Heaven's keep

THIRTY-SEVEN

Cork 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.”

With his free hand, Gully slapped his partner’s shoulder hard. “Goddamn it, I told you to cap her.”

“I did. I just couldn’t shoot her in the face. I told you, she looked too much like Rita. So I put one in her heart. Hell, if that didn’t kill her, I figured she’d suffocate.”

“Obviously she didn’t. Fuck!”

“What do we do?” Quinn asked.

“Get rid of these two and cut our losses,” Mike said. “We’ll put ’em inside with the others and bury the plane again. Then see if we can figure how the woman did the Houdini thing.”

The two thugs were less than a dozen feet away. If they were any good with their weapons, Cork didn’t stand a chance of reaching the rifle in the pit before they nailed him. But he figured at this point, he had nothing to lose. He was just about to make his move when two shots rang out from the top of the canyon wall and two rounds burrowed into the dirt near the killers’ feet. The men spun and crouched, swinging their weapons toward the line where the top of the canyon wall met the sky. Cork grabbed Parmer, and they both dove for the pit. They weren’t alone. Dewey Quinn leaped in after them.

Cork took Quinn. He grabbed the man and heaved him against the pit wall. Quinn lashed out with a fast fist that caught Cork just below his left eye. Cork took the blow, then lunged forward, burying his shoulder in Quinn’s gut, and he wrapped his arms around the deputy. Quinn tried to dig his knee into Cork’s stomach and hammered at the back of his head, but Cork held on. He lifted Quinn off his feet and threw him to the ground. Quinn tried to come up. The toe of Cork’s boot buried itself in the soft tissue below Quinn’s jaw, and the man’s head snapped back. It hit the fuselage with a hollow thud. Quinn lay on the ground, facedown. He moaned and struggled to rise, but Cork sat on his back, pinning him in the dirt.

He’d been vaguely aware of gunfire. And now he saw that Parmer had the rifle, had positioned himself on the steps, and was pulling off rounds over the edge of the pit. At the moment, there wasn’t any return fire. Parmer held off squeezing the trigger. He glanced down at Cork.

“They both got away,” he said. “Do we go after them?”

“What about the shooter on the wall?” Cork asked.

“Nothing since those first two rounds. How’s Benedict Arnold there?”

“Just the way I want him. Alive and rattled.” Cork got up and grabbed one of the shovels. He rolled Quinn over and put the digging edge of the blade to the man’s throat. “I’m very much inclined to separate your head from the rest of you, Dewey. Then I’ll just throw the two pieces in that plane and bury it again. Nobody’ll ever know.”

Quinn looked up at him. It wasn’t fear in his eyes so much as resignation.

“Tell me what you know,” Cork said.

Quinn began to talk.