Darger filed that little nugget away for later.
“How’d you meet him?”
“Bo hooked me up. Said he was getting paid good money under the table to do some construction work. Had all these stories about the dude he worked for. Wild stuff. Like one time he paid for all the seats at the movie theater so no one else would be there for the new Star Wars movie. Said he wanted to enjoy the cinematic experience free from interruption. Always had a big wad of cash stuck down in his boot. One time he tipped a waiter at Steak ‘n Shake with a hundred-dollar bill because the guy gave him extra malt powder in his chocolate malt.”
Darger let Danny talk, not wanting to stop the flow of information now that the floodgates had been opened.
“He told us how he tried to cook up various new drugs when he was our age, thinking maybe he’d discover the next hot club drug. Tried the banana peel thing.”
“Banana peel thing?” Darger asked.
“It’s an old hoax from back in the 60s,” Loshak explained. “Some guy claimed that if you scraped the pith off a bunch of banana peels and smoked it, you could get high.”
“Well I guess Cowboy tried it, except he used fresh banana peels,” Danny said with a shrug. “Made like a smoothie out of it. Said it didn’t do anything but make him shit about ten gallons of liquid. But according to him, the nutmeg trip was wild. Said he put on a movie and something got messed up, like the sync between the sound and the visuals were off, and he became convinced that he could hear the future.”
He ashed the cigarette.
“Also, the guy is obsessed with coconut water. Drinks gallons of it. Said he’s considered moving to somewhere tropical just so he could get his coconut water straight from the tree. He tried planting some here but they died.” Danny paused to pick a bit of loose tobacco off his lip. “Bo said they went out to eat once, and when the waitress offered him water, he scoffed. Said there are like eight thousand beverages in the world — many of them delicious — why would anyone choose to drink water? That’s one thing I can say about Cowboy. Dude was generous. Didn’t skimp with food or booze or dru—”
Danny stopped short.
“Drugs?” Darger asked. “Four people are dead, Danny. We don’t care that you did some blow once. Keep going.”
“OK, yeah. So Cowboy uh… he’s kind of a drug dealer on the side.”
“On the side of what?” Ambrose asked.
“However he makes all his money. Oil, I think? Or maybe fracking?” Danny sighed. “I don’t know. There are a lot of stories, and it’s hard to know what’s rumor and what’s not, you know? Anyway, he has this philosophy. Kind of anti-government, I guess you could say. He doesn’t think anyone should have a right to tell you that you can’t imbibe of substances. Sells drugs as like, his civic duty or something.”
Ambrose scoffed.
“Hey man, I’m only telling you how he thinks, OK? I’m not saying that he’s not full of it.” Danny scratched the side of his head. “Anyway, I’d been hearing stories about this guy for weeks. So when Bo told me they were looking for more guys, I was like, ‘Hell yeah. Where do I sign up?’ Worst fucking mistake I’ve ever made, man.”
“You keep saying they,” Darger said. “Who else was there aside from Cowboy?”
“I guess they used to have a bunch of people working down there, but by the time I got involved, he had a small crew working for him. Me. Bo. Stevie. Worm.”
Darger pointed at her teeth.
“Gold tooth?”
“Yeah. That’s him.” Danny grimaced. “He dead, too?”
“We don’t know.”
“Oh fuck me. If they’re all dead, it means I’m next. Do you understand?”
“Why? Why would this Cowboy guy need to kill you?” Darger asked. “What were you doing for him exactly?”
“I don’t even know! That’s the fucked up part. They kept us in the dark about everything. I don’t even know where we were working because he’d blindfold us and drive us in.”
Darger wanted to stop, to have a moment to process all of this bizarre information, but she couldn’t. She had to keep pressing forward.
“They blindfolded you?”
“Yeah. We’d all meet up at this Arby’s over on West Baltimore Pike, and Cowboy would pick us up in this big diesel pickup truck. We’d climb in, and they’d hand out blindfolds. Sometimes I’d fall asleep, and that was better, because otherwise it felt like the ride took hours. But I timed it once, and it was only about forty minutes.”
“Then what?”
“We’d get to the place. They’d pull in and park inside this garage. And I say garage, but this place was huge. Like the kind of thing you could park a semi inside. Once we were in, then they’d undo the blindfolds. No windows, and the door into the house itself was always locked. From the garage, we could go down a flight of steps and get into the basement, which was sort of a barracks for us workers. Hot tub. A few cots. Cooler full of beverages. He had all this stuff stored down there. Furniture and just shelves of stuff. Old lamps. Statues. Pieces of an old pipe organ from some church. And in one corner, there was just this… black hole in the cement. That was the tunnel.”
“And that’s where you were doing the digging?” Darger asked.
Danny nodded.
“I fuckin’ hated it down there. The tunnels were rigged with lights and shit, but it was still creepy as hell. Cold and kind of damp all the time in parts. They’d done a lot before I got there.”
“A lot of digging, you mean?”
“Yeah. I mean, it’s hard to guess how long this tunnel was, but it had to be hundreds of yards. Maybe a mile. Most of it real narrow but with some wider chambers cut out and shit here and there. It hooked into these caves, and we were mostly working at pecking out some rock during my time. I never knew what for, and we didn’t make much progress. It’s slow going, trying to blast that shit out and haul it away.”
“And they never said what the tunnels were for?”
“No. It was made pretty clear that we weren’t to ask about the whats and whys. And there were certain shafts of the tunnel that were off-limits. Course there were rumors amongst us diggers. And by that I mean me and Bo and Steve. Steve said it hooked into the Philadelphia County Sewer system, but I had my doubts.”
“What about Bailey and Courtney? Were they digging too?”
“Nah. Bailey bitched a lot about that, because she knew how much money we were making and wanted in on some of the action.”
“And how much was that?”
“Fifteen-hundred a week. Cash. Always rolled up in a rubber band.”
Six grand a month, Darger thought. Not bad.
“Cowboy had opinions about what kind of work was appropriate for women, though,” Danny went on. “They came over sometimes and hung around in the barracks while we worked. I always thought it was odd that Bo and Stevie would go along with that. Especially with the way some of the guys looked at Bailey. But they were so weird after spending time up in that cult. Always talking about how you have to let each person choose their own path. And that a partner isn’t property. I said that’s all fine and good until some creep like Worm is checking out my girl’s ass and makin’ little innuendos all the time. At some point, a line has to be drawn, you know? All I know is that if that was my girl, I woulda been all up in that guy’s grill.”
Darger nodded.
“So what happened that made you leave?”
“To me, it was a construction job that paid well. And that was good enough, for a while, despite all the weirdness. But eventually, it started to get too weird. Like no amount of money is worth… Look, I guess I assumed the whole deal was to run drugs. I’d read an article about that. The drug cartels had this half-mile-long tunnel that ran across the border from Mexico into San Diego that had been used to smuggle thousands of tons of cocaine. Then they had another three quarter mile one that they used for El Chapo to escape from prison. I figured with everything else, that kind of thing made the most se
nse.”
Darger considered explaining that Pennsylvania was nowhere near the US border but decided it was better not to interrupt.
“Anyway, one time Stevie said he heard voices down there. Women’s voices. I didn’t like the sound of that. And then the next time I was down there working, the power went out. It was only for like ten minutes. One of the generators they use to power some of the equipment ran out of gas… Have you ever been in pitch black before? Absolute darkness, like you can’t even see your hand in front of your face? That was scary enough. But then I realized that as soon as the lights went out, I’d completely lost track of where I was. I was stuck down there, I don’t know how far down. And I’m telling you, that ten minutes felt like ten hours. And then I heard… something. I thought it was crying, maybe? But almost like part animal. I don’t know. It could have been my own imagination for all I know. I was flipping out down there in the dark, I won’t deny that.”
“What happened after that?”
“They were all apologetic about it, but…” Danny hacked up something and spit it on the ground. “Anyway, I didn’t tell them, but that was it for me. Between the idea of getting stuck underground, and the weird noises, I was done. I got the hell out, right? Next thing I know, Bo is incommunicado. No one’s seen Bailey or Stephen or Courtney. All of them just — poof — gone.”
Danny got fidgety again, eyes darting around everywhere like a weirdo in a Cowboy hat might be watching even now.
“OK,” Darger said, taking it all in. “So you don’t know Cowboy’s real name. Don’t know where he lived or where you were doing the work. What do you know? You mentioned a truck. Do you remember what kind?”
“Like a… Ford F-350. The one with the extra rear wheels that bump out on the sides.”
“License plate?” Ambrose asked.
“What do I look like? Sherlock Holmes?”
“What about a custom paint job? Something like that?”
“It was white. Pretty plain. Kept it clean enough to eat off of, but I don’t remember it being all that particular other than that.”
Darger clenched her jaw. In many ways, they’d made tremendous progress, and yet they had almost nothing to go on when it came to trying to find this Cowboy guy.
“What about other things… did he wear a fancy watch? Were his boots custom made?”
“No. I mean, I don’t really know fashion or whatever.”
Grasping now, Darger tried to rattle off any rich person thing she could think of.
“Did he have a boat? Some kind of collection? Did he smoke cigars?”
“No, but he was really into bourbon…” Danny paused, thinking. Then he snapped his fingers. “What’s the name of that guy that always falls asleep?”
“A narcoleptic?”
“Nah, man,” Danny said. “He grows a long beard and goes bowling.”
The only answer Darger could think of was Jeff Bridges, and she figured that couldn’t be right. Thankfully her partner was better at speaking dingbat than she was.
“Rip van Winkle,” Loshak said.
“That’s it! Old Rip van Winkle. Cowboy went on and on about this bottle he had. Called it ‘Ol’ Rip’ like it was a person. Said one day, when we finished up the job we were doing, he’d take it down, and we’d all party with Ol’ Rip. He showed it to us once. Kept it in this fancy carved box lined with velvet, swaddled in there like a baby. Said it cost him like two grand. But he had this other kind that he bought on the regular. Like, by the case. Hold on…”
Danny pulled a phone from his pocket. He scrolled through a photo gallery for a few seconds and then held it out, showing off a selfie of himself and Bo Cooke. Each of them held a bottle of Heaven Hill bourbon in their hand.
“That’s you and Bo?” Darger asked after jotting down the specific name of the bourbon in the photo.
“Yeah. Sometimes after we were done working, Cowboy’d be in a good mood. He’d want all of us to hang around. Chill in the hot tub. Get shit-faced. Party, you know? And I wasn’t complaining. He’d send Worm out for food and whatnot. This night here, he only had one bottle of Heaven Hill left, and so he asked Worm if he’d picked up the order he put in earlier in the week. Worm said he hadn’t had a chance to stop by the liquor store to get it.” Danny shrugged. “But Cowboy wanted Worm to go get it, and right now. Said the clock was ticking since he’d have to drive over the state line to pick up the order, and the store would be closing in less than half an hour. They got into kind of an argument about it. Worm was in the hot tub and didn’t wanna get out, I guess. He kept saying that we could share what was left.”
Danny’s eyes got that faraway look of someone reliving a memory.
“So Cowboy set the bottle of bourbon on this big ass dragon statue he had down there, went up to the house, and came back with a baseball bat. Didn’t say nothing. Just lined up the shot and smashed the bottle to bits. Said now they were plum out of Heaven Hill, and Worm knew how he got when he didn’t get to properly unwind on the weekend. Worm was pissed, but he jumped up outta that hot tub real quick and got his ass dressed.”
Danny inhaled, coming out of the dream-like state.
“Me and Bo wanted to take off after that. Cowboy could get kind of agitated when he did coke. Like mood swings or whatever. He’d be laughing his ass off, and then he’d go quiet and stare at you real intense.” Danny crossed his arms. “And just so you know, I never did any of that. I stick to strictly legal substances.”
“I’m sure you do,” Darger said, waving him on. “Keep going.”
“Well, we asked Stevie to take us home, and that got Cowboy even more agitated. Said the party was just getting started. Ushered us into this back room in the basement where he had a little theater set up — a projector and those red velvet curtains and a popcorn machine. He put on some old porno movie. Like from the 70s, I’d say. And it wasn’t like normal porno, where the cable guy comes in and ends up banging the two roommates. This was like a few different ladies dancing naked on stage and doing weird routines. Like one of them could shoot stuff out of her nethers, and a different one was squirting milk from—”
Darger held up a hand.
“I think we get the idea.”
“After a while, Cowboy got quiet and did the staring thing. Started asking us weird questions. Like, had we ever thought about how the world needed a reset. That certain people are natural leaders. Made to dominate the rest, keep the sheeple in line, but that things right now are out of balance because all the wrong people are in power. He said that some sort of apocalyptic event was an inevitability, so anyone with half a brain should be planning for that, because we’d need a certain number of people to repopulate the planet after. And then some shit about a prison planet.” Danny’s mouth formed a scowl. “It was uncomfortable as hell. Even if the porno he’d put on hadn’t been that weird shit, the stuff he was talking about...”
“Did you connect his talking about an apocalypse to the digging?” Darger asked, wondering now if the whole case could be explained this simply. Someone with paranoid delusions attempting to build an underground bunker for the apocalypse he was certain would come. But why kill four people? And why starve them first?
“Not really. I was more focused on trying to get the hell out of there,” Danny said. “But then Worm got back with the bourbon and Cowboy calmed down. Said we should each take a bottle and call up the girls and really make a night of it.”
“And what about—”
Danny straightened suddenly and let out a gasp.
“Oh god.”
Darger followed his gaze over to the entrance of the park. There was a group of four elderly women speedwalking in windbreakers and sunglasses and a teenage boy throwing a stick for a Dalmatian, but Darger saw nothing that should have alarmed Danny.
“What’s wrong?”
Instead of answering, Danny jumped to his feet and took off at a sprint in the opposite direction.
“Danny, wait!” Darger said, hopping up and
going after him.
Danny was faster than he looked and had an uncanny ability to slip through gaps in a crowd. He reached the street that bordered the far side of the park and ran straight across without looking for traffic. He made it to the other side unscathed, but Darger had to stop for a city bus. By the time she reached the sidewalk on the other end, Danny had disappeared inside the farmer’s market.
“Shit,” she muttered when she reached the pavilion.
The place was packed. A bustling horde of people haggling over produce and flowers and candles. And Danny wasn’t in sight.
Ambrose caught up with her then, breathing heavily and wiping sweat from his brow.
“He’s gone,” she said. “We lost him.”
“Eh, I figure we got the bourbon thing out of him. That’s something.”
“I guess,” Darger said, pausing to catch her breath. “What spooked him?”
“An extended cab truck rolled by. It was silver, not white. But I guess in his paranoid state, his mind saw what it wanted.” Ambrose gestured back at the park. “Come on. Loshak’s looking up the Old Rip van Winkle right now, seeing if we use that to trace our guy.”
Chapter 43
He fixed his hat and then hunched over the body. Careful to keep his feet wide of the red puddle surrounding it. The wetness on the rocks looked glassy and dark in the soft light of the lantern.
Was he dead yet?
He gazed down at the torso. Saw no rise and fall of the chest. And the blood had stopped flowing from the wounds.
He shuffled a little closer, still stooped over. Hissing breaths spouted from his nostrils as he moved. Almost sounded like silent laughter. Maybe it was, he thought. Maybe it was.
He poked at the corpse with the tip of his blade. Speared it along the collarbone.
No response.
His free hand reached down for the corpse, fingers curved like claws. He squeezed the cheeks between his thumb and forefinger and lifted the face. Turned it toward him.
Violet Darger | Book 7 | Dark Passage Page 20