A Welcome Grave (39 page)

“It was Gaglionci’s idea to partner up and go for more?”

“Yeah. I didn’t know how much Jefferson was worth. He did.”

“You ever see any of that fifty grand?”

“None. He told me it was what he’d been paid to kill me and that he was keeping it. Told me we’d get a hell of a lot more than that.”

“
He
did. Left you out, though, and all that fifty grand went to was setting me up. How’d he get my prints on it?”

“I did that. The night I grabbed you off the street. He’d told me what to do, just put the bills in your hands and work them around once you were out. Easy trick.”

Easy trick, easy answer, and somehow I still hadn’t thought of it.

“Who is that guy, anyhow?” Doran said, pointing in the rearview mirror at Thor.

“Someone I’ve worked with, time to time.”

He chuckled and shook his head. “Sure, Perry. You’re a PI. That guy’s a
warrior.
I’ve seen a few before.”

“And Gaglionci?” I said.

His eyes moved to me, then back to the dark road unfolding ahead of us.

“Yeah.”

I
told Doran I wanted to stop a mile or two before we reached the place where Gaglionci waited. For the remainder of the drive, off the highway and down winding country roads lined with trees, I worried that he wouldn’t tell me where to stop—that the story about the campground had been a lie, that he’d approach Gaglionci and signal him somehow, and we’d be exposed before we even knew we’d arrived. Instead, Doran instructed me to pull off the road in a gravel turnaround circle that seemed to be part of a farm.

“It’s maybe another half mile. There’s a gravel road off to the left. Big sign in front, and a gate, made up to look like some sort of a ranch, something Wild West. There’s an old trailer that was the office, and then a bunch of concrete pads where people parked the motor homes.”

“Is he in the trailer?”

“No. There are five or six cabins where the lake used to be. He’s in one of them.”

A knuckle rapped on my window. Thor. I opened the door and got out to join him, and Joe and Doran followed as I told Thor the situation. He didn’t say a word.

“You were right about him expecting the car,” Joe said. “The question is how to use it best. We can have Doran drive us inside the camp. Use him to get Gaglionci out somehow.”

Thor shook his head. “We should not all be in the car. Something goes wrong, we are all trapped in one spot.”

“Okay. What’s your suggestion, then?”

Thor leaned away from the car and studied the pine trees waving above.

“Is there a way into this camp from the rear? Through the woods maybe, or around the lake?”

We all looked at Doran, and he nodded. “Some old train tracks run up against it. There’s a fence between the tracks and the edge of the camp, but it’s been torn down in places. If you find the tracks somewhere else, you can probably use them to walk up there.”

This pleased Thor. He gave one short nod. “I will drive the car. We will find these tracks, and you and he will walk up to the camp together.”

I frowned. “I should probably be the one to drive in. The driver’s going to be the most likely to have to deal with Gaglionci and—”

“And I am better at that than you,” Thor said. His pale eyes looked dark, but they were fastened on mine. It was not his battle to fight, but he’d come here to help me, and he was right—he was better than me. I thought about objecting, but that flat gaze of his quelled it. We were here to get Amy. If this gave us the best chance, then this was how we would approach it.

“All right,” I said.

“I go with them, or with you?” Joe asked.

“Neither,” Thor answered.

Joe looked angry. He’d been left in the garage when we’d gone to see Reed, and now Thor was ordering him to stay behind again. He didn’t like being told to sit it out.

“There is one way to drive out of that camp,” Thor said. “Supposing things do not go well, and Gaglionci leaves, perhaps with the woman, who will be here to stop them? Take your car and block the exit onto the road after I drive in. Nobody leaves without going through you. That is necessary.”

“Fine.” Joe’s expression changed, and he nodded. Thor was right, of course. In this sort of discussion, Thor would always be right.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll take Doran and go up the tracks. How do we time it, though? You shouldn’t drive in until we’re up there, and we don’t know how long the walk will take.”

Thor pointed at Doran, who shrugged. “Depends where you find the tracks,” he said. “Only place I know is where they crossed the road a little ways back. Probably take, what, fifteen minutes to walk in from there.”

“I will wait twenty,” Thor said. “Once I am inside the camp, where is he?”

“There are some cabins around the lake. He’s in the third one, right side. So is Perry’s girl.”

We drove back to the spot where the tracks crossed the road, maybe a quarter mile behind us. Thor put the RX-8 off on the shoulder, resting in a cluster of dead weeds, and I pulled in behind him. Doran and I got out of the Taurus, and I turned to Joe and passed him the keys.

“We’ll see you soon.”

“Yeah,” he said. “You watch your back with Doran, Lincoln.”

“I will.”

Thor looked at me. “Twenty minutes.”

“Okay.”

Doran and I started to walk ahead down the tracks, a winding path of white gravel and old wooden ties that disappeared into blackness. It didn’t take long to round the first bend and leave Thor and Joe out of sight behind us.

The tracks clearly hadn’t been in use for years, because they’d actually pulled the rails. All that was left behind was the gravel bed and the wooden ties. An occasional rusted spike rolled underfoot, but other than that it was easy enough to move along at a good pace. Doran walked ahead of me, moving effortlessly, without even looking at the ground. The rain was gone, but it had left the air chill. My breath fogged in front of me for the first few minutes, and then either it cooled enough to stop reacting with the air or it grew too dark to notice.

The air smelled of wet earth and leaves and water, the scent reminding me of the winery where Joe and I sat on the deck with Paul Brooks, listening as he lied smoothly and successfully. We’d swallowed his story and moved on, wasting days that had culminated in this: Amy trapped with a professional killer who had his eye on the clock. Now the cost of that delay . . . I shook my head and quickened my pace. I couldn’t let myself think of the potential cost.

Fifteen minutes after we’d started down the tracks, Doran said, “We’re close.”

“How do you know?”

“Fence up ahead. On the left.”

I squinted and stared ahead and saw nothing. The last time I’d had my vision tested they’d told me it was actually better than twenty-twenty, and still I had no idea what Doran was seeing up there. We were a good thirty paces farther along before I could finally make it out: a sagging wire fence, knocked
down in many places, strung along the edge of the tracks, separating them from the trees on the other side.

We stepped off the tracks and through the tall, dead grass. Despite the dampness, it crackled and rustled underfoot, the woods seeming too silent, our steps too loud. I imagined Gaglionci sitting inside one of those cabins, tilting his head at the sound of our approach and reaching for his gun.

The chain-link fence had been beaten down, breaking and sagging until it was only two feet off the ground. Doran stepped over it, and I followed. I could see the lake basin to our right, tall reeds and grasses growing where the water belonged. The dark shapes of the cabins began to show themselves on the opposite bank. We were moving around the lake basin toward the cabins, and the gravel road inside the camp was visible now, a light band in the dark grass.

We made it around the edge of the lake and behind the cabins. Doran had said Gaglionci was in the third cabin, and there were six of them that I could see, with small docks protruding into the lake basin behind them, the wood probably rotten by now, unused in many years. I turned once, walking backward for a few steps, and looked back up the gravel road. I could see the shape of the trailer Doran had spoken of up near the entrance, but then everything faded in shadows. No sign of Thor yet.

The first cabin was beside us, dark and empty, old trash and debris scattered behind it. I stepped over a discarded propane tank as I made my way along the narrow strip of grass between the cabin and the dock. I was ahead of Doran by a few steps and couldn’t even hear him. It seemed each breath I took was impossibly loud, but he didn’t make a sound. A cluster of pines separated the first and second cabins. I pushed the branches aside to step through them; Doran simply ducked his head and bobbed through. The needles left a sticky sap residue on my hands. We were behind the second cabin when the light inside the next building became visible.

“Is that it?”

Doran didn’t respond. He’d stopped where he was, staring at the cabin as if he didn’t trust it.

“What?” I said, my voice a harsh whisper.

“He knows.”

“Gaglionci?”

Doran nodded and ducked, got low to the ground and stared back up the road at the trailer, then swiveled his head to look at the rest of the cabins. I knelt beside him.

“What are you talking about?”

“The lights. He wouldn’t have left lights on in the cabin. We had the windows blacked out with cloth. He wouldn’t have taken it down unless he wanted someone to think he was there. He’s setting a trap in case I didn’t come back alone.”

Light showed on the road behind us. It was Thor. I could tell that from the look of the headlights and how low they were, trademarks of the small car. Doran had underestimated the time it would take to walk up here along the tracks. We’d gone at a good pace and barely arrived ahead of Thor.

“Shit,” I whispered. “This is too fast.”

Doran said nothing. Staying low to the ground, I moved along the wall of the second cabin after the RX-8’s headlights passed over it. Thor was driving slowly. I came around the edge of the building and knelt beside it. A few shingles, blown off the old roof, lay around my feet. I swept them out of the way and planted my left foot, brought the gun up with both hands, and rested my forearms on my knee. Thor had stopped the RX-8 at the third cabin but hadn’t gotten out yet, leaving the engine idling. The headlights lit up the outside of the cabin, and I leaned forward and stared at it. Nothing changed. The door stayed closed, the light stayed on. If Doran was right, and Gaglionci wasn’t inside, then we were in trouble. Any hope of a surprise was gone now—Gaglionci wouldn’t have missed that car.

“Where would he go?” I said and spun in time to see that Doran was twenty feet away, moving toward the tall reeds that filled the lake basin. I stood to go after him, but in that moment I heard the engine of the RX-8 roar and gravel spin under the tires as Thor hammered the accelerator, and I turned back to see what was happening.

He kept the car in reverse—screamed it backward about ten feet and then cut the wheel, spinning it around to face the trailer. As the car spun he hit the brights, and the beams caught Tommy Gaglionci full in the face as he stepped out of the trees just up the gravel road and lifted a shotgun.

The brights had been a good idea, a last-ditch attempt to disorient Gaglionci, but he still pumped a shell into the chamber and got off a shot that blew a cloud of fiberglass and metal off the front end of the RX-8.

I lifted my Glock and fired, but it was a long distance for a handgun, and I missed wide and low. He heard the shot, saw it kick into the gravel by his feet, and spun and fired the shotgun in my direction, showering wood chips from the cabin wall around me.

I stumbled to the nearest tree, just a few feet away, fell against it, and
looked out on the dark road. The RX-8 was motionless, smoke rising off the engine compartment. Maybe the last shot had damaged something critical and frozen the car. I watched and waited for a door to open and Thor to step out, or at least return fire. Instead there was nothing but the thin stream of smoke. The car’s windshield was shattered, Thor nowhere to be found.

I rolled onto my shoulder and looked up the road, searching for Gaglionci. A shadow moved in the trees, but then it was gone. He was working his way down to me through the trees, and I couldn’t see a damn thing. It was a bad position, backed up against the cabin wall with just the one tree offering shelter. I could either move forward, deeper into the trees and toward Gaglionci, or try to get behind the cabin, where Doran had gone.

I’d just made the decision to retreat and move behind the cabin when the RX-8’s engine howled. I looked back in time to see the tires find purchase on the loose gravel road and send the car roaring toward the trees where Gaglionci had been moving. No driver was visible behind the wheel. Thor must be lying beneath the dash, using the car for protection, and driving blind.

Gaglionci spun around a tree no more than thirty feet in front of me and fired the shotgun once more, blowing the remaining shards of the windshield away, but the car didn’t slow. He hesitated for one second before diving back into the trees, and then Thor cut the wheel again and the car hit the pines broadside.