Mortal Pursuit

45

Activating his flash, Tyler followed Gage into the cellar.

The concrete staircase, though cracked and chipped, was intact. Ragged stumps were all that was left of the banister. The wall bristled with bundled spikes of wood splinters, sharp as porcupine quills-bits of the railing driven into the hairline fissures between the cinder blocks by the sheer force of the blast.

Below lay hell in miniature.

Flashlight beams played over a waste of rubble, the funneled light fanning through a sooty mist. Spot fires glimmered in dark corners. At the rear of the cellar, water sheeted down from a broken plumbing pipe.

Cain and Lilith combed the wreckage, shadow figures amid the smoke.

Ghosts, Tyler thought with an irrational chill. Demons.

“Hey, boss,” he called, feeling a sudden need for noise in this silenced place. “Next time you kill somebody, could you make a more serious effort”

Cain glanced up at him. His eyes glinted through slits in the ski mask. “They did go out with a bang, didn’t they”

Tyler nodded. “Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am.”

Eyes burning, he reached the bottom of the stairs. Lilith’s extinguisher hissed, the hose a lashing snake, as she smothered a smoldering pile of debris.

With his flash Tyler found the blast crater in the center of the room. At the deepest point, a great slab of the concrete foundation had been blown free, exposing raw bedrock like an open wound.

So much for percussion. As for fragmentation …

He read that story in the shrapnel glittering around him, the thousand shards of cutlery strewn on the floor and studding the wreckage.

The destruction was total. Those two charming ladies must have been killed a hundred times over.

So where were they

Panning the cellar with his flash, he saw no splash of maroon, no body parts, not even a forlorn shoe or a scrap of the cop’s uniform.

He beamed his flashlight at the crater again. Maybe the two of them had been standing right over the bomb when it blew. Maybe they’d been atomized-nothing left but dust.

Was that possible He didn’t think so.

The beam wavered, searching the floor, and found a second hole, this one at the lip of the blast crater.

But this hole hadn’t been made by an explosion.

It was round, perfectly round.

“Cain.”

The way Tyler said it, low and tense, made the older man turn instantly in his direction.

Cain’s gaze followed the beam of Tyler’s flash. He saw the hole, made a noise. A slow shuddering exhalation like a death rattle.

“Christ …”

Then he was crossing the room, circling the crater, peering into the smaller hole. Tyler joined him.

It was a well. A dry well, the drain uncovered, a sinkhole dropping into subterranean darkness.

“They got away.” Cain stripped off his mask, heedless of smoke and dust. Fury purpled his face. “Robinson and the kid-they got away.”