“Oh, yeah?” I didn’t know what else to say. Keep him talking, was all I could think to do. Maybe Ruth or one of the boys would hear him, and run for help… .
That is, if we weren’t too deep underground for them to hear us.
“I like caves,” Clay Larsson informed me. “This is a real nice one. Lots of different ways in. But only one way out … for you, anyway.”
I did not like the sound of that.
“Now, Mr. Larsson,” I said. “Let’s talk this over, okay? I—”
“Couldn’t have picked a better place for what I got planned if you’d tried,” Clay Larsson finished for me.
“Oh,” I said, gulping. My throat, which had been having a tendency lately, I noticed, to run a little on the dry side, felt like the Sahara. Oh, yeah, and remember how I said my heart wasn’t beating fast?
Well, it was. Fast and hard.
“Um,” I said. “Okay.” I tried to remember what I’d learned in counselor training about conflict resolution. “So what I hear you saying, Mr. Larsson, is that you are unhappy with the way I took Keely from you—”
“And kicked me in the face.”
“Right, and kicked you in the face. I hear you saying that you are somewhat dissatisfied with this turn of events—”
“You hear that correctly,” Clay Larsson assured me.
“And what
I
would like to say to you”—I tried to keep my voice pleasant, like they’d said to in counselor training, but it was hard on account of how hard I was shaking—“is that this disagreement seems to be between you and me. Shane here really had nothing to do with it. So if it’s all right with you, maybe Shane could just slip on out—”
“And run for those Fed friends of yours?” Clay Larsson’s tone was as disgusted as mine had been pleasant. “Yeah. Right. No witnesses.”
I swallowed hard. Behind me, I could feel Shane’s breath, hot and fast, on the back of my arm. He was clinging to the belt loops of my jeans, strangely silent, for him. I wouldn’t have minded a reassuring belch, but none seemed forthcoming. Under the circumstances, I regretted the crack I’d made about his hair.
Could I stall long enough to get Shane into a position so he could make it through one of those tunnels and escape? The opening I’d followed him through was way too narrow for Clay Larsson to fit into. If I could just distract him long enough …
“This isn’t,” I pointed out, “the way to go about ensuring that Mrs. Herzberg gets visitation rights, you know. I mean, a court of law would probably look askance at her sharing a household with a guy who had, um, attempted murder.”
Clay Larsson asked, “Who said anything about attempted?”
And suddenly, the light that had been in my eyes danced crazily against the ceiling as Clay Larsson lifted the flashlight, with the intention, I supposed, of bringing it down on my head.
I screamed, “Run!” to Shane, who wasted no time doing so. He popped through the narrow tunnel behind us quicker than anybody in
Alice in Wonderland
had ever plunged down a rabbit hole. One minute he was there, and the next he was gone.
It seemed to me like following him would be pretty smart… .
But first I had to deal with this heavy flashlight coming at me.
Being small has its compensations. One of them is that I’m fast. Also, I can compress myself into spaces otherwise unfit for human occupation. In this case, I ducked behind this stalactite/stalagmite combo that had made a sort of calcite pillar to one side of the hole Shane had slipped through. As a result, Clay Larsson’s flashlight connected solidly with the rock formation, instead of with my head.
There was an explosion of stone shards, and Clay Larsson said a very bad word. The calcite formation split in half, the stalactite plunging from the ceiling like an icicle off the gutter. It fell to the floor with a clatter.
As for me, well, I kept going.
Only along the way, somehow, I dropped my flashlight.
Considering what happened next, this might have been for the best. Clay, seeing the bright white beam, swung his own flashlight—with enough force for it to make a whistling noise as it sailed through the air—in the direction he thought I was standing. There was another loud clatter, this one from his heavy metal flashlight as it connected with the cavern wall.
He hadn’t been kidding about the attempted murder thing. If that had been my head, I thought, with a touch of queasiness, I’d have a handy space near my brain stem right about now to keep loose change.
“Nice trick,” Clay grunted, as he squatted down to retrieve my flashlight. “Only now you can’t see to get out of here, can you, girlie?”
Good point. On the other hand, I could see what mattered most, and that was him.
And, more to the purpose, he couldn’t see me. I figured I’d better press that advantage while I still had it.
The question was, how? I figured I had several options. I could simply stay where I was, until the inevitable moment I was once again caught in the sweeping arc of his flashlight … and now he had two flashlights, so make that two sweeping arcs.
My second option was to attempt to follow, as quickly as I could, Shane down his rabbit hole. The only problem with this plan was that any rock I happened to kick loose on my way there would give me away. Could I really outcrawl a guy that size? I didn’t think so.
My third alternative was the one I liked the least, but which seemed to be the one I was stuck with. So long as the guy had me to worry about, he wasn’t going to mess with Shane. The longer I could keep him from trying to go after the kid, the better Shane’s chances of somehow escaping.
And so it was, with great regret, that I made a sound to distract Clay, luring him toward where I hid, and away from Shane.
What I had not counted on was Clay Larsson being smart enough—and let’s face it, sober enough—to fake me out. Which was exactly what he did. I’d thrown a pebble one way, thinking he’d follow the sound, and immediately darted in the opposite direction… .
Only to find, to my great surprise, that Mr. Larsson had whipped around and, fast as a cat, blocked my path.
I threw on the brakes, of course, but it was too late.
Next thing I knew, he’d tackled me.
As I went flying through the air, narrowly missing several stalactites, I had time to reflect that really, Professor Le Blanc was right: I
had
been lazy, never learning to read music. And I swore to myself that if I got out of Wolf Cave alive, I would dedicate the rest of my life to combating musical illiteracy.
I hit the floor of the cave with considerable force, but it was Clay Larsson’s heavy body, slamming into mine, that drove all the wind from me. It also convinced me that moving again would probably be excessively painful—quite possibly even fatal, due to the massive internal injuries I was pretty sure I’d just incurred. As I lay there, dazed from the blow—which felt as if it had broken every bone in my body—I had time to wonder if they would ever find our skeletal remains, or if Shane and I would just be left to rot in Wolf Cave until the next camper, some other Paul Huck wannabe, stumbled across us.
This was a depressing thought. Because, you know, there were a lot of things I’d wanted to do that I’d never gotten a chance to. Buy my own Harley. Get a mermaid tattoo. Go to prom with Rob Wilkins (I know it’s geeky, but I don’t care: I think he’d look hot in a tux). That kind of stuff.
And now I was never going to get to.
So when Clay Larsson went, “Nightie-night, girlie,” and raised his steel flashlight high in the air, I was more or less resigned to my death. Dying, I felt, would actually be a relief, as it would make the mind-numbing pain I felt in every inch of my body go away.
But then something happened that didn’t make any sense at all. There was a thud, accompanied by a sickening, crunching noise—which I, as a veteran fistfighter, knew only too well was the sound of breaking bone—and then Clay Larsson’s heavy body came slamming into mine again… .
Only this time, it appeared to be because the man was unconscious.
Suddenly recovering my mobility, I reached for his flashlight, which had fallen harmlessly to one side of my head, and shined it in the direction from which I’d heard the thudding sound… .
And there stood Shane, holding on to one end of the stalactite that had broken off from the cave ceiling, which he had clearly just swung, baseball-bat style, at Clay Larsson’s head… .
And hit it out of the park.
Shane, looking down at Clay’s limp, still form sprawled across my legs, dropped the stalactite, then glanced toward me.
I went, “Way to go, slugger.”
Shane burst into tears.
C H A P T E R
17
“W
ell,” I said. “What was I supposed to think? I mean, after that whole don’t-call-me thing.”
Rob, sounding—as usual—half-amused and half-disgusted with me, said, “I knew what you were after, Mastriani. You wanted to get rid of me so you could ditch the Feds and go after the little guy.”
Shane—who was tucked into the bed beside mine in the Camp Wawasee infirmary, a thermometer in his mouth—made a noise that I suppose was meant to signal his objection to being called a little guy.
“Sorry,” Rob said. “I meant little dude.”
“Thank you,” Shane said sarcastically.
“No talking,” the nurse admonished him.
“And you were okay with that?” I asked Rob. “I mean, letting me ditch the Feds, and you, in order to go after Shane?”
I suppose it was kind of weird, the two of us working out our recent relationship difficulties while the camp nurse fussed over me and Shane. But what else were we supposed to talk about? My recent brush with death? The expressions Ruth, Scott, and Dave had worn when Shane and I, bruised and battered, crawled out of Wolf Cave and asked them to call the police? The look on Rob’s face when he’d roared up a minute or so later and heard what had happened in his absence?
“Of course I wasn’t okay with that.” Rob paused while the nurse butted in to take my pulse. Seemingly pleased by the steadiness of its beat, she moved away to do the same to Shane.
“But what was I supposed to do, Mastriani?” Rob went on. “The guy pulled a gun on me. Not like I thought he’d shoot me, but it was clear nobody—most specifically you—wanted me around.”
I said defensively, “That isn’t true. I always want you around.”
“Yeah, but only if I’ll go along with whatever harebrained idea you’ve come up with. And let me tell you, going into a cave in the middle of the night with a killer on the loose? Not one I’d probably go for.”
I said, “Well, it all turned out okay.”
Rob snorted. “Oh, yeah. Shane?” He turned around and looked at the chubby-cheeked boy in the bed next door. “You agree with that? You think it all turned out okay?”
Shane nodded vigorously. Then, when the nurse reached down and took the thermometer from his mouth, he said, “I think it turned out great.”
Rob snorted. “You didn’t seem to think so when you first got out of that cave.”
Well, that much was true, anyway. Shane had pretty much been in hysterics up until Special Agents Smith and Johnson arrived, along with the sheriff and his deputies, and put a still unconscious Clay Larsson under arrest. They had a hard time dragging him out of that cave, believe me, even using the wider side entrance he’d discovered.
“Yeah,” Shane admitted. “But that was before the cops got there. I was afraid he was going to wake up and come after us again.”
“After that whack you gave him?” Rob raised his eyebrows. “Never mind football, kid. You’ve got batting in your blood.”
Shane flushed with pleasure at this praise. He had nothing but admiration for Rob, having recognized him as the guy from the story I’d told that first night, the one about the murdering car.
What’s more, Rob had pretty much been the only one who’d kept his head in the wake of our crawling out of Wolf Cave. That week’s worth of counselor training hadn’t prepared Ruth, Scott, or Dave for dealing with a couple of victims of an attempted murder.
“You know, Mastriani,” Rob went on, “you have more than just an anger-management problem. You are also the stubbornest damned person I’ve ever met. Once you get an idea into your head, nothing can make you change your mind. Not your friends. Not the FBI. And certainly not me.” He added, “I used to have a dog a lot like you.”
This seemed to me to be neither flattering nor very romantic, but Shane found it hilarious. He giggled.
“What happened?” Shane wanted to know. “To the dog that was like Jess?”
“Oh,” Rob said. “He was convinced he could stop moving cars with his teeth, if he could just sink them into their tires. Eventually, he got run over.”
“I am not,” I declared, “a car-chasing dog. Okay? There is absolutely no parallel between me and a dog that’s stupid enough to—”
I broke off, realizing with indignation that Rob was chuckling to himself. He was in a much better mood now than he’d been earlier, when he hadn’t been sure I wasn’t seriously injured. He’d had a lot to say, let me tell you, on the subject of my insisting on staying at Camp Wawasee in order to find Shane, and thus endangering not only my life, but, as it had ended up, a lot of other people’s as well.
And, of course, he was right. I’d screwed up. I was willing to admit it.
But, hey, things had turned out all right in the end.
Well, for everybody but Clay Larsson.
“So,” I couldn’t help asking, “you’re not mad at me?”
All he said in reply was, “I think I’ll be able to get over it.”
But for Rob, that was like admitting—I don’t know. His undying love for me, or something. So while I lay there, waiting for the inevitable moment when the nurse was going to decide I was well enough for questioning, I perked up. Why, I thought to myself, I’m going into my junior year! Juniors at Ernie Pyle High are allowed to go to the prom. I could invite Rob, and then I’d get to see him in a tux after all … that is, if he’d go with me. It
is
kind of weird, I’ll admit, to go to prom with a guy who’s already graduated, and who knows, maybe if I ask him, he’ll refuse… .
But by the time prom rolls around, I’ll finally be seventeen, so how
can
he refuse? I mean, really? Resist me? I don’t think so.