by Blake Crouch
Lana sat at the piano, having come to the saloon at first light.
Oatha walked over, stood watching her play.
When she’d finished the song, he clapped, put his hands on her shoulders, said, “Merry Christmas, Miss Hartman. You sure do a beautiful job fillin out that corset and camisole, if you don’t mind me sayin. I was wonderin if you’d take a walk across the street to the hotel. Thought you and me could exchange presents. I’d sure fancy a trim—”
“Oath.” Joss said his name softly, but her voice cracked with rage, her black eyes smoldering. “Come here. Quit pirootin—”
“I’m talkin with Miss Hartman at the moment. I’d extend you the same opportunity, but seein as how you’re presently chained—”
“Son of a bitch. Put this plain. I’ll cut off your grapefruits.”
Lana fixed her gaze on the yellowed ivory keys, paling, trembling.
Oatha sidled back up to the bar.
“Why you so knotted up? You her fuckin madam?”
Joss smiled and made a move so deft and graceful, the next thing Oatha knew, the right side of his face had slammed against the bar, Joss cradling his head, a cold knife point digging into his left ear.
“Swear to God,” Joss whispered, wisps of her black hair tickling his mustache, “I’ll jam it straight through whatever brains you got left in there. Go on playin now, Lana. It’s all right. You won’t be bothered no more.” Oatha chuckled, though he didn’t dare move. From his tilted vantage point, he could see Al, a half grin on the lawman’s face as he shaded in oblivious repose beside the stove.
“Joss, would you accuse me of exaggeration if I said that is the most useless cocksucker I ever laid eyes on?”
“Al?”
“Yeah.”
“No, I wouldn’t contradict that statement. Now I’m gonna let you up, and you and me is gonna come off the rimrock. Behave yourself.”
Joss released him, shoved the bowie back into its leather sheath under the bar. She set up two tumblers while Oatha retrieved his hat. They raised their glasses.
“To your impending release,” Oatha whispered.
They clinked and drank. Joss glanced at the sleeping deputy, then whispered, “How’d it go last night with ol’ Bartholomew?”
“It went.”
“Smoothly? Without incident?”
“Well, by the end of the proceedings, Bart sure as shootin wished he’d never yapped to you about them bars.”
“What I mean is, you did it quick, right? There weren’t no need to drag it out, make things any harder on the man than necessary.”
“Billy fucked it up.”
“How?”
“Particulars ain’t important. It got done what needed to get done.”
“You sayin the boy was rough on him?”
“Well, Billy hadn’t never done nothin like it before. He got carried away, but—”
“That little shit.” Oatha withdrew a scrap of paper from his flap pocket, slid it across the bar. Joss unfolded it, saw where Oatha had scribbled something on a torn-out Montgomery Ward page advertising hobnailed miners’ boots. “Fuck is this?”
“Wrote it last night. Notes for what you need to do tomorrow when I come back for you.”
She lifted her suspenders and slipped the paper into the patch pocket of her plaid dress shirt. “What of the boy? You trust him?”
“Shit no, but what other choice I got? Can’t play a lone hand, haul it all up there myself, can I?”
“Oath—”
“It’ll get taken care of. You just worry about them notes I made for you. We do this right, everthing’ll work out. Now this child’s gotta haul out. This ain’t gonna be easy in a blizzard.”
“Know this. When the time comes, I’ll be the one to take care a that hobble-tongue chore boy.”
“Joss—”
“Ain’t arguin with you about it. He gave Bart a rough shake, boy gonna by God learn somethin about pain on his way to hell.”
Oatha headed for the coatrack. He’d just done the last button on his slicker and reached for the door when Joss called his name. He turned back. She held up the piece of paper he’d given her.
“Before I say this,” she said, “let me warn you. If I see a grin, a smirk, a eye roll, one fuckin hint a condescension—”
“Jesus Christ, chew it finer. I gotta go get Billy.”
She shook the paper. “Can’t use this.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I can’t use it, Oatha.”
“Oh.” He started back toward the bar.
“I said, not a fuckin word.”
“I just said ‘Oh.’ It ain’t a judgment. Why didn’t you tell me this when I give it to you in the first place? Think I give two shits whether you can read or not?”
2009
22
Abigail returned to consciousness, aware of only two things—the staggering pain in her head and the echo of voices, one of them her father’s.
“Don’t say that to me again, Lawrence. You know exactly why we’re here. And now that your partner’s out of commission—”
“I swear to you, I—”
“Ain’t believing this. Motherfucker wants me to take him apart.”
“Put away the knife, Isaiah. He’s gonna talk. I can feel it.”
“That true, Larry? My man Stu know some shit I don’t?”
“This is just a huge—”
“Misunderstanding?”
“Yeah, a huge—”
“Oh no, no, no. All right, Lar. After I slice off your thumbs, we’ll continue this—”
“Okay, I’ll—”
“No, I think I better go ahead—”
“We have to go to Emerald House.”
“Big mansion up the trail?”
“Yeah.”
Abigail opened her right eye. It took five seconds for the darkness to sharpen into focus. She sat with Lawrence, Emmett, and June inside one of the ghost town’s structures, her hands bound behind her back. It all looked familiar—the archways, the collapsed staircase, the climbing rope still dangling from the second floor. Three men—she assumed they were men—dressed in night camouflage and face masks busied themselves packing an assortment of equipment into black backpacks.
Under the archway leading into the lounge, Scott lay holding his abdomen, moaning softly. She wondered if Jerrod’s body had just been left in the street.
Didn’t I shoot someone in that old house?
She leaned into Lawrence, whispered, “What’s happening?” As he turned, she saw that his right eye had been closed from a vicious blow.
“I don’t know yet, but …” One of the men finished zipping his backpack and walked over, crouched down in front of Abigail.
“Dirty Harriet,” he said, grinning a big mouthful of straight white teeth through a slit in the face mask. She recognized his voice. It belonged to the man who’d threatened Lawrence. Isaiah. “Bad with that little Ruger, ain’t you? You’d have killed my man, Stu, if he hadn’t been sportin Kevlar. Nasty cut over your eye. Needs stitches.” He pulled a roll of medical tape from his pocket, tore off a strip. “But this’ll have to do.” She groaned when he pinched the gash above her left eyebrow closed and slapped on the tape. Then Isaiah and his partners donned black parkas and trousers over their coveralls, each man also wearing black neoprene gloves and Gore-Tex-lined leather combat boots. One of them pulled a fifth of Ketel One out of his pack, unscrewed the cap, took a long drink.
“Stu, what the fuck?”
“You want my hands to shake? Besides, my ribs are killing me. Might be cracked.”
“So take a fuckin aspirin.”
Isaiah came and squatted down, facing June, Emmett, Abigail, and Lawrence.
He looked them over, said, “In a minute, we’re gonna cut your nylon restraints. You’ll be free to move, but I would advise you to follow my orders. To. The. Let. Ter.” He held up a machine pistol. “Let me tell you about this work of art. Custom Glock Eighteen
. Automatic. Supressor. Aimpoint. Thirty-three cart mag. We each have one, and we won’t hesitate to aerate your ass if you deviate one millimeter from our directives. Ain’t gonna be no love tap from a Taser, you fuck up again. You feel me?” Nods. “Can I get a ‘yessir’?”
He pointed the machine pistol at June.
“Yessir.”
Then he aimed it at Emmett.
“Yessir.”
“What about Scott?” Abigail said, nodding toward the archway.
“Motherfucker look like he can walk to you? He had a seizure before you woke up.” Isaiah leaned in toward Abigail, their faces barely an inch apart. His breath smelled of cinnamon chewing gum.
Two years ago, while waiting to catch a cab after a Christmas party in the East Village, she’d felt something push into her back, followed by low, menacing words in her ear: “Wanna die tonight, bitch?” She’d never seen his face, just listened to his footsteps running up the sidewalk thirty seconds later. He’d taken her purse, earrings, necklace, and left her with something that ruled her even to this moment—the ever-present knowledge of how fast a normal day, a normal evening, could turn into her being raped and bleeding out on the sidewalk. No such thing as safety or control. The worst moments of your life you never see coming, although she had to admit something had seemed wrong about this trip since the previous morning at the trailhead, when she’d caught that look between Scott and Lawrence. Had they known this was coming?
The man called Isaiah still spoke to her.
“That your boyfriend? Y’all fucking? What?” She shook her head. “I poked him in the gut. Be dead in an hour. Maybe less. Painful way to go. But if you’d rather stay with him”—he slid a Fairbairn-Sykes from an ankle sheath and pressed the knife point under her right eye—”I’ll be happy to leave you here, because the truth, bitch, is that I don’t need you.”
Abigail stared into his large white eyes through the holes in the mask. They reminded her of eggs. She felt his sweet breath on her mouth, the cold of the blade against her cheek. She shook her head again.
“That’s what the fuck I thought. Now, I didn’t get my ‘yessir’ from you.”
23
The orders were brutally simple. Walk. Keep quiet. Step out of line, you get shot. Lights on at all times. They’d even given Abigail fresh batteries for her headlamp.
Isaiah led the way, the four captives following single file, his partners bringing up the rear. Abigail walked between Lawrence and June, snow already accumulating in the grass and on Abandon’s splintered remnants. With her hands free, she’d managed to scrape the dried blood out of her left eye. She could see now, but her head still throbbed like hell and her bones felt weak and jittery, her nervous system torqued from the Taser.
They passed their campsite on the outskirts, the llamas huddled between the tents. Abigail lusted after the cell phone in her pack.
Soon they’d left Abandon, gotten a half mile up-canyon, the ruts of the old wagon trail filling with snow and nothing to see but the flakes passing horizontally through the headlamps’ beams, tiny planets of light in that galaxy of darkness and wind. Abigail heard June struggling to stifle sobs. She reached back, felt June squeeze her hand, tears gliding down Abigail’s face now as she tried to comprehend the murder of Jerrod, Scott tied up alone as he bled to death in that degenerated hotel, and how in God’s name she was walking at gunpoint through a snowstorm in this secluded canyon, too horrified even to contemplate what their captors intended to do with them.
Isaiah veered off the main trail.
They climbed narrow switchbacks up the hillside.
Soon the procession was four hundred feet above the canyon floor, scrambling over scree. Through the gap between the mountains, Abigail walked so close to her father that the steel toes of her Asolo boots occasionally banged into his heels. She thought she heard the trickle of running water—a stream, a spring perhaps.
Another half mile and they’d come to the edge of a lake. It stood mostly unfrozen, the wind pushing ripples that lapped at the fragile ice extending out a foot from the bank. Isaiah had started in the direction that would take them around the north side when Lawrence said, “That’s not the best route.” Isaiah stopped, looked back. “There’s a rock glacier on that end, a quarter mile ahead. Drops right into the lake. It’s steep. Very dangerous. Our party had a near miss yesterday with this type of situation.”
“You know I trust you, Larry, but do you know why?”
“No. No, sir.”
“Because I know that you know I will fuck your ass up if you give me bad information.”
They followed the south shore around Emerald Lake. Deep in the basin, the wind had died. Snow fell vertically again, and aside from the whisper of its collection, there was no sound save for the labored breathing of the party and the squeak of boots in the inch of new snow. Across the lake lay the rock glacier—boulders shifting, smashing into one another. From several hundred yards away, their collisions sounded like small-caliber gunshots.
Stu yelled suddenly from behind, “Hey, what’s … what was that? You see that?”
Everyone stopped.
“What you got?” Isaiah said, reaching for his machine pistol.
“I saw a light.”
“Where? I don’t see anything.”
“Straight ahead.” As Abigail stared into the distance, she didn’t see a light either, only the hulking shadow of Emerald House. “I’m telling you, Isaiah, it didn’t last long, but this light or candle, whatever it was, just winked on and off.”
“What floor was it on?”
“I don’t know. It happened so fast.”
“Anyone else see this light?” No one answered. “Larry? You the expert.”
“No one’s lived there in a hundred and sixteen years.”
“I’m just telling you what I saw,” Stu said. “Maybe I’m a little—”
“Fucked-up is what. You got every other day of your life to be a drunk motherfucker. I need you to hold your shit together tonight. You do that for me?”
“Yeah, Isaiah. Sorry.”
Abigail filled with apprehension as she walked the last hundred yards to Emerald House. She’d never seen anything like it—this rambling edifice enveloped in darkness and silence and ruin, the corpse of what it had once been.
Wet snow clung to the facade. Windows busted out. Shingles peeled off. Four-story chimneys toppled into piles of rock. The north wing was a shambles but intact, its southern counterpart long since collapsed on itself, the winter snows crushing it through the years, until all that remained was the foundation and a small mountain of demolished framework.
Isaiah followed the stone pathway up to the portico, passing between the massive rotting Douglas fir trunks. Yellow notices had been stapled to the oak doors—Forest Service warnings regarding the instability of Emerald House, threatening all trespassers with aggressive prosecution. A feeble attempt had been made to chain the iron handles together.