Buried Alive (Carson Ryder, Book 7)

by J. A. Kerley

  I saw headlamps ahead on the highway. They shifted to dim as I cut mine back. Then they blazed bright and blinding between my wipers. I held my hand in front of my eyes to cut the glare. The vehicle passed by, a high-sprung mini-pickup painted with camouflage blacks and greens.

  A hunter’s truck.

  I looked in the rear-view and saw the scarlet lights of braking. I knew in my gut it was Crayline. My eyes returned from the rear-view to see a tight curve ahead. I braked too hard, skidding from the road into a shallow ditch, wheel spinning in my hand until I grabbed tight, losing valuable seconds. Crayline roared up and banged my bumper, pushing me ahead. I downshifted, slid through a bend, straightened.

  He was on me in an instant, another ramming. I heard a gunshot as my side window crumbled away. I braked hard for a switchback, rain sweeping my face. Crayline’s lights seemed in my back seat.

  “History’s getting fixed,” he roared incomprehensibly. “You ain’t stopping it.”

  I ran another blind curve, Crayline cutting low and trying to clip me into a spin. I watched him miss by inches, screaming out his window between shots. Rain blew into my eyes like a gale. I downshifted and gained a few feet. Somewhere ahead was the turn-off to Cherry’s home. Crayline was on my bumper.

  Our combined lights showed a lane between trees. I jammed on the brakes, cut sideways and slid off the road a hundred feet before Cherry’s drive. I clipped a tree, fought for control, made the turn on to the lane to Cherry’s house.

  Crayline was behind me seconds later. I blinked away rain and saw the lights of Cherry’s house, the tree-studded yard, the drive appearing to continue beyond the cabin.

  Crayline was closing fast. A shot screamed off the cab.

  I roared past Cherry’s house, waited a millisecond beyond hope, downshifted to second. The truck slowed with a jolt but without brake lights. I aimed into a tree, hit a glancing blow. The air bag exploded. I shoved it aside as Crayline roared past, probably wild with glee at seeing my wrecked truck.

  But there would be no stopping and no coming back for Bobby Lee Crayline. I pictured his hideous grin freezing as he looked ahead and saw nothing but air.

  Crayline jumped on the brakes. His taillights were horizontal for a split second, then arced inexorably into the valley. I pushed from my truck as the door opened on Cherry’s cabin, I saw a shotgun muzzle sniffing over the threshold.

  “It’s OK,” I yelled. “It’s me.”

  She stepped outside, wearing an outsized T-shirt and little more. It seemed appropriate, given that I was standing in her yard solely in sodden boxers.

  “Sweet Jesus, Ryder. What’s going on?”

  I waved her to follow me to the edge of the cliff. We stared into the valley. Forty stories below the trees were orange with the gasoline-fueled glow of Bobby Lee Crayline’s funeral pyre.

  Chapter 36

  Eight thirty a.m. found Cherry and me at the largest of the pair of park cabins the Feds used as their Woslee field HQ. Krenkler had arrived, her hair even brighter and stiffer than I remembered, the out-curling side points like she’d honed them in a pencil sharpener. She was on her cell and sending her harried agents to and fro solely with irate glances and fingersnaps.

  She jabbed her fingers toward where we should sit: the dining-room table. Krenkler finished her call, popped a stick of gum between her scarlet lips and gave me her best cross-examination stare as she strode over.

  “You knew this guy, Ryder. You interviewed him in the Alabama State Prison. You were at the mental institute when he escaped. He died trying to kill you. That’s three too many coincidences for me. What’s the story?”

  Questions I’d been asking myself for hours. I rubbed my face with my hands.

  “I’m flummoxed. Utterly mystified. There’s nothing I ever did to Crayline to piss him off. He probably had grudges against half the people in his life, but he picked—”

  “You. He wanted you here.”

  “There’s no reason for it. I was never anything to him.”

  Krenkler had big hands with several shiny rings aboard. She set the hands on the table beside me and leaned close. “You sure it was a woman’s voice that called you to the guy with the tool up his pooper?”

  I said, “It sounded like a woman’s voice.” And it had, that being the gender my brother was imitating.

  “You’re absolutely sure?”

  “Yes,” I said, frazzled and sore and feeling like I was still clinging fifty feet in the air with bullets slapping beside me. “Why?”

  Krenkler stood and backed away, leaning against the knotty pine wall, her arms crossed. With her black pantsuit and flared lapels, she resembled a looming raven, only blonder.

  “Ryder, can you think of any reason Robert Crayline would want to kill any of the three others he’s killed here?”

  I rubbed my face. “I don’t have any idea what he’d have against …” I paused, hearing Crayline’s words the day of his escape, right after the lawyer’s hired goon had spat on Bobby Lee and called him a genetic moron.

  “Don’t go dumb on me Ryder,” Krenkler said. “What is it?”

  “Bobby Lee threatened a guy the day he escaped. Last name was Bridges. I don’t recall the first name. Bridges was half-bright muscle, probably an occasional employee of Crayline’s legal firm. Call Arthur Slezak, of Dunham, Krull and Slezak in Memphis. Ask Slezak if he’s seen Bridges lately.”

  Krenkler frowned. “You think the guy with the tool up his tailpipe might be this Bridges?”

  I thought back to the horror show in the reeking shack, saw the body wired to the bed. “The corpse’s face was ruined,” I said, “but the body size fits. Hard and fit. Crayline said he was going to fry Bridges’s guts for supper.”

  I heard one of the agents at my back mutter Holy shit. Krenkler glared at the agent. “How about checking on this Bridges?” she snapped. “That too much to ask?”

  In the past dozen hours I’d been to my cabin only long enough to put on clothes and note with despair I was still sans dog. I stood.

  “Where you think you’re going, Ryder?” Krenkler growled.

  “I’m going to shower and go to bed for a couple hours,” I said quietly. “Anyone thinking different better be ready to use their gun.”

  Cherry said she’d drop me off, my truck still at her home until photos and reconstructions were made, but Krenkler wasn’t through grilling her on local developments. Now would come the reconstruction: why Crayline had selected Woslee County as his killing field. Cherry didn’t look happy at the prospect of continuing the tête-à-tête with Krenkler, but it was part of the job. I was ferried back by Agent Rourke. He seemed the most human of the robots on Krenkler’s team.

  “How is it, working with Agent Krenkler?” I asked him.

  “I retire in two months,” he said, not turning his eyes from the road. “Ask me then.”

  “Gotcha,” I said.

  He dropped me at my front door. I had hoped whatever forces propel the universe had put my night’s ordeal in the book and, checking the account to date, decided I might deserve the return of my dog.

  The budgeting was not in my favor.

  I showered and changed and, still charged with adrenalin residue, lost my need to sleep. I downed two power bars and made coffee strong as the bolts I’d clung to on the cliff face. I added a tot of Maker’s Mark, going out to the porch to sit and think.

  Crayline had been at the Alabama Institute for Aberrational Behavior, the first time during my brother’s tenure. That in itself didn’t mean a whole lot. Though the Institute housed seventy or eighty full-time patients, another hundred or so criminals might rotate through on an annual basis, there for a few days or weeks of evaluation or study. Plus there were levels of security, different wings – “wards” in the semi-hospital parlance used at the Institute. Since Crayline had been there as a transient, a person for temporary study, he might not have had access to the general population which included my brother.

  But I ha
d to know, just for my own knowing. I called Dr Wainwright at the Institute, gave her a brief overview of the situation with Bobby Lee Crayline, and asked for records of his stay. Wainwright was apologetic.

  “Those records are just for staff, Detective. And not even the general, non-medical staff. Only the doctors are allowed to view the records.”

  “It could be important,” I said.

  “I’m very sorry. There are certain notes and observations made that could be subject to privacy issues.”

  “It wasn’t that long ago, Doctor, you begged me to come to the Institute to help stop Bobby Lee Crayline’s hypnosis. I came running. Afterwards, you said you owed me big-time and if there was anything you could ever do to—”

  “I remember,” Wainwright said.

  “In my book that was a promise. I’m here to collect.”

  A long pause. She said, “Let me close the door to my office.”

  I started taking notes as Wainwright looked through Crayline’s records, but after a couple minutes I flung the notes to the floor of the porch, too angry to write. My voice was even as I thanked Wainwright and told her she’d closed the account.

  I hobbled toward my brother’s cabin, fists clenched as tight as my jaw.

  Chapter 37

  I stood on Jeremy’s porch and willed myself calm. If he saw my anger he’d shut me out or disappear into the forest. I had to appear serene. The door was unlocked and I entered.

  “Jeremy,” I called, stepping over the threshold. “Where are you?”

  “Upstairs, in my office,” he yelled, joy in his voice. “Come watch me make money, Brother. The blustering drunkard is starting the day on a binge.”

  I took the steps two at a time, strode the hall to his open office door. He was at his desk, wearing a dark pinstriped suit, pink shirt, tightly knotted tie. It seemed odd until I realized he was in his business mindset. He had his gentleman gardener garb, his button-down business dress, his retired academic outfit, his rugged outdoorsman wear … he affected the uniform necessary to fully complete each personality.

  “What are you doing here?” I said.

  He spun in his chair. The screens on his desk danced with charts and graphs and crawls of stock symbols. “The Chinese Ministry of Economics issued a report calling for increased spending on infrastructure. The drunkard is puking gold … I’ve got a heavy position in an Asian copper-mining company that jumped eight points in an hour on the Hang Seng Index. I’m about to—”

  “NO! What the hell is going on here?” I said, flailing my arms, meaning here, the locale, the region.

  He regarded me warily before turning back to the monitor. “Whatever kind of question is that, Carson? It’s vague. What are you talking about?”

  I crossed the room in a half-heartbeat, grabbed the back of his chair and spun him to face me. My voice was a constricted hiss. “I’m talking about Bobby Lee Crayline. He just tried to kill me. He’s dead, thankfully.”

  The surprise in my brother’s eyes turned to evasion, which in Jeremy was less a tactic than an emotion. He switched into acting mode, moving up-angled eyes back and forth, as if searching a catalogue of names in his head.

  “I’m sorry, Carson. I have no idea who you’re talking about.”

  “You know exactly who Bobby Lee Crayline is,” I said, sick of his games. “You got into the heads of everyone who came near you at the Institute. You needed to know what made them tick and how they could be of use to you.”

  “That’s so cynical. I never had any real contact with the man.”

  “STOP LYING!” I roared. From nowhere my hands were around my brother’s throat, lifting him from the chair, spinning him into the wall. “Did you know the staff at the Institute keep round-the-clock track of who the inmates talk to, relate to, spend their time with? It’s an interaction study to see who pairs up, weak with weak or weak with strong … and who appears to be using who.”

  “It’s whom,” my brother snarled. “And it’s disgusting.”

  “From the moment Crayline walked in the door, you started circling him. Nodding the first day, speaking in passing the second, eating together on day three. Five days later you two were bonded like Siamese twins. Crayline started his mornings in the community room, waiting for your dramatic daily entrance. The staff read the body language, Jeremy. You were the Alpha in the relationship. Big nasty dangerous Bobby Lee Crayline treated you like some kind of wizard king.”

  “A pack of lies from a den of spies.”

  “You know what else was recorded, Jeremy?”

  “My bowel movements, from the sounds of it.”

  I wrenched him tighter to the wall. “You and Bobby Lee Crayline sitting alone in a corner of the ward, Crayline sobbing on the couch as you patted his back and whispered in his ear. People like Crayline don’t cry like babies, Jeremy. What was all that about?”

  Jeremy pushed my chest, hard. It broke my grip, sending me backwards. “All right,” he said, holding up his hands in surrender. “I remember Bobby. He had things clanging together inside him, issues.”

  “Everyone there has issues!” I snapped. “They define issues. What did you and Crayline talk about?”

  “I told Bobby things about my past. My experiences touched something inside him. He seemed fascinated at how I’d overcome my history. My abuse.”

  “You told him how it ended?” I said. Jeremy had disemboweled our father and strung bits of him in the trees.

  My brother smiled and stabbed his hand in the air, as though plunging a knife deep into tissue. “Not an end, Carson. A beginning.” He canted his head, regarding me with curiosity. “Helluva day, wasn’t it, Carson? The day the cops came to tell us we were free?”

  … police at the door telling my mother her husband had been found in a nearby woods, lashed to a tree, disemboweled while still alive, his innards spread across the ground and into the surrounding trees as if a terrible ritual had been performed.

  I said, “I’ll remember it forever.”

  “Do you remember the knife I used, Carson? You do, don’t you? Father’s old hunting knife, the one he’d gotten from his father? Hidden in the back of his top desk drawer?”

  I felt the knife in my hand as if I’d held it yesterday. Razor sharp. Hickory handle, an eight-inch stainless-steel blade with a curve like a gentle smile.

  “Of course,” I said. “I know the knife. Why is this important to—”

  “Did I ever tell you why I selected it?”

  “I don’t know. I guess it was close and wouldn’t be missed.”

  My brother shook his head like I was wasting his time. “Don’t be a simpleton, Carson. It was Daddy’s beloved knife. I needed to do something very important with it. But first, I needed to perform a magic trick: I had to move the knife from his alliance to mine.”

  My brother’s voice had dropped into a soft monotone and I again felt him leading me into the chaos of his mental landscape. “You’re talking about befriending wood and metal?” I scoffed.

  “I’m talking about a power akin to magic, Carson. Gaining power over the past. I started by opening the drawer to get the knife used to seeing me. Later, I took it on visits to my room where it learned to trust me. After I’d made the knife mine, I put it above the ceiling tiles. Beside the light above my bed.”

  “Jeremy, this is completely insa—”

  “SHUT UP! Whenever Father entered my room, he walked beneath the knife. I visualized fingers of blood-red light reaching from the knife to Daddy dear. It felt delicious. By the time I used the knife, Carson, I had granted it power unheard of by Excalibur: the power to cut me free of my past.”

  I shook my head. Excalibur, befriending knives, transforming time through delusions … Talking to my brother was like being locked in a revolving door and thrown into a maelstrom. I walked to the window, finding the reality my brother was attempting to dissolve. Reality was the amber sunlight filtering through the trees and dappling the garden. Reality was the red wheelbarrow, the weath
ered shed, the hoe against the fencepost. Reality was the finches pecking at the feeder, the bees crisscrossing above the hives.

  My brother’s voice broke into my thoughts. “You don’t believe me? You came into possession of father’s magical knife, Carson. You discovered it behind a brick in the storm cellar, right? Where it had been waiting for you.”

  “It was just a knife, Jeremy,” I sighed, keeping my eyes outside, looking at the real. “It was always just wood and metal.”

  hidden behind a loose brick, rolled in a strip of velvet, the blade mottled with dark stains

  “Really? What did you do with the knife, Carson?” he asked. “What happened?”

  “You know that, Jeremy. I threw it away.”

  “Oh? Just tossed it in the trashcan? Or perhaps flung it out into a field?”

  “I threw it in the Gulf, Jeremy.”

  “So the knife went into the sea,” he purred. “Interesting. Where in the sea, Carson? Where exactly?”

  at the mouth of Mobile Bay, or perhaps throat

  “It’s not important.”

  “Come on, O brother mine,” he said. “Tell big brother about the knife.”

  “I was on the Dauphin Island ferry. I threw the knife overboard. No big deal.”

  waiting far out on the waters and knowing the sea floor was littered with the carcasses of broken ships and doomed men

  “Ah. In the channel where the Battle of Fort Morgan occurred. Seems a heroic place to drop a sad old knife, Brother. Down to the depths where the bones of the valiant dead rattle and cry.”

  the knife concealed in my belt, shirt overhanging, my thumb sliding over the edge of the blade as I looked side to side, no one watching

  “Yes,” I admitted.

  “How did you feel when it sunk beneath the waves?”

  the knife moving in a see-saw motion in the current, as if cutting away bonds, a final glint of light slicing from the blade and then covered forever by green and flowing water …