Captives (10 page)

"Mauser has told me your story," the girl said. "But I will hear it from you—and if you lie, your bones will be the next to join this field."

7

Walt raced up the asphalt, gun in hand. Just short of the crest of the hill, he stopped on a dime. He'd been running on instinct, and not a very good one. Who gave a shit if Dim had gotten himself shot? That was
his
problem. Going to his aid wouldn't help get Carrie back. It could only jeopardize things. Events had already been decided: either the spoony bard was dead, or he wasn't.

Walt backed down the hill and installed himself behind a gray-green sagebrush, its scent cloying and dusty. There still hadn't been a second shot. A hawk screeched to his left, its note a faint thing on the wind. Walt braced his laser on his knee and aimed it at the peak of the road.

Dim appeared atop it a minute later, fiddling with his tie. Dust streaked the knees and elbows of his suit. After confirming the man was alone, Walt emerged from the sage.

Seeing movement, Dim's eyes bulged in surprise. He scowled, recognizing Walt. "Trying to send me to an early grave?"

"Sounds like I'm not the only one."

"That was merely a warning shot."

"I thought you knew them."

"I do. And that is why it wasn't followed with a killing shot." Dim glanced over his shoulder, then headed downhill, where a few sickly trees provided some cover. "The bad news is this: I will not be allowed inside."

Walt frowned. "I thought you were on good terms here. Tell me you didn't sleep with somebody's daughter."

"Well yes, why do you think I got into this business? But that is not the cause of their recalcitrance. What concerns them is that they are three days away from proceeding with the sale."

"Of their captives."

"This is so." Dim smiled. "And I would consider this good news."

"Because it means they're still here." Walt swabbed adrenaline-induced sweat from his forehead. "Do you know where they're taking them?"

"Regrettably, the man at the gate did not deign to inform me of their most secret plans."

"Then I've got three days to get her out of here. Are they here at the reservoir? What's the compound like?"

Dim rubbed his chin. "Very much like a prison."

"Cells?"

"No, they are held in one large room."

"Then how's it like a prison?"

"In that there are bars on the windows, they're kept locked up all day, and if they try to run, they will be shot to death."

"Okay, that part does sound prisony." Walt bared his teeth. "How well do you know it? Can you sketch it for me?"

"I have been summoned here on a handful of occasions. Once, I was asked to perform for the captives. A rather misguided effort at morale-building, if you ask me, but I am not one to complain about a paying gig." He located pen and papers from an inner pocket of his suit coat. One of the pages had writing on it and he returned this to the pocket. "But I see you are wearing your face where you are about to yell at me. The point is this: I've been inside it. Now pray my memory for spaces is as talented as my memory for lyrics."

He sat on a dusty rock and retrieved a thin piece of cardboard from his back pocket. Its folds were so worn they were fuzzy. He set it on his thigh and spread the page across it and started drawing. The building was a rectangle split down the middle by a long corridor. One side was dominated by two large rooms. The other held a number of smaller ones. Dim marked one of the large rooms with the male symbol, the other with the female. He did the same for two of the rooms across the hall.

"Male captives over here," he said, tapping the appropriate spot on the map, "females there. Over here you have the kitchen and pantries and so forth, but they're locked off from the prisoners. These smaller rooms… offices? I'm not sure how much they're used. In any event, I never saw the inside."

"What are these?" Walt said, pointing to the two small rooms marked with gender symbols. "Solitary?"

"Bathrooms."

"Indoors? They have plumbing?"

Dim nodded. "Pumped from the reservoir. Some electricity as well."

"Forget rescuing her, I'm going to buy the place." Walt eyeballed the map. "What about security?"

"The staff double as guards. To my understanding, there are no more than two or three on site. They keep the place locked down tight. When it comes to offenders, they no longer have to worry about the Eighth Amendment." He gestured to the reservoir vaguely indicated on the map. "If there were an emergency, most of the others reside just down the road. They could be summoned in a minute."

"Anything else?"

Dim spread his hands. "This is everything that springs to mind."

"Excellent." Walt folded the map into his pocket. "Now give me all your stuff."

"Eh?"

"You've done your job. We're happy friends. And now I need all your food and water."

Dim's jaw dropped. "You're not serious!"

"I really am. But I like you, so I'll cut you a deal: give me
most
of it."

"So I can die in these godforsaken hills?"

Walt gestured toward the reservoir. "Carrie will need it much more than you. If she's hurt, it could take us days to get out. Meanwhile, as soon as you get through the pass, you'll be fine." He raised his eyebrows. "You may have gotten shot at a minute ago. But I jumped off a building to steal you a damn guitar."

Dim sighed theatrically and pulled his pack around front. "Robbed by the infamous Walt Lawson. Wait until my audience hears of this."

"Doesn't count if I'm not threatening you." He accepted the lion's share of the man's remaining food and water, then shook his hand. "Thanks for your help. Conditional though it was."

"I have one more condition to ask."

"That once I get her out of here, I come tell you how it went down?"

Dim nodded, smiling. "I would wish you good luck, but you seem to be the patron saint of it."

He got on his bike and rode away. Walt dragged his into the brush past the shoulder and waited for Dim to disappear over the rise. Once the other man was gone, Walt got a couple hundred feet from the road and trudged through the dust toward the facility.

He came up behind a clump of sage. A few hundred yards down the road, a gatehouse controlled entry through the fence, which extended a mile in both directions, then ran downhill toward the reservoir. Two miles away, the lake's deep waters glimmered in the afternoon.

The nearest building was a half mile past the gatehouse, a bulky, nondescript rectangle connected to the main road by a dirt strip. Other buildings pocked the land around the lake, ranging in size from warehouses to simple homes.

He got out his binoculars, feeling relaxed for the first time since the night before Carrie had been taken. Three days to work with. In three days, you could move mountains. In the old days, you could have driven across the whole country. In the last three days of his life, he'd seen the van, gotten a lead on Dim from Sirita, traveled to San Jose, reclaimed a legendary guitar, and crossed the mountains to look down on the Abyss.

Hell, with three days to work with, God had created half the world. Once Walt was done with his business, he intended to do some pretty fine resting himself.

He kept his distance, observing, hiding in the sparse shade of the sage. Down by the reservoir, the dots of people milled around, accomplishing tasks Walt was too far away to distinguish. Twice, a truck came and went, a tube of dust swirling behind it. The internment center was as quiet as a tomb. Once, a man emerged to grab a smoke.

Mid-afternoon, a group of twenty men and women were herded outside by three armed guards. Walt held the binoculars steady. Hard to make out details at that range, and they were all dressed in bright pink shirts and pants that lent them an anonymous uniformity, but he identified three women who might be her.

The guards jogged them down the road to the lake. One of his potentials splayed her feet as she ran, toes pointed out. Walt's heart fluttered. Carrie's duck-walk. He'd made fun of her for it on a dozen occasions; it was the one exception to the athletic, competent motions she brought to every physical activity, even those she'd never tried before. He grinned.

At the lake, the prisoners washed up and appeared to have free rein to swim and exercise. Up at the prison, the grounds were dead silent.

One hour later, the guards rounded them up and returned them to the building. It grew quiet again, interrupted every ninety minutes or so by the guard strolling outside for a smoke and a cursory glance around. As Walt watched, he offered a silent paean to human vices and the exploitable patterns they presented.

That night was tough. He had a coat and a spare shirt, but he didn't have a blanket, and the high hills grew cold enough to wake him repeatedly, forcing him to get up and jog in place until he rebuilt his body heat. Carrie would hear about his hardship once the ordeal was over. Perhaps he could leverage it to convince her they should destroy dirty dishes rather than waste time washing them.

At last, the sun rose, throwing soft pink light over the valley and the mountains on its far side. The morning proceeded much like the day before: activity down at the reservoir, not so much at the facility, except for Ol' Smoky, who you could set your watch by. Mid-afternoon, the same three guards assembled the captives and started them down the road to the reservoir.

A dry, shallow gully folded the slope in the rough direction of the prison. Walt dropped into it. The bottom was an arrested river of tumbleweeds, but the banks were clear enough for him to run along, doing his best not to kick up too much dust. By the time the ditch changed course, he was within two hundred feet of the concrete building. To his right, the road fell away down the hill, hiding him from the procession headed to the reservoir.

After a glance at the gatehouse, which had been left empty all day, he stood and walked to the building. When he was a few feet from its porch, a tan snake wound through the weeds, its back patterned with a stripe of dark diamonds. He let out a low, startled moan, jumping back a step, then swore. A black band covered the snake's eyes. Bull snake. He stepped onto the cement patio surrounding the building. Like Dim had said, its few windows were barred. The metal side door was locked, which was unfortunate for him, but the guards hadn't bothered to lock the front door on their way out, which was unfortunate for them. He slipped inside.

* * *

Through the grate, the porcelain bowl waited eight feet below him. Taunting him. Reminding him that it is never a bad idea to use a bathroom when one presents itself. He shifted his leg, his foot bumping the side of the ventilation shaft with a dull rumble of metal; sneaky thing had fallen asleep without him noticing. He envied it deeply. More deeply than a man should be capable of envying a foot.

While reconnoitering the two prison rooms, he'd turned up an interesting fact: they had no bathrooms. Instead, as Dim's map had promised, there were two in the hallway across from the rooms. The building's other spaces were sealed off by school gym-style double metal doors.

A quick poke around the women's bathroom turned up the shaft above the toilets. Installing himself there like a massive, perverted spider would have been a gamble, except for one thing: Carrie was a card-carrying member of the Small Bladder Society. Couldn't go more than five hours without waking up to stumble outside. Once upon a time, he wouldn't have imagined there would be perks to knowing someone so well that you could block out their bathroom schedule. He could only hope their relationship was strong enough that she would forgive him for inadvertently spying on every one of her fellow female captives.

Thinking about them gave him a twinge. It wouldn't be impossible to kill the guards and abscond with all of the prisoners. It would be ten times as risky to try to break the lot of them loose, though: not only would a group be much slower, but it would be much easier to follow, too.

If he'd stumbled upon these people at random, he might have been inclined to see what he could do for them. But he wasn't here to make the world a sunnier place. He was here for Carrie. In the equation between one Carrie and twenty total strangers, the answer was as simple as two plus two.

They said love made you a better person, but experience proved that to be a big fat lie. Love only made you better for the lone individual lucky enough for you to be in love with. For everyone else, it made you worse. Fearful. Illogical. Dangerous. Willing to fight.

And to go to war.

Below him, the door opened with a questioning squeak. They'd shut off the lights a little after dusk, the same time he'd heard them locking the doors enclosing the hallway; now, a candle entered the bathroom, flickering away. The circle of its light advanced. The woman bearing it opened the next stall over, setting the candle on the toilet paper dispenser with a metal rasp. The sweet smell of beeswax wafted up to the vent. Walt crept forward as quietly as he could. He didn't have the best angle, but as she sat, she glanced up at the ceiling. Her freckles, her uneven, shoulder-length brown hair.

Walt grinned. "I'm watching you pee."

Carrie bolted from her seat, pants around her ankles, and threw her hands up over her head. "What the fuck!"

"It's me!" he stage-whispered. "Now shut up and be grateful before you wake everyone up."

She lifted the candle over her head, gaping at the vent. "
Walt?
"

"Are you really that surprised?"

Carrie laughed in disbelief and set the candle back down. "Turn around. I gotta piss."

"Never mind me, I'll just be Batmanning from the ceiling."

He lifted the grate and pulled it inside the shaft, wincing each time it banged against the noisy wall. With a bit of squirming, he moved it out of the way and prepared to descend. The shaft was too narrow for him to turn around and he had to climb past the exit, then roll onto his back and scoot forward until his feet slipped through the hole.

He lowered himself, hanging to the reinforced sides of the exit while he reached out with his toes. They contacted the toilet seat and he let go, lowering himself to a crouch.