Bone Key (23 page)
To Deal, the story came as if in a dream. An old man talking while he drifted somewhere in the shadows above as a disembodied presence. It was almost as if he’d become the old man as the words rolled out, the power of the events coming to grip him as the old man insisted they had always controlled his own life.
And not just because Ainsley Spencer had cheated death that day. As a seafaring man, he had managed that feat more than once, and never mind the particulars. Sails torn to tatters by some fearsome blow, or cast adrift from a storm-scuttled ship, whatever the near miss had been, he’d made his way back to harbor without so much as a second thought as to his good fortune.
But the day the senator had called was different. Perhaps it was because he’d led those others to their unjust end. Perhaps it was his sense that he’d done nothing to merit surviving. Whatever the reason, he’d never been able to shake the feeling that he hadn’t really escaped his fate that day.
There was a bill still owing, perhaps that was it. Even after all these years. A debt to be repaid before he could rest, before the curse could be lifted. But for the life of him, he could not figure just how it could be managed.
***
Ainsley’s worst fears had come to pass that awful night. With the roof of the warehouse gone and the skies pouring like a water skin split from overfilling, the cellar where he huddled would have filled soon enough. But hardly had the storm brought the roof crashing down to crush the gunman who meant to kill him than it brought another threat that seemed even more cruel.
As Ainsley stared up at the grate now blocked by a body and a massive chunk of wooden-planked roofing, there came a new kind of rumbling sound, followed by a crash that sent water cascading down upon him. He’d covered his head with his arms to shield himself from the deluge, then glanced up again, just as a second wave crashed down.
Water was gushing down the stairwell now, a virtual river pouring into the room that had come to resemble a cistern more and more. He saw the fallen revolver on the step near where he stood and reached to pick it up in reflex, even as he thought about how futile the gesture was.
What could he do with a pistol? he wondered. Empty it into the dead man who’d trapped him here? Shoot the sea that threatened to drown him?
There was a blinding flash of lightning then, accompanied by an ear-splitting clap of thunder. The water was halfway up the staircase now, lapping at the soles of his shoes, in the next moment sloshing at his ankles. He moved up one step, having to crouch down now, and wedged his shoulders tight against the grate that blocked his escape. He tried to straighten his legs and drive the grate up, but it was like pushing at a boxcar or a mountainside.
He would drown here, he realized, his face pressed against the steel grating inches from the sightless stare of the dead man, gasping until the last breath of air had been displaced by the rising water. Drowning was the threat that every seafaring man lived in the shadow of, he thought, glancing around his fast-shrinking prison, but never had he imagined it occurring in such circumstances as these.
He glanced once more at the pistol in his hand and thought of yet another mode of escape, but dismissed it as quickly as it had come. He knew little of matters spiritual, but whatever lay on the other side of breathing—if anything at all—was surely closed to those who took such a route. He’d die with his last breath held and his shoulders pressed to the immovable steel above his head, he thought, and was about to fling the pistol away to avoid temptation, when he remembered the other stairwell that rose at the far end of the room where he’d been working.
He glanced down at the waters that had risen to his shins where he crouched and knew that the passage to that stairwell lay underwater now. He’d have to take one breath and hope that would be enough to make his way along the narrow passage he’d left while stacking. Otherwise, he’d die down there in that twisting blackness.
What would be worse? he wondered, as seawater continued to cascade around him. But he did not wonder for long.
He forced himself to calm, drawing a series of breaths that were increasingly deeper, at the same time rehearsing the route he would take. To the bottom of the steps, then right, he told himself. Then twenty feet—or was it more?—along that narrow passage to the place where he’d seen those steps. He took one last glance upward, past the motionless form silhouetted by the green-glowing sky, then took his last breath and dove.
He forced himself down, down through the cool water, fingertips brushing the rough-hewn steps as he went, the pressure in his ears growing fierce. He swallowed to equalize the force and felt the pain subside, at the same time he felt a hand swipe itself across his face. He fought back a surge of panic and shoved the drifting body aside. No way to tell who it might have been, and what did it matter now? He groped about until his own hand found the edge of the passage leading to his right.
He pulled himself around, kicking steadily but not frantically, his right hand pressed to the wall of the passageway for purchase, his left clawing crablike over the stacks and stacks of submerged crates, finding a crevice here, a handhold there. He sensed the crates tumbling crazily in his wake as he shoved himself along, a tangle that would jam the narrow passageway, sealing off any hope of retreat. A useless notion anyway, he thought. One breath was all he had.
His hand found a cleft in the stone on his right, his left dug into a seam between the stacks. He threw himself forward with a mighty shove and felt his head slam instantly into something hard.
Bright stars and comet trails erupted in the darkness. He was stunned, felt himself twisting sideways in the water, lolling backward, drifting down. He would die that way, he told himself, and fought the blackness that was even deeper than all that surrounded him.
He forced his legs to scissor once again, willed his hands to move. He found the crate that had toppled over to block the way and jerked back and upward with everything he had. Aided by the water’s buoyancy, the crate gave way, bringing a second backward with it.
He felt the rough wooden sides brush against his legs as he flung himself through the passage he’d made, felt the fire in his lungs growing toward eruption. He was past the last of the crates now, his dizziness replaced by bright pain at the crown of his head.
That pain was good, he told himself, and fixed upon it in an effort to drive out the agony growing in his chest. He felt his hands strike mossy stone then; one rigid angle beneath his groping fingertips, then another.
Another second, he begged his body. Just one. Two or three at most. What’s that against a lifetime?
His knees were on the sunken steps now, his nails raking stone. Lungs turned to cannonballs, to flaming fountains already burst.
His mouth flew open, all pleas disregarded, all abject bargaining tossed aside. The last of his breath blew upward, and seawater rushed down his throat. He was strangling, wondering why he hadn’t used the pistol when he’d had the chance, caught a glimpse of his wife’s lovely face as she bade him farewell and, in the next moment, burst up from the water at last.
***
“I threw up water till I thought I’d drown myself again,” Deal heard Ainsley Spencer say. He gave a shake of his head as if shedding decades-old water, then pointed off into the gloom behind him.
“The water rose a bit more in that chamber, but by then I knew I was safe,” he added. He paused and stared through the dim lamplight at Russell Straight, who sat on a pair of stacked crates across from him. For a moment their gaze held, then both men turned to look down at him.
“He’s back with us,” Ainsley Spencer said.
“About time,” Russell said, nodding.
“Mind your head now, son,” the old man added.
Deal raised his hand to his forehead and felt a bandage there. Flashes of a firefight on the deck of a houseboat strobed through his mind, interspersed with images of a dark and slender fish-man swimming effortlessly along a network of subterranean caverns.
“Where are we?” he asked blearily, pushing himself to a sitting position on what he realized was a dusty pile of burlap sacking. He had a surreal memory of a great concrete slab swinging up like the maw of a graveyard crypt, of himself being carried deep down into the earth.
Russell seemed to find the question amusing. “Can’t you see? This here is King Solomon’s Mines.”
The big man reached for the smoking lantern that sat atop a crate next to him and held it aloft. Deal blinked as his eyes adjusted to the yellowish light.
They were in a windowless room that seemed to have been chiseled out of stone, a set of carved steps angling down the wall behind where Ainsley Spencer sat. Subterranean, Deal thought. A cellar from another era. He’d never been here before, but still, the place had a dreamlike familiarity.
Stacked against the opposite wall were what seemed an endless series of wooden crates, stretching past the circle of light cast by the kerosene lantern, many of them stamped with the likeness of an imposing French château. “You were looking for a case of wine,” Russell said with a humorless laugh. “I guess we came to the right place.”
Deal stared silently at the series of stacked crates. Four crates high, a dozen stacks, he saw, as far as the light allowed. He tried to do the math, but his head was throbbing too painfully.
He turned back to Ainsley Spencer. “This is what Dequarius wanted to tell me about.”
The old man nodded. “I suppose it was,” he said, his head bowed between his narrow shoulders. “And it’s what got him killed, as well.”
Deal shook his head, still coming to terms with what he was seeing. “But why did he come to me?”
“That’s easy,” Russell said. “Because everybody else in this here place is crooked as a dog’s hind leg. It’s pretty clear what Stone’s willing to do to get his hands on all this. Dequarius probably heard about you and your high-rolling old man from Stone and figured you for someone he could talk to, at least.”
Deal stared at Russell, a fresh twinge of guilt come to nag at him. But even if he’d discovered what Dequarius had in mind, what would he have done? He turned to regard the stacks that stretched away into the darkness. “It must be worth a fortune.”
The old man glanced up suddenly. “It’s cursed is what it is. Everybody that’s ever had anything to do with it is dead: the senator, the ones that meant to steal it from him—” He broke off for a moment. “Except for me, that is.”
Deal got a knee beneath himself and with a hand from Russell rose unsteadily to his feet. He waited for the room to right itself around him, then glanced at the staircase.
“Nobody answered my question,” he said, turning back to Russell. “Where the hell are we?”
Russell nodded at the staircase. “What used to be the navy base, that’s what the old man tells me. He brought us here in his boat while you were out. We’re tied up to one of Stone’s docks, right outside.”
Deal turned to the old man. “That’s Truman Town, up those stairs?”
The old man glanced at him as if it scarcely mattered. “We’re underneath where some of the old fort used to be. They used this place to store ammunition a hundred years ago.” He broke off and glanced around them. “Maybe they kept prisoners here, too. It has the right feel for that, don’t you think?”
Deal glanced at the stacked cases again. “How long has all this wine been here?”
The old man glanced up at him. “Ever since Senator Rafferty told me to bring it.”
“Senator Rafferty?” Deal said after a moment. “Douglas Jacobs Rafferty?”
The old man shrugged and began to repeat the story that he’d already related to Russell. As he listened, Deal put a hand against a nearby stack of crates to steady himself, the sense of a disembodied presence among them growing with every word.
In a state whose history was studded with a long list of scoundrels and discredited public officials, Rafferty was perhaps the most illustrious. He’d made a fortune selling underwater lots during the frenzy following the completion of the Florida East Coast Railroad early in the twentieth century and had gone on to amass an even larger fortune running rum during Prohibition. He’d rubbed shoulders with presidents, celebrities, and gangsters alike, and though out of office when he’d been cut down in a hail of bullets outside a Manhattan speakeasy in the thirties, he still held the distinction of the only U.S. senator thought to be the victim of a gangland hit.
By the time Ainsley Spencer had gotten back to the point where he’d escaped the water’s clutches, Deal sensed the ghost of Rafferty among them as keenly as if the draft coursing the chamber were the senator’s whispering breath. He glanced down the dimly lit passageway trying to imagine it filled with murky seawater, the old man swimming madly for his life.
“The stairs are still back there?” Deal asked, feeling the chill draft on the back of his neck.
“Stairs are, but they don’t go nowhere now,” the old man said, following his gaze as if he might still be envisioning how he’d popped up from the top of that rear stairwell directly out into the hurricane-lashed landscape like something shot up from a storm drain.
He’d discovered the entire dockside building where they had labored leveled by the storm, every speck of wreckage carried away by the tidal wave that had swept ashore. Even the heavy truck that had brought them had disappeared.
He’d fought his way home through the backside of the storm, then returned by first light to search the nearly drained chamber for the bodies of his friends. He weighted the bodies before he gave them back to the sea. The corpses of the senator’s men he simply dumped over the side of the seawall at the nearby docks. The body of the man who’d tried to kill him was nowhere to be found.
He’d swung the cover that had hidden the heavy steel grate back into place, then filled the entrance to the back stairwell with rubble. He then made his way back through the wreckage-strewn streets to the quarter and told the story of the great wave that had swept him and his comrades and their truck out to sea. And then he had settled in to wait.