by Scott Blade
After a few seconds I saw a padlock and it was new. I smiled. They had used an underground bunker to hide their victims.
Vaughn came running over through the rain. She shivered, but was too excited to care.
She said, “You found it?”
I said, “It looks like it.”
Oliver said, “We gotta get in there.”
I said, “Shoot the lock.”
Oliver nodded and handed me the shovel.
He said, “Back away.”
Vaughn grabbed my arm and jumped with excitement. We backed away from Oliver.
He pulled out his service weapon, which was a Glock 22, a 40-caliber gun.
He took aim and I held onto Vaughn, which was partially to keep her dry and warm, and also because I wanted to. I had wanted to all night.
She squeezed me back.
Oliver fired twice. The first shot didn’t break the lock all the way, but the second did.
Vaughn let go of me and started for the trapdoor.
Oliver said, “Wait!”
She paused.
He said, “We should clear it first.”
Vaughn nodded and drew her Glock. I stood back because I still had no gun.
Oliver grabbed the trapdoor and counted to three and jerked it back.
Vaughn went in first. She had her flashlight out in front. She took it slow. First a peek down into the darkness and then she dove in full throttle. Oliver followed and I waited.
I looked back at Vaughn’s police car and saw her police shotgun locked in place near the front console. I couldn’t tell the make from this distance—too much rain, but I thought that if I had to, I could run back to her car and grab it. If I had to and if it wasn’t locked in place, but knowing her, I knew that it probably was.
I waited.
There was silence out of the darkness. I started to wonder about this Oliver guy. I didn’t really know him. We hadn’t had much time to build a trust. I still wasn’t even sure what he was doing here.
Then a light came on and the dark tunnel below lit up, bright, and Vaughn’s head came into view.
She looked like she had seen a nightmare.
She said, “Cameron. Get down here. Look at this.”
Chapter 23
IT WAS A PIT OF HELL.
I had seen a lot of things in my life, a lot of unsavory things, but I had never seen anything like this.
The bunker was much, much larger than I had imagined. It was tall enough for me to stand up straight, but not by much. There was a long hallway that looked like something out of a horror movie where a bunch of teenagers get hacked to bits. I couldn’t tell what the interior was made out of because water trickled in from a leaky roof, but it wasn’t brick or wood. The floor was basically just dirt with long wooden planks laid out for us to walk on. There was electricity, which must’ve been powered by a generator somewhere or the whole thing was tied into some old underground power cables that still worked.
The lights were just one or two bulbs scattered about in clusters, but they were very bright in the windowless space.
I counted three rooms total, counting the hallway. The first room had no door and was wide open. It was also where Vaughn had gotten the horror that was in her eyes—no doubt because there was a barrel filled with bones and I was pretty sure they were human. The smell was almost as bad as the sight of them. They were fragmented and broken. Some were charred like they had been burned in a fire. There were no remains of flesh at all. I hated to imagine what they did with it or the organs.
There was a demented handyman table with handcuffs hanging off it.
There was a rack with tools hanging on it. They were rusted from old stains of blood and other fragments that I wasn’t sure about.
I grimaced at everything.
It looked like a torture chamber.
Off to the left was a bucket filled with old wallets, driver’s licenses, and a few passports.
There were three cameras in the room. The first was lying on the table. It was small and looked like any other digital camera. The other was a huge, old-style camcorder that hung on the rack with the tools and the third was a newer camera set up on a tripod like a video camera.
I could only imagine what these guys did here.
Oliver was down the hall trying to get into the last room.
I heard the inspiration in his attempts to kick in the door.
Oliver screamed at me. He said, “Cameron. Come here!”
I backed out of the room of horrors and into the hall. I wanted to forget what I had seen. I turned slowly and saw Agent Oliver banging on a door.
I ran over to him at a slow pace because even though the ceilings were high enough, the walls were basically made of dirt that was held up by cheap wooden beams. There wasn’t much room to maneuver for a guy my size.
I made it to the door and asked, “Is she in there?”
He said, “Someone is!”
I said, “Move back.”
Oliver moved to the side. Vaughn was back at the entrance, half crouched and watching us.
I looked in through a tiny round hole that was bashed through the door. I saw darkness, but I heard something. It was faint, very faint.
I concentrated and listened hard, but the rain pounded above us and water leaked everywhere and another roll of thunder whipped overhead in the distance. Then it faded away and my ears adjusted to the sounds of leaking water and the rainfall.
I tried hard to drown out all of the sounds except what was in the room.
I heard it! It was breathing, low and ambient, but it was breathing! Something or someone was alive in that dark room.
I reached my hand out and pushed Oliver gently back away from the door. He moved aside and I reared all the way back against the wall as far as I could. I looked down at the lock on the door and the size of the wood. It was a simple deadbolt, as best as I could tell. I doubted that they would’ve barricaded it from the other side.
I charged at the door—one point two seconds, not much space between the wall and the door, but I was a big guy with a lot of power and force. And I was busting Janey out of there if that was her that I had heard. When an unstoppable force meets an immovable object a standoff is created. The problem with a standoff is no one wins until someone quits. I wasn’t quitting until Janey was out.
I charged full force into the door and as it turned out it wasn’t an immovable object after all.
The thing didn’t just burst open. It splintered open like weak bones, shattering from brute force.
I was in.
I heard a sudden whimpering and scattering sound and then I heard the sounds of rusted springs and a chain scratching against metal. Then the smell hit me. It was awful, even worse than the next room with the barrel full of human bones.
I glanced to the left wall for a light switch, but Vaughn came in behind me with her flashlight. She swept the room—fast like a well-trained SWAT team member.
The first thing that we saw made her gasp in horror. There was an old bed with a rickety mattress on top. No sheet. No covers.
On top of the mattress were two figures handcuffed together.
The first was the dead girl from the camera that we’d found in Saunt’s motel room. No question. She had that same face piercing and hair and that look of horror on her face, a look that I would never forget.
Her rotting corpse was the smell that rivaled the barrel of human bones. She had been dead and decomposing in that room for God knew how long.
Next, we all must’ve felt the same rush of speechlessness because then we saw Janey Saunt.
She was hiding behind the dead girl’s body. She was shaking and cringing and I realized that the sight of me in the darkness, bursting through her door, must’ve been pretty terrifying.
I said, “Janey? I’m here to help you.”
Vaughn came in around me and said, “Janey. We are the police.”
She must’ve tried to scream, but instead it came out like a
high-pitched shriek like a dying animal.
I whispered to Vaughn. I said, “She probably lost her voice from screaming over and over for help.”
Vaughn shone the flashlight on her and then at me and at herself to show Janey that we weren’t the bad cops.
She said, “We’re the good guys, Janey.”
Vaughn kept the flashlight out of Janey’s face and walked over to her slowly almost in a crouch like you do when approaching a wild dog.
She said, “We have your father, Janey. We’re going to take you to him.”
I glanced back over my shoulder quickly and saw that Agent Oliver was staying back in the hall. He was watching with real concern in his face, which was a good sign because I had suspected him in a way. I mean what were the chances of him being in Hope at the same time that all of this was going on?
Vaughn finally reached Janey and grabbed her. Janey reached out and latched on to her tightly and squeezed her close. That’s when I saw that Janey had been handcuffed to the dead girl.
Those bastards left her here, locked up for days on end, and handcuffed to the other girl, who had probably been alive in the beginning. They probably killed her right in front of Janey. I stared at her corpse. I wasn’t close enough to be sure, but it looked like she had been strangled to death.
I figured that they had handcuffed them together and then whenever the other girl’s ransom didn’t work out, they murdered her right in front of Janey.
Angry filled my heart and a lump came up in my throat. I started breathing heavily and I caught Oliver leaning in closer to me in the doorway. He reached out and put a hand on my shoulder.
He asked, “You okay?”
I said, “Yeah. Couldn’t be better. We got her alive.”
He said, “Yeah. Thanks to you, man.”
I turned and stepped out in the hall.
I said, “Shouldn’t you call the cavalry in?”
He said, “I already texted them. They know I’m here.”
I asked, “Why are you here?”
He said, “To help find her.”
I said, “I mean before. What’re the odds that you’d be here at the same time as this whole thing?”
He paused a beat and then he said, “I was here because of Ryan.”
I said, “Saunt?”
He said, “Yeah. We started investigating him about two months ago for financial crimes. It was really just a dead end. We picked his company because they had some questionable dealings. It was all on suspicion. And it was just about to end until….”
I said, “Until he emptied his bank accounts.”
Oliver said, “Yeah. He emptied his personal accounts and then his business accounts. I thought he had gotten scared and was trying to run. I mean his kid stopped coming to school. The guy emptied his accounts and his house is abandoned.
“One day I was questioning him about his finances and he was being totally compliant and then just when I was about to close the investigation he did all this stuff and basically vanished like he was trying to run.
“I thought that I had overlooked something and he was guilty as sin.”
I said, “But really he was paying off a ransom.”
Oliver nodded and said, “Trying to save his little girl.”
I nodded and said, “Life’s full of anomalies.”
Oliver said, “That poor girl. She must’ve been locked in here for weeks and the only friend that she had was a dead girl. She probably was terrified every time they came to revisit here and bring her water or food.”
I nodded and stayed quiet.
We watched Vaughn hugging Janey tightly.
I said, “Better get those cuffs off her and get her to the hospital. To her father.”
Oliver nodded and entered the room. He approached them slowly so as not to startle Janey.
I watched as he took out handcuff keys and tried to unlock her, but his didn’t work. Vaughn tried hers and they did work. Some departments often buy the same kinds and brands of handcuffs. That’s why often police departments in the same county have the same handcuff keys. Sometimes this applies to a whole state.
The two dead cops had been Colorado State police officers, so they had had the same handcuffs and keys to match.
I smiled because I knew who Mister Man was. At least, I had a pretty good hunch.
Chapter 24
IT TOOK twenty more minutes for Vaughn to convince Janey that I was on her side, which I didn’t take offense too.
She finally convinced her that we were the good guys and not the bad ones. I offered to give her my rain poncho, but Vaughn insisted that I keep it and she gave Janey hers instead.
I didn’t feel right about that, but I didn’t want to argue because I had a plan of my own and I would need my poncho.
Janey had been locked down in that hole for weeks and she was malnourished and dehydrated. I figured that the dead cops had to have fed her and brought her water, but it had only been enough to keep her alive. She hadn’t had much exercise and was moving slowly. Vaughn and Oliver had to lift her up out of the hole and into the pouring rain. I stayed out of the way and watched.
They put her on her feet, but she was walking slowly and they wanted to get her out of the rain as fast as possible. The last thing they would’ve wanted was to give her pneumonia on top of whatever else she might’ve gotten from being down in that hole, possibilities that I didn’t want to think about.
I watched as they brought her over to Vaughn’s police cruiser and placed her in the back seat and bundled her up tightly in the rain poncho.
By this point the water was up to the soles of my boots and in some places it was over an inch deep. I stayed out in the rain, waiting.
Vaughn didn’t come over to me like I had thought. Instead, Oliver ran over to me with his hand up over his head to shield his vision from the rain.
He got about ten feet from me and had to scream at me.
He said, “We’re going to the hospital! Follow us!”
I said, “You got it! Go ahead! Don’t wait! I’ll be right behind you!”
He nodded, turned, and ran back to Vaughn’s car. Her brake lights lit up my face and I watched as she reversed and splashed water and mud from the front tires. She stopped for a second, dead even with me and gave me a quick wave. I waved back and beckoned her to go ahead.
She nodded and slowly drove past, probably so that she wouldn’t spray me with mud. Then she hit the road and floored it as fast as she could in this weather.
I walked out behind her to the road. I watched as the police cruiser’s bright taillights were lost to sight.
I smiled because I had other plans. I would go to the hospital, but later. First, I had to call Mister Man and set up a meeting and then I had to get a gun. Luckily, I knew just the place.
Chapter 25
I SAT IN THE SILVERADO letting the heater blast me with nice warm air and tried to dry off.
After several minutes, I had decided that I would call Mister Man back instead of waiting around for him to call me. I pulled the cell phone and the radio out of my pocket and tossed the radio on the dash.
I looked at the phone and realized that I had forgotten that I couldn’t call out. I didn’t know the passcode. Maybe as I was getting older I was losing the eidetic memory I had been told I had as a kid. I used to have total recall. I guessed now that was either not a hundred percent true or total recall didn’t mean perfect memory. I remembered in high school reading a book called Fight Club and then later seeing one of my favorite movies of the same name. I remembered Brad Pitt’s character was supposed to be the perfect guy. I remember that he had said, “even the Mona Lisa is falling apart.” Well, wasn’t that the damn truth because I was far from being a Mona Lisa, but I sure as hell fell apart sometimes.
Right there in that moment, I got lucky. The cell phone started playing that same song from earlier.
I looked at the screen. Mister Man was calling again.
I swallowed hard, not
because I was nervous, but because I was still angry.
I waited for the third ring and then I answered it.
“Hello?”
Mister Man’s voice came over the phone.
He said, “Hey. Where are you?”
I said, “Still here. Where are you?”
He said, “We are about twenty minutes from Hope.”
Which was the last place that I wanted them. I didn’t want them in Hope. I didn’t want them near Hope or the hospital or, especially, near Janey or her father.
I said, “Don’t stop there. The cops there are all over the place.”
He said, “That’s why I asked where you are? Tell me and we will pick you up.”
I didn’t want that either.
I said, “No. No. What do you think, I’m an idiot?”
Mister Man said, “No, of course not. I’m just trying to get you your money and find my guys. That’s all.”
I said, “I told you that your guys are dead.”
Mister Man said, “I meant find their bodies. I want to cover this thing up as quickly as possible. Where are they?”
I said, “Not yet. You got my money?”
He said, “Yeah. I got it.”
I said, “Okay. Bring it to me and then I’ll take you to them.”
He said nothing for a long minute. I waited, listening to the water pouring across the windshield like it was sweeping to the north. I had the wipers switched all the way off.
Mister Man asked, “Where?”
I smiled because I knew just the place, not the site of the dead cops. That was too out in the open and would’ve been easy to spot an ambush and I wanted to ambush these guys. I didn’t know how many there were, but I would soon enough.
I said, “Do you know the old town of Despair?”
Mister Man said, “Yeah.”
I said, “No one is there anymore. It’s a ghost town now.”
He said, “I know that.”
I said, “So meet me there.”
He said, “Where exactly?”
I thought of Vaughn and of Jack Reacher. I thought about what she had said about Jack’s involvement in the town blowing up. I thought about how she had said that he lit one of their police cars on fire once.