Endangered (9781101559017) (34 page)

Another pebble pinged down beside them. A shower of red dirt fell into Perez's raven hair. “Let's go,” he said, raking out chunks with his fingers.

Stepping off the rock pile, she gasped at the chill. The water now swirled above her knees. The current threatened to sweep her feet out from under her. She had to focus on the present. Zack's fate had already been decided; now she had to look out for herself and Perez. “Wade over to the right side—it's shallower there.”

They felt their way cautiously around the edge of the room, bracing themselves against the rock wall. As they neared the stream's outlet to the next chamber, the water deepened. The roar ahead was ominous.

“How many more levels?” Perez shouted.

She turned her head toward him so he could hear. “Two. The Play Room—the next chamber—is wider, so maybe the water won't be as deep. There's a pretty big drop down to the last chamber. Then we have to get out onto the cliffside.”
Making sure that we don't plunge the last seventy feet over Village Falls,
she added mentally. She'd warn him about that when the time came.

The creek, now more a river, roared through the ten-foot-wide opening in the rock wall and dropped six feet into the next chamber. The swiftness of the water was frightening. She'd never been in a slot canyon during a flash flood, but she'd seen the wreckage left behind—debris that included the bloated, broken bodies of rabbits, lizards, even deer trapped by the rising water.

Mist from the roiling stream filled the chamber beyond, creating an otherworldly atmosphere.

“Dungeons and dragons,” Perez bellowed in her ear. “Through the porthole to the next dimension!”

Dead children didn't faze Perez. Threats of drowning or dying in a rockslide didn't even slow him down. She grabbed his jacket sleeve. “This is real, Perez. We could die in here.”

She had to make him understand. “Hold on to this wall as you step through the opening,” she shouted into his face. “There's a ledge to the right—try to end up there.”

He nodded. A drop of water fell from the tip of his nose into her eye. Blinking, she turned back toward the surging stream. She took a ragged breath, plunged a foot into the torrent, and ducked through the opening.

The water was nearly waist deep at the top of the drop. The current was tremendous. It took all her strength just to keep her feet beneath her. She wedged her boot between two rocks. A mistake. As she tried to pull herself around the rock wall, she couldn't get her foot free. Wonderful; her ankle was going to break. As momentum carried her forward, she waited for the pop of breaking bone.

Suddenly her foot slid free. Her shins banged against underwater rocks. Pain ricocheted through her body. She nearly fell to her knees. It would be suicide to go down like that. Barely managing to stay on her feet, she groped for a rough knob of rock jutting out from the wall. A lifesaving handle.

Panting from exertion, she was able to pull herself up onto the rock shelf that lay only a few inches under the water. Concentrating on keeping both feet on the ledge and both hands behind her on the wall, she sidestepped away from the opening and stopped to wait for Perez.

He faced her as he stepped through, trying to hug the wall as he swung around into the chamber. The water came up only to his thighs, but he had the disadvantage of a higher center of gravity. Arms stretched out, he searched for something to grab hold of.

Suddenly, he slipped, crash-landing on his hands and knees. The water rushed around his shoulders and chest. The torrent tipped him sideways. Sam's heart thumped like a freight train. His pack, now filling with water, would surely pull him under.

“Chase!” She stretched out a hand. At least a yard separated them. He wasn't looking at her. The muscles corded in his neck as he strained to hang on to something underwater. His lips moved. She couldn't hear his words above the roar of the falls. He was probably cursing. She certainly would be.

He reached for a rock that spiked up from the water near the wall. His fingers, white at the tips, curled around the jagged stone. The water geysered up in front of his chest, splashed into his face. His hand slipped from the rock and he fell back. His head went under.

Oh hell. She plunged one foot into the current and stretched to grab his upper arm. Her fingers didn't quite encircle the hard bicep under the slick nylon. The water surged coldly around her crotch and buttocks. She leaned back and pulled with all her might, sat down hard against the underwater ledge. She'd have a bruise the size of Seattle on the back of her thighs. Something in her pack thun-ked against rock: she prayed it was not her phone or camera, then wondered how she could possibly be worrying about equipment at a time like this.

Perez slid less than a foot in her direction, but it was enough. He got a firm grip on the rock spike and crawled back to his feet again. She let go of his arm and pulled herself erect on the ledge.

Water gushed out of his backpack and streamed down the backs of his legs. He raised a hand toward her, knuckles bloody from scraping rocks.

“Thank you, Wilderness!” he gasped.

She heaved a sigh of relief. “Welcome to the Play Room, Starchaser. I thought you were a goner there for a moment.”

“I'd never hear the end of it if I drowned in some backcountry canyon in Utah. The FBI gets gunned down by vicious criminals or we don't die at all.” He squeegeed water from his hair with dripping fingers.

She smiled weakly, the muscles in her face stiff. The cold and wet was getting to her. The temperature inside the Curtain was never more than sixty; the water was colder. Before much longer, hypothermia would claim them both. They had to keep moving; keep the blood circulating. The exit wasn't far now.

Her wristwatch, amazingly enough, was still working. It was nearly ninety minutes since they'd begun their descent, more than an hour since it had begun to rain. She took a deep breath, clutched at his arm again. “Look, Chase, I've got to tell you about the waterfall at the end. I didn't want to scare you, but after that last stunt—”

“Mommmyyy!” A thin little cry floated in the mist.

She gasped and turned her head in the direction of the sound.

“After that last stunt?” he prompted.

She turned back to him. “Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“Mommmmyyyyyy.”

“There! I just heard it again. A child calling for Mommy.”

“I don't hear anything but water.” He gently tipped up her chin with a cold finger and gazed into her eyes. “Neither do you, Summer. Remember, I've got the kid. In my pack.”

The words hit her, a hard blow to the heart. He was right. The search was over; Zack was dead. Like the echo she'd created while rappelling into the first chamber:
dead, dead, dead.

Were auditory hallucinations a symptom of hypothermia? She couldn't remember. Hypothermia muddled thinking, and hers was getting muddled fast. She had to focus. She'd gotten them into the Curtain; she had to get them out.

“Summer?” He stared at the center of the chamber. “How do we get out of here?”

The creek had completely flooded the chamber. Water lapped at the walls that rose around them in a waffled pattern up to a slash of sky at the top of the crevice. The pockmarks in the rock walls, she now realized, were erosion scars from floods like this over the centuries. The water swirled around the chamber in a sluggish spiral, a dirty whirlwind at its center.

“Good Lord. The Slide's underwater.”

He waited for her explanation, a grim set to his mouth.

“This chamber tilts downward about fifteen feet or so. The bottom is smooth; it dips abruptly toward that side.” She pointed to the far wall. “To get to the next level, you pass through a hole about four feet in diameter. Normally you can sit down in the water and glide over the smooth rock, like a water slide. Sort of an Alice in Wonderland experience, going though the rabbit hole.” She stared at the swirling gray water where the hole should have been. The corpse of a small furry animal—a rat?—was sucked into the vortex as she watched.

“Can we go back?”

She shook her head. “The drop from the Wreck Room will be impassable now.”

Perez studied the waffled rock walls. “I don't suppose we could go up.”

Sam took note of how the water-slick walls slanted inward over their heads. Impossible.

“Wilderness Westin could climb out of here, couldn't she?” Perez asked. “I've heard she's superhuman.”

She gave him an exasperated look. How could the man even think of joking now? “Don't believe everything you read.”

Lightning flashed overhead, its brilliance mirrored for a second in the pool's surface. Thunder rumbled loudly over the roar of the water.

Perez had been right when he'd described the Curtain as a gigantic beast. It had swallowed them alive, and now it was going to digest them.

PEREZ placed a hand on her shoulder. “No worries. I swim like a fish.” He gave her a reassuring smile, then pressed his lips together as something crossed his mind. “Correction,” he amended. “I do need to breathe. I swim like a dolphin.”

Then go for help, Flipper
, she wanted to say. She swallowed, then told him, “The next chamber opens up like a cathedral. There'll be plenty of air there.”

He leaned out toward the water. “Let's do it.”

“Wait!” She grabbed his sleeve. Beneath the wet cloth she could feel him shivering. “Remember the waterfall down the side of the cliff? The one I told you about this morning?” It seemed so long ago. “Just below the ruins?”

He raised an eyebrow. “Are you telling me that's the exit from the next chamber?”

“Bingo.” His eyes narrowed, making her wonder what was going on inside his head. “The waterfall comes out of a slit there, only a couple feet wide. We should be able to hang on to the rock there and climb out.”
Please, God, make it so.

“Sounds easy enough.” He faced the whirlpool again.

Did he really grasp the danger? He'd never seen the next chamber, didn't know what he was getting into. She clutched a larger handful of sleeve, pulled him toward her. “Once we're through the Slide—the hole at the bottom of this whirlpool—get to your feet, Chase. Village Falls is a seventy-foot drop. You've got to hang on to something or you'll go over it.”

He gently detached her fingers from his jacket, bent down to bring his eyes level with hers. “Summer, I hear you,” he said earnestly, still holding her hand. “Believe me when I say that I'll be doing my best. I trust you'll be doing likewise. Ready?”

“Mommmmyyyyy.”

That ghostly cry—was it louder now? Sam squinted, peering through the mist, her eyes searching the pockmarked walls for the source of the sound. She clutched at Perez again, this time grabbing the front of his jacket.

“Now what?”

Raising a shaky finger, she pointed to a pocket in the chamber wall ahead. “Chase, tell me that's a hallucination.”

Through the mist, a pair of round blue eyes peered out at them.

 

HIS hands gripped the wheel and his eyes searched the campgrounds, but Rafael Castillo's mind was on his nine-year-old daughter beside him. With her ivory skin, curly black hair, and warm caramel eyes, Rosa was going to be a knockout, just like her mother. They grew up so fast.

“Did Grandma's friend, Mr. Wilson, ever . . . touch you or the other kids?” There. He'd finally gotten the words out.

One of those strange plastic clamps gripped her hair at the crown. Didn't little girls wear ribbons anymore?

“He shook my hand once,” she told him. “He didn't really pay much attention to me or to Christy. He wanted to play with Rique and Katie. He was always hugging and kissing on them.” She thrust her chin out. “But Christy and me . . . we don't like him, anyway. His neck waggles like a turkey.”

“Christy and I,” he corrected automatically. Damn that man! And damn his mother-in-law for dragging the miserable excuse for a human being into their house. Wilson's camper and Wallace Russell had disappeared from the campground. He'd asked the local cops and Highway Patrol to keep an eye out for both vehicle and man.

The rain drumming on the windshield was mesmerizing.
Dios mío
, he was exhausted. Good thing he hadn't been sent up to the plateau: he could barely stand up. He prayed that Zack would still be found safe, but it didn't sound good—if Fischer would use his little boy to get money, what else might he do to that child?

Although all clues pointed to Fred Fischer, apparently Thompson was going to let the cougars be killed, anyway. Did his boss have any sense of justice whatsoever?

He pulled his hat on, then wearily pushed open the door of the truck. “Stay here,” he told Rosa. “I've got to collect the camping fees. Then we'll get you to your dentist appointment.”

He'd only gone a few steps when Rosa called him back. “They're calling you on the radio, Dad.” She held it out the window to him. So grown up, so Anglo now. She rarely called him Papi anymore like the other kids did.

He pressed the Talk button. “Three-eight-six.”

Leeson was at the other end. “Castillo, you lookin' for a big beige Wanderer?” He rattled off the license number.

Rafael's pulse quickened. Wallace Russell/Orrin Wilson's camper!

“It's stuck in the mud here on West Side Road. Driver says the tow truck's on the way.”

“Keep it there until I arrive. Don't let the driver know I'm coming. I'll be there in fifteen. Over.”