Burial Ground (10 page)

“Listen,” I said. “We’ve got to find my friend. There’s somebody back here in the woods who tried to kill us.”

The leader gave the man with the hounds a sideways look as if to confirm my insanity.

“What’s your friend’s name?” the first man asked.

“David Goldman,” I said.

“Got his description?”

I tried to keep my temper. “He’s thin, about thirty-five, dark hair, five-ten. Look, Mr.—”

But the man ignored me. Instead he unclipped a small radio from his belt and spoke into it. I didn’t hear what he said because the hounds started baying. When they stopped the team leader was replacing his radio.

“Your friend’s okay. He’s at my old man’s house, up on the road.”

“Your old man?”

“Marcus Briney. They brought your buddy out an hour ago. He’s okay except for a broke leg.”

I heard the whinny of a horse and a man in uniform emerged from the woods, riding a chestnut mare. The mare did a little dance for us and the man pulled the reins, bringing her to a stop.

“Goodeau’s gonna be pissed,” he declared. “They was supposed to be on the nuclear plant grounds.”

“Screw Goodeau,” young Briney spat. “If he’d of been the kind of warden he was supposed to be they wouldn’t of got out to start with.”

“The escapees are in this area?” I asked.

Briney gave me a dark look. “Don’t you worry none where those inmates are. If we hadn’t been sidetracked with finding civilians we might of had ’em by now.”

P. E. Courtney put her hands on her hips: “We have every right to be on our client’s property.”

I thought Briney was going to explode but before he could respond there was the distant thrum of helicopter rotors.

“Damn,” he muttered.

The horse started to do her dance again, as the helicopter sound grew louder, and the hounds started to protest.

“That son-of-a-bitch,” Briney cried, and I had the feeling he wasn’t talking about either of us.

The chopper emerged over the trees now, coming from the direction of the hills. It hovered over our heads for a few seconds, the draft from the blades whipping sand into our faces and making the horse rear up. Then it moved down the beach to a flatter spot and slowly settled. A few seconds later a short man in khakis popped out of the passenger side and ran toward us, hunched over.

The warden, Levi Goodeau.

“I heard you found tracks at the edge of the hills,” he said. “You seen anything else since then?”

Briney shook his head. “No, sir. We were too busy rescuing civilians.”

Goodeau squinted up at me. “I know you, don’t I?”

I nodded and explained how we’d ended up here.

He shook his head. “Pretty risky, I’d say. I’ll take you both back in the chopper. Your friend’s okay.” He turned to Briney. “I’ve asked for help from the State Police.”

The younger man glowered. “Warden, we don’t need no help from the State Police. We got six chasers on horses and four teams of hounds. I’ll guarantee we run ’em down before dark. You know how it is in there: All we got to do is put on the pressure. After a while they’ll give out and just wait for us to come.”

Goodeau shook his head. “I think we’d better have the State Police,” he said. “We can’t take any more chances.”

Briney started to protest, then turned away angrily. “Come on,” he said to the others. We watched them disappear into the foliage.

“Old ways die hard,” the warden observed. “Young Jack Briney’s a good man, but they’re still playing cowboys at Angola. It’s hard to change.” He smiled then, like a man pleased with himself. “But we’re working on it.”

We followed him back to the helicopter and he waited politely while we climbed in, P. E. first and then me. The warden followed, shutting the door, and when we’d strapped in, the engine roared and we began to rise. In a few incredible seconds the island took shape below us as a bumpy green mat with a brown band of river on one side and steep hills on the other. I caught the reflection of P. E.’s face in the Plexiglas and knew what she was thinking: That in the last hour and a half we’d blundered our way across that terrain and sunk up to our hips in swamp, but now, in a few short seconds, we were jumping over it.

She pointed then, and when I looked I saw the little creek where we’d been pursued. And once more I knew we were thinking the same thing: Who could have been trying to frighten us away? Not the convicts, because all they cared about was getting away. There was no reason for them to try to frighten away hikers who’d never even seen them. That only drew attention to themselves. No, it had to be someone else, someone who didn’t want us there. But who? Marcus Briney? He’d hardly had time to put on field clothes and come after us, and I hadn’t heard any steps following us into the brush.

Without thinking I let my hand reach down and touch the piece of brass in my pocket.

It had to be Absalom Moon. He hadn’t seemed like a violent man, but you could never tell. He was protecting terrain he considered his, protecting what was there. That was the only conclusion I could draw.

As we reached the last rise, I looked over the sea of trees and saw the nuclear plant, tall stacks gleaming in the sun, parking lot dotted with cars.
They’d thought the two convicts were on the grounds, somewhere inside the chain-link fence. Now they were saying the men had doubled back to the river
. I filed the fact away for future reference. Below us, I saw Absalom’s house, a tiny box on a brown scab of yard. Our cars had been joined by a couple of others, and as we settled downward I saw bodies milling about like black beetles. Down the road, at the house of Marcus Briney, there were even more vehicles, and I recognized an ambulance. My heart jumped:
They’d said David only had a broken leg
.

Two cars moved out of the yard then, one to block the road near Greenbriar and the other a quarter-mile north of Absalom’s, and I realized they were preparing for the chopper to land on the tar top.

Heat from the black surface radiated up at us and the telephone wires trembled with the breath of our descent. A second later there was a bump and the warden swung open his door and hopped down. We followed, keeping our heads low, and when we were clear the rotor revved again and the big machine started to rise, hovering for a second over the roadway and then grinding west, toward the river.

There were a couple of deputies and a man in guard uniform in the front yard, and I saw that a pair of paramedics technicians were sliding a stretcher into the ambulance. There was someone on the stretcher, and as I approached I recognized David.

“It’s about time,” he said, smiling, when he saw me. His eyes went from me to the woman. He gave a little frown and I knew he was wondering how she’d managed to be here.

“What happened?” I asked, resting a hand on his shoulder. His clothes were torn and his face was a map of scratches. He gave a weak little shrug.

“I don’t know, Alan. I came to see Absalom and for a few minutes it was going well. We talked about the Bible and the Book of Kings and I was even sitting on the front porch with him. But when I started asking him about the artifacts he jumped like I’d shot him.”

The stretcher bumped going into the rear of the vehicle and David winced.

One of the paramedics, a big man with a handlebar mustache, started to close the ambulance door.

“We need to get him to the hospital. You can talk to him there. Any preference?”

“The Lake,” I said. The paramedic nodded and I watched him get in and start to back out of the yard. They’d take him to Our Lady of the Lake, the Catholic Hospital in Baton Rouge. I knew that David, the ex-rabbinical student, would enjoy the irony.

The ambulance roared off and I saw that Warden Goodeau had struck up a conversation with Marcus Briney. As I approached, I heard Briney say, “The boy’s always had cement in his head, Levi. I never could tell him a damn thing.”

Goodeau stared down at the ground, abashed.

“I think it’ll work out,” he mumbled.

“Well,” Briney opined, “it will or it won’t. I’ll tell you like Boss Ross used to tell me, ‘Either I’m the warden or you are. There ain’t two.’ That boy of mine’s got to make up his mind. If he can’t, then you gotta do what’s right.”

“It’ll work,” Goodeau said and turned around, embarrassed, when he saw I was listening. “Looks like your friend’ll be all right,” he said quickly.

“We’d still like to know what happened to him,” P. E. said from my elbow. “Because whatever it was almost happened to us.”

“Oh?” The two men, joined by a sheriff’s deputy, were staring at us now.

A warning bell in my unconscious sounded. There were too many uncertainties to give out everything we knew…

“She means with convicts out there,” I said. “They might’ve gotten us. I guess it was the convicts that did that to David, right?” From the corner of my eye I saw P. E. frown and I gave her a stern look, hoping it would silence her.

“Don’t know,” the warden said. “All I heard was that he got hurt. A fall, I think. But why he was out there is something else again.”

Briney turned to the warden: “Anyway, I expect they’ll run ’em to ground by nightfall. Always happens. Unless they take to the river again.”

Levi Goodeau shook his head. “I hope they don’t do that, Marcus. I don’t think either one of ’em can fight those currents.”

Briney’s expression turned pensive. “That’s true, Levi, but there’s another way to look at it. When you take away a man’s freedom, send him to work in the fields, and the rest of the world out there acts like he’s dead…” Briney shrugged. “Sometimes he’s better off.”

Goodeau started to protest but the old man raised a hand:

“I spent forty years up there, Levi. I’m telling you, no matter how much you try to change things, sometimes the river is a mercy.”

N
INE

It took four hours to finish the X-rays, set David’s leg, and move him to a room. Meanwhile, I’d called Elizabeth and she’d come to the hospital to wait with us. I also called the office and let Marilyn know what had happened. To her credit, P. E. Courtney had refused to budge from the chair in the emergency waiting room, except when I insisted that we go to the cafeteria. People gave us odd looks, with our mud-spattered clothes, but she might as well have been wearing a Dior gown, for all the difference it seemed to make to her.

At just before three they called us to go up to his room. We let Elizabeth go first and trailed in after she’d embraced him and made the proper consoling chitchat. Then she stepped aside and David saw P. E. and me:

“I think the wrong person’s in this bed,” he said.

I managed a weak smile. “I feel like it.”

He looked over at P. E. Courtney and gave a curt nod.

“P. E. and I sort of ran into each other up there,” I explained. “When we couldn’t find Absalom, we followed the trail into the brush and found your pencil on the ground. We thought you’d be nearby.”

David grinned ruefully. “To tell the truth, I don’t know
where
I was. When I started asking old Absalom about the artifacts, he said he had something to show me. He got up and went into his house and I thought he was rooting around for something to bring out. Then I heard the back door slam, so I got up and went around the house and saw him headed into the woods. I yelled after him but it didn’t do any good. My mistake was in following him.”

“You ended up in the creek,” I surmised.

“Exactly. I wasn’t sure which way to go, so I headed north a little ways, because I thought I heard him splashing around ahead of me, but there weren’t any tracks, so I turned around and started back in the other direction, south. I was looking so hard at the ground, to try to find his trail, I guess I passed where I came in without knowing it.”

I caught P. E.’s look:
I told you we should have gone south
.

David went on: “I don’t know how far I went. Probably a couple hundred yards. Then I was sure I heard something, like somebody above me, in the woods. I yelled but there wasn’t any answer. Then somebody threw something, a big log, that landed in the water and scared hell out of me.”

Elizabeth gave a little gasp but neither P. E. nor I showed any surprise.

“I found a place to climb up the bank, on the west side, and headed toward the river. But when I started down the last slope I tripped on something, and as soon as I landed I knew my leg was broken. I dragged myself a hundred yards or so, because I hoped I could make it to a jeep trail, but I ended up just lying there, by the swamp, until the dogs found me.” He shook his head. “At first I thought the chase team was going to celebrate. But when they came and saw I wasn’t one of their convicts I thought for a minute they were going to string me up.”

I looked at the mosquito bumps on his face.

“I guess it was a pretty long night,” I said.

He jerked his head in assent. “Damn right. When you’re alone in the woods you hear all kinds of noises. Birds, wildcats, maybe even a coyote. But I had the damndest sensation while I was lying there. It was about the only time in my life I’ve really felt creepy.”

“Oh?”

He wore an expression I’d never seen before, far from his usual self-confidence and cheerful cynicism.