Shakedown

Chapter Thirty-four

Latrell waited until close to midnight before he left home. There was a Wal-Mart two miles from the cave that was open twenty-four hours. No one paid any attention to cars left in that lot. He parked there and walked like he always did, passing through a neighborhood, with few streetlights, of older, modest houses whose residents had long since gone to bed.

He would have preferred to park at the rail yard and take the path behind the storage sheds, but then he would have had to explain why he left his car parked at the terminal building overnight. His coworkers might start asking questions if they saw him disappear into the woods, especially after a body had been found nearby in the Dumpster.

The local news had reported that the victim was another drug dealer. The reporter noted there was speculation that the murder could be part of a gang war that had started with the murders earlier in the week. Good, Latrell thought. Things were coming back together.

Dressed in black jeans and a black T-shirt, he was nothing more than a shadow. No one saw him slip into the eastern edge of the woods. Aided by the moonlight and the years underground that had sharpened his night vision, and with his?ashlight tucked into his backpack, Latrell kept on walking.

Though the night had cooled, the woods were dense, holding on to the day’s heat. Latrell heard occasional rustling in the underbrush, night prowlers giving him wide berth. It took him close to an hour to reach the entrance, a thin sheen of sweat coating his skin.

The entrance to the cave was through a hollowed waist-high gash nature had cut into a rocky mound that pushed out from the face of a wooded hillside like a blunt snout.

Concealed with a quilt delicately woven from fallen tree limbs, torn shrubs, and other debris, it appeared natural and random to anyone who stumbled onto it. It was for him a perfect example of ordered chaos, another trick he played on the rest of the world from whom he hid his true self.

Latrell’s breath froze in his throat when he saw that his careful camou?age had been shredded, reduced to a pile of rubble scattered around the entrance as if thrown from the back of a truck. He was certain that no animal could have caused such a disturbance. Someone had found his cave. He clutched his gut as if he’d been cut open.

Kneeling in the darkness, Latrell examined each limb, each fragment of tree bark and remnant of bushes and vines, trying to understand what had happened. His mind raced with so many possibilities the woods began to slowly rotate, speeding up until he threw his arms around the base of a tree, holding on with his eyes pinched closed until the earth stopped moving.

Breathing heavily, Latrell let go of the tree, sat with his back to the trunk, and hugged his knees to his chest. He sorted the possibilities like the papers he filed at work until he gained control of them. The exercise calmed him so that he could think clearly.

Whoever had found the entrance may have stopped outside or gone inside and left or gone inside and stayed. There could have been one person or several-kids drunk or stoned, a bum looking for a cool dry place or, worst of all, it could have been someone who knew, someone who might be waiting inside to ruin everything.

Shock and fear had given way to the fine, hard rage that drove Latrell to put things right. Gripping his?ashlight, he shimmied through the slanted opening, crab walking down ten feet of a rough-hewn chute until he came to the first and smallest of three chambers. Standing, he swept the chamber with the?ashlight’s halogen beam.

The?oor of the cave was dirty. Latrell had given up trying to keep it clean. Not even he could do that. For once, the dirt was helpful.

There were two overlapping sets of footprints, one coming toward him and the other going back toward the interior of the cave, neither of them his. They were large, bigger than his feet, and smooth, not ridged like the athletic shoes he wore. The footprints had not been there when Latrell was in the cave the night before. Latrell stopped, listened for echoes of the intruder’s footsteps.

Hearing nothing, Latrell hurried through a?oor-to-ceiling crevasse that split the first two chambers, the rock cool and moist, easily picking out more footprints on the?oor of the second room with his?ashlight. This room, slightly larger than the first, was a humpbacked oval wide enough for a large table but with a ceiling low enough that even he had to stoop. The opening to the main chamber was a long, shoulder-width vertical cut rising from the base of the opposite wall.

Latrell waited again, pressing against the edge of the opening, listening for any sound that didn’t belong, and then, comforted by the silence, he pushed through the opening and into his private cathedral. The ceiling was twenty feet above the?oor, the walls sloping outward to the edges of a wide basin with jagged alcoves cut into the limestone face. An underground lake lapped at a rock beach, its far shore beyond the reach of Latrell’s?ashlight.

He stood on the outer edge, cutting through the darkness with his?ashlight. The cave was empty, save for him.

Latrell didn’t stop to marvel at the limestone formations dripping from the ceiling like melted wax. He didn’t stop to light the candles he had left hidden on ledges along the wall. He didn’t look for the occasional salamander that crawled out of the ink-black water to lounge on the rocks.

He went straight to the deepest recess of the cave, his most private space, where behind a small barricade of rocks he kept the photograph Johnny McDonald had taken of him and his mother in front of the house when he was fifteen. There, the rocks had been scattered, kicked to the far corners. The photograph was gone. His breath was coming in gasps, his belly churning.

He checked his other hiding place, an alcove Latrell could only reach by climbing ten feet above the?oor and holding tight to natural footholds cut into the rock face. That’s where he kept his gun and night-vision goggles. They were gone, too. He cocked his head toward the cavern roof, certain that he heard laughter deep in the darkness. He dropped to the?oor, spotlighting the ceiling with his?ashlight, the beam bouncing back at him from the empty shadows.

Latrell lit every candle, painting?ickering images on the limestone canvas, kicking small rocks out of his path, hurtling larger ones into the shallows of the lake. The rest of his things, the canned food, the sleeping bag, the change of clothes he kept neatly stacked and folded, were untouched.

He found more footprints, these coming from the water’s edge as if the person leaving them had emerged from the lake. If someone had crossed the lake, how did he do it? By boat? Then where was the boat? Swimming? How could someone swim across the lake in the dark without getting lost or drowning? Latrell followed the footprints from the lake, tracing their route across his cave, eventually coming to each of his hiding places.

He walked back to the water, peering out into the darkness. Latrell had never crossed the lake, had no idea how far it extended or how deep it was. He’d only waded out until the water touched his chin, retreating to the safety of dry rock.

Now someone had crossed the lake, found his hiding place, and stolen his special things and his gun, coming and going through his hidden entrance like they were roommates. He didn’t believe such a person was an accidental explorer. No, it had to be someone who had sought him out, someone who had spied on him until he had unwittingly led him to the cave.

What was it the FBI agent had said? That someone always sees something. The agent was taunting him, telling Latrell that he was the one who’d seen something and that it was Latrell he had seen.

This FBI agent who didn’t have a badge, who had tried to trick Latrell into remembering a man who wasn’t there, he had to be the one who’d followed him to the woods, found the cave, and found a way across the lake in the dark, perhaps in one of those in?atable dinghies Latrell had seen in movies.

This agent who shook so much he couldn’t work. That was nothing but a trick meant to throw him off. Latrell should never have given Marcellus’s dog to him. He should have taken the agent like he took Oleta when she interfered with his plan. That’s what he would have to do now if he were to put things right.

Latrell waded into the water until it covered his ankles. The invisible insects attacked again. He clawed at his?esh until blood ran down his arms, wanting to peel his skin from his bones. Then he dropped to his knees and began to scream.