by Greg Iles
“Busy. I’m a busy man.”
“Okay, be that way. I’ve just been wondering about Kate, that’s all.”
“What about her?”
“Why she really died. I mean, I know better than anyone what a bitch she could be. How manipulative she could be.”
“So?”
“At the trial, the D.A. said you were having sex with her, and that’s what made Dr. Elliott kill her. That he found out about it and went crazy.”
Marko laughs again. “No way, man.”
Logan looks at me, his eyes shining in the dark. “He didn’t do it. He didn’t kill her, Penn.”
“This guy is a snake. Don’t believe anything out of his mouth. Let it play out.”
“You never had sex with Kate?” Mia asks. “I know you wanted to.”
“I didn’t say that.” Marko laughs softly. “You know me, I’m a player.”
“You’re a player, all right.”
“Hey, don’t look like that. It’s just the way I am. You know that.”
“Was she better than me?”
“A gentleman never tells, right?”
I curse Marko’s penchant for head games.
“Right,” says Mia. “And you’re such a gentleman.”
“Lovely Mia. Why do you care so much about Kate?”
“I told you. I just wonder what really happened to her. I can’t see Dr. Elliott killing her. He loved her.”
“What about you? You loved Kate, too?”
“I hated her.”
Satisfied laughter. “I thought so. Why did you hate her so much?”
“She took you away, for one thing. Without even trying.”
“No way. You left me.”
“You gave me no choice. But that’s not really it. Kate had everything, you know? All the fucking advantages, but she never really did anything on her own. She won so many things I should have won at school, scholarships and stuff, even when my scores were higher. That SouthBank scholarship…it was all political. Maybe she gave out some blowjobs to get that, I don’t know.”
Marko snickers. “No way. You’re a lot better at that than she was.”
My ears prick up.
“That’s not funny,” Mia says.
“Forget about Kate. I didn’t bring you here to talk about her. Coach Anders, either. I brought you here to see you.”
“No, you didn’t. I was asking about you all week, and you didn’t bring me here. You only brought me here tonight because you’re worried.”
“Well, you’re here now, okay? And I’m glad to see you.”
“Are you?”
“Yeah. Come over here. You know how long it’s been since we were together?”
“Do you?”
There’s a brief pause. Then Marko says, “Six months.”
“I’m impressed. But you haven’t been lonely.”
“No. You want me to be lonely?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. Screw it.”
“What about you? Why don’t you date anybody, Mia?”
“I have a thing for somebody. He doesn’t know about it. He can’t be with me. He’s with someone else.”
A shiver goes through me. She sounds like she’s telling the truth about that.
“You talking about me?” Marko asks.
“No, retard. After what you did to me?”
“Come here, Mia.”
Hesitation. “Why?”
“Just come over here. I miss you.”
More footsteps. Then the voices soften.
“You look so fucking good,” Marko murmurs. “Shit…feel good, too. Just the same.”
There’s no conversation for ten or fifteen seconds.
“You like that?” Mia asks.
More silence.
A scream of frightening intensity bursts from the receiver. “How can you do that? How can you touch her with me right in the next room!”
“I want her,” Marko says. “Get used to it.”
Alicia is sobbing. Then she screams again: “Fuck you! I’m leaving!”
Smothered laughter. “She’ll be back in an hour,” Marko says, “begging me to take her back.”
“I’m not going with you to L.A., either!”
“No? Okay. Maybe Mia will go instead.”
“She won’t either! She’s not that stupid!”
A door slams.
“Are you taking Alicia with you?” Mia asks.
“Maybe just to tide me over till I get to L.A. I’ll dump her there.”
“That’s not very nice.”
“She doesn’t have to go. I made no promises.”
“Marko…”
“I’m not a nice guy, Mia. You know that.”
“Yes, I do.”
“But you still like me. You don’t want a nice guy.”
“You don’t know what I want.”
“I know you want this.”
“He’s not going to admit anything,” Logan says. “He just wants to get laid.”
“At least we know he’s going to L.A. now.”
“Finding Marko isn’t our problem now. It’s getting him to talk.”
Logan is right.
“We need to pull that girl out of there, Penn.”
“Maybe,” I say in a taut voice.
“I don’t think the guy has anything to tell. I think he was just moving some dope that afternoon. That’s what he used Coach Anders to cover.”
“Your legs are amazing,” Marko says. “Alicia’s soft in all the wrong places. Flabby, man. You’re so tight. Inside and out.”
“Am I?”
“You know you are.”
Mia giggles, and the sound of it stuns me. I’ve never heard her laugh like that.
“Are you really going to L.A.?”
“Yeah, I can’t believe it. I never thought I’d miss this place. But now…”
“Why are you leaving tonight?”
I hear the rustle of clothing. “What?”
“Don’t push it, Mia,” I plead softly.
“I just wondered why you picked tonight. Is it because of the trial? Were you waiting for it to be over?”
Silence follows this question. And in the silence, something changes. I feel it like the approach of a predator in the dark.
“Let’s go somewhere else,” Marko says.
“What’s he doing?” asks Logan.
“Why?” asks Mia.
“I think Alicia’s still watching us.”
“I figured you’d like that.”
“Maybe some night. Not tonight. Just us tonight.”
Footsteps on wood, quicker than before.
“Wait,” Mia protests. “Let me get my purse.”
“What for?”
“Girl stuff.”
“Okay.”
There’s a delay, then Marko says, “That’s a cool bag. Let me see it.”
My throat seals shut with fear.
“Shit, shit, shit,” hisses Logan.
“Give that back!” Mia protests. “That’s my private stuff.”
Marko laughs, and then I hear a bump.
“Hey! Get out of there!”
The sound of Marko rummaging through the bag is like furniture being shoved around a house.
“Should we send Kelly in?” Logan asks, his voice taut.
“Get ready,” I tell him.
The rummaging stops. “Here you go,” Marko says. “Tampax, huh? You on your period?”
“That never mattered to you before.”
Knowing laughter. “Come on. Let’s get some privacy.”
“He didn’t find it,” Logan breathes. “I can’t believe it.”
“Where are we going?” Mia asks.
The hair on the back of my neck stands erect. Mia’s last sentence came from the receiver at half the volume of her previous one.
“He did find it,” I say.
“You think?” asks Logan.
“Her signal’s fading.”
“They walked away from the purse
. They’re making out.”
I crouch and lean close to the receiver. There’s a background of static now. There was none before. The voices come in and out, like someone talking on a cell phone at the edge of a tower’s coverage.
“Give me your radio, Don.”
“You sure?”
“Right now!”
He hands me his walkie-talkie. I press the transmit key and say, “Blue, repeat, blue. Blue, repeat, blue. Acknowledge!”
Two clicks come back to me.
Relief courses through me with the power of Cyrus’s heroin.
“Kelly’s going in,” I say. “Thank God.”
“We were crazy to send her in there,” Logan says. “The Three Stooges after all.”
When the explosion comes, I’m not sure whether it blasted out of the receiver or down through the trees.
Logan gapes at me, his eyes wide. “What the fuck was that?”
“Shotgun?”
He shakes his head. “Sounded like a grenade to me.”
My skin goes cold. Kelly wasn’t carrying any grenades.
Logan drops flat on the ground and puts his ear to the receiver. “Nothing.”
“Booby trap?” I suggest.
Logan gets up and draws his gun from his holster. “I’m going up there.”
I want to go, too, but there’s no way I could keep up with him. “Should I call 911 and ask for backup?”
“I’ll do that. You wait for the units and show ’em where to go.”
I nod, but Logan is already charging up the hill, his gun in one hand and a police radio in the other. As I stare after him, one thing hits me with absolute certainty. By the time backup units arrive here, whatever is happening up there will be over. More than anything, I want to call Kelly on the radio, but he specifically told me not to. If I can help him, he’ll call me. Unless he’s dead.
There’s only one contribution I can make to this effort.
Thought.
I start walking toward Ardenwood. The mansion is seventy yards away, half concealed by massive oaks and magnolias. It looks like a great ship moored in a sea of trees.
Where is Marko taking Mia? Outside? If he took her outside, the signal strength would still be strong. And if he went outside, Kelly would already have nailed him. He didn’t go outside. So, where did he go? Did he throw Mia’s purse into a cabinet? Down a hole, maybe? If he did, the signal would simply have dropped out, not faded gradually. Could Ardenwood have a basement? Most antebellum mansions don’t, other than half-sunken “milk rooms” used to keep dairy products cool. Those were small rooms, not true basements…
I’m forty yards from Ardenwood now, and nothing ahead has changed. It’s as though Kelly and Logan walked up this hill and sank into the earth.
My radio crackles to life.
“I found the girl,” Logan says, his voice choked with emotion. “She’s down. She’s been hit in the neck. It’s shrapnel or shotgun pellets.”
I can hardly speak. “Is it Mia?”
“I can’t tell. She’s covered with blood. I need a light…goddamn it.”
“Is she alive, Don?”
“She’s breathing. I don’t think she can talk. God, this was so stupid.”
“Have you seen Kelly?”
“Nothing. I’ve got backup coming, though. Ambulance, too.”
I walk faster—my legs won’t stand a run. My heart is pounding like a kettledrum, and my jaw is clenched tight enough to break my teeth. “Don’t be Mia,” I pray hoarsely. “Please, God, don’t let it be her.” I push my legs faster, trying to reach the house, but I can’t keep my balance. I crash onto the ground, then pick myself up, so winded I can hardly stand.
“It’s not her,” crackles Logan’s voice. “It’s the other girl. She’s bleeding out, Penn. What do I do?”
“It’s not Mia?”
“No. This girl has a fucking ring in her nose. Mia must still be out there.”
Relief rushes through me. “Where are the wounds?”
“Neck, mostly.”
“Direct pressure, Don. Keep that blood inside her.”
I get slowly to my feet and look up at the house. They’re not in there, says a voice in my head. They’re gone.
“Have you heard any motors, Don?”
“No.”
Then it hits me: It’s not a basement. It’s a tunnel!
I turn to my left and walk away from the house, down the hill toward the low ground on the north side of Ardenwood. As the Civil War began to turn against the Confederacy, many plantation owners realized that the Northern armies would eventually sweep southward over their lands. Some planters had only days to prepare, but others—especially those farthest south—had months and even years. A tunnel could be used to store valuables, and then in the last extremity as a means of escape from marauding soldiers or even neighbors, a real danger to the many Natchez planters who sympathized with the Yankee cause. I’ve never toured Ardenwood, but I know as surely as I know my name that it has an escape tunnel.
Marko Bakic knows it, too.
Moving downhill is a lot easier than moving up. In less than a minute, I’m moving into the kudzu that lines the bayou on the north side of Ardenwood. The smell of organic decay blends with the reek of dead fish and fetid mud. It’s a familiar odor. The whole of Natchez is threaded with bayous and creeks, and I came to know them well as a boy. The planter who owned Ardenwood would have known them, too—this bayou, anyway. And when he decided to build his escape tunnel, in which direction would he have told his slaves to dig?
North.
Dig in any other direction, and they’d not only have had to dig horizontally, but vertically again to come up out of the earth—unless they dug dozens of yards farther than necessary. No slave owner would waste labor like that, especially during wartime. He’d have ordered his “darkies” to dig the shortest route to safety, and that was north. Thirty yards of tunnel would have carried the diggers to the bayou where I’m standing now.
Two feet of black water simmers between the banks, with tangled tree roots reaching like fingers down into it, and long beards of moss hanging from the limbs above. The kudzu is too thick to move quietly along either bank. And walking through kudzu is the best way to get bitten by a copperhead—especially at night. Pushing through the vines that choke the bank, I step down into the water, then begin walking slowly toward the back of the mansion.
The closer I get to Ardenwood, the higher the banks rise around me. If I’m right about the tunnel, it’s possible that Marko and Mia already came out of it, but all I can do is follow my instinct. I try not to splash as I slide my feet along the muddy bottom. With every step I take, unseen creatures scuttle among the roots on the banks, and shining whips uncurl in the water and glide away. Water moccasins. Snakes have always terrified me, but Mia is facing a lot worse than that. Tensing my exhausted leg muscles against the bite of fangs, I push steadily forward.
Ardenwood towers above me now, more like part of the landscape than any man-made thing. If there’s a tunnel leading out of that ruined shell, I should be getting close to its mouth. I stop in the water and listen with the focus of desperation.
Mosquitoes buzz…
Wet leaves rustle…
A turtle splashes—
“If you make a sound, I’ll kill you.”
Unspeakable fear paralyzes me where I stand.
“Did you hear me, bitch?”
“I heard you.”
At the sound of Mia’s small voice, hope flares within me.
“Move your ass, then!”
A splash sounds behind me, much bigger than that made by the turtle. If I move now, Marko will know I’m here. I hear another splash, and then the sound of a siren floats through the trees.
“Fuck!” curses Marko. “You lying whore!”
“Run,” Mia urges him. “You can get away. I’ll just slow you down.”
“If I leave you here, I leave you dead.”
“Marko, please—”
>
“Shut up!”
The siren’s getting louder fast.
“This way!” Marko says harshly.
I hear more splashing, closer to me this time, and getting closer. Marko must be less than ten feet away, yet he’s still walking toward me.
He can’t see me.
It’s so dark at the bottom of the bayou that only the sky is visible. Only night predators can see here. I stand utterly still as the splashes get closer. Marko curses as he works along the left bank, pulling Mia behind him—at least that’s what I picture from the sounds. The water washes against my leg as they pass. They only miss me because they’re walking half in and half out of the narrow stream, while I stand dead in the center.
When they’re ten feet past me, I turn and begin to follow them.
Marko is moving fast now, away from the direction of the road. If I don’t pick up the pace, he’ll lose me. If I do, he may hear me. Twenty feet ahead, two shadows walk through a column of moonlight let in by a space in the trees. Mia’s shorter frame is easily distinguishable from Marko’s. I move faster, fighting a stitch in my side. How long before my legs cramp? How long before I fall again, and Marko runs back and shoots me while I try to rise from the water? As I ask myself these questions, a quick series of splashes sounds behind me. I don’t know what they mean, but it sounds like a horse galloping up the stream.
As I stand frozen, Marko passes through the column of light again, moving swiftly and soundlessly back toward me. In seconds, he will either pass me or crash into me. If he passes me, whatever is behind me will be a sitting duck for him. If he hits me—
“Watch out!” Mia screams. “He’s got a gun!”
Three feet ahead of me, a black form spins out of the dark and fires a gun. The flame spits away from me, though, back toward Mia. Consumed by fury, I crouch in the water and hold out my father’s Browning. Marko fires again, this time in my direction, bracketing the bayou with bullets. I can’t fire for fear of hitting Mia.
“Motherfucker!” Marko screams, firing like a maniac. “Izuzetni!”
Then his gun clicks empty.
With all the energy left in my body, I drive my legs upward and swing the Browning in a roundhouse arc. Metal crashes into bone, and Marko goes down in the water. I raise the Browning again and drive it down hard where I heard the splash. This time I hit something softer. An explosion of air hits my face, but then powerful arms whip around my neck and drag me down into the water.