Twenty-Seven Bones

Chapter Ten
1

They made Pender carry the child. The rainfall, filtered by the canopy, fell softly, in fat drops, widely spaced. Bennie broke trail, Emily followed, then Apgard, walking aslant, holding his gun on Pender from the front while Phil Epp brought up the rear. Epp’s gun was trained dead center on Dawn’s spine as she rode piggyback, her arms around Pender’s neck.

Pender’s head throbbed. The hood of the yellow slicker had saved his scalp from being split open, but he had an egg the size of…well, of an egg, at the back of his skull. Not a bad sign-in the course of his career Pender had taken more than a few shots to his big bald head, a seemingly irresistible target, and had learned that the worse the swelling on the outside of the skull, the less damage on the inside.

The higher they climbed, the thinner the canopy and the louder the rain. Pender took advantage of the racket to whisper to the little girl that it was going to be okay, that he was going to get her out of this. She hugged him tighter. “I want to go home,” she whispered.

“So do I, honey-so do I.” But to his surprise, he found himself picturing the A-frame at the end of the tamarind-shaded lane, not the ramshackle house on the wooded hill above the eastern bank of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal.

Must be true, what they say about home being where the heart is, he told himself. He saw Dawson’s face in his mind’s eye, wondered if she were wondering where he was. Or had they discovered that Dawn was missing yet? If so, it wouldn’t have been long before they found the cruiser in the ditch outside the gate. All somebody’d have to do is grab the microphone, key it in, start yelling. The search might already be under way. If so, his job was to keep himself and Dawn alive long enough to be found.

The procession halted. Phil gave his gun to Emily to hold, shucked off his pack, then helped Bennie clear the brush and vines from a round black hole some three feet in diameter, set into the base of a rocky hillside.

Bennie switched his headlamp to the broad white beam, took the pistol from Emily, and wriggled headfirst, belly down, into the hole, pushing his knapsack ahead of him.

No way, Pender told himself, lifting Dawn off his back, cradling her in his arms. No fucking way they were going down there. A plan began to hatch itself. If he threw Dawn as far as he could, just flat-out dwarf-tossed her, even if he took a bullet it might buy her enough time to get away. And Dawson had said the forest was safe, no wild animals.

“Are you a fast runner?” Pender whispered, turning away from the others, his face half-hidden by his hood.

She nodded, her cheek pressed against the front of his slicker.

“Good. Hit the ground running, don’t stop for anything.”

Bennie? No problem. Phil, Emily? Blow them to hell without a second thought. Pender? Sheer serendipity. He disappears with the other three, his suspicions disappear with him. And to wrap it up in a tidy bow, Lewis told himself, he could even tell the cops he seemed to recall running into the Epps Friday night, when they were supposed to have been in Puerto Rico.

But seeing the little girl had taken all the fun out of it. On the way up the hill, turning back to keep the gun on Pender, he couldn’t help seeing her eyes staring at him over Pender’s shoulder. How did things get so fucking out of hand? he wondered again. It had seemed terribly simple once-Hokey dies, all your problems are ended.

Instead, he’d traded them in, along with his soul, for thirty pieces of silver-that’s how it was starting to feel. Not that Lewis believed in the existence of the soul, any more than he believed in the hooha and the fatamatawhatsis of the Epps. Or maybe he just wasn’t drunk enough-in any case, the idea stuck in his craw. Killing a little girl-that would leave a mark. And haunt your dreams for a long, long time. Make the ram look like Mary’s little lamb.

So when Lewis realized from Pender’s body language what he had in mind, he had a fraction of a second to decide not to shoot him until after the kid had a chance to get away. And afterward, with the remains of the others safely buried under a couple tons of rock and earth, Lewis would tell Coffee that the Epps had made him do it, said they’d shoot him if he didn’t cooperate. Then he’d lead the search party for the girl.

And if she remembered otherwise, it would be the word of a terrified six-year-old against that of a grown man, a pillar of the community-Lewis would have been willing to take the chance.

But the chance never came. Phil grabbed the kid from Pender before he could make his move, sent her down the hole ahead of him. Emily ordered Pender into the tunnel next. He was a tight fit. That left two of them above ground. “Your turn,” said Emily.

“After you,” said Lewis, his free hand dipping unconsciously into his trench coat pocket to reassure himself that the grenades were still there.