Perfect Victim

by Jay Bonansinga

  At the moment, Grove felt dangerously exposed on the side of the shaft, a duck in a shooting gallery. He could feel John Q Public’s presence below him as pervasive as a shark circling the depths, biding its time. Grove picked up his pace a little, ignoring his creaking knees and his cramping fingers—still clad in their rubber surgical gloves.

  According to Old Man Clinger, the front shaft plunged more than a quarter of a mile down to the first level. But how long would that take at this rate?

  Grove estimated that the footholds were about eighteen inches apart, and each hesitant step was taking him about two to three seconds to complete. At this rate he would make it to the first level—Junction A, as it was known in Wormwood literature—in about an hour.

  Old Man Clinger had drawn up meticulous maps of the mine, mostly by memory, revealing the vast network of shafts and tunnels and passageways.

  Essentially, the main work area of Wormwood Mine lay twelve hundred feet under the Kentucky countryside and was shaped like a huge italic E. Junction A was the upper right-hand corner, which served as the threshold to the first level (or the top finger of the E). The back slope was the backbone of the E, plummeting nearly ten thousand feet down, past prehistoric layers of sandstone, shale, and limestone.

  It was the longest single deep-mine shaft in the history of Western civilization.

  Along that impossibly deep shaft were mazes of chambers and tunnels carved into the coal seams—the middle and lower arms of the E—that defied description. Known in mining circles as pillar rooms, these underground labyrinths resembled black stone ghost towns, honeycombed with dead ends and blind alleys, where mining drills had sucked the pulp out of the earth. They went on and on, literally for miles, until they butted up against another mine or an underground body of water. Grove fully expected to find John Q waiting for him somewhere within these silent, forgotten cities of the dead.

  Over the years, three separate religious “interventions” were secretly performed on the Wormwood property. In March of 1939, under the cloak of night, a Catholic priest, garbed in full purple vestment, rode in a coal car down to level one, twelve thousand feet down, waving his smoking incense brazier the whole way, his quavering nervous litany echoing off the stone tunnels. The exorcism apparently didn’t take—or perhaps it had been the wrong denomination—because the Baptists tried it again in the fall of 1952, just eleven months before the Great Disaster. Deacon Earl Pritzker spent five straight hours blessing the shale strata in shaft number two with a gold cross procured from the Crystal Cathedral in Lexington.

  The following summer, on a sultry July night, a sudden and unexplained fire raged through the mine, sending all 311 workers present to their deaths. The maelstrom burned out of control for seven days and seven nights, turning the twin air shafts into volcanic cannons, scorching a five-square-mile radius around the property and touching off forest fires as far away as Charleston. They called it the Great Disaster, and Wormwood achieved national notoriety for a few years.

  Time magazine did a piece on the alleged “Wormwood Curse” the following year. “A Pox on the Earth” read the headline, and miners’ families wrote angry letters to the editor demanding that the company shut the mine down, raze the buildings, and salt the earth forevermore.

  Wormwood managed to stay in business for one reason and one reason only: it made money. Hand over fist, as the old-timers used to say. At the end of the 1950s, for instance, despite its history of misfortune, the mine was generating three hundred thousand tons of coal a year, and grossing over $45 million. Wormwood remained operational, in fact, until the spring of 1972, when the last heir to the Carlisle family, who owned the mine, passed away under somewhat mysterious circumstances. Earlier that winter, ironically, Valesburg town elders had staged a ceremonial protest and prayer service at the mouth of shaft number one. Months later, Harman Carlisle’s will, which was disputed in various courts for years afterward, ultimately dissolved the corporation.

  After that, the mine, like an unmarked grave, simply lay rotting in the Kentucky wilderness, a grim testament to America’s voracious appetite for more of everything.

  Grove saw solid ground looming beneath him at exactly one hour and thirteen minutes after he had entered the shaft. Home at last, home at last, ollie ollie oxen free!

  Grove awkwardly hopped off the last rung with the palsied exhaustion of an astronaut leaping to the surface of the moon. He landed with a grunt, and fell backward, the items in his overstuffed pockets throwing off his balance. He landed on his ass.

  The flashlight snapped its strap, rolled, and hit the wall, the impact instantly cutting off the beam.

  Grove was plunged into darkness unlike any darkness he had ever experienced.

  FORTY

  It was darkness that weighed a million tons, darkness that choked the life out of him, that crashed down on him and made his skin crawl. It was the darkness of deep space. Inner space.

  For a moment he couldn’t breathe.

  He managed to sit up. His legs screamed and ached from the interminable descent. His heart raced. He instinctively raised his hands and felt the air, which was so thin he had to labor to get a breath. His throat burned. His nostrils stung from the methane and ancient dust fog. He tried to stand, but his balance had gone haywire.

  Panic took hold of him then, as he frantically felt the cinder-strewn ground around him for the flashlight. He clenched his teeth and spots of light dotted his blind eye. He started breathing so rapidly and heavily he was nearly hyperventilating. Calm down, he commanded himself, calm the hell down, or you’ll die a purposeless, lonely death down here without even engaging the enemy!

  He forced himself to rise to a kneeling position, forced himself to take deep steadying breaths. His heart rate began to settle.

  Tiny radiant artifacts swam like luminous stars across his narrow field of vision as he got very still, trying to organize his thoughts. He needed to get his bearings and strategize. He needed to adjust to the bottom-of-the-ocean darkness, the tomblike atmosphere, the disorienting claustrophobia. Most of all, he needed to find the opening that led into that first level.

  In his mind he retraced his movements, trying to extrapolate the position of the flashlight.

  At last he gave up and reached in his coat pocket and felt around for the smaller halogen headlamp. He wasn’t sure about the night-vision goggles—they required some level of ambient light in order to function—but he quickly found the halogen light and untangled it from a jumble of supplies in his side pocket. Working blindly in the dark, working solely on feel, he strapped the light around his head, felt for the switch, and flipped it on.

  The slender beam leapt across a fifty-square-foot alcove of hard-packed earth. A wheelbarrow lay overturned to the right, slathered in cobwebs.

  Grove managed to stand on weak legs. He slowly turned toward a doorway.

  The narrow silver beam of light illuminated the top corner of an arched entrance ten feet away. Petrified wooden timbers framed the low-ceilinged passageway.

  Grove looked up. His light brushed a message hastily scrawled in blood across the lintel. A garbled mess of words yammered at him, the same dead language found at the previous crime scenes. Grove sniffed in the silence.

  He turned, and the beam of his headlamp landed on a human face.

  The face smiled.

  Its teeth were bloodstained.

  “Jesus!” Grove jerked back as though slapped, the halogen light slipping off his head.

  In a flash of silver light John Q Public pounced out of the shadows, a sharp object in his hand, going for Grove’s throat.

  FORTY-ONE

  It happened so abruptly, so unexpectedly, so jarringly fast, that Grove barely registered it in the streaks of light from the halogen headlamp bouncing off the walls: a tall, glistening brown giant, as tense as a coil of steel cable, darting out of the darkness, a sharp metal object raised in his powerful right hand.

  Grove let out a yawp, rearing back, as
the assailant swung the knife or scalpel or ice pick or whatever it was down toward Grove’s jugular—

  —but Grove got lucky because he had raised his left hand on instinct to block the blow; and sure enough, John Q’s wrist struck Grove’s arm, preventing the point from sinking into Grove’s artery, the tip only kissing his flesh and the sudden inertia heaving the two men into the opposite wall with a bone-rattling thud.

  Grove managed to shove the immense black man off him before John Q could recover. John Q staggered backward, the heel of his right foot bumping the halogen light, which now lay on the ground.

  The lamp skidded, the silver ribbons of light streaking and blurring across the dark threshold.

  Grove gasped for air, lurching away from his attacker. He had no time to arm the stun gun; it was tucked too deeply into his pocket.

  Meanwhile, ten feet away, the assailant banged into the opposite wall, letting out a feral grunt that sounded like that of a large rabid animal. He still had his weapon clutched in his huge hand.

  For a single instant, in a swirling streak of silver light, Grove caught a glimpse of John Q Public, who now looked like a giant hairless biped, his naked tattoo-covered body filmed from head to toe with coal dust. His bald head bore the crisscrossing gouges of self-inflicted knife wounds, still oozing with blood.

  Only his dead gray eyes—his fish eyes—seemed luminous with insanity.

  Grove managed to get his hand around the grip of the Randall knife against his hip. It came out of the sheath with a dry husky whisper as he squared himself in the darkness. The halogen light had settled against the corner, its beam now glowing up through the fog of dust.

  A piercing howl erupted out of the darkness across the threshold, a primordial death wail pouring out of the monster who had once gone by the name John Q Public—

  —and then the beast pounced again, coming at Grove with almost robotic fury, those dead eyes like dim headlamps in the dark, filled with sickness.

  The next instant seemed to freeze in time as the two men came at each other. Knife fights are like that. Chaotic, jerky, inexact affairs.

  “Come on, come on, motherfucker, come on!” Grove bellowed as he made a wide swipe toward the man’s face, wanting to drive the blade through that diseased brain.

  John Q’s weapon arced down at precisely the same moment, and the two blades sideswiped each other, metal scraping metal, spitting a single spark like a match tip igniting in Grove’s face.

  This time the wild inertia drove both men backward, Grove losing his footing, stumbling, falling backward; John Q tripping over his own bare feet, toppling and going down to the floor.

  They landed hard on train tracks embedded in the stone, spine-wrenching hard, Grove hitting the rails on the small of his back, the halogen light in his eyes now, the sudden pain stabbing his tailbone, John Q sprawling down on top of him with a gasp.

  It felt like a piano had fallen on Grove, the full weight of the killer smashing down on his ribs, compressing his lungs, squeezing the breath out of him. The stench of char-smoke and BO assaulted Grove.

  With one great heaving gasp he willed the knife toward the monster’s midsection, a sharp thrust, the blade only managing to graze oily flesh.

  John Q shrieked, a caterwaul of pain like a cat being skinned, suddenly convulsing, then he rolled off Grove with panther stealth, rolling into the darkness, rolling off into the shadows of the threshold until he bounced off the adjacent stone wall.

  Grove rolled in the other direction, seeing stars, ears ringing, gripped in pain, holding his neck with his free hand where he had been stung by something very sharp.

  The monster was up again, moving inhumanly fast, a shuffling shadow across the space, which made Grove scoot back against the far wall, gasping, the halogen light on the ceiling, his bloody Randall knife raised in a defensive posture, his guts freezing up.

  He did all of this despite the sharp stinging sensation in the back of his neck.

  Over the years Grove had seen perps on PCP slam their hands though car windows, tear through jumbles of barbed wire, bite chunks of flesh out of adversaries’ arms, and right then he saw a similar miracle on the edges of that flashlight beam, because John Q had just vanished with the agility of a jaguar.

  Just for an instant, trying to see in the darkness through his one good eye, trying to catch his breath, his back against the rock, his head spinning, Grove thought the monster had simply ceased to exist, had simply dematerialized, had simply faded back into the utter blackness on the edges of that hellish, reeking, greasy shaft.

  Then Grove reached for the halogen and got his hand around it and shined it to his left, then to his right.

  The narrow opening through which the killer had fled now gaped in front of Grove, which all at once reminded Grove of the Wormwood layout according to Old Man Clinger. The three-foot wide, five-foot-high submarine hatch led miners into the labyrinth of level one.

  In the momentary silence that followed the knife fight, Grove swallowed the pain and rose on aching legs. He had to stand there a moment in order to catch his breath, the knife still gripped in one hand, the headlamp gripped in the other.

  He listened.

  The distant sound of nimble bare footsteps padding back into the black midnight reached his ringing ears. He let out a pained sigh, wiped the knife blade on his pants, then put the weapon back into its sheath.

  The stinging pain in the back of his neck felt hot now, hot and wet. He reached back with his free hand and felt a small object hanging off his skin like a thorn, or a plastic tag. He gently plucked it off.

  He looked at it. His heart quickened, his scrotum contracting deeper into his body.

  It was a hypodermic needle.

  FORTY-TWO

  Working in the darkness, breathless with panic, Grove lanced the puncture wound with his knife, squeezing it as though it were a snakebite. The pain was tremendous. It seared his shoulders and burned down between his shoulder blades. Then he rinsed the wound with bottled water. He drank the rest of the water, forcing it down in order to dilute the unknown dose as much as possible.

  The good news was, most of the pale yellow fluid contained in that tiny vial behind the needle’s plunger had remained there. Grove had no idea how many milligrams of the stuff—whatever it was—had actually reached his bloodstream.

  But he knew some of it had.

  He felt woozy and nauseous and light-headed, and also strangely disengaged, as though he were completely removed now from the passage of time. He had no idea how long he lingered there in that dark antechamber, trying every field remedy he could think of to counteract whatever had been injected into his system. It could have been minutes, could have been hours.

  It could have been centuries.

  By the time he got himself bandaged and ready to travel deeper into the netherworld, he felt cauterized, denatured—as though he had somehow aged a thousand years and had become a wraith, a shadow of a human being. He stood in that narrow opening for a moment, his legs feeling like stilts, his feet a mile away.

  He pulled out the stun gun from his pocket.

  The device was in a holster. It weighed about a pound, and had a coil of silver cable on a quick-release loop on one side connected to the projectile dart. It had to be armed in order to operate. Grove had never used one in the field, but had gone through a training seminar back in the mid-nineties when the things were introduced to the FBI.

  He put the halogen lamp between his teeth and used both hands to arm the stun gun. He thumbed the safety off, then pressed the on button—a faint tone rising in pitch like a camera strobe replenishing. He stuffed the gun into its holster, and clipped the holster to his belt next to the Randall knife for quick and easy access.

  The passageway lay before him, less than ten feet away, but it seemed to waver and undulate in the beam of his halogen lamp like a mirage drifting farther and farther away. Grove braced himself against the wall of the antechamber, a wave of dizziness washing over him
.

  He clenched his teeth and began to pray his silent Swahili prayers again, summoning courage, summoning his powers of concentration. It was dawning on Grove that the contents of that hypo might have been some kind of hallucinogen or psychedelic—especially considering John Q’s background: the tattooed killer had terrorized the mean streets of south Chicago for years as a sort of mute, meth-head Robin Hood. He would rob dealers at knifepoint without saying a word, then sell their wares at reduced rates back to skels and crack whores for a quick buck.

  By the time Grove had encountered the man in the Karen Slattery investigation, though, the killer must have succumbed to his own products, because he was so far gone he could barely hold his head up.

  Back then John Q had worn a full Isaac Hayes–style beard, as well as a scraggly greasy mop of a natural. Tonight, however, in the fleeting glimpses and violent flashes of halogen light, the man looked like a different person. With his clean-shaven face, gray eyes, and scourged bald head, John Q looked not only more dangerous and high-functioning than he had years ago, he also reminded Grove of somebody.

  At first, of course, in the heat of the knife fight, Grove could not grasp who it was that this guy resembled. The chiseled face underneath the ornate Aboriginal-style tattoos, the hollow eyes behind the coal-dusted visage, and the prominent cheekbones behind the scowling look of madness—all of it strummed a painful chord deep within Grove, and he kept going back to it as he stood there in front of that ancient hatchway, preparing to enter the labyrinth.

  Now it struck Grove with the full force of a ball-peen hammer to his skull.

  John Q looked like Grove.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Grove muttered under his breath, fighting the dizziness, steadying himself on the frame of the hatch.