by Meg Gardiner
She reached a doorway and ran her hand along the edge. The crying was stronger on the other side of the wall. She slipped around the corner and slid her feet along the baseboards. Saw shadows, faint moonlight from a dust-ridden window.
The crying was coming from below her.
She inched herself forward in the dark. Her foot found a broken floorboard.
Sophie was in a cellar. Jo saw that the floor was just gone. There was a hole in the room—had the girl fallen through it?
She heard footsteps in the front hallway. Pray was in the building. She stepped back against the wall, heard him pass by on the other side.
Her vision continued pulsing. It made the building seem to breathe. And a breathing thing could swallow you.
She clenched her hands. No, don't do this, Beckett. Not now.
She dropped to her knees and inched forward to the edge of the hole.
"Sophie," she whispered. "Don't say anything. I'm here."
There was a sharp break in the crying. Please, don't shout my name. Don't give me away. . . .
"Don't talk," Jo said. "You can keep crying. Don't let him know I'm here." She wiped sweat from her eyes. "I'm going to get you out."
She stared down into empty space with no idea how she was going to do that.
She focused her eyes, tried to focus her mind on the darkness below, and could see only a maw, ready to swallow her. She was not going to find a ladder. She wasn't going to levitate Sophie out of the depths. If Sopie was in a basement, that meant there were stairs. If she went down, she should be able to get back up.
She hoped.
Slowly, as silently as she could, she lay flat, scooted parallel to the hole in the floor and edged herself over. She swung her legs down into open space, then hung from her hands. She couldn't tell how far down the floor was, or whether anything was down there that she might land on.
"Sophie," she hissed, "can you see me? Just cry."
Sophie cried.
"Can I drop okay?"
Sophie cried.
Jo figured three to five feet—she hoped. This was the leap of faith. She let go.
The fall carried her down, and she hit the floor. She crumpled and rolled. Held still for a second, trying to restore silence. Her leg was screaming. Slowly she got to her feet.
"Sophie?"
She followed the sounds of crying, crouching low, hands out. She found a doorway with boards nailed over it in an X. The crying was coming from the other side. She crawled under and found herself in a stone-floored room that felt cold and smelled damp.
"Jo...."
Jo felt her way forward. She heard snuffling and saw a faint shadow. She found her. Sophie buried her head in Jo's chest, grabbed her shirt, and gulped a loud, hard sob.
Jo held on, put her mouth close to Sophie's ear, and whispered, "You're very brave. You're doing great."
In tiny jerking bursts, Sophie whispered, "I fell down a slide. I didn't mean to come in. I know a building like this is dangerous."
Yeah, Jo bet Gabe would have lectured his kid on safety. But a slide? She looked around the inky room. The light, what few tendrils there were, was coming from above her, high on the wall.
This was a coal hold. It was an old Victorian building. Sophie had fallen down the coal chute.
"I went around the building to hide, and there was all this stuff, a big board, and I wanted to stay close to the wall, and I walked on the board and it wasn't where it was supposed to be and I fell down the slide and ..."
"Bad luck. I'm not mad. Your dad won't be mad."
She felt Sophie hold on for a second longer, and exhale, shoulders softening.
"Are you okay? Are you hurt?" Jo said.
"I got cut. It really really hurts."
"Where?"
"My arm."
Jo felt Sophie's sleeve. The fabric was torn, but it had been torn when they made her costume. However, it was wet, and it hadn't been wet before. When Jo touched it, Sophie recoiled.
Feeling as gently as she could, Jo parsed out the dimensions of the cut. It was about five inches long, a ragged slice in Sophie's arm. It was bleeding profusely. It could have been sliced open by a shard of metal or a rusty nail.
She kept her breathing even. She needed to see it. She was going to have to take a chance.
The phone system was locked in a spasm, but her cell wasn't useless. She could use the display as a light. It might alert Pray to their location as well, but so would fumbling blindly around the basement. And with the light, she could see what they might use for weapons, or tools. And she could see how badly Sophie was cut.
She got the phone and lit the display.
She saw Sophie huddled on the floor in a pile of debris, covered in dust, biting her lip, looking very pale. Her eyes were liquid in the blue light of the display.
She looked at Sophie's arm and didn't like what she saw. The cut was long, deep, and dirty. Behind Sophie she saw a broken two-by-four with a bloody nail protruding from it.
Cupping her hand to control the glow from the display, she swung the phone around the room. They were in a coal cellar, all right, one that had seen a lot of construction debris come down the coal chute just like Sophie did. She shut off the light.
She pulled off her shirt, bit into the hem, and tore a strip off. As quietly as she could, she made a pressure bandage. She had no idea whether it was all Sophie needed, or just a patch on a threatening injury.
Holding still, she listened. She couldn't hear Pray, but she didn't think he had left the building. She listened harder. She heard creaking upstairs.
"Be right back."
She scooted back to the doorway, leaned over the crossed boards and into the next room. She looked up at the hole in the floor. There were only shades of black and gray, and an indistinct patch of starlight filtering through the first-floor windows.
In the other room there was also a long plank propped against one side of the hole in the ceiling. It reached to the floor above. It had been there all along—might have been used as a bridge across the hole, and been knocked down by the quake.
Maybe she could use it to climb up. She could boost Sophie ahead of her, or piggyback her. She looked again at the little girl.
"Can you make a fist?" she said.
Sophie looked at her hand. She worked to squeeze her fingers closed, and her face crumbled. She couldn't do it.
Jo needed to find another way out.
She crawled under the crossed boards and tiptoed across the room to a doorway leading to the basement hallway. The door was missing and there was debris blocking the door frame. Jo leaned out the doorway and shot a burst of light down the hall. She saw a staircase at the front of the building. She saw wood framing and insulation, ripped-out wiring, and drywall half torn down. She saw . . . oh, shit.
Above her in the hall, the ceiling was about to collapse. There was a single four-by-four support beam holding up a precarious piece of the kitchen above. She had a feeling that the glint she saw was a corner of a refrigerator.
She ducked back.
Closed her eyes, turned off the display, slunk back into the coal cellar.
From someplace above came Pray's mechanical voice. "I know you're in the basement. I suggest you tell me what I want to know now. Then maybe I won't burn down this building with you inside it."
Jo didn't answer. Sophie gasped.
"My late acquaintance Skunk, his Cadillac was an amazing vehicle. It had everything, even a wet bar. With gasoline, bottles, and rags, so he could whip up Molotov cocktails. And what do you know, here's one in my pocket."
Jo tried to swallow, but her throat refused. The darkness seemed to compress around her. The whole building seemed to be exhaling like a constrictor. The panic began to vibrate inside her. Heat, smoke, choking darkness, the building collapsing to pin her and Sophie motionless under a burning pyre—all it would take was a match.
Run. Scream, punch, climb the hell out of here, right now. Every synapse in her ner
vous system was trembling.
"Johanna," Pray said.
The sound of her name in that flat buzz nearly made her pee her pants.
She lifted Sophie by the armpits. "Come on."
They crawled out of the coal hold under the crossed boards and scurried across the next room to the door. Sophie was unsteady. At the doorway Jo lifted her over the debris into the hallway and climbed out after her.
Wood creaked at the top of the staircase. Buzz. "Johanna Beckett."
Jo tried to breathe and her chest wouldn't expand. She felt like she was encased in wet cement. The sweat on her arms was freezing cold.
Pray was blocking the stairs. The coal chute was impossible for Sophie to climb. She glanced down the hallway behind them. It was a dead end.
She knew Pray didn't intend to leave her alive. He had the rage of the maimed. He had the shame of the tortured. He had a blind lust for revenge. She had nothing to give him, no names, no information that could slake his thirst to inflict pain.
She looked up and down the hallway. She looked at the wall.
Her breath came faster. Briefly she lit the cell phone, saw the hole in the drywall. There was a space on the other side of it.
A small space. A crawl space, maybe where central-heating ducts were going to be installed. A tunnel, coffin-wide. Tears stung her eyes.
The stairs creaked. "You keep flashing me. I can flash you, permanently. It'll be very hot." Another creak. "Give me the names."
"Pray." Her voice was a whisper.
No. It was time to shoot with everything she had, everything she could conjure from the cobwebs and crumbling plaster around her. She couldn't slake his thirst for pain.
But she could incite it.
She cleared her throat and hoped her voice stayed level. "Pray. If you burn down the building you'll never find out who ordered the attack on you."
"Why?"
"Because the trail stops with me. I'm the last one who knows." She bent down to Sophie's ear. "While I'm talking, go through that hole in the drywall. Get on the other side of the wall. Get as far from it as you can."
Sophie was shaking. So was she.
"Pray, if you kill me the names go up in flames."
Trembling, Sophie scrambled through the hole in the framing and disappeared into the dark crawl space on the other side. Jo picked up a sawn-off two-by-four, about three feet long.
The stairs creaked. Jo felt pressure on her chest, and the tears broke from the corners of her eyes.
"Let us go. I'll give you the names. Just let us out," she said.
She crouched down and put her back against the half-ripped dry-wall along the wall next to the hole. The hole, a passage, so dark, the size of a sarcophagus. Oh, God. Her head throbbed. She bit back the urge to scream.
"Shall we make a deal?" Pray said.
He was coming down the stairs now. One slow step at a time. He thought he knew where they were. He'd been listening to their voices, and probably figured that they had nowhere to go.
"Yes, a deal. You back off, I'll leave the names right here," she said.
"And I'll cover my eyes and count to ten?"
Fucking joker. "Don't play games."
She heard the quaver in her voice. She pressed her back against the wall. She was going to have to move hellaciously fast, and she had to keep her head out of the way. She could live without her legs. She couldn't live without her brain.
And she had to get him close. So close that he couldn't throw the Molotov cocktail without immolating himself along with her. He didn't want to die. She had to draw him right up beside her, close enough to grab.
And she had seen what happened to Scott Southern when he tried the same thing.
"You want to know who ordered us to rob you?" she said.
His footsteps stopped. " 'Us?'"
"God. You really haven't figured it out, have you?" She laughed. She heard the edge of hysteria in her voice. "I was the one in the mask that day."
No sound. Would she hear him if he was gliding along like a rumor? Like a curse? Like—
"Prayers. You prayed. You cried and begged."
Creaking. He was coming down the stairs slowly. He couldn't see her and didn't trust her. He wasn't close enough. She had to get him close enough to breathe on.
"Did you actually think we'd let a scuzzy low-level gangster in the club? You think because David Yoshida played in your executive poker game, you were accepted?"
"You did it as a dare. You robbed me for fun."
"It was your fault. You shouldn't have resisted."
"That weedy faggot tried to kill me. And you told him to get the chain." Another step. "For what? For money to fuel your lifestyles and businesses? Your yachts and IPOs? For blackmail?"
The creaking stopped. She forced her breathing to slow. Her heart was pounding in her ears. She braced the two-by-four in one hand. She was going to get one chance, and she had to time it right. She took out the phone. She heard Pray sliding his feet along the floor, feeling his way toward her.
She listened. How close? She counted to ten, aimed her cell phone at the stairway, and lit the display.
In the dark, it was like a flashbulb. Pray manifested like a monster, black and gray and gaunt, standing right above her.
She took the two-by-four and pushed one end against the cracked support beam that was supporting the kitchen floor above. Screaming her lungs out, she shoved with everything she had left. The support beam keened. She heard it splinter. She dropped the two-by-four and crab-crawled backward through the hole in the drywall, into the dank dirt of the hole behind it.
Everything came down in a horrible crash. The support beam disintegrated. The kitchen floor collapsed. Floorboards, bricks, a chimney, and the refrigerator pounded down like a hammer on a blacksmith's anvil. Choking dust blew through the wall. It filled her world.
39
Firefly lights. Jo had an inkling the blackness was being bombarded with firefly light. It wasn't merely spots in her eyes, not this time. A man's voice, muffled, called out.
"Sophie."
The voice was distant, and cut with an edge of desperation. Jo lifted her head.
"Gabe," she said.
Her throat was dry to dust. Her legs had cramped. Her left hand was stiff from dialing 911, over and over. Her right arm was numb from holding pressure on Sophie's arm.
The little girl was curled under Jo's shoulder, asleep. Please, Lord, let her be asleep. In the tiny crawl space Jo inched her fingers across Sophie's cheek.
"It's your dad," she whispered.
Gabe shouted, closer now. "Jo, are you there?"
"Here." She rasped it. Stroked Sophie's cheek. "Sophie?"
The fireflies clarified into flashlights, and men's voices rose on the air. Footsteps charged down the stairs.
She heard an older man caution, "Wait. We haven't cleared the basement—dammit."
There was more noise. "Jo. Sophie."
Jo inched her hand through the debris field and clawed her fingers out of the crawl space.
"Mother of God. Jo."
"We're here."
Frantic digging on the other side, the debris from the ceiling collapse being scooped out brick by brick. She held on to Sophie. The girl was silent, and so cold.
Gabe and the fire crew dug through the collapsed pile of kitchen debris that was blocking the exit. Then Jo heard the drywall being physically ripped off the wall, saw hands rip through the insulation.
"Sophie."
She drew a breath. "Daddy?"
Jo looked up and saw Gabe literally pull the wall apart. He leaned in, a shadow under the harsh flashlights in the hallway. She breathed. She had never in her life felt so certain she could let go, could release everything, and have somebody else catch it all.
"Sophie needs attention," she said. "Here, take her."
Her voice was only a scratch. Gabe leaned in and reached for his daughter. She was limp in his arms when he lifted her out.
Jo r
eached up, for the light, for air, and couldn't pull herself up. The firefighters helped her out.
"Time is it?" she said.
"Midnight."
Hours with that cut untreated. In the cold basement hallway, Gabe set Sophie down next to the wall. Jo saw the ugly debris field where she'd brought down the ceiling. It smelled of gasoline.
A firefighter took her arm. "Come on. This structure's unstable."
She pointed at the debris. "There's a man under there."
Their heads swiveled and they leveled their flashlights at the pile. She saw Gabe bent over Sophie, checking the field dressing on her arm. She looked at her own hands. They were stiff with blood.
"Sophie, baby. Look at me." Gabe's voice was harsh. "Cricket, come on, honey."
The firefighters circled the kitchen debris, flashlights swinging. "Here he is," one called out. "Why's there a gasoline smell?"
Jo walked over to him. "He had a Molotov cocktail."
The firefighters glanced at her with alarm. They took a step back.
She looked at Perry Ames. He was looking back at her. The firefighters swung their flashlights over the scene.
"Broken bottle, right there, with a rag," one said.
"All right, let's get everybody out of here," said another.
Pray held Jo's eyes. She climbed onto the debris field and leaned down next to him.
"What are you doing?" a firefighter said.
She put her fingers against his neck and found his pulse. She looked at his pupils. She saw that he was lucid, tracking her, that he had a clear airway.
She said to the firefighters, "He has a preexisting laryngeal injury. He speaks with a voice synthesizer."
His eyes were spinning with pain and an almost feral anger. He formed his lips into words and spoke silently, staring at her.
The firefighters hollered up the stairs for an ambulance. They lifted debris from Pray's torso. He reeked of gasoline. Jo saw him take a deep breath. The refrigerator was across his lower legs. He was pinned, but not on the verge of death.
They lifted a splintered piece of a floorboard and he was able to move his arm.
Like daughter, like father. He had a lighter in his fist. He stared straight at her, and he began to flick it. His thumb was shaky. He couldn't get it to catch.
