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"Sachs? You all right?"
She looked around. No, the walls were holding. "Fine." She continued to scrape away dirt from the rounded brick cistern. With the pickax she chipped away mortar. She asked Rhyme, "Any more thoughts about what's inside?" The question was meant mostly for the comfort of hearing his voice.
A sphere with a tail.
"No idea."
A fierce bash with the ax. One brick came out. Then two. Earth poured out from inside the well and covered her knees.
Damn, I hate this.
More bricks, more sand and pebbles and dirt. She stopped, cleared the heavy pile off her kneeling legs and turned back to her task.
"How you doing?" Rhyme asked.
"Hanging in there," she said softly and removed several more bricks. A dozen of them lay around her. She turned her head, shining the light on what was behind the bricks: a wall of black dirt, ash, bits of charcoal and scraps of wood.
She started to dig into the dense dry earth that was inside the cistern. Nothing cohesive about this goddamn dirt, she thought, watching the loose brown rivulets stream downward, glistening in the beam from her hard-hat light.
"Sachs!" Rhyme shouted. "Stop!"
She gasped. "What's--"
"I just looked over the story of the arson again. It said there was an explosion in the basement of the tavern. Grenades back then were spheres with fuses. Charles must've taken two with him. That's the sphere in the well! You're right next to the one that didn't go off. The bomb could be as unstable as nitroglycerine. That's what the dog was sensing, the explosive
s! Get out of there fast."
She gripped the side of the well to pull herself to her feet.
But the brick she was holding suddenly gave way, and she fell onto her back as an avalanche of dry earth from inside the well poured out into the foxhole. Stones and gravel and dirt flowed around her, pinning her bent, cramping legs and spreading fast toward her chest and face.
She screamed, trying desperately to climb to her feet. But she couldn't; the flood had reached her arms.
"Sa--" She heard Rhyme's voice as the headset cord was ripped from the radio.
More dirt cascaded over her body, helplessly frozen under the crushing weight that rose like flooding water.
Then Sachs screamed once more--as the sphere, carried by the current of dirt, dropped from the gaping hole in the brick wall and rolled against her immobilized body.
*
Jax was out of his area.
He'd left Harlem behind, both the place and the state of mind. Left behind the empty lots filled with malt liquor bottles, left behind the storefront tabernacles, the faded, weather-battered posters for Red Devil lye, which black men had used to conk their hair straight in the Malcolm X era, left behind the teenage rapper wannabees and bucket percussion ensembles in Marcus Garvey Park, the stands selling toys and sandals and bling and kente-cloth wall hangings. Left behind all the new redevelopment construction, left behind the tour buses.
He was now in one of the few places where he'd never bombed a Jax 157, never painted a throw-up. The elegant part of Central Park West.
Staring at the building where Geneva Settle now was.
After the incident in the alley, near her house on 118th Street, with Geneva and the guy in the gray car, Jax had jumped in another cab and followed the police cars here. He didn't know what to make of this place: the two police cars out front, and from the stairs to the sidewalk a ramp, like they make for people in wheelchairs.
Limping slowly through the park, scoping the building out. What was the girl doing inside? He tried to get a look. But the blinds were drawn.
Another car--a Crown Vic, the kind the police drive a lot--pulled up and two cops got out, carrying a cheap suitcase, taped together, and boxes of books. Probably Geneva's, he guessed. She was moving in.
Protecting her even steadier, he thought, discouraged.
He stepped into the bushes to get a better view when the door opened, but just then another squad car drove past, slow. It seemed that a cop inside was scanning the park as well as the sidewalk. Jax memorized the number of the building, then turned away and disappeared into the park. He headed north, walking back toward Harlem.
