The door opened onto a back hall leading to another door, this one with a green exit sign and a flashing emergency strobe mounted above it. Susan kept running, her heart pounding. The water wasn’t as deep back here. The strobe light bounced and flickered through the corridor. She waited for the sound of Carey coming through the door behind her, but it didn’t come.

When she got to the emergency exit door and pushed it open, she could hear Archie and Flannigan calling Patrick’s name.

The door opened onto a side street.

She had stumbled drunk down this street before, leaving clubs at two-thirty in the morning, looking for her car when she should have been calling for a cab.

The voices were coming from the east, toward the river, so Susan took a right and headed in that direction. It was pitch-black. If she hadn’t spent her early twenties throwing up on that street, she would have snapped an ankle for sure.

She clomped through the floodwater, trying to ignore the cold biting through her rubber boots.

Carey still hadn’t come through the door.

She considered calling out to Archie, but she didn’t want to scare Patrick if he was still around.

Her clothes were still damp and gooseflesh rose on her arms from the wind.

If she were a kid, where would she go?

Not far. That was for sure. Not in the dark. Not in this weather. Heil had told Susan about the kid’s fort under the bridge. He liked to hide. It was dark enough on that street that you could hide in plain sight. But there was another spot, a big green Dumpster parked next to the kitchen entrance of a bar, where Susan had been surprised more than once by some drunken frat boy with his dick out, peeing against the bricks.

Susan squinted in the darkness, barely making out the hulking shadow of the Dumpster, and headed for it.

“Patrick?” she whispered when she got close. “It’s me.”

She heard Archie yell Patrick’s name again. He was close, where the street met the parkway. Susan could see his flashlight beam cutting through the darkness.

The Dumpster stank, ripe from two days without garbage pickup. Susan put one hand on the slimy, cold metal and thrust the other into the dark emptiness where the back of the Dumpster abutted the building.

“Take my hand,” she whispered.

She waited, her hand outstretched, feeling like an idiot.

Archie’s flashlight beam was getting closer.

She was about to call to Archie, to let him know that she was all right.

Then she felt small cold fingers fold around hers.

She squeezed them. “We need to get out of here,” she said.

Patrick’s form materialized from the darkness. He stepped forward, and she pulled him into her arms.

Archie’s flashlight beam streaked past them, then doubled back and landed on Susan.