Code 61 (49 page)

THIRTY-THREE

Thursday, October 12, 2000
05:46

Inside, there were three separate rooms, of a sort. Tall, maybe six and a half foot, walls with openings in the middle. Cubicles, right out of an office supply catalogue. These were a dark, uneven red. I stepped closer to the nearest one. It looked to me as though it had been sloppily spray-painted. I heard Byng come through behind me.

The rooms seemed to be raised on old wooden cargo pallets.

It was much quieter in this area, the music being muted by the intervening carpets.

I heard a click to my left, and looked toward the sound. Borman and Sally were just rounding their end of the breakfront. They apparently had heard it, too, as all four of us froze for a moment.

There was a hollow metallic sound, barely audible above the music. Like somebody striking two large pots together.

“Please don't,” said a quavering, contralto voice. “I didn't tell anybody, please don't, please.” It wasn't a scream, or a yell for help. It was in an eerily normal, almost conversational tone of a woman speaking to someone in the same room. It was Huck.

I heard a deeper, male voice that seemed to reply, but couldn't quite make out the words. But he laughed. Nothing demonic or anything of the sort. That would have been easier to take, I think. This laugh was kind of quiet, polite almost. He was amused.

We all started to move at once. It was impossible to tell which of the three rooms the sound had come from, so each pair took the one closest. We had him trapped, I was sure.

Byng and I won. I stepped into the room on my right, and saw a workbench with wide, sheepskin straps that were restraining a supine Huck, and a man clad only in running shorts standing near her.

I pointed my gun at his back, and said, “Freeze.”

Things just sort of stopped at that point. In that instant, I took in the fact that there was a transparent length of surgical tubing leading from the side of Huck's neck into a stainless steel basin on the floor; that there was a forceps clamping the tubing off; that his hand was on the forceps; that the tubing was secured to her neck with a tape wrap.

He froze, exactly what I'd told him to do. Looking at his back, I could see his shoulder muscles twitching. I remember thinking that he had great definition.

I moved to my left, toward Huck's head, keeping my gun pointed at him. I felt Byng come in behind me.

“Cover him from there, Byng,” I said. “He moves, shoot him.”

“Yep,” said Byng, sounding very matter-of-fact.

“Your bullets,” said Dan Peale, with an excellent upper class English accent, “cannot harm me.”

There was something very disconcerting about the way he said that. Calm, informative, with absolutely no doubt in his mind. He didn't turn.

“Step slowly back away from her,” I said. “Don't make any sudden moves. We don't want to put that theory to the test, do we? … ”

He was obedient. As he began to step back, slowly, he very deliberately squeezed the forceps, and then released it. Blood flowed instantly from Huck's neck, down the tube, and into the basin. Before I could stop him, he continued his motion by raising his left hand, and almost casually flipping the forceps over the back wall of the cubicle. Then he completed his step back from her.

Huck started to make gasping sounds, and strained at her straps. Dan Peale made a series of hissing noises, sucking air deep into his lungs, and forcing it out. Ventilating. He turned his head, farther than would have seemed normal, and I saw his face for the first time.

Dan Peale had a longish face, with pronounced musculature at the jaws. Dark hair and dark brown eyes. No facial hair except the eyebrows. And fangs, nearly an inch long, made more prominent by a wide, predatory grin. Even knowing that they were prostheses, they were startling. There was a smear of blood on his lips and chin.

I'd never seen him before in my life, but I felt I knew him.

“Put your hands behind your back,” I said. “Now!” I had to get to that tube….

“Bleeding…. ” came from Huck.

Dan Peale grimaced and hissed again.

I reached down without taking my eyes from Peale, and got my left hand on the tube. I fumbled and felt the warm liquid running over my hand. Now the tube was slick, and I couldn't get a grip on it without looking down. I glanced at it for an instant, got a purchase, and squeezed it as hard as I could between my thumb and forefinger. It greatly reduced the flow, if not cutting it off completely.

“Cuff him,” I said to Byng.

Dan Peale had a fine sense of timing. Byng, out of his view, had glanced down at his holster, as he put his gun away so he'd have both hands free for using the cuffs. I had relaxed just a tad, having succeeded in nearly stopping the blood pouring from the tube in Huck's neck. And Dan Peale just lifted his knees, dropped way down, straightened abruptly, leaped up onto Huck's table, and jumped over the back wall of the cubicle. One, smooth motion, and he was gone.

I got off one shot, and thought I might have hit him.

I dimly heard a “Hey!” from outside. Borman. I had been nearly deafened by the sound of the shot.

Byng, taking the best action he could, jumped back through the door, and took off around the back of the little room. I saw Sally and Borman going by, and I hollered “Sally!”

I looked down at Huck. “We'll get you out now,” I said.

She was gulping shuddering breaths, trying to hold still. Her eyes were wide, and I don't think she understood a word I said.

Sally came in behind me. “Holy shit,” she said. It was like I was hearing underwater, with the addition of a monotonous squeal. That shot had been really loud.

“You want to kink this tube, and squeeze it for a minute? Don't let go, and don't try to remove the needle from her neck.”

“Right.” She reached out, hesitated. “Gloves?”

“Later. Unless you got a cut on your hand. I'm going to try to find a clamp or something, and we can start getting her out of here.”

“Right.”

As Sally took over the job of closing off the tube, I released the restraints from Huck's wrists and ankles. She was wearing faded green sweatpants, and her feet were bare. They looked very pale and cold.

She had on a thin, dark blue T-shirt. She was shivering, a combination of the cold air and blood loss. The only thing I could find was a large roll of paper toweling. I unrolled strips about as long as she was, and placed several layers over her.

“Do you feel strong enough to walk?” I asked her.

“Nuh, nuh, no.”

Great. Well, I wouldn't have, either. I had no idea how much blood she'd lost, but I suspected it had been quite a bit. The basin at my feet was just about full.

“We'll get him,” I said. “You're going to be fine.”

“Yeah,” she said, weakly, and her head bumped softly back against the bench. “Sure.”

Borman stuck his head in the cubicle. “Where'd he go?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Did you see a forceps laying on the ground outside here?”

He looked down.

“Out that way,” I said, pointing to where he'd come from.

“No.” He was already starting off toward the other cubicles.

I left Huck and Sally, and worked my way into the yard wide area behind the cubicle where Dan Peale had pitched the forceps. I shone my flashlight on the ground, and sure enough, there they were. My relief was a palpable thing. I holstered my gun, and bent down to pick them up. As I did, my light moved, I became aware of a fine trickle of sand sparkling its way down onto the floor about six feet ahead of me, alongside the bare wall of the chamber. I picked up the forceps, bracing myself for a blow to my back. Nothing. I straightened up, and held the forceps up, over the cubicle wall.

“Sally, here you go,” I said.

A moment later, I felt her take the forceps from me. The primary mission was accomplished.

I drew my gun, and took one more step away from the falling sand. Then I turned, abruptly, and shined my flashlight straight up into the darkness above the level of the fluorescent lights.

There he was. About twenty feet up, in the clear area between the pillar and the drop-cloth ceiling support, clinging to God knows what with his hands and feet.

“Hey, Dan!” I hollered.

He looked down. Those damned fangs glistened, pressing into his lower lip. He was gripping tightly with both hands, with one foot parallel to the pillar's face and braced against a small bump in the surface. The other foot was nearly perpendicular, with the toes wedged into a crack. I could see a dark spot on his lower left side, toward his back. There was a trickle of blood running down from there into his shorts. It looked like I'd hit him.

“You need any help gettin' down?” I yelled, unable to resist.

Two things happened at once. Byng and Borman came flying around the far end of the cubicles, looked up, and Byng said, “Damn!”

At the same time, Dan Peale just pushed himself away from the wall. For the life of me, I thought he hung up there, suspended in space, for an instant. I think in that moment, we were both wondering if he could really fly. Then he plummeted twenty feet to the sandy floor. I guess he was prepared to fly, because he did absolutely nothing to break his fall, or roll with it. He hit feet first, arms outstretched to his sides, with a jarring thump that seemed to send a visible ripple upward from his ankles to his neck. His legs went all weird between the ankle and hip, and he collapsed onto the floor of the mine.

I sent Borman up the elevator to get help. Byng and I tended to Dan Peale. Along with a gunshot wound in his back, he had a compound fracture of his lower right leg, an obviously broken or very badly sprained left ankle, and I feared some internal injuries as well. He was silent, never uttering a word of pain or complaint. Meth combined with ecstasy, they tell me, will do that sometimes. I met his gaze a couple of times as we put toweling over his fracture. He never blinked. I really think he would have tried to escape by crawling, if we hadn't both been there.

We kept clear of his teeth.

Borman returned, with a paramedic, who was being followed by two more. He told me that Lamar and the others had finally gotten in the main mine entrance, and should be up our way very soon. They could easily drive an ambulance up to us, as soon as they figured out which chamber we were in.

I left them, and went back to Huck. She was asleep, and Sally was just standing there, staring at her and adjusting a trauma blanket to try to keep the younger woman warm.

“She's wiped out,” she said.

“Yeah. Who wouldn't be? The last ten or fifteen years have been long ones for her.”

“Peale alive?”

“Yeah,” I said, “but pretty well busted up.”

“Did you hit him with that shot?”

“No doubt.”

“Attaboy,” she said.

There was a commotion in the outer chamber, followed by Lamar and our reinforcements arriving. They'd brought an ambulance with them.

“Sorry we're late,” said Lamar, after hearing my verbal report. He looked around the area where Huck was lying, and saw the tubing and the basin and the straps and everything.

“Is this where Edie …?” He couldn't ffnish.

“Yeah. I believe so.”

“Aw, hell,” he said with his sore throat. “It's cold here. Damn. Edie hated the cold.” He turned away, and went back through the hanging carpet.

“I've never seen him like that before,” said Sally.

“Yeah.”

She looked around. “This really is a lonely place.”