Bone Rattle

by Marc Cameron

  “Bleeding tooth. Devil’s Tooth. Looks like drops of blood oozing out of that gnarly white flesh. Pretty gross if you ask me.”

  “Something new every day,” Lola said. She was already moving, looking for the next discernable track.

  The trees were smaller here, more widely spaced. Mottled shadows from the thinning canopy shifted with the breeze over a carpet of mossy ferns and stones. A few more steps revealed the entire side of the mountain, hundreds of feet across, was an old tailing pile. The guts of the mountain, now long grown over.

  A raven ker-lucked in the treetops.

  Van Dyke stopped in her tracks, raising her open hand.

  Lola froze, listening. Wind rustled the spruce bows. A halfhearted rain pattered here and there on alder and ferns. Then she heard it too. Voices.

  Now she drew her pistol, carrying it muzzle down, away from Van Dyke.

  The women sidehilled slowly, stepping over and around fallen trees and mounds of rock. Springy moss and a recent rain masked their approach, but they needn’t have bothered. Less than a half minute later they stood at the black mouth of a mine tunnel cut into the mountain. Two men, just inside from the sounds of it, were engaged in a fierce conversation, oblivious to the rest of the world.

  “Throw me the damned thing,” a deep voice growled.

  “You put a knot in the rope!” This one was strained, higher. Angry-scared.

  “Insurance,” the gruff one said. “Didn’t want Childers sneaking up and cutting my throat. I hear pretty good, you know. Now pitch the rattle up to me.”

  “You’ll leave me,” the scared man said, panting. “Pull me up.”

  “I will,” the growler said. “But you’ll need both hands. Throw. Me. The. Rattle.”

  Her Glock hovering just below her sight line at low-ready, Lola began to cut the pie, sidestepping slowly around the outer edge of the mine portal, bringing the dim interior into view inch by inch. Van Dyke did the same from the other side.

  “Grimsson!” the tight voice said, frantic now, hollow inside the mine tunnel. “Wait! You’re throwing away a fortune. Half a million according to the archeologist.”

  Lola recognized the terrified voice as Mr. Dollarhyde, from the Valkyrie Mine Holdings offices.

  “Hand it to me, Ephraim,” Grimsson said. “Then I’ll pull you up.”

  “Okay, Okay… Take it… Wait! What are you doing? Wait! I took all the explosives with me…”

  Grimsson’s voice dripped with contempt. “Turns out you didn’t,” he said. “Like I said, I hear pretty well, you traitorous son of a bitch!”

  Lola button-hooked into the mine entrance, her back pressed tight against the wall.

  Beyond the wooden frame supporting the arched alcove, the floor fell away into a huge cavern. Less than a dozen feet inside the portal, Harold Grimsson was on his knees, leaning over the edge, bone rattle in one hand, a black plastic box in the other.

  “US Marshals!” Lola barked. “Do not move.”

  Grimsson remained on his knees, but half turned. His thick beard pushed to one side as he peered over his shoulder. Eyes ablaze, surrounded by dark rock and black pit, he looked like the Devil himself peeking down on Hell. Lola could not remember ever seeing anyone looking quite so much like the embodiment of evil.

  “Marshals?” Grimsson said.

  “Police, asshole!” Van Dyke said. “Stand up slowly.”

  Grimsson gave a slow nod, eyes closed. Groaning, he got to his feet.

  Dollarhyde’s whimpering voice came from the darkness. “Police? I’m down here. He was going to kill me. I’ll tell you everything. The US attorney, the Fawsey kid, all of it. Just get me off this rope.”

  Grimsson turned to stare over the edge again, focusing the intensity of his wrath on the man dangling a few feet below.

  “You worthless—”

  Dollarhyde gasped. “You’re going to kill me!”

  “You and Childers had the same in mind for me!”

  “That’s enough!” Lola said. She nodded at Van Dyke, who gave the orders.

  “Walk backward toward my voice, hands above your head.”

  “Shoot him!” Dollarhyde screamed. “He’s got explosives!”

  Grimsson peered over the edge again and began to rail on Dollarhyde, ambivalent about the two guns pointed at him.

  He shook the rattle at Dollarhyde, working himself into a frothy rage.

  “You were never loyal to me! Always in it for yourself.” Rattle in one hand, Grimsson pounded his fist on rock wall as he screamed. “I oughta cut your traitorous head off!”

  “SHOOOOOT HIM!” Dollarhyde yelled. “Shoot him or we’re all dead!”

  Lola recognized the electronic controller, like a television remote, in Grimsson’s fist – the same fist that he was now bashing into the rock wall in a screaming fit, oblivious to the fact that his thumb hovered a hair away from the button.

  Grimsson’s rage had reached a full lather. He drew back to pound the wall again.

  Lola yelled for Van Dyke to move at the same instant she hooked around the rock the way they’d come in. Both women dove downward, away from the concussive rumble. Rock and fire shot from the portal like a cannon blast directly over their heads. A second blast followed on the heels of the first, knocked Lola off her feet, and sent her tumbling down the mountain.

  Chapter 55

  “Hurry,” Maycomb said, “before I lose my nerve!”

  Cutter turned his head, struggling to bring her into focus with his semi-good eye. “I’m going to need some help,” he said.

  She answered by grabbing the front of his pants, above his belt buckle, and pulling him closer.

  The action was jarring in its intimacy. He pulled away instinctively, but she held fast.

  “Trust me,” she said. And tucked a flat stone under his belt. “Easier this way.”

  Above them, Ephraim Dollarhyde begged for his life.

  Maycomb led Cutter to the edge of the pool.

  Dollarhyde loosed a tattered scream.

  “Time to go!” Maycomb flicked on the headlamp in her baggie and dove headfirst into the water. A bewildered Donita followed. Cutter took a deep breath and dove in behind them.

  They swam hard, pulling downward, reaching the turn into the drift thirty feet down just ahead of the shockwave that propelled them forward like an unseen hand. Cutter rolled off the rocks, tumbling, trying to keep Maycomb’s light in view through the blur. She bounced off the bottom, stunned by the force. He grabbed her hand, pulling her up. She in turn grabbed Donita, guiding her. With no need to conserve energy for a possible return trip, they swam quickly, breaking the surface together, back in the mine tunnel, a minute and seventeen seconds from the time they started.

  The force of the shockwave had sent a geyser of water out of the shaft and knocked the wooden ladder sideways. Cutter straightened it and then stayed in the water, pushing Donita Willets while Maycomb helped her out of the flooded shaft. Spent, oxygen starved, and chilled to the bone, his teeth were chattering badly. He wondered if he’d have enough energy to haul himself up the wooden rungs.

  He remembered the rock behind his belt buckle.

  “Nice touch,” he said, letting it fall before starting his climb.

  Maycomb got another light from her pack, illuminating the tunnel, turning the water a cool aquamarine. She held her hand toward Cutter. “I was right behind you, watched you struggle with floating to the top. I didn’t want to waste time looking for rocks while I held my breath, so I came back up and grabbed one here to help me be less… floaty.”

  The water had washed some of the debris from Cutter’s eyes, but his vision was still clouded.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Guess you overcame your fear.”

  Maycomb scoffed. “The hell I did,” she said, hollow, like she might cry. The aftereffects of stress caved in around her as surely as the mine. “I’m still scared shitless of tight places. I’m just more scared of staying in them all by myself.”

&nbs
p; Soaking wet, she folded her arms tight across her chest. “We made it out of there before Grimsson blew it, but we’re right back where we started. Nothing’s changed.”

  Donita spoke next, softly, still getting her bearings.

  “You saved my life,” she said. “That’s changed. Gunalchéesh.”

  “Don’t thank me yet,” Maycomb said. “We’re still stuck.”

  “But the explosions,” Donita said. “Surely someone heard them.”

  “Maybe,” Maycomb said. “As far as we know, everybody will think we all died in that cave-in.”

  “You’re probably right,” Cutter said.

  “I am?” Maycomb said, crestfallen. “I thought we talked about this telling the hard truth thing.”

  “I’m not saying we’re all doomed,” Cutter said. “I’m saying we need to be our own rescue.”

  Donita began to sob, in shock. “Did Childers…? Is Levi really dead?”

  “I don’t know.” Cutter peeled off his sodden shirt and put on the merino wool top from his pack.

  Maycomb changed into a dry thermal top as well, offering a crushable down jacket to Donita in place of her wet shirt.

  “Do you think someone will look for us?” Donita asked.

  “I think so,” Cutter said. “But what I know is that we need to start digging from this side.”

  “And what if they don’t?” Maycomb asked.

  “Same thing.” Cutter shouldered his pack. “We dig.”

  Chapter 56

  An orange US Coast Guard Jayhawk overflew the mountain twenty minutes after the explosion. Five minutes after that, a Trooper helicopter touched down in the clearing above the cave-in. USFS LEO Bobby Tarrant, two troopers, and three FBI agents, including Supervisory Special Agent Beason, got out to find Deputy Lola Teariki and Detective Rockie Van Dyke, bruised and bleeding but alive.

  Tom Horning was the last to exit the helicopter. Absent the plaster cast, he wore a dark-blue walking boot and fairly skipped down the mountain with the aid of two trekking poles.

  He caught Van Dyke looking at the boot and gave a tense shrug. “I cut the damned thing off. Had an itch – to be up here helping.”

  “Thanks,” Van Dyke groaned. Her hearing was shot from the blast and she spoke much louder than she needed to. “But it’s kind of over now.”

  One of the troopers checked Lola and Van Dyke for trauma, while Beason stood and looked at the large depression in the mountain.

  “Are we sure they were in there?”

  “Grimsson, Dollarhyde, yes,” Van Dyke said. “They were the ones behind the AUSA’s murder.”

  Beason shook his head. “I don’t care about that right now. Cutter and the reporter. Were they down there?”

  Lola bowed her head, tears welling in her eyes. “They must have been.” She sniffed. “We were behind him the whole way, all the way here.”

  “Did you see him go in?” Beason asked.

  “No,” Lola said. “I never did see him. He was always a mile or two ahead.” She buried her face in her hands, muffling an angry sob. “But I was on his tracks.”

  Beason prodded. “Are you sure they were his?”

  Lola nodded, her face still covered, her voice taut. “We found some of the spent cartridges for his Colt, then followed the tracks past the first cave-in, to where we came across Grimsson.”

  “What do you mean, first cave-in?” Tom Horning asked.

  Lola stared up at the sky in despair as she explained the rock slide over the trail.

  “Sounds like the second entrance to the Cross Cut.” Horning gave the area where the blast had occured a tip of his head. “This is… was also an entrance to the Cross Cut mine.”

  Lola’s jaw fell open. “You mean they could have gotten out at the other end?”

  Horning grimaced. “The passages in between are flooded. But we should probably take a look at that other rock slide. That tunnel is open for a couple hundred yards before it reaches the water.”

  Lola lead the way, up and moving before the rest of them could make a plan.

  * * *

  Special Agent Beason found blast marks on the rocks above the first slide while Lola studied the tracks.

  “You said you found Cutter’s spent brass?” the FBI supervisor asked. He sat on a flat rock, on the slope of the hillside.

  “Down there,” Lola said. She pointed down the mountain into the forest.

  “Let’s think about this,” Beason said. “Cutter and that reporter get in a firefight with Grimsson and then they run up here.”

  Lola and Van Dyke nodded in unison.

  Van Dyke patted the flat rock. “So Cutter and Lori make a stand here. But the bad guys blow the tunnel shut, sealing them in.”

  Lola dropped to her knees and began turning over rocks, gently at first, until she found what she was looking for two feet in from the outer edge of the rockslide. She pointed to the Xtratuf track, faint but visible in the dirt. “I’ve been following the particular crease in that heel ever since the shoreline. That’s Cutter’s boot – and it’s pointed toward the mouth of this tunnel, not away from it. He went inside, not past it like I originally thought.”

  Not daring to hope, she picked up a rock and sent it tumbling down the slope. Frantic with worry, she picked up another, and then another, clawing at the dirt and rock until her fingers bled.

  Horning, seeing she was going to dig harder than anyone else, with or without tools, gave her the gloves from his back pocket.

  Van Dyke, Tarrant, the troopers, and the FBI agents, including Charles Beason, joined in. An hour in, a team of deputy marshals showed up in a chartered helicopter jumping out with picks, pry bars, and looks of grim determination. Most of them still wore business suits, straight from their protection details over Judge Forsberg and the surviving assistant US attorney. They’d heard what was going on and hauled in diesel-powered construction lights from the clearing a half mile away.

  By sunset, the area around the mountain looked like a small city, with a first-aid station, rain shelter – thankfully it hadn’t been needed – and Porta Johns. A trooper wife had sent up a plastic tote full of sandwiches, but so far, they’d remained untouched. Everyone focused on excavation.

  Tom Horning ran the operation. He’d dug out enough old mines to know what made them tick – and how to open a mountain without having the rain-soaked earth crash down around his ears. His wirehaired dog, Kat, scampered around the dig, sniffing, helping.

  An hour after dark, the little dog homed in on a particular spot. She whined, then stuck her toffee-colored snout in a narrow crevice, and began to dig. One of the FBI agents got down on all fours to listen, shouting that he thought he could hear tapping from under the rocks. Like ants, the group focused their efforts in that spot, careful not to cause another slide as they cleared away debris.

  Kat barked.

  “I see a hand!” one of the deputies yelled.

  Lola redoubled her efforts. Tears streamed down her face.

  “Fingers are moving,” someone else said.

  “That’s Donita Willets’s ring!” Van Dyke said. “Her aunt gave us a photo.” She took the hand in hers.

  Rocks began to fly off the mountain, exposing a forearm, and then an elbow.

  Lola stepped back, allowing the others to work. She looked up at Tom Horning.

  “The route in from here to that big room where Donita was supposed to be was flooded?”

  “The stope,” Horning said. “Yes.”

  “Could a person swim it?”

  “Theoretically, yes, but they’d have to be a hell of a swimmer—”

  Lola threw herself flat against the rubble, pressing her face to the rocks. “Hold on, boss, we’re coming for you!”

  Beason shot her a quizzical look.

  “You hear him?”

  “No, sir,” Lola said, digging again, “but if Donita Willets was on the other end, and now she’s here, then Cutter went and got her.”

  “And you know this how
?”

  Van Dyke gave Donita’s little hand a squeeze where it stuck out of the crevice. She smiled at Lola. “Because he does the right thing, right now.”

  “Damn straight,” Lola said.

  Fifteen agonizing minutes later, they pulled the girl free of the slide. Lori Maycomb followed, coughing and sputtering. Van Dyke wrapped her wet sister-in-law in a wool blanket and led her to the first-aid tent, not quite forgiving her, but not ready to throw her back in the mine either.

  Cutter crawled out next, soaked to the skin and covered in a layer of mud and shards of rock.

  He swayed uneasily on his feet as he pushed himself out of the mountain. Lola caught him by the arm. Amazingly, he let her hang on and envelope him in a frantic hug. She would have kissed him if she thought he would have stood for it. He was alive. That was all that mattered. Unwilling to let him out of her grasp, she held him at arms’ length, to check his injuries. His left eye was swollen completely shut. His right squinted at all the lights.

  Lola held him up while the other deputies crowded in around him.

  When he spoke, his words came slurred, drunk from shock and exhaustion, and to her delight, he leaned on her for support.

  “What’s going on? Y’all having a party?”

  Chapter 57

  The ophthalmologist in the Juneau emergency room dug six pieces of stone out of Cutter’s eyes. Three of them bore flecks of gold. The doc put those in a tiny glass vial and sent Cutter on his way with a bandage over his left eye, an order for a good night’s sleep, and a promise to go in for a follow-up when he got home.

  The flight back to Anchorage wasn’t until after noon. He went to the hotel for his second hot shower of the day; then Lori Maycomb joined him and Lola for a burger at McGivney’s.

  “Rockie couldn’t make it?” Lola said, when Maycomb showed up alone.

  “Turns out it takes more than a near-death experience to un-hate somebody,” Maycomb said. “But she’s trying.”

  “She’d better,” Lola said, sipping her lemon water. Her hair was up, and sweat beaded across her forehead from her intense workout in the hotel gym. “Did Rockie tell you we arrested two of the women and one of the guys who threatened you on the beach?”