DEAD OR ALIVE a totally addictive thriller with a breathtaking twist

by T. J. Brearton

  “Where was our suspect spotted?”

  “Right here.” The ranger tapped his finger near the section labeled Bacon Rock. “That’s where your . . . that’s where Jackson County has started looking, and some of the federal investigators and our state rangers.”

  Tom looked at Malone. “We go down into the caves?”

  Malone racked the slide on his pistol and holstered it. “That’s the game plan.”

  * * *

  The wind shrieked down into the cavern passageway. Tom looked back as the circle of daylight grew smaller. The stairway and railing descending into the earth was unexpected. So far, the place was unimpressive, with too much signage and too many plaques explaining what everything was. Then they reached the low point and it shut his mind up.

  It was like another world. The air was much cooler. Water dripped and echoed. Stalactites jutted from the cavern roof like the frozen hairs of a wooly mammoth, tinged an eerie blue. A little further along, the lights turned the stalactites and stalagmites beneath amber and russet brown. Tom imagined the centuries of calcium deposits dripping down, forming the upper teeth, the accumulation below accreting into the lower teeth of this giant maw.

  The group spread out, staying in twos. Tom was with the ranger named Olson. Tom feared any small, confined space, but the caverns were well lit, the paths broad enough to permit small groups of tourists. He breathed through the claustrophobia.

  They needed to get deeper and access the caves closed to the public. Deeper down, the paths were narrower, the lights fewer and farther between, until there was nothing to show them the way but their waterproof headlamps. The walls were wet and slimy to the touch, and everything reeked of earth, mold, and sulfur. Olson’s radio crackled, the transmission patchy in the depths.

  Olson put the radio to his mouth. “Say again?”

  “--- in the Chipola.”

  Tom hovered close as Olson pressed the transmit button. “Someone in the Chipola?” He turned and started walking in the reverse direction. Tom followed, grateful to be heading out of the cloying, confined space.

  “--- a sighted --- that someone is in the river . . .” the searcher called over the radio.

  Olson started trotting then running. Before long they were ascending and came out on a nature trail that rode the edge of a bluff along a river floodplain. The wind was like a physical force pushing against them and the rain stung their eyes.

  “That’s the Chipola,” the ranger shouted, pointing to the water in the near distance. Despite the turbulent weather, the river was calm. Impressively tall trees grew on the other side — tall probably because they’d been left alone since the 1930s.

  They jogged abreast and Tom spotted a group of searchers gathering up ahead, plus more on the opposite side of the river, moving along in the same direction.

  “Where’s it go?”

  “We’re upstream. The Chipola flows underground at a river sink and reappears several hundred feet later.”

  The nature trail led them to a natural land bridge where the river disappeared as Olson described. Having picked up speed, the Chipola rushed to a narrowing point beneath the bridge and fell into darkness.

  They stared down into the sink until Olson joined the people on the downstream side of the land bridge. The rest of the searchers in the area had continued in roughly equal numbers on both banks of the river. A few had ventured into the water. One man had a stick and was poking at something in the shallows. Tom didn’t have binoculars, but it looked like a backpack.

  They waited. Tom took a wide stance when a blast of wind tried to blow him away. The tall trees on the west side of the river bent in the gales; the wind harried leaves and sticks across the land bridge. He grabbed Olson and urged the ranger to the upstream side and pointed into the sink.

  “Caves down there?” Tom asked.

  “Caves? Yeah. A few caverns beneath us. They’re small.”

  Tom turned his back to the wind and got on the radio. “Malone. We need divers.”

  * * *

  They stood dripping water in the visitor center. The hurricane pounded the windows and peppered the outside walls with flying detritus. Everyone stared at the backpack retrieved from the river, its contents spilled out, including a soaking wet photograph of Gloria Guttridge, Frank’s daughter.

  “No one is coming out in this,” Malone said. “He’s not going anywhere. If he’s in there, he’s trapped. He hasn’t left the park since he was first spotted.”

  Olson said, “There’s a chance of flooding in the caverns, forcing him to surface.”

  “We checked all the caves,” Malone said. “We checked the fish hatchery, the golf course, the woods. We’ve had a hundred and fifty people going through the park. We’re backing off, getting everyone to safety.”

  “He’s waiting for that,” Tom said. “Then he slips away.”

  There was steel in Malone’s smile. “So we catch him again.”

  Tom shook his head. This thing was all over the news now. Massive manhunt at the onset of Hurricane Isabella. The Chipola River was rising and the caves were flooding. If the hurricane didn’t kill Frank Guttridge, the Vasquez people would.

  “Then I’ll do it.”

  * * *

  As they lowered him down, Tom remembered a dream, the feel of it, the emotional texture: Nick’s face — just for a second and then it was gone.

  The water was surprisingly warm and started to suck him under. Olson had warned him about the pull. “It will take you under, into the sink, but just for a few seconds. Take a deep breath before you go under. Don’t let it out. Let your lungs bring you back to the surface. It will be dark. Click on your headlamp — you’ll be moving fast, but you’ll be above the water. You’ll have to get a handhold. If you don’t, you’ll just shoot out the other side and we’ll grab you. By the way, you’re fucking crazy.”

  The water pulled at his feet, rushing, loud. Above, he saw only rain and vague shapes of the men and women looking down at him from the land bridge. He took the breath.

  A bubbling, churning sound filled his head. Like being boiled alive. He had his lungful of air, but the current started to turn him — that was unexpected. Olson had said the river was deep, carving through the limestone in a clean swath, but it was still hard not to fear a rock or some other object bashing his head open like a cantaloupe.

  The flow of it had him tumbling, almost upside down now, and he beat with his arms, trying to right himself. At the last second, he gave up and let the rotation happen. He drew his legs in, forming himself in a ball, tucking his bare feet against his backside, and waited for his head to rise.

  He stayed inverted. A panic formed in his chest. He broke out of the fetal position and beat at the river in hard swirls, stretching for the surface. In the sudden disorientation, he didn’t know which way he was pushing. The river continued to twist him around, roll him along like a doll. His eyes opened. That was a mistake, an invitation for the sickening vertigo that followed. His heart beat like a fist in his chest, trying to punch through, his lungs desperate for air. Time stopped. He was there, in the river, being hurled along by the force of the darkness and the water, and it was endless.

  His foot scraped something. His toes felt the hard limestone of the river bottom. He pushed off with the balls of his feet and scissored his legs and arms until he broke the surface.

  It was like being inside a storm trapped in a tunnel. The river propelled him onward and he struggled to get a hand free. He just managed to snap on the headlight. The beam showed him the world in flashes, geometric pictures that made little sense to his disoriented mind. He sensed the wall and reached out, scraped it with his fingers. As the river pushed against him like an unrelenting bully, he looked downstream and saw the light on the other side of the land bridge. If he came out, he’d have to do this all over again. Fuck that.

  Tom managed to grasp an outcropping of rock, which immediately broke away. He scrambled for another hold, found purchase, and this
time it held. The water dragged on him, hard; he fought the current. He clung to the embankment like an animal clasping a tree then started hauling himself up. At least the floodplain here was only a foot or so from the rising waters. Kicking furiously with his legs and trying to get a foothold at the same time, he finally managed some combination of traction and propulsion, got his leg up onto the lip of the floodplain and pulled his whole body up.

  He lay there for a moment on his stomach, head to the side, nothing but roaring water all around him.

  His breathing was wet and ragged, but he’d made it. After another moment of resting, he rose to his hands and knees, bent his head and waited for the blood to flow back into his brain, for his internal compass to recalibrate. Then he let out a long slow breath and stood up.

  There was barely enough room to unfurl to his full height. He lifted his arms to brace himself against the roof of the tunnel and walked toward the mouth of the cavern in front of him. The rush of the river beat against his eardrums and the air had that eggy, sulfur smell he’d noticed earlier. He stopped at the entrance to the cavern and peered in with the headlamp. Its walls were flowstone, shaped like hardened drips of caramel or chocolate.

  The cavern twisted to the left and Tom followed the bend around a corner, stopping suddenly when something sliced his foot. He leaned against the flowstone and lifted his leg. The blood was flowing, thinned by the wetness of his skin. He checked the ground and saw what looked like slices of limestone, razor sharp. He kept moving but began taking high, careful steps, testing the ground as he went. The white noise of the river faded behind him as he ventured deeper into the cavern.

  Another right twist. The walls were closing in. Olson had said the caverns below the land bridge were inaccessible from anywhere but the river, meaning there was no other entrance anywhere in the woods, but maybe he was wrong. Or maybe Guttridge had never been down here at all and the searcher who’d spotted him in the river had mistaken a piece of flotsam for a man.

  Only there was no mistaking the figure crouched at the cavern’s dead end for anyone other than he was. Tom saw Guttridge and tensed, ready for his attempted flight, but Guttridge was calm. He squatted with his elbows on his knees, hands dangling between his legs, and looked at Tom with bright blue eyes shining in the beam of the headlamp.

  Tom remained still. After a few seconds, he stepped back against the flowstone and eased down to a seated position.

  Neither man said anything. Tom listened to the sounds of the river and to their breathing. He coughed up a little water and slicked his hair back.

  “What a ride, huh?” Guttridge’s voice had a canned quality, sparking Tom’s claustrophobia.

  “It’s getting higher,” he said about the river.

  “Yeah.”

  Tom finally caught his breath and got to his feet. He dripped from head to toe, his body still vibrating from his underwater ordeal. “I’m not looking forward to that again. I want to get it over with.” He held out his hand. “Come on, all right?”

  Guttridge looked at Tom’s hand, sniffed, looked away. Then he said, “All right,” and stood.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: SECRETS

  Tom dragged the chair across the floor making a scraping sound. He sat down across from Guttridge. Someone was shouting angrily from a cell down the corridor until a guard’s baton rang on the bars. They listened to the noises of the county jail for a moment — Tom, Guttridge and Guttridge’s lawyer, a woman named Carla Enzo — and they didn’t speak. Blythe stood the way she usually did, leaning against the wall with her arms crossed. She could be at a 5 p.m. strawberry cordial and look the same.

  Tom noted the ugly brown walls, the water stains and scatological scribblings. It was a room the cops liked to keep nasty in order to spook whoever they had in the box.

  “You know what they call this place?” Tom said. “This room? They call it the cave.”

  Guttridge lifted his gaze from the table.

  “I didn’t know that.”

  Tom took a black and white photo from a file folder and slid it across the table. “You recognize this man?”

  “No.”

  “Take a close look. He likes to wear nice clothes. A bit flashy for a private investigator, if you ask me.” Tom tapped the picture. “He followed me around for a week looking for you. Got any idea why?”

  Guttridge stared at the photo then turned his head. “I have no idea.”

  “What are you holding onto? Why wait out the storm? You could have left the state. Could be in Canada by now. Mexico. You wanted to stick close to your daughter?”

  The veteran’s eyes flashed. “Don’t talk about her.”

  “You saved a little girl. You fought to keep her alive. There’s your service to your country, your struggle to readjust to civilian life — that’s all in there, and as we work with the district attorney, we’re taking that all into account. But it doesn’t change what you did — burglary, kidnapping. And Mick Lupton is trying to save himself a little time inside, so he’s talking a blue streak at us. You’re looking at twenty-five to life in federal prison. You’re gonna be gone. You’ll have to watch Gloria grow up from in here.”

  Tom paused to itch at the bug bites still healing on his skin. He noticed Maria Lucia’s scratch marks on his forearm. “You know how some people cut themselves? The physical pain takes their mind off the emotional pain. That’s what a guy is doing when he’s breaking windows, breaking his knuckles on some guy’s face. I can see your lawyer was worried this is some kind of a threat. It isn’t. You’re not violent like me. Your reasons for doing what you did are different.”

  Guttridge was inscrutable. He had the dead-eyed stare of a soldier who would keep his tongue behind enemy lines no matter what was done to him.

  Tom said, “Just before Hurricane Isabella hit us with full force, a joint task force of FBI, and state and county police executed a warrant on Evvy’s down on Plantation Island. They found evidence of gunplay, murder and a missing man, Carson Villalobos, an employee.”

  Something, recognition maybe, flickered in Guttridge’s eyes. He glanced at his lawyer.

  “Valentina Vasquez has been arrested,” Tom said. “The kidnapped girl, Lemon, is going to give her deposition this week. It’s all going before a grand jury. She’s going to say that she was at Evvy’s, that she was put in the room where the stone crabs sit on ice before shipping. That Lupton — the man in the mask — wanted to kill her. That she heard gun shots.”

  Tom flicked a look at Blythe who watched Guttridge impassively. Then she spoke. “We know you went to Valentina Vasquez first — you got around the washout and went down to Plantation Island. How did you get out of there? That’s what we’re asking.”

  Guttridge’s hands rested neatly in his lap and he looked down at them, silent.

  His lawyer spoke. “My client is not going to sit here and incriminate himself.”

  “Your client is more afraid of the Vasquez family than us,” Tom said.

  Guttridge’s head snapped up. “I’m not afraid of anybody.”

  “You’re afraid for your daughter. And with good reason. The Vasquez people know where she is. We’re keeping her protected. We have a plan to relocate your wife and her new baby, along with your daughter, and put them in witness protection.”

  “You’re threatening me? Bargaining with their lives?”

  “No. We’ll do it regardless. I’ll see to it. I’m asking you to help me.”

  Blythe uncrossed her arms, took a chair beside Tom and leaned toward Guttridge. “I was over there. Two tours. You come back and going into law enforcement seems like the natural step. Otherwise you’re bagging groceries or driving a forklift and losing your mind, piece by piece. I still get the nightmares, but they’re a little fewer and further in between.”

  She unclasped her hands and lifted her fingers. “This place is no place for you, Sergeant. I know you’re not going to try to make it easy for yourself. But it’s not about you. That’s what you’re not ge
tting. It’s about your family. You think if you want to do right by them and protect them, this is the way to do it. I’m an SAC who goes to benefit dinners with federal judges. I know your lawyer, Ms. Enzo. Right, Carla? She knows where this goes for you. You enter a not guilty plea, you risk a trial, that’s twelve people who are going to listen to the testimony of a seven-year-old girl and weigh it against your record of drug abuse and distribution. Not only do you and I both know where the jury would come down on that, you’d be putting Lemon Madras through a trial. Putting her family through it. You plead guilty, Ms. Enzo cuts a deal with our prosecutor, what’s going to be on the table depends on whether you helped us or not. Talk to us and that deal gets much better. You do your time closer to home in a nicer facility where you can have physical contact with your daughter.” Blythe sat back.

  Guttridge breathed heavily through his nose as if struggling under the weight of it all. He continued to focus on the table, or look at nothing, and then his eyes found Tom. “You can’t protect them.”

  “Yes we can. I’ve done it before.”

  Guttridge shook his head. “No, you can’t. I know you can’t.”

  Blythe leaned in again. “Mick Lupton is behind bars — he’s just down the hall . . .”

  Guttridge opened his mouth but his lawyer cupped her hand to his ear and whispered. He nodded a little and looked at Tom and Blythe again. “You know what the Bus to Abilene is?”

  “I’ve heard of it,” Blythe answered.

  “It’s an expression we use in the military sometimes. A bunch of people get on a bus. It’s a long ride, all kinds of crazy twists and turns and they’re all hootin’ and hollerin’ and having a good time — getting drunk, whatever. Eventually, they wind up in Abilene and they get off the bus and they’re looking around. Someone says, ‘Whose idea was this again?’ And nobody really knows.”

  Tom waited.

  Guttridge said, “I left something with Corporal Parker. Ron Parker. Besides the girl. It’s a thumb drive from the laptop we stole.”