Dead Silence

by Randy Wayne White

  “Yeah, but I also told you it weren’t that missing kid. A fourteen-year-old boy that had never ridden Cazzy? I doubt if you remember what else I said.”

  “Mr. Gardiner pointed out that the horse isn’t saddled,” Sudderram told Tomlinson. “There’s no bridle, no way to control him.”

  Gardiner was nodding. “It would take one hell of a horseman to take Cazzy over a four-rail fence bareback. At night? A stranger? If it was your boy who did that, find him and bring him to me. I’ll buy him a milkshake, give him a full-time job and ask him to teach me a few things.”

  The trainer picked up the blanket he’d been carrying and walked to the fence. “You gentlemen are done here. At least I am. We’re flyin’ in the company vet to do an autopsy, but until Cazzy’s buried he’s gonna at least be covered with some respect.”

  Once again, I kicked at the frozen ground, before saying, “Buried where?”

  “Right here where he lived. Where you think?”

  Before I could press, Tomlinson said, “They don’t get a solid freeze on the East End. It’s because of the ocean, like Fred mentioned.”

  Sudderram caught my eye, both of us now possibly thinking the same thing: In the Hamptons, the kidnappers could either dig their own hole or have a hole dug.

  The trainer had ducked through the fence but stopped to look at Tomlinson, his eyes making notations, taking his time as if evaluating something at an auction. “You from around here?”

  “Not really. I was one of the summer people.”

  “But you was here year-round.”

  “When I was young.”

  “You got a familiar look to you. They was all hippies, the summer kids back awhile. But there’s somethin’ about your face. You do any riding?”

  “I was more the surfer type.”

  “I could swear I’ve seen you . . . Tom? The name, too. Tom . . . Thomas . . .” The man was thinking about it. “You have an older brother?”

  Tomlinson shifted his feet and pulled the sports coat around him. “Nope. An only child. Lived here a couple of years.”

  Despite the fake name, it was odd to hear the most honest man I’d ever met lie. I knew that Tomlinson had a brother, an opium addict who lived in the Far East, if he was still alive.

  “Rich, I suppose. Maybe you know the man owns this place. Nelson Myles? He was one of the rich kids back then. Now he’s richer. Like most of ’em, he heads for Florida before the first snow. Palm Beach, used to be, but now Sarasota.”

  “I remember the Myles place. It was more like a castle, but closer to Montauk.”

  “Only closer,” Gardiner said, “if you lived that direction,” which had some kind of meaning. I could read Tomlinson’s gentle nod.

  The trainer stared for another long second, more interested in what he was seeing than what he was hearing. Finally, he said, “The boy I’m thinkin’ of had a similar name to Thomas but short hair. The same bony kind of Jesus face and eyes.”

  Tomlinson laughed as he blew into his hands. “I was just telling Dr. Ford, I’m no saint.”

  Gardiner didn’t smile. “This boy weren’t either. Fifteen, twenty years ago, a local girl disappeared. Found her blood and panties. The one who did it was a rich kid, too, big mansion on the dunes. His parents shipped him back to college before the cops could prove anything.”

  Tomlinson crossed his arms for warmth and appeared to settle into himself as Sudderram said, “We’re going to check along the perimeter of the fence, then the road . . . if that’s okay with you, Mr. Gardiner.”

  Gardiner didn’t look at me as he brushed past. He opened the blanket to cover his horse. “You’re the FBI, do whatever you damn well please. But get that vehicle with the Red Sox sticker off my drive, you don’t mind.”

  On an overpass, a quarter mile from the trainer’s house, Sudderram showed us where police had found fresh tire tracks, a ball of duct tape, then a lug wrench at the bottom of a hill.

  A stain on the wrench had tested positive for human blood. They were still waiting to hear from Oklahoma and Minnesota about the Indian kid’s blood type. The agency had also collected hair samples from Guttersen’s home to compare DNA with hair on the wrench, possibly on the tape.

  A search team with dogs had been here earlier. Sudderram said he didn’t expect to find anything new but wanted us to have a look.

  Tomlinson’s focus was still inward but in a different way, as I watched him go down the hill, moving sideways because it was steep. Psychic mode, I had seen it before.

  Paranormal powers or not, he is a fastidious observer, with a knack for making intuitive leaps that are nonlinear, empathic, from illogical effect to logical cause. He can arrive at conclusions that for most require a methodical process of assembly, myself included.

  There are times I don’t take him seriously, but neither do I discount what he says. More than once, I’ve experimented with his methods without telling him. Admit it and I would’ve been bombarded with theories on Universal Streaming, “remote viewing.” It is impossible to function when someone is yammering away with step-by-step instructions on how to let go, to empty your mind.

  He had repeated the basics more than enough. Objects are electrically charged. Events create electromagnetic patterns similar to shadows. Observe with eyes closed. To perceive, cease projecting. Feel, don’t think.

  Absurd in many ways, but I’m aware that absurd beliefs are sometimes anchored in undiscovered fact. A hundred years ago, doctors were convinced swamp air was poisonous, long before mosquitoes were proven to carry the malaria virus.

  As Sudderram worked the edge of the road, walking toward Gardiner’s place, I stood on the hill near the tire tracks. I accepted the premise that the boy and his Cuban abductors had been here and tried it Tomlinson’s way.

  Will Chaser would have been in the back of a truck, or a car trunk, or beneath a blanket in the backseat. It would have been dark. The car stopped for a reason, then hurried off for a reason: tire tracks and duct tape had been left on the road. A bloodied wrench nearby. The Cuban Program produced three bona fide monsters, Malvados, but they were also pros. They wouldn’t have made stupid mistakes.

  I interrupted myself. Realized my brain was plodding along, projecting a scaffolding of probabilities instead of perceiving—typical.

  Screw it.

  Tomlinson was Tomlinson. I was me, a cognitive plodder like most people.

  I angled down the hill just to see what there was to see, testing bits of scaffolding as I went, discarding most pieces, accepting a few.

  A bloodstained wrench. Left by the Cubans, it meant Will Chaser was dead. If the kid had escaped, he wouldn’t have stuck around to do battle using a tire iron. Anyone in their right mind would have run and kept running.

  Dead, yes. Logical.

  What wasn’t logical was the Cubans leaving behind the murder weapon. I had witnessed their articulate abduction. More likely, some local guy had knocked part of a knuckle off while changing a tire and thrown the damn wrench in a rage.

  I was near the fence. I knelt and picked up a baseball-sized rock, intending to see if I could lob it to the road. For some reason, I stopped. Stood there feeling the weight of the rock, its mineral density. Smooth, river-sculpted.

  I studied the rock for no particular reason. Brown rock, a glacial oval. One point was stained black: earth tannin, I guessed. Or . . .

  I was cleaning my glasses when Sudderram called, “Have you gentlemen seen enough? They spent three hours here.”

  The search team, he meant.

  I looked from the rock to the road as a bit of scaffolding returned to my mind for review. If left by the kidnappers, did a bloody wrench guarantee the Indian kid was dead? Will Chaser was different, I had been told. Handled anger differently: He’s so silent!

  Maybe the teen had attacked one of the Cubans. The interrogator nicknamed Farfel had to be in his late fifties. Hump looked a lot younger, Harrington had said, a giant. Even so . . . The kid had a temper. Maybe he’d go
tten so mad that he couldn’t stop himself. Possibly got some solid licks in before he ran.

  I bounced the rock in my hand, thinking about it. Imagined the kid with the wrench in his hand, hammering at some hulking guy POWs had called Hump; the guy spinning, trying to get away, before the kid lunged toward the fence, possibly injured—the size difference made it likely—then ran for the barn because horses were familiar. The only home a kid like Will Chaser had ever known . . .

  Wasting time, Ford. It’s a Tomlinson fantasy.

  I realized I was playing a game. I was seeing what I wanted to believe. Astrologers and Tarot-card frauds made their living playing the same game.

  I dropped the rock in the weeds. I returned to the car.

  15

  Will Chaser was reviewing, punishing himself with what he could’ve done and what he should’ve done, a key moment being when he’d bounced the rock off the Cuban’s head and ran.

  Instead of throwing the damn thing, he should’ve pulled the rock from his pocket when he was on Buffalo-head’s back and beat him unconscious. A lug wrench is unwieldy, badly balanced. But a smooth chunk of granite had heft to it. It was as dependable as a hammer and wasn’t as easily deflected as a light piece of steel manufactured by Chrysler.

  A tomahawk. Same concept.

  The boy winced when he made the association.

  A tomahawk. I had a damn tomahawk! But I threw it instead of using it the way it was meant to be used.

  Some warrior. A dope, that’s what he was.

  Will replayed the encounter but changed his selection of weaponry. He pictured himself swinging the rock, like a hatchet, dispatching Buffalo-head, before turning his attention to Metal-eyes, who he would charge and . . . do what?

  Metal-eyes had a pistol with laser sights. A tomahawk didn’t stand much chance against a gun, unless . . .

  That’s when I should have thrown the rock! Drill the old bastard right between the eyes. Grab his gun and kick him a few times for luck, see how he likes having his ribs busted.

  Metal-eyes, that’s who the boy wanted to beat into unconsciousness. After what he’d done to Cazzio?

  That sonuvabitch!

  It was painful even thinking about it, so Will allowed the fantasy to drift, then vanish. He was making excuses for what had happened to the horse and he knew it.

  Hindsight isn’t twenty-twenty, it’s an excuse for following some asshole know-it-all instead of your own instincts.

  Otto Guttersen—a man who didn’t feel kindly toward assholes or excuses. It was true. What had happened happened.

  Will was on his back, hands, legs and mouth taped once again, in the darkness of what his nose told him was a horse trailer or possibly a stall, although a trailer created a distinctive echoing effect when there was a noise outside.

  Yeah, a horse trailer most likely. A big one, fairly new.

  Fresh paint, a recent grease job. He could smell that, too.

  Over the last few hours, there had been some noise. Sound of vehicles coming and going, the mumble of distant conversations. But nothing close, until Will heard what might have been the panting of a dog as it sniffed around, taking his time, acting important, the way dogs do before choosing a tire to piss on. The boy had tried to make some noise of his own, inchworming over the floor, until a distant whistle called the dog away.

  The only other noise he heard was every hour or so when Buffalo-head returned to make sure Will wasn’t chewing himself free again. The man walked like Frankenstein in the movies, his feet slow and heavy. He would crack the door, shine a flashlight, then hurry away. The Cuban was afraid of him, that was obvious, never spoke a word.

  Will liked that. But during the hours of darkness, even the satisfaction of scaring the hell out of Buffalo-head grew boring, so he spent most of his time replaying his escape attempt.

  It came back so clearly, it was like there was a movie screen behind Will’s eyes, but the movie didn’t play beyond that instant when he heard the whap of the first gunshot and then later felt Cazzio’s muscles spasm rock-hard as the horse struggled to run, shuddering as if jolted by electricity.

  Up to that frame of the movie, though, Will’s memory could review it all scene by scene, seeing himself, seeing the horse, and the Cubans, too, as if a camera was mounted above them on tracks. Will knew how TV westerns were filmed—he and Old Man Guttersen had watched a documentary on the great director John Ford—so he could imagine the camera placement if he wanted to.

  He wanted to. What had happened happened, but that didn’t mean Will couldn’t change a few scenes here and there. It made events more tolerable because if they had been filmed for a movie, it was all pretend. Something he could do over until he got it right, replaying scenes, editing, cutting, muting sounds he didn’t want to hear. A horse’s scream, a whinny that bubbled from Cazzio’s chest—just one of the sounds he never wanted to hear again.

  Pretending there was a camera made it bearable, so that’s what he did.

  Will’s favorite scene: He was back in Cazzio’s stall, mounted on the horse, holding the syringe-tipped spear. He could watch his own silhouette, as he cut a handful of hair, tied some to the spear and knotted the rest into the horse’s mane.

  It brought the feeling back: a warrior sensation. Powerful . . . real, not like the drunks playing Indian back on the Rez. Will clung to that feeling. Wanted to hold on to it.

  Why not? Gives me something good to think about until they bury me . . . or I get another chance to escape.

  Maybe he would. Will had been chewing at the tape and now almost had his hands free. Buffalo-head didn’t have the nerve to take a close look.

  Idiot!

  Will hadn’t given up yet and he wouldn’t. Not now, not ever—just like Cazzio—because Will had heard the Cubans talking with their American partner. Two graves had been dug somewhere out there in the pasture, one of them just for Will.

  “The box is prepared, specially constructed,” the American had told them. “That’s where you’ll place the hostage.”

  The American was a skinny, straggly-haired man who had money and knew the area, judging from the way the Cubans deferred to him, and he also had a snooty, educated way of speaking.

  The hostage. Saying it in such an impersonal way to distance himself from this bullshit, like he was too good to get his hands dirty.

  Will found it unsettling that the American, for some reason, hadn’t said anything about killing him first. But they would, of course. They had to—not that Will wanted to die, but you couldn’t bury someone alive. So the American, Will guessed, was leaving it up to Metal-eyes and Buffalo-head to decide, which was good.

  The Cubans scared him. But the American scared him more, with his silence, the way he stayed in shadows, never allowing Will a solid look at him.

  Something else that was good: The American was seriously pissed off that the Cubans had bungled things so badly and he was leaving.

  “Try to finish what you’ve started, but please do it on your own. We have a schedule to keep and I’m keeping it. If you’re not there to meet the boat, that’s your problem!”

  By now, hopefully, the man was gone. Escaping would be easier with only the Cubans to watch him. And he would escape. He had to! The thought of being murdered and buried, even next to a great horse like Cazzio, pushed Will close to panic if he let himself linger on the idea, so he didn’t.

  To get his mind off the subject, Will decided to risk chewing some more at the tape before Buffalo-head returned. Will’s hands were behind him, so he drew his knees to his chest, then threaded his boots through his arms. To manage it, he had to expel all the air from his lungs, but it wasn’t that hard.

  With his hands now in front of him, Will could have ripped away the tape covering his eyes. But even a moron like Buffalo-head might notice, so Will used his lips to feel around until he found the break in the tape he’d already created. A couple more layers and he would be free.

  In fact, if he had only five more minut
es—

  “Devil Child? I’m coming in—I’m warning you.”

  Shit. Buffalo-head was right outside.

  Will was still struggling to step through his hands again when he heard the creaking of the trailer door.

  The boy lay still, focusing on the silence of the Cuban’s labored breathing, feeling the man’s eyes on him, sensing the beam of a flashlight panning over his body.

  Will heard Buffalo-head’s nervous laughter. “You are freezing. Good. Balled up like a dog. That is what you deserve for poisoning me! To live like a dog before I come back with a gun. Do you hear me?”

  Will didn’t move.

  “You say you’re not afraid of guns? Hah! Then how do you feel about being buried in the cold ground? We will see!”

  The trailer door slammed shut, not as loud as a gunshot but almost, and Will jumped. In his mind was this image of the hole the American had mentioned, the empty horse’s grave.

  Moments later, the door opened again, and Will knew it was Metal-eyes. He could smell the man’s hair lotion. He could feel the man stalking closer and soon could smell another distinctive odor, familiar and medicinal.

  Ketamine.

  Damn it.

  Will forced his muscles not to flex when the Cuban jammed a syringe needle into his thigh. Will could feel the horse tranquilizer flooding his system but didn’t react.

  Seconds later, Will couldn’t move even if he had wanted to.

  16

  At ten, Tomlinson banged at my hotel door and said, “Demons have returned to the bell tower. Want to go for a drive? I was twitchy to begin with. Now I’m having visions. I think he’s there.”

  “The boy, you mean. Where?”

  “I mean my brother. Or father. Maybe both—God help us.” He had the keys to the rental car and rattled them in his hand. “I should have told you about the missing girl Fred mentioned, but I never let myself be convinced.”

  Earlier, he’d made only a vague reference to her after admitting that he knew his father had not sold the family estate. Their only contact over the years had been a few phone calls and cards. “The day I began to suspect was the last time I set foot on the property.”