Niceville (4 page)

The camera went down and down into the sink, lights spearing out into the cold black water a way, only to die out, overwhelmed by the darkness. The control cable ran out at a thousand feet.

The attached sonar mapping system showed nothing but rock face and more rock face with a side channel running out of the sinkhole at nine hundred and eighty feet, leading, everyone assumed, eventually to the Tulip River in the valley below the cliff face.

If Sylvia Teague
had
gone into Crater Sink—and so far no suicide note had been found, and suicide was only one of several possibilities—they’d have to wait for natural processes to bring her back up again.

Or maybe she had been dragged into the side channel by a random
current, which meant that perhaps someday what was left of her would come bobbing up in the Tulip River itself.

The Crater Sink search took most of the tenth day, with Nick, haggard and running on amphetamines, there for every minute of it. He stayed there until around six that same evening, the evening of the tenth day, when he got a call from Mavis Crossfire, who told him Rainey Teague had been found.

Nick got to the Confederate cemetery across the road from Garrison Hills just as the sun was setting. He saw the police vans clustered around a low hill on one of the meandering stone pathways that led through the rocky, uneven slopes of the graveyard, weaving past hundreds and hundreds of white stone crosses—here and there a few Stars of David—towards what was called New Hill, a part of the Civil War graveyard that had been set aside for the more prominent civilians of Niceville history.

New Hill had perhaps fifty miniature stone temples, most of them in the Palladian style, mostly family crypts with names like
HAGGARD
and
TEAGUE, COTTON
and
WALKER, GWINNETT
and
MULLRYNE
and
MERCER
and
RUELLE
carved into their lintels.

Each temple was made of marble blocks and each one had a solid oak door, locked and sealed, and then further protected by an iron grate. The ground in the cemetery was stony, so some of the lesser graves were simply a low mounded barrow of red clay brick with a long marble or stone cap, the barrow set deep into the ground and mounded all around with earth and grass. The crypt was accessible only by a low iron grating at one end, always padlocked.

The cops were gathered around one of these low mounds, watching two firemen with sledges who were attacking the roof of the crypt. Nick could hear their sledges clang with each blow, and he saw brick dust rising up in the glimmer of the headlights and the halogen work lamps that had been set up all around the mound.

Everyone turned to watch as Nick parked his Crown Vic down the slope and walked slowly up the hill to where they were working. Mavis Crossfire stepped out of the crowd—Nick could see the rangy form and Marine Corps crew cut of Marty Coors, the CO of the local state
troopers, above the heads of the other cops, turning to stare at Nick, his face solemn and hard, his eyes full of uncertainty.

“Nick,” said Mavis, coming up to shake his hand. “He’s here.”

Nick looked past her, at the mound, at the men slowly hammering it into brick chips and marble splinters.

“He’s in there? How do you know? That crypt hasn’t been open for more than a hundred years. They’re all like that. The padlocks are all rusted and seized. The bars are half in the ground and they’re all grown over.”

“Yes. That’s true. That’s all true. Nick, are you okay?”

Nick looked at her.

“Hell, no, I’m not okay. Are you?”

Mavis gave him a smile that changed into an odd look.

“No. I’m not. None of us are. How we know he’s in there, Nick? We can
hear
him.”

Nick looked at her for a long time.

Mavis nodded, her expression blank, except for a wary look in her eyes and a pallor in her skin.

“Yeah. That’s right. I didn’t want to tell you before you got here. Didn’t want you to die in a crash racing over here. The groundskeeper heard something in the afternoon. Sounded like maybe a bird, but then he thought maybe not. He traced it to this mound here.”

“Who’s in it?”

“Guy named Ethan Ruelle. Died in 1921. In a duel on Christmas Eve, so the groundskeeper is saying. One of the fire guys has a sound sensor, the kind they use to search for people in a collapse? He stuck it up against the roof of that thing. We all heard it plain.”

“Heard what?”

“A kid. Crying.”

Nick looked at her, and then past her at the workers, at the cops standing around, the ambulance waiting a ways back, lights churning red and blue, casting a crazy hectic flicker across the graveyard.

“It’s a trick,” he said finally, his temper flaring. “This whole thing has been some kind of sick stunt. Someone is jerking us around, Mavis. It’s all just some kind of twisted game.”

“If it is, it’s a damn good one,” said Mavis, taking no offense, speaking in a soothing tone. “The guy tapped on the stone and the crying
got worse.
Something’s
in there. We all think—maybe I should say we all
hope
—it’s Rainey.”

They heard a muffled
crump
, a gravelly tumble, and then everyone was talking loud and fast.

Nick and Mavis got to the mound just as Marty Coors stepped up and put his Maglite into the hole the fire guys had opened. There was a terrified face looking up at them, big round brown eyes, dirty blond hair, his dusty cheeks streaked with tear tracks, his mouth round and stretched as he went way back and down for the scream he finally came up with a few seconds later. It rang out across the graves and a flock of crows went exploding up out of a stand of linden.

The boy was Rainey Teague, and he was alive.

When they got him out a few minutes later, still in his school uniform, they realized he had been placed inside a long wooden box, a coffin, and the coffin wasn’t empty.

Rainey Teague had been cradled in the withered embrace of a corpse, presumably the remains of Ethan Ruelle. They had no idea how this had been done, how the tomb had been opened without any sign of tampering, or by whom, or why, but Rainey Teague was alive. They took him to Lady Grace, where, over the next five hours, he slipped slowly but inexorably into a catatonic state.

He was still lying there three days later when his father, Miles Teague, came to see his boy once again in the ICU unit. Rainey was lying in the middle of all the usual medical machinery, IV drips and beeping monitors and catheter racks and catheter drains.

The ICU docs told Miles—a blunt-bodied Black Irish man in his early fifties, with a well-cut, handsome face going rapidly to hell—before withdrawing to leave the man alone with his son, that Rainey’s catatonia was not an uncommon response to unimaginable trauma.

Miles Teague stared down at his son for two hours, watching him breathe in and out, then he leaned down and kissed him on the forehead, straightened up and went out to the parking lot and climbed into his big black Benz. He drove himself back to the family home in Garrison Hills, where he was found the next morning, in the same clothes, in a marble folly at the bottom of the garden, a handmade Purdey shotgun lying by his body and his head blown off at the shoulders.

ONE YEAR LATER
Friday Afternoon

The two-way radio in Coker’s pocket started to buzz, like a palmetto bug in a bottle. Coker was down deep inside himself, trying to see it all unfold. This Zen trick used to come naturally, but that was a long time back. He was looking through the yellow pampas grass at the snaky stretch of blacktop curving towards him through the long green valley, the heavy rifle in his hands as solid and warm as the neck of a horse.

The two-way buzzed again.

Coker pulled the handset out, thumbed the key.

“Yes.”

“We’re at mile marker 47.”

Danziger’s voice was flat and calm, but tight. Coker could hear the sirens in the background, hear the hissing rush of wind, and the rumble of tires on the pebbled surface of the highway.

“What have you got?”

Coker listened to a short hard-edged exchange between Danziger and Merle Zane, the driver, both voices a little adrenalized, which was only natural.

“So far only four,” said Danziger, coming back, “They’re right on us but staying back. We’ve got one news chopper with us, but far as we can see no cops in the air yet. Anything up ahead?”

Coker looked down at the little portable TV on the ground beside him. On the tiny plasma screen he could see a dull black bullet-shaped car with a front like a clenched fist, Merle Zane’s Chrysler Magnum, flying down a curving ribbon of county road, patchwork farmlands all around, with four cars in close pursuit, two charcoal-gray and black
Crown Vics, what looked like a black and tan deputy sheriff car, also a Crown Vic, and one dark blue unmarked car, a flying brick with big fat tires and a rack of black steel bumper bars right up front.

The image was coming from a local news chopper following the chase. Coker could see the roof-rack lights on the patrol cars flickering red and blue.

Coker twisted the
VOLUME
button and heard the hyperventilating commentary of a young female newscaster describing the chase. The image pulled back as the chopper lifted to clear a line of transmission towers, briefly showing a rolling blue country with low brown hills far off to the south.

Coker was waiting in those low brown hills.

He picked up the radio, keyed it.

“So far no roadblocks, road is clear. Confirm you have four units. Two state and a deputy. The blue Dodge Charger is one of their chase units. A hemi, three sixty-eight mill, a roll-cage, those heavy-duty ram bars. They’ve got him laying back in the pack but at the first chance he’ll pull around and climb right up your tailpipe. He’ll use those bumper bars on your off-side taillight, put you into a spin. Don’t let him get close.”

“We won’t,” said Danziger. “So nobody up ahead?”

Danziger’s tone was still flat, but Coker could hear the tension in his throat. Coker was monitoring the police frequencies, listening to the cross talk between dispatch and the pursuit cars.

“They’ve called for units from Sectors Four and Nine, but so far only two units can respond, and they’re twenty miles off, on the other side of the Belfair Range. They’re spread all over the county and most of their guys are up on the interstate, helping with traffic around the crash site. That’s where their chopper is too.”

“Okay,” said Danziger. “Good—”

Coker heard a solid thump, and the sound of glass cracking, and then Merle Zane’s voice, swearing softly.

“Christ. They’re shooting at us.”

Coker glanced down at the television, heard the announcer’s excited voice, her words tumbling out in a rush. The banner along the bottom of the screen read
HAPPENING NOW! POLICE CHASE ROUTE 311 SOUTH SKYCAM NEWS POLICE CHASE! HAPPENING NOW!
but the crawl did not
name her. Coker figured whoever she was, she was having a hell of a good time.

Good for you
.

Get it while you can, kid
.

“Like I said. You’re letting them get too close.”

Coker heard the sound of a pistol firing, a series of sharp percussive cracks, and then Merle Zane’s voice.

“Danziger’s shooting back.”

“Well, tell him don’t, Merle. Shooting back just motivates them. He oughta know that. Tell him to keep his head down or they’ll take it off.”

He heard Merle Zane barking at Danziger, heard Danziger’s heated reply, but the shooting stopped, and then Merle was talking again.

“Mile marker 40. We’re two miles out.”

“I’m here,” he said, and clicked off.

He turned the sound on the plasma screen down and shut off the police radio. Didn’t really matter what the State guys were doing right now.

Whatever it was, it was too late.

The news chopper—now
that
was a problem.

He looked at the TV screen, trying to get an idea of how high up the chopper was, the angles, the kind of machine. Most of the news and some of the police choppers in the state were Eurocopter 350s. What he could hear of the rotor noise and the engine sounded like that’s what this one was. Nice fast machine.