Buried Alive (3 page)

ting
…
ting

Triangle tinging rhythmically, Neddles continued his hypno-patter, trying for that peculiar mental seduction called the suggestive state. After several minutes, Crayline’s head lolled to the side, his face softened, his eyes closed.

“My lord,” Doc Wainwright said. “I think it’s working.”

Neddles set the triangle aside and reached in his pocket,
snapping open a folded page of questions. Crayline looked as close to benign as someone like that could get. We heard his breathing through the sound system, relaxed and regular. I was beginning to look forward to the show when Slezak stood and strode to the switch beside the mirror. He snapped the speakers off and the room went silent.

Wainwright scowled. “I have to monitor the procedure, Mr Slezak.”

“It’s privileged information,” Slezak said. “I demand privacy with my client.”

“How about I leave the room, Slezak?” I offered. “It’ll be you and the doctor. That work?”

“No. Both of you please leave us until we’re finished.”

Wainwright looked into the adjoining room, saw all was calm. She frowned at Slezak. “We’ll be right outside the door.”

“Whatever makes you happy,” he said.

Wainwright and I stepped outside. “You think he’s really under?” I said. “I can’t figure Crayline being hypnotized.”

“Sometimes people who seem the worst potential subjects go under in a fingersnap. You can’t tell who’s a good candidate until you swing the watch.”

“I assume Slezak never told you who he’s really representing?” I asked.

“He suggested it was Bobby Lee.”

“Bobby Lee wouldn’t know Slezak from Muzak,” I said. “Someone else is paying for all this.”

I sat and read a three-day-old newspaper fetched from the employee lounge. Doc Wainwright busied herself reading case histories. I heard a sound from the room with Crayline, lifted my head and, hearing nothing, resumed reading.

After twenty-five minutes, I set the paper aside. Another sound, like a squeal, issued from the room. Then something louder, a moan. I looked at Wainwright.

“Privacy be damned,” she said, turning toward the observation room. “Something’s going on.”

She entered with me at her heels. Slezak stood, his eyes sizzling with anger. “I want you both out, now!”

We strode past him like he was furniture and went the mirror. Bobby Lee Crayline was rolling his head like it was on gimbals. His mouth opened in a howl but nothing transmitted through the glass.

“Doctor Neddles touched something painful,” Wainwright said.

“You’re risking a lawsuit,” the lawyer barked. “I’ll have your …”

Slezak’s voice tapered off as Crayline howled loud enough to hear. His body began to spasm. His fists were clenching and releasing. “Crayline’s too deep,” Wainwright said. “God knows what he’s re-living.”

Another cold and quivering howl pierced the glass. I slipped my hand to the switch on the wall, snapped the speakers on.

“I KILLED THEM WRONG!” Bobby Lee howled. “THEY’RE STUCK THERE FOREVER!”

Neddles looked confused; the words made no sense. Bobby Lee began leaping as if to touch the ceiling with his head. Great pumping leaps in time with his howls, like the floor was on fire. He’d compact himself, leap, repeat. Bridges was beside Crayline, trying to get an arm around the man’s neck.

One of Crayline’s arms flew wide, chain whipping through the air. My heart froze. Crayline had summoned a demonic reserve of strength and torn the ring from the floor.

“He’s loose,” I yelled.

I watched in horror as the madman head-butted Neddles, who collapsed like deflated skin. Bridges aimed a kick at Crayline’s groin. He took it on his thigh, ducked, and shoulder-rammed Bridges into the wall, dropping him. Bobby Lee turned and stared into the mirror, his eyes radiating the rabid-wolf look I’d seen before.

He lowered like a bull preparing to charge.

“Oh Jesus,” Wainwright whispered. I pulled her aside as Crayline exploded through the glass like a missile launched from hell. I dove for his shoulders, tried to snake an arm around his phone-pole neck. Doc Wainwright was screaming for the guards. Crayline bucked like a rodeo bull, sending me spinning across the room. When I spun back to the tumult, Crayline had Slezak’s head under his arm, trying to snap the man’s neck. I grabbed Crayline’s arms, his biceps like living cannonballs.

Emergency horns blared. Guards exploded through the
door. Stun guns sizzled. A final howl from the subject, his voice a high tremolo, like a child sucked down a drain.

The hypnosis of Bobby Lee Crayline was over.

Wainwright and I stood in the bright Alabama sun and waited for a heavily restrained Crayline to return to the prison van. He was belted to a gurney, not allowed to stand. I’d fixed Mix-up’s leash to his collar and kept him to my side.

Bridges stood a dozen feet away, humiliated by the man he’d been charged with controlling. Dr Neddles probably had a mild concussion, but was coherent and expected to do fine. The medics were putting a restraint collar on Slezak’s neck. His face was ashen, like he’d looked into a grave and realized it was his.

“Coming through,” the younger of the guards yelled, rolling Bobby Lee Crayline to the van. Crayline was grinning again, as if the gurney was a sedan chair and he was being borne aloft through adoring throngs. Mix-up lunged toward Crayline, like the man smelled of raw
meat. I pulled my dog tighter against my leg and saw Bridges’s knuckles turn white as Crayline rolled nearer. Bridges strode to the restrained Crayline and stared down at him.
Uh-oh,
I thought, tensing.

Bridges cleared his throat deep and spat thickly in Crayline’s face. Said, “Try my oysters, faggot.”

“Get back from him, now,” the guard growled, shouldering Bridges aside as the gurney clattered to the van.

“How much inbreeding did it take to make you, Crayline?” Bridges yelled at the retreating prisoner. “How many generations of retards fucking their retarded sisters?”

Wainwright strode to Bridges, grabbed his arm. “Bridges! That’s enough!”

But Bridges wasn’t finished. “How was your childhood, Crayline?” he railed. “Bet you got used like a girl by all the men in your family. Bet you put on lipstick and begged for more.”

The grin on Crayline’s face was replaced by a blank screen. His head twisted back as he was hustled across the asphalt, his voice no longer giggly but rasping, the sound of a henchman’s axe on the grindstone.

“You best move to another planet, girly,” he hissed. “Bobby Lee’s gonna fry your guts for his supper.”

“Fuck you, you genetic moron,” Bridges snarled. He strode to his Corvette and roared away. Neddles and Slezak limped to the Benz and followed. A minute later, the van with Crayline pulled away.

Wainwright and I watched the vehicle pass the checkpoints, then swerve on to the road a half-mile distant to
become a brown speck against green fields. Wainwright fumbled in her purse and produced a rumpled pack of cigarettes, lit one.

“Didn’t figure you for a smoker, Doc,” I said.

“I have two cigarettes a week, Detective. I’m having them both now.”

“I fully understand,” I said.

“I owe you for coming up here,” Wainwright said, exhaling a blue plume of smoke. “I know there’s nothing I can do for you, but if ever there is …”

I waved her promise away and we stood quietly for a couple minutes to watch a jet pull a slender contrail from the west to the east. Wainwright lit her second cigarette from the first, squinted over my shoulder. Frowned at something. My eyes followed to a black rope of smoke rising into the sky perhaps five miles away. I knew there was nothing in that direction but cotton fields and pasture.

“What do you think it is?” Doc Wainwright said.

“Nothing good.” I told her to call the local cops, then sprinted to my truck with my dog at my side.

From a quarter-mile away, the scene sent ice cubes clattering through my belly. The Holman van lay on its side in a ditch, orange flames licking from the windows and turning to smoke the color of raw petroleum. I saw a green tractor in the middle of the road and wondered if the vehicles had collided.

I pulled to the side of the road, jumped out, hearing the distant whine of approaching sirens. Mix-up followed,
keeping a wary eye on the fire. The tractor was a John Deere with a trailer behind, piled high with hay bales. A farmer in blue overalls and work shirt knelt above the young guard, severely burned, his clothing smoldering. His face was pocked with shotgun pellets.

The farmer turned to me, his face a mask of terror. “I was in the field, saw smoke, drove over on my tractor. I pulled this man from the van. There’s another man in there, a driver. I couldn’t get to him, the flames …”

I looked into the fully engulfed van. A lost cause. I saw Mix-up in the corner of my eye, grubbing in the hay atop the trailer. The farmer started to touch the man, give comfort, but his hands couldn’t cross the distance to the dying guard. He looked at me, helpless, almost in tears.

“I don’t know what to do.”

“Help’s coming,” I said, hearing the sirens, loud now.

Months passed with no new details added to Crayline’s escape, save that the farmer mentioned hearing a motorcycle racing away in the distance as he arrived. It was theorized that a motorcyclist passed the lumbering Holman van and fired a shotgun into the windows. The speed limit on the stretch of road was thirty-five miles per hour. No matter what the van did when the driver lost control, the chances were Bobby Lee – strapped in from several angles – wouldn’t get hurt too badly. I always pictured him laughing as his rescuer pulled him from the broken vehicle, like a guy getting off a roller-coaster.

It was a brilliant plan, probably hatched in Holman when Crayline discovered his upcoming trip to the Institute. Prisons had “alumni associations”, and someone with the demonic charisma of a Bobby Lee Crayline would
have outside connections, men who’d risk their lives to say they’d helped him escape.

In the meantime, people in Mobile were bludgeoned, stabbed, poisoned, shot and, in one memorable case, vacuumed to death. Harry and I investigated, putting in a lot of eighteen-hour days. Then, good news. Financial stimulus funds reached the understaffed Mobile Police Department and sparked the hiring of new officers. This allowed the promotion to detective of several deserving uniformed men and women. The workload decreased.

I was thinking about taking some time off, when my supervisor, Lieutenant Tom Mason walked to my desk. Tom had been trying to get me to take a lengthy vacation for years. I’d get close, but the caseload would balloon and I’d truncate my plans to a long weekend getaway. At least that’s what I told myself. My partner muttered that I was an investigation addict afraid of missing a fix, but he muttered a fair amount.

But in truth, even I felt increasingly frazzled. Cases were becoming less a rush than a drudge. The slackening of pressure had me thinking it was finally time to take a break and get my edge sharpened.

“You and Harry have had a tough year,” Tom said. “He got his head banged like a gong. You put in eighty-hour weeks on that case with Sandhill. Not to mention this current crop of madness.”

“The point being, Tom?”

“The Department owes you forty-three days of accumulated vacation, Carson. Now, I can’t order you to take
time off, but I think it would be good if you gave it some thought and …”

“I’ll do it,” I said, clapping my hands.

“Do what?”

“Like you just said. Go on a vacation. What a great idea!”

Tom paused. “You will? Just like that?”

“It’s brilliant, Tom,” I said, standing to do a little shuffle-foot dance. “I’ll start making plans.”

Tom nodded and turned back to his corner office, stricken mute. I could tell he’d prepared an entire lecture on
Why Carson Ryder Should Take a Vacation.

Tom paused at his doorway, fingers tapping the frame. He turned.

“You’d planned to take some time off, right, Carson? Is that it?”

I did cherubic innocence. Tom waved the question away and went inside his office, his long face heavy with puzzlement.

Which explains, in a roundabout way, how I ended up in Eastern Kentucky, hanging off the side of a mountain while being yelled at by a gnome.

“Hey Carson!” called a voice from way below my feet. “You get lost again? Yoo-hoo, Earth to Carson Ryder.”

“I hear you, Gary,” I called over my back. Above me I saw two hundred feet of Corbin sandstone, the leavings of untold millennia of alluvial flooding. I was climbing through the compressed floor of an ancient sea that flowed during the Mississippian era, 400 million years ago. My fingers clutched small handholds. My toes were wedged into clefts. At my back lay nothing more than air.

“Others are waiting their turn, bud. Come on down.”

I pushed away from the rock face, dropping a foot until the rope through the bolt jolted me to a stop and I was lowered thirty feet to the ground. Gary, the twenty-five-year-old rock-climbing instructor, a diminutive guy who was part gnome, part mountain goat, grinned as
my feet hit the ground. Pete Tinker, the other instructor from Compass Point Outfitters, grabbed the control rope and launched another aspiring climber up the cliff face. Gary patted my back.

“You seem to get lost up there, Carson. How was it?”

“I’m sweating like a sprinkler,” I said, pulling my soaked tee from my chest to put air over my skin. “My muscles are quivering. My fingers ache. But I’m ready to go back up right now.”

“I’m not surprised. A lot of folks don’t have the physicality for rock climbing, the strength and elasticity. You do. But even more, you have an intuitive feel. You don’t waste motion.”

“I’m surprised to hear that. I feel clumsy as a first-step toddler.”

Gary grimaced toward the young woman just sent up. She’d lost her grip and was spinning in the air as Tinker belayed rope and shouted instructions.

“These folks are toddlers, Carson. Four days of lessons and you’re up and running. But you’ve done this before, I take it?”