Shoofly Pie & Chop Shop (85 page)

To her dismay, Riley saw that in the shadow of a covering cloud
everything
disappeared—every tree, every bush, every life-saving pointer and mark. The only time it was safe to navigate the smoldering hillside was when the moon shone bright—but that’s when she herself was most visible. There was only one safe course of action: she would take her bearings in the moonlight, then move as fast as possible the instant darkness fell.

She scrambled for the scraggly brush, but not directly toward it; that was dangerous ground, she remembered—or was it? It had been almost two years since Riley sat on the back porch on a winter day, wrapped in a blanket, sipping coffee, and watching the falling snow map the contours of the underground fire. It had been far longer since she was on the bony pile, and from up close all the distances and proportions seemed to change. Was her memory reliable—and how much had the fire progressed in two years’ time? She wasn’t sure it was safe to move any farther—but she knew it would be fatal to remain where she was.

She headed straight up the mountain until she was even with the brush, then turned at a right angle and moved directly toward it. She ducked down behind the thick growth and listened.

“Ri-i-i-ley!”

He was on the hillside now. Riley traced her path back down the mountain; her sliding footsteps looked like craters in the undisturbed coal. And the
sound
she made—her feet, struggling through the crumbling slurry, seemed as loud as a car on a gravel driveway. What was the point in hiding? A blind man could have followed her.

“Ri-i-i-ley!
Come on, Riley, my shoes are getting dirty. I only want to talk with you—didn’t your sister tell you that? If I wanted to kill you, I could have shot you the minute you walked in the door.”

Riley looked up the hillside again. Her next goal was a
dishwasher-sized lump of limestone thirty yards away. She looked back down the mountain, straining her eyes against the darkness—and she saw movement. In the moonlight, she could almost make out Santangelo’s contour not far from her last stopping point. She turned to run—but then she stopped. She looked back at the path between her and Santangelo—not the path
she
had taken, not the
safe
path, but the one that he might take—if she called to him.

The idea seemed unthinkable—but what else could she do? She couldn’t run from him forever; she could barely run at all. In another few minutes he would close the gap between them, and then—

“Here I am!” she called out from behind the brush. “Come on up and let’s talk!”

There was a sharp crack. Riley heard a quick hiss and the sound of scattering rock behind her. Once again darkness fell, and she scrambled up the hill toward the lump of limestone. She heard a second crack—but this time she didn’t hear the bullet hit. He was firing wildly, aiming at the sound of her footsteps.

She collapsed behind the boulder and waited. She could hear the
crunch-crunch-crunch
of his footsteps coming up the hill. They stopped; then they started again, moving away from her. Riley pounded her fist against the stone. In the darkness, he had followed the only thing he could see—her own footsteps, leading him safely across cooler ground.

She felt a raindrop on her arm, and then another one. She wiped furiously at the spots with coal dust, but then the drops began to come more quickly. Seconds later, it was a downpour. Washed by the cleansing rain, her fair skin began to reappear like a seashell in a receding tide.

She looked around her. The cloudburst was exposing her skin, but it was obscuring almost everything else—shapes, motion, even the raking sound of her footsteps. She had to take advantage of this blessing from above; she had to put distance between them—but which way? Up, of course—but there were no longer any markers visible, no signposts to guide her safely on her way. She closed her eyes and tried to assemble a mental map—but it came to her only in fragments and pieces. She sensed the cloudburst already beginning to lose intensity, and she knew she had to go, blind or not. She struggled to her feet and started climbing.

Twenty yards up the hill, then right; forward ten yards—no, a
little more than that—then up again. Twenty yards, thirty yards—now left, leaving a wide berth for an especially dangerous section of ground. She stopped; this should be a safe spot. She sagged to her knees, exhausted—and felt a searing pain shoot up both legs. She leapt to her feet again.

Her pants were burned away at the knees, and the skin beneath was charred and blistered. She leaned down and extended her hand; a foot above the ground, the air was like an oven. Did she turn the wrong way? Did she travel too far—or not far enough? Or had the fire beneath her feet eaten away even more of the hillside, rendering her memory useless? She turned one way, and then the other … and then she stopped.

Riley stood paralyzed, utterly spent, her entire body throbbing with pain. She could see her heartbeat pulsing in her eyes. She tasted iron in the back of her mouth—was it the coal dust, or was it her own blood? She felt as though she were drifting away from the scene before her, becoming strangely distant, like a woman stepping back from a great picture window. It amazed her that she was somehow still standing. She wondered: don’t you fall down when you die?

The rain stopped just as suddenly as it began, leaving her completely exposed on the open hillside. She looked at the sky; the last of the clouds slipped past the moon now, bathing the entire mountain in brilliant light. She looked up the slope; she was almost at the crest of the hill now, standing out in stark relief against the nighttime sky. She looked down at the abandoned buildings of Mencken, standing like little card houses in a darkened room. She saw the stores and the houses and the Breaker and even the old entrance to the mine itself. She saw her entire childhood all at once—and on the horizon, in the distance, she saw the lights of Pittsburgh.

She looked down at the base of the mountain. She imagined two tiny figures, scurrying from side to side, searching for the pathway up the hillside. She knew that they would never find it in time; Sarah didn’t know about the sycamore. Sarah never climbed the bony pile as a child; Riley wouldn’t let her. You have to look out for your baby sister; that’s what big sisters do.

She lowered her eyes again. Just twenty-five yards below her, Cruz Santangelo searched for her in a patch of tall weeds.

“Not there,” Riley called. “Not even close.”

He turned. His own face was blackened with soot, just like hers, but at this distance Riley could see little white lines coursing down the sides of his face that freshets of sweat had washed clean. He stared up at her. She was so calm, so perfectly at peace. He whirled and pointed his gun at the darkness around him.

“There’s nobody else—just me.”

Santangelo turned back to her again. He widened his stance, squared his shoulders, and cupped the butt of the revolver in his left hand.

“Come on up,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere. You could miss from there.”

Santangelo raised the gun and took careful aim. “I bet I wouldn’t.”

“You’re an expert—do it right. You owe me that much.”

Santangelo slowly lowered the gun. “You know, you’re a lot of trouble.”

“I’ve always been that way. It’s a specialty of mine.”

He started forward, picking his way slowly across the shifting coal. Ten yards away from her, the ground stopped crumbling under his feet; it became hardened, encrusted, like the excess asphalt they dump on the side of a new road. The soles of his shoes began to make a peeling, sticking sound.

“You’re sure you won’t change your mind?” he said. “It seems a shame to lose a woman like you.”

“It’s a great offer—I just don’t think I’d like working with a moron like you.”

Santangelo smiled. “I have a specialty too. Want to see it?” He flipped open the cylinder of his revolver and slid in two brass cartridges.

Riley’s body was like clay now, senseless, unfeeling—but somehow her mind was perfectly clear. Her thoughts seemed to her like the last high-pitched trill a television makes when it blinks off at night and the picture fades away. She raised her eyes and looked past Santangelo, over his shoulder, at a point halfway down the side of the mountain. She saw a solitary figure scrambling up the hillside toward them, oblivious to his own danger.

“I love Nick Polchak,” she whispered.

Santangelo slowly raised the gun and pointed it at her head. “I’m going to enjoy this,” he said.

She shook her head. “I bet you won’t.”

She tried to jump—her legs refused. She had no strength left, no power to move at all—so she simply told her legs to go ahead and die. An instant later they gratefully yielded, folding under her like strips of cloth, and she came down hard on the brittle mantle at Santangelo’s feet.

Halfway up the mountain, Nick heard a howling scream. It was the voice of a man—or was it some kind of animal? It was impossible to tell; at that level of agony, all species seem to share a common voice.

He looked up the hillside near the crest—there, at the place where a moment ago two shadowy figures had stood, was a gaping, orange hole in the side of the mountain. The heat that belched from the jagged opening shook the air, and white-hot embers swirled above it and disappeared into the midnight sky. The glow from the inferno illuminated the hillside all around. Nick searched everywhere.

There was no one.

He sank to his knees and buried his face in his hands.

Nick and Sarah sat across from each other on the wooden floor of the great room, leaning against opposite walls and staring at the empty space between them. They had spent most of the night pacing their own private prisons of grief and regret—but from time to time they talked. During those times Sarah poured out her heart, openly weeping, longing to explain her motives and actions. But if it was understanding she wanted, she didn’t get it from Nick.

It was morning now. Their anguish, dulled by utter exhaustion, had begun to cool and crust over like the gaping hole on the crest
of the bony pile. Nick lifted his eyes and looked at Sarah, curled in a fetal position against the wall.

“So there was no one else?”

“I already told you.”

“Tell me again.”

Sarah stiffly raised herself into a sitting position. “Julian Zohar—he’s the organizer, he’s the one who has access to the waiting lists. Tucker Truett provides genetic and medical information from western PA. Jack Kaplan—he’s an ER surgeon at UPMC—he does the removals and transplants. Lassiter is the inside man at the coroner’s office. There are two CSIs on the payroll too, but they don’t know the whole system. That just leaves Santangelo.”

“And
you,
” Nick said. “Don’t be so modest, Sarah. You were a valuable part of this team.”

Sarah said nothing.

Nick leaned back against the wall and stared at the ceiling. It was a smaller operation than he ever imagined. Santangelo was the only contact at the FBI—and there were
none
in the Pittsburgh Police. He and Riley had no idea who they could turn to—they weren’t sure that
anyone
was safe—but as it turned out, almost
everyone
was. Zohar was bluffing. He was just a little man who was adept at casting a very large shadow. Nick shook his head in disgust; he felt like vomiting.

Sarah looked at him. “What happens now?”

“Now? That’s easy—I turn you over to the police, along with the DNA evidence that puts you in Leo’s room the night he was murdered. Then you start squealing like a pig—you start naming names, you try to cut the best deal you can for yourself. Santangelo’s already dead—you can blame most of it on him: a deranged federal agent, an ex–Hostage Rescue Team member who went over the edge—he
blackmailed
you, he threatened to
kill
you if you didn’t help. That’s good, Sarah. That just might play—except for one little problem:
me.
I’ll be right there, telling them the rest of the story, making sure you get everything you deserve.”

“I don’t blame you for hating me,” Sarah said.

Nick glared at her; his eyes were more than
intense;
they were like two great coal drills, piercing her black walls. “Last night—while you were sitting there—I thought about walking across the room and
killing you myself. I
thought
about it, Sarah. I don’t mean the idea just passed through my head—I mean I actually considered it.”

“So why didn’t you?”

“It’s too quick,” he said.
“Eight hundred degrees
—that’s the temperature inside that mountain, did you know that? And it isn’t fire exactly—it’s more like a barbecue pit, that’s what it is. I wonder: Is your body consumed immediately, or do you sort of
cook
first? How long can someone survive in that kind of heat—five seconds? Ten? Santangelo seemed to scream for an awfully long time—but pain is like that, isn’t it? It seems to last—”

“Stop it!” Sarah buried her face in her hands and began to weep again.

“Might as well,” Nick said. “You’ll be thinking about it for the rest of your life anyway—and I hope it’s a long life, Sarah, I really do. When the DA pushes for the death penalty, I plan to be there, pleading for leniency. Have pity on the poor girl, make it a life sentence instead—make it two—one for Riley and one for Leo. And I plan to visit you in prison, Sarah. I want to see you as the years go by. I want to watch you age
way
before your time; I want to see the way regret eats away at you—I guess that’s what they mean when they give you
two
life sentences.”