Andy went back to his broom closet and I followed Lula down the hallway.
“They never lock the doors here,” Lula said. “Mostly because they lost the keys and they never got replaced.” She paused at door number one. “Do you want to check out all these rooms?”
“Might as well,” I said.
Lula opened the first door and a huge rat scurried across the room and hid under the bed.
“Maybe it’s not necessary to check every room,” I said.
“Yeah,” Lula said. “They’re all pretty much the same.”
“Just because Andy hasn’t seen Shine today doesn’t mean Shine isn’t here,” I said. “He could be using this to access the tunnel and go somewhere else.”
“I don’t like where this thinking is going,” Lula said. “I’m worried it’s leading to looking for the tunnel, and then it could lead to us going into the tunnel and possibly dying there. And you know how much I hate the thought of dying. And besides this, you don’t even know if that Kia belongs to Shine. It could belong to anybody.”
“I’m not going into the tunnel,” I said, “but I wouldn’t mind finding it. There’s a door at the end of this hallway that’s different from the others. I bet it goes to a mechanical room.”
I opened the door, flipped the light switch, and stared at steel stairs leading down to a poorly lit jumble of decrepit machinery and hoarded junk. Truth is, I don’t like mechanical rooms. They conjure up images of explosions and scalding hot steam escaping from ruptured corroded lead pipes wrapped in cancerous asbestos.
“You aren’t going down there, are you?” Lula asked.
“No,” I said. “Maybe.”
“Maybe? Are you shitting me? That’s sick. There’s no maybe going down in that hellhole.”
“It’s just a mechanical room,” I said. “And there might be a door to the tunnel down there.”
“No way. No how. You try to go down those steps, and I’ll shoot you with my new gun.”
“That makes no sense at all.”
“It wouldn’t be a fatal shot,” Lula said. “Maybe I’d just pretend to shoot you. Like I could say Bang!”
“Okay, give it the nipple test.”
“Say what?”
“Stand on the first step and see what your nipples say. You’ve got nipple radar, right?”
“Damn right I got nipple radar.”
I made a sweeping gesture toward the stairs. “So, stand on the first step and give it the nipple test.”
“I guess I could do that, but you move back in case I gotta get out into the hall real fast. I don’t want to have to knock you over.”
Lula crept onto the first step and froze.
“Well?” I asked.
“Shush,” she said. “I need quiet to concentrate. I need to give them a minute to go sensory.”
I stared at my watch. “It’s been three minutes,” I said. “What’s the nipple verdict?”
“I got nothing.”
“Not even a tingle?”
“Nothing,” Lula said. “Zero. It’s like I got a systems failure. Like my nipples are out to lunch.”