dark.
Pure dark.
No light.
None.
And she froze like a limpet on a rock.
“I can’t see anything,” she whispered.
“Just follow the ladder, babe. Trust me, it only goes down.”
That’s what she was afraid of.
“Maybe we should just hang right here.”
“Maybe not. The cops know about this place, but they never follow anybody past the first level or two. If we can get that far before they catch us, the only problem we’ll have is how to get back out.”
Oh, God.
“I can’t move.” And she couldn’t. She was stuck.
“Suck it up, babe.”
She heard the metal plate being dragged off the hole above, and the thinnest sliver of light shone down.
“Move,” he ordered.
And she moved—fast.
Oh, God. Oh, God. Every step she took down felt crazy, like there had to be a better way.
Above them, she heard the cops coming in, and she moved even faster down the ladder to only God knew where. At one point, she felt a cool breeze and she guessed they were at the first level. The next breeze she felt was warm, and that had to be level 2, and then came the big nothing, a sense of vastness with no breeze at all, and above them, only the tiniest pinprick of light and the receding sound of the cops leaving.
Then the light went out.
“Hey, good job,” J.T. said.
No, she didn’t think so. She thought this was insane. They were three floors down under the city in pitch darkness.
“How long do we have to stay down here?” she asked.
“As long as it takes.”
“For what? Hell to freeze over?”
He laughed, which really didn’t make her feel better.
And then a miracle, a small beam of light shined down from above. He had a flashlight.
“Can you see the floor?”
“Yes.” Thank God. She could see the floor.
“We’ll head north for about a quarter mile and then come up under St. Benedict’s.”
North. For a quarter of a mile. In this black tunnel. She knew the big church, but she hadn’t known about this underground labyrinth—and, quite frankly, she’d have been happier not knowing about it.
“Oh, geezus, what was that?” She’d heard something, some skittery thing in the dark.
“Rats, most likely.”
Oh, crap.
“How did you find this place?” She made it to the floor and stepped off the ladder onto concrete. “Nobody knows about this place.”
He laughed at that, with good reason, she guessed.
“It’s old-school, babe. We were all just screwing around one night, the same way kids always find stuff, especially trouble. Hold on to the back of my pants, and let’s see if we can get out of here before the rats eat us.”
“Very funny.” But it wasn’t, and she was scared, and she held on to the back of his pants for what seemed like hours, before he found the rusted-out old ladder he was looking for and they started back up.
She was exhausted by the time they came up in the basement of St. Benedict’s, which was another labyrinth of rooms full of junk and broken pews and church documents, boxes of them. Much to her dismay, they didn’t head out onto the street. They only crossed the basement to get to another door, which led to another hole in the floor.
“This next stretch is just between you and me, okay?”
“Secret passageway?” A part of her thought he was kidding, but the expression on his face was dead serious.
“Yes or no?” he asked, and she gave him her honest answer.
“Yes.”
And down they went again, with their path winding through old passageways with tumbledown walls and tunnels with the guts of the city running through them, and she knew her promise had been true. Even if she wanted to tell someone about this place, she could never have found her way through it without him.
After a long while, they came through a narrow corridor to a place where the walls didn’t quite meet. He squeezed through, and so did she, and then they were in a real building again. They passed through one room and then another, before coming to an elevator—and she had to wonder where in the world in Denver would they turn out to be.
Home, it turned out. His home. They got off on the eleventh floor, and when he opened the door leading into his apartment, she knew exactly where they were: 738 Steele Street. A hundred feet of floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over the eastern half of the city all the way to the plains. The floors were all hardwood. The furniture was minimal, most of it grouped around