Within minutes, paramedics were coming down with a stretcher, feet crunching broken glass, metal clanging, We waited until they had lifted the body, and I probed the ground where it had been. I stared into the black opening of a tunnel that long ago had been dug into a Mountainside too soft to support it, and I moved closer until I was just inside its mouth. A wall scaled it deep inside, and whitewash on bricks glinted in my light. Rusting railroad spikes protruded from rotting ties covered with mud, and scattered about were old tires and bottles.
“Doc, there’s nothing in there.” Marino was picking his way right behind me. “Shit.” He almost slipped. “We’ve already looked.”
“Well, obviously, he couldn’t have escaped through here,” I said as my light discovered cobblestones and dead weeds. “And no one could hide in here. And your average person shouldn’t have known about this place, either.”
“Come on.” Marino’s voice was gentle but firm as he touched my arm.
“This wasn’t picked randomly. Not many people around here even know where this is.” My light moved more.
“This was someone who knew exactly what he was doing.”
“Doc,” he said as water dripped, “this ain’t safe.”
“I doubt Danny knew about this place. This was premeditated and cold-blooded.” My voice echoed off old, dark walls.
Marino held my arm this time, and I did not resist him.
“You’ve done all you can do here. Let’s go.”
Mud sucked at my boots and oozed over his black military shoes as we followed the rotting railroad bed back out into the night. Together, we climbed up the littered hillside, carefully stepping around blood spilled when Danny’s body had been rolled down the steep slope like garbage. Much of it had been displaced by the helicopter’s violent wind, and that would one day matter if a defense attorney thought it did. I averted my face from the glare of cameras and flashing strobes. Marino and I got out of the way, and we did not talk to anyone.
“I want to see my car,” I said to him as his unit number blared.
“One hundred,” he answered, holding the radio close to his mouth.
“Go ahead, one-seventeen, II the dispatcher said to some body else.
“I checked the lot front and back, Captain,” Unit 117 said to Marino. “No sign of the vehicle you described.”
“Ten-four.” Marino lowered the radio and looked very annoyed. “Lucy’s Suburban ain’t at your office. I don’t get it,” he said to me. “None of this is making sense.”
We began walking back to Libby Hill Park because it really wasn’t far, and we wanted to talk.
“What it’s looking like to me is Danny might have picked somebody up,” Marino said as he lit a cigarette.
“Sure sounds like it could be drugs.”
“He wouldn’t do that when he was delivering my car,” I said, and I knew I sounded naive. “He wouldn’t pick anybody up.”
Marino turned to me. “Come on,” he said. “You don’t know that.”
“I’ve never had any reason to think he was irresponsible or into drugs or anything else.”
“Well, I think it’s obvious he was into an alternative life, as they say.”
“I don’t know that at all.” I was tired of that talk.
“You better find out because you got a lot of blood on YOU.”
“These days I worry about that no matter who it is.”
“Look, what I’m saying is people you know do disappointing things,” he went on as the lights of the city spread below us. “And sometimes people you don’t know very well are worse than ones you don’t know at all. You trusted I Danny because you liked him and thought he did a good job. But he could have been into anything behind the scenes, and you weren’t going to know.”
I did not reply. What he said was true.
“He’s a nice-looking kid, a pretty boy. And now He’s driving this unbelievable ride. The best could have been tempted to maybe do a little trolling before turning in the boss’s ride. Or maybe he just wanted to score a little dope.” I was more concerned that Danny had fallen prey to an attempted carjacking, and I pointed out that there had been a rash of them downtown and in this area.