by Ninie Hammon
Hollywood dumped them onto the ground and stepped back into the van. When he stepped out again, he was dragging another set of girls. They were bound as the others were, their hands but not their feet and their mouths taped shut. One girl was black, with short-cropped black curls, the other's short hair was multicolored — pink, blue, gray — cut in a stylish punk boy cut. The black girl was wearing a sweatshirt and sweatpants, the "tropical fish" wore a black designer dress with a miniskirt covered in sequins that sparkled in dim light, and above-the-knee black boots. He dumped them on top of the other girls, making a pile of them, and the top girls moved off the others and sprawled beside them in the dirt.
The other man, the ugly one, had climbed into the back of the van and emerged with another set of girls. How many were there? Bailey had no idea. One of the girls, whose hair was long, blonde and curly, was dressed in an evening gown, but the other, a tiny, black-haired girl was dressed in jeans and a t-shirt. The blonde in heels, and the tiny girl in sneakers, were such disparate sizes it was hard for them to move as a unit.
Bailey's heart began to hammer. Some of these girls had been hiding in the closet in Poli's room, had witnessed the girl's murder. How many of them? Two? Four? Surely not all of them, but Bailey didn't know that for sure. What she did know was that she connected to the girls who'd hidden in that closet — in a vague way, flashing through their minds, just blurred images. She wondered if she would feel anything now that they were so close. That hadn't happened with Macy Cosgrove. Yet when she touched the little girl, there had been a connecting of some sort that she still couldn't explain and certainly couldn't describe, as if they knew each other well, though she couldn't have told a thing about the child except what she had seen through her eyes on those two occasions.
She stared at the tangle of girls on the ground … and felt nothing. No connection of any kind.
The ugly man returned to the van and brought out a single girl. It was Jeni, pale blonde hair, Nordic blonde, long and straight. Bailey couldn't see it, but she knew Jeni's eyes were blue. Not startling sapphire blue — pale blue, the color of the sky on a hot day. She was wearing skinny jeans, a button-down shirt and a denim jacket.
Bailey recognized her instantly, of course. She had painted her face in such vivid detail the men were able to take digital photographs of her and find her in the casino. Bailey had had only a flashing connection to the other girls, but she had been inside Jeni's head, had suffered through a brutal torture with her, was connected intimately to her. She was sure that if she touched Jeni, she would feel the same connection she had felt to Macy Cosgrove, but the girl lay on the top of a heap of six other girls fifteen feet away. And what was the point of connection? It wasn't like she could communicate with her in any way. And what would she communicate if she could?
Apparently, Jeni was the last one because Hollywood pushed the van door closed behind her.
Bailey sat up in the dirt, the feeling having returned to her arms and legs so she could control them, and stared at Jeni. At first, the girl was unaware of her, looking around at everything and nothing in abject terror just like the other girls. But eventually she noticed Bailey and their eyes met and locked.
If Bailey had expected some kind of connection, it wasn't there. But then, she hadn't connected to Macy Cosgrove either, until she put her hand on the child's shoulder.
When the men spoke now, it was in English. Perhaps the men in the van didn't speak whatever language they'd used before. The metal gate in the chain-link fence had a padlock on it and Jacko turned to the small, Middle Eastern man.
"You got the key, don't you, Akeim?"
The man nodded, put his hand into his pocket and removed a single, small key and inserted it into the padlock. He snapped the lock open, then tossed it aside and walked the gate inward to open it. Then the men went to the girls on the ground. The man who had opened the gate grabbed Jeni and hauled her through the opening. The other men grabbed the other bound girls, dragged them to their feet and shoved them into the darkened area beyond the gate.
The men also removed from the van four plastic barrels with sealable lids. The barrels were light, apparently empty, and the men carried them easily. They also unloaded several duffel bags, heavier than the barrels.
Jacko came to where Bailey sat and she struggled with all her strength not to cringe away from him. But he wasn't interested in terrorizing her right now. He simply yanked her up off the ground and shoved her in front of him through the gate.
Once inside the enclosure, it was clear that they were in the open area in front of a hole in the side of the mountain. The men who'd been hauling the girls threw them back down in heaps up against the fence, then began shining their flashlights around, apparently looking for something.
"S'posed to be on a pole," said the white-haired gunman. The men shined their flashlight beams on the fence, the posts, and the front of the entrance to the mine, their backs toward Bailey and the girls.
"Turns all the lights on," Hollywood said.
Bailey saw Jeni sit suddenly upright on her knees, and watched in fascination as the girl raked her cheek across the side of the chain-link fence next to her, dragging it sideways — must have been painfully — along the links until the piece of duct tape on her mouth began to peel back. She only pulled it back far enough so she could open her mouth, then she tottered on her knees six or eight feet to a spot behind where the men stood searching the darkness. Then she leaned over, put her mouth to the ground and appeared to pick something up with her teeth. Whatever it was, it was small, and the girl tilted her head back and swallowed it. Then she fell over on her side and rolled back to the fence, sat up, shoved her face against the links and smashed the duct tape back across her mouth.
The whole operation had taken only a few seconds. The men saw nothing.
"There it is," said the ugly man called Vinny who'd driven the van, pointing to a panel box on a pole near the entrance to the opening in the front of the mountain. They shined flashlights on it. The sign on it warned Danger and Electrical Something.
Jacko turned to the man who had opened the padlock. "Unlock with the padlock key," he said, and the man reached into his pocket. He felt around, then reached into his other pocket.
"Come on!" Jacko was not happy. The small man who had unlocked the gate was searching all his pockets now, clearly unable to locate it.
Then Bailey understood!
Jeni had seen the man drop the key on the ground and she had picked it up and swallowed it! That's why she'd rolled back to where she'd been sitting — to remove the tracks she had made in the dirt with her knees.
Bailey's heart was pounding so hard her vision was pulsing. There was only one reason for Jeni to do a thing like that — to delay them. To slow them down!
Then Akeim began to look around on the ground, shining his flashlight around his feet.
"You dropped it?" Sandy, the flat-headed one who'd shoved a gun into her belly, was incredulous.
"I had it. It's here somewhere."
The other men trained their flashlights around the man's feet, searching the ground.
It was clear Jacko was losing his patience.
"Find the key!" he said, his voice thunderous.
He used his flashlight, too, searching the ground around them, then tracing the path they'd taken through the gate.
"It's gotta be here somewhere," Akeim said.
It wasn't long before the men were frantic and furious.
"I don't know what could have happened to it." Akeim sounded pathetic now. He shot a glance at the girls, shoved up against the fence and Jacko followed his look.
"What — you think they got it? How'd they manage that — telekinesis?" He got in the man's face then. Didn't yell at him. Yelling would have been far less intimidating than the harsh whisper. "Their hands are tied behind them, moron. And they got shoes on so they couldn't have used their toes. Now, find the key!"
The men searched and searched. But, of course,
they could have looked for the rest of the night and never located it.
After a long search, Bailey couldn't be sure how long, the men gave up on finding the key and began considering how to get the box open without it. One of the men went to the van and returned with a tire iron and began trying to pry open the metal box. It was slow going. The box was made of heavy-grade steel and it didn't give easily.
As they worked, Jacko's rage reached epic proportions.
Half an hour, maybe forty-five minutes later, the man who had lost the key finally managed to move the mangled door away from the control panel on the box far enough to reach inside and flip a switch, and the front portion of the mine was flooded with light.
Akeim's shoulders slumped as relief flooded over him. Jacko raised his gun and shot him in the face.
The girls' screams were muffled by the tape across their mouths, but Bailey let out an involuntary shriek at full volume. Even the other men jumped back.
"Drag him in there," Jacko said. Hollywood and Vinny grabbed the dead man's arms and hauled the body toward the lighted mine entrance.
Chapter Forty-One
As the men dragged away the body of the dead man, Bailey looked at what the bright light now revealed. It was just as T.J. and Dobbs had described it. The multiple shafts of Last Hope Ollie #1 were carved into the back of the cave in front of them. Last Hope Ollie #2 lay under #1. Oliver Northfield had started digging on the other side of the mountain — but the shafts had not "met in the middle" as Bailey had suggested. Last Hope Ollie #2 was sixty feet below Ollie #1, the face of the mine reached by an elevator that ran down the cave wall through a hole in the floor.
When the Beast flipped the last switch, turning on the last bank of lights, Bailey thought about what the men had said about sparks. These were spark-less sodium lights but still … there was poisonous gas here, wasn't there? That's what the signs all around said. Methane in the air. This was an abandoned mine.
Of course, gas wouldn't build up here, in this open cave mine entrance. But down below, in the mine beneath it … maybe. Since you couldn't smell it, perhaps they'd all go in and then drop over dead. That seemed a far better end than the one Bailey could see out there in the future waiting for her.
The men hauling pairs of girls into the cave had to double up, now that one of their number was lying in a dead heap against one wall. They brought the captives into the cave, then went back to the van and brought the barrels, and duffel bags that looked large enough for a set of golf clubs, though that wasn't likely what was inside. Bailey refused to speculate, wouldn't let her mind go there, but there was no denying what she had heard when she was listening to the flashes of conversation from the girls in the van.
And the sound she'd heard in the vision. It hadn't been a lawnmower.
The elevator on the wall looked rickety. Made of wood, not metal — its size and shape were suggestive, and someone had carved a half moon on the solid wooden door. The frame from which the elevator was suspended was constructed of wooden beams. No metal there, either. Even the pulley wasn't a steel cable but a length of rope thicker than Bailey's arm. The elevator was too small for all of them to fit in one trip, so they went down in shifts. As the elevator with the last of the kidnappers and captives slowly sank out of sight into the hole in the floor, Bailey was left alone with the Beast — Jacko. He studied her, a predatory half-smile on his face. Perhaps it was just natural intimidation, the body language of a dangerous man, but it seemed to Bailey an intentional thing. The big man built an air of menace around him with his glowering, cold silence.
"You are a mystery, little mouse." He walked slowly in a circle around where she sat in the dirt, like a man appraising a backyard barbecue grill. "Who are you and how did you come by the information in your little head, huh? I have checked you out — nothing remarkable." He then parroted the high points of the made-up story of her Witness Protection Program identity.
"So, how did you get messed up in my business?" It wasn't a question to which he expected an answer. At least not now. That would come later. "Not just how … why would you do such a thing, a woman who makes a living painting kidneys and livers and gall bladders?"
He shook his head in genuine bafflement.
"It makes no sense. My men found the note on Poli after … let's just say she could no longer tell me where she got it. On surveillance video, I watched you pass it to her. Poli didn't know you! So how did you know her? How did you know she planned to run off with that—?" He used a word in another language she was sure was a curse.
His lips formed an approximation of a smile, stapled to his face like a yard sale sign to a telephone pole. "I am looking forward to the tale and I will hear it soon. Very soon you will be begging me to ask more questions so you can tell more of your story."
"I didn't get mixed up in your business." Bailey hated that she sounded as frightened as she felt. Her voice was thin and reedy, and it trembled. "I know nothing about—"
"Wait." He stopped her before she could spew out more of a story he was not for a nanosecond going to believe. "I decide when you speak and when you are silent."
Someone below had pushed the button and the elevator rose slowly from the open area in LHOM #2 below to the cavern that formed the entrance to LHOM #1. She briefly considered making a break for it, and this time she didn't have the excuse that she couldn't feel her arms and legs. If she ran, he'd shoot her … not a kill shot. He wanted her alive.
But she might get lucky. He might miss and actually kill her. It was worth a try.
She didn't leap up, though, and dash out into the darkness. She sat where she was, staring up at the monster, paralyzed with fear. It wasn't panic — panic was white-hot rocket fuel that propelled you into action without thought. This fear glowed with a cold blue flame that burned away resolve, left you unable to form an intent to do anything, much less the will to carry it out.
She thought of T.J, who was a decorated war hero. He seemed like a peaceful old man, wouldn't hurt a fly. But you could sense a strength in him that hadn't been diminished by age. More than that — she could sense courage. In T.J. and in Brice, too. These were men who had been in battle, had lost friends, had done what was required of them even at the risk of their own lives.
Some foster father or other who'd been pontificating on a subject about which he clearly knew nothing, had handed out a platitude as if he'd earned the understanding of it. His ignorance didn't make it any less true, though. Being brave didn't mean you weren't afraid. Bravery was doing what you had to do anyway.
The Beast took her arm and pulled her to her feet.
"Pick that up."
He indicated the duffle bag one of the men had left lying beside the elevator. Bailey obeyed. It was heavy, with all the weight on one end. The size and shape, yeah, she knew what it was and the understanding momentarily paralyzed her.
She wanted to scream stop! As she had wanted to do when she sat in the anonymous chair in the anonymous police station, trying to wrap her mind around the reality that her husband was dead and her daughter lost to her. She had wanted to call out to the universe, point out the mistake: "Hey, Fate, you got the wrong girl here. You must have been looking for somebody else. I'm just a young mother with a beautiful baby daughter and a husband who loves me and we have a life."
But the universe didn't right things. She'd just been a leaf in a stream then, being carried along by the current, taken wherever the river wanted her to go. And she was being swept along now by an equally mindless stream.
Jacko picked up the remaining duffle bag and shoved her into the elevator, closed the door, punched the green button.
As the wooden contraption began to move slowly down into the mine below, she screamed in her head, Nooooo, it's not fair. And heard T.J. reply, Sugar, the only fair I know gives prizes for livestock.
It was what it was. The very best possible outcome was for her to find a way to make her death less horrible. The people in the twin towers on 9/11 were
ordinary people just like she was, whose fate was no more fair than hers was now. They hadn't wanted to jump out the windows of a skyscraper! But burning to death was worse and they'd jumped. If she could figure out any way to get the Beast to kill her outright, she had to jump.
She had a bullet in her brain, for crying out loud! Not everybody had a get-out-of-jail-free card like that. Oscar. Dislodge him, game over. Surely, a severe head trauma would do it. Well, then she had to orchestrate a severe head trauma. The death the Beast had planned for her was definitely worth dying to avoid.
Chapter Forty-Two
The elevator descended through the rock ceiling of a ten-foot-tall space hollowed out of the face of LHOM #2 into a mine that was just as Dobbs had descried it with his sugar-cubes/sugar-bowl illustration. Fifty-foot pillars of coal — left behind to hold up the mountain — were separated by fifty-foot-wide shafts of empty darkness where the coal had been removed around them, eight black tunnels that stretched a mile, maybe farther through the center of the mountain to the opening on the front of the mine on the other side.
Back there in the darkness were cross shafts eighteen feet wide that cut across the mine from one side to the other, creating a grid of shafts around black "sugar cubes" of coal.
She finally understood the problem of "tall miners." She was five feet, five inches tall and even she would have to bend over to enter one of the mine shafts. The roofs were only fifty-two inches off the floor, shoulder high on Bailey, a little over four feet.
… because that's how thick the coal seam is and no coal company on the planet is going to dig out the rock above the seam just so guys like me can stand up.
Brice had told her that in another lifetime as they drove through the mountains in the fall sunshine.
