by Mason Cross
“I’ll call if I hear anything from them,” Sarah said.
“I appreciate it.”
“What department did you say you were from again?” He hadn’t.
“VCB. Violent Crimes.”
Sarah assured him she would call him if she heard anything and hung up.
She quickly gave Blake a summary of the conversation.
“It sounds like Freel’s in some trouble,” Blake agreed. “This Gage guy certainly knew what he was doing.”
“Do you think he can track them down? I mean, he doesn’t have the notebook, or ...”
“He struck out back in Summerlin, but there are always other ways around a problem,” he said. “The cop said he was from Violent Crimes? That covers a lot of ground, none of it good.”
“Drugs, murder, mob stuff ...” she agreed. “It sounds like maybe Freel saw something he shouldn’t have. Like they want him silenced.”
“Or was involved in something he shouldn’t have been.”
Sarah said nothing. Okay, Blake had a bias against Freel, but it was certainly something to consider. She ran over the conversation in her head again, remembering the detective’s knowing tone.
“That guy Costigane. It sounded like he knew what I was thinking, like he knew I was holding information back. I have a friend pretty high up in the department, Greg Kubler. He was promoted away from the action a long time ago, but maybe I should give him a call, see if I can find out a little more about what Detective Costigane is looking into.”
“That’s a good idea, but tell him to keep it between the two of you.”
“Kubler’s okay; it won’t go any further.”
Blake said nothing for a few moments, his green eyes staring ahead at the road. “Lot of people looking for your neighbors,” he said at last.
“There sure are,” Sarah agreed. “What do you think that means?”
“I think it means we should find them fast.”
24
We still had a way to go to our first stop on the trail: Grady’s Rest Stop. Sarah was waiting on a return call from the friend in the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department whom she could ask about Detective Costigane. She had heard back from Diane Marshall in Quarter—no news yet, but she would try a few more avenues and call later on, whatever happened. Sarah had her phone on speaker, and I could tell from Diane’s voice that this was the most interesting thing she had had to do in a while.
After Diane’s call, we talked a little more about Carol. We speculated about the man with the gun, and wondered how it all fit with whatever crime Costigane was investigating. The conversation moved on, and with no small amount of difficulty I made sure she talked more than I did. She talked a little more about her ex-husband. About writing her books. About her old job: big stories she had broken, celebrities and politicians and sports stars she had interviewed. She talked about her childhood, about her dad who had been a test pilot at Edwards in the ‘70s and ‘80s, flying F-15S and the new generation of stealths. I guessed that explained her relaxed attitude toward risk. Danger would have been a constant presence in her life, since she was old enough to understand that her dad’s job meant he might not come home at the end of any given day.
We reached Grady’s just after five o’clock. As we were pulling off the highway, Sarah received a text. It had been sent an hour before, but we had been out of range. I was surprised we were in range now. The text was from Diane Marshall. It was short and to the point, saying that if Sarah was still planning to be in Quarter tomorrow, it would be good to meet. Sarah replied and they arranged to meet at the newspaper office.
I parked and turned the engine off. We looked out at Grady’s Rest Stop. As the culmination of a day’s drive, it was underwhelming. It was a square of asphalt with four pumps outside, in front of a cluttered store with a small area with some tables and chairs. I topped the tank up and Sarah bought a foldout map of the county. Online maps are great, but given we were barely getting a phone signal now, we couldn’t rely on internet access.
The guy behind the counter seemed to be cashier, waiter, cook and manager all rolled into one. He was a big man with curly red hair and a white shirt that was a little tight on him. He didn’t wear a nametag. After we paid for the gas and the map I asked if he was serving food. He answered in the affirmative and indicated the seating area. We sat down ordered coffees and burgers. The coffee was a little stale. The burger wasn’t going to win any culinary awards, either. I had forgotten how samey the diet can get when you’re on the road. But we needed fuel, so we ate quickly. We needed something else, too, so I kept an eye on the guy in the white shirt to see if he was going to engage us in conversation. He seemed to be busy with paperwork. After we had finished eating, he looked up and came over.
“Would you like to see the dessert menu?”
“Just the check please.”
“No problem,” he said, starting to clear the plates. “You folks down here on vacation?”
“That obvious, huh?” Sarah said.
“We don’t get a lot of people coming through here, these days. If it wasn’t for the truckers, we’d be broke.”
“That’s a pity,” Sarah said. “It’s real pretty out here. In fact we only came to your place because our friends recommended it.”
“For real?” The corners of the red-headed man’s mouth shot upwards in a surprised grin.
Sarah nodded. “They were down here a couple months back.” She turned to me, acting casual, as though she couldn’t recall. “Back in February or March, maybe?”
“March, I think,” I said. I looked up at the guy. “You might remember them. They told us the burgers here were good.”
“They did?” He sounded skeptical. I didn’t blame him.
Then he stopped to think, the plates balanced on his forearm. I took my phone out and got the picture of Carol and Freel up on the screen, hoping this place really was as dead as he said. His brow furrowed.
“Yeah, I guess I remember them.” I could tell he wanted to be helpful, but his tone made me doubt it. For all the quietness if this place, a customer was a customer. I guessed he didn’t spend time memorizing the faces of everyone who came in.
“They talk to you much?” Sarah asked.
“Sure. Nice folks.”
I remembered the time stamp on the receipt. After seven o’clock in the evening. Unless they were driving through the night, they would probably have gotten a room somewhere.
I put the phone face down on the table, like I was moving the conversation on. “Can you recommend a motel around here? We had a pretty early start, and we had planned to go farther south, but maybe we’ll stop soon. No hurry.”
“Well that’s easy. Only town around here is Iron City, and it only has one hotel.” A look came over his face like he had remembered where he left his car keys. He snapped his fingers. “Matter of fact I do remember your friends. I told them the same thing.”
Sarah smiled. “That’s perfect.”
By the time we reached Iron City, the sky in the west was a furnace of orange and red and purple. The stars were already starting to come out in the east. The vast flatness of the landscape seemed to capture several times of day all at once. Corinth was another twenty miles distant, but we agreed to check out the hotel first. It was the first building off the highway, its red neon sign indicating vacancies. I pulled off the road and into the parking lot.
The Iron City Inn was a one-story brick building with a gray tile roof. There were only a couple of other cars in the lot, and most of the windows were in darkness.
The clerk at the desk, a morbidly obese man with a bushy beard and glasses, took a while to tear his attention away from the football game he was watching on the computer screen. He tapped on his keyboard, clicked his tongue while he considered where to put us, and finally handed Sarah two key cards for adjoining rooms. When she produced the photograph, he could not remember whether he had roomed the couple in it on March 12th, or even if he had been on duty tha
t day. That was okay, though. We already knew the guy at Grady’s had sent them here. Given the size of the town, it was telling that the clerk didn’t recognize Carol or Freel. If they had been around this town for the past few weeks, he would have recognized them for sure. After unenthusiastically asking if they wanted anything else, the clerk sat back down on his rickety wooden chair and turned his attention back to the game.
“That guy was helpful,” Sarah remarked as we walked back out into the gravel lot.
“It’s fine. We can head for Quarter in the morning if we don’t find anything here.”
We got back into the car, and Sarah spread out the map we had bought at Grady’s on her lap.
I looked up at the darkening sky. It would have been better to check out Corinth in the daylight, but Sarah wanted to get to Quarter as quickly as we could tomorrow.
“What do you think?”
Sarah ran a finger across the page, tracing the twenty miles from our current position to Corinth.
“The night is young.”
25
CORINTH WEDNESDAY, 19:41
Sarah noticed that Blake was quiet on the twenty-minute drive out to Corinth. Given that she wouldn’t have described him as a chatterbox at normal times, that was saying something. It was fine; she didn’t feel like conversing either. She was too preoccupied, thinking about what they might find in the old town. As the last embers of the sunset faded from the sky, her mind went to the image of Trenton Gage in her doorway again. She felt a sick feeling in her belly, and wondered if they should have waited until morning.
It was full dark by the time the headlights of Blake’s Ford lit up a sign at the side of the road. The sign was old, pockmarked with shotgun pellets. The sign said Corinth, 10m, with an arrow indicating there was a turnoff ahead. Blake slowed and took the exit off the highway onto a narrower road. A triangular yellow highway sign warned, Unimproved Road. True enough. The road was rutted and decayed, probably hadn’t been resurfaced since the town died.
A few minutes later, they passed the massive crater left by the open-cast mine on their right-hand side. Were it not for the clear night and the full moon, they might not have noticed it at all. And then they were at the edge of town.
Corinth was, if anything, smaller than it had looked from satellite images: a few streets of houses arranged around a wide main street. Some of the buildings were still standing, others had collapsed in on themselves. Some were boarded up, others were left wide open, the doors missing and the glass long gone from the windows. Blake slowed down a little and both of them glanced from side to side, taking in the signs on the storefronts. Sarah saw a general store, a library, a barber’s, a doctor’s. Arranged at regular intervals at the side of the road were small craters where the streetlights had been ripped out and sold for scrap. She knew that if they were to look for plumbing or appliances in the stores and houses they would find the same thing. Anything the departing residents hadn’t taken with them had long since been evaluated by salvagers and either removed or discarded, leaving a dark, empty shell. It was like the town itself had been mined.
It didn’t take her long to pick out the old building from Carol’s sketch. It was the tallest structure in town, sitting at the far end of Main Street. She guessed it had been the town hall. Blake parked in the middle of the road and the two of them got out. The chill in the air caught her by surprise. At this elevation, the temperature could really plummet after sundown. Almost as striking was the silence. There was no wind, no buzz of electrical wires, no traffic noise, no television chatter through an open window. It was like somebody had pressed pause on the world.
What had brought Carol and Freel here? It couldn’t be idle curiosity, although seen in the moonlight, Sarah could see the attraction of that. The deserted town had a kind of compelling, wasted charm. But they wouldn’t have come so far, just for that. Blake had Carol’s notebook in his hand. He opened it to the page where she had sketched the old town hall, and held it up in front of the real-life building, using the Ford’s headlights for illumination. Sarah’s eyes flitted between the building and the sketch. Carol had a good eye, she had captured it perfectly.
She turned away and looked up and down the deserted main street. Nothing moved. From the highway, at least five miles away, she could hear the sound of a big rig’s powerful engine.
“Creepy,” she said in a library whisper. “But cool, though.”
Blake’s face was serious, composed. “Let’s get started.”
They had spoken at length about their plans on the drive down from Nevada. The first thing they wanted to make sure of was that Carol wasn’t here. Blake suggested that would be pretty easy to confirm. Their secondary objective was more nebulous: they were looking for something, but they didn’t know what. A reason for Carol and Dominic to come here, for Carol to sketch the building in her notebook.
Sarah opened the back door of the car and took her backpack from the back seat. She unzipped it and took out a flashlight and her tablet. She handed Blake the tablet while she swung the pack on her back. Blake pressed the button to wake the screen and a second later they were looking at their position from space. It wasn’t a live feed, of course. They were at least twenty miles away from basic internet. When they had stopped for gas in Winslow, Sarah had zoomed in and taken a screenshot of the satellite view of the town, providing a reasonably up-to-date map.
Sarah watched Blake as he examined the map, the soft illumination from the screen bathing his features in a bluish glow. Her eyes went to the left side of his jacket. He looked up and seemed to read her mind. He patted the spot where his gun was holstered.
“Always assume trouble.”
They started with the town hall. It wasn’t hard to gain access. Just as in Carol’s sketch, there was a gap ten feet high and six wide in the middle of the ground floor where Sarah assumed the doors had once hung. Blake stepped inside first and she followed. She was conscious of a large, open space. Blake directed the beam of his flashlight upwards and they heard shuffles and scrapes as the light disturbed the peaceful night for some hidden winged animals. Birds or bats, or both. In the beam of the light, Sarah could now see that the interior was a big open space, taking up the full three-story height of the building. The roof was arched, with rafters spanning the space between the two walls. There was a stage on the far side, and behind that, a spiral staircase leading up to a short platform about fifteen feet long. There was a door at the far end of the platform. The hall was mostly empty, the broken remains of wooden chairs and boxes scattered here and there.
The floorboards creaked as they made their way inside. As they got closer to the platform, Sarah noticed that there was also a door in the wall beneath it. It was unlocked, and gave into a kitchen and then a corridor that led to bathrooms. The fittings and many of the tiles had disappeared long ago.
They emerged back into the main hall and Blake shone the beam of the flashlight on the spiral staircase. It was iron, badly rusted in places. Blake exchanged a glance with her as he sized up the condition of the steps. She estimated Blake had at least fifty pounds on her.
‘I’ll go up first,” she said.
Blake looked at her slim frame, compared it with his own, and concurred. “Watch your step.”
The staircase creaked and the central column shook visibly as she stepped onto it. She stopped on the third step and examined the fourth. It looked almost rusted through. She stepped over it and onto the next one. She continued up the stairs. There were twenty of them, and she counted every one while holding her breath. After what seemed like an eternity, she made the platform. That, at least, felt a little more solid than the staircase.
Blake walked underneath the platform and directed the beam up through the iron grate as Sarah walked carefully along the length of the platform, stopping when she got to the door. It was chained shut and padlocked.
“I’ll come up,” Blake said as she examined it.
“Don’t bother,” she said. “Unless yo
u have a blow torch. The padlock’s rusted shut.”
Sarah took even more care descending the staircase, feeling it tremble as she put her weight on each step. She sighed with relief when her feet were back on solid footing.
Then she heard a sudden noise from above them, and let out an involuntary scream.
They looked up to see shapes move across the ceiling in a flutter of wings that echoed in the space. A couple of pigeons had chosen that moment to shed their perches and fly up to the rafters. Sarah and Blake were probably the first humans they had seen in some time; no wonder they were getting tetchy. She let out a relieved breath, and Blake gave her a reassuring smile. He had been startled too. Neither of them had really noticed how on edge they were. There was something very disturbing about the weird, in-between state of a town that had once hosted a couple of thousand souls, now in the slow process of returning to nothing.
Blake cast the beam over the platform and the door one more time as Sarah started moving back toward the main door. Blake was in the middle of saying something when she heard a soft creak beneath her.
The next second, the world caved in.
26
Sarah’s scream was a high, piercing sound in the darkness. I spun around, reaching for my gun. Sarah had been no more than twenty feet from me, but she had vanished.
I rushed forward in the direction Sarah had gone, calling her name. I stopped when she yelled again.
“Stop!”
There was a moment of disconnect. Somehow, it sounded as though her voice had come from below me. I heard another flutter of wings from above me in response to the cry. I looked down and saw my foot was inches away from a set of fingers. It took my mind a second to process what had happened, and then I dropped to my knees and grabbed Sarah’s hand with mine, feeling the ragged edge of a hole in the floorboards, about six feet long by two wide. Had she not yelled, I would have followed her into the hole. It was virtually invisible unless you directed a light straight at it. We had been lucky not to fall through it on our way in.