Destroying Angel Read Online Free Page A

awful.
    “Smell it?” Krantz asked.
    “Yeah. Body waste, mostly. Something dead too.”
    “That’s how I found the place. I climbed up here to get a good look around, maybe spot something. And then I smelled it. After that, it was a matter of following my nose.”
    Eliza lifted her mask and sniffed. “Reminds me of Caleb Kimball’s sanctifying pit.”
    Jacob remembered the hell his sister had gone through in the dump outside Las Vegas. “Are you good?”
    “Good enough. Don’t try to stop me.” Her voice was muffled but defiant through the mask.
    Toward the top the sandstone hump grew knotty and treacherous. Fissures opened in the rock where one could turn an ankle, and sinkholes pocked the surface, their sandy bottoms damp with melted snow. The three companions hugged an outcrop above one of these sinkholes and came out the other side to a flat, smooth stretch about ten feet wide by fifteen feet long, before the hump dropped sharply on the far side.
    The breeze turned, and the smell of feces and rot grew stronger. It wasn’t enough to turn Jacob’s stomach, not yet. But Eliza winced. He was about to ignore her determined words and suggest that she wait down below, then thought better of it. She wasn’t a child anymore, hadn’t been for a long time. And if she was seriousabout being Krantz’s deputy, she couldn’t avoid the unpleasant tasks.
    “Here it is,” Krantz said.
    Jacob leaned over the edge. The smell hit him like a fist.
    The sinkhole was oddly shaped. Usually these things widened as they grew deeper, forming a bowl-like hollow in the stone. This one dove down like a well, three, maybe four feet across at the top, but narrow and dark all the way down, as if the water and ice had found a soft spot in the sandstone and eaten deeper and deeper, like a cavity in a molar. It was at least fifteen feet deep but no more than six feet wide at the bottom.
    His eyes had adjusted to the bright sun, and he struggled to see into the gloom. There were blankets, and he caught the glint of a tin can. But he couldn’t distinguish most of what he was seeing. Flies zoomed in and out of the sinkhole, and dozens more buzzed at the bottom.
    “How did he…” Jacob started to ask, but then he saw the knotted cord that emerged from the far side to wrap around a knob of stone. It didn’t look strong enough to hold a man’s weight, but he supposed Taylor Junior had been half-starved from his ordeal.
    “I need to go down.”
    “Already done it,” Krantz said.
    Jacob eyed the cord, then glanced up at the former college hammer thrower, who was six feet four and weighed at least 240 pounds. “You did?”
    “Not like that, of course. I went back for my own rope. But I don’t have it with me, and I wouldn’t trust myself to that flimsy thing if I were you. Besides, everything you need to know you can see from here.”
    “Still, I have to see it for myself.”
    “I could do it,” Eliza said.
    Jacob turned, surprised. “Come on, Liz, that doesn’t make any sense.”
    “You don’t need to do it yourself,” she said. “But you want a second opinion, right? And you probably outweigh me by fifty pounds.”
    “The rope is strong enough for Jacob,” Krantz said. “Let him do it.”
    “Oh, now you want him to go down,” she said. “Is the rope stronger all of a sudden? I’ll be fine. It’s safe enough, right? There’s nothing down there that can hurt me, is there?”
    “It’s not your physical safety I’m worried about. The rope is worn, but it’s nylon and tough, more or less what we used in the FBI for rappelling out of helicopters. But it’s filth and trash down there, that’s it.”
    “I’m going in,” Jacob said. “Liz, no arguments—let me do it.”
    She chewed on her lip, then nodded. Krantz opened his backpack and took out a pair of garbage bags. “Put these over your feet unless you want to throw away your shoes when you get out.”
    Jacob put on the bags, tucking the plastic into the tops