Dead Simple (18 page)

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Authors: Jon Land

BOOK: Dead Simple
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“
W
e’re not anywhere near the route I mapped out for you,” Othell Vance protested again.
“Maybe that’s why you never found your tanker, Othell,” Jack Tyrell snapped back, as their stolen Jimmy thumped over the road. “Bad weather that night, right?”
“I told you that from the beginning.”
“So maybe they took a wrong turn.”
“And ended up
here
?”
The route Mary had set them on cut through Pennsylvania coal country into the heart of the Valley and Ridge region northwest of Harrisburg. About as mean as land could get. Roads mostly forgotten by even the locals.
“I can feel it close by.” Mary spoke defensively from the passenger seat. “Like we’re …”
“Yeah?” Tyrell prodded.
She looked across the seat at him like a hurt child. “You giving up on me, Jackie?”
“I say that?”
“’Cause I don’t know how I’d take it if you did. You believing in me is what kept me going all these years, what held me together.”
“Why’d you think I came back?”
“I’m just afraid of letting you down, that’s all.”
Jack Tyrell relaxed a little behind the wheel. “We’ve been over these roads all day. We’ll keep going over them until we—”
“Stop the car,” Mary said suddenly, stiffening. “Stop it now!”
Tyrell jammed on the brakes, feeling the Jimmy fishtail on the rocky road surface. It wasn’t strictly a road at all, so much as a path between the ridges. They’d been struggling across different stretches of it through the brutally long day, Tyrell uncertain whether they had actually covered this patch before. The road surfaces had been gritty and granular, full of washouts and covered with masses of loose stones. For the better part of the day they had bumped and ground their way over debris that looked to have been shoveled on by some mad road crew. Tyrell had never felt anything like it, coaxing the vehicle’s tires to keep churning the whole way, as Othell Vance bounced around in the back seat. The Yost brothers and Tremble were driving behind them in a stolen pickup. Night had fallen hours before, and the darkness slowed their speed to a jogger’s pace, the world extending no farther than what their headlights showed them.
Mary was out of the truck before Tyrell had brought it to a complete stop. She sank to her knees and spooned the road dirt through her hand like she was mixing a cake. Her eyes had gotten that dreamy, faraway look Jack Tyrell had remembered for twenty-five years.
“What do you see?” Jack asked her.
Mary cradled herself tightly. “It’s underground. That’s where we’ll find—”
Tyrell saw her start to shake and move into that staticky field that seemed to encompass her when one of her quickenings overtook her. He tried to embrace her, but she pulled away.
“You didn’t tell me, Jackie,” she said sadly. But then her expression turned mean, emotions changing as fast as heartbeats. “He was ours. You should have told me. I had a right to know.”
And Jack realized where her mind had drifted, what it had found when it got there. “I didn’t see the point.”
“It’s my pain too, Jack,
that’s
the point. Why should you bear it alone? Others deserve to feel it too, something you shouldn’t deny, especially to me. How could you, damn it, how could you?”
She was on her feet by then, pounding at his chest. Tyrell barely felt the blows, letting her wear herself out. When she was spent, on the verge of crumpling, he took her in his arms.
“It’s all right, babe. I’m right here.”
Mary pulled away enough to find his eyes. “For how long this time? Don’t you see that it doesn’t matter if I can’t trust you? I couldn’t trust you all those years ago and I can’t trust you now. How do I know you won’t leave again when all this is over?”
“Because it’s not gonna be over,” Tyrell said softly. “Because what this stuff is going to do for us is only the first step. You follow the news?”
“Bits and pieces.”
“Oklahoma City, the World Trade Center, Flight 800, the Unabomber—you see what I’m getting at?”
“No.”
“It’s a different world now, Mary, the kind of world we were meant for, where one crazy can threaten to stick a bomb on a plane and ground all flights. We make a call like that twenty-five years ago, the best we can hope for is to get our dime back when it’s finished. People have learned how to be scared. All these boys, they’re just bad imitators of what we did, but they got more people paying attention, and that’s what we want.” His expression tensed in determination. “Yeah, people have learned how to be scared now, and we’re gonna keep scaring them again and again. We’re gonna make them scared to leave their homes, make them scared to send their kids to school. And then, just for fun, maybe we’ll bring the whole country to a screeching halt. But we need the Devil’s Brew to make it happen, Mary. Best minds in the country couldn’t find it, but here we are now, thanks to you. You’re mad because I didn’t let you share my pain. Well, there’s something a lot bigger you can share with me now.”
He watched Mary nod, a slow, determined motion, the two of them standing there as though the missing years had never happened. The others all held their distance, knowing how it was when Mary got one of her quickenings.
“Up there,” she said, cocking her gaze toward the foothills enclosing them, dotted with the open mouths of caves and openings to longabandoned anthracite mines that had stripped the land clean.
“I thought you said underground.”
“The way in’s
up there
. Follow me.”
She set a torrid pace over the rough, uneven ground. Jack did his best to keep up but kept slipping and sliding along with the others in the darkness. She moved like something was pulling her on, not letting go. Jack Tyrell’s breath was long gone when he saw what looked like the mouth of a cave gaping in the middle of absolutely nowhere. Mary had picked up her pace again when he lunged forward to grab her.
“Lemme go!” she roared, stiff under his grasp. “You wanted me to take you to it. We’re almost—”
“Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh,” Tyrell said, covering her mouth, signaling back to the others to hold their positions. Then he gestured toward the cave. “There’s a light on inside there.”
B
uck Torrey nursed the fire, willing it to stay lit. He still had plenty of matches, but the thought of venturing outside on his broken ankle in search of more wood was enough to keep him blowing and stoking the flames all night. Buck watched them lick at the air, smoke rising in small wisps that quickly grew into warm clouds blowing over him. He shivered and shifted closer to the fire, dragging his splinted leg in both hands, as near to the warmth as he dared.
His first-aid kit had perished with his truck, the second thing to have gone terribly wrong with this trip. The first, his cell phone battery going dead, had seemed routine enough. He’d planned to recharge it on the next leg of the drive, but the storm had intervened and left him peering out a windshield blanketed by rain that fell in black sheets. Being the only vehicle on what passed for a back road was all that allowed him to keep going until the road vanished before his determined headlights.
He experienced a moment of panic when it seemed he had driven off the edge of a mountain and was plunging to his death. His bowels turned to jelly and he squeezed the steering wheel hard enough to bend it in the long moment before he felt the jarring impact on all four wheels. Buck rolled down the window and gazed out.
He had driven into some kind of long, deep sinkhole where he was certain the road had been just seconds before; the windshield wipers had cleared enough of the rain away to show him the scattered rocks and
debris. Buck might have spent more time trying to figure out what had happened, if the hole hadn’t begun to close up around him almost as quickly as it had appeared. The walls were caving in, the floor of the pit seeming to rise as wet mud.
Fearful of being buried alive, Buck climbed atop the truck’s hood and then the cab, still a hefty leap from the nearest side of the quickly closing hole but offering the only chance he had for escape. He had come up just short with his first leap and crashed back down, his leg buckling on the curvature of the roof. He heard
and
felt his ankle snap, had all he could do just to keep from sliding off into the collapsing pool of muck that was intent on entombing both him and Jay Don Reed’s truck.
Numbness had set in, allowing him to stand on the roof again and put a slight amount of pressure on the ankle. Buck knew he would get only one more shot at climbing out, anything that passed for a wall certain to be gone before he could mount another try, assuming his ankle could handle it. No way he could manage the reach with only one leg pushing off. He needed to use his broken one for balance and thrust, which meant giving it most of his weight.
Buck knew the pain was coming, but it was worse than anything he had imagined; his entire ankle felt like shattered glass as he leaped outward for the edge, wailing at the top of his lungs. This time he managed to catch both hands on the rapidly disintegrating surface, dirt and mud running through his fingers even as he desperately clawed to pull himself up. He kicked with his good leg and then his bad one, regained the surface coughing dirt from his mouth. No trace of Reed’s truck remained, the whole of it swallowed up in the freak cave-in.
Buck wondered if he had taken a wrong turn somewhere and ended up in the Bermuda Triangle. That might figure. Lend credence to what he had begun to put together after his meeting with Maxwell Rentz.
As a boy, Buck spent many an hour down by the lake with his grandfather, listening to the old man spin tales of the secret Northern mission that had crossed their farm in the middle of the Civil War. His grandfather claimed even to have seen the soldiers through the raging blizzard that had stranded them. But he also claimed there was no use looking for the treasure, because they left with it before morning, before the flood that accompanied an even more powerful storm a day later and carved out the lake.
Still, Buck had spent his formative years as a teenage diver exploring every inch of that lake bottom. Feeling about blindly through the utter blackness. Teaching himself never to be scared by the black silt kicked up over his mask. As the years passed he began to dismiss his grandfather’s yarns as tall tales meant to entertain a young boy and nothing else. No treasure had ever left the Torrey family farm, because no treasure had ever been there in the first place.
But Maxwell Rentz had proved Buck wrong and his grandfather right. The only thing Rentz had wrong was the belief that the treasure was still under the lake. Buck’s grandfather claimed Stratton’s men had not frozen to death in the blizzard, because he had seen them leave well before the valley was flooded. Of course no one, including Buck, had ever paid him much heed, since the old man was known to cuddle up with a bottle more nights than not. If he was right about that part of the story, though, maybe his insistence that Stratton had headed north into Pennsylvania was right too. Even showed young Buck a tattered map he claimed the soldiers had left behind.
How Buck could have used that map three days ago, after his little talk with Maxwell Rentz confirmed he was on the right track. He knew that following what he suspected was Stratton’s trail would have to wait now. His truck was gone, the first-aid kit buried under a ton of dirt with it, and his cell phone was dead. First on the agenda was finding a way to splint his leg, immobilizing it so he could move, then look for some shelter. All he had on his person was a nine-millimeter pistol he would gladly have traded for an air cast or a good chug of whiskey.
Buck Torrey had taught good men how to survive under similar circumstances and had himself done so on at least one occasion. His wound at that time was a bullet to the shoulder, the rest of his scout team wiped out, and five miles to cover before morning gave him up. He’d managed then with a hundred Cong soldiers scouring the brush for him. He’d manage now with no one prowling about, but no one waiting beyond the fire line to extract him, either.
That was last night, and the splint he had fashioned from branches and vines was still in place, albeit with fresh vines from that morning. He’d spent today limping along the roadside, hoping for a vehicle that never came. He had found this cave just before dusk. Its warmth promised a limited salvation, a respite to get him into another day, when a vehicle might come by.
He should have told somebody exactly where he was, what he was up to, damn it! Pushing sixty and he was still playing games, figuring that keeping his body rock hard was enough to cheat the years. Except this was no recon mission and he had no relief beyond the next ridge. He could do nothing about the swelling of his ankle, and the feeling of bones shifting about just below the skin was getting worse instead of better.
He wanted to believe he was doing this for Liz, leave her one thing to make up for the missing years. But deep inside he knew the truth was he longed for one last great adventure. He had run to Condor Key, trying to turn his back on the man he was, and thought he’d pulled it off until Blaine McCracken arrived, dragging the past with him. In training McCracken again, Buck realized he was training himself, learning that what Blaine was desperately striving to get back he had lost as well, though in
a different way. He actually welcomed the call from Jay Don Reed, because it gave him the excuse he needed to go back to being who he really wanted to be.
Buck dozed off and on through the night, waking on occasion certain he had heard vehicles in the not too far off distance. Sounds, though, were tricky in these parts; the wind made plenty of them up and pushed the rest a long way, bouncing them in all directions.
But the wind had no part in the footsteps and voices he heard approaching the cave from below; they must have been campers attracted by the blessed fire he had tended so obsessively through the first part of the night.
Buck had dragged himself up and was almost to the doorway, propped on his makeshift crutch, ready to wave gratefully to the approaching party, when he saw the car thumping down the unpaved road. He couldn’t make out anything at first beyond a dust cloud moving behind bright headlights. As it drew closer he saw on the roof the light bubble of a Pennsylvania Highway Patrol car.
The small group approaching the cave stopped on the hillside, as the patrol car slid to a bumpy halt. The driver’s door snapped open and a big trooper climbed out, straightening his cap as he started up the slope after them.
 
“
Y
ou folks mind telling me what you’re doing out in these parts?”
The big cop wasn’t holding a gun, but Jack Tyrell could tell he was thinking hard about his police-issue Beretta, the restraining snap open over its holster.
“Hiking, sir,” Jack said, feeling Mary stiffen at his side, hoping the others would follow his lead.
“Not a good idea at night, sir,” the trooper warned, advancing. “Matter of fact, I’d say it’s a lousy idea in these parts anytime.”
“We’re being careful.”
The cop stopped, sizing them all up cautiously. “You mind if I ask you a few questions?”
“Not at all,” said Jack.
“We been on the lookout for a stolen GMC Jimmy all day.”
“Is that a fact?”
“Occupants been reported missing too,” the trooper said. “Couple of college girls. None of you folks would recall seeing them or their Jimmy, would ya?”
Jack looked at the others, shook his head on their collective behalf. “Sorry, Officer.”
“See, the reason I ask is that I came upon just such a vehicle back down the hill. Different plates, of course, but I still had to check it out.”
“Like I said—” Jack started, but the cop wasn’t finished yet.
“I got a description of the missing girls too.”
“Haven’t seen them,” Jack said.
“Got a pretty complete rundown of what they were last seen wearing, including Timberland hiking boots,” the trooper continued. “Just like the one lady’s size seven I found a couple miles back down the road.” His hand flirted with the Beretta, maybe hoping for an excuse to draw it, but holding them in his flashlight beam instead. “You folks might just wanna come down so I can ask a few questions and …”
 
“ …
get a few things straight.”
As he shrank further inside against the cave entrance, Buck found his own motions mirroring the cop’s, thinking about the pistol he had left back by the fire. Kind of man he had walked into battle with often enough to know the type. But it was a type that should have known not to prance straight into trouble, outmanned and outgunned. Buck figured another couple of cars must be streaming in after him, except they still hadn’t showed when the impossible happened.
It must have surprised the big cop as well, because he barely managed to free his gun from its holster before the bullets tore into him. The first took him in the throat, spouting a geyser of blood that washed down over his uniform top as the next three or four shots thumped into his chest. It was a head shot cracking into his skull, spewing bone and brain matter into the air, that finally spilled the cop over several feet from where a gun he hadn’t fired had fallen.
Buck saw that the group was now moving toward the cave again, gun smoke still fluttering from their barrels. Whoever they were, they were good, especially the pair of pale-skinned men who even together didn’t seem full-framed enough to make a single man.
Buck retreated, anxious not to make the same mistake the trooper had made. The familiar heat of battle surged up his spine, but the dry, sour taste in his mouth was that of fear. He’d known it a few times before, but this was as bad as any.
He scooped up his pistol and hobbled toward the back depths of the cave, out of view of the meager spill of light from the flames when the enemy reached the entrance.

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