Twenty-Seven Bones elp-3

by Jonathan Nasaw

  Apgard did as he was instructed. “That you, Pender?”

  “Both hands out the window.”

  Again, Apgard obeyed. His hands were empty. Squinting against the rain, Pender stood up, holding the gun in a two-handed firing position, and stepped sideways, out from the cover of the A-frame and into the muddy path. An instant later his world exploded into white-a blow to the occipital portion of the skull, around back where the optic nerve runs, will do that every time.

  From the moment he saw Bennie making his way down the path, Lewis knew that against all odds, everything was going to come out just fine. He left the motor running, raced toward Bennie. “Help me get him in the car.”

  Bennie slipped his sap back into the waistband of his jeans and grabbed one of Pender’s legs. Lewis grabbed the other and they dragged him to the Land Rover. Sonofabitch must have weighed close to three hundred pounds-they had the devil’s own time loading him into the back cargo well, behind the rear seat. Though Pender was still out cold, Lewis covered him with the revolver. Bennie splashed back up the muddy path to get his knapsack and check on the Epps. He returned in seconds.

  “Where are they?” whispered Lewis.

  Bennie jerked a thumb toward the path. “On the way.”

  Lewis climbed over the seats, slid behind the wheel, released the parking brake. The back doors opened. He heard a grunt of surprise. “Who’s this?” called Phil, as he dumped something heavy on top of Pender.

  “FBI guy. He tailed me-Bennie bopped him. Everybody here?”

  “Present and accounted for.” Emily opened the front door, tossed her pack onto the floor, climbed into the passenger seat. Phil and Bennie tossed in their loads, scrambled into the backseat. Phil took his own.38 out of his pack, and half turned in his seat to cover the still unconscious Pender as Lewis put the Rover into four-wheel drive and peeled out, spattering mud all over the front of Holly Gold’s psychedelic Volkswagen bus.

  It had been years since Lewis had last driven to the cave. Traveling counterclockwise along the Circle Road, east from Estate Tamarind, north past the mangrove swamps, then west again, he missed the turnoff. He knew he’d gone too far when he passed Smuggler’s Cove. He stopped, executed a three-point U-turn across the two-lane road. It wasn’t until Lewis was turned in his seat, looking over his shoulder as he threw the Rover into reverse, that he realized there was yet another body lying atop Pender’s-a small one in a red slicker.

  “Who the fuck is that?”

  “She saw us. We had to bring her.”

  “She saw us…we had to bring her.” Liar liar pants on fire. The last thing Dawn remembered was being lifted off her feet as she left the Crapaud, a big hairy hand covering her nose and mouth. Fighting, kicking, swinging in midair…blackness.

  She opened her eyes, found herself in the back of a moving vehicle, lying across a man in a yellow slicker. It was Mr. Pender, who’d just moved into the Core. His breathing was all loud and strangled. She rolled off him, saw a man with a beard like Abraham Lincoln pointing a gun at her over the back of the rear seat. “It’s okay,” he whispered. “We’re not going to hurt you.”

  She knew he was lying about that, too.

  8

  As always, Holly waited until after the kids were in bed to break out the chronic. She closed her bedroom door, stuffed a towel under the crack, twisted up a nail-thin doobie, fired it up sitting naked and cross-legged on her bed listening to the rain drumming on the tin roof.

  It’s okay, she told herself as she filled her lungs. It’s all over. Machete Man’s a deadah, as Detective Hamilton so quaintly put it. You can relax now.

  Only she couldn’t. Couldn’t relax worth a damn. And the weed wasn’t helping-the more she smoked, the more paranoid she got. FFA: free-floating anxiety. But when you have kids, anxiety never floats free for long before attaching itself to them. She stubbed out the joint, dropped the roach into her Sucrets tin, slipped on her bathrobe, and opened the door to check on the children.

  Their bedroom door was open. She peeked in, expecting to get that little heart rush she always got, seeing the two of them asleep. Instead, it was a rush of panic-Dawn’s bed was empty.

  “Marley, where’s Dawn?” Good luck trying to wake Marley from a sound sleep. “MARLEY, WHERE’S YOUR SISTER?”

  He was lying on his side, head propped on a fat pillow-a marvelously comfortable-looking position, without arms to get in the way. He opened one eye, saw Dawn’s empty bed, his auntie in the doorway. “Gone potty?”

  Holly turned in the bedroom doorway, saw that Dawn’s slicker and umbrella were gone, as well as one of the two flashlights they always kept by the front door. Of course. “Sorry-go back to sleep.”

  She felt like an idiot. Getting stoned, freaking out. Must be why they call it dope, she told herself, not for the first time. Then the munchies struck. She pulled one of the kitchen/living room chairs over to the counter, stood on it to retrieve her Oreo stash from the back of the top shelf, then turned on the propane cooker to boil water for tea.

  When it came to Oreos, Holly was a twister-and-separator. Open the cookie, eat the bare half, lick the creme off the other half, then eat that. Slooowly, while keeping an ear out for Dawn’s return. Sound of the first footfall on the step, she’d hide the cookies. Sharing was one thing, sugar-rushing a six-year-old at ten-thirty on a school night was another.

  But the water boiled, the tea steeped, half a dozen cookies disappeared, and still no Dawn. Holly took her olive green poncho down from the peg, tugged her clear plastic rain booties over her slippers, splashed across the hillside and down the path toward the Crapaud.

  Dawn’s flashlight lay broken on the ground, not far from the door. Holly shined her flashlight around, saw Dawn’s umbrella lying upside down a few feet away. Like someone in a dream, she opened the door to the Crapaud knowing it would be empty, and called Dawn’s name anyway, louder and louder and louder, until the hollow, tin-roofed building echoed with her screams.

  Chapter Ten

  1

  They made Pender carry the child. The rainfall, filtered by the canopy, fell softly, in fat drops, widely spaced. Bennie broke trail, Emily followed, then Apgard, walking aslant, holding his gun on Pender from the front while Phil Epp brought up the rear. Epp’s gun was trained dead center on Dawn’s spine as she rode piggyback, her arms around Pender’s neck.

  Pender’s head throbbed. The hood of the yellow slicker had saved his scalp from being split open, but he had an egg the size of…well, of an egg, at the back of his skull. Not a bad sign-in the course of his career Pender had taken more than a few shots to his big bald head, a seemingly irresistible target, and had learned that the worse the swelling on the outside of the skull, the less damage on the inside.

  The higher they climbed, the thinner the canopy and the louder the rain. Pender took advantage of the racket to whisper to the little girl that it was going to be okay, that he was going to get her out of this. She hugged him tighter. “I want to go home,” she whispered.

  “So do I, honey-so do I.” But to his surprise, he found himself picturing the A-frame at the end of the tamarind-shaded lane, not the ramshackle house on the wooded hill above the eastern bank of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal.

  Must be true, what they say about home being where the heart is, he told himself. He saw Dawson’s face in his mind’s eye, wondered if she were wondering where he was. Or had they discovered that Dawn was missing yet? If so, it wouldn’t have been long before they found the cruiser in the ditch outside the gate. All somebody’d have to do is grab the microphone, key it in, start yelling. The search might already be under way. If so, his job was to keep himself and Dawn alive long enough to be found.

  The procession halted. Phil gave his gun to Emily to hold, shucked off his pack, then helped Bennie clear the brush and vines from a round black hole some three feet in diameter, set into the base of a rocky hillside.

  Bennie switched his headlamp to the broad white beam, took the pistol from
Emily, and wriggled headfirst, belly down, into the hole, pushing his knapsack ahead of him.

  No way, Pender told himself, lifting Dawn off his back, cradling her in his arms. No fucking way they were going down there. A plan began to hatch itself. If he threw Dawn as far as he could, just flat-out dwarf-tossed her, even if he took a bullet it might buy her enough time to get away. And Dawson had said the forest was safe, no wild animals.

  “Are you a fast runner?” Pender whispered, turning away from the others, his face half-hidden by his hood.

  She nodded, her cheek pressed against the front of his slicker.

  “Good. Hit the ground running, don’t stop for anything.”

  Bennie? No problem. Phil, Emily? Blow them to hell without a second thought. Pender? Sheer serendipity. He disappears with the other three, his suspicions disappear with him. And to wrap it up in a tidy bow, Lewis told himself, he could even tell the cops he seemed to recall running into the Epps Friday night, when they were supposed to have been in Puerto Rico.

  But seeing the little girl had taken all the fun out of it. On the way up the hill, turning back to keep the gun on Pender, he couldn’t help seeing her eyes staring at him over Pender’s shoulder. How did things get so fucking out of hand? he wondered again. It had seemed terribly simple once-Hokey dies, all your problems are ended.

  Instead, he’d traded them in, along with his soul, for thirty pieces of silver-that’s how it was starting to feel. Not that Lewis believed in the existence of the soul, any more than he believed in the hooha and the fatamatawhatsis of the Epps. Or maybe he just wasn’t drunk enough-in any case, the idea stuck in his craw. Killing a little girl-that would leave a mark. And haunt your dreams for a long, long time. Make the ram look like Mary’s little lamb.

  So when Lewis realized from Pender’s body language what he had in mind, he had a fraction of a second to decide not to shoot him until after the kid had a chance to get away. And afterward, with the remains of the others safely buried under a couple tons of rock and earth, Lewis would tell Coffee that the Epps had made him do it, said they’d shoot him if he didn’t cooperate. Then he’d lead the search party for the girl.

  And if she remembered otherwise, it would be the word of a terrified six-year-old against that of a grown man, a pillar of the community-Lewis would have been willing to take the chance.

  But the chance never came. Phil grabbed the kid from Pender before he could make his move, sent her down the hole ahead of him. Emily ordered Pender into the tunnel next. He was a tight fit. That left two of them above ground. “Your turn,” said Emily.

  “After you,” said Lewis, his free hand dipping unconsciously into his trench coat pocket to reassure himself that the grenades were still there.

  2

  Nightclothes and rain gear, general alarm. Every building in the Core was searched. They soon spotted the SLPD cruiser parked down by the gate. Roger the Dodger grabbed the microphone off the dashboard, explained the situation as best he could. After a few minutes of confusion, during which the night desk sergeant, who doubled as switchboard operator and night dispatcher, was under the impression that Pender was being accused of kidnapping a six-year-old girl, a patrol car was dispatched to the Core.

  Vijay Winstone was the responding officer. Normally he’d have been glad for something to do, but his goal that night had been to get through his shift without getting wet. Buncha crazy hippies, was his first reaction.

  He asked if they were sure they’d searched every building.

  Yes, they were sure.

  And the child was last seen when?

  The auntie had tucked her into bed around eight o’clock, read her a story. She was there when the brother, the armless boy, went to sleep at nine, and wasn’t missed until around ten-thirty.

  Did anybody see or hear anything out of the ordinary during those ninety minutes?

  Car left like a bat out of hell between ten and ten-thirty, reported Miss Blessingdon, a nurse at Missionary who lived down by the lane-she could narrow down the time, she said, because she’d been listening to the BBC news on the radio.

  And Pender? When was the last time anyone had seen him?

  Shrugs all around. Vijay got on the squawkbox (and in his old Plymouth cruiser it really did squawk) and asked the desk sergeant about Pender.

  “Lef’ here around eight. Ain’ seen nor heard from him since.”

  “Maybe you’d better call de chief,” said Vijay.

  “Maybe you’d better call de chief,” said the desk sergeant.

  “No phone line out here.”

  “I’ll patch you t’rough.”

  “Give me a few more minutes-I’ll get back to you.”

  Vijay, who didn’t want to spend the rest of his career working night shifts, would have to be awfully sure there was a problem before he called the chief at home so close to midnight. But as he slipped the microphone back into its wire cradle, someone banged on the window of his cruiser. It was the armless boy, the brother of the missing girl, knocking with his head to get Vijay’s attention. Vijay rolled down the window.

  “What is it, buoy?”

  “Come quick, see what I found.”

  Vijay pulled up the hood of his department-issue yellow slicker, stepped back out into the rain, followed the barefoot, dripping wet, pajama-clad boy down the lane and around the side of the A-frame to the right of the lane. Holding the butt end of a pencil flashlight in his mouth, the boy shined the beam downward. Vijay followed with the more powerful beam of his eighteen-inch cop torch/truncheon, illuminated a department-issue semiautomatic pistol lying in the brush beside the muddy path just beyond the A-frame.

  “Dot’s Pendah’s gun, sah,” said Marley, unconsciously slipping into deep dialect.

  Vijay patted him on the shoulder. “Good work, wait here, don’t let nobody touch nuttin’.” Then he stripped off his own slicker and draped it over the boy’s shoulders, buttoned the top button under the boy’s chin to hold it on, raced back to his cruiser, snatched up the microphone, and told the desk sergeant to patch him through to the chief.

  3

  Standing in the rain outside the cave entrance, Lewis and Emily went through one more round of Alphonse and Gaston before Lewis acceded to her demand that he go first. He didn’t think she knew about the grenades, but he didn’t want to take the chance of inflaming her suspicions. And his options were limited-if he killed her then and there, he might not have time to uncork and heave the grenades before Phil or Bennie came out to investigate the sound of the gunshot.

  He pocketed his gun, started down the tunnel on his hands and knees, flashlight bumping the ground as he crawled. What he saw encouraged him: the floor of the tunnel was solid rock, as he’d remembered, but the walls and ceiling were boulders and dirt, with roots showing through in places. It certainly looked as if a grenade would bring it down-the hard part was going to be preventing the grenade from rolling all the way down the slope and exploding in the first chamber instead of sealing the tunnel. Have to either hold it a couple seconds or roll it slow. Or maybe blow them all to hell with the first grenade, then leave the second near the mouth of the tunnel and run lak fuck.

  Lewis emerged into the first chamber. Reflected by the shiny black wall, helmet lamps and flashlights illuminated the sandy floor, the dragon’s-tooth stalactites hanging from the ceiling. Pender and the girl were to the left of the tunnel opening, sitting with their backs against the wall. Bennie was holding the gun on them. Phil and Bennie had taken off their backpacks. Phil was digging through his trying to find something with which to tie up Pender. They were all still dripping wet.

  Emily emerged from the bottom of the tunnel, pushing her backpack ahead of her. She stood up, stretched to her full five feet three inches, arched her spine, pressed her thumbs against the small of her aching back.

  “Did you bring some rope?” Phil asked her.

  “I wasn’t planning to have to tie up anybody.”

  “Neither was I,” said Phil qu
ickly, flashing her a meaningful spouse-to-spouse warning glare. Apgard didn’t know he’d snatched the girl on purpose, much less why. Probably wouldn’t approve, either. Most people wouldn’t-then again, most people weren’t as free from societal constraints as the Drs. Epp. “Didn’t we leave some rope in the cross chamber last time?”

  “I think we did. Bennie?”

  Bennie half turned. Pender, who’d been waiting for his chance, launched himself upward, diving for the gun. His foot slipped on the sand. Bennie sidestepped nimbly, pistol-whipped Pender once across the back of his already battered skull as he came flailing by, and again as he fell unconscious to the cave floor, bleeding profusely from a nasty scalp laceration.

  Phil had to laugh. “Guess we won’t be needing that rope after all,” he said.

  “He’s still breathing,” said Emily, pointedly.

  It took Phil a second-then he realized what she was hinting at. After all, he had the little girl’s dying breath to look forward to. Might as well tie Pender up in case he regained consciousness, keep him around for Emily. She’d always liked the big strong ones. “I’ll go get those ropes.”

  “I’ll help you.”

  “Don’t bother, I-”

  Emily gave him a meaningful spouse-to-spouse glare of her own. “I said, I’ll help you.” She had a few things she wanted to talk over privately-such as, how far did he think they could trust Apgard? She had gotten some pretty hinky vibes off him out there-it wasn’t hard to tell he didn’t approve of their taking the girl.

  So after instructing Bennie in Indonesian to keep Apgard there, Emily switched on her headlamp again, followed Phil down the first winding passage, and caught up to him in the second chamber. They picked their way around the obstacle course of purple traffic cone stalagmites, and were halfway down the slightly narrower second passageway-the white walls of the third chamber had just appeared in the beam of their headlamps-when they heard the explosion behind them.