Gravewriter (23 page)

He asked the driver, “Ever been to northern New Hampshire?”

The cabbie stole a glance at Flagg in the mirror. He wore sunglasses with mirrored lenses and a Boston Celtics cap. He needed a shave. Flagg wondered if the scruffy look was in. Did women like it? He would need to know these things if he was going to make a new life, with money, in northern New Hampshire.

“Been as far as Manchester a couple times,” the cabbie said.

“Ever been up north, way up north?”

“Nah.”

“I'm thinking of going there,” Flagg said.

“Mm-hm.”

“Yeah—” Flagg caught himself. Could this cabbie identify him to the police? Did cabbies have privilege, like a lawyer and a client? Flagg decided to lie. “But I think I'll probably end up someplace else. Like New York City, you know?”

“I been there.”

“Lately?”

“Nah.”

“I may go out west, you know? Someplace with mountains. You ever been out west?”

“What for?”

Flagg peeked into the bag again, felt the same cold tickle, and grinned. “I like to see new places.”

“Mm-hm.”

Flagg wet his lips with his tongue. “You're a real talkaholic, eh?”

“I drive the cab.”

They drove twenty minutes before the taxi abandoned the highway for a rural route that pitched and rolled like a river. They passed fields of cornstalks and gigantic turf farms, nothing but green grass for a mile. Flagg caught a whiff of the sea. The cab turned hard and bounced down an old country road that was patched all over, looking like an extreme close-up of a gum-spotted city sidewalk. They left the farmland behind. Trees closed in on either side of the road. They drove five minutes without seeing a house or another car.

“We lost?” Flagg asked, breaking a long silence.

“Nah.”

Flagg looked around. “This don't look like Kingston.”

“It ain't yet,” the cabbie said. From his tone, Flagg imagined the driver's eyes rolling behind his sunglasses.

“I never been this way,” Flagg said, readying for an argument. He had the money; he was the boss.

“Mm-hm.” The cabbie sounded dismissive.

Through the trees, Flagg glimpsed a high-speed passenger train running roughly parallel to the road. It shot past the taxi in seconds.

“Oh,” Flagg said. He leaned back. Flagg had read about the high-speed service from Boston to Washington, D.C.; the train hit its top speed in Rhode Island—130 miles per hour.

At a fork, the cab turned left, away from the railroad tracks, down what seemed like a paved oxen path. The woods grew thicker. The meter was already at sixty-six dollars. This guy was running up the tab, taking Flagg for a ride.

Where the hell are we?

Flagg started to ask, then paused to check the driver's name on his taxi license, posted on the seatback: Galeno M. Gomez.

Odd … this driver ain't Hispanic.… Was he adopted?

The bushy brown hair on Flagg's forearms lifted straight up.

He was in a stolen taxicab. They were driving in the woods, heading down a cart path that probably was a dead end, at least for Frank Flagg.

Double-crossed.

They're going to kill me.

The cab was rounding a curve at twenty-two miles per hour when Franklin D. Flagg threw himself from it. He hit the ground with a grunt and let his momentum carry him into a roll. The pavement scraped his elbows, knees, and shoulder blade. Flagg rolled into a wet gully, lay there, and groaned. He was still holding the paper sack. The money was soaked.

Brakes squealed.

Flagg clambered to his feet. The driver calmly stepped from the cab. He had a nickel-plated pistol in his right hand. He jabbed the gun in Flagg's direction and fired.

The bullet whistled over Flagg's head.

“Jesus Christ!” Flagg screamed. He hugged the money and ran up the road.

Bang.

Bang.

A slug hit near Flagg's feet and ricocheted. Flagg yelped and dashed into the woods, staggering over a fieldstone wall, knocking stones to the ground.

I promised I'd disappear.…

Flagg stomped through the forest, plowing through underbrush with the grace of a rolling boulder. He panted and whimpered as he ran, lost and without direction, crashing, bashing through the thick forest, cradling the money against his heart. Branches raked his skin. Sticks and roots grabbed for his feet and tried to twist his ankles. His eyes watered from pain and from fear.

It was only fifty thou.…

Bang.

A white-hot drill bore into his left calf.

He shrieked from deep in his belly.

Flagg stumbled, fought to stay on his feet, knocked his head on a downed tree, saw wisps of white cloud twisting in a circle against a perfect blue sky, and then tumbled down a steep hill, still clinging to the money. He landed with a thunk on a path of packed stone dust. The ground beneath him trembled. Lifting his face from the dust and shaking his head clear, Flagg recognized the railroad ties, laid side by side like piano keys, and the steel rails upon them, shining like mirrors in the sun.

Around a bend, an oncoming train grew louder. Flagg crawled. He rose, wobbly, to his feet. His chest ached. His thighs had turned to pudding. The pain in his gunshot calf spread down his leg, like he had one foot in a bucket of lightning. He staggered ten paces.

Bang.

The slug slapped Flagg's neck and he could no longer breathe. He watched his own feet stumble onto the tracks, between the rails. He felt drunk, or like he was watching somebody else's feet.

The high-speed train was on him in an instant. He pushed the money at it. Hit it square on the nose.

T
o sneak into the boathouse during daylight, Billy and Mia approached by sea. They slipped their kayaks into the bay about half a mile to the south. Billy's used thirteen-foot fiberglass boat was banana yellow, scuffed like a tiger's scratching post, tight on his hips and fast in the water. Mia paddled a rented twelve-foot plastic boat, lollipop red, fat, as stable as a beached rowboat, and slow. Not that speed mattered; no matter how anxious they were to search the boathouse, they wanted to look like recreational paddlers braving the dark and ugly water of the upper bay.

“Let's stick together,” he told Mia. “We look like a happy couple enjoying the sun on a day off from jury duty.”

He watched the ying-yang symbol tattooed on Mia's upper left arm. The symbol flexed as she worked the paddle. Billy felt a squirt of embarrassment.

A happy couple? We could almost be father and daughter.

They stayed a hundred feet off a shoreline that cut in and out like the ridges of a key. They passed beach houses on their left, mostly small bungalows, more than fifty years old, with back porches and
tiny lawns that dropped off at concrete retaining walls, cracked and pitted by the tides. Many of the homes had small wooden docks. Others had just stairs leading down to the water, or, at low tide, to beaches of foul black muck. The water smelled vaguely of sewage. Billy tried not to think about the untreated waste that oozed into the upper bay each year, carried there when heavy rain overwhelmed the treatment plants.
When was the last big rain?
he wondered. He was glad he couldn't remember.

They paddled around a stone breakwater, like a finger laid in the bay to protect a small cove from storms. Stray cats watched them from between the rocks, or tore at baitfish left by anglers. Seagulls gathered on the rocks, flapping up nosily when a cat came too close.

Billy pulled the paddle as much with his abdomen as his arms. Ahead on the left, the boathouse appeared suddenly as they rounded a small, jutting peninsula. The front half of the boathouse was built into the slope; the back half stood on twenty wooden piles. The gentle dark cove water rode up and down the posts. On the back of the building, three sheets of plywood covered what had been a panoramic window overlooking the water. A dozen steep wooden stairs led from a short dock to a door. Glass in the door had been smashed and crudely repaired with silver duct tape and cellophane plastic.

Billy threaded between the piles and beached his kayak in mud under the boathouse.

Mia's boat slid up close to his. She said, “Are you going to tell me what we're looking for before I help you search the place?”

Sitting in the kayak, Billy slipped off his life jacket and stuffed it between his legs. “You saw barefoot prints in blood leading away from J.R.'s body,” he said.

“Somebody walked away on tippy-toes.”

“We assumed that Peter Shadd didn't slaughter J.R. because he had no blood on his prison jumpsuit, and none on his sneakers.”

“And his hands—his hands were clean.” She whipped off her life jacket.

“I try to pay attention to the testimony in court,” Billy said. “Though sometimes I feel like the only one who gives a shit. Early in the trial, we learned that Garrett Nickel's body was found south of here, having floated down a small stream.”

“He was shot at some industrial building, you said.”

“I've been wondering what Garrett Nickel was doing at that shitty industrial building; he should have been driving to Maine. But I had overlooked the three items of clothing he was wearing when he went into the stream.” He ticked off the items on his fingers. “One pair of cotton pants. Checkered flannel shirt. Running shoes.”

She nodded each time, waited for more.

“Where the bloody hell,” Billy asked, “was his orange prison jumpsuit?”

In the boathouse attic, Billy toed the edge of the bloodstain but did not step on it. He avoided treading on the stain as he would stepping on a grave. Billy was not squeamish over blood—he had seen plenty flow from his own nose throughout a decade of phoning bookies with his bad hunches. So why couldn't he step on the stain? Why did his feet refuse to do it?

Mia stood hands on her hips and tapped her foot in the center of the goddamn thing.

“Garrett must have had extra clothes with him,” Billy said.

“How would he get the clothes?” she asked.

“If what his cell mate said in court was true, then somebody on the outside helped Garrett get a stolen car,” Billy said. “Throwing some old clothes in the trunk would have been easy. Do you know how often J.R. hung out here?”

“Only to drink,” she said.

“Was that often?”

“He could have gotten his mail here.”

Billy rubbed his chin in thought. He realized he hadn't shaved in three days. “If there was no blood on the stairs, let's assume he killed
J.R
. here,” he said. Billy looked around the room. Old newspaper, forty-ounce beer cans, shopping bags, and a hundred other distinct pieces of trash littered the corners. “And if Garrett killed him here, then his jumpsuit could still be around.”

“He could have run off and changed someplace else,” Mia said, not with doubt, just offering the possibility.

“Don't think so. We know he walled away barefoot—I'd guess he was naked. He stripped off the prison outfit, wiped his hands on it, and shoved it somewhere. Then he put on clean clothes someplace else. Downstairs, maybe.”

Trash was piled in front of the crawl space over the eves. Billy dug through it. He took Bo's tiny flashlight from his pocket—the kid had been honored to lend it for his father's mission. The beam made long shadows behind lumps of trash. He grimaced at the sour stench of rotting waste. “Like the outhouse at a leper colony,” he said.

She clapped him on the shoulder. “This will be good training if you ever want my job,” she said.

“This tunnel,” he grumbled, “smells like the shortcut to hell.”

Clenching the flashlight in his teeth, Billy crawled on hands and knees through the trash and into the hole. The stench brought tears to his eyes. He blinked past them and breathed through his mouth. Floorboards creaked under his hands. He swiveled his head to shine the light around. A cluster of stubby white candles, burned nearly to their bottoms, sat in a puddle of congealed wax. There were dozens of empty cigarette boxes, crumpled fast-food wrappers, balled-up blankets, an old army-issue sleeping bag, foam coffee cups, piss-stained sheets, batteries bleeding their corrosive guts.

Mia called to him in the singsongy rhythm of a limerick. “There
once was a guy name Billy, whose ass was looking quite silly-crawling through a smell, down the shortcut to hell—where a hundred degrees would be chilly.”

She giggled.

Billy laughed, too. “You're a h'ain in de h'ass,” he told her, the flashlight still clenched in his teeth.

He pawed through debris as he crawled, trying to keep his hands out of the smears of human waste. The tunnel ended at a wall of planks and two-by-fours. There was no room to turn around.

“Anything?” Mia called down to him.

He grunted no.

Where did you hide it, Garrett?

Billy backed slowly the way he had come, shining the light around. Black ants scurried from the light like it was the end of the world.

Wait a sec—would Nickel have had a flashlight?

Billy closed his eyes. If he had no light, how would he hide something here?

His hands groped.

He found a crack to his left, where the plank floor met the sloped roof. The space was just wide enough to sink his fingers in. He pulled. It was stuck fast—at least at this spot. Billy backed up three feet and tried again. The board creaked but would not yield.

He backed up three more feet, wormed his fingers inside the crack, and yanked. A narrow two-foot board popped up and whacked Billy in the forehead.

“H'uck!” he cried. He spit out the flashlight and repeated, “Fuck!”

“What?” Mia yelled. “Are you all right?”

He rubbed his head. “This boathouse attacked me,” he yelled. Billy grabbed the light, aimed it where the board had been, and gasped.

A thousand black ants bustled in happy chaos over two bloody
sneakers crushed down the hole. He could see the orange jumpsuit below the sneakers; it was stained deep brown.