The screams continued, and no one came out.
Conch realized that he was going to have to go in.
God help him, he had no choice.
PARKER SHIELDED his eyes against the sun and sat in the passenger seat, one eye on the Google Maps app on his phone, the other on the road ahead. Kendall was driving like a local, speeding through the curves of the mountain road to the spot that Sheriff Conch had asked them to check out.
The afternoon was waning, but they’d lost a little time earlier at the Clark Residence. Mrs. Clark was dead. Breast cancer, the year before. Mr. Clark had answered the door in a dirty t-shirt and shorts, with a beer in one hand and a half-smoked cigarette in the other, looking very much like a man with a dead wife and a missing daughter.
He was drunk and their badges seemed to agitate him. “I blame all you motherfuckers, how’s about that?” he slurred, wobbling briefly in the doorway before he wisely chose to lean against the doorframe.
Kendall tried to head the situation off. “Mr. Clark, we’re sorry for your loss—”
“Sorrrrry? Bullshit! You’re out here to cover yer asses for some reason.”
“Sir—”
“Had you guys just done your”—he paused to partially ball up his fist, the cigarette sticking up at them like a smoking finger—“your damn jobs and found my baby girl, my little Amber, then Jenny would still be here too, I know it.”
Parker tried next. “Look, Mr. Clark, we’re trying to see if we can garner any information to help find—”
“Don’t! Don’t you even say it.” His voice cracked. “We called and called that first month. You sons a’bitches and all your ideas. She ran away, my ass! My little girl would never do that.”
“Sir, I’m—”
“Sure. She was caught up with those hood rats some. They got her to do crack once. But only once. She told me so. She loved her momma and me. She’d never run away. No matter what. I told you bastards that!”
Kendall sighed and pushed on. “Well, we’re here now to—”
“Don’t say it, you rat bastard.” Then Mr. Clark flicked his cigarette past them, brought his hand to his face and completely lost it. “You come to tell me you found her body, right?”
“What? Sir, no, I—”
“You did, didn’t you? You found my baby’s body.” And he broke down in the doorway with a few heavy sobs before taking a vengeful pull on the beer can and glaring at them.
Kendall seemed stunned, so Parker took over. “Absolutely not.”
Mr. Clark teetered a bit, and then looked warily at Parker. It was the gift of a drunken mind to swing from utter sorrow to complete glee in mere seconds. Mr. Clark’s face brightened, and he gave a smile full of crooked teeth. “Oh my God. Did you find her, then? Is she okay?”
“No, sir. I’m sorry. We haven’t. We just have some questions.”
Mr. Clark’s face briefly morphed into a mask completely absent of emotion, and then it came, a scowl so full of disgust and hate that it was almost flung from him. “Questions? Screw the both of ya. Get outta here!” he screamed, banging the doorjamb with his free hand. “And don’t you come back until you find my baby girl!”
With that he stepped back and slammed the door in their faces.
Parker looked at Kendall and raised his eyebrows. “Well. That was interesting.”
“I half-expected him to swing at us,” Kendall uttered as they walked back to the car.
Parker looked over his shoulder twice as they made their way. “Well. We ain’t outta here yet. He’s drunk as shit, and if he’s got a gun in there…”
“I hear ya,” Kendall said with a nod.
They backed out of the dirt driveway of the Clark property and both let loose a mutual sigh of relief when they drove down the road.
That had been nearly forty minutes ago, and according to Parker’s phone, the spot Conch had asked them to check out was now only 1.3 miles away. The mountains around them had long slopes in some places, and steep climbs and dips in others. The phone was holding the satellite signal, but barely. It had blinked off once already and reset. If it did again they might lose it all together, and then they’d be screwed. The cell phone bars were down to 1X, a symbol Parker hadn’t seen on his phone in years.
“We getting close?” Kendall asked.
“Yep. Right around this curve up here, then a bit off to the right.”
The mountains were checkered with desert brush and foliage, green trees in spots giving way to brown and dying bushes and grass. It was a parched place mostly, but enough moisture made its way here to keep the heartier trees and plants alive.
As they turned the bend Parker saw that there was a very small turnoff up ahead, on the right. He wondered, but not for long: the turnoff matched up perfectly with where the phone told them to stop.
“Right here, Kendall.”
As they got out of the car the hot air of the day greeted them.
Before them was a deep ravine covered in heavy brush, most of it lush and full. It was the greenest, densest place they’d seen on the entire drive up.
“Well?” Kendall asked while stretching out his arms and back.
“Odd place for him to take a lunch break,” Parker replied.
“Yeah. For all we know he had a hooker and was getting a hummer on company time.”
“Long way to drive for a blow job,” Parker chuckled.
“Yeah. And no hooker I ever met is going to go to a place this isolated anyways.”
Parker nodded. “True story.”
“What now?”
Hands on his hips, Parker took a moment to think, then replied, “Well. Why don’t you make your way down the road and look around a bit. I’ll go the opposite way and do the same.”
Kendall wasted no time in starting off down the hill.
After fifteen minutes of digging around dirt piles and staring into bushes, Parker was about to consider some sort of Plan B when he saw it: a fingernail, tiny and painted pink, completely out of place in all the gravel and brown pebbles that it was lying in.
He froze. “Kendall!”
It took a second for the reply to come. “Yeah?”
“You might wanna come up here!”
Parker crouched for a closer look at the fingernail. It was a little dusty but still bright, almost shiny in the sunlight. After a minute or so he heard Kendall’s shoes crunching in the dirt behind him.
“What ya got?” Kendall asked.
Parker pointed at the fingernail. “Odd, don’t you think? I mean. There’s nothing else around here. No trash, no beer bottles, no discarded oilcans. Not even a straw wrapper.”
Kendall nodded. “Coincidence?”
Parker smiled ironically, remembering Napoleon.
They stood and both looked down into the ravine at the same time. Nothing was visible through the thick canopy of trees and overgrowth below, and some of the trees grew sideways off the surrounding mountain walls, giving the area almost a double layer of density.
“You got any rope in the car?”
Kendall nodded. “About two hundred and fitfy foot, emergency grade cord, in case of search and rescue or what not.”
“Well, I’d say this merits a search.”
“Down there? Shit, Parker. That’s a steep drop. I don’t know if I can—”
“You won’t have to. You can hold the line from up here.”
“And you?”
“I made rappels like this all the time in the army, in Afghanistan. I’ll be fine.”
“You sure?”
“Yep. Your rope should get me a good ways down there.”
Kendall secured the rope on the guardrail next to the turnoff as Parker loosened his shirt and tied himself in. A few minutes later he was over the side and on his way down, his hamstrings yelping in protest at not having been used like this in a long time. Some of the outcroppings of rock were slippery, with firmer sections then giving way to patches of shale-like areas before Parker hit a section about sev
enty-five feet down that was all boulders and dirt. He was just above the tree canopy, and down here the heat was worse, mixing with the smell of ragweed and the dust he’d kicked up, creating a funky atmosphere. Looking up, he saw Kendall’s head peering over at him from the road. He shot him a thumbs up and Kendall gave a wave.
Kicking off from the rock face, Parker decided to expedite things and take longer drops, fifteen feet or so at a clip, mindful to feel for the stop knot he’d tied before he began the descent. After three drops of this length he split through the canopy at last.
The smell of dead flesh, rotting and sickly sweet, struck him immediately. There was no denying this smell. He’d dealt with it many times during the war, and encountering it now almost caused him to have another flashback. He slammed his mouth shut, bit into the sides of his cheeks and tried his best to hold his breath, because he knew the smell would get into his nostrils, and even the pores of his tongue, and stay there for days if he didn’t.
Below the canopy it was much darker, and it took a moment or two for his eyes to adjust.
When they finally did, he wished they hadn’t.
The bodies were everywhere, scattered about, upside down, lying sideways, doubled over in sickly back twists, arms and legs akimbo, dozens of them, more, all in various states of decomposition, their skins like hides, distorted by the heat.
“Oh my God!” Parker shouted.
He had no idea the level of horror he had in his voice until Kendall screamed with desperation from the roadside above. “Parker! Are you okay?”
Parker closed his eyes. The smell was bad, but the dead faces, the dead eyes staring up at him, were too much. The worst of it was that there were plenty of skeletons too, with their gaping jaws and vacant, hollow eye sockets.
Skeletons? My God. How long has this been going on?
Knowing that he had a job to do, Parker forced his eyes open and looked around. His jaw trembled with mounting horror as he counted them, first by twos, and then fives, then by tens. He cracked sixty as his eyes panned around the ravine, and then he saw a flash of blue jeans.
He stopped counting.
Blue jeans, white Chargers jersey, blond hair on a fully rotted head.
It was Amber Clark.
Parker thought of her father, just hours earlier, pulling that deep swig of his beer. And don’t you come back until you find my baby girl!
It was all he could take. “Kendall! Pull me up! Now! Do it, Kendall! Get me out of here!”
The rope went taut immediately and Parker felt momentarily ashamed for screaming out like that, but this wasn’t war and these weren’t enemy combatants. Down in that ravine was a ghastly gathering of young women, snuffed out, beauty buried without even the decency of a grave, left to the exposed air and wildlife, discarded like trash.
His face said it all, and it seemed to be reflected in Kendall’s, who was looking at him with a mixture of concern and horror all his own as he finally pulled Parker back up to the drop point. “What the hell is it, Parker?”
His mouth was parched dry with shock, but Parker managed to say it: “Bodies.”
“What?”
“Bodies, Kendall. Lots.”
“Jesus.”
“The delivery guy. He’s our guy.”
Kendall stood straight up like a bolt and dug furiously into his pants pocket. Producing his cell phone he cursed while Parker rose weakly to his feet.
“Shit. Work, you piece of shit!” Kendall screamed at the phone.
“What is it?” Parker asked.
“The Sheriff.”
“What about him?”
“When he and I talked earlier?”
“Yeah?”
Kendall looked at Parker, “He was going to check out this guy’s house.”
CHAPTER 31
CONCH TOLD HIMSELF TO go in quickly and without hesitation, but it was easier said than done. He couldn’t make out if there were boxes opposite the doorway or a wall of some kind, and once inside, he had no idea what the layout of the garage was at all. Sunbeams splintered the entrance at steep diagonals, dust motes swirling in them as a few flies carved triangles in the air.
From inside, the one girl kept screaming for help, but, truth be told, he would’ve loved it if she would just calm down a little and help him out. If she could, then maybe she could tell him if Troy was in there, for instance, and if he was armed. She could tell him—
It was the last scream that did him in, blood curdling and beyond horrified. “Oh my God! No! No!”
Conch took a deep breath and advanced.
He came through the garage just in time to see a man he assumed to be Troy Forester removing his knife from the left rib cage of a girl hanging on the wall. His eyes were still full of sunlight, and the inside of the garage was dark, but from her hair alone Conch recognized her as Jasmine White. The recognition was no sooner registered than it was dismissed, because he had other issues now—serious ones. He’d come through the door expecting the threat to be deeper inside.
Instead, Troy was only about six feet away and lunging at him.
Conch was able to level his aim for one shot and pull the trigger, but his eyes hadn’t fully adjusted yet and his aim was off. The shot missed, the bullet unluckily going through the small gap between Troy’s right arm and chest. A few inches either way and he would’ve hit him clean. Instead, the inches were going the other way, in the favor of his assailant.
The knife plunged into Conch’s right side at an upward angle, and it hurt like a sonofabitch. He grunted and cried out, instinctively defending himself by bringing his gun hand in hard for a right jab to Troy’s left ear. It was a solid shot, but not on Troy Forester, who had instantly gone feral.
Instead of stepping back or pulling away, Troy just kept stabbing him—once in the shoulder, the blade barely glancing off Conch’s neck, then his triceps, then again in his stomach. Wetness spread down his shirt and into his pants, but it was the wetness Conch could feel spreading inside his body that scared him the worst.
And then there was Ashley Barton. He could see her now, behind Troy, chained to the opposite wall, naked and scrawny, half-starved it seemed, still screaming. But the screaming was of a different color now; it was that brand of a scream that was losing hope.
Troy managed to stab him two more times, again in the side and then in the chest, in the soft spot near his armpit, before Conch pulled the trigger of his gun out of shear desperation, twice. The gun was pointed upward and the garage ceiling erupted in splinters, but the weapon discharged right near Troy’s left ear, the flash from the muzzle burning his cheek. He yelped and scuttled backwards, and this, Conch realized, was his only chance.
He leveled his arm and willed himself to focus. But it was getting very hard to breathe, his lungs were filling with something, and the gun felt too heavy now, as if it were a cinder block instead of the weapon he’d been firing at the practice range for nearly thirty years. Conch felt dizzy, desperate and sad. How could this happen? How could his gun fail him at a time like this? How could it suddenly get so heavy?
Jasmine White was shaking in convulsions in her chains and he looked up one last time at poor Ashley Barton, her eyes wide with terror, her mouth suddenly silent, but her lips saying something as she shook her head violently at him. Tears were streaming down her face and Conch suddenly understood.
I’m sorry. I was your only hope, wasn’t I? I wanted to save you, young lady. I really did.
He fell face first over a metal drum container and rolled flat onto his stomach, the pain of all his wounds pulsating as his eyes tried to roll back in his head. No. He couldn’t faint, or die, now. Not now. But he could barely move either.
Dear God, Conch thought, don’t let this monster hurt them. Stop him, Lord. Please.
The Bread Man took a step towards Ashley Barton and stopped. He seemed confused and disoriented. Instead, he took two steps towards Conch.
This is it. He’s coming to finish me off.
; He thought of his wife, and a whisper escaped his lips and rolled out onto the cold pavement of the garage floor. “Mandy. I’m so sorry, baby.”
Next he thought of his children and grandchildren. Especially the grandchildren. He hoped that no one would ever tell them how Grandpa really died. Here, on this property, at the hands of this monster.
He blinked and looked up. Amazingly, Troy Forester wasn’t moving.
He was standing still, right there in the middle of the garage, squeezing his head between his hands, his palms cupped over his ears, his face contorted in agony. He shouted a few times and cried out, then fell to one knee, then tried to stand and almost fell before he righted himself again.
Conch had no idea how, but he managed to raise his gun, frozen there in his hand mere feet from his face, and pull the trigger. Aiming was a fantasy. He just wanted to get lucky, just once, in this whole damned charade.
He didn’t. The bullet whizzed by Troy’s hip and burrowed into the wall beyond. But the sound of another gunshot seemed to be the last straw for him. Troy screamed in agony and rage, then spun in a semicircle and retreated to a corner of the garage that Conch hadn’t noticed until now. There was a computer desk there with large monitor and a printer. Troy grabbed some papers from the printer and nearly ran into the wall before he spun around to leave.
The world was fading on Conch, fading fast. He was fighting it, but he was losing. He could feel the blood pouring out of him, and now even his trigger finger had gone out on him. Nothing worked anymore. Just his eyelids, and even they were growing increasingly heavy. Ashley was still frozen against the wall and Conch could hear Jasmine moaning now. Good. She was still alive.
Conch looked at Troy, the whites of his eyes were on gaping display as he stared off into space. It was obvious that he was in severe pain, and his jaw contorted from side to side as he blinked repeatedly.
Shot before last must’ve blown out his eardrum, Conch thought with some mild satisfaction.
Then, to Conch’s utter amazement, Troy Forester, with the papers from his desk in one hand and his knife in the other, ran past him, stepping over Conch in the process, out the door.
A Million to One: (The Millionth Trilogy Book 2) Page 31
