Deadliest of Sins (19 page)

Twenty-Eight

Chase dropped the cell
phone and hurried back out to Gudger. He lay sprawled beside the front door, his knee a bloody red mess, his lower leg bent at an impossible angle to his thigh. His eyes were closed, but his mouth was sipping shallow little gasps of air, like a goldfish in a bowl of scummy water.

Chase grasped the doorjamb, dizzied by the odors of blood and urine. “Please be okay,” he whispered, for the first time in his life praying for Gudger to live instead of die. As he stared at the wounded man, he fought back the urge to vomit. What should he do now? Stay here and wait for the ambulance? The cops would come, too. Should he tell them that Gudger knew where Sam was? That Gudger was planning to sell him to some people as boy meat? The cops already thought he was crazy; they would never believe that Gudger would do such terrible things. To them, ol' Gudge was a stand-up guy.

Run,
some inner voice told him as he stared at Gudger's yellow-
stained underwear.
Get out now while you can still save Sam.

Leaving Gudger sipping air, he turned and headed for the kitchen door. He ran out into the back yard, figuring he'd slip under the fence and follow the creek down to the highway. He'd just passed the marigold patch when he heard a siren coming down Kedron Road. The sound grew louder, was soon joined by other sirens, wailing like coon dogs in full cry.

“Oh man!” he cried, tears coming to his eyes. “How did they get here so fast?”

Gudger's one of their own
, the voice whispered again.
They're going to come fast, and come hard.

He looked around. He didn't have time to get to the creek now—he would have to hide. But where? The cops would search the house and shed immediately. He turned around, desperate for a refuge, when his gaze fell on the maple tree in the side yard. For months he'd tried to climb it to hide from Gudger, but he'd always been too short to reach the branches. Was he tall enough to climb it now? He didn't know, but he had to try.

His heart thudding, he raced toward the tree. As the sirens split the stillness of the morning air, he ran to the tree, then leaped with all his strength. His fingers scraped along the bark, then caught. Tightening his hold, he swung himself forward. His legs wrapped around the next branch and he began to shimmy up into the thick green leaves. Branch after branch he climbed, twenty, then thirty feet into the air. He glanced down once, dizzyingly, to see the red lights of the ambulance turning into the driveway, followed by three sets of flashing blue lights. Then he kept his eyes on the tree, climbing until he reached a deep crotch that held him like a cradle. Ten feet higher and the limbs would be too slender to hold him, but here, it was perfect. Though it made him dizzy, he could stretch the length of one branch and get a clear view of the house, yet remain hidden by the foliage. Wrapping himself tight around the branches, he settled in and turned his attention to the house. Already the paramedics were heading inside, red backpacks in hand. Three cop cars had pulled up behind them, their radios blaring. While one cop hurried to the back of the house with his gun drawn, the others rushed the front porch and pounded on the door. When they got no answer, one of the beefier cops put his shoulder to the thing. It opened slowly. He heard one cop call, “Heads up! Somebody's lying against the front door!”

The others pulled their guns and crept inside. Chase started to tremble, his arms and legs quivering so badly he feared he might fall out of the tree. For a long time nothing happened, then the paramedics came out and retrieved a gurney from the back of their truck. They took it inside. Chase waited, his stomach prickling with fear. If they brought Gudger out in a black body bag, he would be arrested, convicted of murder, and would spend the rest of his life in a prison cell. Better to just let go of these branches and break his neck right now. He waited, hardly daring to breathe, when finally, the door opened again. A paramedic came out, slowly pulling the gurney. On it was not a black bag, but Gudger, wrapped in a red blanket, an oxygen mask over his nose. As the second paramedic eased the gurney off the porch, a cop walked beside them, holding an IV bag over Gudger's arm.

Chase felt weak with relief. Gudger wasn't dead. He wasn't guilty of murder—at least not yet. He watched as they loaded Gudger into the ambulance, then drove off, sirens blaring and lights flashing all over again. He figured the cops would soon follow—their precious Gudger had been taken care of. But that didn't happen. They all stayed—two searching the house, another doing a sweep of Gudger's property, his eyes on the ground, looking for clues.

Chase wanted to cry, wanted to wish himself as far away from here as he could. But all he could do was cling to the tree branches, being as still as he could, praying that nobody would think to look in the maple tree.

The cops seemed to stay for hours, wandering in and out of the house. One cop brought out Cousin Petey's gun. “Look at this,” he cried. “Little fucker nailed him with one shot from this old Army Colt. Five bullets left in a six-bullet barrel.”

“I'm surprised he had the strength to hold it up,” said another cop Chase recognized from Gudger's bowling team. “Kid doesn't weigh eighty pounds, soaking wet.”

“He weighs a little bit less than that now,” the third cop announced as he came out of the house, tossing something in his hand. “I found his front tooth under the sofa.”

With his tongue, Chase felt the empty space where his left front tooth had been. It was now just a jagged edge of bone, close to his gum. He hadn't even realized it was gone.

“Guess the recoil must have knocked it out of his mouth.” The cop put the tooth in his pocket and shook his head. “We're done here, guys. The kid's taken off. We've got a good description—somebody will pick him up from the APB.”

“Chief will be pissed,” warned the bowling team cop. “He wanted that kid, bad.”

“Then he'll just have to be satisfied with his front tooth,” said the one who was apparently in charge. “The little bastard ain't anywhere around here.”

“Goddamn!” The third one put his hands on his hips. “We got here seven minutes after the 911. How could a little kid vanish in seven minutes? On foot, too.”

“Maybe he hitched a ride,” said the bowling cop. “Crump was telling some crazy ass tale about how he'd thumbed up to Asheville on a peach truck.”

Their radios started to crackle. Two leaned closer to hear the dispatch, but the third cop turned in a slow circle. Chase watched him look down the driveway, across the front yard, up the side yard, then he stopped and stared directly at the tree.

Chase gulped. His arms and legs turned to stone as the cop's gaze seemed to penetrate every leaf on the tree
.

“Anybody check that big maple tree?” he finally asked.

The others turned to follow his gaze. “I didn't,” said the bald-headed cop. “I was searching the shed.”

“I was working inside,” said the one who had his tooth.

“I'm gonna go have a look. Used to be a tree-climber myself, when I was a kid.”

Chase watched as the cop started toward the tree. Fighting a real panic, he knew if he climbed higher, he would fall. If he climbed anywhere lower, the cop would see the branches moving. All he could do was lie still and hope the leaves hid him. He curled his arms and legs along the branch and held his breath, watching through slitted eyes as the cop drew closer. He was almost directly underneath him when one of the other cops called out.

“Hey, Brady! Fuck the tree! Chief wants us back now!”

“Thirty seconds,” said Brady. “Just to be sure.”

“Suit yourself. I'll tell him you were climbing a tree when he asks where you are.”

Brady stopped. He peered up into the tree one more time. For an instant his eyes seemed to lock on Chase's, then they slid away, trying to penetrate the green leafiness. “Probably up there,” he muttered to himself as he turned to rejoin the others. “Probably up there laughing his fucking little head off.”

Barely daring to breathe, Chase clung to the branches as they got in their patrol cars and left. When the last light bar disappeared from view, he closed his eyes and started to sob. The world had gone crazy, out of control. All he'd ever wanted was to find his sister. How he'd wound up here with Gudger carried off in an ambulance, he didn't know.

He stayed in the tree until he was sure the cops weren't coming back. Then slowly, with stiff legs and numb arms, he began to inch his way downward. When his feet touched the ground, his legs felt wobbly, as if he'd been on a merry-go-round too long. Gudger's last words echoing in his head:
Last I heard, she was at an old motel near Hubbard Mountain.
Was Sam possibly still there? Still alive? All he had to do was figure out how to get to her. Call somebody, he supposed. But who? The cops hated him. His mother was probably weeping at Gudger's bedside. Mary Crow, according to Gudger, had been taken care of. That left him with no one.

“I'll just go myself,” he said.

He walked, lurching, back to the house. Inside, blood was all over the living room floor. The paramedics had left empty plastic bags that held needles and IV solutions. Beyond that, everything seemed to have been demolished by some interior tornado—sofa cushions lay on the floor, the drawers of the end tables stuck out like open mouths. He made his way to his room, where the destruction was even worse. The cops had stripped and overturned his bed, pulled out his drawers, dumped his clothes on the floor. Even his books lay in a pile in one corner, his favorite picture of his father thrown on top of them.

“You didn't need to do that,” he said, tears coming to his eyes as he grabbed the photograph. He looked at the picture a moment, then he carefully put it between the pages of the Sherlock Holmes volume Cousin Petey had given him. He could look at his dad later. Now, he had to get to Hubbard Mountain.

He took off his blood-spattered clothes and pulled a pair of jeans and a clean T-shirt from the pile on the floor. He looked for his one pair of sneakers that weren't held together with duct tape, but he couldn't find them.

He turned to the closet, where the cops had dumped all their winter coats on the floor. He found an old pair of his mother's sandals, the heels Sam wore for special occasions. Fumbling through the clothes, he looked for his shoes. He had a brief, horrible thought that the cops might have taken them, then, at the very back of the closet, beneath an old parka, he found them. He grabbed them, laced them up, got to his feet. He was halfway out the door when he remembered Sam's little purse with the money in it. He had no idea if Hubbard Mountain was near or far; certainly he would need money to get there.

He returned to the middle of his room and again started pawing through the mess the cops had left. He found underwear, pajamas, some marbles from Cousin Petey. Finally he saw the little purse, pushed back beneath the box springs of his mattress. Lying on his stomach, he stretched out on the floor until his fingers curled around it. He pulled to him, wondering if the cops had taken his $94.70 and just shoved the thing back under his bed. He unzipped the purse to check—much to his relief, the money looked undisturbed. Just the same, he decided to count it. If Gudger had taught him one thing, it was that not all cops could be trusted. He was counting the ones and fives, had gotten up to $67 when he found a business card nestled between the bills. He pulled it out. It read
Detective Victor Galloway, Campbell County Police Department.

“That's the guy Mary Crow told me about,” he whispered. He'd hidden it while she and Gudger had talked on the porch; with everything that had happened since, he'd forgotten all about it. He was a good cop, according to Mary. Somebody he could trust. Chase leaned back against the overturned mattress and stared at the card. If he called this guy, he might be bringing the whole police department back down on his head—he'd heard one of the other cops say that the captain wanted him bad. But he also might be calling the one man who would take him seriously about Samantha. Someone who might be able to reach Hubbard Mountains a lot faster than he could. He ran his finger over the raised lettering of the card, then got to his feet.

“I just hope everything Mary Crow said about you is true,” he whispered, running down the hall, hoping the cops hadn't taken Gudger's cell phone.

Twenty-Nine

Mary was swimming; gliding
weightless through the sunlit waters of Atagahi, the secret Cherokee spring that was supposed to heal all your wounds. The light was green and shimmery around her and she seemed to be floating through her own memories—her mother laughing, then her father singing, as if on some distant radio. Another kick of her legs and she heard Jonathan calling her.
Where are you? Why can't I find you anymore?
Why did you leave us alone?

“I'm here!” she tried to call, but all the water vanished and she was no longer swimming. A great weight seemed to press down upon her, paralyzing her on her back as a strange voice talked over her.

“
Chudovvy,
” the voice says. “
Yaka znakhidka
!”

She felt someone brush her hair away from her forehead, gently trace the shape of her mouth. At first she thought it was Jonathan, but the voice wasn't right; the touch foreign. Whoever it was smelled of florid cologne, with underlying notes of body odor, as if they used fragrance as a substitute for soap and water. She lay still as they stroked her neck, then lifted the front of her blouse.

“
Chudovvy,
” the whisper came again.

She almost slapped the hand away, but something caught her attention. She'd heard that word before. Lying still, she tried to remember who had said it, why she would know it.
Chudovvy, chudovvy.
In a rush it came back—her old clients in Hartsville, the Kovalenkos had said that. She'd negotiated an excellent price on a small piece of land for them. Vadim had clapped his hands like a child, repeating the word
chudovvy.
Luda had laughed and said, “Forgive him. When he's excited, he goes back to Ukranian.”

“What does
chudovvy
mean?” asked Mary.

“Beautiful. Splendid. Wonderful.” Luda beamed, her fat cheeks rosy. “You have saved us lots of money.”

So now why was she was lying here with another man saying
chudovvy
over her? She doubted that she'd saved him any money—what it all meant beyond that she had no idea. What she did know was that it might be better to keep feigning sleep, at least until she figured everything out. Trying to keep her eyelids from fluttering, she thought back. Her memories were random as clouds, forming and dissipating. She recalled a meal in a restaurant, a man kissing her, and her kissing him back. Then driving in her car, a baby's car seat by the side of the road. At that moment everything aligned, like cherries on a slot machine. She'd eaten dinner with Galloway, they'd kissed, she'd headed back to Gastonia and seen this car seat on the side of the road. Some sort of mechanical baby was inside. She'd just realized she'd been tricked when her lights had gone out.

But why? She wasn't working on any hot trail. She was just going back to her motel room to write a report for the governor. Her focus turned outwards as she heard the door open and someone else enter the room.

“Yusuf,” said the first man. “
Dayte iy shcho nubed' poïsty
.”

“
Ben Rus anlammiyorum
!” replied Yusuf, his voice strident. “
No Rus. No Rus
.”

“
Do you speak English, then?” asked the first one, growing im-
patient.

She heard a long pause, as if the man were trying to fit his mouth around unaccustomed words.
“
A little
.”

“I'm going to Charlotte,” the Russian spoke loudly and slowly, as if Yusuf were either deaf or mentally challenged. “You stay here, with Smiley. Feed this one, then the other. When I come back, we'll load them up.” There was a long moment of silence, broken when the Russian said, “Understand?”

“
Olur!
Feed and guard. Then we take out.”

She heard another silence, then the door opened. She looked through slitted eyes just in time to see two men going out the door. The first was just a shadow—the second was tall and rangy. His head was shaved and he wore a white suit that looked like rumpled linen.

That must be the Russian, she decided. What Yusuf looked like she had no idea. After they relocked the door, she was tempted to sit up and look around the room, but again she decided to lie still. They might have surveillance cameras.
If I'm going to get out of here, it's better that those bastards not know I'm awake.

Still, she needed to know where she was, to see if there was anything here she could use as a weapon.

She tilted her head up slightly, looking through half-closed eyes. She saw an old-fashioned fluorescent light flickering from a concrete block ceiling. Wondering if they had her in some kind of prison cell, she pretended to yawn. While doing so, she turned her head to the left. On that side of the room she saw a boarded-up window and a television so old that it had a dial to change the channels. Yawning again, she turned her head to the other side. There, a battered door revealed a bathroom with a toilet as ancient as the television set. On the wall over the sink she could see where someone had written
I want to go home
—childish letters in a brownish ink that looked like dried blood. A chill went through her.

It's an old motel room
, she decided.
But where? And who are these men? What do they want with me? And what happened to the person who wrote
I want to go home
in such clear and plaintive English that it could have been written on a blackboard?

She turned back, flat on her back. Keeping a half-open eye on the door, she tried to clear the fuzziness from her head and remember what she'd learned from her captors' conversation. The man who'd fingered her face sounded Ukrainian and seemed to be in charge. He spoke English far better than his helper, Yusuf, whose vocabulary was mostly verbs. The Ukrainian had mentioned someone named Smiley, but made a point that he was coming back to help Yusuf load them up. She did not like the sound of that.
Loading up
implied cargo—cattle to market, sheep to shearing. And who was the other person the Ukrainian had told Yusuf to feed? Was there someone else locked up here besides her?

She opened her eyes wider and looked at the door, sorry that she hadn't gotten a glimpse of Yusuf. Was he big? Strong? Did he go around armed? If he did what the Ukrainian told him, then he would soon be coming with something for her to eat. And what then, she wondered? More drugs that would send her back to Atagahi? If that happened, then where would she wake up next? Russia?

“Not if I have anything to say about it,” she whispered. She closed her eyes again and tried to calm herself by thinking of all the things Yamamoto had taught her in karate class: Release the tiger … come out fast, come out hard. Assume they have a weapon; assume they mean to kill you.

Okay
, she thought, mentally preparing herself as she began tensing the muscles of her arms and legs.
Even if this Yusuf is big and armed, all you have to do is get through one guy. He'll probably be expecting a still-drugged woman, so you'll have the element of surprise. After you take him out, then get up and get yourself out.

Trusting that her exact battle plan would come once she saw Yusuf, she lay there and waited, still pretending to be asleep. The minutes dragged on, dripping as slowly as the water that plunked from some faucet in her bathroom. Once she thought she heard the sound of cars starting; another time she could have sworn she heard the muffled sound of a girl crying.

The minutes dragged on, turning to … hours? Days? She fell into a kind of waking dream about Jonathan and Lily the night they rescued the barn owl. Then she heard footsteps. Again, the sound was muffled—she couldn't tell if they were coming toward her room or away from it. She held her breath, listening; she heard a key turn in her door. Gulping, she lay back down on the pillow and watched through her eyelashes as a man came into her room. He was short but muscular. A tight white T-shirt covered olive skin and his jeans topped a pair of gray athletic socks. His hair was dark and curly and ended in a thick black beard cropped close to his chin. He was middle-aged, going to paunch but still handsome in the way of Persians. She knew her plan the moment she saw the way he looked around the room—his gaze darted from the bed to the TV to the bathroom as if he expected something to jump out at him. Yusuf was terrified. With a quick glance at the bed, he walked over to the bathroom door, where he put a tray of food silently on the floor.

Turning, he watched her for another moment, then slowly approached the bed. She lay still, concentrating on keeping her breathing even. As he drew closer, she caught the faint smell of grease and garlic.

“Girlie?” he said softly.

She could tell by his voice that he was too far away—she needed him to come closer. She lay motionless, waiting.

“Girlie?” He spoke a little louder, but made no move toward her. Again, she lay still.

“Hey, girlie,” he said, now coming a step closer. “Time you eat.”

She stirred, pretending to be on the edge of sleep. She wanted him to think she needed to be prodded awake. She turned her head and looked at him with hazy, unfocused eyes. “Hmmmm?” She gave a sleepy groan, soft as a kitten.

“Girlie!” he called. Newly emboldened by her lassitude, he stepped close to the bed, started tapping her on the shoulder. “Wake up. Time you eat.”

She waited one more moment, then she opened her eyes and looked at him, fierce and full in the face. He jumped, startled by the intensity of her gaze, but before he could move farther she clenched her hands together and hit straight up, catching him squarely beneath his chin. His head snapped back as blood spurted from his lower lip. While he was still off-balanced and surprised, she took her shot.

She leapt off the bed and head-butted him in his gut. She heard the wind come out of him, in both a fart and in a great belch of air. He fell back and slid down the wall, struggling to breathe, limp for those precious few seconds his diaphragm would need to right itself. Mary did not waste those seconds. She grabbed the tray, dumped a plate of orange-looking stew and hot tea on his head. As he lifted his hands to cover his eyes, she leaned back and kicked him in his balls as hard as she could. He screamed in pain, but she kept kicking him—once, twice, three times, hard and fast. Weeping, he scrambled to his knees and finally started crawling, his fingers reaching for the tile floor of the bathroom. She let him go in, but only so far. He was just about to crawl beneath the sink when she picked up the food tray again and slammed it against the side of his head. He went down so quickly it surprised her—she figured his thick hair would cushion his skull well enough for him to last a few more licks.

Dropping the tray, she stretched him full length on the floor and unzipped his jeans. She pulled off all of his clothes from the waist down and then went through his pockets. He had a wallet but no driver's license, twenty-six American dollars, and a picture of a pretty girl who looked Indian, draped in a sari with a bindi dotting her forehead. Besides the wallet, she found a small knife and a ring of keys. She pocketed those items, then hid his jeans and underwear in the tank of the toilet. If Yusuf woke up and felt frisky enough to come after her, he'd have to find his wet clothes first or come in the nude.

“Okay, Yamamota-san,” she whispered as she shut the bathroom door behind her. “I'm in touch with my tiger. One bad guy down. Probably considerably more to go.”