Silencer (17 page)

He tried brushing it against the wall a few times like a blade against a whetstone, and yes, the fibers dropped away and the edge shined a little brighter.

On the wall, at about the right position for his next step up, he spotted a brownish stone that jutted out about an inch. It was lodged slightly higher than he would've liked, but it would do. He gripped it with both hands and wiggled it up and down like a bad tooth. When it was loose he pried the wedge-shaped rock out of the wall and exposed a deep slot that was just wide enough to insert his hand into. Using the sardine lid he scraped at the hole until he had it broadened enough for his toe.

He looked up at the wall and thought of the blind climbers who picked their way to the peak of Everest, the joy in their faces, their fearless determination. All he had was a bad hangover and a knee heading south and some serious stiffening.

He went over and picked up the body of the sardine can. He wasn't sure how useful it would be as a digging tool. Not as good as the lid. But the lid wasn't going to last much longer. He didn't want to find himself nearing the top of the wall with a used-up digging implement. At least the can itself was heavier-gauge aluminum, and he might use one of its corners to scoop out a cranny or two. He slipped it into his pants pocket and heard it plink against something.

He reached in and drew out the can, then withdrew the wedding ring. The idiot brothers had missed it last night when they frisked him—the diamond solitaire he was going to embarrass Rusty with in front of all their friends and all those strangers. He should have gone ahead and done it. How differently the evening would have gone. He probably wouldn't be a hostage in a sinkhole somewhere near
Lake Okeechobee. More than likely he and Rusty would still be spooned together in bed, sleeping off the party.

At this moment Rusty would be searching for him. He felt more confident of that than he had earlier. The note he'd written might delay her some, but he had no doubt she'd see through it and realize it was written under duress. She and Sugar would be doing what they could to track him down. He couldn't imagine how they'd manage it, but was certain they'd be on his trail.

The thought gave him little comfort.

Once again Thorn had put others at risk. He'd meant well. Secretly, he'd been swollen with pride over the plan Rusty concocted. Something good was going to come from his misspent life. Land would be spared from the march of urban sprawl. Habitat preserved, wildlife saved. All of that seemed hopelessly foolish now. An absurd, self-indulgent fantasy.

He dropped the ring back in his pocket along with the can. He scuffed the toe of his boat shoe at the tip of a stalagmite to try to blunt its sharp point. But that accomplished nothing. He took one last look around before he started the climb.

Something had bothered him earlier when he'd been dunking his shirt in that subterranean water. Not only the oddly smooth sides of the crevice, but something else, something he'd seen, registered, and dismissed in his haste and confusion.

He went back to the crevice, kneeled, reached in, and swabbed his open hand across slick rock several inches below ground. It was a perfect circle about a half foot in diameter. Such a thing had to be manmade. He knew of nothing that exact, that perfectly contoured and smooth that existed in nature.

Elbow below the ground, he ran his hand farther down. And, yes, what looked like an accidental fissure in the stone seemed to be no accident at all.

Which had to mean the pit wasn't a sinkhole. It was more likely the eroded remnants of some ancient well. That slick, perfectly round
opening in the rock was a bore hole. With his fingertips he could even feel faint grooves that might have been the tracings of a drill bit chewing into stone.

If that was true, the opening had been carved to tap into the earth, then abandoned later for some reason, and over the years the steady rains had eroded the opening, widened it into a larger and larger pit. How long that erosion had taken would depend on how large the hole was to begin with, but it had to be many years, maybe decades.

As he drew out his hand, he noticed again several white clumps of stone lying beside the opening. That's what he'd seen. That's what nagged at him.

They were a familiar rock formation whose name and significance he'd known in his school years when he'd been under the magical sway of that geology teacher. That man had rhapsodized for hours about the lost worlds beneath our feet. Now, in the haze of his dehydration, hangover, and concussion, Thorn couldn't summon the rock's name or why it was unique. Each of them was about the size of a walnut and seemed to be the fossilized remains of a bunch of interlocking shells.

He picked one up, touched its contours, and pictured that geology teacher. He tried to recall the slow patient voice of the dogged educator who'd taken Thorn's class of smart asses on numerous field trips around south Florida so they could root in the soil, scavenge for rocks, sift through pebbles and old shell bits.

The word came to him then.

It was a rudist. A cluster of mollusks clumped together and hardened into rock, each of them shaped like a tiny human heart. Those bivalve creatures had been extinct for a hundred million years, making their last appearance when the shallow Cretaceous seas covered the Florida peninsula. During their prime, rudists had thrived for thousands of years, and when they died, their shell remains helped form the reefs where long-extinct fish and marine creatures once gathered. Thorn had only seen photographs of rudists. Their fossilized
shells were so rare that even his geology teacher had never encountered one outside of a natural-history museum.

That was because the ancient seabed where they once flourished was now buried deep. And the only possible way a rudist could appear in such a place as this was to be pumped up as backwash from a drill rig that had penetrated at least two miles below the earth where Thorn stood.

Which was one hell of a deep hole to search for water.

 

 

THORN PUT THE FOSSIL IN
his pocket and went back to the wall.

He didn't have time to sort it out. There were more urgent matters. He took a long breath, dug his right toe in the first foothold, and hitched himself up, raising his left foot to find the second hole. His right hand clutched for the slot high on the wall.

When his toe was lodged deep into the second hole, he withdrew his right foot and cranked himself up, shifting all his weight to his left leg. The bad knee held fine.

He realized he'd made a mistake. The handhold he'd cut into the wall was on the wrong side, his right, which meant he would have to dig out the next foothold using his weaker, less adroit left hand, and to make matters more complicated, the foothold would have to be dug out close to where his navel was pressed flat against the craggy surface of the pit. He hadn't diagrammed it correctly. Somehow in his woozy state he'd flipped the blueprint. Now he was forced to carve a divot in the rock wall while assuming a yoga position that had no name.

He set about it. Twisting himself, left foot lodged in the slot of stone, right hand gripping above, left hand searching for any yielding spot. At last he found one, dug an inch-deep channel, then came to
solid rock or fossilized shell, and had to start over a few inches to the right. He was sweating, and he could hear his own breath rising from the strain of staying in place. Already his muscles had started to complain.

He worked the sardine lid deep into a mushy vein in the wall, making progress. He allowed himself a look backward. No great distance down. But those bayonets of stone worried him. If he fell clumsily he could easily skewer himself.

Still, it wasn't like he was clinging to a cliff high above some bottomless gorge, or clawing his way inch by inch up the towering peaks of a real mountain. He was simply climbing up the sheer walls of a shallow grave.

With the slot widened enough to fit the toe of his boat shoe in, he brought his right foot up and dug it into the niche, wiggled his left foot free, and hauled himself up another foot and a half.

He estimated he had about a dozen feet to go before he reached the wooden deck. Five or six more footholds, a couple more handholds. At this rate he should make it to the top by Christmas.

 

Jonah burst into the hunting cabin, buzzing with what he'd learned from Thorn, eager to lay it on Moses, then the two of them could brainstorm about what it meant. He guzzled some water from the tap, called out for Moses, but his brother hadn't returned from his scouting mission at the lodge.

For a moment Jonah stood in the kitchen, listening to the birds outside, listening to an airplane passing. Knowing what he was about to do, but resisting it, because Moses could return any time and catch him. But that familiar tug was too much, and finally he left the kitchen and drifted back to the storage room where they stashed the auction goodies.

They kept the door locked so none of the visiting asshole hunters would stumble in. He unlocked it, went inside. He stood looking at
the shelves, five of them, mostly photos and letters, a couple of bullet-pocked shirts stiff with blood folded up inside plastic bags. Mostly though, it was prison artwork. Killers liked to draw. Like little kids on rainy days, nothing to do but play with their crayons and paint sets.

It was quiet in the storage room. He couldn't hear the birds anymore. The airplane was gone. In the warm air there were ripples of weirdness, as if the letters and drawings and poems and clothes were giving off radioactive vibes from all the grisly shit those people pulled. Superstars of American homicide. Ghouls and cannibals and blank-eyed killers.

At the moment their inventory was low. A lot of selling lately had cleared a couple of shelves. What they had at the moment was a scribbled letter with assorted doodles and a poem from Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker. And there was a Henry Lee Lucas painting of a sunrise over a mountain range. Lucas got his start killing his mother, then went on to murder hundreds more. He claimed six hundred but cut that in half eventually, though nobody ever nailed it down for sure. They had a drawing the BTK killer did, Dennis Rader, a very graphic and detailed pen and ink that showed all the bad shit he was planning to do to one of his female victims. Bind, torture, kill. And then there was Jonah's current favorite, a topless self-portrait made by Carol Bundy. Big-titted woman wearing horn-rimmed glasses, another serial killer who first beheaded her ex-boyfriend then helped Douglas Clark with the Sunset Strip Murders, killing a string of hookers. Big boobs, little red nipples, like the tits on that bar girl in Clewiston Jonah had screwed a few times.

All told, just that single shelf of murder porn had to be worth over five K.

Their latest prize was an oil painting by John Wayne Gacy. It was poster-sized on a black background with skulls lined up, five rows of seven skulls. Each skull exactly the same, like the face a creepy kid would carve into a pumpkin, empty eye sockets, empty nose hole, shark teeth in the mouth.

Gacy painted in a bloody scythe behind each skull. One skull for each of his victims. Thirty-four boys. And in the top left-hand corner, at the head of the first row, was the face of a circus clown with big red lips and a doughy white face and a limp white-and-blue sock hat. That was a self-portrait. Gacy had done gigs at kid's parties. Pogo the Clown was his stage name.

When they got around to putting the Gacy painting up for auction, Moses was going to start the bidding at four thousand, about twice what they'd paid for it from one of Gacy's jailers.

He knew it was wrong. Knew he shouldn't handle the merchandise. You could get grease stains on them, fingerprints, lower their value. You could drop it, bump it, scuff an edge. It was stupid. Totally against the rules.

He listened for Moses, but heard nothing. He slid the Gacy out of the bubble wrap it arrived in and held it up to the light. Gacy had killed boys. Teenage boys. Raping them, then strangling them, stashing their bodies in the dirt beneath his house. Jonah thought about that as he looked at that picture, those thirty-four skulls, thirty-four dead kids. And that one clown like God up in the left-hand corner smiling down on his creations. The clown's lips were pouty and red.

Jonah had killed five people so far. Nobody important enough to make the news. All work-related, impersonal assignments handed out from the big guy. A pro like Jonah should have zero respect for a sick fuck like Gacy, who was nothing but a retard whose hobby was tormenting kids. But the truth was different. Jonah couldn't help himself. Sometimes he found himself getting buzzed from where his mind took him. Coming into the storage room, handling the items, letting his thoughts roam.

People like Gacy were famous. They were celebrities with their mug shots on TV. People read books about them, movies got made, TV shows recounted their life stories. They became legends, part of the fucked-up folklore of America. While Jonah labored in obscurity, doing his job, efficient and straightforward. At his current kill rate,
he'd pass Gacy's thirty-four before he was done. But no one was going to know. He'd be anonymous to the end.

In the news photos Jonah had seen, Gacy's house was gray and shabby, his bedroom was in the back, away from the street. Jonah could picture a boy tied up on Gacy's bed, struggling, his mouth stuffed with cloth. The kid's eyes were big and he was crying and shivering. Jonah imagined walking slowly over to the kid like Gacy did, thinking about how Gacy peeled off the kid's clothes and did sex things to him. Everything Jonah had ever done to a college girl or a bar maid or a hooker, Gacy did to the kid. Did it and did it again till he was worn out and empty. Jonah pictured all that, how it would feel to choke the kid to death using the edge of a board the way Gacy did it, and watching the boy die in his hands.

He replayed in his head the black-and-white videotape they'd auctioned off, the one they'd sold eventually to that talky waitress in Omaha. Gacy's floorboards ripped up by the cops, exposing the crawl-space. All those shallow graves down in the dirt. One by one he'd buried the boys until every inch of the crawlspace soil was used up. After that he dumped his last six victims into local rivers.