Forever Odd

space that housed a steep flight of conventional stairs. They rose twenty feet to a door marked PMDPW.
        I interpreted this to mean Pico Mundo Department of Power and Water . Also stenciled on the steel was 16S-SW-V2453, which meant nothing to me.
        I explored no farther. I had discovered that the subterranean systems of the department of power and water interfaced with the flood-control-project tunnels at least at a few points.
        Why this might eventually be useful information, I didn’t know, but I felt that it would.
        After returning to the drain and discovering that the white-eyed snaky man was not waiting for me, I proceeded east-southeast.
        When another tunnel met this one, the elevated walkway ended. In the powdery sediment below were footprints crossing the intersection to the place where the walkway resumed.
        I dropped two feet to the drain floor and studied the prints in the silt.
        Danny’s tracks were different from the others. His numerous fractures over the years-and the unfortunate distortions in the bones that often accompanied healing in a victim of osteogenesis imperfecta-had left his right leg an inch shorter than his left, and twisted. He hobbled with a roll of the hips and tended to drag his right foot.
         If I was also hunchbacked, he had once said, I’d have a lifelong job in the bell tower at Notre Dame, with good fringe benefits, but as usual, Mother Nature hasn’t played fair with me.
        In keeping with his diminutive stature, his feet were no bigger than those of a ten- or twelve-year-old. In addition, his right was a size larger than his left.
        No one else could have made these tracks.
        When I considered how far they had brought him on foot, I felt sick, angry, and afraid for him.
        He could take short walks-a few blocks, a tour of the mall- without pain, sometimes even without discomfort. But a trek as long as this would be agony for him.
        I had thought Danny had been taken by two men-his biological father, Simon Makepeace, and the nameless snaky man, now deceased. In the powdery silt, however, were three additional sets of footprints.
        Two were the prints of grown men, one with larger feet than the other. The third appeared to have been made by a boy or a woman.
        I tracked them across the confluence of tunnels to the next section of walkway. Thereafter, I again had nothing to follow except my uniquely intense intuition.
        This dry section of the labyrinth lacked even the silken whisper of shallow water flowing unimpeded. This was deeper than a silence; this was a hush .
        I have a light tread; and having proceeded at a measured pace, I was not breathing hard. Even as I walked, I could listen to the tunnel without masking any noises my quarry might make. But no telltale footfalls or voices came to me.
        A couple of times, I halted, closed my eyes to concentrate on listening. I heard only a deep hollow potential for sound, and not a throb or gurgle that wasn’t internal to me.
        The evidence of such profound silence suggested that somewhere ahead, the four had departed the flood tunnels.
        Why would Simon have kidnapped a son he didn’t want and whom he refused to believe he had fathered?
        Answer: If he thought that Danny was the offspring of the man with whom Carol had cuckolded him, Simon might take satisfaction in killing him. He was a sociopath. Neither logic nor ordinary emotions served as a foundation for his actions. Power-and the pleasure he got from exercising it-and survival were his only motivations.
        That answer had satisfied me thus far-but no longer.
        Simon could have murdered Danny in his bedroom. Or if my arrival at the Jessup house had interrupted him, he could have done the job in the van, while the snaky guy drove, and would have had time for torture if that was what he wanted.
        Bringing Danny into this maze and hiking him through miles of tunnels qualified as a form of torture, but it was neither dramatic enough nor physically invasive enough to thrill a homicidal sociopath who liked wet work.
        Simon-and his remaining two companions-had some use for poor Danny that eluded me.
        Neither had they come this way to circumvent the roadblocks, nor the sheriffs-department aerial patrols. They could have found better places in which to lie low until the blockades were