Gone, Baby, Gone - Dennis Lehane [81]
“Done much rock climbing lately?” I asked Angie.
“You’re not thinking…?” Her light beam danced across the rock face.
“Don’t see any alternative.” I handed her my flashlight and raised the toe of my shoe until it found the first small lip. I looked back over my shoulder at Angie. “I wouldn’t stand directly behind me, if I were you. I might be coming back down real quick.”
She shook her head and stepped to my left, kept both flashlights shining on the rock as I flexed the toe of my shoe against the lip and pushed up and down a couple of times to see if the smile crumbled. When it didn’t, I took a deep breath and pushed up off it, grabbed for the higher shelf. I got my fingers in there, and they slid on dust and rock salt and then popped back out again, and I bounced back off the rock face and fell on my ass.
“That was good,” Angie said. “You definitely have a genetic predisposition toward all things athletic.”
I stood and wiped the dust off my fingers, smeared it on my jeans. I scowled at Angie and tried again, and again I fell back on my ass.
“It’s getting nervous, though,” Angie said.
The third try, I actually held my fingers in the shelf for a good fifteen seconds before I lost my grip.
Angie’s lights shone down in my face as I looked up at the beast slab of stubborn granite.
“May I?” she said.
I took the flashlights from her, shone them on the rock. “Be my guest.”
She walked backward several feet and peered at the rock. She squatted and rose up and down on her haunches several times, stretched her torso from the small of her back, and flexed her fingers. Before I even knew what her plan was, she rose, took off, and ran full speed at the rock face. A few inches before she would have smacked into it like Wile E. Coyote into a painted-on door, her foot dug into the lower shelf, her right hand grabbed the upper one, and her small body vaulted up another two feet as her left arm slapped over the top.
She hung there for a good thirty seconds like that, pressed flat into the rock as if she’d been hurled there.
“Now what are you going to do?” I said.
“I thought I’d just lie here awhile.”
“That sounds like sarcasm.”
“Oh, you recognize it?”
“One of my talents.”
“Patrick,” she said, in a tone that reminded me of my mother and several nuns I’ve known, “get under me and push.”
I shoved one flashlight into my belt buckle, so that the light shone up into my face, and the other in my back pocket, stood under Angie, got both hands under her heels, and pushed up. Both flashlights together were probably heavier than she was. She shot up the rock face and I extended my arms until they were straight above my head and her heels left the palms. She turned around on top of the rock, looked down at me from her hands and knees, and extended her hand.
“Ready, my Olympian?”
I coughed into my hand. “Bitch.”
She withdrew the hand and smiled. “What was that?”
“I said I have to switch the other flashlight to my back pocket.”
“Oh.” She lowered the hand again. “Of course.”
After she’d pulled me up, we shone the lights across the top of the rock. It ran unbroken for at least twenty yards and was as smooth as a bowling ball. I lay on my stomach and stuck my head and flashlight over the edge, watching the cliff face drop straight and smooth another sixty-five feet to the water.
We were about midway up the north side of the quarry. Directly across the water was a row of cliffs and shelves, littered with graffiti and even a stray climber’s piton. The water, when under my beam, shimmered against the rock like heat waves off a summer road. It was the pale green I remembered, slightly milkier, but I knew the color was deceptive. Divers looking for a body in this water last summer had been forced to abandon their search when a high concentration of silt deposits combined with the natural lack of visibility in depths of more than one hundred