Twenty-Seven Bones

6

Pender awoke in the darkest dark he’d ever known. Impenetrable blackness-he’d left the flashlight on and the batteries had worn down. He couldn’t see his nose. He’d have felt disembodied if it weren’t for the throbbing in his head.

He forced himself to move slowly, changing the batteries with painstaking deliberation, to prove to himself that he was in charge of…something…himself, his mounting panic, something. But Pender knew, even as the beam from the flashlight did its narrow best to light up the cave, that he was in charge of nothing at that point, least of all his life.

Lying still, conserving oxygen, looking up at the hundreds of tiny, curved stalactites hanging from the ceiling, an old picture book memory surfaced for Pender: somebody sowed dragon’s teeth in the ground, and they sprang up as warriors.

He rolled onto his side, went back to reading the manuscript beside his makeshift pallet. The adventures of P and E and B. It didn’t have a title. Call it The Autobiography of a Serial Killer, thought Pender. Or was that already taken?

And what a motive: the victim’s dying breath. Pender was less surprised than most would have been. He’d consulted on the Richard Chase investigation. Chase, the so-called Vampire of Sacramento, killed for blood. Pender had also worked on cases where people killed for thrills, for lust, for body parts to add to their collections. This was a new one to him, but it was a difference in degree, not in kind. In Pender’s opinion, in the long run serial killers killed for the sake of killing, they enjoyed holding the power of life and death, and the rest was window dressing.

Before falling asleep, Pender had read up to the part where the trio of psychos were in California, city unspecified, experimenting to find the most efficient way to “dispatch” their “subjects.” (Considering the topic, the prose of the unnamed author-presumably Phil-was surprisingly bloodless, except during the frequent sex scenes.)

Now he read how they’d tried piercing the heart, only to breathe in bloody flume. Internal injuries proved unpredictable. Some died on the spot, others lived hours and might have lived days, if permitted. Then B told them (in pidgin English, dreadfully rendered by the author) that in the old days, after the Dutch had outlawed head-hunting and some of the villages on Nias had switched over to taking the right hands of their enemies, a captured warrior’s hand was often lopped off while he was still alive, and that death invariably resulted within a predictable period of time: two to three minutes.

And the glee, the pure bubbling elation of P and E when they put B’s hypothesis to the test and found he was right, struck Pender as more purely, repulsively pornographic than all the sex scenes that had preceded it, even the ones that didn’t have a murder for a centerpiece. P was as boastful of the way E developed the ability to predict the precise moment of death as he was of her “overdeveloped female attributes,” to which he couldn’t help referring every two or three pages.

By the time the manuscript ended, with a secondhand description of what sounded convincingly like Fran Bendt’s murder at the hands of Lewis Apgard, Pender had reached the boiling point. He didn’t always hate the serial killers he pursued. Sometimes he felt sorry for them, especially the schizophrenics. They couldn’t help themselves, couldn’t have stopped themselves if they’d wanted to. But he hated this batch with a white-hot passion. And in a way, Apgard was the most revolting of the four. The other three were clearly psychopaths, but if the manuscript was to be believed, Apgard had his wife killed out of sheer greed, of which the Bendt murder was merely an offshoot.

Suddenly the worst part of Pender’s current predicament became not knowing whether any or all of the others in the cave had survived the explosions. There were no bodies in this chamber and no blood save for his own. The possibility that any or all of the killers had survived, and that they had the little girl, was troubling enough, but the possibility they might get away with it was maddening, and made the prospect of waiting passively to die or be rescued, without knowing, seem unbearable.

Without any way to gauge how long his air supply would last, or even if there was really any danger of running out of oxygen, Pender began to consider the likelihood that he might be backing the wrong horse. Because if he had only hours left, he was going to die anyway, and if he had days, then all he’d accomplish by lying there doing nothing would be to guarantee his death.

But he could dig. By God, he could dig. If there were rescuers, he could meet them halfway. And if he didn’t make it, they’d find dirt under his fingernails and know he died trying. And he’d take the incriminating manuscript along with him. They find him, they find it; they find it, they take down Apgard, Bennie, and both Epps. Hang ’em side by side. Man, thought Pender, it’d be worthwhile staying alive just to see those bastards swing.