“Fuck all,” he hissed toward the body. “God, please ... Ty...,” he whispered as he kept turning, story after story, anguish encroaching as no inspiration hit until he couldn’t hold it off anymore. It gripped him hard, and he curled in on himself, hot tears slipping loose and dotting the pages. He could hardly think through the pain and loss of blood.
Defeated, he looked up at Henninger’s body. Blood was matted in his hair. Ty’s blood? More stained his hands, along with traces of what looked like grit and dust from where he had laid on the concrete of the parking deck.
He must have taken Ty down with chloroform—because Zane knew Ty would have hurt him badly if he had tried some other method—hidden him away, then hit himself in the head just hard enough to make blood flow. All he had to do was lay on the ground pretending to be unconscious until someone found him.
The tears gave way to an ill resignation as Zane’s eyes continued down the killer’s body, looking for some hint. Henninger had been on his knees and fallen backward, his heels pushing to one side as he had died.
It took a long moment for Zane to register what he was seeing. The bottoms of Henninger’s dress shoes were covered in gritty, gray mud. It was ground into the treads and covered the insteps. Zane pulled himself closer, almost out of energy. Reaching out slowly, Zane drew shaking fingers down the sole, and they came away covered with thick, damp mud. He stared at the dead body. They were in the city, and it had been dry all week. Where would he find fresh mud?
"They even kept the original tunnels below the building intact…."
“Jesus,” Zane hissed, grabbing for the book, ignoring the gritty muck coming off his hand onto the pages. He found what he was looking for: The Cask of Amontillado. “Jesus!”
Lurching to his feet, Zane collapsed again with a harsh cry, catching himself on the couch’s arm with his good hand. He was too weak, and he hurt so badly he could barely tolerate it. He focused on the one thing he could. Ty.
Ty would be going crazy, stuck somewhere small and in the dark, like in the story.
He needed something to pump him up until he could get to Ty.
Stumbling into the bedroom, he made it to the nightstand and swiped up the bottle Ty had given him. Pulling the top off, he saw the caplets marked OC inside and shook them all out onto the bed. Ten pills. Without a thought to the dosage, he scooped up a handful, tossed them in his mouth, and started chewing. The dry, sharp chemical taste filled his senses when he swallowed, and he pushed himself out to the front room again and found his gun and the bloody knife. He grabbed Sears’ gun for good measure and drew a deep breath as he felt the first wave of drug-induced energy. He wove dangerously as he headed to the door, the drugs already taking effect since he’d bypassed the time release by chewing them up. By the time he got to the elevator, the high was rushing through him.
“I’m coming, Ty,” he murmured to the closing elevator doors. “I’m coming.”
TY struggled and called out for help until his voice was hoarse and his abused wrists were dripping blood down his arms. The chains held fast, though, and nothing but the flicker of the candle noticed his distress.
Soon he found himself hyperventilating, and he forced himself to breathe slowly in a desperate attempt to calm. He would surely die if he didn’t remain calm. He closed his eyes, but realized immediately that the darkness felt heavier without the light of the candle. He opened them and stared longingly at the bricks. They were so close in the small space, but still unreachable.
Tim Henninger—and Ty was still trying to get his mind around how horribly he had misjudged the kid—had left everything incriminating inside Ty’s tomb with him. His plastic protective gear, his tools, the bucket of drying mortar, and probably the cruelest of all, the keys to Ty’s shackles, just out of reach on the ground.
Ty looked back at the candle with a growing sense of calm. He was going to die here. In the dark. He swallowed past the tightening of his throat and watched the candle. The flame had weakened alarmingly, and now its circle of light didn’t even reach Ty’s feet. As Ty watched it, the flame went blue, stuttering in the growing darkness.
Ty took in a deep breath of the stale, damp air.
His head shot up at the sound of a voice echoing faintly on the other side of the wall. Was he hallucinating? He could have sworn that he’d heard a shout somewhere in the distance. He stared at the brick wall in front of him, shaking convulsively with cold and encroaching shock. At his feet, the tiny flame spit and flared violently, then sputtered one last time and died.
He tried to call out for help, but his voice was gone.
The desire to simply close his eyes and let sleep take him over was almost overwhelming. Ty cocked his head as he heard the sound again.
“Zane,” he whispered to the hallucination, the sound barely a word as his head spun and he gasped for the nearly nonexistent air.
ZANE emerged into the darkened basement, lit only by a couple of bare, hanging light bulbs. He was shaking again, this time with manic energy instead of pain and exhaustion. The drugs had taken hold quickly and adrenaline and chemicals shot through his body at warp speed. He walked past the large furnace, looking around quickly, gun in his hand. He had no idea if Henninger had an accomplice or not. He came upon a long, ill-lit hallway that had doorways covered by chain-link fence on each side. Storage units.
“Ty!” Zane yelled, his voice echoing through the large space as he moved down the hallway. The echo was the only thing that answered his calls.
Finally, he spotted a darker hole in the wall at the end of the hallway, one that wasn’t lit at all. Tunnels, Henninger had said.
Zane couldn’t see into the rough-hewn passageway, and he quickly started patting his jacket pockets and found his lighter. Thank God he’d talked Ty out of making him stop smoking. Annoyed with the restraining sling, he pulled his arm out of it and dropped it, then held up the flaming lighter and looked down at the dirt. It was gray, just like Henninger’s shoes.
“Ty!” he yelled again, heading into the catacombs, bypassing the insets filled merely with old crates and construction debris.
Walking in long strides, hurt arm raised to shelter the flame, Zane almost kept going before he noticed that he had passed a space of wall where an inset should have been. Backtracking, his heart plummeted as he saw a square of clearly new brick in the wall.
“Ty….Ty!” he yelled, running to the inset and touching the wall. The mortar was wet. He pulled out his knife and started prying at a brick with one hand and pushed it in. He heard it thump to the ground inside the little alcove, accompanied by the rattle of plastic. Then he dislodged another, and another.