Buried Alive (32 page)

Outside of the costume, Cherry was naked. She looked worn and frightened, but angry as well, watching Stone like he was a deadly snake, one she might kill if she found the chance.

I looked through slitted eyes as Cherry saw my crumpled form. Her eyes dropped in despair. I had no way to signal her without alerting Stone to my consciousness.

Stone rope-dragged Cherry to the far end of the structure, tying her to an iron hoop in the wall. My eyes searched the ground and saw a brown glint in the dirt a yard away, glass. I wormed through the mud, scraped at it with my fingernail, unearthing a semi-triangular shard from a beer bottle, shorter than my thumb. It was thick on one end where the wall of the bottle joined the butt end, pointed on the other. As a weapon, it was
lacking - short and brittle - but it was something. I cupped it in my palm, shot a veiled glance at Stone.

He was staring at me.

“I saw you move,” he whispered.

He was reaching for a dark wooden bar when I closed my eyes, heard feet pounding my way. I made myself go limp, knowing what was coming.

The feet stopped beside the cage. The stick probed my back, jabbed my side.

Slashed down on my legs, the pain like a dozen simultaneous hornet stings.

Don’t move … don’t move …

The rod slashed down twice again. Finally satisfied I was unconscious, Stone padded back toward the dogs and prodded them with the stick. The emptiness in his eyes was spooky. Stone was foreign in time, inhabiting a world his body had left twenty years ago, but where his mind remained in a prison beyond anything of rock and iron. It was not the world of his miserable childhood, of the XFL, of the hole in the barn floor. Stone was in the twilight of all his worlds, and they intersected on these unholy grounds where, long ago, children had fought in the pit they called the grave.

When the dogs were foaming and furious, Stone went to Cherry and began untying the rope from the iron ring.

“Come on, Colonel,” he said, jerking her across the floor toward the pit.

“I’m not the Colonel,” Cherry gasped. “I’m—”

Stone calmly backhanded Cherry. She caromed off the
wall, slipped in dogshit spread across the floor, fell to her knees. Stone grabbed the back of her hair, lifting. She groaned and fought to her feet, the hat sideways, glue tearing away. Stone replaced the hat atop her head, slapped it down. The blow must have been like a pile-driver, but Cherry stayed standing.

“Time to meet the boys, Colonel,” Stone said.

I wondered if I was seeing a fantasy created while he had retreated inside himself during his false abduction. He’d fantasized killing Powers by dressing her in whore garb, inverting logic by “baptizing” her in the pond. He’d crushed Burton beneath the kind of vehicle in which the man likely raped the young Teeter Gasper as he had William Taithering. Stone had fed poison to Tanner, a dark echo of the preacher feeding spoiled food to the boys in the camp.

I wondered what Stone imagined for the Colonel.

I heard a moan and saw Cherry stagger and seem to falter. It was a ruse. She snapped a kick into Stone’s belly that doubled him over. Cherry kicked again, catching Stone in his head. But Cherry’s kicks were nothing compared to punishment Stone had absorbed from professionals; his open hand swatted her like a troublesome fly. She spun away into the dirt.

“Get up, Colonel,” Stone whispered. “Up and up.”

Cherry tried to rise, hands squishing in the mud. Stone again lifted her to her feet with her hair, the hat tumbling away. He pushed Cherry into the pit and she sprawled across its mud-slick bottom. Stone retrieved Cherry’s
clothes from the floor and used the dark stick to push them between the bars of the dog cage. The enraged animals shredded the cloth in seconds. Stone put his back to the cage and began skidding it over the floor to the pit, his heels digging into the floor.

“We’re going to be free,” he called over his shoulder to Cherry. “We’re free tonight, Colonel.”

Stone’s eyes glittered with an electric glow, haunted by his need to tear free of the bonds of his childhood. Stone grunted the cage toward the edge of the pit, the grave. The dogs tore at the metal, aching to sink their teeth into flesh.

Stone had only to release the latch and the dogs would cover Cherry. He stood back and took a final look at the scenario, an eerie smile on his face, beatific calm. My mind raced to fathom the shapes in Stone’s head. What had eleven-year-old Teeter Gasper seen in this place eighteen years ago? Who had he known?

Jimmie Hawkes.

With Stone’s eyes turned to his tableau, I stripped to white briefs and rolled the sides into straps, a white pouch over my genitals. Stone moved toward the cage and put his hand on the latch. The dogs fought at the door, establishing which came first to Cherry’s throat.

I dipped my finger in the mud at my feet and scrawled a dark shape on the white cloth, like a number, feverishly trying to recall what Jimmie Hawkes screamed in LaGrange.

“YEEEEEE-HAH!” I screamed maniacally, leaping
from one side of the cage to the other. “PUT ON YOUR CUPS AND COVER YOUR PUPS!” The sound echoed through the barn. The dogs stopped fighting and looked my way, sensing more quarry.

“PIN A NUMBER ON YOUR DICK!” I howled. “BUST THEIR ASSES AND GET SOME EAT IN THE BELLY! EAT AND MORE EAT.”

Stone halted, his face turning to me. “Jimmie?” he said, confusion clouding his eyes.

“DOPE AND WHISKEY AND GETTIN’ ALL FRISKY! WIN AND FILL THE MOUTH-HOLE!”

“Jimmie? Is that you?”

I drummed down my body, jerking my hips, Stone was frozen in the black hole of his mind, mouth open and aghast at whatever images I was creating in his brain. His hand fell from the latch. I pointed my hand at him like I was delivering an ultimatum.

“READ THE DOG, BUDDY! THE DOG KNOWS THE FUTURE.” I bounced from side to side of the cage like a trapped animal. I stopped, stumbled as if seized by a terrible thought. I craned back my head and screamed.

“HERE COMES THE SNACK TRUCK!”

No,
Stone mouthed, his face seized by fearful awe.

“HELP ME TEETER,” I cried. “I WANT OUT FROM THE GRAVE!”

Stone seemed as numb as a zombie as he plodded to my cage, yanked open the door. He came to me with arms wide.

“Jimm—”

My hand flicked out and slashed his left eye with the shard. When reflex pulled his hand to the eye, I jammed the shard so deep into the right eye I felt it hit bottom, whatever that was.

He screamed like a scalded banshee but instead of grabbing at his eye he closed his massive hands around my neck, as if everything in him had burned away but the instinct to fight. I jabbed at his face with the glass but he tucked it between his arms and all I could do was scrape at his crown. His hands seemed ready to meet in the center of my windpipe and I heard the roar of unconsciousness closing in, felt the final rush down the vortex. The roar turned to a series of noises I figured would be the last sounds I ever heard. It sounded like twigs breaking in a moonlit forest.

Was Crayline after me in the next life, too?

“You’re a hot dog, Ryder,” said the voice in the sky.

“And you just about got what hot dogs deserve. Cooked.”

Krenkler’s voice. It zoomed down to stop just past my splayed feet. I opened my eyes. The agent named Rourke was crouched beside me, palpating my neck.

“Nothing broke,” he said to Krenkler.

“You can’t win ‘em all.”

“Cherry!” I said, my head snapping upward.

“Outside getting medical attention,” Krenkler said. “She’s all right, outside of cuts and bruises.”

My eyes came to focus on a human form, horizontal and still, the body of Jessie Stone face-down in the mud of the barn floor. I smelled cordite in the air and realized the cracking twigs were gunshots.

“The cavalry arrived just in time,” I said, feeling my head clearing. “Thank you.”

“It was close,” Krenkler said. “Luckily we had a window into your ridiculous attempt to fly solo.”

She nodded toward the door of the barn. Entering, surrounded by a half-dozen FBI agents, was my brother, hands behind his back. Krenkler had probably started digging into Jeremy’s background from the moment he’d stepped into Burton’s visitation. He’d told me how he’d put one over on Krenkler, asking to be part of the investigation. It appeared he’d misread the lady. His life in the forest - his life in the real world - was over.

Jeremy said something to one of the agents. The guy looked at me and laughed. My brother shot me a wink and a wave.

No handcuffs.

The agent patted Jeremy on the back, nodded at me. They both laughed like I was the butt of a joke.

“Doctor Charpentier came to us an hour ago,” Krenkler explained. “He said you were at his home earlier. You were looking for some place tucked way in the north of the county. You couldn’t raise McCoy on your cell and you thought a hiker like the doctor might know how to get here.”

I shot a glance at my brother. “I, uh … yes, that’s right.”

“The doctor also said you were acting pretty squirrely. He began to fear for your safety and called us. You owe him big time.”

Rourke extended his hand and I let him pull me to standing. I closed my eyes with my hands on my knees
for a few seconds, getting my bearings. My brother had walked into the lion’s den to save my life.

Krenkler shook her head at me for a final time, then trotted over to inspect the body, snapping orders to the agents like they were errant bellhops. I went to Jeremy, now alone.

I said, “Thanks, Doc.”

“This has been very instructive,” he said quietly, sliding his hands into his pockets and leaning against the wall, totally at ease. “I’ve been quite the curious fellow on the way here, asking the boys how they dig into people’s backgrounds and so forth.”

“The boys?”

“And, of course, dear Miss Krenkler. They’ve been most informative without realizing it. With a little more work I can harden my identity.”

I shook my head in amazement: My brother had once again fallen upwards. I went outside and found Cherry about to be taken to the hospital for a checkup. The paramedics were kind enough to allow us a few quiet moments together, and I followed the ambulance to the hospital.

Cherry’s exam and several X-rays took a half-hour. McCoy stopped by for a few minutes. After she was pronounced in remarkable shape, given her ordeal, we retreated to her home and stood in a steaming shower until the water ran cool. She poured us bourbon over ice, enlivened with a few ounces of seltzer. We sat on the porch as the stars wheeled overhead.

“How well did you know Horace?” I asked.

A long pause. “He laughed a lot. Bought me birthday gifts, graduation gifts. Things Mama couldn’t afford. I loved to be close to him because he smelled so good, his aftershave or cologne. I’d sit in his lap with my arms around his neck when I was little. One time I … he …”

She fell silent, her eyes far away and looking inside.

“Talk to me,” I said. “Don’t hide it.”

“I-I must have been ten, eleven. My birthday party. I was sitting on his lap and spooning ice cream into his mouth. I felt his hand on my legs, then … something tickled and I wriggled away. The ice cream fell on to him. I remember seeing this startled look on his face. I thought I’d done something wrong.”

“Do you think—”

“I think he was testing something, that he might have even scared himself. From that point on he started telling me I’d gotten too big to hold. For a long time I thought it was because I’d spilled ice cream on his lap. Then time sped up and it was junior high school and I was in the band and on the newspaper and then high school and I was in clubs and there were boys, whoopee. College and studies came next. I really didn’t see him much after I was thirteen or fourteen, too much happening in my life.”

“But he left you his home.”

“Horace had changed over the years, become a recluse. His big laugh went away. He had an enlarged heart that
was expanding. I’d come to visit and he really seemed to appreciate the company and, uh, and …”

Reality crashed in and her words choked into tears. She stood and wiped them away with the back of her hand. She paced the porch until her voice was steady.

“I can’t believe what a monster he was, Carson. What a disgusting monster. I can’t live here any more, knowing what he was. I can’t.”

“Maybe Horace changed at the end,” I said.

“People like that never change, Carson. Their souls are too broken.”

She fell into the chair and put her head in her hands. I moved close and put my arm over her shoulder.

“Did you know Lee McCoy was on the recovery team when your uncle fell?” I asked.

Her face turned to me, puzzled. “He never mentioned it.”

“There’s something else Lee didn’t mention.”

I told her a brief story about a ranger rappelling to a body in a tree and finding a scrap of paper pinned to the corpse’s ice-cream suit. I handed her something McCoy had kept for three years, figuring it might someday be needed. I’d asked him to bring it to the hospital.

Donna Cherry stared at four words written in a whisper:

I’m sorry for everything

She folded the note, closed it in her hand, and we walked to the edge of the precipice, lit in the soft light from her porch.

“Two men involved in the fight camps died down there, Carson. One created horror, the other was trapped in it. Both were looking for freedom from their pasts. Why did they both die here? What does it mean?”

“Whatever you need it to mean,” I said. “Whatever it takes to work the magic.”

“Magic? What do you mean by …”

But I was already climbing the steps to her porch. I went inside and stripped her walls of the half-dozen implements used in training dogs. I took them outside and told her what they were.

“They’re all that remains of the bad,” I said. “If you kill them properly, you can set your home free.”

Cherry stared into my eyes for a long moment, nodded understanding. She went inside, returning minutes later in a simple gown of white. Her feet were bare in the warm grass. She was wearing Horace Cherry’s hat.