quiet room, but the part of her who had never had a father was warmed at the thought that Cully was treating them like family.
Jakob was snoring in the easy chair beside Cully’s. Every once in a while, he woke up, punched his friend on the arm as if to say, “Glad you’re alive, buddy,” then drowsed off again. Faye was seriously short on relatives, so she thought maybe she’d make Jakob an honorary uncle.
“I’m going to call a bellhop and get your stuff moved up here,” Cully said to Faye and Joe. “There’s a bedroom at the end of the hall, next to the sauna.”
Faye thought that being next to a sauna sounded seriously awesome. She felt wet through and through, and she wanted to bake herself until her bones finally dried out.
Cully reached for the phone to call a bellhop but it rang before he picked it up.
“Well, that’s service,” Faye murmured.
When he hung up the phone, he said, “That was Ahua. He’s coming up and says that he’s bringing a man who’s been looking for me all day.”
“It’s been a weird day,” Joe said. “You sure it’s safe to let a stranger come up here?”
“Ahua’s coming with him. He’s a fed, so it’s not like we’ll be defenseless. Also, he says he’s pretty sure I’m going to want to talk to this guy.”
Within minutes, there was a knock at the door and Cully answered it.
Ahua entered. Faye recognized Ben McGilveray at his side, but she could tell that Cully had no idea who he was.
Ben introduced himself to Cully by saying, “I brought you a gift. It’s from an old friend.”
He handed Cully a fat, yellowed envelope. Ahua reached in his pocket and handed him a slimmer one that was damp, as if maybe it had spent time in the pocket of a man trying not to drown.
“Ben gave this to Carson, who came straight to me with it, because he thought something was fishy about the way he said to give it to Cully and only Cully. It can be dangerous to be a celebrity. Unfortunately, I pretty much went straight from Carson to our adventure in the storm sewer and the letter is still wet.”
Faye could see that Cully was intrigued, because he settled back in his chair next to Jakob and motioned for Ben to sit in the empty chair on his other side. He gestured at another chair for Ahua, but the agent stayed standing, watching Ben’s every move.
Cully slid a stack of old photos out of the dry envelope. As soon as he saw the top photo, he dropped it and the other envelope and all of the photos, except for the one he held in his hand. Tears ran down his face and dripped off his jaws, but they didn’t wet the photo because he held it so carefully away from harm.
Faye was burning with curiosity, but a loud knock sounded on the door before Cully could say anything.
“Cully Mantooth! Are you in there? And do you have my son and my new daughter in there with you? Open up!”
Cully was on his feet and across the room in a single stride. He threw open the door and threw one arm around Joe’s father Sly, but just one arm. The other one was holding the old photo at a safe distance. Amande and Michael rushed past them to throw their arms around Faye.
“It’s been a long time,” Sly said. “I really missed you, man.”
“Missed you, too, Little Guy. Now would you look at what this young man just brought me?” he said, pointing at the fifty-something-year-old Ben and showing the photo to Sly.
Sly had to look twice. “Good God. That’s Angela. Only she’s got some meat on her bones and she’s smiling. She’s just beautiful.”
Cully looked at Ben. “This picture was taken a long time ago. Do you know what happened to her?”
Ben stooped to pick up the photos and the wet envelope that Cully had dropped. He sorted through them silently and chose another one to show Cully.
“This one’s Angela, too,” the older man said, looking at the photo as if he would kiss it if he weren’t afraid he might damage it. “But it’s before she picked up that extra weight. And—” He brought the picture closer to his eyes. “Is she pregnant?”
Catacombs Page 27
