Heaven's Keep (33 page)

Cork took his place behind the wheel. Parmer settled himself in back. Quinn sat on the passenger side with the rifle cradled in his hands. They headed off once again, and half an hour later, without incident and without seeing any further evidence of another vehicle, they arrived at their destination.

It was clear from a distance how, in a vision, the formation might appear as a bed or a box. The sides were dark red, like rough-finished cherrywood, and the floor of the canyon was dirt of the same color. It was half a mile long and a couple of hundred yards wide. It sat on a flat plain maybe a mile square that lay at the very base of the foothills. Behind it rose a small mountain that Cork figured had to be Eagle Cloud. This was the only large, flat area he’d seen all morning, and he understood why Quinn thought an airstrip could have been scraped there.

As they approached the opening to the canyon, Cork stopped the pickup and got out. His eyes swept the scene before him, east to west. Quinn and Parmer came and stood beside him and saw the same thing: a long, narrow band of earth, clear of rock and sage and all debris, leading directly into the canyon.

“They landed here,” Cork said. “The sons of bitches brought the plane down right here.”

“Where do we begin?” Parmer finally said.

“In the canyon, at the end of the strip they cleared,” Cork said. “If I was going to bury a plane, that’s where I’d do it.”

They drove into the shadow of the canyon a hundred and fifty yards to a place where the makeshift airstrip came to an end. There, very clearly, they saw a long rectangle where the earth had been disturbed. It was like a grave in a cemetery, old enough to have lost the mounding of dirt but still new enough not to blend in completely with the ground around it. Quinn dragged his metal detector from the bed of the pickup, clamped the headphones on, and ran the instrument over the area, all the time nodding to the others confirmation of their suspicions.

When Quinn finished, Cork asked, “Can you tell how deep it is?”

“No, but I’d say not deep. The readings are strong.” He looked back at the cleared strip behind them. “They didn’t bother to cover their tracks. Probably figured nobody would ever come out here. And if they did, the plane was out of sight. Unless you were really looking for something, like we were, hell, you probably wouldn’t even notice.”

“Well,” Parmer said. He looked at the others. “Shouldn’t we start digging?”

They spread out and began. At just over two feet, they struck metal. Parmer’s shovel found the plane first. Cork and Quinn left their own excavations and joined him. Together they cleared a large rectangle of white fuselage that sloped right. They dug a pit following the downward slope of the plane. Two men worked in the ground while the idle man stayed above with the rifle, watching for any trouble that might arrive. Parmer and Quinn relieved each other, but Cork refused to take a break. By midmorning, they’d created an excavation deeper than they were tall that ran for nearly eight feet along the plane and extended half a dozen feet outward. They’d uncovered the upper part of the door and cleared the latch. Cork carefully wiped the dirt from the mechanism and tried the handle. He leaned the weight of his body and the will of his spirit into the attempt, and he let out a cry as if the effort hurt him. The handle didn’t yield. He
yanked and swore, grabbed his shovel and raised it to deliver a blow, but Parmer’s hand restrained him.

“Easy, Cork. We can’t open the door yet anyway, not till we’ve cleared the rest of the dirt. Let’s worry about the handle then, okay?”

Cork stood frozen, the shovel poised. He was deep in the grip of a desperation that, as the door had revealed itself, had coiled tighter and tighter around his heart.

“We’re almost there.” Parmer waited, and when Cork didn’t respond, he said, “If you damage the latch, we might not get inside at all.”

Cork finally heard the wisdom in the words. He stepped back, took a few deep breaths, and nodded. They’d cut crude steps into the side of the pit as they dug, and now Parmer climbed out and disappeared. He returned with bottles of water they’d packed that morning. The men drank and wiped at the sweat and grit on their faces, and considered in the silence of their own thoughts the prospect of what lay before them. Finally they returned to their labor.

On a shimmering crest of heat, the sun continued to rise. The only sounds were the occasional buzz of a flying insect, the dull
chuk
of the blades biting dirt, and the grunts of the men as they broke the earth free and catapulted it from the hole.

An hour past noon it was finished. They’d cleared the door. Parmer examined the latch.

“A lot of grit jammed in there,” he said. “Some water and a brush might clean it out.” He looked up at Quinn, who stood above, at the edge of the pit, holding the rifle.

Quinn nodded and left the hole. He returned with a bottle of water. He also brought a sponge and a soft-bristle scrub brush, which he said he used to wash his truck. Parmer unscrewed the bottle cap and poured half the contents around the handle, then took the brush and with short, careful strokes began to clean the grit from the mechanism.

Cork stood watching, aware from the throb in his chest and thickness in his head that his heart rate, and probably his blood pressure, was spiking. Sweat ran down his face and soaked his clothing. All of this, he understood, was a physical manifestation of something that had nothing to do with the long hours of exertion. Parmer was methodical
and thorough, maddeningly so, and as the minutes dragged on, Cork struggled to hold himself back from leaping at his friend, grabbing the water and the brush, and attacking the door.

At last, Parmer sat back. “You want to give her a try, Cork?”

He’d been waiting for this moment, but now that it was here, he felt suddenly weak, unequal to the task. He shook his head. “You go ahead.”

Parmer braced himself and gave the handle a steady pull. Nothing happened. He relaxed, settled himself once more, and again pulled hard. This time the mechanism gave. He shoved the door open fully, leaving a gaping entry. Inside was utterly dark, and from it poured the foul stench of entombed putrefaction.

“We’ll need a flashlight,” Quinn said. He disappeared.

Parmer was studying Cork. “You okay?”

Cork didn’t answer. He was thinking,
Not Jo. That’s not Jo inside.
He felt himself reeling, falling backward. Suddenly he was staring at the pure blue rectangle of sky framed by the edges of the pit, and for a moment he was back on Iron Lake as a kid on a raft on a summer day staring up and thinking that in heaven the angels must be dressed in fabric made from the sky, it was so perfect.

Then Parmer’s voice brought him back. “Just stay down, Cork.”

Quinn clambered into the hole. “Whoa, what happened?”

“He fainted,” Parmer said.

Quinn waved a hand briskly in front of his own face. “It’s the smell. Enough to gag anyone.”

“I’m fine.” Cork sat up and leaned back against the side of the pit.

“Here, have some water,” Parmer said.

He gave Cork the bottle he’d used to wash the handle mechanism clean. There were still a few swallows in it. Cork finished the water, and Parmer said to Quinn, “There’s another bottle in my knapsack in the truck.”

“Got it,” Quinn said and took off.

Cork sat looking at the open door and feeling faint again. “I don’t think I can go in there, Hugh.”

“No reason you have to, Cork. Let Quinn and me handle that. You just stay here.”

“I should go,” Cork said.

“No, you’ve come as far as you need to. What’s in there, you don’t have to see.”

“I should go,” Cork said again. “But honest to God, Hugh, I can’t.”

“I understand.”

Quinn came back. He handed the bottled water to Cork.

“Okay?” Parmer said.

Cork nodded.

“Dewey, you and me are going inside,” Parmer said.

“All right.” Quinn accepted the situation without comment.

The two men stood up. Quinn set his rifle against the fuselage, turned on the flashlight he’d retrieved from his truck, and led the way into the plane.

Cork tried to drink some water, but his throat was dry and he choked. He stared at the black beyond the door and forced himself not to imagine what was inside. He heard Quinn and Parmer talking in voices too low for him to catch the words. He felt the tension in him building, roiling up from the pit of his stomach.

And then Parmer stood in the doorway of the plane, eyeing Cork in an odd way.

Every muscle in Cork’s body had drawn taut, and he felt ready to explode. “Well?”

“They’re in there,” Parmer replied. His face held a puzzled look. “They’re all in there except for one, Cork. Your wife’s not on this plane.”

C
ork staggered up. “What did you say?”

Parmer shook his head in bewilderment. “She’s not in there, Cork. Jo’s not in there.”

Quinn came out looking grim and unsteady. “Christ, enough to give anybody nightmares.”

Cork grasped Quinn by the shoulders. “Did you see her?”

“No,” Quinn replied. “Five bodies. They’ll be a bitch to ID, but all definitely male.”

Cork grabbed the flashlight from Quinn and pushed between the two men into the foul-smelling plane.

What greeted him was an eerie scene. The cockpit was empty. He’d expected that. In the cabin, the passengers sat in their seats, still wearing the oxygen masks that had deployed from the compartments above. The skin of their faces had drawn back, and skeletal grins peeked out from the sides of the masks. Their eye sockets were empty, and they seemed to watch Cork with black stares. The liquefaction of internal organs had caused the bodies to collapse inward, giving them an exaggerated gauntness. They hadn’t decomposed a great deal, the result, Cork supposed, of the airless crypt where they’d been entombed. He walked slowly between the seats until he came to one that was empty, next to a window, where he saw a briefcase lying on the floor.

“Cork, what happened here?”

He turned and found Parmer just inside the door, Quinn at his back.

“Shot,” Cork said. “All of them in the head at close range. Small
caliber. A twenty-two would be my guess. The bullet stays inside the skull, ricochets off the bone, and destroys the brain. Work of professionals.”

Parmer stared at the dead men, sitting before him in a repose that seemed almost peaceful. “You’re telling me that they just sat there like that and let someone execute them?”

“That’s exactly what I’m telling you.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Where’s your wife?” Quinn asked.

“She was here.” Cork leaned over the body next to the empty seat. From the long gray hair, he was pretty sure it had been George LeDuc. He lifted the briefcase from the floor. “This is hers.” He pointed to the cushion of the empty seat. “I don’t see any blood. Maybe she wasn’t shot like the others.”

“Then where is she?” Quinn persisted. He seemed perturbed that she wasn’t there.

Cork didn’t have an answer. He felt almost giddy. Jo’s mysterious absence from that macabre scene was the first glimmer of hope he’d had since the plane went missing.

“This smell’s making me sick,” Quinn said. “Let’s get out of here.”

Cork took a long last look around, then followed the others. Outside, his two companions stood motionless at the top of the pit. As he climbed the crude steps to join them, he saw what had made them freeze. A couple of men stood facing them, holding handguns.

“That’s right, O’Connor,” one of the men said. “Come on up and join the party.”

Cork stood next to Parmer, kicking himself for letting his guard down. He was thinking they must have been hiding among the rocks of the canyon wall, waiting for their chance, and when all three men had entered the plane, they’d wasted no time in seizing the advantage. He was thinking about the rifle still in the pit, propped against the fuselage. He was thinking that, given a moment of distraction, he could be in the pit with that rifle.

One of the men was tall and slender with brooding lips and sleepy eyelids that made him look tragically poetic. The other, the one who’d spoken, was like a washing machine—plain, square, and efficient. Cork
recognized him. He’d seen him before, in the Turtleback restaurant in Rice Lake, ordering Leinenkugel’s on the waitress’s recommendation, and again that same night, framed in the rain-streaked window of a car that passed Parmer’s Navigator only moments before the front tire blew.

“You’re a hard one to get rid of, O’Connor,” the man said. “I kind of admire that, don’t you, Mike?”

“Makes me warm all over, Gully,” Mike said.

“I was being sincere, Mike. Then you have to go and interject uncalled-for sarcasm. That’s disrespect.”

“Whatever,” Mike said.

“We’d have made an appearance earlier,” Gully said, speaking toward Cork and the others, “but I hate to interrupt good men while they’re working. Also saved us the trouble of digging a hole for your bodies. Now we can just toss you in with the others, fill that hole back up, nobody’s the wiser.”

Quinn suddenly began walking toward the two men. “Jesus,” he said. “You almost blew it. O’Connor spotted your tire tracks on the way here.” He took a stance next to Mike.

Cork said, “Dewey?”

Quinn shrugged and smiled affably. “Services to the highest bidder.”

Cork said, “Couldn’t become a rich man by prospecting so you took an easier route?”

“Got a wife with expensive tastes. Money makes her happy. Makes me happy, too.”

“People have died for your happiness, Dewey.”

“People die for all kinds of stupid reasons, Cork. By the way,” he said to his cohorts, “O’Connor’s wife isn’t in there.”

Gully shot him an evil look. “The fuck you saying?”

“I’m saying she’s not in there. She should be there, dead like the others, but she’s not.”

“Mike, check it out.”

Mike took his lean, poetic-looking self into the pit. He was gone a minute, and when he returned he came with a string of words few poets would normally use in rhyme. He walked toward Gully with his
hands open and empty and his face confounded. “Bitch isn’t there, Gully. Just like Quinn says.”