“I do have a plan. It’s worked before, it’ll work this time.”
“And that would be?”
“We find out what that old man was afraid of, why he was in such a hurry to part with his land, that’ll tell us where Thorn is.”
“Do that again.”
“In the heart of the heart of the trouble. That’s where Thorn’ll be. You watch.”
FIFTEEN
* * *
WITH A TIGHT GRIP ON the collar, Thorn hauled his flowered shirt out of the cleft in the sinkhole floor. It was sopping with cool water. The oversized yellow hibiscus blooms had turned two shades darker, and the cotton was starting to shred from being dragged repeatedly across the jagged stones. It was the fourth time he’d dunked and retrieved his shirt, and he was starting to get the hang of it.
Careful not to exert too much pressure, he coiled the shirt into a rope, held it by the ends, lifted it, tipped his head back, opened his mouth and wrung the water out.
He swallowed the dribble, maybe a quarter of a cup, twisted the cloth harder, then harder still for the last drops. The water tasted metallic. Maybe fertilizer run-off or pesticide or some dissolved minerals that had leached into the groundwater. It didn’t matter. Better to ingest a few carcinogens than die of thirst before sundown.
Problem was, the process took too long, wedging his shirt into the crevice, soaking up water, and wringing it into his mouth. He’d be working all night before he could rehydrate himself. He was still parched, still felt the drill bit of his headache boring into his frontal lobe, but he had to stop.
He stood up, hung the shirt from a jagged ledge about shoulder high, and took a long look around the pit. It was time to get busy, time to get the hell out of there.
It had to be near noon, which meant this would probably be the best light he’d have all day. A twilight haziness filled the space, with a few splashes of brightness projected onto the walls and floor from sunlight pouring through the chinks between the planks. Three of the stalagmites were illuminated. Spiny tubes with pointed tips, like stalks of coral on the reef.
Stepping around the half-dozen stalagmites, he circled the sinkhole again, patting down the walls, here and there poking his fingers into the crumbly sediment, exploring, finding some places as squashy as fresh plaster, pebbles breaking free, and other areas that were gritty on the surface, but tough an inch below. The bad news was that most of the walls were unyielding, an ancient limestone that had calcified over the centuries into impervious stone.
Impervious to Thorn’s fingers anyway.
He retrieved the sardine can he’d pitched into a corner and found the lid nearby. The lid was curled slightly and fit neatly in his hand like a primitive trowel. Thorn selected what he believed was the western side of the sinkhole, a section not quite as sheer as the others. Maybe a few degrees beyond vertical. He and Sugarman had once watched a documentary about a group of blind climbers taking on Mount Everest. That was the extent of his knowledge of rock climbing. It didn’t look easy. And it didn’t fall nicely into any of Thorn’s skill sets.
He was a fly-tier, a fisherman. He had excellent eyesight, fairly good hand-to-eye skills, and a degree of dexterity in his fingers, but he’d never spent time in mountains or around rock walls or cliffs. As close as he’d come to any of that was climbing trees as a kid.
He stood back and tried to calculate the geometry of the climb. How far apart the footholds should be spaced, where exactly to start. He didn’t want to consider yet what he would do when he reached the wooden lid at the top of the sinkhole. He’d deal with that in due course. From this distance he couldn’t tell how solid the carpentry was, whether the workmen had used screws or nails to fasten it all together. Didn’t matter. First he needed footholds.
Trying to climb the wall without some kind of precut traction didn’t look possible. A little menacing, too, since the wall was studded with burrs of rock and jagged edges. Losing his hold and sliding back down that rock would be like grinding his flesh across a cheese grater.
The initial foothold was simple. He dug the sharp edge of the sardine lid into a chalky spot about three feet off the floor of the pit. After half a minute he hit a patch of granular sediment, thick sand or marl. The material spilled out of the wall and left a fissure about three inches deep.
He put the toe of his boat shoe in the cranny, a perfect fit, and hoisted himself up, balancing for a few seconds with all his weight on that one foot. He pressed his stomach and chest flush against the wall and searched for a likely spot for a handhold higher up. He scratched the lid against a few places but the rock was too hard. Two or three inches beyond a comfortable reach, he found another natural fissure. He had to keep himself stretched out completely while he used the lid to enlarge the opening.
When he was satisfied, he pushed away and hopped back to the floor. He looked up at the wall. It seemed higher than before. Not insurmountable, but a lot more challenging than he first imagined. For sure, he wasn’t going to be able to keep carving footholds then hopping down to catch his breath. Once he got up on the wall and wriggled a foot or two higher, jumping back wouldn’t be wise.
Last night when he was shoved into the pit, he’d landed in an incredibly lucky spot. Missed by inches being gored by one of those rocky spikes. Not something he wanted to gamble with again.
And the truth was, he doubted he could absorb one more fall.
His body was a collection of lumps and nicks and deep bruises and stiff and swollen joints, but the sum total of all that was nothing compared to what waited for him if he didn’t make it up that wall.
For a few moments he searched for a place to sink his second foothold, somewhere around two feet higher than the first. He tried two places but got nowhere with the lid. And the aluminum was already beginning to grow dull, and loose threads of metal were fraying along its edges from the rough use.
He tried brushing it against the wall a few times like a blade against a whetstone, and yes, the fibers dropped away and the edge shined a little brighter.
On the wall, at about the right position for his next step up, he spotted a brownish stone that jutted out about an inch. It was lodged slightly higher than he would’ve liked, but it would do. He gripped it with both hands and wiggled it up and down like a bad tooth. When it was loose he pried the wedge-shaped rock out of the wall and exposed a deep slot that was just wide enough to insert his hand into. Using the sardine lid he scraped at the hole until he had it broadened enough for his toe.
He looked up at the wall and thought of the blind climbers who picked their way to the peak of Everest, the joy in their faces, their fearless determination. All he had was a bad hangover and a knee heading south and some serious stiffening.
He went over and picked up the body of the sardine can. He wasn’t sure how useful it would be as a digging tool. Not as good as the lid. But the lid wasn’t going to last much longer. He didn’t want to find himself nearing the top of the wall with a used-up digging implement. At least the can itself was heavier-gauge aluminum, and he might use one of its corners to scoop out a cranny or two. He slipped it into his pants pocket and heard it plink against something.
He reached in and drew out the can, then withdrew the wedding ring. The idiot brothers had missed it last night when they frisked him—the diamond solitaire he was going to embarrass Rusty with in front of all their friends and all those strangers. He should have gone ahead and done it. How differently the evening would have gone. He probably wouldn’t be a hostage in a sinkhole somewhere near Lake Okeechobee. More than likely he and Rusty would still be spooned together in bed, sleeping off the party.
At this moment Rusty would be searching for him. He felt more confident of that than he had earlier. The note he’d written might delay her some, but he had no doubt she’d see through it and realize it was written under duress. She and Sugar would be doing what they could to track him down. He couldn’t imagine how they’d manage it, but was certain they’d be on his trail.<
br />
The thought gave him little comfort.
Once again Thorn had put others at risk. He’d meant well. Secretly, he’d been swollen with pride over the plan Rusty concocted. Something good was going to come from his misspent life. Land would be spared from the march of urban sprawl. Habitat preserved, wildlife saved. All of that seemed hopelessly foolish now. An absurd, self-indulgent fantasy.
He dropped the ring back in his pocket along with the can. He scuffed the toe of his boat shoe at the tip of a stalagmite to try to blunt its sharp point. But that accomplished nothing. He took one last look around before he started the climb.
Something had bothered him earlier when he’d been dunking his shirt in that subterranean water. Not only the oddly smooth sides of the crevice, but something else, something he’d seen, registered, and dismissed in his haste and confusion.
He went back to the crevice, kneeled, reached in, and swabbed his open hand across slick rock several inches below ground. It was a perfect circle about a half foot in diameter. Such a thing had to be manmade. He knew of nothing that exact, that perfectly contoured and smooth that existed in nature.
Elbow below the ground, he ran his hand farther down. And, yes, what looked like an accidental fissure in the stone seemed to be no accident at all.
Which had to mean the pit wasn’t a sinkhole. It was more likely the eroded remnants of some ancient well. That slick, perfectly round opening in the rock was a bore hole. With his fingertips he could even feel faint grooves that might have been the tracings of a drill bit chewing into stone.
If that was true, the opening had been carved to tap into the earth, then abandoned later for some reason, and over the years the steady rains had eroded the opening, widened it into a larger and larger pit. How long that erosion had taken would depend on how large the hole was to begin with, but it had to be many years, maybe decades.
As he drew out his hand, he noticed again several white clumps of stone lying beside the opening. That’s what he’d seen. That’s what nagged at him.
They were a familiar rock formation whose name and significance he’d known in his school years when he’d been under the magical sway of that geology teacher. That man had rhapsodized for hours about the lost worlds beneath our feet. Now, in the haze of his dehydration, hangover, and concussion, Thorn couldn’t summon the rock’s name or why it was unique. Each of them was about the size of a walnut and seemed to be the fossilized remains of a bunch of interlocking shells.
He picked one up, touched its contours, and pictured that geology teacher. He tried to recall the slow patient voice of the dogged educator who’d taken Thorn’s class of smart asses on numerous field trips around south Florida so they could root in the soil, scavenge for rocks, sift through pebbles and old shell bits.
The word came to him then.
It was a rudist. A cluster of mollusks clumped together and hardened into rock, each of them shaped like a tiny human heart. Those bivalve creatures had been extinct for a hundred million years, making their last appearance when the shallow Cretaceous seas covered the Florida peninsula. During their prime, rudists had thrived for thousands of years, and when they died, their shell remains helped form the reefs where long-extinct fish and marine creatures once gathered. Thorn had only seen photographs of rudists. Their fossilized shells were so rare that even his geology teacher had never encountered one outside of a natural-history museum.
That was because the ancient seabed where they once flourished was now buried deep. And the only possible way a rudist could appear in such a place as this was to be pumped up as backwash from a drill rig that had penetrated at least two miles below the earth where Thorn stood.
Which was one hell of a deep hole to search for water.
SIXTEEN
* * *
THORN PUT THE FOSSIL IN his pocket and went back to the wall.
He didn’t have time to sort it out. There were more urgent matters. He took a long breath, dug his right toe in the first foothold, and hitched himself up, raising his left foot to find the second hole. His right hand clutched for the slot high on the wall.
When his toe was lodged deep into the second hole, he withdrew his right foot and cranked himself up, shifting all his weight to his left leg. The bad knee held fine.
He realized he’d made a mistake. The handhold he’d cut into the wall was on the wrong side, his right, which meant he would have to dig out the next foothold using his weaker, less adroit left hand, and to make matters more complicated, the foothold would have to be dug out close to where his navel was pressed flat against the craggy surface of the pit. He hadn’t diagrammed it correctly. Somehow in his woozy state he’d flipped the blueprint. Now he was forced to carve a divot in the rock wall while assuming a yoga position that had no name.
He set about it. Twisting himself, left foot lodged in the slot of stone, right hand gripping above, left hand searching for any yielding spot. At last he found one, dug an inch-deep channel, then came to solid rock or fossilized shell, and had to start over a few inches to the right. He was sweating, and he could hear his own breath rising from the strain of staying in place. Already his muscles had started to complain.
He worked the sardine lid deep into a mushy vein in the wall, making progress. He allowed himself a look backward. No great distance down. But those bayonets of stone worried him. If he fell clumsily he could easily skewer himself.
Still, it wasn’t like he was clinging to a cliff high above some bottomless gorge, or clawing his way inch by inch up the towering peaks of a real mountain. He was simply climbing up the sheer walls of a shallow grave.
With the slot widened enough to fit the toe of his boat shoe in, he brought his right foot up and dug it into the niche, wiggled his left foot free, and hauled himself up another foot and a half.
He estimated he had about a dozen feet to go before he reached the wooden deck. Five or six more footholds, a couple more handholds. At this rate he should make it to the top by Christmas.
Jonah burst into the hunting cabin, buzzing with what he’d learned from Thorn, eager to lay it on Moses, then the two of them could brainstorm about what it meant. He guzzled some water from the tap, called out for Moses, but his brother hadn’t returned from his scouting mission at the lodge.
For a moment Jonah stood in the kitchen, listening to the birds outside, listening to an airplane passing. Knowing what he was about to do, but resisting it, because Moses could return any time and catch him. But that familiar tug was too much, and finally he left the kitchen and drifted back to the storage room where they stashed the auction goodies.
They kept the door locked so none of the visiting asshole hunters would stumble in. He unlocked it, went inside. He stood looking at the shelves, five of them, mostly photos and letters, a couple of bullet-pocked shirts stiff with blood folded up inside plastic bags. Mostly though, it was prison artwork. Killers liked to draw. Like little kids on rainy days, nothing to do but play with their crayons and paint sets.
It was quiet in the storage room. He couldn’t hear the birds anymore. The airplane was gone. In the warm air there were ripples of weirdness, as if the letters and drawings and poems and clothes were giving off radioactive vibes from all the grisly shit those people pulled. Superstars of American homicide. Ghouls and cannibals and blank-eyed killers.
At the moment their inventory was low. A lot of selling lately had cleared a couple of shelves. What they had at the moment was a scribbled letter with assorted doodles and a poem from Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker. And there was a Henry Lee Lucas painting of a sunrise over a mountain range. Lucas got his start killing his mother, then went on to murder hundreds more. He claimed six hundred but cut that in half eventually, though nobody ever nailed it down for sure. They had a drawing the BTK killer did, Dennis Rader, a very graphic and detailed pen and ink that showed all the bad shit he was planning to do to one of his female victims. Bind, torture, kill. And then there was Jonah’s current favorite, a topless self-
portrait made by Carol Bundy. Big-titted woman wearing horn-rimmed glasses, another serial killer who first beheaded her ex-boyfriend then helped Douglas Clark with the Sunset Strip Murders, killing a string of hookers. Big boobs, little red nipples, like the tits on that bar girl in Clewiston Jonah had screwed a few times.
All told, just that single shelf of murder porn had to be worth over five K.
Their latest prize was an oil painting by John Wayne Gacy. It was poster-sized on a black background with skulls lined up, five rows of seven skulls. Each skull exactly the same, like the face a creepy kid would carve into a pumpkin, empty eye sockets, empty nose hole, shark teeth in the mouth.
Gacy painted in a bloody scythe behind each skull. One skull for each of his victims. Thirty-four boys. And in the top left-hand corner, at the head of the first row, was the face of a circus clown with big red lips and a doughy white face and a limp white-and-blue sock hat. That was a self-portrait. Gacy had done gigs at kid’s parties. Pogo the Clown was his stage name.
When they got around to putting the Gacy painting up for auction, Moses was going to start the bidding at four thousand, about twice what they’d paid for it from one of Gacy’s jailers.
He knew it was wrong. Knew he shouldn’t handle the merchandise. You could get grease stains on them, fingerprints, lower their value. You could drop it, bump it, scuff an edge. It was stupid. Totally against the rules.
He listened for Moses, but heard nothing. He slid the Gacy out of the bubble wrap it arrived in and held it up to the light. Gacy had killed boys. Teenage boys. Raping them, then strangling them, stashing their bodies in the dirt beneath his house. Jonah thought about that as he looked at that picture, those thirty-four skulls, thirty-four dead kids. And that one clown like God up in the left-hand corner smiling down on his creations. The clown’s lips were pouty and red.
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