Forever Odd

FIFTY-FIVE

I LIKED THE IDEA OF WITHDRAWING DATURA'S PISTOL from under my belt and firing down on Andre as he crawled toward me in the tunnel. Payback.

The only thing better would have been a shotgun, or maybe a flamethrower, like the one with which Sigourney Weaver torched the bugs in Aliens. A vat of boiling oil, bigger than the one Charles Laughton, as the hunchback, poured down on the Parisian rabble from the heights of Notre Dame would have been cool, too.

Datura and her acolytes had left me less willing than usual to turn the other cheek. They had lowered my threshold of anger and raised my tolerance for violence.

Here was a perfect illustration of why you must always choose carefully the people with whom you hang out.

Poised on a six-inch ledge, my back to the murky pool, holding with one hand to the lip of the drain, I could not have a taste of revenge without putting myself at too much risk. If I tried to fire Datura's pistol at Andre, the recoil would surely upset my precarious balance, and I would fall backward into the catch basin.

I did not know how deep the water might be, but more to the point, I didn't know what junk lay just below the surface. The way my luck had been waxing and waning lately, mostly waning, I would fall onto the broken hardwood handle of a shovel, splintered and sharp enough to put an end to Dracula, or the rusted tines of a pitchfork, or a couple of spear-point iron fence staves, or maybe a collection of Japanese samurai swords.

Unharmed by the single shot that I had gotten off, Andre would reach the top of the drain and see me impaled in the catch basin. I would discover that, brutish as he appeared to be, he possessed a jolly laugh. As I died, he would speak his first word, in Datura's voice: Loser.

So I left the gun at the small of my back and made my way around the ledge to the farther side of the room, where the highest of the exit drains lay an inch or two above my head, four feet higher than the one from which I had just extracted myself.

The dirty water cascading out of the high inflow pipes kicked up spray when it met the pool, splashing my jeans to mid thigh. But I couldn't get any filthier or hardly any more miserable.

As soon as that thought crossed my mind, I tried to reel it back because it seemed like a challenge to the universe. No doubt inside of ten minutes, I would be astonishingly filthier and immensely more miserable than I was at that moment.

I reached overhead, got a two-hand grip on the lip of the new drain, toed the wall, muscled myself up and in.

Ensconced in this new warren, I considered waiting until Andre appeared at the mouth of the tunnel that I had left, and shooting him from my elevated position. For a guy -who had been so reluctant even to handle firearms earlier this same day, I had developed an unseemly eagerness to pump my enemies full of lead.

The flaw in my plan immediately became clear to me. Andre had a gun of his own. He would be cautious about leaving that lower tunnel, and when I fired at him, he would fire back.

All of these concrete walls, more ricochets, more earsplitting noise…

I didn't have sufficient ammunition to keep him pinned down until the water rose into his drain and forced him to retreat. The best thing I could do was keep moving.

The tunnel into which I had climbed would be the last of the three outflow drains to take water. In an ordinary storm, it would probably remain dry, but not in this deluge. The level of the pool below rose visibly, minute by minute.

Happily, this new tunnel was of greater diameter than the previous one, perhaps four feet. I would not have to crawl. I could proceed at a stoop and make good time.

I didn't know where that progress would take me, but I was game for a change of scenery.

As I gathered myself off the floor and into the aforementioned stoop, a shrill twittering arose in the chamber behind me. Andre didn't strike me as a guy who would twitter, and at once I knew the source of the cries: bats.