Page 50 of So Insane

“Faith, I’m not leaving you,” he said. “I’ve done that too many times. Not again.”

His eyes registered fear but also guilt. Faith softened her voice and said, “I forgive you for earlier. With West. You haven’t had much of a reason to trust me for a while. I understand why you didn’t answer. It’s not your fault I didn’t wait. But I can’t wait now. We can’t wait. And I’ll be fine. I’ll take Turk, and you can take your excellent shooting skills and tough macho man strength.”

She smiled at her joke, but Michael didn’t return it. “This isn’t a good idea,” he said.

“Doesn’t matter,” she replied. “It’s the only option available to us.”

“I don’t know that I agree with that,” he said.

There was a lot less force in his protest this time, however. She smiled softly and said, “Yes, you do. Go on, Michael. I’ll be okay.”

He hesitated a moment longer, and on impulse, Faith pulled him into an embrace. She squeezed him tightly, and when he wrapped her just as tightly into his own arms, she felt her spirits lift. For a moment, it didn’t matter that she was hunting a crazed serial killer underground or that she was hunting an even more crazed and dangerous killer aboveground. She wasn’t alone anymore, and that was what mattered.

Turk barked, and Faith smiled down at him. She never really was alone, was she?

Except when West took Turk from you, a voice in her head reminded her.

The joy she felt for a moment vanished. She separated from Michael and said, “We’ll sync our phones to share our locations.”

“How’s that going to help us underground?”

“They use ultrasonic frequencies to stay in contact,” she said, pressing the required settings first on her phone, then Michael’s.

“That still won’t even be remotely accurate underground with hundreds of yards of bedrock in between us.”

“It’s all we have,” she said, handing his phone back. “Good luck.”

He took the phone and sighed. “You’re crazy, you know that?”

Faith smiled. “Yep. Crazy as a fox.”

“You keep telling yourself that,” he said with a grin of his own. He hugged her once more, then disappeared, taking the tunnel to the left.

Faith took a deep breath and looked down at Turk. “You ready to catch another bad guy, boy?”

Turk barked firmly. Thus encouraged, Faith started down the tunnel directly ahead of her.

The tunnel narrowed after about ten yards, becoming an irregular shaft of uncut bedrock. The lantern hooks were gone too. Faith consulted her map and confirmed that she had reached one of the tunnels that led from the mine to the natural cave system. She checked the map of the caves and found that this was one of the unmapped tunnels. From here on out, she was on her own.

A sound echoed through the caves, and Faith almost imagined she could hear a voice speaking. No wonder Martle had abandoned his project. Faith couldn’t imagine being down here any length of time and not going insane.

After another fifty yards or so, she heard the voice again, and this time it was definitely a voice.

And it was calling a name.

“Frankie! Frankie! Are you there? Shawna! Girls, if you hear me, shout for me!”

Faith followed the sound. She reached a cavern with three different tunnels and waited until she heard the voice again, coming from the rightmost tunnel. “Frankie!”

She drew her handgun and held it under her flashlight as trained. She followed the beam and a few dozen yards into the tunnel, she came face to face with a man.

His eyes widened in shock. Faith trained her handgun on him immediately and shouted, “Hands in the air! Don’t move!”

Turk growled low in his throat. The man took one look at him and bolted.

Faith swore and sprinted after him. “Stop!” she cried.

The man made it about a hundred yards deeper into the tunnel before Turk caught him. He leapt onto the stranger and pushed him to the ground. The man squealed and covered his head, shouting, “Don’t hurt me!”

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