Seize the Night

truth.
    The boy wasn't here, not in any of the rooms along this hallway, not on the level below this one or on the level above. I'd thought it must have been difficult for the kidnapper to descend the maintenance ladder with Jimmy, but Jimmy hadn't been with him. The yellow-eyed bastard had at some point realized he was being followed by a man—and a dog. He had put Jimmy elsewhere before carrying the pajama top—which was saturated with the boy's scent—into the rat catacombs under the warehouse, hoping to mislead us.
    I remembered how uncertain Orson had become after leading me so confidently to the warehouse entrance. He had wandered nervously back and forth in the serviceway, sniffing the air, as though puzzled by contradictory spoor.
    After I'd entered the warehouse, Orson had remained loyally at my side as we had been drawn by the noises rising from deeper in the building.
    By the time I'd found the Darth Vader action figure, I'd forgotten Orson's hesitancy and had become convinced that I was close to finding Jimmy.
    Now I ran toward the elevator alcove, wondering why I hadn't heard a bark or a snarl. I'd expected the kidnapper to be surprised when he found a dog waiting for him on the main level. But if he'd known that he was being tracked and had taken the trouble to use the pajama top to establish a false trail, perhaps he was prepared to deal with Orson.
    When I reached the alcove, it was deserted. The shaft wasn't aglow with the kidnapper's light, which I had glimpsed just before I'd gone into the third room and found the pajama top.
    I directed my flashlight up toward the warehouse, then down at the bottom of the shaft, one floor below. There was no sign of my quarry in either direction.
    He might have descended. Maybe he was more familiar with this section of the Wyvern maze than I was. If he knew of a passage connecting the lowest level of the warehouse with another facility, elsewhere on the military base, he could have left by that back door.
    Nevertheless, I intended to go upstairs and find Orson, whose continued silence worried me.
    I could risk climbing with one hand partly encumbered, but I couldn't hold both the flashlight and the pistol and still keep my balance.
    The Glock wouldn't be helpful if I wasn't able to see trouble coming, so I holstered it and kept the light.
    As I ascended from the second subterranean level toward the first, I became convinced that the kidnapper had not gone all the way up to the ground floor of the warehouse. He had climbed just one level, halfway.
    He was waiting there. I was certain of it. He was waiting there like a troll with a lemon-sour gaze. Going to ambush me as I clambered past the next entrance to the shaft. Lean out, smile to reveal all his neat doll-size teeth, and take a whack at my head with another club.
    Maybe he'd even discovered a better weapon this time. An iron pipe. An ax. A scuba diver's spear gun loaded with a barbed, explosive-tipped, shark-killing bolt. A tactical nuclear weapon.
    I slowed and finally stopped before I reached the rectangular black hole in the shaft wall. From a few rungs below, I played the flashlight beam into the alcove, but I was at an angle that allowed me to see little more than the ceiling of that space.
    Indecisive, I hung on the ladder, listening.
    Finally I overcame my trepidation by reminding myself that any delay could be deadly. After all, a humongous mutant tarantula was crawling toward me from the pit below, poison dripping off its serrated mandibles, fiercely angry because it hadn't gotten me on my way down.
    Nothing gives us courage more readily than the desire to avoid looking like a damn fool.
    Emboldened, I quickly climbed past the first basement, to the main level, into the office where I had left Orson. I was neither hammered into mush by a blunt instrument nor shredded by giant arachnid jaws.
    My dog was gone.
    Drawing the pistol once more, I hurried from the office into the huge main room of the warehouse.
    Flocks of shadows flew away from me, then circled to roost in even greater profusion at my back.
    “Orson!”
    When circumstances left him no alternative, he was a first-rate fighter—my brother the dog—and always reliable. He wouldn't have allowed the kidnapper to pass, at least not without extracting a painful toll.
    I'd seen no blood in the office, and there was none here, either.
    “Orson!”
    Echoes of his name rippled across the corrugated steel walls.
    The repetition of those two