Lost (35 page)

Killing wasn’t a sex type thing with Dug, just that he liked to snuff things out. Household cats, wild pigs, human beings, they all gave similar satisfaction.

“What if he asks?” Dug says.

“You tell him I took care of it. Just hand over the boy and get out of there. He won’t be expecting no long conversations. You got your knife?”

“Always got my knife,” Dug responds with elaborate dignity.

“Okay then. You best be careful. Whole idea is, we come out of this alive. We got plans, remember?”

“I get my own cabin.”

“You get your own cabin, and enough ammo to kill everything in a ten-mile radius, how does that sound?”

“Good,” says Dug, and obediently turns to the path that will take him to the boy.

Roy hurries toward the girl. He can feel Ricky Lang in his head, a nudge of pure fear that makes his knees feel weak. He’s well aware of the terrible risk he’s taking by failing to obey. My God, look what befell poor Stick! One moment a laid-back dude, a living legend, the next moment nothing more than a howl in the flames. Ricky’s way of saying see what happens to those who disobey. Not that he’d ever actually forbidden Roy from hijacking the aircraft, selling it on the black market. Like most of Ricky’s rules it was a presumed thing, subject to his whims.

All gone now, that beautiful flying machine. Reduced to twisted metal, a blackened path on the runway. A man dead, millions of dollars up in smoke, all because the former Nakosha chief is in a bad mood, wants to make an impression on his subordinates.

Kill the girl.
Just issues the order without explanation. Like saying
burn the money,
only worse, because even if he and Dug survive the madness of Ricky Lang, the abduction and killing of a minor in the state of Florida almost invariably leads to death row. If they get caught. If? A zillion FBI agents combing the area, what are the odds of not getting caught on a stone-cold murder?

No, no, no. Roy knows he has to play it smart. Play it smart and he can still come out the other end with something to show for his troubles.

His mind ticks over the possibilities as he approaches the cooler. The old walk-in cooler, ripped out of a failed Miami restaurant and dumped here in the middle of nowhere, had once been used to store wax-sealed bales of marijuana. Somehow it had been missed when the rangers swept through. Probably because it had been neatly hidden within a stand of overgrown cypress. Now its thick, insulated walls make a handy cage of galvanized steel.

Nice thing, the girl can scream her lungs out, all that emerges is a faint, birdlike shriek. Plus with the foot-thick door padlocked from the outside, she can be left unattended for hours or even days. Really too bad they can’t keep her in the cooler, but eventually the search parties are bound to find it. Plus there’s the Dug problem.

Roy is thinking about Dug when he opens the cooler door and steps inside, flashlight roaming. Before he can react, something flies out of the darkest corner, something deeply furious, something with a long sharp claw that pierces the softest part of his throat, penetrating his esophagus.

As he falls to his knees, choking on his own blood, the furious thing flies past him, out the door and into the night.

9. Oof Says The Monster Man

Pure adrenaline carries her out of the steel prison, into the muggy darkness. Clawlike branches scratching at her face, tugging her hair, raking her bare arms. There’s no up or down, no direction home, just the explosive desire to get away.

Wherever she imagined she might be, it is not here, in the absolute wilderness. The steel box made her think of buildings, maybe a village near the remote airstrip where she had Seth had put the Beechcraft down, enjoying their big adventure. A real live Indian chief! What a kick, what a tale to tell her friends. The real thrill, though, had been piloting the aircraft all the way from New York. Seth finally taking control for the tricky landing on the narrow strip, but that was it. And then, of course, the dream flight turned into a total nightmare moments after they touched down.

Heedless of the branches and thorns and vines, Kelly crashes headlong through the stand of cypress, arms shielding her eyes as best she can.

Is he dead? Did she kill him? She’d been aiming for an eye—hours she’d waited, crouching in the corner like a taut-wound spring. Psyching herself up. Telling herself this was her one chance. Go for the eye. Blind him, kill him, whatever it takes.

Get out of the box or die trying. And then run for your life, girl. Run as long and as far as you can.

All of a sudden she stumbles into a clearing. An area large enough that the edges melt away into the night. She looks at her scratched and bleeding hands, realizes she no longer has the weapon she honed so carefully.

Hide.
She must find a place to hide until the sun comes up, whenever that is. The man she attacked may be alive, or
there may be others. She has formed a firm conviction that more than one man has been keeping her captive. Changing the foul bucket, leaving behind the bag of pasty, white-bread sandwiches and the jug of water that has kept her alive, barely. Two at least, maybe more.

At that very moment, heart slamming and lungs heaving, she imagines footsteps following her.

Run!

Weakened by her captivity, half-starved, the adrenaline takes over, making her legs pump furiously. Kelly sprints through the clearing, then through grass up to her knees. Runs like a madwoman until the rough ground reaches up, catches a foot, sends her sprawling facedown.

Wham. Knocks the breath out of her.

Lying in the rough grass she manages to roll over, searching the sky for stars. Fearful that if she doesn’t find something to judge direction she’ll end up running in circles. Her eyes detect a few faint stars intermittently obscured by low clouds, and somehow that calms her slightly. Her breathing returns to something like normal.

Stay where you are, she decides, until you get your bearings. Then choose which way to run.

Gradually her heart slows to match her breathing and she begins to discern sounds. Insects buzzing. A bird squawking some distance away. Heron? Owl? Something wild that’s for sure. The low-pitched bellow of something far away—could that be an alligator? Does that mean she’s close to the Everglades? Miles from where they landed, if true. Crickets, very close, mere inches away. And then another sound that pours like chilled water through her veins.

A human voice.

“Move along, you little shit!”

Kelly flattens herself, trying to blend into the ground. Is the grass deep enough to hide her? In a panic she tries to dig herself into the rough ground. Impossible, too hard.

Lie still, her instinct urges. Be quiet. Be small.

“I ain’t carryin’ no full-growed man,” the voice says. “Walk or be dragged, them is your choice.”

“My legs don’t work,” says another voice. Faint and obviously in a lot of pain.

Seth!

Kelly lifts her head until her eyes just barely clear the grass. At first she can’t see anything. Gradually her vision adjusts and she can make out what looks like a dark, humpbacked creature slowly making its way along the edge of the clearing, barely visible.

The humpbacked thing becomes two men, one of them hobbled, barely able to walk.

“That just cramps in your legs. Walk ‘em off.”

The hobbled man—it has to be Seth—is tied up somehow, hands bound, a rope around his waist. The other man, medium size but strong looking, is all coiled impatience. Jerking the rope as if he enjoys the grunt of pain it produces.

“You want me to chop off another finger? I can do that, you want.”

Eyes narrowing, Kelly begins to search the ground for a weapon. Hands encountering nothing but hard dirt beneath the blades of grass.

Having convinced herself that Seth’s oppressor is focused on tormenting his victim, Kelly crawls and slithers until she reaches the edge of the clearing. Has to be something, a branch or a stick, something to poke the monster in the eye.

What she finds, belly flat to the ground, is a chunk of rock about the size of her head. Charred and smelling of a campfire.

Her hands explore the weapon, finding it very rough and not quite as heavy as expected.

Whatever, it will have to do.

Gathering the meaty rock into her hands, she waits for her moment. That’s the hardest part as her fury rises, waiting as the monster continues to torment her friend.

“What are you,” the monster demands, “some kind of fag? There’s nothing wrong with your legs! You tryin’ a trick me, huh? We’ll see about that!”

The monster does something and Seth collapses.

“Get up and walk like a man! We ain’t got all night!”

The monster bends over Seth, a fist raised.

Kelly explodes across the clearing, the hefty chunk of limestone raised high. And as the monster turns, astonished—the thing has human eyes, is that possible?—Kelly brings the rock down on his head with every ounce of her adrenaline-charged strength.

“Oof!” says the monster man, falling backward.

A moment later she and Seth Manning are running for their lives.

10. Eyes That Couldn’t Care Less

The Irish have their wakes, the Jews sit shiva. At the Glades Motorcourt Inn there are no kegs of whiskey, no mirrors to cover, unless you count the cracked glass over the medicine cabinet. Nevertheless, the sense of mourning, of loss that has yet to catch up, seems as deep and insidious as the black specks of mold on the walls. Whatever flush of excitement came with our little triumph at the Hunt Club has been erased by the long wait for Leo Fish.

Please. I’m supposed to put my faith in a stranger with a
ridiculous name? Some hermit who lives in a swamp? Talk about grasping at straws! Other than Fern leaving a pep-talk message, no one has phoned my cell with news of the search. Not the FBI, not the local cops, nobody. Despite Randall Shane’s encouraging words about not giving up, I’m taking the lack of news as a bad sign. The man Shane surprised in Cable Grove has had plenty of time to return to wherever he kept my daughter, and to eliminate her as a witness. Isn’t that what mad kidnappers do? Snuff out their victims? I’ve seen the movie, read the tabloid version. I know how this ends, with the poor mother weeping and the media vultures shedding glycerin tears.

Shane is in the next room, his television faint but discernible through the thin walls, tuned, as mine is, to local news. Bright eyed and bushy tailed, the man who never sleeps has encouraged me to do so. As if. My exhausted brain seems determined to clock each passing second. Waiting, waiting. Two hours have ticked by since Mr. Ponytail zoomed away in his airboat—sounded like a plane taking off, frankly—and each minute has been soaked in molasses.

So when 11:05 p.m. finally ticks over, and fat tires spray the driveway gravel, I’m not at all surprised to see Detective Rufus Sydell climbing out of his cruiser, adjusting his hat, looking professionally grim. He has news to impart and my thudding heart tells me it won’t be good.

Shane and I burst through our doors at precisely the same moment, like cuckoos out of the same clock.

“Evening,” says Roof, stepping back, a little startled.

Shane glances at me, then reaches out and gives my hand a reassuring squeeze. “Go on,” he says to the cop. “Something happened. What?”

“Um, you all mind if I come inside? Skeeters are fearsome.”

“Of course.”

I follow them into Shane’s room, slapping instinctively at the mosquitoes that follow. I have to restrain myself from leaping on the cop’s back and tearing the terrible truth out of him.

Roof takes off his hat, runs a ruddy hand over the gray speckles of hair on his shiny, freckled skull. He looks like he’d rather be elsewhere. Anywhere but here, reporting to a concerned mom. “Ma’am, I need to ask, how tall is your daughter?”

Taken aback, I stare at him stupidly. Why would he want to know such a thing? Then it dawns on me. They’ve located a body, need identification. He’s trying to break it gently.

“Ma’am?”

“Kelly is five foot five,” I tell him in my smallest voice. “Exactly my height.”

Roof drops into a plastic stack chair, causing the legs to creak ominously. He lets out a breath and breaks into a face-wide grin. “Well, that sure is good news! Didn’t mean to scare you, ma’am, but they come upon a body out in the backcountry, and the only thing they took off it so far is approximate height. Five foot ten is a long ways from five-five.”

“Oh my God.”

“Yes ma’am, it surely had me scared. Lots of tall girls these days.”

“So the search parties are still out there?” Shane asks, surprised.

“Not as such,” Roof says, fanning himself with his hat. “The tribal police was attracted by flames. Could be seen for miles, apparently. Seems there was a fire out that little airstrip Ricky used. The one Mr. Shane here located. An airplane was torched and a charred body was located not far from the aircraft. Body was burned so bad the, um, sorry ma’am, the
gender isn’t immediately obvious. They’ll know more when they get the remains back to the lab.”

“So it could be a male?” Shane asks. “You’re thinking, who, Seth Manning?”

Roof looks around, spots the dented little refrigerator. “You wouldn’t happen to have a beer, would you? I’m not normally a drinkin’ man, but I surely could use one about now.”

“Sorry, no.”

“Can’t be helped,” he says, obviously disappointed. “Oh well, Where was we? Oh, right. No, it’s likely not Seth Manning, on account of the height I mentioned. Turns out he ain’t but a few inches taller than the girl.”

“Kelly,” I remind him.

“Right. A course.”

“You have another theory?” Shane prompts gently. “About the victim?”

“Just a hunch.”

“Hunches can be good,” says Shane.

“Well,” the cop drawls, pronouncing it
wall.
“I got to thinkin’, after our little talk. Decided maybe I’d take a look at Roy Whittle, since his name come up. Found he wasn’t home to talk to, but he had been seen recently in the company of a fella name Stick Davis. Stick being a pilot with a shady reputation. Come to me that Stick pretty well fits the description you gave, of the suspects checking out the stolen airplane.”