Page 117 of Pieces of Her (Andrea Oliver 1)

They heard the metal bang against the house, then clatter into the debris.

“This way.” Andrew took the lead, crouching as he ran across the room. They were down the stairs, on the main floor, when they heard cars pull up in the street outside, which was fine, because leaving by the front door had never been the plan.

Andrew felt along the wall with his fingers. He found another secret button, accessed another secret panel, and revealed the steps to the basement.

This was why Nick had chosen the two-story shed after months of searching. He’d told the group that they needed a safe place to keep Alexandra Maplecroft, but they also needed a safe route of escape. There were very few basements in the Mission District, at least as far as the city knew. The water table was too high, the sand too swampy. The shallow basement under the Victorian was one of the city’s many remnants from the original Armory. Soldiers had hidden in the dungeons when the Mission was under siege. Nick knew about the passages from his homeless days. There was a tunnel connecting the house to a warehouse one street over.

Nick clicked the panel closed behind them. Jane felt a chill as the temperature dropped. At the bottom of the stairs, Andrew was trying to push away the bookcase that covered the tunnel entrance.

Nick had to help him. The bookcase slid across the concrete. Jane saw scrapes across the floor and prayed like hell the FBI would not see them until it was too late.

Paula slapped a flashlight into Jane’s hand and pushed her into the tunnel. Nick helped Andrew tug on the rope that pulled the bookcase back into its spot. Quarter was supposed to pull the rope. He was the carpenter of the group, the one who had turned all of Nick’s sketches into actual working designs.

And now he was dead.

Jane switched on the flashlight before the bookcase sent them into complete darkness. Her job was to lead them through the tunnel. Nick had made her run through dozens of times, sometimes with a working flashlight, sometimes without. Jane had not been down here in three months, but she still remembered all the irregular rocks that could snag against a shoe or cause a bone-breaking fall.

Like the one Alexandra Maplecroft had experienced.

“Stop dawdling,” Paula hissed, shoving Jane hard in the back. “Move.”

Jane tripped over a stone she knew was there. None of the practice runs mattered. Adrenaline could not be faked. The deeper they went underground, the more claustrophobic she felt. The dome of light was too narrow. The darkness was overpowering. She felt a scream bubbling into her throat. Water from Mission Creek seeped in from every crevice, splashed up under their shoes. The tunnel was forty-eight feet long. Jane put her hand on the wall to steady herself. Her heart was pushing into her throat. She felt the need to vomit again but dared not stop. Now that she was out of Nick’s embrace, away from his calming influence, the same question kept darting around inside of her head—

What the hell were they doing?

“Move it.” Paula pushed Jane again. “Hurry.”

Jane picked up the pace. She reached out in front of her, because she knew that they had to be close. Finally, the flashlight picked out the wooden back of the second bookcase. Jane didn’t ask for help. She made an opening that was wide enough for them to squeeze through.

They all blinked in the sudden light. There were windows high in the basement walls. Jane could see feet shuffling past. She ran up the stairs, some sort of internal autopilot clicking on. She took a right because she had trained to take a right. Thirty yards later, she took a left because she had trained to take a left. She pushed open a door, climbed through a break in the wall, and found the van parked in a cavernous bay that smelled of black pepper from the building’s previous life as a spice storage facility.

Paula ran ahead of Jane, because the first person to reach the van was the person who got to drive. Jane was second, so she pulled back the side door. Nick was already heading toward the bay door. There was a combination lock.

8-4-19.

They all knew the combination.

Andrew threw the metal box into the van. He tried to get in, but he started to fall backward. Jane grabbed at his arm, desperate to get him inside. Nick rolled up the bay door. He sprinted back to the van. Jane closed the sliding door behind him.

Paula was already driving out of the warehouse. She had tied up her hair and stuck a brown hat on her head. A matching brown jacket covered the top of her shift dress. The sunlight razored through the windshield. Jane squeezed her eyes shut. Tears slid down the side of her face. She was on her back, lying between Nick and Andrew. They were on a futon mattress, but every bump and pothole in the road reverberated into her bones. She craned her neck, trying to see out the window. They were on Mission within seconds, then turning deeper into the city, when they heard the sirens whizzing past.

“Keep cool,” Nick whispered. He was holding Jane’s hand. Jane was holding Andrew’s. She could not remember when this had happened, but she was so grateful to be safely between them, to be alive, that she could not stop weeping.

They all lay there on their backs, clinging to each other, until Paula told them they had reached the 101.

“Chicago is thirty hours away.” Paula had to shout to be heard over the road noise that echoed like a dentist’s drill inside the van. “We’ll stop in Idaho Falls to let them know we’re on the way to the safe house.”

Safe house.

A farm just outside of Chicago with a red barn and cows and horses and what did it matter because they were never going to be safe again?

Paula said, “We’ll change drivers in Sacramento after we drop Nick at the airport. We’ll follow the speed limit. We’ll obey all traffic laws. We’ll make sure to not draw attention to ourselves.” She was mimicking Nick’s instructions. They were all mimicking Nick’s instructions because he claimed to always know what he was doing, even when everything was out of control.

This was madness. It was absolute madness.

“Je-sus Christ, that was close.” Nick sat up, stretching his arms into the air. He gave Jane one of his rakish grins. He had that internal switch, too—the one that Laura Juneau had when she murdered Martin, then herself. Jane could see it so clearly now. For Nick, everything that had happened in the shed was behind him.

Jane could not look at him. She studied Andrew, still lying beside her. His face was ashen. Streaks of blood crisscrossed his cheeks. Jane could not begin to know the source. When she thought of the shed, she could only see death and carnage and bullets ricocheting around like mosquitos.