his cap. “Who’s there?”
“Police. Bring your hands up where I can see them.”
Apgard did as he was instructed. “That you, Pender?”
“Both hands out the window.”
Again, Apgard obeyed. His hands were empty. Squinting against the rain, Pender stood up, holding the gun in a two-handed firing position, and stepped sideways, out from the cover of the A-frame and into the muddy path. An instant later his world exploded into white-a blow to the occipital portion of the skull, around back where the optic nerve runs, will do that every time.
From the moment he saw Bennie making his way down the path, Lewis knew that against all odds, everything was going to come out just fine. He left the motor running, raced toward Bennie. “Help me get him in the car.”
Bennie slipped his sap back into the waistband of his jeans and grabbed one of Pender’s legs. Lewis grabbed the other and they dragged him to the Land Rover. Sonofabitch must have weighed close to three hundred pounds- they had the devil’s own time loading him into the back cargo well, behind the rear seat. Though Pender was still out cold, Lewis covered him with the revolver. Bennie splashed back up the muddy path to get his knapsack and check on the Epps. He returned in seconds.
“Where are they?” whispered Lewis.
Bennie jerked a thumb toward the path. “On the way.”
Lewis climbed over the seats, slid behind the wheel, released the parking brake. The back doors opened. He heard a grunt of surprise. “Who’s this?” called Phil, as he dumped something heavy on top of Pender.
“FBI guy. He tailed me-Bennie bopped him. Everybody here?”
“Present and accounted for.” Emily opened the front door, tossed her pack onto the floor, climbed into the passenger seat. Phil and Bennie tossed in their loads, scrambled into the backseat. Phil took his own.38 out of his pack, and half turned in his seat to cover the still unconscious Pender as Lewis put the Rover into four-wheel drive and peeled out, spattering mud all over the front of Holly Gold’s psychedelic Volkswagen bus.
It had been years since Lewis had last driven to the cave. Traveling counterclockwise along the Circle Road, east from Estate Tamarind, north past the mangrove swamps, then west again, he missed the turnoff. He knew he’d gone too far when he passed Smuggler’s Cove. He stopped, executed a three-point U-turn across the two-lane road. It wasn’t until Lewis was turned in his seat, looking over his shoulder as he threw the Rover into reverse, that he realized there was yet another body lying atop Pender’s-a small one in a red slicker.
“Who the fuck is that?”
“She saw us. We had to bring her.”
“She saw us…we had to bring her.” Liar liar pants on fire. The last thing Dawn remembered was being lifted off her feet as she left the Crapaud, a big hairy hand covering her nose and mouth. Fighting, kicking, swinging in midair…blackness.
She opened her eyes, found herself in the back of a moving vehicle, lying across a man in a yellow slicker. It was Mr. Pender, who’d just moved into the Core. His breathing was all loud and strangled. She rolled off him, saw a man with a beard like Abraham Lincoln pointing a gun at her over the back of the rear seat. “It’s okay,” he whispered. “We’re not going to hurt you.”
She knew he was lying about that, too.
8
As always, Holly waited until after the kids were in bed to break out the chronic. She closed her bedroom door, stuffed a towel under the crack, twisted up a nail-thin doobie, fired it up sitting naked and cross-legged on her bed listening to the rain drumming on the tin roof.
It’s okay, she told herself as she filled her lungs. It’s all over. Machete Man’s a deadah, as Detective Hamilton so quaintly put it. You can relax now.
Only she couldn’t. Couldn’t relax worth a damn. And the weed wasn’t helping-the more she smoked, the more paranoid she got. FFA: free-floating anxiety. But when you have kids, anxiety never floats free for long before attaching itself to them. She stubbed out the joint, dropped the roach into her Sucrets tin, slipped on her bathrobe, and opened the door to check on the children.
Their bedroom door was open. She peeked in, expecting to get that little heart rush she always got, seeing the two of them asleep. Instead, it was a rush of panic-Dawn’s bed was empty.
“Marley, where’s Dawn?” Good luck trying to wake Marley from a sound sleep. “MARLEY, WHERE’S YOUR SISTER?”
He was lying on his side, head propped on a fat pillow-a marvelously comfortable-looking position, without arms to get in the way. He opened one eye, saw Dawn’s empty bed, his auntie in the doorway. “Gone potty?”
Holly turned in the bedroom doorway, saw that Dawn’s slicker and umbrella were gone, as well as one of the two flashlights they always kept by the front door. Of course. “Sorry-go back to sleep.”
She felt like an idiot. Getting stoned, freaking out. Must be why they call it dope, she told herself, not for the first time. Then the munchies struck. She pulled one of the kitchen/living room chairs over to the counter, stood on it to retrieve her Oreo stash from the back of the top shelf, then turned on the propane cooker to boil water for tea.
When it came to Oreos, Holly was a twister-and-separator. Open the cookie, eat the bare half, lick the creme off the other half, then eat that. Slooowly, while keeping an ear out for Dawn’s return. Sound of the first footfall on the step, she’d hide the cookies. Sharing was one thing, sugar-rushing a six-year-old at ten-thirty on a school night was another.
But the water boiled, the tea steeped, half a dozen cookies disappeared, and still no Dawn. Holly took her olive green poncho down from the peg, tugged her clear plastic rain booties over her slippers, splashed across the hillside and down the path toward the Crapaud.
Dawn’s flashlight lay broken on the ground, not far from the door. Holly shined her flashlight around, saw Dawn’s umbrella lying upside down a few feet away. Like someone in a dream, she opened the door to the Crapaud knowing it would be empty, and called Dawn’s name anyway, louder and louder and louder, until the hollow, tin- roofed building echoed with her screams.
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
