Sins Of The Father

by James, Harper

  ‘Lead the way,’ Guillory said with a sweep of her hand.

  Evan’s legs wouldn’t respond immediately. He didn’t know if he wanted to lead the way and be at the forefront when they broke down the door, or sit on the steps out here and wait for the news, good or bad.

  Ryder took the decision out of his hands, pushing his way through the throng.

  ‘You best stay here Buckley, where you can’t cause any more trouble,’ he said and pushed Evan aside. ‘Leave this to the professionals.’

  Evan put a hand on his chest and gave him a hard shove back.

  ‘Fuck you, donut.’

  There was a ripple of barely stifled sniggers which just made Ryder’s face get even redder than it normally was. Guillory didn’t bother trying to hide her grin, gave Ryder a look that said you deserved that.

  Evan took a step towards Ryder. He was in the mood to punch his head into next week, damn the consequences.

  Nothing came out of Ryder’s mouth for a second before he found his voice.

  ‘You—’

  Guillory stepped between them, her back to Ryder, her eyes on Evan’s.

  ‘We haven’t got time for this.’

  He held her stare a moment, mouthed later to Ryder over her shoulder. With a look on her face that said wait until I get you home, she took hold of his elbow and turned him around, gave him a gentle shove towards the door.

  He went inside, Guillory right behind him, then the guys with the gear, Ryder bringing up the rear. He led the way through the kitchen that looked as if a small tornado had passed through, on down the hall to the door at the top of the basement stairs. He stood to the side to let a guy running cable from the generator outside go down first, closely followed by the guy with the floodlights. Then they all piled down the stairs after them as the basement lit up below them.

  Evan took the key off the nail and unlocked the door, pushed it open the inch that the hasp would allow. The same dank, fetid smell flowed into the basement.

  ‘Reckon there’s an old well down there,’ somebody said.

  It made sense, explained why the length of rope Evan found was damp. It also opened up the possibility of a whole bunch of other things Evan didn’t want to think about. In his mind he’d always pictured another chamber like the others he’d found. He’d never imagined a well plunging down into the bottomless depths of the earth.

  The other odor behind the dampness was stronger now. Soon it would be the dominant smell. A thought went through his mind, just like everyone else in the room. Luckily no one gave voice to it.

  Reckon there’s something else down there too.

  ‘You okay with this?’ Guillory said to him.

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘You don’t sound it. Why don’t you stand at the back?’

  It was phrased as a question but he knew her well enough to recognize an instruction-cum-order. The subtext was clear.

  So we can shield you from whatever we find.

  It was a compromise, better than banishing him from the room altogether. He nodded and moved through the men in the basement, shouldered his way past Ryder.

  ‘Room for a fat one up front,’ he muttered under his breath.

  He sat down on the second step, stared at the backs of the men in front of him, heard the creak of wood and metal straining against each other as they jammed the wrecking bar between the padlock and the door. It didn’t sound like it was getting far.

  His phone pinged in his pocket. From Charlotte, no doubt. Texting him because he wouldn’t answer his phone. He pulled it out, looked at the display. Everything was about to be turned on its head once more.

  It wasn’t Charlotte.

  It was Floyd.

  ***

  EVAN STOOD UP QUIETLY and crept back up the stairs. He needn’t have worried with the amount of noise in the basement, the intense attention of everyone in there channeled towards the unyielding door.

  He stared at his phone, read the message.

  For reasons he couldn’t put his finger on he was sure it wasn’t Kyle’s body causing the smell coming from the well behind the door. It was all part of the sick, twisted game Floyd and Hendricks were playing. The words in front of his eyes now were what this was really about. They held the answer to where Kyle was being held, an invitation to the final stage of the game.

  The answer was in the text message.

  There’s none so BLIND as those who cannot see.

  It usually meant there’s no point trying to reason with someone who refuses to listen to reason. That wasn’t the case here. Nobody was saying anything to him, trying to reason with him, least of all Floyd. Something niggled at the back of his mind. Something wasn’t right. Floyd was an uneducated man, might not grasp the real meaning behind the phrase. What if he simply meant ...

  He laughed out loud at his own stupidity, read the text again and understood what Floyd was saying to him. He’d jumped to conclusions again, seen what he was expecting to see, not what was written. The text didn’t say those who will not see which is how he’d read it. It said those who cannot see.

  All Floyd was saying to him was, it’s right under your nose and you can’t see it.

  Kyle was somewhere nearby, somewhere Evan ought to be able to find him. And Floyd wanted Evan to find him. Because that’s where he’d be too, waiting for the ultimate showdown, the end of the game. Why else would he have intervened, stopped Vasiliev’s men from dragging him away? He had no beef with them, not until they killed his dog, anyway.

  He stared at the message again, waiting for divine inspiration, any inspiration.

  BLIND

  Why was the word capitalized? Was it just Floyd taunting him? Or was he telling him something else?

  Evan found himself wandering aimlessly in the yard. He’d been so engrossed in his thoughts, he hadn’t noticed he’d walked through the house and come outside. Floyd’s gruesome tableau was immediately in front of him, flies buzzing obscenely in the body cavity.

  Was there some clue in what Floyd had done, some significance to the way he was nailed to the wall upside down? It wasn’t as if one of his arms had been nailed pointing in any particular direction: this way to your death, Buckley.

  Floyd had field-dressed the guy, like you would a deer. What did that tell him? Floyd was a hunter. So what, he’d known that the moment he saw the bow, the first time he was in the kitchen.

  He’d removed half the entrails, left the rest. Was it because he planned to eat them, but only had a small appetite, couldn’t manage a whole portion of innards in one sitting?

  The sight of Vasiliev’s man spread out in front of him made him think of Vasiliev himself with the top of his head blown off. He hadn’t told Guillory or anyone else about that yet. He looked out across the fields to where he’d left the body hidden in the undergrowth. The breeze had picked up now, blowing in his face, a clean, fresh smell unlike the smell in the basement. He closed his eyes and angled his face into the wind, wishing it would blow his whole head clear.

  He was wasting time. He opened his eyes again and saw something glistening wetly in the sun. Saw something that made his legs go weak. He should go back inside, get Guillory and the others. There wasn’t time. He ran to edge of the yard, saw blood and bits of a man’s insides in the grass at the edge of the field. Standing right above the wet, sticky mess, he turned his head to the right, looked directly at the gutted man. He turned his head back a hundred and eighty degrees, stared out across the fields directly at the small woods where his car was hidden.

  It was as good as an arrow drawn on the ground.

  He felt behind his back, made sure the gun was still there. He sent up a silent prayer to whatever deity had stopped him from handing it over to the traffic cop and set off running across the fields.

  At the edge of the small woods he knew he was right. A second dollop of sticky, slimy innards adorned the branches of a bush. He bent over, rested his hands on his knees and caught his breath, his eyes scanning the
ground for further bloody directions.

  Ahead of him, a path curved away into the woods which weren’t as small as he’d thought. He knew it was the way he had to go even before he took the first few steps down the path and saw another mound of wet guts on the ground. What other way would it be? Towards the road and civilization? Or deeper into the woods, away from the house, away from Guillory and the other cops—ever closer to a man with a bow and a grudge who’d planned this for a very long time.

  He set off running again.

  It never crossed his mind that Floyd and Kyle might not be together wherever the trail led. All thoughts of what lay behind the basement door were long gone.

  Chapter 49

  ‘IT’S NO GOOD,’ the guy with the wrecking bar said, wiping the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand.

  Guillory let him get out the way, then motioned for the guys with the battering ram to have a go. On the second try, aiming immediately above the hasp and padlock the door flew inwards, splitting vertically, revealing the steps leading down into the dank darkness. With the door hanging open, the rotten smell was dominant, overpowering the fetid dampness.

  Everybody knew it was only going to get worse.

  Guillory didn’t look around, hoped Evan stayed where he was at the back. She played the beam of her flashlight down the steps. There looked to be at lease twenty of them, green and slimy with algae. She ducked her head, still couldn’t see what lay at the bottom, the low ceiling cutting of her view.

  ‘I reckon it’s a well, alright,’ the same guy as before said.

  But it’s not just water that’s in it, Guillory thought to herself.

  She stood aside for a couple of guys to come forward with the cable and portable floodlight.

  ‘It’s not going to reach,’ one of them said, not meeting her eye.

  ‘We could bring the generator into the kitchen the other one said. Give us a few more feet.’

  It wasn’t worth it. She shook her head. They’d make do with the flashlights.

  ‘You want to go first,’ she said to a fit young guy called Sanchez.

  He nodded and took the flashlight from her, stepped onto the top step and looked for a handrail that wasn’t there.

  ‘Careful,’ Guillory said, ‘it looks slippery as hell. Maybe you need the—’

  Her words were cut off by a loud yell as Sanchez took another step down, slipped on the slick stone and went down on his ass. His arms flailed and the flashlight went flying, clattering down the rest of the steps.

  ‘Way to go, Sanchez,’ somebody called from the back.

  A rope was passed forward and Guillory threw the end to Sanchez, still on his ass, not keen to try to stand with nothing to hold on to. He caught the rope and pulled himself to his feet. She handed him another flashlight and he started down the stairs.

  When he was halfway, Guillory took hold of the rope and followed him down backwards, ducking slightly to keep her hair from brushing the low ceiling. She was surprised she didn’t hear Evan call out to tie the rope off on Ryder, then they could all go down on the rope at once. Maybe he’d gone up for some fresh air. She wished she could do the same, get rid of the churning in her gut.

  Sanchez had retrieved the flashlight he dropped by the time she got to the bottom. It still worked. He handed the other one back and she played it around the small room. It was about six feet square. The floor was damp dirt with a well in the middle, a retaining wall about a foot tall surrounding it. If Sanchez had slid all the way down the steps, they’d likely be hauling him out of the well before they found out what else was down there.

  The smell was much stronger down here, a smell she recognized far too vividly. The smell of death and decay. She closed her eyes and wished she was anywhere else.

  A piece of lumber lay across the low retaining wall, a rope tied around it, disappearing into the smelly blackness. She called up the steps for somebody else to come down and help Sanchez with the heavy lifting. She edged her way around to the back of the well to make enough room and shone her flashlight down the well.

  She couldn’t see a thing.

  She got down on her knees and laid the flashlight on the ground. Then she rested her left hand on the piece of lumber and took hold of the rope with her right. She gave a hard tug. It didn’t budge an inch. It sure as hell wasn’t just a rusty old bucket down there.

  The third guy joined them. They all looked at each other, nobody looking forward to the next five minutes. She nodded to them, get it over with, bile and dread inching up her throat.

  It was immediately obvious they couldn’t both get a good grip on the rope leaning over the well. The floor space in the small room was severely limited. There was no way they could back up the slippery stairs. Guillory called for another rope and they had to wait while someone ran outside to fetch it. The waiting was driving her crazy. She didn’t want to think what it must be like for Evan. She knew him well enough to know he’d already have arrived at the same conclusion she had.

  If he hadn’t left his car at Charlotte’s, Floyd would never have known of Kyle’s existence.

  She wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d come slithering down the steps on his ass any minute, arms and legs flying everywhere, eyes wild with fear. She couldn’t even smile at the thought.

  Sanchez tied the second rope around the piece of lumber and shouted back up the steps for them to start hauling. He took hold of the rope and with the other guy, Rogers, fed and guided it, keeping it clear of the edge. Guillory shone her flashlight into the hole and prayed for a miracle.

  ‘I can see something,’ she said a minute later, a hollow feeling in her stomach as her prayer went unanswered.

  Sanchez and Rogers looked at her, not recognizing her voice.

  ‘Looks like somebody’s head,’ she said quietly, peering into the hole. ‘I can see dark brown hair. Can’t see what’s below that.’

  ‘Slow it down,’ Sanchez called up into the basement.

  Their heads met in a three-point star over the middle of the well as the rope inched through the two guys’ hands. The hair was clearly visible now, eight feet below them. Then a glimpse of dirty flesh, the skin waxy and unearthly in the wavering beam of the flashlight. Beyond that, the dark mass of the body filled the well, indistinguishable at first from the deeper blackness surrounding it. Then the white sleeves of a varsity jacket, caked with dirt and grime scraped from the sides of the well, almost ghostly as they emerged from the shadows.

  There was a sudden blur of movement. The beam of Guillory’s flashlight reflected back from a pair of pink eyes, small and beady. With a startled squeal, a rat the size of a small dog leapt off the body onto the side wall of the well, its claws gripping the slimy surface.

  ‘Jesus,’ Sanchez said. ‘you see the size of that?’

  Then Guillory dropped her flashlight into the hole.

  Chapter 50

  EVAN KNEW HE’D HIT pay dirt as soon as he rounded the curve in the road. He’d followed the trail of blood and guts for a mile or so before the woods opened out into a wide clearing. On the far side, tight up against the trees was a boxy wooden structure about six-feet square mounted on stilts, lifting it eight-feet off the ground. A ladder was attached to one of the stilts, leading up to a door in the side. The whole thing was covered in dark green canvas, torn and faded in places. There were a couple of long vertical windows with shutters over them on each side.

  It was a deer blind, somewhere for hunters to hide while they waited for the unsuspecting deer to come along. Hence the capitalized BLIND in the text message. Floyd sure didn’t want to risk him walking straight past it.

  Kyle was inside, not down the well.

  And Floyd was hiding in the trees somewhere nearby. The hairs on the back of his neck rippled as he imagined Floyd lining up an arrow on the center of his back at this very moment. His hand went automatically to the small of his back, to get his gun. He changed his mind. It might be better for Floyd to think he was unarmed.


  He crept forward around the edge of the clearing, keeping his back to the trees, scanning the trees on the other side, his ears sensitive to every rustle, every scuffle in the undergrowth. Every tree he passed he half expected Floyd to step out and grab him from behind, to feel the gun in his pants snatched away and turned on him. Except his gut feeling, his base instincts, told him it wasn’t going to happen that way. Floyd favored a weapon more personal, more intimate, than the clinical efficiency of a bullet. Images of Vasiliev’s men, Floyd’s arrows ripping into their flesh, crowded his mind.

  He got to ten yards away from the blind and stopped, pressed himself further into the trees. He couldn’t say why. Floyd was either here or he wasn’t. And if he was, he’d watched Evan every step of the way, could have shot him at any time—it just wasn’t time yet.

  The silence of the clearing was suddenly shattered by his phone ringing.

  ***

  KYLE STOOD VERY STILL, gritted his teeth and tried not to cry like a big baby, as Uncle Evan would say. Never a dull moment with Uncle Evan around, no sir. Despite the circumstances he gave a small laugh—it wasn’t a sob—when he thought about some of the things his mom said about him when she thought he couldn’t hear.

  Kyle’s hands were tied behind his back, not so tight as to hurt, but tied just the same. It was no big deal, he’d been tied up worse by the bigger kids at school. The hood over his head was harder to deal with. It was smelly like old socks. And he hated—wasn’t scared of—the dark. It was the noose hanging loosely around his neck, a loop of heavy rope suspended halfway down his back, that made his legs shake uncontrollably, made him sure he was going to piss his pants.