Kill Me (31 page)

SIXTY-TWO

The drive east from Glenwood Springs on I-70 toward the Continental Divide is, intermittently, glorious. Lizzie wouldn’t reveal anything more about Adam while we drove. Nor would she tell me how she’d made it to Glenwood from Boulder after I’d left her behind at Dr. Gregory’s office, but her fresh, wide-eyed wonder at the marvels of Glenwood Canyon and the rushing Colorado River below the highway clued me in that she had made the journey either at night on the highway or by airplane.

We were zooming past Eagle when I started to share with her all the details I could remember about Dr. Gregory and my epiphanies about intimacy and openness and vulnerability. I was still going strong as we flew below the ski areas at Arrowhead and Beaver Creek, and then Vail. We both grew quiet as she absorbed the beauty of the highest reaches of Vail Pass and the White River National Forest. It seemed to take us only minutes to slice through the ravines between Copper Mountain and Frisco in the shadows of the Tenmile Range. Seconds later we were on the bluff above Dillon Reservoir. A temporary electronic warning sign had been placed on the shoulder a half mile before the Keystone/Highway 6 exit. The sign warned, TUNNEL REPAIRS AHEAD. EASTBOUND ONE LANE ONLY. TRUCKS EXIT AT HIGHWAY 6.

I hesitated for a moment, considering whether I wanted to be in line with a thousand cars waiting to squeeze through one lane of the tunnel, or whether I wanted to be in a convoy with a few hundred big rigs trying to climb the treacherous, curvy route over the Divide on Loveland Pass. It wasn’t a tough call. I downshifted into fourth and began the final, long, determined climb that would take us up and over — well, through — the Continental Divide.

I’d chosen the tunnel approach.

As we climbed the steep hill I kept at least one eye focused on the side of the road, watching for men with cell phones, solitary scouts with binoculars, or even the glint of reflected light from a scope atop an assassin’s rifle in a sniper’s lair. Every van I passed I marked off as a potential adversary already vanquished.

Lizzie remained assured that the Death Angels would not kill us while we were together.

I didn’t share her confidence.

She’d nodded off to sleep moments after we started up the obscene grade to the twin tunnels that cut through the Divide. By then the mountain canyons below us were completely dark. I’d spotted nothing that worried me. And we were making good time.

Traffic slowed about halfway up the long climb to the tunnels, near the point where the final few trees before timberline were nothing more than stunted, pathetic versions of their downhill forest cousins. I was neither alarmed nor surprised by the slowing traffic, but I was disheartened that the construction backup might extend back this far. Although the uphill highway was blessed with a climbing lane for overburdened trucks, it wasn’t uncommon for drivers to underestimate the grade, or overestimate their vehicles — or both — and for the slowest sloggers to clog two of the three uphill lanes. When that happened, traffic could back up far in advance of the tunnels. But not as far as it was backed up that day.

I estimated we’d lose at least half an hour to the construction delay. The only alternative to waiting in the two-mile-long line to make it through the narrowed tunnel passage would have been getting in an almost equally long queue on Highway 6, the pre-tunnel route over the Divide that led across Loveland Pass some twelve thousand feet above sea level. The pass was a twisty, panoramic, exciting two-lane roller coaster lined with sheer drops and hairpin turns. But clogged with lumbering eighteen-wheelers that had been detoured from the tunnel, it was certainly no panacea to the delays that we were facing on I-70.

I tried to be calm and tried not to look at the clock. Instead, I watched Lizzie sleep. We inched our way up to the tunnels. I fiddled with the controls on the radio in an attempt to pull in a radio station that would tell me that the sniper had been caught.

Didn’t happen.

The Porsche’s valves continued to ping in protest whenever I got careless and allowed the rpm to migrate too low for her tastes.

Some things never change.

And some things change so fast I can’t keep my eyes in focus.

It didn’t take long in that traffic — three minutes, five? — for me to start feeling like a sitting duck. My planned defenses against a Death Angel sniper rifle on the drive east to the Front Range were going to be the Porsche’s speed and maneuverability, and my willingness to exploit both. Those advantages were eliminated by the bumper-to-bumper uphill crawl. I tried to compensate by staying in the middle lane on the interminable climb to the tunnel, doing everything I could to keep the little sports car in the shadows of someone else’s oversized vehicle. I pulled in behind a small UPS van in the middle lane, and adjusted my speed to try to always keep an SUV flanking me on the right. To the left, though, was my greatest vulnerability. That’s where the cliffs were; that’s where the sniper’s best angle would be. For the first time in my life, I was thankful that so many Colorado drivers preferred big, hulking SUVs and pickups. I was taking some comfort whenever I could linger in their figurative shade.

I was wrong by half in my estimation about how long it would take to snake up to the eleven-thousand-plus-foot elevation of the tunnel entrance. It took us forty-five minutes, not thirty, to dodge and merge and inch up the hill to the final stretch of the tunnel approach.

Known locally as the Eisenhower Tunnel, the twin bores through the Continental Divide are officially named the Eisenhower/Johnson Memorial Tunnels. The original Eisenhower bore now carries only westbound traffic. The newer, two-lane eastbound passage that Lizzie and I were about to enter was the Edwin C. Johnson Bore, named after a state politician who’d long advocated mountain highways and ambitious tunnels, including this one.

Edwin C. had gotten his wish; the tunnel bearing his name is ambitious, and long. It shoots just shy of two miles through the hard granite wall that divides the North American continent down its geographic center. Anyone who drives the route regularly knows that two lanes in each direction no longer provide sufficient capacity. And when one of the two lanes in either direction is closed for some reason, the resulting backups can leave vehicles bumper-to-bumper for miles.

Lizzie woke up to the blare of a big rig’s air horn. The truck was on the other side of the highway, coming downhill. It seemed to me that the trucker was signaling to another long-haul driver who was heading off the road to a paved area where he could check his brakes prior to the steep descent that awaited him on the road toward Dillon.

“Are we there?” Lizzie asked, dazed from her doze.

“Wishful thinking. We’re still in traffic. There’s only one lane open through the tunnel. Things should free up as soon as we’re on the other side.”

“How long will it take after that?”

“I’ve been known to do it in well under an hour,” I said. When she didn’t respond I asked, “I’ve been wondering something. If they poisoned me, what should I be watching for? How would I know?”

“I don’t want to suggest anything to you. I’m watching you for symptoms. Leave that to me.”

“And?”

“So far I don’t see anything but paranoia.” She laughed.

I didn’t.

A minute later I pulled, finally, into the tunnel portal. Orange cones blocked off the left lane. A series of tall rolling scaffolds had been erected so that workers — I guessed electricians — could do something with the overhead lighting. Coils of Romex snaked out of exposed circuit boxes above our heads. I thought the workers were replacing the fixtures.

With the tunnel lighting intact above the right lane, along with additional lighting that had been mounted on the scaffolds to assist the workers, and with the headlights of the slow-moving vehicles inside the bore, the tunnel was almost as bright as an overcast day.

“How long is this thing?” Lizzie asked.

“The tunnel? A little less than two miles.”

She shuddered. “So we’re in the middle of a mountain? I don’t like tunnels. I especially don’t like not being able to see the other end. I feel trapped when I’m in them. In the city, I can’t use the tunnels under the river anymore; I always take the bridges. Always.”

“What about the subway?”

“Until what happened in the Tube in London, it didn’t bother me.”

“That makes no sense,” I said.
Except,
I thought,
for the part about London.

“I didn’t say it did.”

“A few minutes, we’ll be out,” I said, touching her on the wrist.

“You promise?”

“Yeah.”

But a minute later I wasn’t so sure. We hadn’t made it far and the line of cars in front of me had come to a complete stop.

Lizzie tolerated the lack of progress for about thirty seconds before she asked, “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know. Construction, I guess.”

“Why aren’t we moving? We were moving before.”

“Maybe they’re shifting the position of one of those scaffolds and they’re temporarily blocking both lanes.”

I noticed that she’d moved her left hand onto my thigh. I felt pressure through her fingertips. She was anxious.

I considered the likelihood that I was with a claustrophobe in a stalled elevator.

My own fear was, as she had suggested, much more paranoid than phobic.

Lizzie’s difficulties aside, my mind started playing with the variables. She and I were trapped a little over halfway into an almost two-mile-long tunnel. The left lane was closed for maintenance on the overhead lighting. On the outside of each lane was a raised pedestrian pathway intended for use during emergencies. Traffic was stopped dead in the open lane in front of us and behind us. A parallel tunnel, over a hundred feet to the north through solid granite, carried traffic back in the direction we had just come. The only links between the two bores were occasional pedestrian passageways — built for use by maintenance personnel — that ran perpendicular to the roadways. The entrances to the cross tunnels seemed to be at least a quarter of a mile apart.

The question I was pondering was:
Would this be a good place for the I-70 sniper to take someone out?

How would he, or she, avoid detection? How would he, or she, escape?

I quickly decided that avoiding detection was impossible. The lighting in the tunnel was brilliant, there were a thousand possible witnesses, and a surveillance camera system covered every square meter of the interior.

Getting away? Immediately, I recognized that those maintenance passageways between the two bores might allow a relatively uncomplicated escape. The sniper could wait just inside one of the connecting passages, shoot someone — like me or Lizzie — while we were stalled in the eastbound bore, then turn and run thirty or forty yards through the pedestrian connection to the adjacent westbound tunnel. There, a car would be waiting, the assassin would jump in and be out on the Western Slope side of the mountain in a minute or less.

But —
but
— the whole episode would be monitored by the tunnels’ surveillance cameras. The Colorado State Patrol would know within seconds exactly which vehicle to chase coming out of the tunnel on the Western Slope. Since there are no highway exits for miles on the western descent from the tunnel, the troopers would certainly be able to apprehend the sniper within a short time.

That’s as far as I’d gotten in my musing when the overhead tunnel lights flashed off.

No flicker, just —
poof
. Off.

My pulse jumped.

Seconds later — five, maybe — a smaller pattern of lights came back on. The tunnel was noticeably darker than it had been before the power failure.

Emergency generators,
I thought.
Backup lighting. Much lower wattage.

“What was that?” Lizzie said. “What just happened?” Her voice was tight with concern. I could tell that the pressure was tunnel phobia. She hadn’t made the logical leaps I was making. Yet.

Before I could answer her question the work lights on the scaffolds began to die. Not all at once. But haphazardly, one here, one there. The workers must have been following instructions to kill the lights in the event of a power failure so as not to tax the tunnels’ backup generators. Priority would undoubtedly channel most of the auxiliary energy to power the huge fans that were necessary to suck poisonous exhaust gases from the two tunnels. Overhead light was a luxury.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “Power failure, maybe. It’s no big thing. The car headlights provide plenty of illumination for us to see our way out.”

She was examining my face and I could tell that she could see that I was trying to solve a puzzle. If this were a chess game, and not life and death, this would be like a mate-in-four exercise. This time, though, I knew it wasn’t a game, and I wasn’t on the attack; I had to see the future to avoid getting mated.

Because this time getting mated meant dying.

And dying meant not seeing Adam.

“What are you thinking?” she said. She was dead calm. I didn’t know what to make of the sudden change in her demeanor.