An Echo of Death Read online

  I jammed two-by-fours between the wall and the door to construct a barrier between them and us. I heard banging on the door, but the hastily wedged two-by-fours held for the moment. If these guys took a minute, they would find another way through the warren of the penthouse and arrive at us from the opposite direction. We couldn’t stay here.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  Scott breathed deeply several times.

  “Can you run?”

  He nodded. He staggered for a few feet and then began to move with more confidence.

  We rushed to the stairs that led to the floor below where Scott had installed a private gym with a running track around the perimeter and thousands of dollars of the most up-to-date training equipment in the middle.

  We crossed quickly, dodging between machines and barbells. At the exit door, I looked back to see the killers just emerging at the far edge of the running track. Quickly through the door, we began descending flights of stairs. The rear entrance existed specifically because of fire-code regulations.

  We passed numerous fire doors leading to the floors we hurtled past. We didn’t dare try opening one of these emergency doors leading to the inhabited floors we flew by. Who knew whether we’d run into someone willing to help, and we could spend precious seconds banging on doors trying to find someone who was home. Besides, getting into somebody’s apartment and holding up until whoever this was bashed down that door didn’t seem to make much sense. Or we might wait who-knows-how-long for an elevator and could be trapped in the hallway. So far we had no evidence of enemies coming up from below us.

  We flew pell-mell down. Around the fifteenth floor, Scott stumbled.

  I grabbed him. “You okay?”

  “Yeah. What if they’re waiting for us at the bottom?”

  “I don’t know. Go!”

  In the brief pause, I heard the pounding footsteps above us.

  It didn’t help that we were both still in our dress shoes. The soles made the going more slippery and kept me from hitting top speed.

  Gasping great gulps of air into my seared lungs and willing my tired legs to keep going, we ran on, finally arriving at the ground floor with pursuit still far behind us but coming on quick. We both worked out, and Scott, a professional athlete, was in great shape; so even with the wrong type of shoes, we probably gained in the rush down.

  At the foyer level we were now on, the stairs ended at the rear of a room that once had been a lounge for guests and tenants to meet. It hadn’t been used as such since the seventies, when the new marble-and-glass front of the building had replaced an art deco eyesore or treasure, depending on whose side of the fight over the change you’d been on. I could see old couches, table lamps, and oil paintings by deservedly unknown artists. Huge canvas cloths covered nearly half of the relics of a lost golden age. With all this debris, the thirty-by-forty-foot space was tough to maneuver through. Near the front were a row of buckets, carpet cleaners, mops, brooms, and cardboard boxes labeled: INDUSTRIAL STRENGTH SEE INSTRUCTIONS ON CONTAINER.

  An exit to our immediate left led I knew not where. A door twenty or thirty feet straight ahead of us led to the foyer. Through its square of glass, I could see the front desk. Howard wasn’t present, but I saw the top half of a bald man with a blond mustache speaking into a portable phone. He clicked it shut and motioned toward the door I was looking through.

  “They’re coming this way,” I said. “No choice.” I led us to the door on the left.

  As I pulled on the handle, the door to the foyer banged open.

  “Get them!” the bald man yelled.

  I yanked on the door. It was stuck or locked. I glanced over my shoulder. Two guys had joined Baldy. One was pulling a gun. Scott leaned down, and we both yanked on the handle. It burst open.

  It was a straight flight down maybe twenty stairs with one bulb overhead illuminating cinder blocks painted white. Down we rushed. I wrenched open the door at the bottom. Scott leaped through and I darted after him.

  I wondered why they didn’t shoot. They wouldn’t get the best shot, but all the way down the endless flights from the penthouse, that threat had flashed through my mind.

  We arrived at the underground parking garage. The lighted security area loomed fifty feet on the other side of the car-filled underground barn. Two hefty looking guys in gray suits glared at the surrounding cars from within the glow of the neon of the glassed-in enclosure. They looked very much like the guys upstairs and definitely not like the blue-jean-clad casual guys who parked the cars and were our supposed security. These two guys held their hands inside their vests, maybe pretending they were Napoleon, or maybe ready to reach for their guns. They were between us and my pickup truck or Scott’s Porsche; but, even more important, between us and the ramp leading out.

  A car started up on our left and moved toward us. I decided not to wait around to see if it was someone barreling down on us trying to run us over or simply somebody on their way out.

  “We can’t get past them,” Scott said. “Now what?”

  I pointed to the ramp leading to the bottom level. “That way,” I whispered.

  “Can we get out that way?” Scott whispered back.

  “I hope so,” I said. “The only other way is blocked.”

  For some reason, I desperately wanted to say, “Walk this way,” and a brief vision of old comedies flashed in my mind. You think of the goofiest stuff at scary times.

  Forcing my tired legs to move, I started jogging toward the car-sized opening that led down. The door we just exited banged open behind us.

  “Where are they?” someone shouted.

  I glanced behind and saw the guys at the security desk running over to join the newly emerged guys from the stairs.

  As we rushed around the corner leading to the next level, I heard a set of brakes squeal, a male voice swore, and someone shouted, “There they are!”

  We flew down the ramp and entered another flat parking expanse jammed with cars. This area was darker because there was no illumination from a security area. Neon lights gave off their impersonal emanations at regular intervals. No people or cars moved at this level.

  I raked my eyes over the gray walls searching for an opening. On the opposite wall away from the ramp leading up, an exit sign glowed redly. No time for indecision. I had no idea where this new doorway led, but we couldn’t go back.

  We hunched behind cars and ran bent over. They would see the one exit sign, too, but they couldn’t be sure which way we were taking to get there. Maybe they’d split up to hunt for us among the cars. I’d have preferred a vast suburban mall parking lot for them to spread out and search.

  My muscles were long since past aching from the race down the stairs, but I urged them to further efforts. I’d seen the results of these guys’ ministrations on Glen Proctor, and I didn’t imagine gaping red holes in various parts of my anatomy would improve my appearance.

  Scott trotted ahead of me. I could hear his rasping breaths. Ten feet away from the new opening, I saw Scott glance back. “At the end of the ramp,” he gasped.

  I didn’t bother to look back. I leaped forward. I shoved on the safety bar on the door. We emerged onto a five-foot-by-five-foot landing with stairs leading down to the left, with a single bulb enmeshed in a wire screen providing illumination. The air smelled dank and unused. Down the stairs we rushed to another landing which contained two gray doors perpendicular to each other, one in front of us and one on our left. Both had large gothic lettering saying “Do Not Enter.”

  Scott banged open the one in front. Over his shoulder, I saw it was crammed with buckets, mops, brooms, pails, and cleansers. I pulled open the door on the left.

  We paced slowly for a few seconds down the narrow center aisle of a room lit by widely spaced bare bulbs encased as the one on the landing had been. To our immediate right was a freight elevator whose gaping maw was enclosed by a row of wooden picket teeth, joined in the middle. The cage wasn’t on this level. We could see into a mass o
f cables that seemed to end in the depths about ten feet below where we were.

  Beyond this on the right and to our left the room spread out, but I couldn’t see how far the walls extended because cardboard boxes stacked nearly to the ceiling barred any vision in those directions. The boxes had labels such as “light bulbs,” “plumbing fixtures.”

  The path stretched for another hundred feet and ended in a row of boxes. No indentation led off to right or left. We hurried toward the far end hoping for some way out. I began to lose hope as we passed between the looming walls of brown.

  As we hurried down the path, we swiveled our heads in every direction trying desperately to spot any escape. It was useless to try hiding in a box. They knew we’d come down here. The prospect of searching even this many boxes wouldn’t deter them, not with the kind of determination this crowd seemed more than likely to have.

  No opening appeared among the rows of boxes.

  “There!” Scott pointed.

  I looked. The row of lights ran above the central corridor, but to our left near the far end about fifty feet away, a feeble light glowed in the murky dimness. Because of the boxes, we couldn’t see what it illuminated, but there had to be a reason for its being back there, and we were rapidly running out of choices. We hurried forward. We reached the end of the box-induced hallway. No path led to the light. The door behind us crashed open.

  We scrambled up a staircase of boxes. At the top it was impossible to stand up, so we alternately crab-walked or crawled toward the light. Several times my back or butt touched the clammy ceiling, which I could feel through my shirt and pants. The boxes must have been full because, as we scrambled forward, while we heard faint crunches and made occasional dents in the packaging, neither hand nor foot penetrated the outside. Perhaps we were moving fast enough so as not to put sufficient pressure for one of us to fall through. This cardboard flooring held until we scrambled down the far side, half sliding, then falling. My foot sank into one of the boxes, and I began to lose my balance. I growled in frustration. Scott reached back and hauled me up. We jumped past the last set of boxes to the floor.

  The feeble glow we had seen illuminated a little square of space fronted by two doors. In bold red letters, one said “High-Voltage Electricity, Keep Out.” I yanked it open. A million wires glared back at me.

  Cardboard cartons began being shoved around behind us. Looking back, I saw the head and gun of one of our pursuers emerge as he slid toward us over the barrier of boxes. He leaned on a carton beneath him with his left hand and with the other raised his gun and pointed it at us.

  “Hold it, you two!” he bellowed.

  The carton he was resting his weight on gave way. His left arm disappeared up to the elbow. The arm with the gun shot up toward the ceiling, and the weapon fired.

  The noise and smell surrounded us, but I had no time for that. The other door said “No Admittance.” Scott had already ignored the sign and was through the opening. I followed, closing the door behind me.

  2

  Pitch-black. Midnight on the ocean. Negative on the hand in front of your face, too. I felt Scott’s palm against my chest. “Hold it! I at least saw that we’ve got a flight of stairs here. Be careful,” Scott said.

  I inched forward, found the step, and started down. Scott was on my right. With my left hand, I felt the cool brick wall. We had carefully clambered down twenty-five stairs when the door above swung open. The glow wasn’t very bright, and we had been deprived of light for only a short while so our eyes didn’t wince at the new light. It let us see enough to dash a few more steps to the bottom of what was a narrow set of stairs. An opening at the bottom turned abruptly to the left, and we found one more set of stairs.

  In the shadowy light, with the sound of footsteps pounding behind us, we fled down again. At the bottom were two passageways, both opening into total blackness. I grabbed the sleeve of his shirt and pulled him toward the opening on the left.

  No shouts or gunshots followed. I listened as we hurried along. I heard no sounds of pursuit. Perhaps they hadn’t been close enough to see which way we took, and now they would be as blind as we were.

  As the dim glow behind us rapidly dwindled, I slowed slightly to breathe more easily. I didn’t want to trip over something as the light failed.

  “I don’t know how much more of this I can take,” Scott said. His voice reverberated in the passage.

  “Hush,” I said and needed to say no more. He’d heard the echo of his own voice as well as I.

  We paced rapidly until the light behind us was the size of a pinprick. I held out a hand for Scott to stop. I slumped against the wall on my left and listened to the two of us breathe. Not another sound came from anywhere.

  “Are they following us?” Scott asked.

  I blinked back to where the last vestige of a gleam had been. I couldn’t tell whether the pinprick of illumination swayed as a light would if carried by someone, or whether it was simply a light at the beginning of the tunnel.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I let myself pant for another minute, ears straining for any sound of movement behind us.

  “Where are we?” Scott asked.

  “Don’t know.”

  I heard his breathing begin to become more even.

  Despite the rapidity of our progress and the fast-fading light, I managed to take some note of our temporary place of existence. The floor and walls of the passage we were in were cement. The floor was damp with frequent puddles of water that we plowed through. Each side curved to meet about a foot or so above our heads. Several sizes of pipe ran along the roof. We could walk or run side by side. Each outside elbow would scrape against a wall. The exact center of the tunnel gave us plenty of vertical room. Because we were moving side by side, our heads nearly scraped the sides of the excavation. The air felt cold and damp, but there was no wind.

  “Awful dark,” Scott said.

  “Unless they’ve got flashlights, it works against them and for us, I think.”

  “Maybe they took the other turn,” Scott said. “I don’t know if they saw which way we went.”

  “If we’re lucky, they didn’t.”

  My breathing wasn’t back to normal yet, but I whispered, “I don’t want to stop here any longer. I think we should keep going forward. This has got to lead somewhere.”

  “I hope!” Scott said.

  We pushed forward, and in a moment all vestige of possible light was gone. We tried to keep our footfalls silent, but I was still in my dress shoes and they clicked with what was probably a minor tap, but which after a time, I thought was firecracker loudness. Scott had dressed far more casually than I for the fund-raiser, which meant he’d worn chinos, a pale yellow shirt, blue blazer, and brown dress shoes. He still wore everything except the blazer.

  Our steps became more hesitant as we went along. So far we hadn’t run into any obstructions, but I had no idea whether sudden openings would gape in the floor, or whether we’d run into a flight of stairs. In a short while, we were slowly groping forward, with feet and fingers extended ahead and to the side of us. Careful as our movements were, we still managed occasionally to dislodge what I guessed to be small stones or pieces of wood. They echoed slightly, but we could hardly help running into them. So far no creepy critters or crawly insects had decided to make their presence known. The place smelled as if someone hadn’t emptied their cat-litter box in years.

  At one point, I tried counting the number of paces we took, but gave it up after a couple of hundred. Certainly we were traveling some distance. The tunnel seemed to go on straight. If we needed to go back, it wouldn’t matter how far we walked. We could just turn around.

  I couldn’t see the face on my watch, so I don’t know how long it was after I stopped counting when Scott said, “I’m scared.”

  “Me, too,” I said.

  We felt our way forward for a few more steps. Then Scott said, “I’m sorry about bringing Glen into the house. You were right. He was into something awf
ul. It’s my fault we’re in this.”

  I wanted to say, “I told you so, and you should have listened,” but this was not the time. When we were safe again, I could indulge in my frustrations. I muttered a noncommittal “S’okay.”

  If we decided to compare our insights or lack thereof about mutual acquaintances, although none of mine had gone this spectacularly wrong, Scott could remind me about our problem with the dwarf, the psychic, and the buffalo five years ago, when we encountered the above-mentioned at the height of the worst monsoon storm in Bombay in thirty years. All I had to do that day was agree to stay in the hotel room until afternoon. My insistence on going out had lead to a classic disaster. Memory could never blur the sheer terror of the events that followed; but, in my opinion, it hadn’t been nearly as life threatening as this. At the present moment, I didn’t want to stop and ask Scott’s opinion of that escapade.

  We fumbled onward for a time. Occasionally his right and my left arms, shoulders, or knees, bumped together. After one such movement, I felt Scott’s hand slip into mine. I drew immense comfort from that closeness. I on the right, using my right arm, he on the left using his left, groped our way along the wall. Hand in hand we shuffled forward.

  Our progress felt glacial, but although nothing sounded behind us, my tear began to grow. I’d never had trouble with claustrophobia before, but being this far underground, with fear behind us, and uncertainty ahead, I was upset big-time. Without Scott’s presence, I don’t know how I would have managed.

  Scott said, “I think there’s a light ahead.”

  We stopped. “You’re right,” I muttered.

  Scott asked the obvious question. “What could it be?”

  “I don’t know, but we’d better be careful until we’re sure.”

  “They couldn’t get ahead of us?” Scott asked.

  “If they’ve got lights, they could, and if the opening we didn’t take eventually led this way.”

  It took several moments for the pinprick of light ahead to swell to the size of a baseball, but its glow barely penetrated to our position. It began to look like a miniature train-engine light bobbing in the distance. I halted for a moment; then my good sense chased away the irrational thought that it was a train. There were no rails under our feet, and any sound of thundering wheels would have echoed throughout the tunnel.