“Closed, disengaged,” Brad echoed.

“Fuel pumps off, ignition off.”

“Pumps off, ignition off.”

She felt the slight swerve as their left side thrust vanished. Percey compensated for the yaw with a slight adjustment to the rudder trim tabs. It didn’t take much. Because the jets were mounted on the rear of the fuselage and not on the wings, losing one power plant didn’t affect the stability of the aircraft much.

Brad asked, “What do we do now?”

“I’m having a cup of coffee,” Percey said, climbing out of her seat like a tomboy jumping from a tree house. “Hey, Roland, how d’you like yours again?”

For a torturous forty minutes there was silence in Rhyme’s room. No one’s phone rang. No faxes came in. No computer voices reported, “You’ve got mail.”

Then, at last, Dellray’s phone brayed. He nodded as he spoke, but Rhyme could see the news wasn’t good. He clicked the phone off.

“Cumberland?”

Dellray nodded. “But it’s a bust. Kall hasn’t been there for years. Oh, the locals’re still talking about the time the boy tied his stepdaddy up ’n’ let the worms get him. Sorta a legend. But no family left in the area. And nobody knows nuthin’. Or’s willing to say.”

It was then that Sellitto’s phone chirped. The detective unfolded it and said, “Yeah?”

A lead, Rhyme prayed, please let it be a lead. He looked at the cop’s doughy, stoic face. He flipped the phone closed.

“That was Roland Bell,” he said. “He just wanted us to know. They’re outa gas.”

. . . Chapter Thirty-four

Hour 38 of 45

Three different warning buzzers went off simultaneously.

Low fuel, low oil pressure, low engine temperature.

Percey tried adjusting the attitude of the aircraft slightly to see if she could trick some fuel into the lines, but the tanks were bone dry.

With a faint clatter, number one engine quit coughing and went silent.

And the cockpit went completely dark. Black as a closet.

Oh, no . . .

She couldn’t see a single instrument, a single control lever or knob. The only thing that kept her from slipping into blind-flight vertigo was the faint band of light that was Denver—in the far distance in front of them.

“What’s this?” Brad asked.

“Jesus. I forgot the generators.”

The generators are run by the engines. No engines, no electricity.

“Drop the RAT,” she ordered.

Brad groped in the dark for the control and found it. He pulled the lever and the ram air turbine dropped out beneath the aircraft. It was a small propeller connected to a generator. The slipstream turned the prop, which powered the generator. It provided basic power for the controls and lights. But not the flaps, gear, speed brakes.

A moment later some of the lights returned.

Percey was staring at the vertical speed indicator. It showed a descent rate of thirty-five hundred feet per minute. Far faster than they’d planned on. They were dropping at close to fifty miles an hour.