The Deep Zone

by James M. Tabor

  Soon.

  TWENTY-SIX

  “WE SHOULD HAVE SIGHTED THAT CAVE HOURS AGO,” STIKES, down on one knee, whispered to the others. The previous night they had kept going while it was still dark, fighting uphill through the vines and brambles and mala mujer, expecting to come out of the forest and spot the cave anytime. Then the sky began to glow and they went into a hide. A person could have walked within ten feet and not seen them. Two slept while one watched, the shifts rotating. It was after eight P.M. when Kathan judged it dark enough to move again.

  Now it was getting close to their second dawn. “The GPS coordinates are bad,” Dempsey said. “Got to be.”

  “Never happened before.” Kathan sounded disgusted. “Gray’s intel’s always been good.”

  “You said that already,” Stikes pointed out. “We can’t keep wandering around out here. Get them up on comm and ask for some decent intel.” His patience was exhausted.

  “Can’t risk that.” Kathan, adamant. “The narcos or Feds or both will be running energy scans. Even on the IR bands. Gotta solve this one our own selves.”

  “Here’s something else I gotta solve. I need to take a crap,” said Dempsey.

  “Hold it, little buddy,” Kathan said.

  “I been holding it. See you boys in a few minutes.”

  Stikes and Kathan waited, seated back to back, M4s held across their chests. Stikes was feeling guilty about needling Kathan. Plus, it could turn into a long mission. So he reached out with a whispered question.

  “How come you hate water, man? Me, I’m like a fish.”

  Kathan was silent for a moment, then said, “I drowned when I was a kid.”

  “You mean, almost drowned?”

  “No, I mean drowned. Dead.”

  “What the hell happened?”

  “My old man took me fishing for bullheads in this creek. He called it fishing, anyway. Mostly it was about drinking whiskey and smoking weed. So he got drunk and stoned and fell asleep on the bank. I waded in. Five years old, you know? Creek just sucked me away, man. A guy downstream pulled me out. I wasn’t breathing. He did CPR and I came around.”

  “Oh.” A story like that was pretty much a conversation stopper. But then Kathan continued.

  “You know how people have dreams? So now I have this dream where I drown. It’s not a good way to go, trust me. There’s a reason we used waterboarding to get intel out of the hajis. People who think it’s all quiet and peaceful, they need to try it for themselves. Take it from one who’s been there. It feels like somebody’s pouring acid into your chest.”

  “You have that dream often?”

  “Often enough.”

  Stikes started to say something about a dream he had, but Kathan spoke first: “He’s been gone too long.”

  “Maybe it was a huge dump.”

  “No. We need to look. Leave everything here except your M4. Let’s go.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Stikes found him. “Kathan. Here.”

  Dempsey’s body had fallen backward and lay with its legs stuck out stiffly, frozen in the spasm of death. Around his shoulders, blood had pooled into a shape that reminded Stikes of those thought balloons over cartoon characters’ heads. But Dempsey had no head. It was lying five feet away, face up, on top of its own small blood pond, still warm enough to appear bright green in the NVDs. Stikes had seen plenty of decapitations, most of them haji-done. Usually the cut edges were ragged, like steak hacked with a dull knife. Not Dempsey’s.

  “Look at his neck,” Stikes said. “A scalpel could have done that. You ever seen anything like it?”

  “No.”

  “What the hell, Kathan? We were twenty-five mikes away. I didn’t hear a thing.”

  “Me, neither. I’ll tell you this. Whoever killed him knew what they were doing. Dempsey was good at this work.”

  “There’s no way anybody could sneak up on him through undergrowth like this. All those thorns and brambles scratching at your clothing, I mean,” Stikes said.

  “Maybe somebody was waiting here for him,” Kathan said.

  “I don’t see it. How would they know where he would be?”

  “Something else, Stikes. There aren’t any tracks.”

  The forest floor here was damp and soft. Their own tracks, and Dempsey’s, were clearly visible. And those three sets, with the distinctive Vibram patterns of their boot soles, were the only ones to be seen.

  “This feels bad. Something’s not right here.”

  They were down on one knee, facing away from each other, surveying. Through his NVDs Stikes saw the shimmering green columns of tree trunks with darker green empty space between them. Nothing moved. He listened for any sound, but except for their controlled breathing, there was nothing to hear. He sniffed the air for any dissonant scent, but nothing came.

  “What do you think?” he whispered. “Narcos?”

  “Could have been the federales or those Indians just as easily,” Kathan said. “My money’s on the narcos, but it doesn’t really matter, does it?”

  “What do we do with him?” Stikes asked.

  “The body stays. We’ll take his comm gear and weapons,” Kathan said. Stikes thought he detected a hint of emotion in the big man’s voice, but he couldn’t be sure. It might have been fatigue.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  PULLING INTO A PARKING SPACE IN HER APARTMENT BUILDING’S lot, Evvie Flemmer stabbed the brakes so sharply the old Camry’s tires screeched. She was never especially happy to be coming home, and with so much at stake now at the lab, she was especially unhappy. But after her fourth sixteen-hour day in a row, Dr. Casey had finally told her to take time off.

  “And since I am aware that our definitions of ‘time off’ may vary considerably, let’s be clear that I mean sixteen hours, minimum, Evvie Flemmer. Sixteen. Do you read me?” Dr. Casey had delivered his little lecture in mock-stern tones, laying his hand on her shoulder for emphasis, but his fatherly smile never wavered as he spoke and she knew he thought he was doing a good thing.

  It was after eight P.M., full dark, the parking lot washed in sodium-vapor sepia. She turned the engine off and just sat there. She was tired; he had been right about that. Not too tired to work properly, of course, but the thought of making it all the way to her apartment on the third floor was a bit daunting.

  Flemmer passed through the small lobby, with its stainless steel mailboxes and blue barrels for recycling. She glanced briefly at the bulletin board where the property manager posted notices—time for parking sticker renewals, elevator maintenance, changing days for trash pickup—but there was nothing new.

  She thought briefly about taking the stairs, but it was too late and she was too tired. To save money they had installed energy-saving bulbs that made riding the elevator like standing in a cube of dusk. The third-floor hallway itself was completely dark when she stepped out, but motion sensors detected her presence and turned on the lights—more dim energy savers. The hall smelled faintly of fried fish and cigarette smoke. The whole place was supposed to be nonsmoking, but of late new kinds of people had begun infiltrating the building. Sullen women with red dots on their foreheads. Hand-holding men who conversed in shouts. Pierced and tattooed families of astonishing corpulence that made her think of sideshows. Flemmer gladly would have moved, but Washington-area rents were exorbitant, and even this place stretched her $65,000 salary.

  Inside her apartment, Flemmer closed the door, double-checked the locks, and hung her brown coat in the closet. She set her pocketbook on a table and stood waiting for her mind to issue some direction. At the lab she never hesitated like that because the work told her where to go and what to do; her mind broke big projects down into smaller tasks, and the tasks took her to certain places where she had to do specific things very precisely. Orchestrated, was how she thought of it, and how she liked it.

  Finally she asked, out loud, “Are you hungry?” Like many who lived alone, she had acquired the habit of speaking to herself.

  “Not really.
”

  “What, then?”

  “Maybe a glass of wine would be nice.”

  “Yes. Let’s have some wine.” From a box of Chablis in the refrigerator she filled a water glass halfway. She carried the glass of wine into the living-dining room, turned on a table lamp, sat on the sofa, and looked at the red paper poppies in the white vase on the coffee table. There was no television or radio—cracks in the wall of hell, was how she thought of those things. She watched the poppies and sipped wine and her mind whirred.

  She thought of her parents, still out there in Oklahoma. What time would it be? About nine. Her father would be in bed already, snoring, sleep drool collecting into a dark stain on his pillow. She drank some more wine, swallowing it like water in audible gulps. She hummed “La Marsellaise” all the way through, and then halfway through again. She started to drink more wine but the glass was empty, so she filled it from the box in the refrigerator and came back to the couch.

  She did not like being away from the lab. Being away from the lab made her angry. As the wine worked, she felt the anger more, and then her stomach growled. In the kitchen she heated a Stouffer’s frozen chicken à la king dinner, warmed three Parker House rolls, and slathered all with real butter. For years she had tried without success to lose weight. Finally she had seen a doctor, hoping to get some diet pills. Instead, he had told her to find out why she wanted to lose weight. Core motive, the doctor called it. If she could identify her core motive, it would empower her, the doctor said. It wasn’t easy. For an hour every day for a week, she sat with blank paper and pen, staring into space, thinking, waiting for her core motive to show itself.

  It never did. The best she could manage was that it might have something to do with wanting to look good for men, and she laughed out loud at that. She wrote the word in the middle of the blank sheet of paper:

  MEN

  After staring at it for some minutes, she drew a line though it:

  MEN

  It felt good to do that, so she drew more lines and more and more until she could see only a jagged clot of lines that looked like a ball of fishhooks and no word. She had never visited that doctor again and had not tried to lose weight since.

  She set her plate and glass and silverware on the coffee table. The living-dining room had a beige couch, end tables with matching lamps, and two matching white chairs. A large bookcase stood against one wall. The shelves were filled with big hardcover books arranged alphabetically by the single word that appeared on the spine of each book: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, England, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, twenty-nine in all.

  She decided to read the book about France again and went to retrieve it. On the shelf above the books sat two framed pictures, black and whites, her mother and father. Her mother had straight dark hair, three deep creases in her forehead, and full, swollen-looking lips. Her face was tilted slightly to the left and her eyes were soft and unfocused. Her father wore a T-shirt that emphasized his thick and muscular neck. Black chest hair curled over its collar. Her father was the hairiest man she had ever seen. The hair swathed him like an animal’s coat of fur. She remembered running her fingers over the mat of hair on his back and being surprised by how stiff it was, not soft and pliant like her own hair but more like the bristles of a brush.

  She talked to them as well as to herself. “Hello,” she said. “How are things where you are?”

  She brought the book back to the coffee table and paged through it as she ate the soft chicken and mushrooms and peppers over white rice, careful not to spill any on the beautiful pictures. There was an entire section titled “Paris, City of Light.” She lingered over those pages, pausing to put herself in one photo, savoring a glass of fine Bordeaux at Café Constant on Rue St. Dominique, watching the Tour Eiffel throw off shards of light as night overflowed the day.

  But it was the sun of Provence she loved most, and that was her favorite part of the book. Every photograph of Provence seemed to radiate light. There were times when she felt a physical hunger for light, especially in gray, overcast Washington, D.C. She had spent too many years in dark places. There had been no choice about some—the trailer in Oklahoma, dark dorm rooms in college, the dingy studio in graduate school. Then, after earning her doctorate, she had searched for apartments that would be filled with light. She had looked at a good many. But every time she stood in one, empty and echoing, the white walls and white ceilings bright with light that poured through curtainless windows, she had begun to feel anxious for no reason she could understand. The longer she stayed, the more anxious she became, until the urge to get out became a breed of panic. And so somehow she always ended up in places like this one, apartments that were clean and dark, and in which she felt safe.

  She hand-washed her dishes and set them in the drainer, replaced the book on its shelf between England and Germany. In the bedroom she locked the door, undressed, and put on her white terry-cloth bathrobe. She stepped into the bathroom, locked that door, and took the robe off again. She turned on the shower to let hot water run in. From the medicine cabinet she took two sleeping pills and swallowed them with a handful of water she cupped in her palm under the faucet. She closed the medicine cabinet door, over the mirror of which she had taped thick brown wrapping paper, and stepped into the shower. Flemmer showered twice every day, once in the morning before going to the lab and again after dinner.

  The white wire basket hanging from the showerhead held three bars of soap, white, green, and blue. She washed her face with the white one and her body with the green one. With the blue soap she washed her buttocks and groin area three times, using the handheld sprayer to rinse with very hot water after each soaping.

  Toweled dry, she put on her nightgown and robe and went back to check the apartment locks a last time before going to bed. On the tan carpet lay a white envelope someone had slipped under the door. They must have done it while she was showering. She picked up the envelope and took it back to the brighter light of the kitchen. She tore one end of the envelope open and shook out a single sheet of stationery on which was written,

  PLEASE TAKE OUT THE TRASH BEFORE FRIDAY.

  She stood in front of the stainless steel kitchen sink, looking at the paper for a long time. She found some matches from a drawer, lit the envelope and paper on fire, and let them burn to ashes in the sink. She used the sprayer to flush the ashes down the drain and then ran the disposal for a full minute.

  Back in her bedroom, Flemmer went to a second closet, which did not contain clothes. In it were scores of true-crime paperbacks, a library of murders committed by husbands and wives, bosses and workers, friends and strangers, parents and children. She ran her index finger along the spines of the books on the top shelf, dropped to the second, and stopped at one with a yellow cover and red title: Home of the Devil: A Grisly Tale of Torture and Murder in Small-Town America. It was one of her favorites.

  She read until she became drowsy and put the book on top of the Bible on her bedside table. She looked at the framed photos of her mother and father, the same photos as those on her bookshelf, just in different frames.

  “Good night,” she said, and turned off the light.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  HALLIE’S BRAIN FLARED WITH ONE LAST BRIGHT THOUGHT: Go left. She pushed off in that direction, legs still bound together, stumbling, clawing the cave walls with her bare hands.

  She bumped the pack.

  She lurched up so fast that she hit her head again, but felt no pain, felt only the inrush of cool air into burning lungs, felt the agony begin to recede from her belly and chest and groin, felt her throat begin to loosen and her eyes to settle back into their sockets.

  There were only two inches of air space here, but that was more than enough for her to fill her lungs over and over again, flushing the carbon dioxide out of her system, oxygenating her brain and muscles.

  “Cave almost got you, Hallie Leland,” she said.

  It was as close as she had ever come to dying in a cave, and she kne
w it. But something strange had happened, that last flaring thought, and she was alive.

  “Thank you,” she said to Chi Con Gui-Jao. “Thank you.”

  When she felt able, she freed her legs from the rope. Instead of retying the rope around her waist, from then on she would haul it along with one hand or the other, so that she could break free instantly if she needed to. She retrieved a backup light from one of the thigh pockets on her caving suit and used it to find her helmet and the other light.

  Half an hour later she came out the siphon’s far end. She stood knee-deep in a black lake of still water. On her right, the beams of her lights revealed a sheer gold-colored rock wall rising up to the ceiling fifty feet overhead. She thanked the cave god again and walked out onto dry cave floor. Bowman was waiting.

  “That was a bitch,” he said, sounding really challenged for the first time.

  “Tell me about it. I almost bought it back there.”

  He looked up quickly. “What happened?”

  She saw that Bowman had taken off his pack. She shucked out of hers, too. “I stumbled, fell underwater, and got my legs tangled up with the pack tow rope. Damned stupid and clumsy.”

  He didn’t speak for a moment. Then he walked over, put a hand on one of her shoulders, drew her closer to him. He put a hand on her other shoulder. His jaw was clenched, brow furrowed. The air around him felt electric. It was the first time she had seen him like this. He started to speak, stopped, shook his head. Got control, then spoke.

  “Hallie. You have to be careful.” His eyes were filled with concern, but his voice was sharp. “If anything happens to you, all of this will be for nothing.”

  She had never taken well to being scolded. She reached up, grasped his wrists, and took his hands off her shoulders. “Who’s talking here?” she asked. “Secret Agent or Horse Man?”