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“Why do they call this hole the Freedom Tunnel?” Doyle asked Avila as the train’s red devil–eye taillights disappeared around the long, dark curve ahead of us.
The train cop paused to kick a discarded sneaker out of his way.
“They named it after some graffiti artist named Freedom, I think,” he said. “See the way the light from the grates hits the wall, kind of like an art gallery? He would do all these elaborate pieces there. One was a portrait of the Unabomber, if memory serves me right.”
“I’ve always wanted one of those,” Doyle said as the dog, Radar, stopped in its tracks.
The black-and-brown shepherd’s sharp ears perked up, and then it suddenly swung around to the left, jumping and straining on Avila’s leash as it started barking like mad.
Through the string of barks came a scraping sound in the dimness and some movement up on a cement shelf on the left-hand wall that I hadn’t noticed before.
“Get down from there now! Move, move!” Doyle yelled, gun already out and trained.
CHAPTER 42
AVILA SWUNG HIS FLASHLIGHT and spotlit a bearded man standing on the ledge with his hands up.
“Move!” Doyle yelled again, but before the guy even had a chance to comply, Doyle did it for him. He leaped up and seized him by his lapel with his free hand and hauled him hard facedown into the gravel and cuffed him.
“What the hell, man?” the guy said, sitting up and spitting gravel as he squinted into Avila’s bright flashlight.
He was a little middle-aged man. Despite his wild gray hair and Duck Dynasty beard, I noticed that his jeans and jean jacket and even his construction boots were newish and surprisingly clean.
“What the hell?” the mole man repeated. “What was I doing? I wasn’t doing anything. I was taking a piss. You’re roughing me up and arresting me for taking a damn piss?”
Avila nudged me and nodded to indicate that the guy was Mr. Hamster in the flesh.
“Take the cuffs off him, Doyle,” I said.
“What? Why?” the young cop said, still shaken from being startled.
“Just humor me, OK?” I said.
“Sorry about that,” I said as I helped the man back to his feet. “You’re Hamster, right? They call you Hamster?”
“Some people call me that, assholes mostly,” the guy said as he haughtily brushed himself off. “But I actually have a real name like you and every other human being on this planet, if you can possibly believe it.”
There was a self-assured, forthright, almost snotty tone in his voice. I thought he sounded well educated.
“What’s your real name?” I tried cheerfully.
“What business would that be of yours?” he shot back.
“Is it Gollum?” Doyle mumbled from behind me.
I shot a look at Doyle.
“I’m Detective Bennett and that’s Detective Doyle. We heard that two months ago you saw a dinner along the river around here, a bunch of men with a tied-up girl,” I said.
The haughtiness suddenly fell from Hamster’s face. He looked at us fearfully for a long second. Then he turned and looked down into the dark distance of the tunnel. After a few seconds, he began to slowly and methodically crack his knuckles one after the other, loud snaps in the dead silence of the tunnel.
“I’ve been down here half my life, and I never saw anything like that,” he said after a while.
“What did you see?” I said.
“They ate her,” he said quietly as he shuddered and looked at me sadly. “They cut her and cooked her and ate her up.”
CHAPTER 43
