Three Graves Full

by Jamie Mason

  The ruckus in the clearing pinched her attention away from Ford. They were barking and snarling and yelping like a trio of cornered foxes. Tessa whirled into the mix. The keystone strain was on Tim, and the air shook all around where he stood. His anger bore down on the man from the house, and she didn’t know why. He was okay, the man from the house; someone you could love when he wasn’t crumpling. She tried to show Tim that everything was all right, that the man just needed to hear a Good girl.

  Then she went to Tim directly, but before she could convince him, a blast broke over the night.

  And now the man from the house was running. Directly toward the hole.

  Tessa’s senses arced in a wide dome around wherever she was. Light and sound played in the vault of what she knew, showing her the edges and guiding her around the curves. The meager light was swallowed up everywhere by things, and it glimmered, uninterrupted, where things were not. Sound muffled over, under, and through the woods, and the notes of the wind murmured back to her the shape and distance of what was out there.

  These woods were woolly in places—dense enough in spots to discourage even Tessa’s curiosity—but tall and twiggy and dry in long stretches, and mulchy in the hollows, damp and compelling. The night noises were a sissing, clattering cascade. Up ahead and to the right was a gap. It was huge. Sound fell in, starlight fell in, and soon, if he didn’t trip up, the man from the house would fall in, too.

  Tessa chased him down, barking. She galloped to his right, herding him back away from where he’d meet the edge, but the forest’s fingers tangled close in that space and their whip ends thrashed him. She hung back, giving him no reason to risk a double-around. She let him think he was just a touch faster. He ran a narrow margin between the brambles and the path to the pit that he couldn’t feel, just yards ahead and three wide slide-steps to his right. The man from the house ran heedless, nibbling into his leeway, as he shrank from the grasping brush that crowded closer and closer and flogged his left side as he sped by. But Tessa knew she could be scarier than a bush. She found more speed and snarled and snapped at his right flank. He screamed and veered away from her. Almost safe. Tessa pulled alongside her herd of one as he came abreast of the hole. Dancing inches from the edge, she bared her fangs in an unparalleled performance of ferocity.

  Nimble as she was, though, losing her back legs to crumbling earth was a daunting tax on her agility. The first displaced stones rattled down the sides of the drop. Tessa lunged for firmer ground, but the rim gave way under her push-off. She yelped and flexed her toes into the loose dirt. Her back legs cycled for purchase, but instead she kicked away more ground beneath her than the millimeters of advantage she bought.

  Tessa understood gravity. She’d had blessedly little experience with pain in her life. Ford had always kept her safe. But she tensed for a lesson and fell.

  • • •

  Boyd hadn’t completely lost it in nearly twenty years. Gunfire didn’t always bother him, but every now and again, without warning, it would bring back the picture of his mother on her knees in the kitchen, cringing away from the .22’s barrel, or the family dog cowering under the stock of the hunting rifle, or of Bart charging blindly past any good sense, flying in front of their father’s rage and aim in the yard.

  His father had never pulled the trigger, except to shoot at game, but the threat of it came down reliably three or four days each time before he’d take his leave again. The screaming clashes had left Boyd likely to wet the bed for weeks afterward. He’d stew, so bitter against his mother, his brother, and any danged dog who couldn’t seem to keep clear of Daddy’s temper. It was simple enough, wasn’t it, not to get on Daddy’s last nerve? It wasn’t as if the man didn’t offer up plenty of warnings. From these lessons, Boyd had lost patience with stupid people who couldn’t do as they ought to protect the peace. But Boyd had never brandished a gun that he didn’t fire. He was a better man than that. It was a cowardly thing to threaten if you weren’t willing to see it through.

  When the shot rang out as he hunkered against the tree, the bullet tore through the leaves and nicked bark somewhere close by. The seam it cut through the air split the strangling quiet from around him and catapulted Boyd Montgomery out of the last of his self-control.

  He sprang from his crouch and vaulted the last landmark he’d managed to keep track of, a fallen tree he’d crossed once already on his way into this part of the forest. Some deep instinct of the landscape kept him more or less upright, but as soon as he felt a more open breeze, Boyd’s speed came on. The wind of it, and of his own breath, roared through his ears, blessedly louder than the echo of the muzzle blast.

  • • •

  When the dog had jumped him, back in the clearing, Jason had thought for a moment that she was intent on ripping off his face; that she had somehow sniffed out everything he’d got away with. Her breath had streamed up his cheeks, but before he could even brace for the pain, her soft, wet tongue had stroked his chin. Her excited panting lapped over him, and he swayed with the happy waving of her tail that was rocking her paws against his chest.

  Bayard’s taking a shot at him had canceled out all the high-minded analysis of interspecies communion, and Jason had fled. Fled like he didn’t know he had that brand of flee in him. The dog had gone primal and given chase, bearing down in an attack. Jason had felt a swell of almost pride that he’d been able to keep her mostly behind him. But he’d no more than thought it, and she was there, striding easily beside him and growling over the crash of his feet and the thundering of his pulse. The Neanderthal terror of having a wolf at his knee had blanked his mind, but then she’d disappeared with a yelp.

  And by her fall, Jason now knew where he was. His breath burned bright tracks down his throat and caught full fire in his lungs. He bent over gasping, hands on knees, his shirt sticking, cold and wet, to his back. The blood pulled a tidal sound against his eardrums, so he didn’t hear or see the man rushing up behind him.

  Nor, apparently, did Boyd see much of anything, tearing down the gap in the trees as if all the bears in the woods were on him. He was lucky not to have fallen into the sinkhole himself. He barreled, full throttle, into Jason, who was hunched over in the middle of the lane, minding his own struggling heart.

  The two men shouted their surprise, and both took the collision for a tactical maneuver. Jason thought Bayard had come to finish what his pistol shot hadn’t. Boyd battled everyone he’d been expecting over his shoulder for the last three years. Whoever it might be was about to take a beating in Phil’s place for not being where he’d always been, where he should have been, with his cars and his pills. That they were both wrong hardly mattered. Punching and tussling became a blaring red command, instantly washing both men clean of civility. Boyd’s teeth itched to sink into raw meat, and Jason’s knuckles couldn’t get enough thrashing. That they couldn’t see each other only blocked the last inhibition that would have pulled them back. So they wound around each other, clawing, clambering, twisting for advantage and protection, each raining blows on the other without knowing or caring where they landed.

  Months of tension stoked strength into Jason’s thin arms, and years of bottled frustration fed vengeance into Boyd. With the ebb of stamina, the two men reeled up the path they’d come. Then the flow of renewed purpose tottered them forward, deeper into uncharted territory. Uncharted for the two of them bound together, but Jason, at least, knew where he was.

  The light of the next day had been seeping into the sky for the better part of an hour. The trees hoarded night at their roots, so the slow dawning was only clear at the verge of the crater.

  The slate gray of the forest floor could no longer compete with the ink black of the dark well at their feet. Their tussle had marched them to the ledge of fickle dirt at the rim of the sinkhole. All the heat of the fight left Boyd as he flung out his arms and sucked in a great measure of terror in its place. He heard the patter of loosened soil and imagined that he felt little holes sieving open, tickl
ing his feet through the soles of his boots. His prodigious will scrambled backward, but ran up against his frozen spine. He was poised like a diver, looking out over a great pool of shadow.

  Where there should have been solid ground, there was nothing under all ten of Boyd’s toes and five of Jason’s. Jason was firmly on his back foot and just slightly behind the tightrope line where Boyd perched. Boyd shifted his weight to his heels and inched back the tips of his elbows, a trembling reversal from the irresistible drag of the yawning hole, but his back struck Jason’s chest, and Jason did not yield.

  He slid his leg through Boyd’s wide stance, blocking the bettering of the other man’s balance. He gripped the man’s left arm for pull and his right shoulder for push. One hard twist from Jason and the detective, or so he thought, would drop headlong into the abyss.

  Jason, once again at a crossroads, swallowed an ache in his throat. Time itself was nauseating, the seconds oozing over him, so slow and lucid compared to the last occasion he’d straddled a man’s death. There had been no choice with Harris. The instant kicked and was over, bronco-wild and terrifying.

  This was worse. The abandoned roadwork that branched back to the main thoroughfare was just a few yards away. He knew where he was now. It pulled at him like a magnet. But he wouldn’t do it, no. Still, he couldn’t unsee the last gap of opportunity. He might make it before the rest of the police arrived, if he could bring himself to . . .

  Both men, chests heaving, looked to the rumble of running feet. Jason felt a tickle of hair brush his face. It set his eyes to watering as the two men turned their heads, automatically, together. Jason heard Leah, “Detective, wait!”—then Bayard’s voice, from farther away than it should have been, demanding that Jason step back.

  The last thing Jason needed was a puzzle. Suddenly, the man he’d latched onto was too tall and thin to be the policeman, but that was somehow not as disorienting as the desperate need to rub the itch from his nose and to figure out how Tim Bayard’s hair had grown half a foot and turned yellow overnight.

  “Get him off me,” cried the man on the ledge, voice pitched phobia-high.

  Bayard’s flashlight lit his face. “Boyd Montgomery? What are you—”

  “Get him off and I’ll go with you. Whatever you think, I never laid a hand on Bart. I never would have. He did that hisself. Please! Just get him offa me. We’re gonna fall,” Boyd wailed.

  “What the hell?!” Bayard yelled full into the trees.

  “I only came back for Phil,” Boyd babbled.

  “Getty, back up!”

  “ . . . Katielynn and that whore-hound, long-haired faggot . . . in my bed.” A clump of dirt dislodged when Boyd, in spite of himself, ground his foot just the slightest for emphasis. It rattled a tiny avalanche over the side. Boyd shrieked. “I wasn’t gonna hurt nobody!”

  Jason had seen Leah in silhouette straighten at the mention of Katielynn, and she’d cringed as if she’d been slapped at the description of Reid. Jason, at the dawning of the end of his bid, heard the shower of dirt over the edge gain tempo. It was over and he was leaving this glen headfirst down the sinkhole or in handcuffs.

  Boyd slipped forward and reached back for a hold. He found only Jason, who buckled under the fight between momentum and retreat. Clods of forest floor rained down the cliffside. Bayard ran forward with a cry of “No!” He swiped blindly in the gloom, snagged a flailing arm, and hauled back on it. A scream tumbled down the side of the rock wall, cut short midhowl with a sodden rip and a splintering clatter of dead wood.

  30

  The light dialed the black a little bit bluer with every passing second. Tim Bayard sucked in a breath over the wicked cramp that knotted his side. His holstered cell phone had gone a fair piece toward digging all the way up under his ribs, and he couldn’t help but wish he’d left the damned thing in the car. Jason Getty sprawled over Tim’s lower legs and had more length of him over the lip of the sinkhole than out of it. This was especially worrisome the harder Getty clamped and clawed, climbing Tim’s body.

  “Jason!” Leah ran forward, but Bayard threw out a halting hand.

  “Stop. Don’t come any closer. Getty, stop! Hold on, but for God’s sake, stop pulling.” Tim and Jason lay still, locked in a jumble. Their breaths, ragged and halting, slipped into a rhythm until their shoulders rose and fell in time. “Getty, ease back this way. But slowly. Can you feel it slipping?”

  Jason nodded and crept forward on his elbows, trying to kick away as little dirt as possible. A few inches at a time, they held their breath and pulled off the rim. Flat on his back on the packed earth, Tim sighed one last time, “What the hell?”

  Back on his feet, he motioned for Leah’s flashlight. His own had got dropped in the lunge and had been kicked away over the edge. His gun had also been knocked clear, but Tim didn’t mention that just yet. He ran the light over the ground casually, checking the integrity of the footing around them and for any sign of his pistol. “You two just stay right there where I can see you,” he said in the same voice he would have used if he’d been fully armed and heading up a posse.

  He followed a solid-looking swath of ground to the edge and peered over the brink. Two stories down, Boyd Montgomery lay still, bristling all over with red-tipped spears from a tangle of roots jutting out from the side of the embankment.

  Bayard rubbed at his eyes, as if he could soothe away the image. But it had already sunk in. “Oh, Christ.”

  “He hit me with the shovel.”

  Bayard’s head snapped up, as did Jason’s. “What?” Bayard asked.

  Leah’s ears were still ringing from the shot, and it didn’t do anything kind for the pain pulsing hot-pink and green in her head. She stared at the two men, watching them watch her in the rising light, knowing that everything that lay ahead was all blame and tears and trying to explain something that was nearly impossible to make any sense of. She’d had to dig for her stupid truth just once too often.

  All Leah wanted was to subtract herself from this night, to undo everything she’d changed, right or wrong, about what would have happened without her. If that meant leaving Jason to his fate, then so be it. Her fury filled her through to the fingertips. She wished she could catch his eye, so that he’d see her resolve, so that he’d know not to fight it. But she couldn’t make him out any clearer than that he was the taller of the two outlines facing her.

  “He hit me with the shovel,” she repeated. “I went over to the house—just to see where Reid had died, that’s all I was going to do, I swear. And then I caught him digging up the backyard.” She drew in a shuddery breath.

  Jason found more bitter pleasure in having called it right than he would have guessed. Given the first chance, just as he’d thought she would, she had turned away from his explanation. He knew his own fault in this night, and others. The reasons for what had happened didn’t mean all that much in the end. But that she hadn’t waited until he was at least out of earshot stung with an equal measure of surprise. The last chance at a mad dash for the road cast its vote, and Jason’s blood fizzed into his legs, readying him to run, no matter if it ended with a bullet in his back. But the disappointment was deadweight and it slowed the trick.

  Leah’s anger carved the mist, drawing Bayard and Jason along on the brass hook of her story. “At first, I just assumed he was the man who lived there. I didn’t know that he was Boyd Montgomery until I saw him up close. How could I have known?” She pointed an accusing finger at Bayard. “You told me he was dead.” Her arm fell to dangle at her side, exhaustion sapping the strength from her. “He’d just dug up some hideous thing—Phil, I guess, from the sound of it—and then he hit me when he realized I saw him. But then Jason ran out of the house to help me. We got away, but Montgomery was chasing us all over the place. He stabbed Detective Watts. Oh, God, I think Mr. Watts only came out to the house because of me.”

  Leah sobbed out her very real regret, while Jason’s fight and flight went cold in his feet. He tried to play it back and
translate at the same time.

  “God Almighty! Ford!” Bayard quickly herded them together and steered them back toward what they’d all nearly forgotten in the clearing. He kept at a trot as best he could through the undergrowth in the rising dawn.

  Jason caught her eye once they were close enough to see each other in the low light, and she drilled him straight through with a hard look. She sketched out her story on the way, calling it out to Bayard’s back, but holding Jason silent with blazing eyes. She told them the story, true enough, of how Jason had helped her get to her car, their pursuit to rescue Detective Watts when the truck burned rubber down the road, and how they didn’t know a thing about what Boyd Montgomery had been up to this night. Not one thing. Both men listened, but only Jason heard.

  • • •

  The morning had teased up a mist from the ground, but the faint river fog, as it grew, made the dark almost preferable for finding things. Big, fallen cop things, for instance. The lone flashlight had been more useful in total darkness. Now all the beam threw back was a glare of haze. Whatever her gamble back at the hole, Leah’s thoughts for Ford Watts dropped an electric despair down through her stomach. They’d left him for far too long.

  They walked three abreast, picking their way back as best they could. Leah heard a dragging behind her, she was almost sure. She spun to the source, replayed the sound in her mind, and overlaid it on the last image she had of him—slack against a tree, his long legs stretched out before him. In her imagination, he drew one leg up through the leaves and fallen twigs beneath him. The projection matched exactly the dredging scrape she’d heard. Leah grabbed Bayard’s flashlight arm and pushed it around toward the rustle.

  She found his ankle first, darker than all the dead wood that the light crawled over, and also, unlike the forest shrapnel, it was wrapped in a sock. They ran to Ford’s side.