Twenty-Seven Bones elp-3

by Jonathan Nasaw

  4

  It didn’t take Julian long to figure out where Pender had gone after leaving headquarters. He sent a squad car out to Estate Apgard. Nobody home at the overseer’s house; Dodge van in the driveway. Nobody home at the Great House; dark blue Bentley in the stable.

  Upon receiving this information, the Chief issued a BOLO for Apgard’s black Land Rover. If it was still on the road, they’d find it-it wasn’t that big an island, and there weren’t that many miles of road. But if it was off road, they’d either have to wait for the FBI to send a chopper from Puerto Rico, assuming they had one to spare, or rent one from Island Tours, at a hundred and fifty bucks an hour, plus fuel.

  Julian’s mind was racing. What else could he accomplish by telephone? Of course: get Judge Seaman out of bed to issue a telephonic warrant for all Apgard’s property, then send Hamilton and Felix out, one to toss the Great House and the other the overseer’s house.

  Anything else? Call Layla, get her out to the Core.

  Anything else? He kept asking the question until he ran out of answers, then went back up to the bedroom to get dressed. Ziggy was sitting on the side of the bed loading her little pearl-handled twenty-two revolver, which she’d happily unloaded when he’d called her that afternoon with the good news that the Machete Man scare was over.

  She glanced up. “Don’t blame yourself,” she told him, though he hadn’t said a word.

  “Do I have a clean uniform?”

  “In the closet.” Ziggy put the gun back in the drawer, slipped a shawl over her nightgown, found her slippers under the bed. “I’ll make you some coffee.”

  “Don’t bother.”

  “It’s no bother.”

  “The little girl-it’s Marley’s sister.”

  “Marcus’s friend Marley? The…?” She waved her arms ineffectually, discovered it was impossible to indicate Marley’s condition by using your hands.

  He nodded.

  “Why?”

  “Maybe she saw them. Maybe they’re just sick bastards.”

  “Don’t blame yourself,” she said again.

  “Woman, I heard you the first time,” he told her.

  5

  Lewis watched Emily receding down the narrow passageway, the light from her headlamp casting a squat shadow behind her. With her gingery hair squashed down and sticking out from under the miner’s helmet, she had sort of a Bozo the Clown look going, at least from behind.

  Now! he told himself-there won’t be a better chance. “Look, Bennie, I have to get out of here before somebody spots the Rover. Tell them I’ll be back sometime tomorrow, as soon as-”

  “No.” Bennie had hunkered down to light a Coleman lantern. He glanced over at Pender, who was still breathing, still bleeding, then back up at Lewis. “Ina Emily say you stay, wait ’til they come back.”

  Lewis slipped his right hand into his trench coat pocket. “If somebody spots the Rover, me son, we’re all screwed.”

  “You wait.” Bennie turned back to the lantern.

  “Sure, whatever.” Lewis angled around to keep his body between Bennie and the grenade he had just removed from his pocket, and found himself looking down at the girl in the red slicker huddled against the wall. She stared up at him. Her pale eyes, enormous in that little heart-shaped face, met his. Behind him, the Coleman hissed, flared white, casting a giant black shadow-Lewis over the girl and onto the shiny wall. Forget her, he told himself, just bail. Lewis angled around a little farther, so Bennie couldn’t see the shadow of the grenade, squeezed the striker lever against the barrel-shaped body the way Bungalow Bill had showed him, then pulled out the pin.

  Lewis glanced over his shoulder, saw that Bennie had put his gun down while he adjusted the lantern flame. He turned back to the girl, who was staring at Bennie. Forget her, he told himself, but when she looked up and their eyes met again, he jerked his head ever so slightly in the direction of the tunnel. Go, he mouthed. Run.

  The next portion of Bennie’s life would be measured out in seconds. Maybe eight seconds, total. Not a long time, except perhaps to a professional bull rider.

  Begin: he’s turning the tiny wheel on the Coleman to lower the flame. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees movement. He glances up, sees a flicker of red: the girl is crawling toward the tunnel. One second elapsed.

  Bennie reaches for the gun next to him as Apgard begins to whirl to his left. Two seconds.

  Bennie’s hand closes around the gun. As he raises it, he sees a dark roundish object in Apgard’s right hand. Apgard bowls it underhand; it rolls in Bennie’s direction. Three seconds.

  Bennie throws himself to the side, tries to squeeze off a shot, but the gun is on safety. The grenade, its striker lever released, has rolled across the floor of the cave toward the inner passageway. The striker has ignited the percussion cap inside the grenade; the fuze has begun to burn. Four seconds.

  The girl is scrambling up the tunnel on her hands and knees, Apgard behind her. The grenade comes to rest in the mouth of the inner passageway. Bennie glances back and forth between the grenade to his left and the tunnel to his right. In about the time it takes a synapse to fire, Bennie grasps the magnitude of the choice that now confronts him. To the right, up the tunnel, safety, freedom; to the left, down the passageway, Ina Emily and the spirits of his ancestors. Five seconds.

  Bennie drops the gun, grabs his knapsack, throws it ahead of him into the passageway, dives over the grenade-six seconds-hits the ground rolling, scrambles down the passageway dragging the knapsack behind him. Seven seconds.

  Bennie throws himself flat, using the bulky knapsack for as much cover as it will provide. He hears a tick-boom! behind him-that would be the fuse inside the grenade setting off the detonator that in turn set off the plasticized PETN explosive. Eight seconds have elapsed, but it will be another ten seconds or so before Bennie looks up to see Ama Phil and Ina Emily standing over him. Their mouths are moving, but no sound emerges over the roaring in his ears.

  No matter. On the other side, his ancestors will make him whole again. Providing, naturally, that he has crossed the bridge with enough tribute. That’s why he’d risked one-eighth of what might have been the remainder of his life in order to bring his backpack along: for Bennie, all that mattered in this world was his money, his hands, and of course Ina Emily’s dying breath.

  6

  Holly’s life had not been without its difficulties, even tragedies. She had been outed-humiliatingly-in high school by a girl she’d loved and trusted. She had buried both parents. She’d left behind everything she knew and loved in California to bury her sister and care for her niece and nephew.

  But this-knowing your child had been kidnapped while you were locked in your room smoking dope-this was despair. Biblical, tear-your-hair-out and rend-your-garments despair.

  If possible, Marley was in an even deeper circle of hell. Watching out for Dawn had only been Auntie Holly’s job for a couple years-it had been Marley’s ever since he could remember. And he was the one to whom their mother had whispered, Take care of your sister-it was practically the last thing she’d said.

  When he’d heard Holly screaming in the Crapaud he had raced out into the storm in his pajamas. He’d banged on doors with his feet until there were no doors left to bang on, gone as deep as he dared into the forest, calling for his sister until his voice was hoarse, then searched the Core with his flashlight in his mouth until he spotted Pender’s gun by the side of the path behind Andy’s A-frame. And when Officer Winstone draped the yellow SLPD slicker over his shoulders and told him to watch over the gun, a team of oxen couldn’t have dragged Marley away, at least until Marcus Coffee’s Auntie Layla arrived to take charge of the crime scene.

  For Dawson, who’d loved Dawn since birth and Pender since last night, Mysterianism just wasn’t cutting it any longer-she found herself praying for the first time in years to a God/Goddess/Whatever.

  “Listen,” she told the God/Goddess/Whatever. “This isn’t about me. But I’ll make yo
u a deal anyway-let them live, let them be okay, let this just be some kind of a misunderstanding, I don’t care how you work it, and I’ll…I’ll…”

  But there was only one thing Dawson had to offer that any G/G/W she could have respected or believed in would have accepted. So she offered it-then she put on her poncho again, grabbed her twelve-volt lantern, and walked back out into the rain to search for her friends.

  7

  Lewis scrambled up the tunnel on his hands and knees. The explosion sounded surprisingly distant, though he was only halfway up when the grenade went off. He caught the girl from behind just as she emerged from the mouth of the tunnel, grabbed her by the ankle, yanked her back under the overhang that kept the tunnel from flooding. She jerked one foot out of her rain boot; his hand closed around her skinny calf. She started kicking with her other foot; he grabbed that one, too, and flipped her over onto her back.

  “I’m on your side,” he shouted, over the storm. “I got you out of there, didn’t I? I’m not going to hurt you. I’m on your side. I saved your life, and I’m gonna get you home safe and sound. But you have to trust me. They could be coming after us. I have to blow up this tunnel. Do you understand?”

  Tough call for a six-year-old. But that get you home safe and sound resonated with Dawn. She wanted to believe him, she wanted to believe in him. She had to believe in him-they were in the middle of the deep dark forest and he was the only grown-up left. And he was blond and handsome and a friend of her auntie’s-he didn’t look like her idea of a bad man. She nodded.

  He took his flashlight out of his pocket, switched it on. “Okay. I’m gonna give you this flashlight. When I say go, I want you to run that way, the direction we came from…” He shined the flashlight down the trail. “…until you get to that big gray elephant’s ear tree there. I want you to put the flashlight on the ground pointing back up the trail so I can see, then get behind the tree and cover your ears.” He looked around, found her rain boot, helped her tug it on, handed her the flashlight. “Okay, go!”

  Dawn scrambled through the beaded curtain of rainwater runoff dripping from the overhang, got to her feet, splashed downhill through the mud. She reached the elephant’s ear tree. She wanted to keep running. She shined the flashlight back up the trail, saw Mr. Apgard crouched in the mouth of the tunnel behind the watery silvery curtain. He gave her a nod and a thumbs-up. She put the flashlight down, beam pointing toward him, ducked behind the tree-the trunk was ten feet in diameter-and jammed her fingers in her ears.

  Emily stayed behind to tend to Bennie, while Phil went back to explore the damage from the explosion they’d heard. As he’d feared, the light from his headlamp revealed that the blast had brought down a wall of earth and rock, effectively sealing them off from the only way in or out of the cave complex that they had discovered in nearly eighteen months of exploring and mapping.

  Even worse, their packs, his and Emily’s, were also on the other side of the collapse, along with anything else that wasn’t in Bennie’s knapsack. They’d have to dig their way out, he reported back to Emily.

  “What with?” she asked him. Bennie was still dazed, still deaf.

  “With our bare hands, if necessary. What do you think happened?”

  She shrugged. “I’m going back to the cross chamber, see if there’s anything there to dig with.”

  “I’ll get started on the cave-in,” said Phil.

  For the second time that night, Lewis felt himself suffused with the certainty that against all odds, things were going to come out just fine. The girl obviously trusted him; on the way back, he’d inoculate her with his version of events. Instead of being a victim, she’d be an eyewitness and a character witness all rolled into one.

  He took the second grenade out of his trench coat pocket. This next part was going to be tricky. Have to blow the tunnel high enough to bring down that overhang without blowing himself up in the process. He lay facedown with his feet to the entrance, reached as far as he could, set the grenade down tentatively in the darkness of the tunnel. It started to roll down the slope. He snatched it up again, took off his Dolphins cap, put the grenade in that to keep it from rolling down the slope. Perfecto.

  Lying half-in, half-out of the rain, Lewis extended his arm as far as it would reach again and set the cap down. He picked up the grenade, squeezed the striker lever, pulled the pin, extended his hand, felt around, then lowered the grenade into the cap, still squeezing the lever.

  Now all you have to do is open your hand, then skedaddle, me son, he told himself. Just open your hand and-

  Somebody groaned, down in the cave. Pender or Bennie? Could either of them have survived the blast in that enclosed space? Didn’t matter: Lewis opened his hand, scuttled backward out of the tunnel. He slipped in the mud, scrambled to his feet, ran toward the light.

  The downward slope of the inner passageway, by deflecting the first blast upward, had saved Pender from the storm of metal fragments, if not from the concussive force of the explosion, which rendered him unconscious again just as he was coming to his senses the first time, after his pistol-whipping.

  He didn’t know why his ears were ringing and his nose was bleeding when he regained consciousness the second time. He couldn’t hear himself groaning and didn’t hear the second grenade go off either. Nor could he see the resulting shower of dirt and rocks that blew backward into the pitch-black chamber, but he felt the force of it flying past and thought somebody had fired a shotgun at him.

  Pender crawled backward out of the presumed line of fire, covering his head with his hands, and realized that his scalp was bleeding badly from the pistol whipping. He felt around until his fingers brushed against the aluminum frame of a backpack. He pulled it closer, unzipped it, found a roll of toilet paper, pressed wads of it tightly against the back of his scalp to stop the bleeding.

  Dragging the pack with him, he scooted backward until he reached the wall. Still woozy-the worst part of a concussion (as Pender, or any NFL quarterback, could tell you) wasn’t so much the headache, nausea, or dizziness as it was the panicky, suffocating feeling that came with not being able to think clearly. And this was his second or third concussion of the evening-this was probably what it felt like to be in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, thought Pender.

  He was also terribly thirsty. Sitting up with his back propped against the wall, Pender felt around in the pack until his fingers closed around a plastic water bottle. He drank greedily, not even thinking about conserving his resources. He still believed he could feel his way around to the tunnel, then crawl up the slope to safety. As soon as his head stopped pounding, that is. As soon as he could think.

  Chapter Eleven

  1

  The Core kitchen had the look and feel of a temporary Red Cross shelter. Somebody made coffee and sandwiches. Cops in yellow slickers and civilians with rain gear thrown over their bedclothes milled about drinking the coffee, eating the sandwiches, conversing in subdued tones. Panic, anger, and despair were tempered by exhaustion. Somebody made more coffee. When Roger the Dodger raised one of the tarps a few feet to let in fresh air, the rain-diffused glare of the red-and-blue lights from the cop cars on the lane and the crackle of the police band radios added to the scene-of-the-disaster ambience.

  At one of the trestle tables, Holly sat warming her hands around a coffee mug. Dawson sat beside her, an arm around Holly’s shoulders. Marley sat across from them, sipping coffee through a straw. Normally he wasn’t allowed to drink coffee, but he was pretty sure nobody was going to give him any crap tonight.

  At the other table sat Julian, Layla, and the two detectives. They reviewed all the meager evidence again, the flashlight and umbrella in front of the bathroom, Pender’s gun by the side of the trail, the fresh mud splashed across the front of the VW bus to window height, and the earwitness testimony of Miss Blessingdon, and agreed that it all added up to a double kidnapping and a tire-spinning getaway sometime between ten and ten-thirty. The details of who had done what to who
m in what order were still a mystery. Detective Felix ventured the opinion that Pender was already dead, that they would have killed him immediately. Chief Coffee told him to stick it where the monkey hid the nuts.

  Around two in the morning the rain finally began to show signs of slackening. The drumming on the tin roof grew less frenzied. Roger the Dodger raised all the tarps, all the way. Most of the cops had already left, assigned to scour the roads, and most of the Corefolk had gone back to their huts and cabins.

  Save for the principal mourners, Roger was the last to leave. He hugged Holly from behind, walked around the table, patted Marley on the head, waved good night to Dawson, tossed the Chief a salute, and stepped out into the drizzle.

  Marley twisted around on the bench, watched the Dodger trudge head down toward his cabin. He saw him raise his head, step into the middle of the lane, take off his rimless glasses, shelter his eyes from the drizzle with his hand, squint into the darkness at a pair of oncoming headlights, then turn and race back toward the kitchen, stiff-kneed like a stork, his long hillbilly beard streaming out behind him over his shoulder.

  Marley was off the bench, splashing barefoot through the mud toward the approaching vehicle, before Holly had even raised her head.

  “It’s the Rover,” Roger told Marley, as he and the boy passed each other. “It’s the Rover,” he shouted to the others, windmilling his arms.

  The flaw in his plan had made itself apparent to Lewis almost immediately. If he played hero and brought the little girl back, they’d want to know where the others were, they’d want him to lead them back to the cave. But even if he’d blown Bennie and Pender to kingdom come, the Epps might still be alive down there. It might take days for them to die-weeks, if they found water.