Buried Alive

by J. A. Kerley

  She looked up and I thought I saw a spark of smile, quickly extinguished in favor of nonchalance. I spun a chair in front of her desk, where I saw a grouping of photos from Powers’s death scene.

  “You’re back on the case?” I asked.

  Cherry shrugged. “I figure Krenkler’s first day push-away was a shot over my bow, making sure I knew my place.”

  “Which is?”

  “Making multiple copies of all case materials,” she said, keeping her face and voice emotionless. “Making runs for coffee and burgers. Smoothing the lady’s way into interviews with locals.”

  “Ever think she’s keeping you close to keep you open to blame?”

  “That thought has occurred, Kemo Sabe. I’m watching my flank.”

  I’ve watched it a time or two, my mind said. My mouth said, “Krenkler making any headway?”

  Cherry leaned back in her chair and sighed. “She wants to do all the interviews herself, like I’m too incompetent to ask a question. Trouble is, she’s got this imperial attitude. And she’s got all these guys in dark suits with her every step she takes, no idea how scary it is to a lot of the populace.”

  “People clam up the second Krenkler appears,” I said.

  Cherry nodded, silver earrings bouncing. “They pretend to be as dumb as she thinks they are. It seems to validate her suspicions, so she treats them even more like ignorant children and the circle keeps spiraling down. She has no concept of mountain folk.”

  I nodded understanding. Any group from a relatively isolated and low-money background learns the ritual as a form of protection. When you don’t know how the rulers will use information, the best play is playing dumb. To the well-heeled, knowledge is power. To the poor it’s usually just a target on their backs.

  “What’s Beale doing?” I asked.

  “He’s turned the Woslee police force completely over to Krenkler. She uses them for errands. She uses everyone for errands.”

  Cherry’s cellphone rang. She pulled it from her jacket. “What? Where? How bad?” she said, listening between the words. She snapped the phone shut and shook her head.

  “Caudill’s got a problem. Some preacher has gone O.K. Corral and is holed up in a church shooting anything that moves.”

  “Anyone hurt?” I asked.

  “A county worker brush-cutting a side road got hit in the thigh. He found cover under the tractor, but Caudill can’t get to him. Uh, Ryder …”

  “I haven’t been to church in a while.”

  17

  Within a minute we were on the Mountain Parkway, Cherry standing on the pedal, the speedometer in the hundred-ten-plus range. We veered on to an asphalt road that was barely a car and a half wide, changed direction on a switchback, climbed a couple hundred feet, swerved off on to a dirt road.

  I saw a trio of wooden crosses in the distance, the center cross twenty feet high. Behind them, on a rise of three mowed acres, was a single-wide trailer with a large cross painted in white across its front. A hand-lettered sign said Solid Word Church. A hundred feet behind, at the edge of a woods, was a second trailer, living quarters, a small garden to its side.

  A slug thudded into the side of the cruiser.

  “Damn!” Cherry yelled. “Get down.”

  She aimed the car into a steep drainage ditch beside the road, a few feet of cover. I saw a single-lane bridge two hundred feet ahead, a county-cop SUV and dark FBI cruiser on the far side. The occupants were safe behind a four-foot rock wall. Caudill and the Feds.

  We jumped out as a round thudded into the dirt. Cherry pulled up a walkie-talkie, waved it at Caudill. He pulled his own unit from his belt.

  “What’s the story, Caudill?”

  “We been stuck here since I called you. I’ve got two ambulances waiting a quarter-mile away.”

  “Where’s Beale?”

  “Hunting squirrel.”

  “Who’s in there, Buddy?” Cherry said. “Who’s the shooter? Over.”

  “It’s Brother Tanner.”

  “Ezekiel Tanner?” Cherry said. “Uncle Zeke?”

  Cherry set aside the communicator and stared at the church.

  “You’re related to the guy in there?” I asked.

  “His father was my uncle’s wife’s cousin’s brother third removed or something like that. I can’t keep it all straight.”

  “He’s a for-real reverend?”

  “Self-ordained. Zeke has always seemed more sick with the spirit than inspired by it. He used to give the blessing at family reunions. You ever been eight years old and told you’re gonna end up as cooked as the supper chicken, only in the devil’s oven?”

  “I had my own problems. You got field glasses in the cruiser?”

  Cherry thumbed the trunk mechanism on her keys. I duck-walked to the trunk, lifted the lid. A shot from the church blew out half the light bar as I found a set of high-powered binocs. I scrabbled back to Cherry’s side and peered over the top of the gulley, staying low.

  The church-trailer was atop a rising hill, a small rocky creek at the base, a hundred feet from us. A narrow asphalt county road angled the side of the church. Between church and creek and slender lane, the scene was postcard pastoral. Until you saw the big green John Deere tractor tipped into the gulley, its bush hog attachment like a giant lawnmower on its side. The injured operator sprawled beneath the tractor, his right leg red with blood. He wasn’t moving.

  Another shot rang out. A headlamp exploded on the tractor, glass raining down on the wounded man.

  “AVANT THEE, SATAN,” screamed a voice from the church. “Yea though I WALK through the VALLEY I FEAR NO EVIL!”

  It was Cherry’s turn to duck-walk to the trunk, returning with a bullhorn. She aimed the cone over the wall. “Zeke? This is Donna Cherry. You remember me, right? I always loved your preaching.”

  “BITCH DEVIL!” the man screamed, punctuating his words with a volley. “SPAWN OF SATAN! WHORE OF BABYLON!”

  “Not working,” she said, ducking back down as the guy started talking in tongues. “ARM-A-LACKEE TATALODO. SHEM PAYLA RAS! HARWHALLA DEEM-ADAYDA!”

  “He’s losing whatever’s left,” Cherry said. “Mad as a hatter.”

  “The guy under the tractor looks passed out,” I said. “Probably in shock.” I gauged the width of the creek, deep-cut banks, the creek a good yard beneath the level of the land.

  “I think I can get to the wounded man with the car,” I said. “There’s a rise I can use as a ramp.”

  “Jump the creek? No way. You’ll plant the nose in the creek bed. Even if you make it, you’ll have to drive in front of the church. He’ll pop you like Dick Cheney shooting a caged bird.”

  I studied Cherry’s car, the big Ford Crown Vic cop cruiser with a roaring four-point-six liter V-8 and the beefed-up frame and suspension. Harry and I had done enough unlikely feats in our succession of Crown Vics that the Motor Pool considered us persona non grata. I scuttled to the cruiser, pulled myself inside, studied a downslope over meadow grass to the creek-jump east of the church, then the two-hundred-foot run to the toppled tractor.

  Ducking low, I jammed the gear stick into reverse, pulling out of the cover as the windshield exploded. He had the range. I pushed the accelerator to the floor and heard the big V-8 scream. I roared into the field below the church, the creek rushing at me.

  I hit the rise, the car bottoming out, grille lifting in rebound. Airborne. Then: Thunderous boom, shocks breaking, sideways-skidding, passenger door popping open on busted hinges.

  I’d crossed the creek.

  Now to pass the trailer. I saw the rifle barrel hanging out a front window, ready to pick me off through the open door…

  Change of plans. I skimmed the car across the front of the trailer, cheap pasteboard construction versus serious Detroit iron. The Crown Vic peeled open the trailer like a jack plane slicing pine. A tire exploded. The hood popped open. My face filled with steam from the radiator. Tire flapping, I aimed the wobbling vehicle toward the wounded man.

/>   And then I was out and rolling beneath the tractor. Touching the man’s throat. Feeling a pulse, thank God.

  I saw Cherry and Caudill racing to the listing trailer with guns drawn. A warning shot, Cherry baying Stay down! The ambulances were moving in. It seemed odd that I didn’t see the Feds.

  I stood and was doing fine for about three seconds, until adrenalin buckled my knees and I sat flat on my ass like a swami.

  18

  Cherry and Caudill had stormed the trailer when they’d seen Tanner on the floor, moaning, grabbing at his belly. In what seemed like seconds - and with no resistance - the pair had the reverend subdued.

  The bush-hog operator was rushed toward a hospital in Jackson. The paramedics from the second bus were trying to get Tanner stabilized. We’d figured the guy was having a psychotic episode, but it seemed he had serious physical problems as well. He struggled to pull in breath, then rolled to his side and began shaking.

  Krenkler walked up, looked at the reverend. “Jesus,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “What’s wrong with him?”

  “What’s wrong with you?” I said, anger rippling through my guts.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  I said, “The only people I saw crossing the field to the church were Cherry and Caudill.”

  “And?”

  “Three armed and experienced FBI agents and you sat on your thumbs.”

  Krenkler looked on the verge of a yawn. “It’s a local matter. Not our problem.”

  “What?”

  “We’re here to stop a psychotic torturer, not a local head case. There were no new inclusions on the geocache site and Officer Caudill told us the victim was emotionally erratic. Ergo, it fell under local jurisdiction.”

  “That’s bullshit,” I said. “Fellow law-enforcement agents and an injured man were at risk and you squatted behind a wall and watched it like a croquet match.” I looked at the two other agents. They were turned away, like this scene wasn’t happening.

  Krenkler’s mouth twisted into an ugly shape. “Get out of here, Ryder. That’s an order.”

  “It’s not your jurisdiction, Agent Krenkler. You just said so.”

  The mouth twisted tighter but any response was interrupted by the preacher convulsing so powerfully he knocked one of the attendants from the ambulance. The sick man projectile-vomited a sticky curd the color of dead blood. It kept coming, a deluge, like a drainage pipe had broken in his guts.

  “My God,” Cherry whispered.

  “His vitals are failing,” one medic yelled to the other, eyes tight to the monitors attached to Tanner. “Oh shit, he’s shutting down, cardiac arrest.”

  The medics applied the shock paddles. Nothing.

  Applied them again.

  After four tries, they shook their heads. The bus pulled away. Somewhere in there the FBI had departed to do things in its jurisdiction.

  McCoy appeared, called by Cherry. Caudill and I followed Cherry into the torn and listing church-trailer, McCoy standing aside and watching us work. There were no pews, only folding chairs in disarray. At one end of the floor was a plywood pulpit, painted white, a hand-painted cross on the front.

  “Look for drugs,” Cherry said. “The rev was acting like a guy on PCP or meth.”

  Caudill was scrabbling through a metal cabinet. “Bullets and bibles. Wonder why he stopped shooting?”

  “He got too sick,” Cherry said. “Dry-heaving like his body was trying to push something from his gut.”

  “Demons,” I suggested. “Unfortunately, they were in his head.”

  “Let’s check his house,” Cherry said. “Nothing’s here.”

  We walked the fifty steps to the trailer where Tanner had lived. A two-box life. We went our separate ways and I checked a closet.

  “I’ve got six boxes of ammo at fifty rounds per,” I noted. “Another box of nines for the Browning. Was Tanner expecting a revolution?”

  “Paranoia.” Cherry lifted a 3 × 5 index card, a hole punched in one corner, a loop of string tied through the hole.

  “Got something?” I asked.

  “A note that says Bless you Brother for your constant inspiration. From one of the flock, I expect.” She tossed the note aside and studied a pan on the stove.

  “Tanner’s last meal. Chunks of chicken, potato, carrot, mushrooms, gravy. Hope he said grace.”

  We stepped into the dining area where I reported finding nothing of merit, Caudill the same. We heard a clanging of silverware and turned to see McCoy in front of the stove. He’d fished something from the stew with a fork, holding the specimen at eye level, studying it in the light through the window.

  “I don’t like this mushroom,” he said.

  We bagged the stew and went outside. Cherry’s cruiser was a jumble of useless metal and Caudill took us to his department, loaned Cherry a county car. She drove me to her office.

  “Tanner was really half-crazed?” I asked.

  “Like I said, Uncle Zeke was touched by the spirit, though some might say walloped so hard he lost all worldly perspective. You and I see gray, mostly. Zeke only saw white and black, Good and Evil. And Evil was always winning.” She paused to watch a hawk spiral in the sky, turned back to me. “When I see things like Soldering-iron Man, I think maybe Zeke was on to something.”

  “Tanner was always that way?”

  “Zeke started out gentle, a young pastor in tune with his flock. But maybe twenty years ago everything became repent this, repent that. He got strident on the salvation message, screaming at everyone to get saved before the devil got them. I always had this feeling …” She frowned, trying to find the words.

  “What?” I asked.

  “He wasn’t preaching to a flock so much as to himself.”

  Cherry dropped me off. I stepped up to my porch, pulled my keys. A fortune-cookie-sized strip of paper had been taped across the lock with small and precise words penned over it. Though the words were in French, the language didn’t matter: My brother wanted something, and that always meant Now. If I blew it off, he’d end up at my cabin at three a.m., shrieking in the window.

  My shoulders slumped. I turned and trudged to Charpentier’s cabin. I knocked on the thick door of Jeremy’s home, heard entrez-vous. My brother was sprawled on the couch wearing a purple robe, his long feet tucked into a pair of battered hiking shoes with laces removed. He had a cup of coffee at his side and a computer on his lap. He looked up, closed the computer.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “Company.”

  “I’m a little tired right now.”

  My brother’s nose started quivering like a hound’s nose. “You stink of sweat and gunpowder, Carson. I smell a woman, too. Have we gone burrowing for love in the cherry grove?”

  I saw his emergency-band scanner on the table. “You know what happened, right? You were listening.”

  He held up his hand, thumb and forefinger a half-inch apart. “A bit. I heard cops and medical people. A man died, correct?”

  “Yes. Badly.”

  “Tell me all about it, brother.”

  “I was visiting Cherry and she got a call about a man with a rifle shooting at—”

  “Not all three acts, Carson, just the final one. What was the death like?”

  “The man was sick. Convulsing. His heart stopped in the ambulance. Drugs maybe. Or it just chose that moment to go.”

  Jeremy’s brow furrowed with curiosity. “Was the death interesting?” he asked, eyes alert.

  “Interesting?”

  “You know … a sense of drama. Of theater. Or, as deaths go, was it just…?” he fluttered his tongue dismissively.

  “I don’t need this right now,” I said, not wanting to revisit a man’s demise for the odd pleasures of my brother. I walked out the door and kept moving.

  19

  The next morning found me sitting in the lodge restaurant at Natural Bridge Park, McCoy and Cherry across from me, revisiting the Tanner episode. Her cellphone buzzed. Sh
e pulled it from her jacket, walked to the porch for better reception. After three minutes she rang off, returning with a hard smile on her face as she shot McCoy a thumbs-up.

  “I messengered the mushroom to a buddy in forensics. Tanner’s chicken stew contained a fungus called a fool’s mushroom.”

  McCoy winced. “Amanita verna. Deadly poisonous. A few bites would start messing up the head and tearing down the machinery. Think Brother Tanner’s recipe came from the Borgia family cookbook?”

  I thought back to fungi noted on my hikes. In under a week I’d seen perhaps fifty different varieties. “Does this happen often?” I asked McCoy. “Mushroom poisoning?”

  “It’s a problem.”

  “There’s another possible explanation,” Cherry said, shaking her third packet of sugar into her cup of coffee. “Brother Tanner was purposely eating poison mushrooms to prove he was touched by Grace, safe under the watchful eye of God. It’s the creed of the snake handlers. Taking up serpents to test one’s faith. Cousin Zeke had been getting stranger over the years, more insistent on proofs of faith.”

  McCoy said, “Two choices, then: Zeke got careless or tempted fate.”

  I said, “There’s a third. Tanner’s part of the other killings. The geocache murders.”

  Cherry shook her head. “It hurts to agree with Krenkler, but nothing ties Tanner’s case to the others. He wasn’t tortured. Nothing appeared on the geocache website.”

  “He looked a lot like a man in torture,” I argued. “Especially those last few minutes. Something feels related to the others.”

  “Can you expand on that logically,” Cherry asked, “or are you using your psychic powers?”

  I thought a moment, shrugged, let it go. “What’s your plan for the day?” I asked, changing the topic.

  “Sonny Burton’s visitation is today. The Feds want me there in case our killer pays his respects.”

  “The Feds are attending?”

  “I actually convinced Krenkler they’d be too conspicuous in person. There’s a junk shop a block and a half away. They’ll park behind it and we’ll use radio.”