The Bone Tree

by Greg Iles

  “Can’t we go any faster?” I ask. “Just a couple of knots?”

  “We can,” Danny says in my headset, “but we shouldn’t. Her phone will only be pinging for a tower every one to three minutes. If we pass over her too fast, we could miss it.”

  “You realize we were doing this very thing only two months ago?” I say in a shaky voice. “Searching for Caitlin.”

  “That was different,” Carl says in my headset. “Then we were flying at night, and we were using FLIR to look for her body heat. We were trying to pick her out of thousands of false positives created by animals, and we didn’t have any decent idea of where she was.”

  “And now?”

  “Now we’re scanning for a ping with a two- to four-mile range, line of sight. If we fly close enough, that phone will come up on this scope like a lighthouse in the night. We can fly straight to her.”

  “If her phone’s on,” Danny says in a grim voice. “And if she still has it.”

  “Fuck that noise,” Carl snaps in a rare display of temper. “The girl knows what she’s about. She’s a survivor. She’ll have it on.”

  “If she’s such a survivor,” I mutter, “how does she keep winding up in these situations?”

  “You know how,” Carl says. “She can’t stand to sit by and do nothing when she sees something messed up. Keep your eyes on the deck, Penn.”

  What I can see from the window is far less valuable information than the electrons on the Raytheon screen Carl is studying on the scope behind my seat, yet I can’t take my eyes from the cypress trees passing steadily beneath the chopper.

  “Watch for boat wakes,” Carl says. “Anything.”

  “No wakes so far,” Danny says. “I’ve been watching.”

  “Caitlin’s smart,” Carl insists, almost like a mantra. “If she hears this chopper, she’ll find a way to signal. She’s got a gun on her, too. I saw it.”

  Thank God, I say silently. “How are you choosing your course, Major?”

  “I’m riding the border between the federal preserve and the private hunting land. That’s our best shot, right?”

  “Right,” says Carl.

  Time passes with inexorable slowness. I feel more like I’m riding in a cable car than a helicopter.

  “Carl?” I say into my headset mike. “Nothing?”

  “Not a beep, bro. Just keep the faith. . . .”

  A frantic pressure is building in my chest, so strong that I wonder if I’ve inherited my father’s propensity for heart attacks. “What are we missing?” I ask in desperation. “Are we making some stupid mistake? Maybe the problem is that she doesn’t know she’s in danger. Maybe she’s actually hiding from us. Or from someone else she thinks is out there.”

  “That’s a good point,” McDavitt says.

  “Bullshit,” Carl insists. “If she’s in trouble, she knows it. This is like fishing. We’ve just got to stick with it.”

  “I hate fishing,” I mutter.

  “Hold it!” Carl yells. “I got a ping! Decent strength . . . I think she’s trying to make a call.”

  “Which way?” Danny asks.

  “Sixty degrees. Strong, too. Eyes open, Penn! She’s down there. Watch for that pirogue!”

  Danny banks to the right for what feels like a quarter mile, then goes into a hover. Carl studies his screen like a sonar operator tracking a torpedo that could kill him. Agonizing seconds pass.

  “Carl?” I prompt.

  “Hold it . . . I’ve lost the signal. Backtrack, Danny!”

  “Oh, God,” I whisper.

  “Hang tight, Penn. We’re close.”

  CHAPTER 71

  CAITLIN HUNCHED AGAINST the trunk of the cypress tree, gasping for breath, every atom of consciousness focused on the bloody tube protruding from her chest. Shock had set in—she knew from the uncontrollable shivering. Her visual field had darkened at the edges; the world was fading to a small circle, to the tube in her hand. Most alarming, her jugular vein had swollen again, so badly that it was hard to bend her neck. Every few seconds she looked skyward and twisted her neck; the motion seemed to help keep her conscious.

  As her symptoms worsened, Caitlin had tried to drain more blood from her chest, but to her horror she’d discovered that the tube had clogged shut. The blood must have clotted inside the pen barrel. She figured she might be able to expel the blood from the tube if she pulled it out of her chest and blew as hard as she could, but she knew she’d never get the damned thing back into her pericardium.

  Her panic over Tom passing out again had become anger, then rage at his weakness. But after screaming for half a minute, she’d realized two things: first, that Tom was never going to wake up again; and second, this situation was as much her fault as his, for lying to Penn last night when she could easily have told him that Tom was hiding at Quentin Avery’s house. If she’d only done that, everything that followed would have been different. . . .

  Faced with the reality that she would die unless she could relieve the growing pressure on her heart, she tried to contort her neck sufficiently to suck on the barrel herself. This was akin to trying to suck her own nipple—which she’d once done at the request of a college boyfriend—only much more difficult. Because the pen was three inches lower than her nipple, and also because as the end of the pen barrel neared her lips, she felt its tip slip out of her pericardium. Dizzy with pain and terror, she drove the pen to its maximum depth again.

  A dark rivulet of blood ran down her belly.

  At first she thought the fresh pressure of built-up cardiac blood had driven the clot out of the tube. A surreal image of herself on television rose in her mind: she was making the talk-show rounds, like that kid who’d cut off his own arm to get free from a cliff. And I’m just as stupid as he was for running off to a blank space on the map, where no one knew where to look.

  “I’m a media whore!” she cried, giggling hysterically as the echo of her voice rebounded through the swamp.

  But her exultation evaporated almost instantly. The rivulet of blood had come from her wound, not the pen barrel. The plastic tube was still clotted shut.

  “No,” she whispered, fighting the urge to drive the barrel deeper into her suffocating heart. “No, no, no.” Her back and chest felt as though someone had been pounding them with a mallet. “Please, God,” she moaned, remembering the blessed relief after the first jets of blood had drained enough smothering fluid for her heart to find its rhythm again.

  Staring down at the clogged tube, she began to sob quietly. I’m going to die because I don’t have a six-inch needle and a syringe. “For want of a nail,” she whispered. “One motherfucking nail.”

  She probably had only minutes to live. Tom lying motionless on the ground made her future all too plain. A wail of desolation forced its way up through her constricted throat, but the strangled squawk that emerged probably traveled less than fifty feet. Her vision flickered, faded to black. Panicked again, she shook her head and shifted position; the world returned.

  Magic, she thought. But soon the light would vanish forever.

  A soft hiss sounded in her ears. Then little splashes threw water droplets off the surface of the swamp like glass beads over a black floor. Only a few dozen at first . . . then hundreds, thousands . . . millions. As Caitlin stared, each impacting raindrop registered in her brain as a separate event. Time had slowed, or dilated somehow, every second stretching to many times its usual duration. The chilling drops fell indifferently on Tom’s gray face, and he did not move.

  Somewhere above the canopy of branches, she knew, beyond the leaden clouds, glorious sunlight streamed over the horizon onto this part of the world. A few miles to the west, the Mississippi River rolled over the land as it had for millions of years. And somewhere to the north, Penn had probably heard from Terry Foreman by now. He might be racing toward Athens Point even now. But long before he found Caitlin, she would have vanished from the world.

  Her baby, too.

  The thought of a new li
fe growing inside her did not drive Caitlin to fight harder. The last thin filament that held her to the world—an umbilical as fine as a strand of spiderweb—had stretched to the point of breaking. The old part of her, the super-competent control freak, was finally laying down her weapons and giving in to the ebb and flow of eternity. She recalled how safe she’d felt inside the ancient tree behind her, the sacred chamber, a centuries-old repository of bones. Why not use her last reserve of strength to get out of the rain? Even dying animals had the sense to find a warm, dry place to lie down for the last time.

  She tried to scoot to her left, but she couldn’t manage it. She could no longer even shift her own body weight. She would die here, and before long, animals would crawl up out of the water and devour what remained of her.

  Circle of fucking life, she thought. So it goes.

  The rain fell cold upon her face, but she didn’t care. Now that she’d accepted the inevitable, her thoughts drifted to Penn, and to Annie. She wished she could say something to them, explain that she’d had no intention of abandoning them when she came on this crazy quest.

  She picked up her Treo and checked the screen again, praying for a miracle. One bar could be considered divine intervention at this point. But there were none.

  She pressed 911 anyway.

  Nothing happened.

  Staring at the silver device, Caitlin realized that she had one last way to speak to Penn and Annie, or at least to leave them a message. After gathering her thoughts as best she could, she activated the Voice Memo program and began talking softly. She had to pause every few words to take replenishing breaths, but this effort brought her a feeling of peace that nothing else had. She tried not to cry, but tears came anyway. She felt like a mountaineer trapped on a storm-shrouded peak, leaving a final message for her family. As she ran out of words, she realized with a jolt that she was losing consciousness.

  Is this how it ends? she thought dully.

  She still had enough neurons firing to know that if she could clear the clot from the pen and drive it back into her pericardium, she might be able to save herself. As she lowered her gaze, the world began to shrink again, tunneling down to the small plastic tube. Then a new train of thoughts flashed through her mind, not images from her past, but from the future: She lay on a hospital bed, a pink baby swaddled in her arms. Tom stood beside the bed, grinning through his white beard. He had somehow delivered the baby, even though his arthritic hands made that all but impossible. Peggy stood on the other side of the bed, Annie smiling beside her. The scene was pure Norman Rockwell. Yet as corny as it was, Caitlin wanted it more than anything else the world had to offer.

  But where was Penn? He wasn’t in the picture. He wasn’t even in the room. But Caitlin could hear him. He was shouting at her, seemingly from far away. What was he saying? He wanted her to do something. But what?

  Pull it out! he cried. You have to do it now. Pull it out and clear that clot. . . .

  “Do it now,” she echoed, her voice slurred.

  Caitlin raised her right hand to the two inches of plastic protruding from her chest. Her fingers, slick with blood, could barely grip the pen barrel. She tried to squeeze harder, but her fingers lost their purchase. The hexagonal tube stayed in her chest. With her last pulse of energy, she seized the tube, yanked it from her body, stuck it in her mouth, and blew with all the force left in her.

  “GOT IT!” CARL SHOUTS, as Danny holds the hover with perfect steadiness.

  “If it is her,” Danny says worriedly. “It could be one of the search teams.”

  “We must be right on top of her!”

  “No boat wake,” I say, desperately scanning the black water as Danny shifts the bird thirty yards to starboard. The surface of the swamp is empty of human signs for as far as I can see.

  “Ten o’clock!” cries Carl. “What do you see, Penn?”

  “Holy shit,” I breathe, catching sight of the crown of a massive cypress tree in the distance. “Look at that, Carl.”

  “Son of a bitch,” he says. “That’s gotta be it. Danny?”

  The chopper is already rolling right, picking up speed as we bore in toward the ancient giant.

  “Got it again!” Carl says. “This is it.”

  As Danny slows to a hover fifty yards from the tree, I catch sight of something too white and clean to be part of the natural environment.

  “Under the tree!” I shout. “Something white.”

  “I see it,” says Danny.

  The JetRanger dips forward, then descends toward what now looks almost like a white flag of surrender. As we draw closer, I recognize the red stripe across the back of Caitlin’s jacket.

  “It’s her!” I scream, straining against the four-point harness that holds me in my seat. “That’s her jacket.”

  I’m suddenly terrified that Caitlin’s been dumped in the swamp like Casey Whelan. “Back off a little bit. Get down close to the surface, so we can see under the branches.”

  “It’s gonna be close,” Danny says in a taut voice. “Those branches are a problem.”

  “Screw the branches,” Carl growls. “Take this bitch in, Danny.”

  The JetRanger edges up to the colossal tree, chopping branches into kindling like the world’s biggest Weedwacker. A choking lump rises in my throat. Caitlin is sitting with her back against the cypress. She’s still too far away for me to see if her eyes are open or closed, but if she were all right, she would be jumping and waving at the helicopter.

  “Get us down, Danny! Hurry!”

  With an expert hand, Danny noses the chopper still closer to the enormous cypress, descending all the while. Suddenly Carl is at my shoulder, staring through the side window with me.

  “I’ll go down first,” he says. “With the hoist.”

  “Bullshit you will.” I grab the handle on my chest and pop the harness free.

  Carl opens the side door, then begins prepping the rescue basket. When I look forward, Danny is holding a pair of field glasses to his eyes.

  “What do you see?” I ask, dread filling my chest.

  “She’s got blood on her chest. A good bit. Her eyes are closed. We’ve got to get her out of there ASAP. Let Carl go down first.”

  “I’m going down.”

  “Penn, wait.” Danny looks back, his eyes searching mine from beneath his helmet. “Your father’s down there, too. He’s lying face-up, his eyes are closed, and he’s not moving.”

  I scramble back to where Carl is prepping the aluminum mesh basket for descent and drop to the floor. From here, I can see the pilot was right. Dad is lying on his back about ten feet from Caitlin, near the water’s edge.

  How the hell did this happen? How did he get here? In less than a second I know the answer: Snake Knox brought him here.

  Carl checks the hoist’s cables, then gives Danny a thumbs-up. We’re only six feet above the water now. I’m going to jump. As though reading my mind, Carl grabs for my arm, but I twist away and leap through the door before he can stop me.

  My feet dig into soft mud as icy water closes around my chest. The chopper’s rotors fling a stinging storm of spray and debris into the air, nearly forcing my eyes shut. Just above me, Carl slides the rescue basket through the open door.

  At six foot one, I can bull my way over to the cypress without swimming. Pushing through the sulfurous water, I see a dark vertical slash in its trunk, like a great scar left by the sword of a giant. She really found it, I think. That’s the fucking Bone Tree. This realization transforms the cold iron of dread into molten terror—not of the tree and its legends, but of the men who use it as their killing ground.

  Clawing my way out of the water, I scrabble up onto the tussock beside my father. “Dad!” I shout, shaking him. “Wake up!”

  He doesn’t move. Checking the pulse at his throat, I feel nothing, but my fingers are already stiff from the cold water. Leaving him for the moment, I crawl to Caitlin, whose stomach and lap are red with sticky blood. My right hand goes straight for t
he artery beneath her jaw. Her lips are blue and her neck strangely swollen, but she’s faintly warm, as though life still thrums somewhere beneath her skin.

  There’s no pulse in her throat.

  “Caitlin!” I shout, taking her cheeks in my hands and squeezing tight. “Caitlin, can you hear me?”

  She doesn’t move. With rising panic I turn and wave to Carl for help. He’s fighting through the water now, nose and eyes just above the surface, dragging the rescue basket behind him. Turning back to Caitlin, I slide my hand over her belly, searching for her wound. My palm hits something hard: a Bic pen, stuck to the blood on her stomach. Six inches above it is a small hole beneath her left breast. A bullet made that. . . .

  A loud splashing sounds behind me, and the ground thumps as Carl drops to his knees at my side. “Any pulse?”

  “Nothing. She’s bled out, Carl. She’s dead!”

  His dark fingers go to her throat, where mine were moments ago. “My ass,” he says. “I feel something!” He presses his ear to her chest. “This girl ain’t dead till a doctor tells me she is. Let’s get her in the chopper. We can make Baton Rouge General in fifteen minutes!”

  “The basket?” I ask numbly.

  “Fuck the basket! Danny’s practically on the surface. I’ll carry her. You get your old man. He’s bigger.”

  As Carl turns to the hovering chopper and waves Danny still lower, I run to my father and grab him beneath the arms. Struggling with his heavy bulk, I see Carl drag Caitlin away from the Bone Tree, lift her slim body over his shoulders, and charge into the blast of spray coming off the water. Replaying the scene in Brody’s basement two nights ago, I drop to my knees and heave my father’s body over my shoulder, then march down into the black water while Danny’s screaming rotors smash bone-thick branches off the towering tree above me.