“Hey, didn’t that used to be the Nugget?” he asked.
“Sure did,” said one of the tac squad deputies. “Me and my wife used to go dancing there almost every weekend.”
“I don’t suppose you’d happen to know what became of the gal that owned it?”
“Amy, you mean? She passed away, oh, two, three years ago. Cancer, I think it was. She fought the good fight, though. Couldn’t have weighed more than seventy-five, eighty pounds, but she kept on dancing right up until the end.”
I bet she did, thought Pender, feeling like somebody’d hit him in the chest with a medicine ball. I just bet she did.
But there was no time to dwell on the past, no time for grief or even tenderness. Gut it out, you big sissy, Pender ordered himself, as the BEAR swung off the county road onto a deeply rutted, unpaved fire trail. You can mourn her later.
For the moment, job one was grabbing a strap and hanging on for dear life as the BEAR lurched up the steep, narrow fire trail in four-wheel drive, tires spinning, branches scraping at its roof and sides. For a while the driver was able to use the vehicle’s bluntly sloping armored nose to plow down the brush and saplings that sprang up in its path, but as they climbed, the saplings turned into full-grown trees.
“End of the line,” called Lieutenant Sperry. “We’ll hike in from here.”
The squad piled out. Pender, who’d exchanged his sport jacket for a too-small Kevlar vest, flipped down the darkened visor of his borrowed, ill-fitting helmet and slipped into line. Again Sperry gave him the ol’ skunk eye; again he permitted him to remain. “Just keep your eye on me and follow my hand signals. This”—palms down—“means get down, this”—finger to lips—“means maintain silence…”
Yeah, I think I could have figured that out, thought Pender.
“And when I do this”—slapped one, then two fingers against his forearm, then with bladed hands perpendicular to the ground, made veering motions to the left or right—“I’m signaling to teams one and two which way to go. Which has nothing to do with you—if we have to split up, I want you to stay behind and cover our rear. If I need you to come up, I’ll do this.” He clicked the tin cricket in his hand twice. “Got all that?”
“Got it.”
“Okay, team. Cell phones off, let’s move out.”
4
It’s been a long, hard day for Asmador. Digging up the decomposing corpse he’d buried last week along with Fred and Evelyn’s rapidly decaying heads, dragging it half a mile to the top of the highest grassy hill to serve as vulture bait, hiking back down to get Epstein, walking the gimp up to where he’d left the corpse, and finally lashing the two of them, the live man and the dead one, together—that was a lot of walking and a lot of work under a broiling sun.
And with no guarantee of success. Asmador hasn’t the slightest idea whether a week-old, disinterred corpse will serve to whet the appetite of a Cathartes aura. And even if the scent does manage to attract the vultures, there is always the possibility that the presence of a live human, no matter how firmly bound, will scare them away. Even if it doesn’t, it’s still anybody’s guess whether, having been attracted initially to the corpse, the birds will move on to the fresh—
Wait, wait—there they are, right on time! Asmador, crouched behind a patch of creosote bushes on the very crest of the hill, some twenty yards above Epstein and the corpse, can feel the hairs on the back of his neck rising. Watching the birds swoop and glide in ever-narrowing circles, he is reminded of that sweet pastoral passage in the Book: Sitting with our backs against the trunk of a red-barked madrone at the edge of a high, grassy meadow dotted with white puffs of clover, we watched a pair of hawks riding the thermals, swooping and gliding so lightly and gracefully they looked like they were made out of paper.
Surely these vultures are no less graceful—maybe even more so, thanks to their greater wingspan. But why aren’t they landing? They circle and circle, but they don’t land. Is it because of all that squirming and screaming Epstein’s doing? The vultures are no more used to their meals moving around or making noise than you are, Asmador reminds himself.
But just then, the larger of the two birds flattens out its orbit and dives. Half-rising from his crouch to get a better view, Asmador spots a sudden glint of sunlight bouncing off something shiny in the wooded hillside directly across the valley. It’s there and gone like a firefly, then there and gone again, a little farther to Asmador’s right. The longer he watches, the more certain he becomes that there are several humans in the woods across the valley, moving from Asmador’s left to his right, in the general direction of the barn.
But who are they? If they’re cops, there’s no time to waste. He has to get to the barn first. That’s where the car’s parked—he can’t take a chance on being cut off from it. So the only question that remains is whether or not to kill Epstein first. If he doesn’t, and those are cops over there, there’s a good chance Epstein will wind up being rescued. But if he does kill Epstein, and the interlopers are only kids or hunters, he’ll not only have spared Epstein the greater part of the suffering he had in mind for him, he’ll have disappointed the Infernal Council once again.
To kill or not to kill? For once, the answer is not in the Book, so Asmador digs into his jeans pocket, feels around for loose change, comes up with a quarter. Heads you kill him, tails you don’t, he tells himself, and with a flick of his thumb Asmador sends the coin spinning into the air.
5
Like the Eskimos say, unless you’re the lead dog, the view never changes. Drenched in sweat beneath the bulky Kevlar vest, with more sweat dripping down his face from under the too-small helmet, Pender followed the camouflaged back of the deputy in front of him through a sun-dappled second-growth forest, pickin’ ’em up and layin’ ’em down to a medley of unlikely march-time oldies playing on his internal jukebox: “Ballad of the Green Berets,” “The Battle of New Orleans,” and “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover.”
The column halted at the edge of a wooded ridge looking out over a wedge-shaped valley that fanned west to east, with a range of grassy hills, greenish gold in the spring, forming the opposite rise. Below and to the squad’s right, on the broad side of the wedge, lay a flat patchwork of abandoned fields, subsumed now by scrub brush and man-high weeds, with only a few discontinuous stretches of three-rail wooden fencing still standing to demarcate the borders.
Below to the left, at the narrow end of the valley, the front end of a weathered gray barn protruded from a steep scree of dirt and rocks. At first it appeared to Pender as if the barn had been constructed half underground, but a closer look through borrowed binoculars spoke instead of a monumental landslide that had buried the rear half of the barn but left the front half miraculously standing.
The lieutenant showed Pender the readout on his handheld GPS device—the first one Pender had ever seen. “The cell phone was picked up in or near that structure,” Sperry whispered, pointing to the barn. “We’re going to circle around the back, then split into two teams to flank the barn. I need you to stay up here and watch our backs—I’ll leave you the glasses along with a walkie-talkie and a cricket. If it looks like we’re heading into any shit, key Talk and click the cricket twice, but do not, repeat not, speak into it for any reason until I give you the go-ahead. Otherwise you might accidentally give our position away. Got all that?”
“Got it.”
“Good.” Sperry turned to the squad. “Okay, let’s move out. I’ll take the point. And maintain mission silence, everybody—we want the element of surprise on our side.”
Although he’d never have admitted it, not even to himself, Pender was more than a little relieved at no longer having to keep up with the younger, fitter tac squadders. After taking a slug of water from a plastic bottle one of them had loaned him, he removed his helmet and sluiced the rest of the water over his steaming dome. Then he dropped to a prone position at the edge of the tree line and began scanning the barn, left to right, top to bottom, with the
binoculars.
The sliding front door was wide open, askew on its hinges. No signs of life inside or out—but of course Sweet could be hiding almost anywhere in there. Or he could be lying in wait behind the building, or around the side, or somewhere out there in the weeds, or in the hills directly across the way, Pender realized. Expanding the parameters of his scan accordingly, he began sweeping the binoculars the length and breadth of the valley.
But the only thing moving on this hot, windless spring afternoon was a pair of turkey vultures circling the grassy hill to the north, directly across the valley from Pender’s position. Pender watched them soar, following them through the glasses as they swooped and glided, then resumed his visual sweep of the valley. But the cop part of his brain, the area where law enforcement professionals store information like the mug shots of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted criminals and the license plate numbers of stolen cars, had already begun flashing the red lights and sounding the awooga horn to remind Pender that turkey vultures were an integral part of Luke Sweet’s m.o. lately.
So he turned the glasses back to the vultures, and when one of them suddenly peeled away from the other and swooped downward, Pender followed its flight all the way to the ground. It touched down with a skidding hop and darted up to a struggling, heaving mass that Pender first took to be a dying calf. But when he adjusted the focus and zeroed in again, he realized that there were in fact two bodies lying there, roped back-to-back. One of them looked like a corpse in an advanced state of decay; the other appeared to be…yes, it was Epstein—no mistaking that built-up shoe.
Pender swung the glasses back around to the west, past the barn, just as the squad’s point man emerged from the woods. Urgently he thumbed the Talk key on the walkie-talkie and clicked the cricket twice.
6
You’d think there’d be some kind of shutdown mechanism that would kick in, some threshold of horror beyond which consciousness would glaze over and self-awareness cease.
You’d be wrong. The only part of Skip’s neurosystem that seemed to be affected by being lashed to a decaying corpse was the olfactory sense, which rather than shutting down completely, merely shifted its baseline. When stench is all, stench is the norm: a fish doesn’t know it’s wet.
Then the first vulture landed. Skip had never seen one close up before. Its face was shiny crimson, its short, sharp beak curved and ivory-colored. It stalked toward him at an oblique angle, moving with a ducking, bobbing gait. “Shoo!” he shouted, his voice cracking plaintively. “G’wan, get out of here.”
The vulture hissed and hopped backward, confusion in its oval-shaped, oddly pensive eyes. It took another tentative hop toward Skip, who yelled at it again. But this time the bird took only a single backward hop before resuming its oblique approach, and the third time Skip shouted, it ignored him entirely.
This is not happening, this is not happening, this is not happening was Skip’s mantra as the creature closed the ground between them. Lying motionless, holding his breath, he waited until it was only a few feet away, then shrieked and threw his body against the ropes.
Startled, the vulture jumped backward, hissing and clacking. You’re going to wake up any second now, Skip assured himself as the bird spread its wings and launched itself at him. Any second now…
The vulture landed heavily on Skip’s left shoulder and upper arm and dug its sharp talons into his flesh to anchor itself. The red head darted downward. Skip shut his eyes and braced himself, but instead of striking him, the vulture tore a chunk of rotting meat from the carrion hulk to which Skip was lashed, and gulped it down whole like a cormorant swallowing a fish.
Skip felt an immense upwelling of relief that quickly died away when a second vulture skidded to a landing in the tracks of the first. An image from a Discovery Channel documentary flashed through his mind: on a wide, grassy plain, the body of an antelope or wildebeest or something is all but obscured beneath a writhing black mound of feathered scavengers. You are so fucked, Skip told himself. You are so fucking—
Crack! A distant gunshot. Crack! A second shot. With a heavy, sullen beating of its wings, the vulture atop him released its claw hold on his shoulder and took flight. Skip opened his eyes, saw what looked like half a dozen helmeted, camo-clad soldiers charging up the hill at a fast trot. Holy crap, he thought, with a rush of gratitude so intense he could scarcely breathe, they called out the National Guard.
A moment later, Pender was kneeling in front of him, wearing an armored vest and holding a handkerchief over his nose and mouth. “Hang in there,” he said soothingly, his voice muffled by the handkerchief as he sawed at Skip’s ropes with a wicked-looking commando knife. “You’re safe now, it’s all over. Just hang in there, we’ll have you loose in a second.”
The last rope parted. Strong hands lifted Skip by his arms and legs, rushed him unceremoniously down the hill with his ass sagging, and lowered him gently to the grass. For Skip, it was one of those eye-of-the-hurricane moments. He lay motionless on his back, staring up dazedly into the bluest, most beneficent sky he’d ever seen, and thinking how sweet and strange it was to still be alive. Then Pender’s face floated above him, big and pale as a harvest moon—funny how he didn’t look half so homely now, thought Skip.
“You okay, Magnum?”
“No major damage,” said Skip. “Did you get him?”
“Missed him by a couple minutes. Do you have any idea who our fragrant friend is?” Pender jerked a thumb behind him, in the direction of the corpse.
“Not a clue.” Skip sat up slowly. The body was fifteen yards up the hill, lying on its side with its back to him. He could almost see the stink coming off it in little, wavy cartoon lines. But in his current adrenaline-filled, endorphin-drenched condition, Skip found his heart going out to whoever it was lying there all curled up and lonesome, and he experienced the weirdest urge to go back and sit with it, to keep it company until the meat wagon arrived.
The tac squad paramedic had other ideas. Learning that a vulture’s talons had inflicted the shallow, parallel cuts on Skip’s shoulder while he was tied to a rotting corpse, she administered a field lavage, a heavy dose of wide-spectrum antibiotics, and a syrette of morphine, then insisted on calling in a helicopter to medevac Skip to the trauma center at Marshall County General.
There was a minor holdup just as they were about to load Skip into the chopper. Due to the residual corpse-stink, the pilot demanded that Skip first be stripped of what was left of his clothes, which were relegated to a sealed, hard-plastic biohazard bin.
At County General, the E.R. doctor was adamant that Skip remain overnight for observation. “Purely as a precaution,” he told Skip, who was feeling so nauseated by the antibiotics that he gave in without an argument, despite a near-phobic aversion to hospitals not uncommon in polio survivors.
Skip slept fitfully, despite or because of all the drugs they were pumping into him—Demerol for pain, Donnatal for nausea, diazepam for anxiety. At one point during the long night, he fell into a troubled, hallucinatory doze and dreamed that they’d moved the dead body from the hillside into his room to keep him company. Curious to get a look at it, Skip’s dream-self climbed out of bed, padded noiselessly across the room, lifted the sheet covering its face, and recognized the corpse immediately, in spite of the horrific damage done to it by the process of decay.
“I—I don’t understand,” said Skip. “If you’re dead, then who kidnapped me?”
But the only answer from the corpse of Luke Sweet, Jr., was a merry wink of his only remaining eyelid.
Part Three
CHAPTER ONE
1
April 17
I did it. I actually did it. Blew the joint to kingdom come, got away clean, and now I only have one question: Who’s crazy now, ladies and gentlemen? Who’s fucking crazy now?
I have to admit, for a while there, things weren’t exactly looking rosy. Maybe I overestimated how long it would take for the gas to fill the boiler room once the shutoff valve had b
een bypassed. (And by the way, whoever had the bright idea of posting the printed instructions for bypassing the valve right there on the wall next to the boiler: thanks a bunch.) Or maybe I underestimated the speed at which the trail of paint thinner would burn its way from the fire exit to the boiler room door. Either way, the last thing I remember is touching the match to the paint thinner and watching the blue flame sizzling down the corridor and around the corner.
Next thing I know, I’m lying on my back, looking up into a heat-wavy blue sky streaked with oily brown smoke. Scorched flakes spin dizzily through the superheated air, and ashes pile in scalloped mounds atop the fence posts and the bushes and the domed roofs of the cars in the parking lot, transforming the landscape into a mute, gray statuary garden.
It’s not so bad at first, this snowstorm from hell. A peaceful silence reigns momentarily. Then suddenly, as on that long-ago summer morning, my hearing returns. Crackling flames, clanging bells, ululating car alarms, anguished screams. It occurs to me that I’d better get the hell out of there before the whole fucking building comes crashing down on top of me. But when I try to crawl away, I realize my left ankle is firmly pinned beneath the heavy, steel-plated Alarm Will Sound fire door, which had been blown clear off its hinges.
“Help! Somebody help me! Somebody get this thing offa me!” Another voice joins the trapped and panicked chorus: mine. I’ve never been so scared or screamed so loud in my entire life, and yet I can barely hear myself. Sitting up, I see that I’m lying only a few feet from the burning building. A brick wall rises straight over me, blocking out half the sky. The ashes are falling thick and fast. I can feel the heat coming through the bricks. I grab my trapped leg in both hands and try to yank it out from under the un-budgeable weight. The pain is so intense that I lose consciousness momentarily.
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