2
The wall of debris sealing off the passageway must have been unstable-it had collapsed again after the second grenade. Phil, who’d been scrabbling away at the face of the wall, had turned away at the sound of the explosion, but another section of the roof and walls had fallen on him before he could escape, burying him to the waist.
The worst part wasn’t being trapped, though; it wasn’t even the pain in his legs, severe as that was. The worst part was knowing that there was something crushed and broken inside, around his pelvic region. Movement was agony. As Emily and Bennie worked feverishly to dig him out from under what must have been several tons of earth with their bare hands, he couldn’t help swearing at them every time he was jostled.
Toward the end, Phil started pleading with the other two to shoot him. Bennie, who was just starting to regain his hearing as the buzzing in his ears died away, had to tell him he’d left the gun behind. Phil raised his head. “You’re a worthless piece of shit, you know that? You’d had the brains to wipe down that machete-”
Phil stopped, turned his head to the side as if someone were whispering into his ear. He looked puzzled, opened his mouth to speak, but vomited a copious amount of dark clotted blood instead.
Bennie flattened himself against the ground, turned Phil’s head toward him, forced Phil’s lips open, reached into his mouth, cleared his airway, pinched his nostrils shut, and bent his head to Phil’s. At first Emily thought he was giving Phil mouth-to-mouth; when she realized what he was actually doing she shrieked, shoved him away, and covered her husband’s lifeless lips with her own. She was too late to capture his dying breath.
Bennie sat back against the wall of the cave, his eyes glazed, a foolish smile playing across his blood- smeared lips. Emily threw herself on him, beating at his chest with the sides of her fists, sobbing and swearing. He looked startled, then grabbed her hands. She continued to struggle. He hauled off and belted her one, open-handed, right across the chops. A woman without a husband, a childless widow from a non-bride-giving clan, had no status whatsoever, so far as Bennie was concerned.
On the other side of the wall of debris, Pender couldn’t hear the commotion-he couldn’t hear anything over the ringing in his ears. But the brain fog was lifting, his nose had stopped bleeding, and by continuous pressure of the toilet paper against the back of his head he’d finally managed to stop the bleeding there. Afraid that tugging it free would open the wound again, he left the toilet paper stuck to his scalp.
His most immediate problem handled, Pender leaned back against the wall. He felt oddly detached from the proceedings. Probably the concussion, he decided. Concussions. Plural. He tried to take stock. He was in a cave. There’d been an explosion. Somebody fired a shotgun. Or maybe it was a second explosion. He seemed to be alone. He couldn’t hear anybody breathing. But then, he couldn’t hear his own fingers when he snapped them next to his ears.
He dumped the contents of the backpack out onto the sandy floor of the cave, and felt around until his hand closed around a flashlight. He shined it around the chamber, came to two quick conclusions. One, he was alone. Two, there was no apparent way out.
Interesting statistic about Antisocial Personality Disorder: it has the lowest suicide rate of any major psychiatric illness. Psychopaths don’t get the blues, they give them, and their will to live is an extraordinary thing to behold-ask any cop who’s ever cornered one.
Emily would not cry-she wouldn’t give Bennie the satisfaction. She had never been struck before, not once in all her years. She retreated to the white room and lay down on one of the rattan mats. The whiteness was unbearable. She switched off her headlamp, felt the darkness closing in around her.
It can’t end here, she told herself. Not here, not like this. There’s a way out of the cave. Those two corpses found it-so can I. And I won’t tell Bennie-let him rot. Phil, too. Selfish bastard-I told him to leave the girl alone. She had no doubt what had happened-Apgard had turned on them. Because of the girl: she’d seen it in his eyes.
It was too much, too soon. Given time, Apgard would have learned to see the world from her point of view, as Phil had. But Phil had sabotaged that. The older and weaker he got, the more he liked the little powerless ones. The ones who didn’t know the difference between a limp dick and a hard one, didn’t even know what a hard one was for. Pitiful old man-she told herself she was glad he was dead.
And with that potential emotional sinkhole paved over (most psychopaths are geniuses when it comes to compartmentalizing emotions), she sat up and took off her poncho, rearranged the big ’uns, tugged her brassiere straps back into place, tightened the chin strap on her helmet, and set off down the next passageway, in the direction of the cross chamber.
Pebbles scattered and rolled underfoot. The passageway leveled, then widened out into the chamber with the horizontal crucifix. Emily turned her head, surveying the room with the beam from her helmet lamp. There was a kerosene torch in the natural sconce, but no way to light it.
The first sacrifice in the chamber, a sailor named Brack, had helped Bennie carry the crucifix there in pieces, thinking it was bracing for the hole in the treasure chamber, not noticing how the two timbers dovetailed to form a cross until it was too late. The ground under one arm of the structure was stained black with blood, some of which was Brack’s.
The rest belonged to Frieda Schaller, to big old Tex-his blood was spattered all around the chamber-and to Andy Arena. The crucifix itself had a forlorn, abandoned look. Emily pictured some archaeologist stumbling across it a few hundred years hence, trying to imagine what dark religion had practiced its bloody rites there.
But perhaps they’d know, thought Emily, thinking of Phil’s manuscript. Perhaps it wasn’t such a bad thing that he’d written it. Especially if she never made it out of-
Whoops. There’s an ugly little thought that needed to be stomped out before it got a chance to breed. There had to be a way out. And once out, all she had to do was determine whether Apgard had survived the explosion, as seemed likely if indeed he was the one who’d set it off.
Because if he had survived, then sentimental and value-ridden as he was, he couldn’t possibly have been self-destructive enough to let the cop and the little girl survive as well. Apgard would have to help her escape, give her money. If we don’t hang together, etc….
And if Apgard hadn’t survived, so much the better. As long as the manuscript remained undiscovered, there was no evidence linking her to any of the murders, nothing she couldn’t blame on Bennie, whose fingerprint was on the machete, or Phil, or even Apgard himself.
But first she had to find a way out. She thought she could hear water trickling deeper in the cave complex, in the direction of the Oubliette. That was how the corpses got out. Not an inviting prospect-more like a last resort. But the Bat Cave also lay in that direction, and she knew there had to be some sort of chimney leading to the surface from there, wide enough to permit easy ingress and egress for the enormous bats and their equally impressive testicles. Whether it was also wide enough for Emily and her big ’uns remained to be seen. But one way or another…
Emily thought back to Nias, the defining moment of her life. She’d always known she was superior to most people, in any of the ways that counted (that confidence was one of the psychopath’s greatest allies), but after the horror at the chieftain’s deathbed had come the illumination, the elevation, a sense of having been chosen. And despite everything that had happened, it was still with her. Emily Epp wasn’t beaten yet, not by a long-
“Oh.” Startled, Emily put her hand to her breast. She hadn’t heard Bennie coming down the passageway from the white room, didn’t know he was in the cross chamber until he touched her shoulder. Nobody ever heard Bennie coming unless he wanted them to. “What do
“Only what is mine,” he said politely, then he applied his heavy rubber sap to the back of her head with a deft touch, hitting her just hard enough to render her unconscious, but not so hard as to fracture her skull.
3
The headrest and seat back of the Rover were wet with Apgard’s blood. Apgard himself seemed to lapse in and out of consciousness. Just before he was loaded into the ambulance, his breathing grew labored, sporadic. The paramedics hooked him up to an oxygen tank and rushed him to the hospital.
That left Dawn. They wanted to take her to the hospital, too, but Holly put her foot down. Julian debriefed
