A Darker Justice

by Sallie Bissell

  CHAPTER 46

  Jonathan Walkingstick opened his eyes. An inch from his nose, irregular spots of knotty-pine paneling wavered before him. One spot looked like the profile of Abraham Lincoln; another reminded him of a small birthmark on Ruth’s arm. For an instant he smiled at the memory, then a wave of sick, hot pain dissolved the spots into darkness. Christ, he thought, squeezing his eyes shut. What have they done to me?

  He lay motionless, hardly breathing. Gradually the pain ebbed away, like poisonous floodwater receding into some sick river. When his pulse slowed, he lifted his head. He lay on his side, curled into the same fetal position that he’d seen coma victims assume. He inched his hand down between his legs and held his breath. Gently he touched his penis, then, spreading his legs just a little, his balls. They were shriveled hard and tight against him, but everything still felt attached to his body, where it ought to be. Thank God. Whatever those bastards had done to him, at least he was still whole.

  Gingerly he straightened his legs, then rolled over on his back. His head bumped against something. He looked up. More knotty-pine planks disappeared into the gloom overhead. If he extended his left hand, he touched a wall. If he stretched his legs, he touched another. He seemed to be lying in a tiny room. The air hung cold and rank around him, and a sour, sweet smell like something rotting made him want to recoil from the very air that kept him alive.

  Easing forward with infinite care, he sat up. For an instant the room spun so crazily, he thought he might vomit, then images began to resolve around him. Instinctively he felt for Ribtickler, his knife. It was gone, as was the gun Safer had given him. Curiously, his wallet remained in the back pocket of his jeans. He opened it and thumbed through its contents. His lips curled in a faint smile. Tucked behind his driver’s license and insurance card was a tattered picture of Mary Crow.

  As he checked the rest of his pockets, his feet banged against a rough-hewn door, where a thin ribbon of light seeped in. Along the back wall of the room stood two wooden boxes with dingy, cracked toilet seats; beyond them lay Agent Daniel Safer, hunched in the same fetal position from which Walkingstick had just arisen.

  “Safer?” he called. His voice rasped like a dry corn husk. “Are you okay?”

  The agent did not respond. Jonathan stared at his motionless body and struggled to piece together what had happened. He remembered Safer’s turning around and saying Tuttle? And then the other man’s insane grin as he said Hello, Big Dan; then teenagers taking his gun, their eyes shiny with rage. Then his balls felt as if a dozen mules had kicked him all at once and his knees buckled as he slid into a mindless oblivion.

  “Safer!” Jonathan called again. “Wake up, buddy.”

  Safer’s eyes flickered open. They looked at Jonathan, unseeing. His mouth moved, but no words came out.

  “You’re okay,” Jonathan reassured him. “You’ve still got all your parts.”

  Safer blinked.

  Jonathan struggled to his feet and hobbled over to the door. Pressing his face against the slit of light that shone from outside, he tried to pinpoint where they were, but all he could see were pine trees melding into an endless forest of darkness. In a fit of mad hope, he tried the door. It wobbled in its frame, but did not open.

  “Christ, it stinks in here. Where are we?” Safer wheezed from the floor.

  “In a latrine,” Jonathan replied. “They’ve locked us in.”

  “It feels like somebody’s done a war dance on my balls.”

  “I think they must have used some kind of phaser on us. Nothing else would hurt this long, and this bad.”

  “Bastards.” Safer’s voice was as rusty as an old man’s. He struggled to his feet and checked his own pockets, pulling out a set of keys, a wallet, two quarters, and a penny. “They took my gun and my phone.”

  “And my knife,” said Walkingstick. “But they left everything else. Have you got anything we could make some kind of tool from?”

  “I don’t think so.” Safer blinked at the array of items in his hand.

  “Then we’ll have to try something else.” Jonathan ran his hands over the surface of the door. Constructed of four wide boards nailed together, it was hung from the outside, a curious arrangement for a simple latrine. The hinges were on the exterior of the structure, and when he pushed against the door it didn’t budge. Someone had shoved a bar into place to wedge it firmly shut.

  “We could get out easy if we had something to lift up the bar on the other side.”

  Jonathan studied the door for a moment, then he unbuckled his belt and slid off the empty knife sheath. The leather was worn, but long and stiff. If he could squeeze it through the gap in the door, they might have a shot. “Let’s give this a try.”

  At first the sheath seemed too thick to squeeze through the gap, but Jonathan manipulated it until finally half of it emerged on the other side of the door. Working upwards, he felt it nudge against the bar.

  “Okay,” he said softly. “I’m there. If the leather is strong enough to raise the bar, we’re out.”

  “Hold it tight against the door.” Safer moved closer. “And lift real slow.”

  With sweat beading his forehead, Jonathan wriggled the sheath upwards. The bar felt heavy, but moved freely in its cradle. Centimeter by slow centimeter, he inched the sheath higher, knowing he risked getting the bar almost up and having it flop back down, locking them in again.

  “When I say push,” he murmured to Safer without taking his eyes off his task, “push this door hard.”

  “You got it.”

  The seconds dripped by. Up the bar came, inch by inch. Finally he felt it jiggle, free of its frame.

  “Push!” he cried.

  Safer slammed against the door. As it flapped open, a rush of cold, sweet air filled the rank latrine. Both men dropped to the ground in case a guard stood lurking outside, but the woods remained silent except for a screech owl shrilling far off in the shadows.

  They crept out of their prison and back toward the castle. When they reached the tree line they saw that the lights that had once glowed so brightly from the gym had spread; now every window in the castle blazed like a beacon in the dark.

  “Jesus, what the hell’s going on?” murmured Safer.

  The two men watched as the boys who had been laboring in the gym now gathered around a bonfire built at the edge of the old tennis court. Its leaping flames illuminated their serious young faces, and as the blaze grew higher more boys came from the castle, all dressed in black camouflage suits, carrying rifles slung over their shoulders. The young Troopers ignored the cheery warmth of the fire and paced up and down the tennis court, focusing their attention on the broad mountain ridge that thrust into the darkness beyond them.

  “I’ll be damned!” whispered Jonathan. “They must have escaped!”

  “Oh, come on,” Safer scoffed. “Mary and Judge Hannah? They’re probably beaten and hungry. They couldn’t break out of that castle and get past those armed boys.”

  Jonathan chuckled. “If Mary Crow went in there to rescue Irene Hannah, it would take more than armed boys and a big castle to stop her.”

  “But where would she go?” asked Safer. “There’s nothing around here but forest.”

  “Russell Cave.” Jonathan pointed in the same direction that Wurth’s Troopers were gazing. “At the top of that ridge. Best place in the world to hide.”

  “Can we get up there before they do?” Safer nodded at the boys around the fire.

  “We can sure as hell try,” said Jonathan as he slipped silently into a growth of shadowy pines.

  CHAPTER 47

  Tommy ran through the forest, keeping the ancient, barely visible road on his left, praying that Willett hadn’t been kidding when he’d said it joined a paved highway just a couple of miles to the east.

  “Two miles,” he said out loud, mostly for the comfort of hearing his own voice. In the summer, when he and Willett had ventured out at night, the woods had roared with noise—crickets chirping, ni
ght birds calling, unseen predators shuffling through fallen leaves, on the track of some hidden prey. Now the forest stood hushed and silent, as if the wintertime trees themselves resented his intrusion into their brittle, leafless world.

  He zipped his jacket up closer around his neck and ran on, pushing branches away from his face, falling into a ground-covering stride that allowed him to plow on through the night. He wondered if Willett’s ghost might not pop out from behind the trees, his face stretched in a grin. Tommy-boy, it would say. What took you so long?

  Finally, when his legs began to feel rubbery from fatigue, he glimpsed something. The dark gray of the cave road seemed to dissolve into a wide expanse of lighter gray. Slowing, he crept behind a tree and peered through the branches ahead. His heart flopped in his chest. He saw the intersection, just as he expected. But what he hadn’t expected to see was one of Wurth’s Jeeps parked in the middle of it.

  He blinked at the eeriness of the scene. Five young men sat in the vehicle, all armed but doing nothing except looking straight ahead. It was if all five had known exactly where to find him; now they were just waiting for him to come walking down that road.

  Damn, he thought. Wurth must have known about the cave all along. Grice and Rogers and the other three were sentries Wurth had posted at the mouth of the cave road.

  Why hadn’t they heard him? He had been tromping through the woods like an elephant, yet they all sat in the Jeep as if they were in some kind of trance. Suddenly the driver bent his head and raised his arm. He was looking at his watch.

  “Okay.” Cabe heard Rogers’s voice so clearly, he could have been standing right beside him. “Let’s get going.”

  He held his breath as everyone but Spooner leaped out of the Jeep. They divided up into two-man teams, each taking one side of the cave road. With their rifles pointed at the ground, each boy pulled a flashlight from his pack and held it at shoulder level, just like cops on a raid. At Rogers’s single command of “Go!” they slid into the forest, their flashlights flickering through the trees. It would be only moments, Cabe knew, before those lights fell on him.

  Hastily he pressed his body against the chill forest floor. He would have to crawl now, and crawl fast, staying under the beams of flashlight. He started snaking through the underbrush, inching forward on his belly. Twenty yards away he could hear Grice and Armbruster, rattling through the leaves, moving remorselessly toward him.

  With his heart beating wildly, Tommy crawled, trying to be quiet, using his toes to push himself along the frozen earth. Close to the ground the air smelled like iron, and his fingers touched icy little pockets of snow. For an instant he feared he might sneeze. Flattening himself behind a rotting log, he grabbed both nostrils tight and breathed through his mouth. When the tickle in his nose finally passed, he raised his head. The flashlights were flickering on the tree he’d hidden behind only minutes before. Step by step, Grice and Armbruster were coming straight toward him.

  Crawling was not getting him out fast enough. He was going to have to try something else. Swiftly he rolled over the log, burying himself along its mossy underside. If Grice and Armbruster’s lights fell on nothing but empty forest, they might move on somewhere else.

  He heard a twig snap, then a male voice whispered “Ouch!” His muscles were rigid with apprehension as he lay motionless while the Troopers neared. Beams crossed above his head, one light catching the rough branches of a shagbark hickory. Just play dead, he told himself, trembling so hard his teeth chattered. Play dead now, or be dead in a few minutes.

  The footsteps neared; the lights played a kind of tag inches above his head. He could hear Armbruster’s thick breathing, almost smelled his cigarette-tainted breath. Suddenly both lights converged just inches above his head.

  “What the fuck’s that?” Armbruster said incredulously.

  “Don’t know.” Grice took a step forward. “I’ve never seen nothing like it.”

  Cabe heard leaves rustling, then a cry, then something scuttled through the underbrush, not a foot away from him.

  “Don’t shoot!” Armbruster cried. “It’s not them.”

  “What the fuck was it?”

  “Bobcat, maybe. Or a skunk. It wasn’t either of those women or Cabe.” Armbruster giggled. “You look like you just shit your britches, Grice.”

  “Shut up,” Grice snapped. “Let’s get the fuck out of here. They couldn’t have gotten this far, anyway.”

  Cabe held his breath as they lingered a moment longer, then he heard their footsteps moving away. When the flashlight beams disappeared, he looked up. All he could see were shadows now, slipping through trees, flicks of light issuing from them like dying stars. He knew he didn’t have much time left. Soon they would figure out that Mary and Irene weren’t in the woods at all. Soon they would find out that those two were in the cave, cornered and helpless.

  Tommy counted backward from fifty, then got to his feet. The search party moved on, and the hushed emptiness returned to the forest like snow sifting down from heaven. Without a glance back, he turned and ran, forgetting about Grice and Armbruster, forgetting about everything except the minutes ticking away for the ladies in the cave.

  He threw himself up a hill, slipping on pine needles that had less traction than black ice. Something yowled and skittered through the bushes ahead of him; a thorny vine nearly pulled off his glasses. Finally he struggled to the top of the ridge, his lungs heaving. He blinked, astonished. There, just as Willett had told him, stood the bridge that spanned Highway 441. He ran.

  Across the highway was a parking lot and a sign that read “Scenic Overlook.” To his left, the road twisted up the dark mountain like a coiled piece of grapevine. To his right, it curved less precipitously down into the valley below. At night, a semi driver might well pull into the overlook parking lot to cool off his brakes.

  He crossed over to the parking lot, rubbing his arms, listening for the growl of an engine decelerating down the mountain. A screech owl cried in the darkness, near enough to make him jump, but he heard nothing that sounded remotely like a truck.

  “Come on,” he urged. “Somebody drive down this damn road right now!”

  He paced up and down, his footsteps echoing as a raw wind stung his cheeks. Suddenly he stopped. Had he heard the distant rumble of a motor? The sound came again—sketchy, but crisp enough to convince him that he wasn’t imagining it. In the dark, a truck was barreling down the mountain. Now he just had to figure out how to stop it.

  He studied the road. If he stood in the middle of the pavement a hundred feet before the parking lot, he might be able to flag a semi down in time for it to stop. Provided, of course, that the truck wasn’t going over twenty-five miles an hour and the driver was alert enough not to flatten him like a possum. Two big if’s, but what the hell. Time was running out. He had no choice.

  He pulled off his jacket and shirt as he ran, running past the overlook and stationing himself on the center line of the highway. Already he could hear some big engine downshifting, the low diesel whine of speed tamped down by gears. Suddenly he wanted to laugh. This was crazy. Insane. Willett would have loved it. You’re flyin’, Tommy boy, he would say.

  Cabe jumped up and down to keep warm, his clothes in his hands, his bare chest puckering from the icy air. When the beam of two headlights flashed across the treetops above him, he started waving his shirt like crazy. Before he could draw another breath, lights brighter than the sun blinded him. White ones, yellow ones, red. An airhorn screamed. Although his arms were flapping like bird wings, his legs seemed frozen to the road. All he could do was wait for the truck to smack him far out into the overlook, where he would soar over a million trees before falling, like Icarus, dead to the ground. Flyin’, he thought, grinning as Willett’s voice echoed in his head. You’ll be flyin’, Tommy-boy. Flyin’ for real!

  CHAPTER 48

  Stump Logan followed Wurth as he spread his boys out in a sweep, just as he and Wurth had led other boys, so many years ago. Mo
st of those boys were dead now. Though this terrain was mountainous instead of flat, the air cold rather than hot, the trees and the damp and the inscrutable darkness were the same. A hard, tight knot tingled in Logan’s gut just as it had back then, when he’d slithered along on his belly, listening for the enemy that made no noise until the last sound you ever heard: the single, sick criiick of the trip wire you just stumbled over or the chuuuunk of a grenade dropping at your feet. What he remembered about the war were the tiny little noises. They still had the power to drench him in a cold sweat and send his pulse skyrocketing.

  Logan frowned. Where most guys had hated every second they spent in that miserable swamp of a country, he and Wurth had relished it. Each patrol turned them into hunters like they’d never dreamed of, and after a week or two in the bush they always came back to camp honed like the straight razors in his uncle’s barbershop. He and Wurth always made their body count, sometimes bringing back an occasional ear as a souvenir. Jack Bennefield said they were sickos, but then Bennefield never had been a Feather Man. An operative, yes, but Jack had never had the balls to be a Feather Man. Bennefield just did his job and strummed his damn guitar, mooning over the pretty wife he’d left at home. The Feather Men drank whiskey and played more lethal instruments. Women, beyond a ready one to fuck, held little interest for them. Stump spat as he remembered Bennefield crawling back from one particularly bad patrol, holding on to his sanity by singing broken bits of “Sweet Dream Baby” under his breath. Poor Jack Bennefield. Everybody was so sorry about him.

  Now, as they crested the mountain ridge, he felt his old rage at Bennefield consuming him all over again, even though the bastard was long dead and he was now helping Wurth hunt two beat-up women and a boy whose voice still cracked.