Dangerous Games (41 page)

47

The water was deep now. Abby wasn’t sure how much longer she could keep going. But she was nearing her destination. She’d caught the words BEVERLY GLEN on the tunnel wall at a crossing point a mile or so back. Sepulveda wasn’t far away.

The Civic sluiced through the rising current, spraying huge fans of water on both sides. The deluge from the manholes overhead was now constant, as if there were no gap between one drain cover and the next. The noise around her was thunderous and deafening. She’d never imagined that water could generate so much sheer sound.

Keeping the car on track required all her strength. The influx of rainwater from tributary pipelines threatened constantly to kick the car sideways. Her hands were white-knuckled on the steering wheel. The muscles of her forearms burned with fatigue.

Ahead, her high beams picked out a cascading trough of water from a side channel—a big channel, big enough to be the north-south trunk line that paralleled Sepulveda. She pumped her brakes, but the car didn’t slow. Her momentum and the speed of the current carried her forward. She was going to shoot right past the intersection.

She stomped down hard on the brake pedal. The car fishtailed and slammed against the tunnel wall. The engine coughed, struggled, and died. The headlights stayed on.

She cranked the ignition key, pumped the gas pedal, but the car wouldn’t start. This was the end of the line. She hoped like hell she’d stopped at the right intersection, because she sure wasn’t going any farther.

She snapped open the glove compartment and rummaged inside for the flashlight she kept there, a better one than the penlight in her purse. This was the big Maglite model powered by six D-cells. It would do almost as good a job of lighting her way as the car’s headlights.

Swiveling in her seat, she beamed the flash at the tunnel’s far wall and found the word stenciled there—SEPULVEDA. She’d guessed right.

Now she just had to find the rescue party or Madeleine—assuming any of them were in the vicinity.

Before leaving the car, she picked up the GIS reader to recheck the map. The screen glowed in the darkness. The red X marked a square junction room linking two pipelines, one of which entered the Olympic artery immediately west of the Sepulveda line. All she had to do was get into that service tunnel and make her way straight to the junction room. On the map it looked easy—a short hike. It might be a tad more difficult in practice.

She checked her purse. She had her phone, her gun, her penlight flash, and a picklock that would serve as a handcuff key if she found Madeleine. She fastened the clasp and slung the purse over her shoulder.

Time to get wet.

She crawled over to the passenger side of the car, which would put her a little closer to the porthole she intended to enter. Opening the car door was harder than she’d expected. The weight of water running past held the door shut. She thought she might have to break the window and climb out, but with effort she forced the door open just wide enough to make her exit, splashing into the knee-high current.

The force of the flow took her by surprise and almost knocked her down. She grabbed hold of the door handle and hung on until she’d steadied herself against the tide.

Then she directed the flashlight at the porthole and slogged toward it. She needed to travel only a few steps, but with each stride she had to fight to keep her balance. If she fell down, she would be picked up by the water and sent hurtling downriver.

She was out of breath, fighting to find some oxygen in the waterlogged air, when she reached the porthole.

A grinding metallic noise caught her attention. She glanced back in time to see the Civic pull away from the wall and slip past her. The car increased its speed and drifted out of sight.

“’Bye, Old Paint,” she murmured.

The Civic hadn’t owed her anything, and she would’ve had to get rid of it, anyway, but she was still sorry to see it go.

She turned back to the tunnel and scanned the interior in the Maglite’s glow. The tunnel was round and small, less than five feet in diameter. Water was flowing out at a steady clip. To climb in, she would have to boost herself up—ordinarily no problem, but with the water smacking her in the face and with the rim of the tunnel coated in slippery muck, it would pose a considerable challenge.

Worse, the tunnel itself slanted toward her at a slight incline. If the floor was as slippery as the rim, she would never be able to negotiate the passageway. Then she saw a line of handholds set in the tunnel wall on the right-hand side. Unfortunately the nearest one was out of her reach. She would have to get into the tunnel and then grab hold of it—if she could.

She clipped the flashlight to her belt, then tried several times to hoist herself up. Her fingers kept sliding off the rim. She used the heel of her hand to scrape away the worst of the scum, then finally got a grip on the rough concrete and hauled herself inside.

Instantly the rush of water attempted to repel her into the Olympic artery. She wedged a knee against the side of the tunnel and twisted sideways to seize the nearest handrail. The iron rung swiveled in her grasp, one end popping out of the wall, and for a bad moment she was sure she would be propelled into the main pipeline and swept away.

The other end of the rung held. She pulled herself along the pipe, maneuvering from handhold to handhold. Water splashed her in the face, half blinding her, some of it getting into her lungs and sinuses, making it harder to breathe.

The flashlight in her belt was still guiding her. She thought she saw the entrance to the junction room not far ahead.

A surge of current raced down the pipeline, banging her hard against the wall and nearly dislodging the Maglite. She kept one hand on the rail and grabbed hold of the flash with the other. A second wall of water smashed into her, stripping her purse from her shoulder. The strap, reinforced with wire, didn’t tear, but with both hands occupied she couldn’t snag the purse before it spun away into the foaming water. Gone.

She didn’t care about the credit cards, driver’s license, and other ID, all of which was in the now-defunct Abby Hollister name, but the gun was a serious loss. She still had the Maglite, though. That was the highest priority. She reattached it to her belt, then climbed the handholds up the rest of the slide and through a porthole into a small flooded chamber.

The junction room.

Here the water was waist-high. She braced herself against a wall, sucking in air, and beamed the flash around the room. On the opposite wall she saw a ladder of iron rungs ascending a narrow shaft.

Handcuffed to the lowest rung was Madeleine Grant.

Her eyes were the widest Abby had ever seen. They stared out from behind a net of sopping hair, eyes that were wild and helpless and terrified. A torrent of water streamed down from what must be a manhole or drainage basin at the top of the shaft, dousing her in a sizzling spray. Her wrists, shackled behind her back, were red and bleeding from her efforts to free herself. She made no sound, at least none Abby could hear. Her mouth was sealed with duct tape.

Abby waded across the room, fighting the current, and reached Madeleine. “It’s okay,” she was saying, “it’s okay, I’m here, it’s okay.”

With a sharp yank she stripped off the duct tape, and then Madeleine was screaming.

48

Tess got off the phone with Michaelson and briefed Crandall. “SWAT is on the scene. They’re coming down. Should take them about five minutes to reach us.”

Crandall looked nervous. “Water’s rising fast.”

“We’d better assist Larkin back toward the entrance. LAPD can meet us halfway. We—” She stopped. “You hear that?”

“Hear what?”

She shushed him. Over the roar of the current rose another sound, high-pitched, keening.

Screams.

“It’s Madeleine,” Tess said. “She’s down here, after all. Not far away.”

“We can’t leave Larkin.”

“
You
can’t leave Larkin. Help him to his feet and get him out of here.”

“What about you?”

“I’m going after her.”

“The goddamn tunnels are flooding, Tess.”

“I noticed. Just go.”

“LAPD may not be able to reach you.”

“Don’t worry about me. I’ll get out somehow. Go.”

She didn’t wait for an answer.

“It’s okay, it’s okay”—Abby had to shout to be heard over the pounding water and Madeleine’s screams—“calm down, I’m here, it’s okay.”

That was a lie. It was not okay. She’d lost her purse and, with it, her picklock. She had no way to unlock the handcuffs. Under other circumstances she would have shot them off. But she’d lost her damn gun, too.

At least Madeleine was buying it. Or maybe she’d just run out of strength. Either way she let her screams die away into hiccoughing sobs.

“Just get me out,” Madeleine whimpered, her thin body shaking.

“I will, don’t worry.”

Another lie. Abby had no certainty she could free Madeleine, and with the water still rising—nearly chest-high now—there was plenty of reason to worry.

Abby could climb up the shaft if she had to. But Madeleine couldn’t move, not as long as she was shackled to the lowest rung. She would be submerged soon.

Madeleine had lapsed into quiet weeping. Abby wondered if she even knew where she was anymore. She’d believed she could protect herself. She’d bought a gun and learned to use it. But she’d found there were some things she couldn’t defend against. She’d discovered bow helpless she really was. The knowledge seemed to have broken her. She’d put up a fight, though—tugging at the handcuffs until her wrists were bloody and torn….

But it wasn’t the handcuffs that were the weak point. It was the iron rung embedded in the wall.

Abby had seen how loose those rungs could be. She’d nearly ripped one free of the tunnel wall while maneuvering up the slide.

If she could detach this rung from the wall, Madeleine would be free.

The bottom rung was underwater. Abby took three quick breaths without exhaling, building up oxygen in her bloodstream, and submerged.

Her flashlight, hooked onto her belt, was still working. It was supposed to be waterproof, and it hadn’t conked out yet. Its glow cut through the murky water, revealing the bottom rung, a chunk of iron shaped like a staple, its two short ends sunk into the moss-encrusted concrete wall. The handcuff chain was threaded behind the long bar that served as a foothold.
 

She scraped away the moss to expose the rung. It was dark with rust, which could be good or bad—good if the rust had weakened the metal, bad if it meant the rung was rusted in place. She cupped her hand around the nearest end, trying to pry it free. Already she felt a growing need for air. Still, she didn’t surface. She could feel the bar weakening….

It popped free in a cloud of rust particles. She broke the surface and gulped air.

The water was higher now. Madeleine was in it up to her neck. She wasn’t crying anymore. Her drawn face looked weirdly calm.

“You should go, Abby.” Madeleine spoke softly, the words inaudible, but Abby read her lips in the flashlight’s bobbing glare. “You need to go.”

Abby leaned close and shouted to be heard. “I’m getting you out. Hang on!”

She gulped three more oxygenating breaths and resubmerged. One end of the rung was free, but the other remained in place, solidly anchored in the concrete. Unless she could increase the clearance between the bar and the wall, she couldn’t extricate the handcuff chain.

She grabbed the rung and tried to wrest it away from the wall, hoping it was sufficiently rusted to bend or fracture. No such luck. The rung was solid, not rusted through. There was no chance of separating the rung from the wall without loosening the other end.

This end was harder to reach than the first. Madeleine’s hands partly blocked it, and the slow stream of red droplets issuing from her wrists impeded visibility. Abby reached underneath the rung and got hold of the bar, grappling with it, but the damn thing wouldn’t budge.

She shifted her position, tried attacking it from a different angle. Still, it refused to loosen. Must be rusted solid, fused with the wall. If she could crack it apart…

First she needed air. She surfaced, grabbing quick, shallow breaths. Water was slopping against Madeleine’s chin, her mouth. In seconds it would reach her nostrils.

Down again, this time with a new plan. She unhooked the flashlight from her belt and turned it around so the base was extending outward. Using the flashlight as a hammer, she pounded the step iron. Shuddering jolts of pain radiated through her arm. The beam flickered and dimmed. On the fourth strike it winked out.

Darkness, opaque and solid. She’d known the flash couldn’t take that kind of punishment, but the loss of light still unnerved her.

In the dark she could only guess at the position of the rung. She kept hammering, hearing loud clangs of impact, feeling new vibrations in her elbow and shoulder.

The metal must have given way by now. But when her other hand, groping, found the step iron and tugged at it, the thing still wouldn’t move.

Light penetrated the darkness for a drawn-out moment. She saw the rung stubbornly rooted in the wall. Then a new slam of darkness like the closing of a door. Lightning stroke, she realized. It had illuminated the junction room through the grated drain lid at the top of the shaft.

She surfaced in another lightning flash. Madeleine wasn’t there. She was gone. For a wild instant Abby thought she’d broken free. Then she understood that Madeleine was now beneath the water.

Furious desperation seized her. She snatched another breath and plunged down, pawing at the step iron, the handcuffs and chain, anything she could touch, not caring what it was, wanting only to find a way to break the death grip on this woman’s wrists while there was still time.

Another lightning stroke. Glimpse of Madeleine dropping lower in the water. Eyes staring. Bubbles streaming from her parted lips.

Darkness again. Abby hammered at the rung until the flashlight slipped out of her hand and fell away into the gloom. She braced herself against the wall and put both hands on the step iron, fighting to tug it loose.