The Cutting Edge (Lincoln Rhyme #14)(51)

Another bout of coughing, another slug of water. The regurgitation—one of her absolute least favorite activities—seemed at bay.

The important thing, she told herself, was that her knee was fine, after the slam onto the wobbly plank. She was still mobile and free—largely free—from the arthritic pain that had dogged her for so many years.

She squinted away tears from the puking, and noticed ribbons of mud on Schoal’s clothes.

“You pulled me out?”

“Me and Gibbs. The guy we were talking to.”

“He here?”

“No, he went to call his wife. See if she was okay.”

Okay? she wondered.

“I’ll have to pay you,” she said to Schoal.

The man blinked and nodded, though he’d had no idea what she was talking about.

“For the mud treatment. In a spa they can cost a hundred bucks.”

He laughed.

Sachs did too. And summoned up every ounce of willpower to keep from sobbing.

She’d told the joke not for him but to shove aside the utter horror of being held immobile in the muck, unable to breathe.

It had affected her. Badly. Being held helpless, being sucked down, down, down. She’d almost been buried alive—wet earth or dry, that made no difference. Confinement was her personal hell.

She shivered once more. Recalling a banished memory from years ago. As a girl she’d read a book that she believed was called Stranger than Fiction, about real-life occurrences that were, well, strange. One was about exhuming a coffin, for some reason, only to find fingernail scratches on the inside of the lid. She hadn’t slept for two days after that and when she did she refused to cover up with sheets or blankets.

“Hey, Detective. You okay?”

She controlled the creeping panic attack, like she’d controlled the coughing. But just.

“Yeah, sure.”

Deep breaths, she told herself.

Okay, okay.

She wanted to call Rhyme. No, she didn’t want to. She wanted to drive two hundred miles an hour even if it meant burning out the Torino’s engine. No, she wanted to go home and curl up in bed.

Frozen—hands, feet, arms, belly and neck, all held motionless in the wet, slimy grave.

She shivered. Put. It. Away.

The medical technician said, “Detective, your heart rate…”

Her finger was clipped to one of the heavy-duty machines the EMTs came armed with.

Breathe, breathe, breathe…

“Better.”

“Thanks.” She pulled the clip off, handed it to the tech. “I’m good now.”

He was examining her carefully. And he nodded.

It was then that she noticed that the Northeast Geo workers were talking among themselves, standing in clusters. Their expressions were troubled. And it wasn’t Sachs’s near-death experience that took their attention.

She recalled wondering about the supervisor’s comment that Gibbs, the worker she’d been speaking to, had called his wife to see if she was all right.

Something was going on.

She realized too that there were a dozen sirens in the distance. Ambulance sirens and police sirens.

She remembered the shaking of the ground. And she thought immediately of a terrorist attack. The Twin Towers once again.

“What happened?” Sachs whispered, the tame volume partly from concern, partly because her vocal cords weren’t up to a louder task.

A male voice, not Schoal’s or the EMT’s, said, “Believe it or not: earthquake.”

A slim man approached, pale, about forty. He was in gray slacks and white shirt and blue windbreaker, beneath the requisite orange vest. His paisley tie disappeared against his chest between the second and third buttons from the top of his shirt, probably so it didn’t get caught in machinery gears. His glasses were round.

He looked, Sachs thought, sciencey.

Which made sense because, as it turned out, he was a scientist.

Schoal introduced her to Don McEllis, an inspector with the New York State Division of Mineral Resources within the Department of Environmental Conservation. He was an engineer and a geologist and it was his job, he explained, to supervise the drilling that his organization had approved. Since the Northeast geothermal project dug shafts that were five hundred feet or deeper, the DMR regulated the work; above that depth the Division of Water oversaw the construction.

“Earthquake?”

“Yep.”

Sachs recalled some TV show, or maybe an article, about quakes in the New York area. There’d been several.

“Did it cause any damage?”

McEllis said, “At least one fire. That’s the main danger with earthquakes in first-world nations. Even if a building isn’t designed to be earthquake-proof, most of ’em’ll remain standing. But gas lines can shear. So, fires. San Francisco, nineteen oh six, the city burned, it didn’t collapse.”

“I’m standing up,” she said to the med tech.

He looked at her quizzically. “Okay.”

She’d expected him to say no.

“I am.”

“You can stand up.”

She stood. She was a little woozy but managed to rise without difficulty, though she swayed a bit—mostly from the weight of the mud embedded in her hair.

“How powerful was it?”