Текст книги "The Bone Tree"
Автор книги: Greg Iles
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Текущая страница: 46 (всего у книги 58 страниц)
CHAPTER 71
CAITLIN HUNCHED AGAINST the trunk of the cypress tree, gasping for breath, every atom of consciousness focused on the bloody tube protruding from her chest. Shock had set in—she knew from the uncontrollable shivering. Her visual field had darkened at the edges; the world was fading to a small circle, to the tube in her hand. Most alarming, her jugular vein had swollen again, so badly that it was hard to bend her neck. Every few seconds she looked skyward and twisted her neck; the motion seemed to help keep her conscious.
As her symptoms worsened, Caitlin had tried to drain more blood from her chest, but to her horror she’d discovered that the tube had clogged shut. The blood must have clotted inside the pen barrel. She figured she might be able to expel the blood from the tube if she pulled it out of her chest and blew as hard as she could, but she knew she’d never get the damned thing back into her pericardium.
Her panic over Tom passing out again had become anger, then rage at his weakness. But after screaming for half a minute, she’d realized two things: first, that Tom was never going to wake up again; and second, this situation was as much her fault as his, for lying to Penn last night when she could easily have told him that Tom was hiding at Quentin Avery’s house. If she’d only done that, everything that followed would have been different. . . .
Faced with the reality that she would die unless she could relieve the growing pressure on her heart, she tried to contort her neck sufficiently to suck on the barrel herself. This was akin to trying to suck her own nipple—which she’d once done at the request of a college boyfriend—only much more difficult. Because the pen was three inches lower than her nipple, and also because as the end of the pen barrel neared her lips, she felt its tip slip out of her pericardium. Dizzy with pain and terror, she drove the pen to its maximum depth again.
A dark rivulet of blood ran down her belly.
At first she thought the fresh pressure of built-up cardiac blood had driven the clot out of the tube. A surreal image of herself on television rose in her mind: she was making the talk-show rounds, like that kid who’d cut off his own arm to get free from a cliff. And I’m just as stupid as he was for running off to a blank space on the map, where no one knew where to look.
“I’m a media whore!” she cried, giggling hysterically as the echo of her voice rebounded through the swamp.
But her exultation evaporated almost instantly. The rivulet of blood had come from her wound, not the pen barrel. The plastic tube was still clotted shut.
“No,” she whispered, fighting the urge to drive the barrel deeper into her suffocating heart. “No, no, no.” Her back and chest felt as though someone had been pounding them with a mallet. “Please, God,” she moaned, remembering the blessed relief after the first jets of blood had drained enough smothering fluid for her heart to find its rhythm again.
Staring down at the clogged tube, she began to sob quietly. I’m going to die because I don’t have a six-inch needle and a syringe. “For want of a nail,” she whispered. “One motherfucking nail.”
She probably had only minutes to live. Tom lying motionless on the ground made her future all too plain. A wail of desolation forced its way up through her constricted throat, but the strangled squawk that emerged probably traveled less than fifty feet. Her vision flickered, faded to black. Panicked again, she shook her head and shifted position; the world returned.
Magic, she thought. But soon the light would vanish forever.
A soft hiss sounded in her ears. Then little splashes threw water droplets off the surface of the swamp like glass beads over a black floor. Only a few dozen at first . . . then hundreds, thousands . . . millions. As Caitlin stared, each impacting raindrop registered in her brain as a separate event. Time had slowed, or dilated somehow, every second stretching to many times its usual duration. The chilling drops fell indifferently on Tom’s gray face, and he did not move.
Somewhere above the canopy of branches, she knew, beyond the leaden clouds, glorious sunlight streamed over the horizon onto this part of the world. A few miles to the west, the Mississippi River rolled over the land as it had for millions of years. And somewhere to the north, Penn had probably heard from Terry Foreman by now. He might be racing toward Athens Point even now. But long before he found Caitlin, she would have vanished from the world.
Her baby, too.
The thought of a new life growing inside her did not drive Caitlin to fight harder. The last thin filament that held her to the world—an umbilical as fine as a strand of spiderweb—had stretched to the point of breaking. The old part of her, the super-competent control freak, was finally laying down her weapons and giving in to the ebb and flow of eternity. She recalled how safe she’d felt inside the ancient tree behind her, the sacred chamber, a centuries-old repository of bones. Why not use her last reserve of strength to get out of the rain? Even dying animals had the sense to find a warm, dry place to lie down for the last time.
She tried to scoot to her left, but she couldn’t manage it. She could no longer even shift her own body weight. She would die here, and before long, animals would crawl up out of the water and devour what remained of her.
Circle of fucking life, she thought. So it goes.
The rain fell cold upon her face, but she didn’t care. Now that she’d accepted the inevitable, her thoughts drifted to Penn, and to Annie. She wished she could say something to them, explain that she’d had no intention of abandoning them when she came on this crazy quest.
She picked up her Treo and checked the screen again, praying for a miracle. One bar could be considered divine intervention at this point. But there were none.
She pressed 911 anyway.
Nothing happened.
Staring at the silver device, Caitlin realized that she had one last way to speak to Penn and Annie, or at least to leave them a message. After gathering her thoughts as best she could, she activated the Voice Memo program and began talking softly. She had to pause every few words to take replenishing breaths, but this effort brought her a feeling of peace that nothing else had. She tried not to cry, but tears came anyway. She felt like a mountaineer trapped on a storm-shrouded peak, leaving a final message for her family. As she ran out of words, she realized with a jolt that she was losing consciousness.
Is this how it ends? she thought dully.
She still had enough neurons firing to know that if she could clear the clot from the pen and drive it back into her pericardium, she might be able to save herself. As she lowered her gaze, the world began to shrink again, tunneling down to the small plastic tube. Then a new train of thoughts flashed through her mind, not images from her past, but from the future: She lay on a hospital bed, a pink baby swaddled in her arms. Tom stood beside the bed, grinning through his white beard. He had somehow delivered the baby, even though his arthritic hands made that all but impossible. Peggy stood on the other side of the bed, Annie smiling beside her. The scene was pure Norman Rockwell. Yet as corny as it was, Caitlin wanted it more than anything else the world had to offer.
But where was Penn? He wasn’t in the picture. He wasn’t even in the room. But Caitlin could hear him. He was shouting at her, seemingly from far away. What was he saying? He wanted her to do something. But what?
Pull it out! he cried. You have to do it now. Pull it out and clear that clot. . . .
“Do it now,” she echoed, her voice slurred.
Caitlin raised her right hand to the two inches of plastic protruding from her chest. Her fingers, slick with blood, could barely grip the pen barrel. She tried to squeeze harder, but her fingers lost their purchase. The hexagonal tube stayed in her chest. With her last pulse of energy, she seized the tube, yanked it from her body, stuck it in her mouth, and blew with all the force left in her.
“GOT IT!” CARL SHOUTS, as Danny holds the hover with perfect steadiness.
“If it is her,” Danny says worriedly. “It could be one of the search teams.”
“We must be right on top of her!”
“No boat wake,” I say, desperately scanning the black water as Danny shifts the bird thirty yards to starboard. The surface of the swamp is empty of human signs for as far as I can see.
“Ten o’clock!” cries Carl. “What do you see, Penn?”
“Holy shit,” I breathe, catching sight of the crown of a massive cypress tree in the distance. “Look at that, Carl.”
“Son of a bitch,” he says. “That’s gotta be it. Danny?”
The chopper is already rolling right, picking up speed as we bore in toward the ancient giant.
“Got it again!” Carl says. “This is it.”
As Danny slows to a hover fifty yards from the tree, I catch sight of something too white and clean to be part of the natural environment.
“Under the tree!” I shout. “Something white.”
“I see it,” says Danny.
The JetRanger dips forward, then descends toward what now looks almost like a white flag of surrender. As we draw closer, I recognize the red stripe across the back of Caitlin’s jacket.
“It’s her!” I scream, straining against the four-point harness that holds me in my seat. “That’s her jacket.”
I’m suddenly terrified that Caitlin’s been dumped in the swamp like Casey Whelan. “Back off a little bit. Get down close to the surface, so we can see under the branches.”
“It’s gonna be close,” Danny says in a taut voice. “Those branches are a problem.”
“Screw the branches,” Carl growls. “Take this bitch in, Danny.”
The JetRanger edges up to the colossal tree, chopping branches into kindling like the world’s biggest Weedwacker. A choking lump rises in my throat. Caitlin is sitting with her back against the cypress. She’s still too far away for me to see if her eyes are open or closed, but if she were all right, she would be jumping and waving at the helicopter.
“Get us down, Danny! Hurry!”
With an expert hand, Danny noses the chopper still closer to the enormous cypress, descending all the while. Suddenly Carl is at my shoulder, staring through the side window with me.
“I’ll go down first,” he says. “With the hoist.”
“Bullshit you will.” I grab the handle on my chest and pop the harness free.
Carl opens the side door, then begins prepping the rescue basket. When I look forward, Danny is holding a pair of field glasses to his eyes.
“What do you see?” I ask, dread filling my chest.
“She’s got blood on her chest. A good bit. Her eyes are closed. We’ve got to get her out of there ASAP. Let Carl go down first.”
“I’m going down.”
“Penn, wait.” Danny looks back, his eyes searching mine from beneath his helmet. “Your father’s down there, too. He’s lying face-up, his eyes are closed, and he’s not moving.”
I scramble back to where Carl is prepping the aluminum mesh basket for descent and drop to the floor. From here, I can see the pilot was right. Dad is lying on his back about ten feet from Caitlin, near the water’s edge.
How the hell did this happen? How did he get here? In less than a second I know the answer: Snake Knox brought him here.
Carl checks the hoist’s cables, then gives Danny a thumbs-up. We’re only six feet above the water now. I’m going to jump. As though reading my mind, Carl grabs for my arm, but I twist away and leap through the door before he can stop me.
My feet dig into soft mud as icy water closes around my chest. The chopper’s rotors fling a stinging storm of spray and debris into the air, nearly forcing my eyes shut. Just above me, Carl slides the rescue basket through the open door.
At six foot one, I can bull my way over to the cypress without swimming. Pushing through the sulfurous water, I see a dark vertical slash in its trunk, like a great scar left by the sword of a giant. She really found it, I think. That’s the fucking Bone Tree. This realization transforms the cold iron of dread into molten terror—not of the tree and its legends, but of the men who use it as their killing ground.
Clawing my way out of the water, I scrabble up onto the tussock beside my father. “Dad!” I shout, shaking him. “Wake up!”
He doesn’t move. Checking the pulse at his throat, I feel nothing, but my fingers are already stiff from the cold water. Leaving him for the moment, I crawl to Caitlin, whose stomach and lap are red with sticky blood. My right hand goes straight for the artery beneath her jaw. Her lips are blue and her neck strangely swollen, but she’s faintly warm, as though life still thrums somewhere beneath her skin.
There’s no pulse in her throat.
“Caitlin!” I shout, taking her cheeks in my hands and squeezing tight. “Caitlin, can you hear me?”
She doesn’t move. With rising panic I turn and wave to Carl for help. He’s fighting through the water now, nose and eyes just above the surface, dragging the rescue basket behind him. Turning back to Caitlin, I slide my hand over her belly, searching for her wound. My palm hits something hard: a Bic pen, stuck to the blood on her stomach. Six inches above it is a small hole beneath her left breast. A bullet made that. . . .
A loud splashing sounds behind me, and the ground thumps as Carl drops to his knees at my side. “Any pulse?”
“Nothing. She’s bled out, Carl. She’s dead!”
His dark fingers go to her throat, where mine were moments ago. “My ass,” he says. “I feel something!” He presses his ear to her chest. “This girl ain’t dead till a doctor tells me she is. Let’s get her in the chopper. We can make Baton Rouge General in fifteen minutes!”
“The basket?” I ask numbly.
“Fuck the basket! Danny’s practically on the surface. I’ll carry her. You get your old man. He’s bigger.”
As Carl turns to the hovering chopper and waves Danny still lower, I run to my father and grab him beneath the arms. Struggling with his heavy bulk, I see Carl drag Caitlin away from the Bone Tree, lift her slim body over his shoulders, and charge into the blast of spray coming off the water. Replaying the scene in Brody’s basement two nights ago, I drop to my knees and heave my father’s body over my shoulder, then march down into the black water while Danny’s screaming rotors smash bone-thick branches off the towering tree above me.
CHAPTER 72
WALT HAD KEPT nearly a mile between himself and Forrest’s cruiser as he followed his quarry southward. The GPS tracker allowed him that luxury. He prayed that Knox and Ozan were driving to wherever Tom was being held. If they weren’t, then Forrest might already have given the kill order, and Tom could be dead or dying at this moment.
For the thousandth time Walt cursed Mackiever for not bugging Knox’s car, but there was nothing to be done now. All he could do was follow Knox and the Redbone to wherever they were bound. The cruiser was following a roundabout back road that looked as though it might lead around the Lusahatcha Swamp, toward the Mississippi River. Walt couldn’t actually see any water, but he could smell it. When you lived in a dry state like Texas, you got to where you could smell rain from a hundred miles off.
When he slowed Drew’s pickup to soften the sickening drop of a pothole, the guns in the bag on the floor behind him made a reassuring clank. Thinking himself at the end of this empty, winding road, Walt visualized various scenarios. No matter what odds he confronted, he could not hesitate to fire, as he’d done back at the Bouchard lake house. In fact, he decided, he would shoot the bastards in the back if he got the chance. Kidnapping was a felony, after all.
I ain’t proud today, he thought. Or particular.
FORREST KNOX LEANED AGAINST the side of his cruiser and watched the pirogue glide toward him out of the cypress trees. Ozan looked back from the water’s edge and gave him a thumbs-up sign. If the boy in the boat had done as instructed, then Caitlin Masters was no longer a problem.
Forrest had parked his cruiser right beside the boy’s junk pickup truck. He left his engine running, so he couldn’t hear the hum of the trolling motor as the pirogue neared the shore. Harold Wallis raised his left hand and waved. Ozan waved back. As Wallis cut his motor and drifted toward them, Forrest could see the kid was surprised to find them waiting for him.
“Hey there, Colonel!” Wallis called. “I didn’t expect to see ya’ll out here.”
The pirogue’s bow bumped the shore.
“I guess you didn’t,” Ozan said, “since you didn’t call us back.”
Harold opened his mouth but no answer emerged.
Forrest took a couple of steps toward the water’s edge. It surprised him that a drug courier like this boy couldn’t sense the danger in what he had done.
“That was a big job you did for us, Harold,” he said. “We want you to know we appreciate it.”
The boy relaxed a little, but he didn’t move to get out of the boat.
“What about the girl?” Ozan asked. “She dead?”
Harold ducked his head with an exaggerated nod. “Yes, sir. She gone. Long gone.”
“How many times did you shoot her?”
Wallis’s eyes flicked back and forth. “Oh, three, fo’ times. Right in the chest. She died inside the tree.”
“You checked to be sure?”
“Yes, sir. She bled to death right there.”
Ozan had taken a step closer to the water. “What’sa matter with your arm? Is that blood on it?”
Wallis shook his head quickly. A stupid lie.
“Did she shoot you?” Ozan asked.
“It ain’t nothin’, Captain. She winged me after the first couple of shots. But I finished her off good.”
The kid was definitely lying, Forrest decided. He’d shot her, all right, but he hadn’t stuck around to watch her bleed out.
“It’s too bad she had to die,” Forrest said. “She was a hell of a pretty girl, wasn’t she?”
The boy looked at the bottom of his boat. “Yes, sir.”
“Did you think about fucking her? As a little bonus?”
Wallis shook his head. “No, sir. I just done my business, so my brother could get out of Angola.” He looked up at last, clearly frightened. “You gonna take care of that next month, Colonel? Like the captain said?”
“Absolutely,” Forrest said. “Least I can do, after what you did today.”
The boy’s face was still troubled. “That lady told me she was pregnant, Colonel. She was lyin’, right?”
Why would Masters tell the kid that? Forrest wondered. She must have figured that killing a pregnant woman might move a simple young man to mercy. A smart play, considering the softness of this kid. She’d probably been lying, of course, but they’d never know, because no one would ever find her body and perform an autopsy.
“Sure she was lying,” Forrest said. “She was trying to play you, Harold. Play on your sympathy. She sensed you’re a good boy.”
Wallis didn’t look convinced. “It’s wrong to kill a doe that’s carryin’, Colonel. Every hunter knows that.”
“Let me help you out of there, kid,” Ozan said, reaching out his left hand.
“I’m good,” Harold said. “You men got important things to do, I know. I can pull the boat out and load it. I do it dern near every day.”
“No, it’s no problem,” Ozan said, his hand still extended.
Harold hesitated, then stepped to the bow of the pirogue and took Ozan’s hand. Forrest saw the Redbone’s other hand slip into his back pocket and take out his knife. In a single motion Ozan released the spring-loaded blade and drove it up beneath Harold Wallis’s sternum.
Nobody ever looked as surprised as people stabbed without warning. It wasn’t like the shock of a bullet, which often scrambled the brain in a millisecond. A blade gave people time to comprehend what had happened to them. The force of Ozan’s blow had surely knocked the wind from Wallis’s lungs, and the knife had probably punctured his heart, but his eyes were wide open and still full of life. The kid looked like some blackface cartoon from the 1920s, drawn to illustrate the question: “What the heck?” Or maybe, “Why me?”
Ozan lifted Wallis off the ground by main strength. The boy hung there, folded around the knife, his eyes bulging.
Forrest heard a low rumble that rose in volume, then faded. Probably an eighteen-wheeler back on the highway. He stepped up to the dying boy and looked directly into his stunned eyes.
“Your brother’s gonna rot in Angola, son. But I do appreciate the favor.”
Forrest nodded, and Ozan twisted his hand.
The light in the boy’s eyes went out. His body hit the ground with solid finality.
“What you want I should do with him?” Ozan asked as Forrest walked back to his cruiser.
“Load him into his truck. Have one of the boys drive him down to Baton Rouge and leave him behind a crack house. Too many eyes around here right now. The security cameras from the café will ID him as the person last seen with her, and after we get rid of her body, they’ll eventually write it off as a homicide.”
“True dat, boss. See you back at the camp.”
Forrest’s hand was on the door when a helicopter stormed over them at treetop level, its throttle wide open. For a moment Forrest stood paralyzed, back in Vietnam, trying to recall map coordinates for an artillery strike.
“Son of a bitch!” Ozan yelled. “Who the fuck was that?”
“Lusahatcha County Sheriff’s Department!” Forrest cried, shading his eyes and peering after the bird. “I saw the gold star on the door. That’s Billy Ray Ellis’s chopper.”
“Looked to me like it was coming from Valhalla.”
“From the Bone Tree is my guess,” Forrest said. “Goddamn it.”
“What would Sheriff Ellis be doing there?”
“That wasn’t Billy Ray, Alphonse. Shit. We’ve got trouble.”
“You mean you think they found the girl?”
“That’s exactly what I think.”
“What you wanna do?”
Forrest’s mind was gearing down into combat mode. If Penn Cage had somehow discovered the Bone Tree, then a tectonic shift had occurred in the situation. A curtain was about to be stripped from the past, which meant casualties were inevitable.
“Boss?” Ozan asked softly.
“We’ve got an hour before the cavalry gets here. Maybe half that. We’ve got to move fast.”
“Where to?”
“First Valhalla, to clear out the safes and get some diesel fuel.”
Ozan gave him a puzzled look. “And then?”
Forrest smiled the way he once had before going out on night patrols when he expected contact.
“The Bone Tree, Alphonse. Where else?”
WALT HAD JUST WORKED his way into a spot from which he might see something when a Bell JetRanger came blasting over the treetops above him. Whatever Knox and Ozan had stopped to do, the appearance of the chopper had startled them. Even before the sound of the rotors faded, he heard an engine start up. Then a pickup truck he had never seen trundled over the hill with Ozan at the wheel and a pirogue in back.
Walt ducked down and waited for it to pass, then started running back toward his own truck. Knox was bound to be right behind the Redbone, and Walt had a feeling that things were going to happen fast from this point forward.
Just as he reached his truck, Forrest’s cruiser came racing past on the road. Walt cranked his engine and started to follow, but then he realized that he shouldn’t do that before driving back and checking the spot where they’d stopped. It might be that Tom had been held prisoner by whoever owned that truck and pirogue, and Knox and Ozan had killed both guard and captive.
Cursing like a sailor, Walt manhandled the truck out of the trees, then pointed it back into the woods and floored the gas pedal.
