“Good girl,” he said. He could smell the sweat between them. He bent his head down again and rested his face on the crown of her head.

“I have the stuff,” the boy said.

Roy stepped away from the reporter and she let loose a gasping sob. The boy was looking at them, his arms full of supplies. “Put it over there and get an air pump,” Roy said.

It wasn’t like the boy to interrupt him, and it crossed Roy’s mind that the boy had done it on purpose.

No, Roy decided.

The kid didn’t have the nerve.

Chapter 52

CHAPTER

52

Aquarium World was on Naito Parkway, crammed into the first floor of one of the elegant old buildings facing the river. It had a small sign out front, no parking, and a front window painted to look like a tank full of fish.

Archie and Flannigan had made it to First Avenue, one block west of Naito, with two squad cars behind them.

“SWAT’s having trouble getting through,” Flannigan said. “Half the roads downtown are impassable.”

What had Heil said? Two feet of water was enough to sweep away a car?

“We need to continue on foot,” Archie said.

Downtown was dark and the falling mist was so fine it looked like fog. Water dribbled from awnings and fire escapes and gushed down the curbsides. The three-story buildings that lined First were ornate, their windows and roofs frosted like wedding cakes. But the first-floor storefronts and the offices upstairs had been evacuated, the electricty shut off, and their black windows were now illuminated only by the reflection of streetlights and the emergency beacons of the patrol cars.

The city seemed utterly abandoned. There were no people. No parked cars. Traffic lights were out. Water ran down the pavement like a wild brook. The thin wisps of trees lining the sidewalk shuddered, bare-leaved, in the wind. The whole world glistened wet and black, like the Pacific Ocean at night.

Archie didn’t bother to park. He just stopped the Cutlass in the middle of the road, got out, and walked around to the trunk.

The two patrol cars following them stopped. Their red and blue lights were strangely comforting. They were something familiar in an environment suddenly defined by everything it was lacking—shoppers, office workers, bicyclists, buses, homeless teenagers with their dreadlocks and cardboard signs.

Archie opened the trunk and took off his jacket.

“Suit up,” he called to the uniformed cops, who were already stepping out of their cars. They were both young and skinny, clean-shaven, one light-haired, the other dark. “We’re walking,” Archie said.

He pulled a flak jacket out of the trunk and strapped it on, then handed one to Flannigan.

Flannigan put it on.

No one spoke.

Choppers droned invisibly overhead. They had become such a part of the downtown experience that they barely registered. It was just another sound, like the drum of rain on the hoods of cars.