Buried Prey

Chip led the way down the bank to the entrance. There were nine of them, sliding down the dirt track, seven cops including Lucas and Sloan, plus Chip and one more sewer guy, everybody with flashlights, Chip and the other sewer guy carrying heavy battery-powered work lights. They spent a moment pulling back the metal grate, then squeezed through the enlarged opening.

Lucas was the third man through, into the dark, damp air, smelling of wet sand, dead fish, old concrete, and an undertone of sewage.

“Been somebody here,” one of the leading cops said, shining his light toward the ceiling. There were bench-like shelves at the top of the concrete walls on either side of the entrance. A plastic garbage bag, fat with weight—clothing, apparently—sat on each of the walls. The floor was littered with paper, some old, some new: wrappers from packages of cookies, crackers, candy bars, along with plastic wrappers for fast-food meat, wieners, sausages, adding their own rank, rotten-grease odor to the underground mélange. A few steps inside, the concrete ended, and the walls became cave-like, cut through natural rock.

They edged inside, slowly, climbed a cave-in, found themselves in a wider section with a rusted metal superstructure overhead, its use obscured by the rust and damage. They played their lights over it, and something flapped past them, and they all ducked, and the second sewer guy, whose name was Russ, said, “We got bats.”

“Scared the shit out of me,” one of the cops said.

Somebody else said, “You fire a gun in here, it’s gonna ricochet all over the place.”

“So don’t be shootin’ any guns,” somebody else said.

“We oughta be armed with tennis rackets,” said a fourth voice.

Chip said, “Bats can have rabies—let them go, don’t mess with them.”

Sloan, who was a step behind Lucas, said, “This is a good afternoon. I’m chasing a bum through a sewer filled with rabid bats. I can’t wait to tell my wife.”

“See, this isn’t a sewer—” Russ began.

Sloan said, “It was a figure of speech. Let’s keep going, or get out of here.”

Up ahead, a dark hole.

They left two cops to guard the exit, while the rest moved on until Chip said, “Look.”

Lucas looked where he was shining his light. A thin stream of water cut across the floor, coming from who-knows-where, bordered on both sides by a half-inch of fine sand. A single set of tracks were pressed into the damp sand, heading deeper into the dark.

They went past a short shaft going straight up, like an upsidedown well. An intersecting shaft went off to the right, perhaps fifteen feet up. “If he had a rope, he could get up there and nobody could get at him,” somebody said.

But Chip said, “Yeah, but . . . see?” He pointed to a partial track in the sand, six feet past the intersection, going deeper into the tunnel. “And I’ve never seen a rope or anything going up there.”

They moved on, then somebody spotted a hole in a wall to the left. Lucas climbed a short slope to the hole, pushed his light in: there was a low-ceiling space, a kind of pot full of water. He could hear more running water, but couldn’t see anything inside the room except a pile of metal trash and some rotting wooden beams.

He hopped down and said, “Nothing.”

They found another hole, and this one carried a human stench. Sloan looked and he said, “Somebody’s using it as a can. Hang their ass off the wall, and let go.”

“More tracks,” somebody called, from up ahead.

SCRAPE WAS FAR AHEAD of them, carrying a cheap aluminum flashlight with a weak bulb: but he knew where he was going. He got in the main room, under the power plant, tiptoed across the wet concrete, careful not to leave footprints, boosted himself up on a damp concrete revetment, then onto a rusting steel beam that sat on top of it. Once on top, he slid down into a narrow space on the other side, and lay on top of the concrete revetment. He barely had room to move his shoulders and hips, but he was practically invisible. They wouldn’t find him unless they climbed a ladder that led up toward the power plant, and then shined a light down. . . .

If they did that, he was cooked.

As he lay there, in the dark, listening to the cops coming down the tunnel, he began to feel his muscles clenching up and down his body, in fear and anger. If they caught him, they’d put him in a hospital, and the hospital people would do experiments on him, as they had in the past. Experiments . . .

He’d known when the cops released him that they’d be back. Scrape was crazy—and knew it, and regretted it, and suffered for it, nothing to be done about it—but not stupid. Once they had a taste of him, he believed, they’d be back if they didn’t find the little girls with somebody else. He was just too good a target, and in his experience, if cops couldn’t solve a bad crime, they began to look for somebody they could hang it on.