Boz shouted, “Then don’t get so far ahead! I swear, the next one is in your back!”
Boz began to lose track of time. He declared a rest. They had entered a largish chamber. Men had hollowed out this cavern, clawing at rocks to release ore from which gold could be sifted. Their flashlights played on the walls and ceiling.
“This is hell,” Boz declared. “We’re going down, ain’t we? We’re going down all the time, to the center of the earth.”
“Some of the time,” Kibosh said. “But what difference does it make? There’s as much above us as there is ahead. I think.”
“You think? Why, you lousy old bastard, don’t you know? Are you lost? You’re lost, ain’t you?”
He looked around, close to panic. He wanted to go back. But when he paced back to the entrance to the chamber, he saw another drift, not far to one side. He paused. Could that be the way they had entered the chamber? He wheeled around and came back to where Kibosh was sipping at a jar of water.
“Are we lost?” Boz demanded, his eyes wild.
“No, we ain’t lost,” Kibosh said, as calmly as he could muster. He felt superior now. “But I’m the only one knows the way on.” He let that sink in. A few things had become clear to him as they had slogged through these dusty, infernal passages. Once they got out, Boz would have no further use for him. If he could contrive to get them lost—a little lost—the man might collapse before he did. The passage of time seemed greater to Boz than to Kibosh. It was a phenomenon even of outdoor trails, when you were stuck behind someone who knew where the end of the trail was, how much farther it was to camp, to the water—that could drive a man bats. It was infinitely more the case when one was stumbling inside the guts of a mountain.
At this point, Kibosh reckoned, they were more than halfway. Boz had no notion of what remained. They had not descended nearly enough, to a grade more in keeping with the exit at the river. But he knew Boz would be spooked by this. Kibosh figured he could take the wrong way on one of the cross tunnels and still find his way out. But maybe not. After all, he’d only been clear through once, and back. And at what point might Boz simply panic and kill him?
“I gotta warn ye,” Kibosh said, “a man alone in here could wander for the rest of his short life.”
Boz backhanded him across the mouth. Kibosh tumbled away and struck his head against a rock. “You filthy little prick,” Boz rasped, leaping on him. “Don’t even think about it. I won’t shoot you. I’ll beat you death with my bare hands! I’ll strangle you and gouge your fuckin’ eyes out with my thumbs! Now get your ass up and get us out of here!”
Kibosh was dazed. He got to his feet and hoisted his pack. He didn’t say a word, but trudged on. One thing he didn’t want, he realized, was to spend his last hours inside this hole with this wretched maniac. It was too sordid a way to die.
As he’d expected, Boz was terrified by the descents. “We’re going into the pit of hell,” Boz said. “If I ever get out of here, I’ll never so much as drive into a tunnel I can see the end of.”
It was noticeably warmer. Boz said they were nearing hell. Kibosh thought he’d made a joke and almost laughed, but realized that the man had that nightmare lodged in his head. It was an actual fear. At one of their rests, he said, “Ye musta had a religious upbringin’.”
Boz nodded. “Them damn Baptists in Georgia harped on it all the time. Same in Texas. Hell! That’s all they talked about. Lake of fire.” He shuddered. “I seen the pictures in the churches, in Serbia. Awful. One thing about them Muslims, though, none a that shit in a mosque. But we dynamited those fuckers, anyway. We made hell for ’em.” He laughed, grimly.
Onward they went. At one point, Kibosh thought he was lost. Then he realized that they’d taken the wrong passage. He could no longer see any of his marks. A tunnel, back a ways, had been blocked. He said they had to go back to it. This scared Boz. He had lost all track of time. But he doggedly backtracked with Kibosh, and when they came to the blocked passage, he dug in with his hands to help clear away the debris. It wasn’t as bad as it had appeared. Kibosh had feared that the route was blocked by a massive collapse, but it was only a minor fall of rock and sand.
They were now, he realized when they got through, no more than a hundred yards from the exit. Just thinking of it scared him. They could have wandered forever—well, not forever, obviously—within a stone’s throw from freedom.
Kibosh decided to halt. The air was fresher, but he didn’t think that Boz, sweating and drunk, dazed by exertion and fear, was aware of it. Kibosh couldn’t go on, not knowing what would happen once they saw the exit. He knew that it was still night. As they sat, drinking water and brandy, he said, “Boz, I got to know. What’s gonna happen?”
“What do you mean?” Boz said. “At the End?”
“Yeah, at the end,” Kibosh said.
Boz leaned his head back against the wall. Little grains of sand sifted down, sticking to his sweaty skin, but he didn’t care anymore. He closed his eyes and after a moment, he said, “At the End, the Devil comes.”
“Ah,” Kibosh said, understanding now. “And who’s he? I mean, what’s he like?”
“He’s a beast … he’s awful,” Boz said, his eyes still closed, letting his mind wander. “He’s wet, hairy … big red eyes, like coals burning, teeth like daggers. He’s huge and powerful, with long claws. He chooses the ones he knows. He takes them away.”
“But what does he do with them?” Kibosh asked. He was momentarily distracted by this vision.
“He devours them, but they ain’t eaten. No, he tears them into little pieces, but they ain’t torn up. His hands are like ice, but they burn. It’s awful, like you’re chewed up, ripped apart, but you’re still there.”
Hands? Kibosh thought. “Is he a man? Does he have feet?” he asked.
“No, he ain’t a man, but he’s like a man. He’s like … like a wolverine, or a badger. Ferocious.”
“A badger?” Kibosh wondered if this was a joke. He wouldn’t have thought Boz was capable of joking at this point.
“Like a monster badger-bear. Only he don’t go on all fours, he don’t have a hide, but his skin is like hairy leather. He walks sort of in a crouch. And his feet, they’re like a turtle’s,” Boz said. “Or maybe a huge lizard. Claws. He’s got a huge prick, giant hairy balls. He smells like shit, like he was dead.”
Kibosh felt a hysterical mirth rising in him. This was too crazy, a Sunday school fantasy. Well, not any Sunday school he could remember. But a joke. From the tone of despair in Boz’s voice, though, he could tell that on some level he believed this.
Kibosh coughed and cleared his throat. It was time to get serious. “Actually, I was meanin’, what happens when we come to the exit.”
“The exit?” Boz said, uncomprehending. And then he must have caught something in Kibosh’s tone. “You mean we’re there?” The relief was plain on Boz’s dirty face, in the dim light of the flash. “How far is it?”
“’Tain’t far, but we got a couple a jinks,” Kibosh said. “What are ye gonna do?”
“Do? Why, damn it, man, I’m gonna run! I’m gonna run across the field under that sky and I don’t believe I’ll stop running.”
“I mean … what about me?” Kibosh said. “I want ye to know … it’s like I never seen ye. As far as I’m concerned, ye can go anywhere ye want and nobody’ll ever hear a bad word about ye from ol’ Kibosh.”
To his surprise, Boz smiled and reached out and hugged him. “Don’t you worry, old man. You got me through. That’s all I care about. I’d never harm you. Shit, man, we just slogged through the outskirts of hell together! We’re buds.” He was genuinely grateful. He opened his last bottle of County Fair. He took a deep swig, coughed, and handed it to Kibosh. “Don’t you fret,” he said, “I’d never put the kibosh on you.” He laughed.
Kibosh drank and handed the bottle back. “Well, it has been a little bit a hell, ha’n’t it?” He grinned uncertainly at the young man. “The outskirts, ye said.
I like that. The suburbs, ye might say.”
Boz drank again and screwed the lid back on tight and put the bottle in his pocket. He got to his feet with new vigor. “The city limits, maybe … and back, buddy. And I couldn’t’ve done it without you. Now come on, let’s get the fuck out of here.”
Ostropaki
He was running up the hill through the forest, the branches slashing at his face and his breath coming in flashes of cold steam burning his chest and his throat, and below him the pursuers were shouting to one another, their voices high and excited, as they heard his gasping and his clumsy breaking of fallen limbs and crashing through the underbrush. And all the while a mechanical heart was buzzing in his breast pocket, calling to him. No time for that. He couldn’t stop. If he was caught he’d be killed, murdered. Forced to kneel with his hands bound behind his back and wait, cringing, for the blow.
Then he awoke. Like that, it was over. Edna was prodding him. She said, “The phone! The phone!”
“I’m awake,” he said, as calmly as if she hadn’t been nearly punching him in the shoulder. He reached out and picked up the phone. “Tucker,” he said.
“Vern? This is Max. I know it’s late, but I thought you’d want to know right away. I think we’ve found Ostropaki.”
“Alive? You’re kidding. Where?”
“Would you believe Brooklyn?”
Tucker felt a coldness he hadn’t experienced in some time, not since Vietnam. “When you say ‘we,’” he said, “exactly who do you mean?”
“Me and Aaron.”
“Does Aaron know you’re calling me?”
“He thinks I’m calling Barnes, the night controller. Which,” Max said, “I’ll be calling next.”
Tucker’s brain processed all the permutations of this information very quickly. If Ostropaki was in Brooklyn and had not contacted him, or the DEA … and Max Kravfurt was calling Tucker first, before he contacted his controller … then Max had been following some sort of lead and at the end of it was Ostropaki, whom Max hadn’t expected to see but whom he knew that Tucker would be interested in.
“Was this a tip?” Tucker asked. Max said it had been. “Let me guess,” Tucker said. “Anonymous? A phone call? To you, specifically, or just the department?”
“Me,” Max said. “I’ll make it quick, then I got to go. Caller asked for me, said a man would make a delivery at a parking lot. One individual would get in the car. The driver would cruise while the individual checked out the goods. They would be in cell-phone contact with another vehicle. Caller didn’t know where that car would be. If the goods were okay and if the party on the other end said the money was okay, the driver would stop at some prearranged point and the individual would hop out with the goods and get in another car, which would be going the other way. We barely had time to make the scene, but we spotted the car, followed, and the first stop he made was to pay a toll at the Triborough Bridge.”
“The guy with the goods got away,” the colonel said. “But you tailed the deliveryman? Have you arrested him, then?”
“For what?” Max said. “Giving a guy a ride?”
“So, you don’t have the goods and you don’t have the money, either. How do you know it’s—”
“Ostropaki? I saw him, once, remember?”
“And where is he now?”
Max gave the address in Brooklyn.
“What will your report say?” the colonel asked.
“Blown lead,” Max said. “It looks suspicious, but that’s all. We did the best we could. We didn’t know in time to set up anything. I’ll be asking Barnes if I should question him, pick him up, whatever. My guess is that Barnes will tip off the NYPD, they’ll watch him, pick him up sometime soon on some unrelated charge, and we’ll be notified and have a chance to talk to him. I imagine that, at that point, you’ll be notified.”
“I imagine I will,” Tucker said. “Well, thanks, Max. I appreciate the heads-up on this. It’s good not to have it sprung on one.”
“Just keep me in mind, Vern, if it works out for you.”
“I will Max. You’d better call Barnes now.”
When he set the phone down, Tucker lay back in the bed. Edna drew close, and he put his arm around her but continued to stare into the darkness of the bedroom. She didn’t say anything. It was her way. He was grateful. He was also tired. It was nearly four A.M. Out in Montana—he subtracted two hours—it was almost two.
“Get some sleep,” he said to Edna. He lay there until she fell asleep, then rose and went to the shower. Afterward, he left a note for Edna, explaining that he was going in to the office. He didn’t mention Ostropaki, only that he’d call later, that lunch might not be possible.
It was raining pretty steadily. Once in the car, he tried to call Jammie. The service said, after several rings, “The party you are trying to reach is either out of range or otherwise unavailable. Please try your call later.” As he was entering his office, however, the phone was ringing. It was Jammie.
“I was going to leave a message,” Jammie said. “What are you doing there at this hour?”
The colonel explained about Ostropaki.
“I thought he was dead,” she said.
“Apparently not. What do you know about him?” the colonel asked.
“He was a contract agent, wasn’t he?” Jammie said. “Or was he—”
“More?” the colonel broke in. “In a way. But this is not a good time to discuss it. What are you calling about? It’s pretty late there.”
“How about Max?” she asked.
“You know Max? He’s just fishing for a job. He hates working with Barnes and those guys. Are you in your car? What’s going on?”
“We may have found Bazok,” Jammie said. She explained that she was on her way to meet Joe Service, up some back road. The cell phones had some kind of interference. She had stopped to use a pay phone at the village en route. “He thinks he may have your man cornered.”
“Badger in the holt,” Tucker said. “This could be dangerous. Be careful. But what about Franko? Any word on him?”
“For all I know, Bazok may have found Franko,” Jammie said.
“Where did he go to ground?”
“The situation’s not clear to me yet,” she said. “Somewhere out in the boonies. Communication isn’t good. That’s why I’m on the road.” She didn’t mention the mine.
“Quite a morning,” the colonel said. “Raining here.”
“Dry and clear here,” Jammie said.
“You know … I’ve got a lot on my plate,” the colonel said. “I think I’ll leave this to you and Joe. I take it no local yokels are involved?”
“Really?” Jammie was surprised. “No, the locals don’t know anything about it, as far as we know.”
“That’s good,” the colonel said. “Let’s leave it to Joe. How are you two getting along? You three.”
“Joe was a little jumpy at first, but we’re cool. Helen is leery of me, but she’s okay.”
“Leery? Ah, girl stuff? Well, she’ll get over that. Now, you can offer your assistance with the badger, make suggestions, but let the decisions be Joe’s. Let me know as soon as it’s resolved. I’ll probably be at the office, at least for a while yet, but call my cell number.”
“As you say,” Jammie said. “Are you expecting to see Ostropaki?”
“At some point, I imagine,” the colonel said. “But probably not immediately, maybe not even today. It depends on how things turn out. Why?”
“I was wondering if you shouldn’t come out here,” Jammie said. “It may not be easy to get the badger out of his fort without involving the locals. You could be a big help with that. Bazok may know about Ostropaki.”
“I would think so,” the colonel said. “But it can’t be helped. Let Joe run this, but if the badger looks like he’s getting away … don’t let him.”
That was pretty clear. “Should I pass this on to Joe?” she said. “What about Franko?”
“Franko is Joe’s job. He�
��s got my instructions. Bazok … that’s a matter for our disposition—yours, as it happens. So, no, I don’t think it’s necessary to confide in Joe about Bazok. Joe has badgerlike qualities himself. They’re famous diggers, you know.”
Jammie almost laughed. “Badgers?” she offered in a comic accent. “We don’t need no stinkin’ badgers.”
Tucker was silent for a moment, but the best he could offer in response was, “Oh, dear.” Then, “All right, call me as soon as you can. I may need some help on this other business.”
“That might be a good idea,” Jammie said. “Maybe you should hold off on meeting with Ostropaki until we’re through here.”
“Well, we’ll have to see what develops,” the colonel said.
Jammie saw Joe on the road, well down the hill from the Seven Dials. He hopped into her car and told her to take it slow, with her parking lights only. “This road’s a little hairy for no lights,” she said.
“You can do it,” Joe said. He seemed in high spirits. “Did Paulie get the message? I couldn’t be sure how much got through. Damn these mountains and phones.”
“He said he thought you had Boz cornered, in this mine,” Jammie said. “Isn’t that right?”
“We haven’t seen him,” Joe said, “but Frank’s truck was parked up there. Luckily, Frank had a key, so I coasted it down to this turn-out here—logging trucks use it. Just pull in. We can hike up.”
The big Dodge Ram was parked next to the Durango. Before they started up the hill, Joe selected some armament. He took the H&K and offered Jammie an AK-47. “Have you ever used one of these?” he asked. She said she had.
As they made their way up the hill he explained the situation. He assumed that Boz had taken refuge with the old recluse Kibosh. The fact that the light had been on, then turned off suggested that Kibosh was aware that he was harboring somebody dangerous, but that Kibosh was still able to act with some freedom. They hadn’t noticed any activity since they’d arrived. Frank was still on watch. He was armed with one of Joe’s shotguns. Joe had decided that it would be the most effective weapon for Frank, who wasn’t a hunter, no kind of shooter at all.
Badger Games Page 25
