Chapter 9 - Under the Pump House
Ortiz put the caller on speaker and motioned her team toward the building.
"Where's the boy?" she asked.
"Not where you're standing."
"You don't need to hurt him."
"Then stop pretending this is about a kid. It's about the gate."
The call ended. Within minutes, the officers cut through the Station 12 door. I was ordered to stay behind the barricade with Elias. We watched two police officers disappear inside and heard the clang of an old emergency ladder.
Ben wasn't there.
In a lower room they found a folding chair, a half-empty carton of orange juice, and a coil of nylon rope. None of it was evidence of safety. But on the wall was a message scratched with the tip of a screw:
HARP. ASK ABOUT THE TEST.
Ben had called me Harp since he learned to talk. A stranger wouldn't know it. My knees almost gave out, but Elias held my elbow, carefully avoiding the stitches beneath my shirt.
"He's alive," he said.
"He was alive when he wrote it."
A county engineer arrived to help Ortiz inspect the chamber. Her name was Nadine Cho, and she recognized the words at once.
"The autumn stress test," she said. "Wren Infrastructure is supposed to demonstrate emergency closure before the winter rains. Their last test was canceled."
"By whom?" Elias asked.
"Everett's office. The official reason was a software upgrade."
"Can a failed gate flood Glen Creek again?" I asked.
Nadine hesitated. "Not by itself. But if the river rises and the upstream bypass opens at the wrong time, the lower neighborhoods could be in serious trouble."
The date of the next scheduled demonstration was tomorrow. At midnight, the upstream bypass would change over to its automated setting. I pictured the note in my father's handwriting and understood why it mattered now.
A squad car pulled up beside ours. The officer had found the van from Bellwether abandoned near the highway. The driver escaped on foot, but a dash camera in a passing truck had caught the rear doors opening. A young man stepped out and climbed into a second vehicle.
Ortiz showed me a still from the footage. Ben's hands weren't tied anymore. He was looking back toward the first van, as if pleading with somebody not to do something.
May you like
Behind him was a woman with long blonde hair.
On her wrist glittered the same silver bracelet Mara had worn to dinner.
