Bone

by George C. Chesbro

  "I'll do the best I can, Bone. I'm not even certain all of the victims have been positively identified, and the records on the rest are likely to be pretty scanty."

  "Call Lieutenant Lightning. Tell him I've been in touch with you, and report exactly what we've discussed. That will protect you. He won't believe I'm not the killer, but he just may help you get the information I want."

  "I think I'll ask him for the information first."

  "Handle it the way you feel best, but remember that Lightning is no fool. He'll want to know why you want the information, and he'll probably suspect right off that you've been in touch with me. I'd tell him up front."

  "Okay."

  "How are you getting on with Barry?"

  "Fine," Anne replied after a slight pause, somewhat surprised by the question.

  "I need other information which he may be able to supply. I recall him saying that he used to work for a firm that does underground surveys for the utilities and other companies that want to dig into the ground."

  "That's right; Empire Subway Limited."

  "Barry has always thought I was the killer, so I'm not sure how you should approach him on this. If you tell him it's for me, he may not help you."

  "What do you need, Bone?"

  "All the information I can get about structures—natural as well as man-made—in a broad area underground, with an epicenter under the building at the corner of Thirty-third Street and Ninth Avenue. That's where I was found, unconscious, on the sidewalk next to a construction site a little more than a year ago."

  "Bone! Who found you?!"

  "There's no time now, Anne, and I can't give you information that I don't want Lightning to have. But I need to know what's under that area. I thought Barry might know, and he might even be able to steer you to some maps of the general area, say nineteen or twenty square blocks. I know there are subway tunnels that run under there, but I'm looking for something else."

  "Do you think you were hurt somewhere down there?"

  "I'm almost certain of it."

  "Can you tell me how you found out?"

  "Not now. I got lucky. Do you have any idea how long it will take you to start getting the information?"

  "I'll start right now, and we'll see how much I can find out by, say, five o'clock. How will I get in touch with you?"

  There was a prolonged silence at the other end. Finally, Bone said: "Lightning will probably have this phone tapped right after you talk to him—if he doesn't already. I guess it doesn't make any difference. He'll ask you to cooperate with him, and that's what you'll be doing. I'll call you at this number at five."

  "Bone, let me come to you."

  "No."

  "If Barry can get me maps, I'll have to hand them over to you anyway."

  "First see if you can get the maps. I don't want you to lose your job, and I certainly don't want the police to charge you with aiding and abetting a fugitive. I think you should be in the clear as long as you keep Lightning informed of what you're doing, and why."

  "Considering the fact that we're talking about saving lives, I find I really can't get too excited about what the police may do to me."

  "I can."

  "Do you really think this phone could be tapped?"

  "Probably not now—but it will be. I may have to call you a few times, from different phones, and only speak for short intervals."

  "That sounds very clever," Anne said, and smiled thinly. "You go ahead and call here at five. If I'm not around, it probably means that I've gone for a walk—and that walk should take me somewhere around the boathouse in Central Park at about six o'clock."

  "Anne—!"

  "You can withhold information and refuse to meet in order to protect me, but you can't tell me I can't be at the boathouse at six o'clock if I want to. I'm just telling you that. But call here first to see what I may have for you. Oh, incidentally, I've decided that I'm in love with you."

  There was a long, deep, clearly audible sigh on the other end of the line. "Anne, thank you. There are so many things I'd like to say to you, but I can't. Not now; not yet. I know the stranger will love you."

  "Well, thank you for saying that. There's no stranger, Bone. There's just an honest, decent, courageous man who's been hurt and lost his memory. We're going to find the real killer and prove you innocent. Now, let me get going and see what I can dig up for you."

  "Anne?"

  "Yes, stranger that I love?"

  "There's one other thing I'd like you to think about."

  "You name it, I'll think about it."

  "I need a place somewhere close by where I can climb."

  "Climb?"

  "A very high, sheer surface; a cliff."

  (iii)

  "Homicide. Lieutenant Lightning speaking."

  "This is Bone, Lieutenant."

  There was a sound like a sharp intake of breath, but Bone could not be sure; there was a great deal of background noise on the street just behind the bank of pay phones from which he was calling. When Perry Lightning did speak, his tone was even. "It's good to hear from you, Bone. I thought I might."

  "Why do you say that?" Bone asked tightly.

  "Because, as I've told you, I've always believed that you were basically a decent man with a big problem. Somehow, I think those three people you offed last night might have been just a little too much for you. You're ready to give up and come in, and I salute you for that; that's the truth. Tell me where you are, and I'll come and pick you up."

  Bone clenched his jaws in frustration, then glanced at Zulu, who was shielding him from the gaze of passersby at the same time as he acted as a lookout and timekeeper. The huge black man held up two fingers.

  "Lieutenant, since I don't care to have you trace this call, I don't have a lot of time to talk; I don't want to use my time trying to convince you that I'm not the killer."

  "Let me bring you in, Bone. Give yourself—"

  "Did Anne Winchell, the social worker with HRA, call you today?"

  There was a short pause, surprise in the police lieutenant's tone when he answered. "No. Why?"

  "Are you sure? Maybe she called when you were out."

  "Every call is logged, and I check in every hour or so. Anne Winchell's call would have been forwarded to me; she's high on my list of priorities, since she's a link to you. She didn't call me. Now, you tell me why she would have wanted to call me."

  Bone again glanced at Zulu, who held up one finger.

  "I was in touch with her this morning—which, incidentally, she was going to report to you. Besides you, I asked her to get in touch with Barry Prindle, her ex-partner, to try to get some information that I need."

  "What information?"

  Zulu put a hand on Bone's shoulder, used his other hand to make a slashing motion across his throat.

  "That's not important now. What's important is that I was supposed to be in touch with her at five—and, if not five, then six.

  "It's past eleven, Bone."

  "I know that. She wasn't at either place where I was supposed to be in touch with her, and she's not home."

  Zulu's fingers began to press more tightly into Bone's shoulder.

  "I haven't heard from her, Bone," Lightning said, his tone suddenly very hard. "I'm thinking this may be another little game of yours, pal. If you're really worried about the woman, you'll let me come and get—"

  Bone angrily slammed down the receiver, then turned around and followed Zulu—dressed less flamboyantly than usual, in jeans and a sweatshirt—through the crowds of people in Times Square. They turned right on Forty-second Street, and Zulu stepped in front of him just as a police cruiser sped up the block, lights flashing, and screeched to a halt in front of the pay phone where Bone and Zulu had been only moments before.

  "You like to cut things pretty close, Bone-man," Zulu said under his breath as they reached Sixth Avenue, waited for a light and then walked on toward Grand Central Terminal.

  "He's got her," Bone said, his heart ra
cing and his breath rasping in his lungs for reasons that had nothing to do with their fast pace.

  Zulu stopped, put a hand on Bone's shoulder and drew him into the shadows of a storefront. "Take it easy, Bone-man; just take it easy. You look like you're about to have a heart attack. We're safe now. Tell me what the good lieutenant said."

  Bone took a series of deep breaths, then reached up and wiped a sheen of sweat off his forehead. "He says Anne never called him."

  "Maybe he's lying."

  "Why should he lie?"

  "Because he's trying to lay a trap for you; he wants you under a lot of pressure."

  Bone shook his head. "She was supposed to be at the boathouse at six, and she wasn't there. Also, she never called Prindle. You heard my conversation with him, when I was finally able to get a number where I could reach him." He paused, took another series of deep breaths in order to fight the sense of panic that threatened to engulf him. "She may have spoken to someone else first, Zulu. The killer."

  "Before she called Prindle or Lightning? Come on, Bone-man." •

  "It has to be. She wasn't able to reach Prindle, and the thought of talking to Lightning made her uneasy. So she tried to get the information for me some other way. She had to have called somebody else: the killer. Their conversation tipped him off that I might be close to finding out—or remembering—who he is, so he panicked and took Anne." He paused, then forced himself to say the words that were in his mind, haunting him. "Maybe she's already dead."

  Zulu squeezed both of Bone's arms. "Easy, Bone-man," he said in his deep, resonating voice. "You're not going to help her by getting all hyper."

  "If she's dead, Zulu, I killed her: my call to her, the things I asked her to do. I killed her."

  "No, Bone-man. I hear your grief talking, and that's just a waste of time. If you're right about the killer having her, and I think you are, then one of two things is true: she's either dead or alive. If she's dead, there's nothing you can do about it; if she's alive and being held somewhere, then it seems to me that the best thing for you to do is keep working to get your memory back. What about calling this Prindle guy back and asking him yourself for information about what may be under that West Side section of the city?"

  Bone thought about it, shook his head. "Prindle never much cared for me in the first place, and he's been convinced all along that I'm the killer. I'm sure he must have reported our last conversation to the police. The first thing he'll do if I talk to him again is call Lightning back and report on what I said; there'd be cops all over the place around there, and I don't need that."

  "Then we'll go back to that section again tomorrow, and we'll keep walking through the subway tunnels until we find something that looks familiar to you. Maybe we can find a way to get down to another level—if there is another level."

  Bone again shook his head. "Too time-consuming, and we might never find what I'm looking for." He paused, looked up into Zulu's face. "Tomorrow I climb. Have you got a place for me?

  Zulu clucked his tongue, pointed to Bone's stomach. "If you try to do any serious climbing, you're going to rip yourself right open."

  "You know I have to do it, Zulu. Have you got a place?"

  Zulu sighed, slowly nodded. "I've got a place. It's in Nyack, across the river in Rockland County where my sister lives. It's about an hour away. We'll get you disguised again and take a bus there in the morning. It's a state park, but it's early in the season, and it's a weekday, so we should have the place pretty much to ourselves."

  "The climb—is it steep enough?"

  Zulu raised his eyebrows slightly, smiled thinly. "You'll tell me. It's called Hook Mountain."

  Chapter Sixteen

  (i)

  "That high and steep enough for you, Bone-man?"

  Bone stood in the small meadow, gazing up at the sheer escarpment before him, feeling his heart hammer with excitement.

  They had gone to the Port Authority early, boarded a bus to Nyack. They had gotten off in the center of the small waterfront town, walked the two miles to where North Broadway ended at Nyack Beach State Park. While still a mile away, the mountain had suddenly come into view as they'd rounded a bend in the road. From the time when he had first glimpsed the escarpment soaring up into the sky, time had begun to collapse in on Bone, and he had kept his gaze firmly fixed on the mountain as they had approached. Now he stood in the clearing at the base, staring up, taking deep breaths, trying to empty his mind of everything but the challenge which faced him. The stranger had stood in places like this before, he thought—not at Hook Mountain in Nyack, but before other cliff faces that were even higher and more sheer.

  He felt at home.

  This was a "new" mountain, Bone thought, one that had thrust up out of the earth in fairly recent geologic time. There was this plateau on which they stood, and behind him the mountain dropped off at a steep but easily climbable angle to the Hudson River; the cliff face before him was almost perpendicular, perhaps seven hundred feet high.

  It was exactly what he had wanted.

  "I figured you could get your exercise clambering up and down that stuff at the base," Zulu said, pointing to the hundred feet or so of jagged rockfall at the foot of the escarpment. "Just take it easy, Bone-man. I've got you taped up pretty good, but you could still split open that wound if you put too much stress on the stomach muscles. Do about ten minutes on that loose stuff and see how you feel. Okay? Just watch out you don't break an ankle."

  Bone did not reply. He was deep within himself now, his eyes scanning the face of the escarpment as he planned his ascent. He removed his floppy hat, dark glasses, slacks and coat, leaving himself dressed only in leather shorts and a T-shirt. The wind blowing up the Hudson River swept over his body, chilling him, but at the same time filling him with exhilaration. He would not be cold for long, he thought as he opened the canvas bag at his feet, took out smooth-soled black sneakers which were among the items they had purchased before leaving New York, put them on over his two pairs of heavy socks. Next he took out a muslin bag of powdered chalk which he positioned against his spine on the belt he had looped around his waist.

  He was aware of Zulu speaking to him—but now all of his concentration was focused on the cliff face as he searched for the best angles, finger- and toeholds.

  Once he started up, he thought, there would be no way back. Somehow he knew that a cardinal rule of what he was about to attempt was to keep moving at a steady, fluid pace, in an almost continuous flow of motion where his body would become as one with the stone and flow upward, defying gravity, to the top. If he found the right angles, took the proper route. To stop for too long, to make one wrong decision, was to die as muscles cramped and fingers lost their grip.

  All of this he knew.

  His mind now cleared of everything but the terrible knowledge he possessed of free climbing, Bone abruptly started walking away at a rapid pace, angling off to his right toward the base of the route he had chosen.

  "Hey, Bone-man, where the hell are you going?!"

  Bone reached the base of the sloping rockfall, stepped up on a rock wedged between two huge boulders and began picking his way through the loose, jagged rocks, remembering as he climbed to breathe deeply, flex his knees slightly and push with his legs in order to conserve energy.

  This was, he thought, about a 5.1 climb—very difficult, for top experts only. But he was a top expert, and he had executed climbs of 5.5 difficulty, which would have been considered impossible only a decade earlier.

  He effortlessly climbed to the top of the loose rockfall, reaching the base of the escarpment itself where he unhesitatingly reached up with both hands and gripped a tiny, narrow ledge jutting out from the rock face.

  "Bone-man, what the hell do you think you're doing?! You're going to fucking kill yourself! Get back down here! Nobody can climb that!"

  Zulu's shouting voice was close, Bone thought, right beneath him, at the base of the rockfall; but this was the last time he actually heard Zulu, f
or now he was totally immersed in the challenge posed by his free climb. There could be no hesitations, no pauses to rest except for those which were planned, when he reached places where he could hang by his legs. He could not climb too fast, for that would deplete his energy too quickly—but he could not climb too slowly, for this too would exhaust him before he had reached the top. Pace and rhythm were everything. He had no rope, no equipment whatsoever to help him in his climb; there was only his body and his mind to pit against the sheer rock face, and to make a misjudgment with either his mind or body was to die.

  The momentum of his initial swing took him out over the rock face, and at the apogee of his swing he released his right hand, reached up and gripped another minuscule outcropping of rock. A split second later he released his left hand, and as he swung again like a human pendulum he flexed his knees, brought his legs up slightly and pressed the toes of his left foot into a small niche. With this leverage he pushed himself up to his next handhold and immediately moved to his right. Then he repeated the same series of motions, this time moving to his left, driving with his legs, pulling, following cracks in the rock, flowing up the bottom third of the escarpment in nonstop motion.

  He knew that now he could no longer peel off, no longer voluntarily release his grip and fall back to the ground to search for another, safer route; he was far too high for that, and if he dropped now, his body would be broken on the jagged rockfall below.

  He reached a relatively wide, deep ledge. Here he swung his legs up and over the outcropping, then released his grip and lay back in space, letting his arms hang loose in order to rest them, regain strength and circulation. It was a planned rest stop, one he had spotted from the ground as he had planned his route. II his eyesight and planning had been good, he thought, he would come to two more such rest stops on his way to the top.