Dark Places (28 page)

The SUV went into a hard, sidelong skid across the road while Bud yelled and flailed his arms hysterically, trying to get the snake off him. He knocked the basket and reptile down onto the floorboard and frantically fumbled for the door handle as we skidded off the shoulder and rammed headfirst into a copse of snow-covered cedars.

My head slammed the steering wheel on impact, and there was a burst of white pain, warm blood on my face. It knocked me back against the seat, but I wasn't dazed enough not to get the hell out of the car before the snake got me, too. I jerked the door open and fell out into a deep drift, blood spattering crimson drops across the snow. Groggy with pain, I realized that my air bag hadn't activated. I could see that Bud's had, and I could hear him yelling and fighting to get out the passenger's door.

“It got me, it got me in the neck!”

I pressed my palm against the gash on my forehead and shook my head. I was still dizzy and felt sick to my stomach but I forced myself to crawl around the rear of the Explorer. Bud was on his side, vomiting into the snow. He was holding his jaw with both hands and groaning.

I grabbed the front of his jacket and yelled into his face. “Listen, Bud, listen to me, you gotta lie still. Don't panic, it'll make it worse.” I jerked out my cell phone and hit speed dial for dispatch. I grabbed a hunk of snow and slapped it against my forehead to stop the bleeding, then unzipped Bud's coat. I could see the two puncture marks near the base of his neck on his shoulder. I packed some ice on it where it was bleeding from the bite of the fangs.

Dispatch picked up, and I heard myself screaming. “Bud's down, snakebite. Way out on 5, about twenty miles, I think.” I forced my voice calmer and searched the road for a distance marker. I found one not far from where we crashed into the trees. “Marker 119. You gotta get an ambulance here fast, you hear me. Hurry, hurry, dammit!”

I looked at Bud, at the wound already swelling, the location of the bite, and I knew I couldn't sit back and wait for the ambulance, not with snake venom entering Bud's bloodstream so close to his heart and brain. I almost panicked then, but knew I couldn't, could not, so I packed more snow on the bite, not knowing if it would help, but not sure what else to do. I knew not to cut the wound and suck out the poison, not if you were close to a hospital and God, what if I hit his jugular? Oh, God, what if the fangs had hit the jugular?

“Bud, c'mon, we gotta get you to the hospital.”

We had to get going, meet the ambulance halfway. Every minute we waited could be deadly. The snake was in the car. I had to get it out. I jerked the Glock out of my shoulder holster and crawled to the passenger door. It was hanging open. I looked inside, and the rattlesnake struck so hard at me that it propelled itself bodily out of the car onto the snowbank. I opened up on it as it tried to coil, deadly rattles clicking, hitting the writhing reptile four times before I could force my finger off the trigger. The sharp blams of my gun retorted and rolled like thunder through the surrounding woods, the smell of cordite pungent in the crisp clean air as the snake continued to jerk and twist in its death throes. I grabbed up a piece of the snake and threw it in the passenger's floorboard for identification, then struggled through blood-soaked snow to Bud. He was writhing in pain, still clutching his throat.

“Bud, you gotta get back in the car. We can't wait for the ambulance. We gotta get you an antidote fast. Hear me, Bud, we don't have time to wait. We gotta go now!”

Bud nodded but he was already violently ill and fast becoming disoriented. I dragged his arm around my shoulders and staggered with him to the backseat. I pushed and struggled until he was sprawled across the seat. The Explorer was headfirst in a drift, and I clawed my way around to the driver's side and started it up, working the steering wheel back and forth until the spinning tires finally gained enough traction. The vehicle shot backward onto the blacktop road. I could hear Bud groaning and vomiting behind me. I wiped the blood out of my eyes and floored the accelerator. I called dispatch again and told them to alert the ambulance that we were on our way to meet them.

Less than ten minutes later flashing blue lights appeared in the distance and I skidded to a stop as the ambulance pulled up abreast of me. Two paramedics jumped out as I scrambled out and jerked open the back door. They got Bud on a gurney, and I grabbed the remnant of the snake and held it up.

“This is the snake, some kind of rattler, but I don't know which kind. Do you have the antidote with you? Give it to him, give it to him!” I was screaming. I could hear my voice shrill, terrified, echoing out through the snowy cedars lining the roadway.

“Yeah, we got it with us. That's a timber rattler. What the hell's it doing outside in the winter? What about you? That head wound looks pretty bad. Did you get bit?”

“No, just Bud. I hit my head on the steering wheel when we crashed.”

I helped them get him inside the back, then climbed in with them, leaving my Explorer in the middle of the road. The ambulance lurched forward in a U-turn, siren screaming, and I watched the EMTs work on Bud. I held onto the sides of the rocking vehicle, staring at Bud's disfigured face, already black and blue and grotesquely swollen. And I knew it was happening again. Like it always had. People around me got hurt, got dead, the people I cared about. I thought that was over after what happened last summer, but it wasn't. It was starting up again. Bud could die, and if he did, like always, it should've been me.

Gabriel and Uriel had a real good time from that day on. Until something terrible happened. Gabriel's daddy suddenly decided that God had called him to go across the ocean to Uganda to preach the Gospel to the unsaved. Gabriel didn't want to go, and Uriel was terrified he was going to lose his only friend.

But it turned out all right because Gabriel talked his daddy into letting him work at this special school way out in the woods. It was called the Dome of the Cave Academy for the Gifted. Gabriel's good grades and good deeds at the hospital made it easy for him to get on there, and after all, it was only until his daddy converted enough Africans so that he could come back home.

Gabriel got Uriel a job at that school, too, to go to after he finished his high school classes each day. About that time, they killed Uriel's grandma with an overdose and then just left her in her bed to decompose. Nobody ever knew because she had become so reclusive that no one came to call on her. It was easy. All their heavenly work was very easy because it was God's will.

Both of them really liked the academy because there were lots of pretty girls around and Gabriel got his drugs to sell from somebody who worked there. It worked out great for everyone.

Until the day that Uriel found a special girl, his first real girlfriend. She went to the academy, too, and was really, really nice to him. She was pretty in a tomboy sort of way, and she agreed to go to the drive-in with him one summer night. She wore a pink blouse and white denim skirt and white sandals and had pinned pink-and-white-striped ribbons in her blond hair. Uriel thought she looked really pretty. He took her in the van, and after the movie, Uriel took her out to a deserted road in the woods near the old hunting lodge so they could kiss and stuff. He had never kissed a girl, or really even touched one, but she wanted him to touch her and even put her hand up under his shirt and rubbed the hair on his bare chest.

It was the greatest single moment of Uriel's life, even better than killing people. He slid his hand up under her shirt and found out that she didn't have on a bra. They kissed some more and she pulled off her top and pressed herself against his chest, and he almost died from joy and the strange, wonderful feelings rushing through his body.

Then suddenly the door flew open, and Gabriel was there. He laughed at the way they both screamed and scrambled for their clothes, then he grabbed the pretty girl by her hair, yanked her out, and cut her throat in one quick slash of a big butcher knife. The blood shot out like a geyser and sprayed Uriel in the face but he didn't like the taste of blood this time, not hers. The girl crumpled to the ground, dead, without making a peep.

Rage filled Uriel, red and awful, and he screamed and jumped on Gabriel, knocking him backward to the ground. They grappled there, rolling and fighting, slugging each other with their fists, and drenching themselves in the dead girl's blood. They fought until they were exhausted and fell on their backs, panting and coughing. Both had deep cuts in their hands from the sharp knife they fought over.

Gabriel finally got up on his knees and looked down at Uriel, who was crying and sobbing over the girl's lifeless body.

Gabriel said, still breathless, “I don't see why you're so mad. We do this all the time.”

“I wanted her. She was nice. She made me feel good.”

“Other girls can make you feel good, too. She was trying to take you away from me.”

“No, she wasn't. I ought to kill you and send you to heaven for this.”

“Or maybe I ought to kill you. Then you can be with her.”

“Go ahead. Just try. I'm almost as big as you are now.”

Gabriel sat down. “Okay, I'm sorry, all right? I just couldn't help it. I saw you making out with her and I got jealous. I was afraid you'd go off with her or tell her our secrets.”

“You've had girls, lots of 'em, and I didn't kill them.”

“No, but we made that blood pact, and you know it. We can have sex with any girl we want, but we've got to kill them afterward. I always killed the girls I had sex with, didn't I? Just like we agreed on. And you weren't going to kill her. I could see the way you smiled at her and followed her around out at the school like some kind of lovesick puppy.”

“Well, it doesn't make any difference now, does it? She's dead.”

“It's against our code and you know it. No women allowed unless you kill them afterward. This is your own fault, Uriel.”

Uriel began to cry again and pulled the girl's nearly severed head onto his lap. “She said I was handsome. She meant it, too.”

“She left home to get away from her daddy and never went back. Nobody in her family knows where she is. You told me so yourself. All we've got to do is get rid of the body, and everybody'll think she just took off again.”

“No! I'm going to keep her and you can't stop me.”

“You'll have to keep her in the cave and it won't smell so hot after a while. You ought to know that by now.”

“I don't care.”

Gabriel sighed and struggled to his feet. “You're actin' like a big baby about this, Uriel. This time is no different than the others. I thought you'd like all the blood. That's why I slit her jugular.”

“Just shut up. You make me sick.”

“You need to remember who's been your best friend all these years. Me. I taught you everything you know. I was your friend when nobody else wanted you around. Maybe you oughta remember that instead of bawling over some stupid little bitch.”

But Uriel wouldn't speak to Gabriel after that, not for almost a month.

Bud did not die. But he almost did. The EMTs got the antidote in him in time. But that didn't mean he wouldn't. I tried not to think that way. Even if he did live, he was going to be laid up for a long time and the doctor said the pain was bad, real bad. I sat in the hospital corridor outside the CCU, shut my eyes and listened to his agonized groans. The doctors were still with him, anxious but calm, too, well aware his condition could go either way. A bite so close to his heart could've, maybe should've, killed him quickly, and they were taking every precaution.

I rubbed bleary eyes and rested my face in my open palms. I felt dazed, disbelieving, trying to figure when the snake could've been put in that basket. Who? And when? McKay had been in my sight when Bud came around the house. Had he somehow done it the night before? The Explorer was in my garage while Black and I were at the gala but neither one of us had remembered to set the security system when we'd left. But the basket had been in my backseat for several days; anybody could have gotten to it.

The guys in the ER had cleaned and dressed my wound, the same doctor who'd been on duty when they'd cut Simon Classon out of that sleeping bag full of spiders. Chris Dale, the nurse who was a friend of mine, was on shift, too, and she'd taped a neat square of gauze over the eighteen ugly black stitches it took to bind up the two-inch laceration on my forehead. It throbbed like the devil and I had one hell of a headache that hadn't let up and probably wouldn't, because I refused the painkillers they offered me. I'd lost some blood, too, not too much, but enough to make me feel weak and sick and guilty and angry all wrapped up together which made it even worse.

I heard footsteps coming down the hallway. They stopped in front of me and a hand touched my back and Black's voice said, “You okay? How's Bud?”

I'd called him while they were stitching on me, and I was embarrassingly glad to see his concerned face now. He knelt and held my chin as he peeled back the bandage. He examined my wound critically, as if no other doctor could stitch as neatly as he could. A regular Betsy Ross of the AMA.

“Thought I warned you about ducking and weaving.” Our own little personal joke, but his eyes were serious, the vivid blue dark and worried.

“Bud's real bad. They don't know yet if he's gonna make it. They think so but things could change in a hurry.”

Black sat down on the bench beside me and drew me close against him. I let him embrace me, the first time I ever had, in public. It felt pretty good to have a friend to turn to. Other than Harve, there hadn't been many true friends in my life, and few lovers, not until Black had come along.

“He'll make it, babe. I called the CCU on the way over, and they told me they got the antidote in him on time, and it's working. It just takes time. People rarely die of rattlesnake bites, not when they're treated quickly and competently. Thanks to you. You got him here in time.”

“Oh God.” I kept my face hidden in his chest and kept my eyes shut. Maybe if I did, it'd go away. Why isn't life like that, like a videotape, just rewind and start over? Go in a different direction, don't open a basket of French goodies, don't get nailed by a deadly snake.

“Tell me again what happened. You were pretty shaky over the phone.”

“Somebody put a rattlesnake in the picnic basket you brought from Paris. I stuck it in the backseat. I was going to give some of the stuff to the guys at work but kept forgetting to take it inside. McKay did this, Black. I just don't know when or how.”

“He found a time when you were gone. Probably when the car was in your garage. If he's smart enough to handle poisonous spiders and snakes, he's smart enough to sneak that snake in without anybody knowing about it.”

“It's got to be McKay. Everything points to him. I'm going to get him for this, Black, I swear I will.”

“Yes, you will. And soon. Booker called me about an hour ago. Guess who's got a warrant out in L.A. on a child abduction case?”

That brought me to attention, along with a wave of pain that knocked around inside my skull like a steel golf ball. I clamped my jaw against it. Black picked up a strand of my hair. “You've got blood in your hair.”

I pressed my palm down on top of my head and felt the stiff, caked blood. But I was more interested in what Booker had dug up.

“He snatched a child out in Los Angeles? Now, that fits. There was a snowman in his yard. How old is the missing kid?”

“Eighteen months. A little girl named Elizabeth Duncan. Lived in some big apartment complex in Anaheim. They issued an Amber Alert a couple of months ago, but she just dropped off the face of the earth.”

“That would be about the time McKay showed up here. What about a rap sheet? Did Booker find any priors for sex crimes or kiddie porn?”

Black shook his head. “McKay's records are clean. Nothing like that, nothing that linked him to Classon's murder. No arrest record. No misdemeanor pranks with spiders or snakes or anything else, not since that one time here when he was eighteen. Booker says the guy served in the Marines, got a chest full of medals and an honorable discharge. His superiors commended him highly, used him for lots of special ops when he was in, sometimes even Black Ops, which makes him top of the heap, militarily.”

“Yeah, all that may be fine and dandy, but now he's slipped up and we've got him on a California warrant. I thought I heard somebody inside his house. It could've been the little girl. And the snowman means she's probably still alive.”

I stood up, blood pumping. I pressed my fingers to my temples and tried to think straight, tried to will the throbbing to stop. “Charlie's in Jeff City but he'll let us serve the warrant when he hears about the missing child.”

“C'mon, Claire, you need to go home and get some rest. You've been up all night. Bud's stable at the moment, under sedation. Get some rest. Somebody else can pick up McKary and the little girl.”

“I'm going out there now and confront him before he disappears with the kid again.”

“How? Your Explorer's still out on the highway.”

“Yeah. Buckeye and the guys are out there processing it. Let me take your car. McKay can't disappear if I'm sitting on his doorstep and surveilling him. Charlie's going to give me the go-ahead as soon as I reach him, I'm sure of it.”

“McKay's probably already halfway to Mexico by now.”

“Look, Black, I'm going out there. You can go, or not. He's not getting away, not after doing this to Bud.”

Black did not look pleased, but hell, I wasn't pleased, either. Why did there always have to be an argument? Who'd he think he was? My mother?

“And if Bud crashes?”

A hard hit of hesitation rocked my conscience, and for the first time gave me pause. I had to make sure Bud was okay but Black had hit the nail on the head a few minutes ago. What good was it doing for me to sit here and hold my head in my hands? Bud would want me to get McKay instead of wasting time outside his hospital room. He had a whole staff of doctors and nurses to take care of him.

“They'll call me if . . . anything happens, and I'll head right back here.”

Black put his fists on his hips and stared at me with one major displeased expression. One that made his employees jump down, turn around, and pick a bale of cotton. I wasn't much the jumping type. I wasn't the trembling type either. I didn't even say “how high.” He was dressed for work, in a custom-tailored navy suit, crisp white shirt, and burgundy-and-gray striped silk tie. His heavy overcoat was black cashmere lined with silk, and expensive. He shook his head. He looked really, really frustrated. He did that a lot when we knocked heads. “Okay, I'll take you out there, but I'm going, too. No argument.”

“Sure. Fine. Let's go.”

When I finally got Charlie on his cell and informed him of McKay's California warrant, he told me to arrest the bastard and search his house for the kid. By the time we left at the ER entrance, a frigid wind was swirling and twirling snow around our heads. I barely noticed the cold air as I climbed into Black's Humvee.

The late-afternoon sky was iron gray and heavy, the clouds roiling and diminishing light and making everything dark and foreboding, which promised another subzero night. Black's Humvee caused the usual spectacle, with everybody and their dog staring at us. We sure as hell better not rob a bank in the thing. And it wasn't the vehicle I'd choose for undercover surveillance either, but hey, we wanted McKay to see us.

“You sure John Booker didn't turn up criminal convictions in McKay's past? I give you that he's clever, but not that clever.”

“The background showed pretty much what Charlie said it was. Joe McKay has no living family; he's never been married. Been pretty much a loner, even when he was in the military. That's why they gave him dangerous missions that he had a good chance of not coming back from. Records indicate he never showed fear, never seemed to care if he came out dead or alive.”

“Maybe that's because he's got ESP and knows when and where he's going to die. That'd take the pressure off. Did Booker find any mention of psychic abilities?”

“No, not a word. Apparently he kept his mouth shut about it. If he has it at all, and I have my doubts.”

“Yeah, you and me both. Pretty odd he was so hush-hush until he showed up here. Then all of a sudden, he's John Edward in the flesh and making sure everybody knows it.” I rubbed my bandage and closed my eyes against the snow glare. I should've taken a handful of the painkillers they offered me. I reached in my pocket and found one capsule that they gave me but that I didn't take. I popped it in my mouth and swallowed it sans water.

“What was that?”

Sometimes dating a doctor gets on my nerves. “A pain pill they gave me for my head.”

“Here, put these on. They'll help.” He handed me his sunglasses, which I happened to know came from the ski slopes at Turino, Italy. I put them on and presto, the glare was gone. Wow.

Black said, “What kind of pill was it?”

“I don't remember. Who cares?” I changed the subject. “I know Joe's involved in Classon's murder, Black. The others, too. And if he didn't off them himself, I guarantee he knows who did. And maybe that's just it, maybe he's protecting somebody, somebody close to him.”

Black adjusted the defroster as sleet pecked against the wide windshield. “Like who? His family's gone.”

“That's what I'm going to find out when I take him in for interrogation.” And I was salivating to get my hands on him.

The sleet made the going slow and the day gloomy, as if things could get any worse. When we reached the spot where the guys were sweeping my Explorer, we slowed and I asked Shag if they'd turned up anything. They hadn't. A couple of fingerprints was about it. We pulled away, and inside I cursed the snow. Outside, too. Enough already. This was not the frickin' North Pole.

By the time we reached McKay's road and headed toward the farmhouse, the ice pellets hitting the car petered off some and turned into soft, silent flakes.

“He better not be gone.”

“He's not. Look.”

Lights were on in the farmhouse, yellow squares glowing in the deepening dusk. We stopped out front, and I'd barely stepped out of the passenger's side when I heard the buzz of McKay's four-wheeler firing up behind the house. I drew my weapon, but before we rounded the corner, McKay was halfway across the open field that led into heavily wooded hills.

“Police! Stop!”

I fired a couple of shots in the air, but McKay didn't stop. Seconds later he'd disappeared into a thicket of cedars at the far end of his property.

Black said, “C'mon, this Humvee'll go anywhere.”

We ran for the vehicle, slipping and sliding, but Black was grinning as he fired the ignition. “I've been dying to see what this baby'll do in the woods. Hold on.”

Yeah, I admit it, sometimes Black's giant, expensive toys come in real handy. Like now. Dark was falling over us like a big, black blanket, making it hard to follow him, but our headlights reflected off the white snow as we veered and bounced across the back yard. My adrenaline was pumping out of control.

“Floor it, Black, don't lose him!”

Even if we did, the four-wheeler would leave a nice wide track to follow. We hit the tree line, and Black didn't even slow down. The big tank slammed through the slender cedars, mowing them down indiscriminately and dumping lots of snow and slapping evergreen boughs across the windshield. I held on tightly to the dash and tried not to remember how much this rampaging ride was hurting my rampaging headache.

The solitary track was easy to see in the jouncing Humvee's headlamps. We got about thirty yards inside the woods before cedars gave way to ancient oaks with two-foot-diameter trunks that didn't mow quite so easily. Black stopped and idled the Humvee. The windshield wipers swished back and forth with wet, sloppy sounds. “Can't go any farther. The trees are too close together. Either we follow him on foot or get out an APB.”

“He's heading for the nearest paved highway. Count on it. The State Patrol'll already be out in force on a night this bad.”

I didn't want to give it up, but I wasn't stupid, either. Neither of us was dressed or physically prepared to track a fugitive through the woods at night in a brewing blizzard. McKay had gotten away for now. I stared at the shadowy woods, then went tense when the “Mexican Hat Dance” sang alive inside my leather purse.

Black and I stared at each other, and I let it play. Truth was that I was afraid to answer, afraid it was news about Bud. Bad news.