Gone, Baby, Gone (Kenzie & Gennaro #4)(66)

I shoved one flashlight into my belt buckle, so that the light shone up into my face, and the other in my back pocket, stood under Angie, got both hands under her heels, and pushed up. Both flashlights together were probably heavier than she was. She shot up the rock face and I extended my arms until they were straight above my head and her heels left the palms. She turned around on top of the rock, looked down at me from her hands and knees, and extended her hand.

“Ready, my Olympian?”

I coughed into my hand. “Bitch.”

She withdrew the hand and smiled. “What was that?”

“I said I have to switch the other flashlight to my back pocket.”

“Oh.” She lowered the hand again. “Of course.”

After she’d pulled me up, we shone the lights across the top of the rock. It ran unbroken for at least twenty yards and was as smooth as a bowling ball. I lay on my stomach and stuck my head and flashlight over the edge, watching the cliff face drop straight and smooth another sixty-five feet to the water.

We were about midway up the north side of the quarry. Directly across the water was a row of cliffs and shelves, littered with graffiti and even a stray climber’s piton. The water, when under my beam, shimmered against the rock like heat waves off a summer road. It was the pale green I remembered, slightly milkier, but I knew the color was deceptive. Divers looking for a body in this water last summer had been forced to abandon their search when a high concentration of silt deposits combined with the natural lack of visibility in depths of more than one hundred and fifty feet made it impossible to see more than two to three feet in front of their faces. I brought my beam back across the water toward our side, skipped over a crumpled license plate floating in the green, a chunk of log that had been gnawed open in the center by animals until it resembled a canoe, and then the edge of something round and the color of flesh.

“Patrick,” Angie said.

“Wait a sec. Shine your light down here.” I darted my beam back to my right, back to where I’d seen the curve of flesh, found only more green water.

“Ange,” I said. “Now, for Christ’s sake.”

She lay on the rock beside me and flashed her light beside my own. Having to travel sixty-five feet down weakened the light, and the soft green of the water didn’t help much either. Our circles of light ran parallel like a pair of eyes and swayed back and forth across the water, then up and down, in tight squares.

“What did you see?”

“I don’t know. Could have been a rock….”

The coffee-brown bark of the log floated under my beam, then the license plate again, crumpled as if by thick angry hands.

Maybe it had been a rock. The white light, green water, and surrounding black could be playing tricks with my eyes. If it had been a body, we’d have found it by now. Besides, bodies don’t float. Not in the quarries.

“I got something.”

I tilted my wrist, followed Angie’s shaft of light, and the twin beams bathed the curved head and dead eyes of Amanda McCready’s doll, Pea. It floated on its back in the green water, its flower-print dress soiled and wet.

Oh, Jesus, I thought. No.

“Patrick,” Angie said, “she could be down there.”

“Wait—”

“She could be down there,” she repeated, and I heard a kicking sound as she rolled onto her back and pushed one shoe off her left heel.

“Angie. Wait. We’re supposed to—”

On the other side of the quarry, the tree line behind the cliffs exploded. Gunfire ripped through the branches, and light popped and erupted in sudden blasts of yellow and white.

“I’m pinned down! I’m pinned down!” Broussard’s voice screamed over the walkie-talkie. “Need immediate support! Repeat: Need immediate support!”

A chip of marble jumped off the cliff and into my cheek, and then suddenly the trees behind us buzzed and sheared their branches, and sparks and metallic pings popped off the rock face.

Angie and I rolled back from the edge and I grabbed my walkie-talkie. “This is Kenzie. We’re taking fire. Repeat: We are taking fire from the south side of the quarry.”

I rolled back farther into the darkness, saw my flashlight where I’d left it on the edge, still pointing its shaft of light out over the quarry. Whoever was shooting from the other side of the water was probably using the flashlight as a homing beacon.

“You hit?”

Angie shook her head. “No.”

“Be right back.”

“What?”

Another barrage of bullets hammered the rocks and trees behind us, and I held my breath, waited for a pause. When it came in a roar of silence, I scrambled through the dark and swung the back of my hand into the flashlight, sent it over the edge and dropping toward the water.

“Christ,” Angie said, as I scrambled back to her. “What do we do?”

“I don’t know. If they got LAD scopes on their rifles, we’re dead.”

The shooter opened up again. Leaves in the trees behind Angie leaped into the night and bullets spit into the trunks, snapped thin branches. The gunfire paused for a half second as the shooter realigned his aim, and then metal slapped the cliff face below us, just on the other side of the lip, hammering the rock like a hailstorm. One shift of the gun an inch or two up in the shooter’s arms, and the bullets would streak over the cliff top and into our faces.