The Bone Tree

by Greg Iles

  CHAPTER 72

  WALT HAD KEPT nearly a mile between himself and Forrest’s cruiser as he followed his quarry southward. The GPS tracker allowed him that luxury. He prayed that Knox and Ozan were driving to wherever Tom was being held. If they weren’t, then Forrest might already have given the kill order, and Tom could be dead or dying at this moment.

  For the thousandth time Walt cursed Mackiever for not bugging Knox’s car, but there was nothing to be done now. All he could do was follow Knox and the Redbone to wherever they were bound. The cruiser was following a roundabout back road that looked as though it might lead around the Lusahatcha Swamp, toward the Mississippi River. Walt couldn’t actually see any water, but he could smell it. When you lived in a dry state like Texas, you got to where you could smell rain from a hundred miles off.

  When he slowed Drew’s pickup to soften the sickening drop of a pothole, the guns in the bag on the floor behind him made a reassuring clank. Thinking himself at the end of this empty, winding road, Walt visualized various scenarios. No matter what odds he confronted, he could not hesitate to fire, as he’d done back at the Bouchard lake house. In fact, he decided, he would shoot the bastards in the back if he got the chance. Kidnapping was a felony, after all.

  I ain’t proud today, he thought. Or particular.

  FORREST KNOX LEANED AGAINST the side of his cruiser and watched the pirogue glide toward him out of the cypress trees. Ozan looked back from the water’s edge and gave him a thumbs-up sign. If the boy in the boat had done as instructed, then Caitlin Masters was no longer a problem.

  Forrest had parked his cruiser right beside the boy’s junk pickup truck. He left his engine running, so he couldn’t hear the hum of the trolling motor as the pirogue neared the shore. Harold Wallis raised his left hand and waved. Ozan waved back. As Wallis cut his motor and drifted toward them, Forrest could see the kid was surprised to find them waiting for him.

  “Hey there, Colonel!” Wallis called. “I didn’t expect to see ya’ll out here.”

  The pirogue’s bow bumped the shore.

  “I guess you didn’t,” Ozan said, “since you didn’t call us back.”

  Harold opened his mouth but no answer emerged.

  Forrest took a couple of steps toward the water’s edge. It surprised him that a drug courier like this boy couldn’t sense the danger in what he had done.

  “That was a big job you did for us, Harold,” he said. “We want you to know we appreciate it.”

  The boy relaxed a little, but he didn’t move to get out of the boat.

  “What about the girl?” Ozan asked. “She dead?”

  Harold ducked his head with an exaggerated nod. “Yes, sir. She gone. Long gone.”

  “How many times did you shoot her?”

  Wallis’s eyes flicked back and forth. “Oh, three, fo’ times. Right in the chest. She died inside the tree.”

  “You checked to be sure?”

  “Yes, sir. She bled to death right there.”

  Ozan had taken a step closer to the water. “What’sa matter with your arm? Is that blood on it?”

  Wallis shook his head quickly. A stupid lie.

  “Did she shoot you?” Ozan asked.

  “It ain’t nothin’, Captain. She winged me after the first couple of shots. But I finished her off good.”

  The kid was definitely lying, Forrest decided. He’d shot her, all right, but he hadn’t stuck around to watch her bleed out.

  “It’s too bad she had to die,” Forrest said. “She was a hell of a pretty girl, wasn’t she?”

  The boy looked at the bottom of his boat. “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you think about fucking her? As a little bonus?”

  Wallis shook his head. “No, sir. I just done my business, so my brother could get out of Angola.” He looked up at last, clearly frightened. “You gonna take care of that next month, Colonel? Like the captain said?”

  “Absolutely,” Forrest said. “Least I can do, after what you did today.”

  The boy’s face was still troubled. “That lady told me she was pregnant, Colonel. She was lyin’, right?”

  Why would Masters tell the kid that? Forrest wondered. She must have figured that killing a pregnant woman might move a simple young man to mercy. A smart play, considering the softness of this kid. She’d probably been lying, of course, but they’d never know, because no one would ever find her body and perform an autopsy.

  “Sure she was lying,” Forrest said. “She was trying to play you, Harold. Play on your sympathy. She sensed you’re a good boy.”

  Wallis didn’t look convinced. “It’s wrong to kill a doe that’s carryin’, Colonel. Every hunter knows that.”

  “Let me help you out of there, kid,” Ozan said, reaching out his left hand.

  “I’m good,” Harold said. “You men got important things to do, I know. I can pull the boat out and load it. I do it dern near every day.”

  “No, it’s no problem,” Ozan said, his hand still extended.

  Harold hesitated, then stepped to the bow of the pirogue and took Ozan’s hand. Forrest saw the Redbone’s other hand slip into his back pocket and take out his knife. In a single motion Ozan released the spring-loaded blade and drove it up beneath Harold Wallis’s sternum.

  Nobody ever looked as surprised as people stabbed without warning. It wasn’t like the shock of a bullet, which often scrambled the brain in a millisecond. A blade gave people time to comprehend what had happened to them. The force of Ozan’s blow had surely knocked the wind from Wallis’s lungs, and the knife had probably punctured his heart, but his eyes were wide open and still full of life. The kid looked like some blackface cartoon from the 1920s, drawn to illustrate the question: “What the heck?” Or maybe, “Why me?”

  Ozan lifted Wallis off the ground by main strength. The boy hung there, folded around the knife, his eyes bulging.

  Forrest heard a low rumble that rose in volume, then faded. Probably an eighteen-wheeler back on the highway. He stepped up to the dying boy and looked directly into his stunned eyes.

  “Your brother’s gonna rot in Angola, son. But I do appreciate the favor.”

  Forrest nodded, and Ozan twisted his hand.

  The light in the boy’s eyes went out. His body hit the ground with solid finality.

  “What you want I should do with him?” Ozan asked as Forrest walked back to his cruiser.

  “Load him into his truck. Have one of the boys drive him down to Baton Rouge and leave him behind a crack house. Too many eyes around here right now. The security cameras from the café will ID him as the person last seen with her, and after we get rid of her body, they’ll eventually write it off as a homicide.”

  “True dat, boss. See you back at the camp.”

  Forrest’s hand was on the door when a helicopter stormed over them at treetop level, its throttle wide open. For a moment Forrest stood paralyzed, back in Vietnam, trying to recall map coordinates for an artillery strike.

  “Son of a bitch!” Ozan yelled. “Who the fuck was that?”

  “Lusahatcha County Sheriff’s Department!” Forrest cried, shading his eyes and peering after the bird. “I saw the gold star on the door. That’s Billy Ray Ellis’s chopper.”

  “Looked to me like it was coming from Valhalla.”

  “From the Bone Tree is my guess,” Forrest said. “Goddamn it.”

  “What would Sheriff Ellis be doing there?”

  “That wasn’t Billy Ray, Alphonse. Shit. We’ve got trouble.”

  “You mean you think they found the girl?”

  “That’s exactly what I think.”

  “What you wanna do?”

  Forrest’s mind was gearing down into combat mode. If Penn Cage had somehow discovered the Bone Tree, then a tectonic shift had occurred in the situation. A curtain was about to be stripped from the past, which meant casualties were inevitable.

  “Boss?” Ozan asked softly.

  “We’ve got an hour before the cavalry gets here. Maybe
half that. We’ve got to move fast.”

  “Where to?”

  “First Valhalla, to clear out the safes and get some diesel fuel.”

  Ozan gave him a puzzled look. “And then?”

  Forrest smiled the way he once had before going out on night patrols when he expected contact.

  “The Bone Tree, Alphonse. Where else?”

  WALT HAD JUST WORKED his way into a spot from which he might see something when a Bell JetRanger came blasting over the treetops above him. Whatever Knox and Ozan had stopped to do, the appearance of the chopper had startled them. Even before the sound of the rotors faded, he heard an engine start up. Then a pickup truck he had never seen trundled over the hill with Ozan at the wheel and a pirogue in back.

  Walt ducked down and waited for it to pass, then started running back toward his own truck. Knox was bound to be right behind the Redbone, and Walt had a feeling that things were going to happen fast from this point forward.

  Just as he reached his truck, Forrest’s cruiser came racing past on the road. Walt cranked his engine and started to follow, but then he realized that he shouldn’t do that before driving back and checking the spot where they’d stopped. It might be that Tom had been held prisoner by whoever owned that truck and pirogue, and Knox and Ozan had killed both guard and captive.

  Cursing like a sailor, Walt manhandled the truck out of the trees, then pointed it back into the woods and floored the gas pedal.

  CHAPTER 73

  I HAVE A friend whose son was accidentally shot in the chest by his brother during a hunting trip outside Natchez. For thirty-five miles my friend cradled his dying son in the backseat, trying to stanch the bleeding while the sobbing fourteen-year-old brother drove toward St. Catherine’s Hospital at nearly a hundred miles per hour. Twelve miles from Natchez, the boy’s heart stopped.

  I used to wonder what those last twelve miles were like.

  Now I know.

  Under a sky so dark we could see the lights of the capitol from thirty miles out, Danny McDavitt piloted the JetRanger southward toward Baton Rouge at over 130 knots. In the chopper’s belly, Carl Sims gave Caitlin continuous and violent chest compressions while I got on the radio and fought to get landing clearance at Baton Rouge General Hospital. They had an active delivery in progress, and since we weren’t an authorized LifeFlight, they were trying to divert us elsewhere.

  During the first minute of flight, Carl had determined that my father had a faint pulse and a heartbeat. After I used a fence-cutting tool to remove the handcuffs from his hands, I’d plundered Danny McDavitt’s flight bag, found a Snickers bar, and stuffed a chunk into Dad’s mouth. We couldn’t be sure that blood sugar was his problem, but there was little else we could do without real medical help.

  Caitlin was another matter.

  Ten miles out of Baton Rouge, Carl could no longer detect a heartbeat in her chest. While Danny pushed the chopper’s engine beyond its operational limit, I telephoned Drew Elliott and begged him to do anything he could from Natchez. Thirty seconds later we were over Baton Rouge and boring in on Baton Rouge General. Danny started to land in their automotive parking lot, but space was tight and the risk to bystanders real. While Carl and I stared wild-eyed at each other over Caitlin’s bloody chest, Drew called back and told me to divert to Our Lady of the Lake. A med school buddy of his was a trauma surgeon there, and he was ready to get Caitlin into an OR the moment she arrived. Danny instantly aborted the parking lot landing and got us over Our Lady in less than a minute.

  As we dropped toward the rooftop helipad, John Kaiser called and told me we’d been cleared to land at Baton Rouge General. I thanked him and shut off my ringer as Danny flared and settled the JetRanger dead center on the white-painted ring. Crouching against our rotor blast, a trauma team rushed to the chopper and moved Caitlin onto a gurney within ten seconds of the skids touching concrete. Carl and I followed them into the elevator, watching in stricken horror as they started large-bore IVs and searched in vain for a heartbeat. A technician diagnosed pericardial tamponade even before the doors opened on the next floor.

  Drew’s buddy was scrubbed and waiting in the OR when they shoved Caitlin through the big double doors and ordered the security guard to keep me outside. Four minutes later, using a long pair of tweezers and a portable fluoroscope, the surgeon pulled a deformed .22 slug out of Caitlin’s heart with as little trouble as a boy pulling a doodlebug from a hole with a stick.

  Then he declared her dead.

  She’d apparently been dead when they bundled her off the chopper. The surgeon had only opened her chest because the nature of her injury sometimes offered hope of an “exceptional save.” There was also the unspoken reality that the doctor had been doing Drew a favor.

  When I close my eyes, I still see Drew’s friend coming through the double doors, pulling off his mask, and reciting his stock speech with solicitous eyes: Mr. Cage, your wife was shot, as you probably know. The bullet struck her heart. We tried every means at our disposal to resuscitate her, but in spite of our best efforts, she died a few minutes ago. I’m sorry.

  “She’s not my wife,” I said, which was legally true but made no sense or difference to the well-meaning surgeon.

  He apologized again, and I mumbled that he should forget it while it struck me that no matter what the law says, I am twice widowed, which must be a fairly rare mark of distinction among forty-five-year-old American men these days.

  Carl Sims put his hands on my shoulders and in a cracked voice said he was sorry. Then he told me that Danny McDavitt would have been there, but the hospital had asked him to move the chopper to a secondary landing site near the car lot. Then, to my surprise, the trauma surgeon spoke some more, telling us things that brought tears to our eyes. He told us that Caitlin was brave, even heroic, and that she and my father had used an ingenious method to try to relieve her cardiac distress. The remarkable thing, the surgeon said, was that Caitlin must have done all the cutting and probing herself. For since my father’s hands had been cuffed, he could not have done it. Had Dad not gone into a diabetic coma, he might have kept Caitlin alive long enough for the trauma team to save her.

  I was in no mood to hear praise for my father, and I did not react well. The surgeon shook my hand and bade me farewell, and then a nurse came out with a hospital bag containing Caitlin’s personal effects.

  All that happened twenty minutes ago.

  Now I stand alone with Caitlin in the OR—“viewing the remains,” as I heard a nurse say, in what she thought was a whisper. Someone had draped a sheet over Caitlin’s body, covering her to the neck, but I removed it as soon as the nurse left me alone with her.

  Standing in the awful silence, I relearn lessons that I learned when my wife died, then forgot out of self-preservation. Lesson one: the stillest thing in the world is the corpse of someone you loved. A hunk of cold granite seems more alive than a dead human being. You don’t expect a stone to move. A person robbed of all motion and cold to the touch is the most alien object in the world. Natural instinct drives us away from the decaying body, and quickly. Yet love compels us forward, to kiss the empty vessel of the soul departed.

  Lesson two: there are many fates worse than death. The most common is surviving the death of a loved one. For the dead, all questions have been answered or made irrelevant. For the survivor, some questions have been rendered unanswerable. When my wife died, I had months to prepare, yet even then the final reality stunned me. But Caitlin has been snatched away like the son of my deer-hunting friend: alive and vital one moment, permanently AWOL the next. The cruelty in this feels personal. Many in my circumstance would lay it at the door of God. Yet I know where the true blame lies.

  But that is for later. . . .

  For now I must say good-bye. Unlike my wife, Caitlin is beautiful in death. Sarah was beautiful in life, but cancer stripped away her loveliness piecemeal until all that remained was a living husk. On this table, Caitlin reminds me of stories from London during the Blitz, w
hen lovers seated on park benches had the life snatched out of them by the blast of a V-2 rocket they never even heard. The bullet wound in her chest is obscene, as is the thoracotomy window the surgeon cut in her side, but the rest of her body bears no mark. Her skin was always china white, and with her veil of black hair, she looks more like an actress playing a murder victim in a film than an actual corpse. For a surreal moment, I half expect someone to yell “Cut” and to hear the footsteps of the crew rushing in to congratulate her and give her sips of Perrier.

  But no one does.

  Looking closer, I see that Caitlin died without a trace of makeup on. Jordan Glass’s influence, no doubt. Beneath her frozen perfection, though, I sense that the process of decay has already begun. Her cheeks sag in a way they never did in life, and her breasts lie flatter than I ever saw them. This woman will never bear a child, never nurse one, or watch one take its first steps. She will never sit proudly at a graduation, or grow old and touch the wrinkles on her face with exquisite sadness over slowly encroaching mortality. For Caitlin Masters, mortality arrived all at once, in a tiny package of lead and copper that rearranged her vibrant heart just enough to smother it in its own blood.

  Questions swim like ravenous fish below the surface of my consciousness, yet something of almost terrifying power holds them at a certain depth. Since Caitlin cannot answer questions for me, the fish must wait to be fed. Some part of me understands that this will be the last time I spend with Caitlin in her natural state. As a prosecuting attorney, I know too well the clinical rituals that follow death. After this brief lacuna in the rush of events, she will be violated by the pathologist’s saw; her organs will be weighed upon the scales; her blood will be pumped out by the embalmers and replaced by chemicals; all the other ghoulish sequelae we inflict upon the dead will follow in train. Yet all this leaves me strangely cold. My temporarily cauterized nerve endings transmit no signals of agony; my brain experiences revulsion as a concept, not an emotion. I know that pain will come—in minutes perhaps, or hours, or even days—and when it does, I may not be able to endure it.