Twenty-Seven Bones elp-3

by Jonathan Nasaw

  His mind worked feverishly at the problem as he and the girl hiked back down to the Rover. It wasn’t until he felt something warmer than rainwater trickling down the back of his neck, and realized that he’d somehow reopened the wound Bennie had given him Wednesday night that it came to him. A head injury-yes indeedy doody, a head injury would be just the thing.

  He knew he’d have to sell it, though. He dropped to his knees halfway down the trail. The girl helped him to his feet, concern in her eyes. Stooped almost double, one hand leaning heavily on her little shoulder, her thin arm around his waist, her piping voice cheering him on-c’mon, mistah, it ain’ much farther, mistah, please doan die, mistah-they stumbled through the rain until they reached the Rover.

  The performance continued. Lewis drove slowly, squinting, half-draped over the steering wheel. He pretended not to know which way to go when they reached the Circle Road. She pointed to the right.

  When they passed the airport turnoff he pulled over, pretended to lose consciousness. She patted his hands urgently, chafed his wrists. Please, mistah, please. He recovered, drove on, around the east end, south past the mangrove swamps, west past the turnoff for Estate Apgard, until they reached the turnoff marked Estate Tamarind.

  Here, turn here, she told him. He told her to buckle up, and when the Core gate came in sight, he slumped back in his seat, took his foot off the accelerator, closed his eyes and braced himself.

  The Land Rover kept coming, but at idle speed, moving like a dying animal, wobbling slowly from side to side across the lane, until just outside the gate it veered off the road entirely and crashed into the back of the patrol car Pender had abandoned in the ditch hours earlier. Or perhaps crashed is too strong a word-it bumped the cruiser from behind, then nudged against it insistently, like a dog trying to sniff another dog’s crotch.

  Marley reached the car first, saw Apgard slumped over the wheel. Beside him, Dawn fumbled with her seat belt. The front and side passenger doors were blocked by the wooden fence beside the drainage ditch. He tried to open the driver’s door with his foot, fell backward. Roger the Dodger scooped Marley up and set him on his feet. Chief Coffee yanked the door open, pushed Apgard back from the steering wheel, switched off the ignition. Dawn scrambled over Apgard’s lap and into the Chief’s arms. She didn’t start bawling until he handed her to Holly, who was already bawling. So was Dawson. Women, thought Marley-then he started bawling, too.

  2

  The wall of debris sealing off the passageway must have been unstable-it had collapsed again after the second grenade. Phil, who’d been scrabbling away at the face of the wall, had turned away at the sound of the explosion, but another section of the roof and walls had fallen on him before he could escape, burying him to the waist.

  The worst part wasn’t being trapped, though; it wasn’t even the pain in his legs, severe as that was. The worst part was knowing that there was something crushed and broken inside, around his pelvic region. Movement was agony. As Emily and Bennie worked feverishly to dig him out from under what must have been several tons of earth with their bare hands, he couldn’t help swearing at them every time he was jostled.

  Toward the end, Phil started pleading with the other two to shoot him. Bennie, who was just starting to regain his hearing as the buzzing in his ears died away, had to tell him he’d left the gun behind. Phil raised his head. “You’re a worthless piece of shit, you know that? You’d had the brains to wipe down that machete-”

  Phil stopped, turned his head to the side as if someone were whispering into his ear. He looked puzzled, opened his mouth to speak, but vomited a copious amount of dark clotted blood instead.

  Bennie flattened himself against the ground, turned Phil’s head toward him, forced Phil’s lips open, reached into his mouth, cleared his airway, pinched his nostrils shut, and bent his head to Phil’s. At first Emily thought he was giving Phil mouth-to-mouth; when she realized what he was actually doing she shrieked, shoved him away, and covered her husband’s lifeless lips with her own. She was too late to capture his dying breath.

  Bennie sat back against the wall of the cave, his eyes glazed, a foolish smile playing across his blood-smeared lips. Emily threw herself on him, beating at his chest with the sides of her fists, sobbing and swearing. He looked startled, then grabbed her hands. She continued to struggle. He hauled off and belted her one, open-handed, right across the chops. A woman without a husband, a childless widow from a non-bride-giving clan, had no status whatsoever, so far as Bennie was concerned.

  On the other side of the wall of debris, Pender couldn’t hear the commotion-he couldn’t hear anything over the ringing in his ears. But the brain fog was lifting, his nose had stopped bleeding, and by continuous pressure of the toilet paper against the back of his head he’d finally managed to stop the bleeding there. Afraid that tugging it free would open the wound again, he left the toilet paper stuck to his scalp.

  His most immediate problem handled, Pender leaned back against the wall. He felt oddly detached from the proceedings. Probably the concussion, he decided. Concussions. Plural. He tried to take stock. He was in a cave. There’d been an explosion. Somebody fired a shotgun. Or maybe it was a second explosion. He seemed to be alone. He couldn’t hear anybody breathing. But then, he couldn’t hear his own fingers when he snapped them next to his ears.

  He dumped the contents of the backpack out onto the sandy floor of the cave, and felt around until his hand closed around a flashlight. He shined it around the chamber, came to two quick conclusions. One, he was alone. Two, there was no apparent way out.

  Interesting statistic about Antisocial Personality Disorder: it has the lowest suicide rate of any major psychiatric illness. Psychopaths don’t get the blues, they give them, and their will to live is an extraordinary thing to behold-ask any cop who’s ever cornered one.

  Emily would not cry-she wouldn’t give Bennie the satisfaction. She had never been struck before, not once in all her years. She retreated to the white room and lay down on one of the rattan mats. The whiteness was unbearable. She switched off her headlamp, felt the darkness closing in around her.

  It can’t end here, she told herself. Not here, not like this. There’s a way out of the cave. Those two corpses found it-so can I. And I won’t tell Bennie-let him rot. Phil, too. Selfish bastard-I told him to leave the girl alone. She had no doubt what had happened-Apgard had turned on them. Because of the girl: she’d seen it in his eyes.

  It was too much, too soon. Given time, Apgard would have learned to see the world from her point of view, as Phil had. But Phil had sabotaged that. The older and weaker he got, the more he liked the little powerless ones. The ones who didn’t know the difference between a limp dick and a hard one, didn’t even know what a hard one was for. Pitiful old man-she told herself she was glad he was dead.

  And with that potential emotional sinkhole paved over (most psychopaths are geniuses when it comes to compartmentalizing emotions), she sat up and took off her poncho, rearranged the big ’uns, tugged her brassiere straps back into place, tightened the chin strap on her helmet, and set off down the next passageway, in the direction of the cross chamber.

  Pebbles scattered and rolled underfoot. The passageway leveled, then widened out into the chamber with the horizontal crucifix. Emily turned her head, surveying the room with the beam from her helmet lamp. There was a kerosene torch in the natural sconce, but no way to light it.

  The first sacrifice in the chamber, a sailor named Brack, had helped Bennie carry the crucifix there in pieces, thinking it was bracing for the hole in the treasure chamber, not noticing how the two timbers dovetailed to form a cross until it was too late. The ground under one arm of the structure was stained black with blood, some of which was Brack’s.

  The rest belonged to Frieda Schaller, to big old Tex-his blood was spattered all around the chamber-and to Andy Arena. The crucifix itself had a forlorn, abandoned look. Emily pictured some archaeologist stumbling across it a few hundred years henc
e, trying to imagine what dark religion had practiced its bloody rites there.

  But perhaps they’d know, thought Emily, thinking of Phil’s manuscript. Perhaps it wasn’t such a bad thing that he’d written it. Especially if she never made it out of-

  Whoops. There’s an ugly little thought that needed to be stomped out before it got a chance to breed. There had to be a way out. And once out, all she had to do was determine whether Apgard had survived the explosion, as seemed likely if indeed he was the one who’d set it off.

  Because if he had survived, then sentimental and value-ridden as he was, he couldn’t possibly have been self-destructive enough to let the cop and the little girl survive as well. Apgard would have to help her escape, give her money. If we don’t hang together, etc….

  And if Apgard hadn’t survived, so much the better. As long as the manuscript remained undiscovered, there was no evidence linking her to any of the murders, nothing she couldn’t blame on Bennie, whose fingerprint was on the machete, or Phil, or even Apgard himself.

  But first she had to find a way out. She thought she could hear water trickling deeper in the cave complex, in the direction of the Oubliette. That was how the corpses got out. Not an inviting prospect-more like a last resort. But the Bat Cave also lay in that direction, and she knew there had to be some sort of chimney leading to the surface from there, wide enough to permit easy ingress and egress for the enormous bats and their equally impressive testicles. Whether it was also wide enough for Emily and her big ’uns remained to be seen. But one way or another…

  Emily thought back to Nias, the defining moment of her life. She’d always known she was superior to most people, in any of the ways that counted (that confidence was one of the psychopath’s greatest allies), but after the horror at the chieftain’s deathbed had come the illumination, the elevation, a sense of having been chosen. And despite everything that had happened, it was still with her. Emily Epp wasn’t beaten yet, not by a long-

  “Oh.” Startled, Emily put her hand to her breast. She hadn’t heard Bennie coming down the passageway from the white room, didn’t know he was in the cross chamber until he touched her shoulder. Nobody ever heard Bennie coming unless he wanted them to. “What do you want?” she asked without turning around. The old imperious tone-it had never failed before.

  “Only what is mine,” he said politely, then he applied his heavy rubber sap to the back of her head with a deft touch, hitting her just hard enough to render her unconscious, but not so hard as to fracture her skull.

  3

  The headrest and seat back of the Rover were wet with Apgard’s blood. Apgard himself seemed to lapse in and out of consciousness. Just before he was loaded into the ambulance, his breathing grew labored, sporadic. The paramedics hooked him up to an oxygen tank and rushed him to the hospital.

  That left Dawn. They wanted to take her to the hospital, too, but Holly put her foot down. Julian debriefed the child personally, with Holly present. Warm and dry, wreathed and turbaned in towels, sitting in her auntie’s lap in her auntie’s bed, Dawn felt a little like Madeline in the storybook, after she’d had her appendix out. She remembered almost everything except how terribly, terribly afraid she’d been. (In that respect at least-the way the memory lets go of fear and pain-somebody had done a nice job of programming the human mind.)

  She told them how Mr. Pender had rushed the Japanese guy. When she described the beating Pender had taken, and how she hadn’t seen him move afterward, Julian pursed his lips, bent his head to his notebook, and scribbled furiously, channeling all the emotions he would not allow himself to feel down his arm to his writing hand, breaking the point of his stubby silver mechanical pencil again and again.

  “And then the lady and the old guy left,” Dawn continued, “and Mr. Apgard told me to run, and there was a big explosion, and we were the only ones who got out. And Mr. Apgard said he had to blow up the tunnel because they were coming after us. He gave me the flashlight and told me to hide behind the elephant’s ear tree, and there was another big explosion and then we ran back to the car and he brought me home but it took such a long time because Mr. Apgard kept falling asleep.”

  When he left the cabin, Julian had five pages of notes and two pages of questions-what was Apgard’s involvement? was he a hostage or a perp who’d had a change of heart? what caused the explosion? — including the biggest question of all: where was the cave? Somewhere on the north end, was about all Dawn could tell them.

  But St. Luke wasn’t that large an island, and the part they called the rain forest was smaller yet. And at one time or another every inch of it had been explored-somebody had to know about a cave that size.

  Julian started making mental lists: old-timers, geologists, pot growers, old Mr. Wicker at the Historical Society. Have to roust some people out of bed. Tough titi. The girl hadn’t seen Pender move, but she couldn’t say for certain he was dead. And Julian of all people knew what a thick skull his old friend had. So if he had to wake up every person on the island, one by one, until he found somebody who could lead him to the cave, then that’s what-

  “Chief Coffee?”

  He turned, saw a woman he failed to recognize-a rarity for him, outside of tourist season. “Yes?”

  “I know where the cave is.”

  4

  I’ve been in tighter spots than this, Pender told himself. Whether he believed it was another matter. But there did seem to be plenty of food and water in the backpacks the Epps had left behind, a bottle of Darvocets for his headache, and more than enough batteries to keep the flashlight going until long after he’d run out of air.

  Air-that was going to be the problem. Or more precisely, oxygen. As far as Pender could tell, he was in a sealed chamber. He thought of those nine Pennsylvania miners who’d been trapped that past summer-how had they survived? Yes, of course: there’d been an air shaft.

  Never mind the miners. Bad example. There was only one of him and the chamber was ten paces wide, fifteen paces long, with a ten-or twelve-foot ceiling. How long would it take to use up that much oxygen?

  Frankly, my dear, I have no fucking idea, he told himself. He knew you were supposed to get down on the floor and conserve energy-or was that only in fires? Heat rises, but is CO2 heavier or lighter than oxygen? Or would they be evenly distributed? Again, no fucking idea. But he was pretty sure about the conserving energy part.

  And what a lucky coincidence that conserving energy just happens to be one of the things at which I am both naturally gifted and well practiced, Pender, slightly buzzed from the Darvocets, reminded himself, taking off his slicker and laying out layer after layer of the clothes he’d found in the backpack to make himself a reasonably comfy mattress. Then he remembered you weren’t supposed to let yourself fall asleep after a concussion. He recalled seeing a rolled-up typewritten manuscript in the pack with the women’s clothes-he took it out, rolled onto his side.

  They met at S University, the manuscript began. He was her professor, and although he was over a quarter of a century older than was she, it was love at first sight.…

  Dawson had eavesdropped. Shamelessly and without apology, she had flattened herself against the side of Holly’s cabin and listened through the screen overhead for word of Pender’s fate. She had winced, jammed her fist into her mouth to keep from crying out when she heard how Pender had been pistol-whipped into unconsciousness, and almost missed the next part.

  But when Dawn had mentioned hiding behind an elephant’s ear tree, that caught Dawson’s attention. Necklaces strung from the reddish brown seeds and the curiously shaped seedpods that gave the tree its name were among her best-selling handicrafts.

  There were several elephant’s ear trees on the island, but Dawson only knew one that was near a cave. The reason she knew that was when she’d climbed the tree at dusk last summer, during the dry season when the pods were the easiest to get at, she’d seen cloud after cloud of the enormous island bats, hundreds, maybe even thousands of them, emerging from
a hole in the ground only a couple hundred yards uphill, at the summit of the rain forest ridge.

  It was all Dawson could do not to rush into the cabin. But all those years as a fugitive had bred caution in her. I’ll tell Holly to tell them, she told herself. I’ll write an anonymous note. I’ll make an anonymous phone call.

  But Holly couldn’t lead them to the cave, any more than a note or phone call could. And besides, she’d already made that deal with the G/G/W, offering the only thing of value she had to offer-her freedom-for the safe return of Dawn and Pender. If she was going to turn herself in anyway, what did it matter whether Chief Coffee recognized her or not?

  She caught up with Coffee, voluntarily confronting a police officer for the first time in thirty-two years. She told him what she knew about the tree and the cave.

  He leaned forward, well into the intimate conversation zone. “You’re Dawson, aren’t you?”

  She held his eyes, held her breath-had Pender told him? “Yessir.”

  One beat, two beats; she thought her lungs would burst. Finally: “You’re even prettier than Pender said you were.”

  Dawson thought then that her heart would burst-from relief, not the compliment. Okay, maybe a little from the compliment-because it was Pender’s, indirectly. He can’t be dead, she thought. It just wouldn’t be fair.

  But then, life hadn’t exactly been fair to Robert Fassnacht, had it? Or his widow, or his three fatherless children. Was this going to be her payback? After all these years of penitence? If so, life was a petty son of a bitch and so was the G/G/W. Dawson decided to go back to being a Mysterian. Much less trouble.

  Lying on his side, his head propped up on one elbow, with the toilet paper stuck to the back of his scalp starting to unwind, Pender managed to get halfway through the manuscript before his eyes began to close of their own accord. I can’t fall asleep, he told himself, pillowing his head on his arm. I won’t-I’ll just rest. Have to rest. My eyes. Just for a second.