by Chris Bauer
Ballast, cinder, crushed stone, and hard-packed dirt formed a trail wide enough for two cars to pass side by side. Abandoned railroad tracks paralleled it. At one time rail lines were popular in this part of the state, the tracks laid more than a hundred years ago to haul coal to other railway systems. When the mines closed, these short railways closed with them. Still, they spawned some serious hiking trails just like this one.
The three of us were out here in the late afternoon heat, Tess doing fine without the leash, Fungo trotting next to me, his leash dragging. Tess darted in and out of the brush going after whatever interested her, had no trouble keeping up despite her digressions, blessed with some serious acceleration capabilities and an incredible vertical leap to go with them. At home, for squirrels who decided to hesitate on a tree trunk, a huge fail. If they didn’t get their rodent asses farther up the trunk, and quickly, I’d be cleaning up regurgitated squirrel guts in my living room later on.
I stopped for a breather, bent over, hands on my knees. Fungo stopped, sat next to me. Tess was up ahead at a rise in the trail, waiting for us.
I didn’t like Tess’s look; she was going to run. “Tess, come,” I called, my voice stern.
She looked over the rise, looked back at us, and was gone.
Fungo and I trotted to where we saw her last. In the distance, Tess circled a large oak, her squirrel prey thirty feet up and well into its routine of scolding its pursuer from the safety of the treetop.
“Bad dog, Tess, bad.”
She cowered, lowered her ears, and tucked her tail stub where I couldn’t see it. It was an act. She was remorseful, but more so because squirrel notch number twenty-eight or more had eluded her. I called her again. She slinked her way back to me, her head still bowed, hoping I bought into her act.
“You know the drill. Drop and give me twenty.”
She slid down into a crouch. I dropped to the grass next to her and assumed the push-up position. Tess, her stubby tail moving nonstop like a car wiper in a hurricane, hopped her fifty-plus pounds onto my back and found her balance. We pounded out twenty push-ups in under half a minute.
“That’ll teach you,” I said, out of breath.
* * *
Another quarter-mile down the trail and—fuck—again Tess was gone, this time around a bend. After a moment I whistled. Then it was a two-fingered whistle with feeling. No Tess. After that, I went with the one shouted command that never failed: “TESS, FETCH.”
The forest shouted back. Hooting owls, chirps and caws, tree branches on high swaying from the wind, cicadas. Still no Tess. Fungo and I jogged beside the tracks that followed the bend in the road.
Noise, far left. I squinted to focus on an opening in the trees and a path of disturbed leaves that was still settling. Tess. She had another scent. Here the hiking trail and the rail tracks separated. I followed the tracks. Fungo and I jogged into a parting of the trees that the tracks ran through, followed them to where they ran up a slight grade. At the top of the rise, facing us across a dip and underneath a rocky, moss-covered ledge, was a large gash carved into the base of the opposing hillside, the gash dark and shadowy. The train rails led inside.
An old mine entrance. From this distance we saw Tess, on her way in. Me screaming at her, scream-whistle, whistle-scream, did nothing other than piss me off and rile Fungo up. He broke ranks and bolted, his leash trailing, airborne.
I managed a “Fungo, stop!” before the Tourette’s started in, rose up my throat, spewing like bile, jerky hand gestures hindering my trot. My mouth was a slave to it, commenced launching its contorted, sick mind-farts. They came hard and fast, and were as welcome to my ears as a runaway nail gun.
“—bile vile doggie style, in the aisle—
“—doggiedick-lemonstick, flick your Bic, flickle tickle fickle, cocka-doodle ding-dong, dippity-do, zippity do-dah—”
Fungo put on the brakes before he entered the mine, did an about face and waited for me to jog up to him. My mouth finished with its shit. When I got there I gave him a quick pat and a chewy piece of jute rope from my pocket as his reward.
“—good boy, boy-o-boy, ahoy me matey—”
I caught my breath and puckered up, then I let go a granddaddy of a whistle and followed it up with another “Tess, come!”
Barking floated back to me from inside the mine entrance, the echoes turning in on themselves. Before I moved another step the barking stopped, and now I heard accelerating paw patters from dog toenails that need clipping. They glided across the railroad ties and were coming my way, the nails scraping the wood and the crushed stone that separated them, closing fast.
Tess exploded out of the mine, scrambled up, sat next to Fungo at attention. Her tail stub wiggled while she waited for a pat on the head or a treat or both. “No reward. Not after what you did.”
Didn’t matter, there was nowhere to put it. Her mouth was full of rat. A big, squirming, meaty all-white rat with black eyes and red drizzle leaking from its mouth.
Tess’s jaw closed tighter. More squirms from the rat now, and more rat blood. Then it was no more squirms and a lot more rat blood. She would have crushed it if I didn’t stop her.
For what it’s worth, she’d abided the fetch command.
“Tess, drop it.”
She obeyed, the oversize white rat now at my feet. Dogs with terrier genes and rodents of all species had a long history with each other, although not on a persistent personal basis, considering one did the chasing part and the other did the getting caught, ripped up, and eaten part. Not this time. Tess held back, was as interested in this thing as I was. I’d seen white rats before, but not outside and not this big, this one the size of a toy poodle. She nudged it. Its mouth ack-acked, then it shuddered, then it was gone for good. I pulled her back by her collar before she could get at it again and I sat her down, her back and neck muscles straining against my grip. She whimpered; I quieted her with a raised finger. Another scolding, another twenty push-ups. We pounded them out one more time together, more stressful for her this time than for me because I made her do it right next to the dead rat, with her fucking knowing better than to break ranks while we did it.
White rats in coal mines. They were in my head on the jog the whole way back. At the van I toweled my two deputies down, deposited them inside, and moved to my phone, which still had a signal. I did a search.
Superstition: A white rat in a coal mine is a sign of a cave-in. Hell, not all that different than rats leaving a sinking ship. Nothing new there, like the canaries that miners took with them into mines to detect carbon monoxide.
I ran across a different spin from an early twentieth century newspaper entry: White rats are common in the deeper parts of an active coal mine. They live on what miners, careless or otherwise, leave behind. A rat’s life span is two to three years, so multiple generations might never see the light of day if they’re given enough to eat…
An active coal mine? Hardly. Yet the idea of something living in there, even rats, with nothing to feed on but rocks, dirt and coal was a real stretch.
Another search result. A warning of sorts: The next time you go into an abandoned mine may be your second to last trip underground.
I let that search result have the last word. It was almost six o’clock. The sun was below the ridgeline, a mountain mist starting to creep in. Time to get back to the B&B to feed my posse their dinner then grab something to eat as well. After that, we’d need to go looking for that classic Chevy.
13
Andy arrived, parked out front, grabbed his equipment bag and slipped it over his shoulder. St. Possenti’s didn’t so much look like a bingo hall or a building named after a Catholic saint as it did a cinder-blocked fortress reminiscent of its former life as a police station.
He retrieved his membership ID; the smiling senior at the entrance waved him through. “You’re good to go, Andy,” he said. “Have fun.”
Once past the vestibule he passed a few occupied booths, found one that was empty and
rested his bag in it. He unfastened the clasp, pushed some of the bag’s contents out of the way, and searched inside. On its flat bottom sat an antique handgun in an equally antique cracked black leather holster, vintage items both. The gun wasn’t in his bag so much for protection as it was a reminder to him, daily, of his aunt, Kitty Buchinsky.
Aunt Kitty had bequeathed him the 1890s Colt, a six-shooter Kitty’s father had given her as a child. A “squirrel gun,” her father called it. At close range it was as deadly as it needed to be, but because it was a smaller caliber it did the job without ravaging the meat the hunter intended to eat. Andy lifted the antique gun out of the way, continued rummaging in the bag and each of its side pockets.
Dody Heck arrived alongside, dropped her bag next to his. Andy persisted in his agitated search. “What didn’t you bring?” she asked.
“Eye protection.”
“I’ve got a spare pair.”
“Thanks. So what did you find out?”
Dody, Rancor’s chief of police before the job became an elected position, had connections with the Scranton police department and law enforcement agencies in other neighboring towns, relationships she’d fostered from nearly thirty years as a cop. They were further solidified by her husband’s brutal death while on the job in Scranton, a crime the police never solved. Kinship among cops, feelings of guilt; these both begot infrequent favors and information requests the Scranton police chief granted Dody when she’d occasionally asked. Today had been one of those occasions.
“Morgan Higgins is the little girl’s name,” Dody said. “Sodomized and strangled while her parents were preoccupied in the restaurant brawl. Nine years old, in a white birthday dress. Her partially clothed body was crammed into the toilet like a roll of paper towels. There’s DNA, and there’s video inside and outside the restaurant. Right now their person of interest is a guy driving a sixties Chevy convertible in urban streetwear. A maroon hoodie with airbrushed pictures of blunt-smoking cats.”
“Gangster wannabe,” Andy said.
“Nah. Older white male with thick white hair. Grandfatherly type, but he could be younger according to one of the restaurant’s employees.”
“Any chance the Scranton chief will let you see the film from the security cameras?”
“He already has, sweetie. When we’re done here I’ll pull it up for you. But Andy, honey, the person who did this could be anywhere by now.”
“Anywhere includes here.”
They strewed the contents of their bags around the side-by-side personal booths lined up against one end of the building’s well-lit open area, a space the size of a small auditorium. Piece by piece they costumed themselves, colorful vests, pinned safety badges, wraparound safety glasses, and noise deafening headgear for ear protection, initially draped around their necks. They stepped into their individual booths and activated their sessions with a push of a button.
Andy moved the headgear into place. Deep and vibrant, reverberant guitar chords from the bingo hall’s sound system warmed him, a sensual song and a favorite of his, Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game.” He wrapped his hands around his nickel-plated firearm, raised his arms eye-high, and emptied his head of peripheral thoughts. One eye closed while he spread his feet, lined up the sight and steadied himself. He squeezed the trigger six times, discharging the contents of Aunt Kitty’s Colt into the paper target twenty-five feet away. Six out of six hit the head area.
“We have a bingo,” Dody said, her voice elevated.
“We have a bingo,” other pistol range patrons intoned.
Andy returned the old Colt to his bag, removed a Sig Sauer semiautomatic, found a full clip and inserted it. He waited a moment, watched Dody squeeze off multiple rounds that also demolished her target’s head area. Andy reassumed the position for another round, this time with his Sig. Another bingo.
14
Randall enjoyed their attention. The two chatty uniformed waitresses were either married to cheating husbands and were cheaters themselves, or were heavy partiers, or they were shacked up with boyfriends number two or three or ten, and in the market for more.
His mannerly nice-guy routine was smooth. Never a shortage of desperate women anywhere he’d ever lived. One had to be Greek, with thick, naturally black hair, the other he wasn’t sure, was maybe Greek, with who knew what color hair under the uniform, but it was definitely not the teased honey-pot blonde above her collar.
His peripheral vision caught the signals: slumped postures that straightened up on their approaches so their ample Greek or Irish Catholic or Jewish Princess breasts were properly showcased. Neither acknowledged knowing Regina when he showed them her photo.
The black-haired one: “More coffee, sugar? Hey, up here, sweetie, eyes north. You want more coffee?”
“Yes, please. Thank you.”
He decided the honey-pot babe would be the easiest, although Xena, or Apollonia, or whatever the dark one’s name was, was for sure just playing hard to get. He’d come back and make a play for Honey-Pot. Aristotle’s Diner looked to be family-owned, so the darker Greek one could have a brother or a cousin or an uncle as its manager or a cook, and Randall didn’t need no crazy cleaver-swinging Greek after his ass.
Randall pulled off the road. Eight p.m. on the Buick’s dashboard clock. The Impala was where he’d left it, a quarter mile from the state park, which closed at sunset. Better that the Buick stay distant from the entrance. He’d need to leg the distance only once—the way back. He threw on the gangster hoodie he picked up on one of his trips to the casino, a ghetto brand, the street hustler making him pay double for it, Randall being a cracker and all.
He popped open the Impala’s trunk lid, shined a flashlight in. Nap was still there and still dead. He checked Nap’s pockets. A wad of cash, a set of keys, a wallet with a condom in it—how quaint—and a phone, still on. He hit a few buttons, pulled up a list of missed calls. The scrolled list was long.
Pictures in the wallet. Nap and his wife with a college-aged son and teenaged daughter. A picture of an elderly couple, probably Nap’s parents, a professional shot, for their fiftieth anniversary per the handwriting on the back. An intimate photo of Nap’s dimpled, pudgy Italian wife. Definitely doable. Then again, maybe not: he found her Catholic death announcement from last year.
Randall wasn’t envious. Being close to people who might miss you was overrated. He hadn’t been missed by anyone since he reached the age of puberty. Biological parents? No idea who they were. He was in the state’s care until he ridded himself of his last set of foster parents, those Wisconsin dairy farm fucks who died in a suspicious barn fire a week short of his eighteenth birthday. How he’d hated that farm and those fucking cows.
He keyed the Chevy’s ignition and put the convertible top up. No lights on the road from either direction. The Chevy was on the move.
At the closed state park he checked out the entrance with the headlights on, wary of the two black, utilitarian wrought-iron gates. They’d be a bitch to push despite their wheels, the gates secured to each other by chains in the center of the asphalt. Headlights off. Out came the bolt cutters and a flashlight from the back seat.
Snip-snap. The chains untangled, and with a hefty swing they ended up in the brush. He strained to push the gates out of the way.
The Chevy entered the park. Beyond the park entrance were the parking lot, a small touristy-type single-story building, and a walking path to the main attraction. The car rolled to a stop in front of two massive boulders. More chains there, bolted into the boulders and joined in the middle by an upright metal sign on a post sunk into a cement-filled bucket. The sign read No Vehicles Past This Point.
Snip-snap, snip-snap, chains and sign eliminated.
Back in the car he inched it forward, sizing up the space between the boulders, inched it forward more until the chrome front bumpers kissed the inside of each rock on both sides of the car. He grabbed a flashlight, circled one boulder on foot to face the car’s front and get a good look at
the Impala’s wheelbase, tire to tire. Its full width, including the fenders and the bumper, might not fit through the opening, but everything from the tires on inward would.
He backed the car up seventy-five feet. Lights on.
The Chevy revved while in neutral. The Beach Boys were in Randall’s head now, praising the car engine’s monstrous, oh-so-fine magnificence. He hummed along. “Giddy-up, giddy-up, four-oh-nine… Four-oh-nine, my four-oh-nine…”
He slammed the transmission into drive. The car fishtailed then straightened out to make its run.
The side fenders and the edges of the front bumper crushed inward, and the bolts the chains looped through in the rock cut jagged stripes from front to rear, slicing both sides of the Impala open. The car’s steel panels screamed in protest joining Randall’s rebel yell, him knowing what he was doing to the car, feeling the rush, knowing how phallic this was, him jamming himself into something that wasn’t ready for him. The speed and his aim and this motherfucking monster engine’s horsepower grinded the car through the separation, its peeled steel chunks of fender and rear bumper left to bounce and spark in its wake. On the other side of the boulders he jammed the brakes, the front tires skidding onto asphalt, the rear tires kicking up crushed stone. The car stopped half on, half off a paved walkway.
Visible in the headlights was a chest-high silver pipe railing with chain-link fencing between its posts and rungs. It bordered a thin but reinforced concrete slab that jutted forward over the gorge. The railing snaked an amoebic path around the curve of the huge pothole, the pothole at its widest point the width of two basketball courts end to end. The car lights illuminated both the near and far sections of railing. Between the two was eighty feet of nothingness, a blackness dark as a nightmare, and the reason the car was here.