The Bone Tree

by Greg Iles

  The boy didn’t answer.

  Fear struck her like an arrow as she confronted the dark and silent silhouette in the crack. Is that even Harold? she thought crazily. Of course it is. He just doesn’t want to take the bones.

  But something odd about the figure’s posture stoked Caitlin’s fear into panic. Was someone standing behind him? Did Harold have a gun jammed in his back? Moving as naturally as she could, she dropped her camera, closed both hands around the butt of her pistol, then shifted her feet so that she was facing the crack.

  You’re being paranoid, she told herself. Just take out your fucking light and shine it on him.

  When she did, she saw Harold watching her with a strange intensity.

  “What’s the matter?” she whispered, trying to look past him. But her eyes had adjusted to the dimness, and the light beyond the door was blinding.

  “I’m about to do you the biggest favor of your life,” Harold said.

  A spit of flame erupted from the center of the silhouette, and a blazing dart punched through her chest.

  Stunned, Caitlin wavered, then fell to her knees, trying to draw breath.

  “Don’t fight it,” Harold said. “I don’t want to have to shoot you again.”

  From pure instinct, she raised her pistol and fired five rounds at the shadow in the opening. The blasts of her pistol deafened and blinded her, but they must have driven her guide away from the tree, because a few moments later, her traumatized retinas again perceived the blue-gray light of the crack. Every instinct told her to lie down and try to catch her breath, but what remained of her reason argued that doing so would mean death.

  Flattening her left hand on the cool floor, she struggled unsteadily to her feet, even as someone turned a giant screw at the center of her chest, driving it into her heart. She nearly collapsed twice, but somehow she managed to stay erect.

  Her plan was to stagger through the crack with her pistol in front of her, then take the boy’s boat by force. She told her right foot to take the first step, but more primitive fibers than her cerebral cortex now had control of her brain. After two labored breaths, she backpedaled until she collided with the wall of the Bone Tree, then sat down hard.

  For half a minute, she could do no more than force breath into her lungs. The stink of burnt gunpowder in the closed space sickened her. She laid the flashlight beside her. Then, shifting the pistol to her left hand, she raised her right and slipped her fingers inside her jacket.

  “Oh, God,” she gurgled, feeling warm fluid soaking her top. Then she felt the small, ridged hole a couple of inches below her left nipple. My heart is under that, she thought. I’m dead.

  “Hey, lady,” said a soft voice. Harold’s voice. “Can you still talk?”

  Caitlin squinted at the crack of light, searching for a target, but she saw nothing. She still wasn’t sure what had happened. Had Harold shot her? Or had someone standing behind him shot them both? Or had they shot her and knifed him?

  “What happened?” she croaked.

  “I know you’ve got more bullets. That Springfield holds ten.”

  Caitlin didn’t want to believe that the boy had shot her. If he had, then she had no hope of getting out of here alive.

  “What happened?” she asked. “Is somebody else out there?”

  “No. And you owe me for that. Captain Ozan told me to call him when I got you out here, but I didn’t. And I ain’t gonna. I got a walkie-talkie right here, and I ain’t even turned it on. You’re a nice lady. You don’t need to go through that.”

  A wracking sob burst from Caitlin’s throat. “You shot me?”

  “I had to. But it’s way better than what could have happened, believe me. Pretty thing like you . . . they’d rape you for sure. All day long, front and back. Even shot like you are now. They don’t care. That Ozan, and Colonel Forrest, man . . . they’re sick.”

  Gasping for breath, Caitlin tried to understand why a black man would be working for the likes of the Knox family.

  “Look up to the left of those wired-up bones,” Harold said. “Shine my flashlight. You see what’s up there?”

  Caitlin didn’t try to lift the light. But in a shaft thrown from the door, she saw a woman’s leather coat hanging on a nail, brown and tattered where the waist hem should have been.

  “That ain’t what you think it is,” Harold said. “That’s a skin. That lady wasn’t much older than you, either. Mexican lady. She got in the wrong car one night. Po-lice car. Now there she is.”

  Caitlin struggled to hold down the few bites of cheeseburger she’d eaten at the Crossroads Café. She thought of Terry Foreman waiting there, her bright cheerleader’s face lined with worry.

  “Will you help me?” she asked, trying not to sound pathetic. “I’ll pay anything you ask. A hundred thousand dollars. Two hundred.”

  “You shoulda said something sooner. It’s too late now.”

  Caitlin thought of her father, sitting in his office in the glass tower high above Charlotte. “My father will pay you a million dollars if you take me to a hospital, Harold. A million dollars. No questions asked. I mean it. He doesn’t care about any of this crap. Not the bones . . . nothing. Only me.”

  Caitlin realized she was crying.

  “Shit,” Harold muttered from outside the fissure. “After what I done just now, your daddy would stake me to the ground and back his car over me.”

  “He wouldn’t!”

  “This ain’t what I wanted,” said the boy. “My brother’s stuck in Angola. Twenty-year sentence. Now that I done this, Colonel Forrest will get him out. Next month, when his parole hearing comes up.”

  Caitlin finally understood what had happened. Harold Wallis was probably a low-level drug dealer. He’d recognized her the moment he saw her standing outside the service station with Terry, and he’d called someone in the Knox organization. Probably Captain Ozan. Ozan had made him a proposition, or given him an order, and he’d strolled into the café to make his pitch. And she’d been so gullible! She’d brushed Terry’s doubts aside like the fears of a nervous child. After all, wasn’t she on a crusade for justice? Justice for murdered black activists? Surely a young black man would be on the side of the angels.

  Caitlin cursed as the pain in her chest intensified. She’d made an assumption based on race—exactly what she’d always told others not to do—and it had proved her undoing. The irony was that she’d made a positive assumption, and thus hadn’t seen it as an assumption at all.

  “You won’t get away with this!” she screamed. Every word caused her agony, but she kept shouting. “Terry saw you at the café! She saw your driver’s license. They have security cameras back there! The FBI will find you, no matter where you go!”

  “Lady, you got no idea how things work down here. Colonel Forrest can make them tapes disappear. He can make that Terry disappear if he wants to. She’s liable to be in a car with Captain Ozan right now, thinking he’s trying to save you.”

  Caitlin moaned. She felt as though a strong man were pressing down on her breastbone.

  “Colonel Forrest, he’s connected all over this state. Even up in Washington. That’s how it’s always been down here. My granddaddy told me that. Forrest’s daddy was just like him. He kept all the niggers round here in line for the Man.”

  She wanted to speak, but her lungs felt like they’d shrunk to a quarter of their normal size. Maybe it’s panic, she thought.

  “You still awake?” Harold called.

  When she didn’t reply, he said, “Come on, now. Don’t play games with me.”

  A terrifying thought came to her. “Harold, please,” she gasped. “I’m pregnant.”

  The boy said nothing to this. Had she struck a chord of compassion?

  “I just found out. I was . . . supposed to be getting married next week, and . . . I’m already pregnant. If you let me die here, you’re killing my baby, too.”

  After a long silence, a spooked whisper said, “You’re lying.”

  “
I’m not,” Caitlin sobbed. “I wouldn’t lie about that.”

  “Women lie about being with child all the time.”

  “Oh, God,” she croaked. “Why don’t you just . . . fucking get it over with?”

  “ ’Cause I know you’ve got more bullets. It’ll be over soon enough.”

  She wondered why Harold had only shot her once. He must be worried about attracting attention, in case there were still deputies in the swamp. Honest deputies like Carl Sims. Harold had been genuinely frightened by the sounds of the boat motors during the trip in.

  With desperate effort, Caitlin raised her pistol, then shut her eyes and fired two shots at the crack of light. Then she opened her eyes and watched for the slightest movement at the edge of the fissure.

  A shadow deepened at the right edge of the crack.

  She fired.

  Harold cried out in pain, then screamed in fury.

  Caitlin gritted her teeth and scooted about three feet to her left. Seconds later, the barrel of the .22 rifle appeared in the crack and orange flame shot from it. The impacting rounds knocked stinging wood chips into her face, but at least no lead struck her.

  “Fuck you!” she yelled, and fired another round. “You missed!”

  One shot left.

  She waited for the barrel to appear again, but it didn’t. Twenty seconds later, she heard the trolling motor start up. Panic shot through her like a jolt of electric current. She tried to roll sideways and crawl across the dirt floor, but it was useless. Before she’d made it two feet, she heard the hum of the motor fading. Ten seconds later, all was silent.

  But not for long. For some reason her ears began ringing, making a harsh sound like her junior-high-school bell, only this bell wouldn’t stop. She drew all the breath she could into her lungs, then slowly, agonizingly, forced herself back into a sitting position. She only managed it because the earth humped against the wall helped her get herself out of a prone position.

  Taking the flashlight in her hand, she shone it around once more in hopes of finding something that might somehow help her. This time she played the beam around the seam where the trunk legs met the earth, where dirt and other organic matter had been mounded up in the darkest part of the cave. As the beam came closer to her, she realized that the mound she had clung to as she pulled herself up was not all made of earth.

  It was human.

  There was a body lying facedown against the wall of the tree. Whoever that person was, they had to be dead. He or she had not stirred during the gunfight, and that could mean only one thing.

  Knowing she was probably only minutes from death herself, Caitlin let her body fall sideways, then used her elbows to crawl close enough to the head to shine her light on it. The hair was gray and white. She steeled herself against her fear, then held the flashlight closer with her left hand, took hold of the hair with her right, and pulled the head as far back as she could. The moment the beam fell on the face, she recognized what would have been—but now would never be—her father-in-law.

  Tom Cage.

  HIGHWAY 24 IS A serpentine track of asphalt cut through deep, encroaching woods and bordered by eleven-foot game fences. With the leaden sky above and no other cars in sight, it feels like I’m driving through some Central European country during the darkest days of the Cold War. But somewhere between the tiny hamlet of Lessley and Lake Mary, the Lusahatcha County Sheriff’s Department JetRanger swoops out of the sky ahead and drops toward the wet asphalt like a gunship on a strafing run.

  I brake as hard as I dare, and finally skid to a stop mere yards from where Danny McDavitt has flared the helicopter to land. Grabbing my pistol from my glove box, I shove it into my belt, then snatch up my cell phone, leap from the car, and run to the chopper as it settles onto the road.

  Carl pulls me through the side hatch and starts strapping a four-point harness over my chest.

  “Any signs of Caitlin’s cell signal?” I ask.

  The deputy points to the headset muffling his ears, then slaps an identical one over my head.

  “What’d you say?” he asks, working at my harness buckles.

  “Have you seen any sign of Caitlin’s cell signal?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Kaiser called. The last tower her phone pinged was four miles west of here. I don’t think she’s far away.”

  “Yeah, well. I don’t want to bring you down, but you haven’t seen that swamp yet.” Carl slaps my chest, then gives McDavitt a thumbs-up.

  “You secure, Mayor?” asks the pilot.

  “Go!” I shout. “Get her up!”

  The JetRanger rises slowly at first, but then its nose tips forward and we beat our way into the dark sky like a mother hawk in search of a lost fledgling.

  CHAPTER 70

  CAITLIN SAT WITH her back against the inner wall of the Bone Tree, staring at Tom’s motionless face. She’d recoiled in horror upon first recognizing the corpse as Penn’s father. But then, realizing that he might be the last person she would ever see, she’d placed her hand on his cheek and murmured a prayer. As she did, she realized Tom could not have been dead long, because his cheek was not yet cold.

  Then he breathed on her wrist.

  At first she jumped back in terror, but then she understood what that breath meant. Leaning over the body, she spoke Tom’s name, shook him, then pinched his cheek, hard—but nothing brought him around. His breaths were faint and frighteningly far between. He might be so close to death that he could not be revived—even by doctors. That would explain why he hadn’t stirred during the gunfire.

  Caitlin knew she needed to attend to her own injury, but the terrible truth was that without Tom’s knowledge and skill, she wouldn’t live more than a few minutes. The pain in her chest had begun to drive out all thought when an obvious realization struck her.

  Tom is diabetic.

  If he’d been dumped here without food, he might have gone into diabetic shock. Low blood sugar could send a diabetic into a coma . . . even kill them. And if Tom had gone hours without sugar—

  Shifting her body painfully, Caitlin dug her hand into her pants pocket, searching for the peppermints she and Jordan had stolen from the Lusahatcha sheriff’s office.

  She had one left.

  Her hands shook terribly as she unwrapped the cellophane, but she finally got it out. Since Tom was unconscious, she forced his mouth open and pushed the peppermint between his tongue and the roof of his mouth. He might choke on the candy, but she could address that if it happened.

  If she was right, then that sugar was his only hope.

  The next minutes passed with the slowness of a nightmare. Tom did not move or make a sound. Caitlin, by contrast, grew steadily more agitated. She stared down at the hole in her chest, which she’d exposed by removing her jacket and shirt. It was so small, the skin hardly puckered around it, though a little distended rim of flesh had begun to swell under a slow but steady flow of blood. As best she could tell, the bullet had grazed the lower left edge of her sternum and passed between two ribs, entering her chest just below her bra. She hadn’t known whether the slug had passed through her body entirely until she’d gotten her shirt off and seen that its back was free of blood.

  The bullet was still in her chest.

  Caitlin knew enough anatomy to understand that her heart, lungs, and several major blood vessels might lie in the path of that chunk of lead. Yet she was still alive and conscious. For the first couple of minutes after Harold fled, breathing had become a little easier. But now it seemed harder to fill her lungs with each passing breath. The pressure in her chest felt like the flat of someone’s hand pressing down on her sternum, harder and harder.

  She checked her cell phone for the hundredth time: still no reception.

  I’ve got to get outside this tree, she thought, with a last hopeless look at Tom. I’ve got to find a signal. . . .

  With a supreme act of will, she packed her phone into her jacket, then managed to flex her thighs hard enough to slide her
back up the inner wall of the tree and get to her feet. Using the wall as a brace, she slid her way around to the crack in the trunk and turned sideways. She’d planned to marshal her strength for a few moments, but as soon as she was at a right angle to the crack, she fell through, crashing to the ground with an impact that blacked out her vision for a few seconds.

  “Unnghh,” she groaned, feeling tears on her face. “This is bad.” Even as she said this, a thought went through her mind. What would Jordan do?

  “Jordan wouldn’t be here,” she said. “TSTL, that’s me. Too Stupid To Live.”

  She rolled onto her stomach, reached into the pocket of her fallen jacket, and pulled her phone up to her face. The LCD still read NO SERVICE. Fighting back panic, she looked around the tree.

  The rain had stopped.

  All she saw were more cypress trees jutting from the black water, the largest of them standing on tufts of earth. Between the trees, an endless mere stretched into the distance. She couldn’t walk through that water, and she hadn’t the strength to swim it. Even if she had, she’d seen enough alligators during the ride in to know that slogging through a swamp trailing blood wasn’t a good idea.

  You have to climb, said a voice in her head. Get high enough, and your phone will find a tower. . . .

  “I can’t climb,” she wailed with self-disgust. “I can’t even walk.”

  It wasn’t a matter of will. The pain in her chest was so intense that she’d be lucky to stand again.

  There are people nearby, she thought. Within gunshot range. Fire the bullet you have left and hope to attract attention. This idea wasn’t completely stupid, except for the fact that she’d left her pistol back inside the tree. If I can’t get out of here on my own, then I have to stay alive until somebody comes for me. Terry will call someone eventually.

  Caitlin thought back to a night two months ago, when she’d been trapped in a building with another woman and death seemed certain. She’d summoned extraordinary strength that night, and done things most people wouldn’t have been able to do. The police and paramedics had told her that. She was a survivor; she’d proved it in spades. But somehow the bullet in her chest made a mockery of all her confidence. A tiny lump of lead fired from a plinking gun, a child’s rifle. But a plain old .22 could kill you if it hit a vital organ or artery.