Gone, Baby, Gone (25 page)

“I don’t see any instructions,” Angie said.

Bubba, I knew, was out there somewhere. He could probably see us right now. Maybe he could see Mullen and Gutierrez and whoever was working with them. Maybe he could see Amanda McCready. He’d approached from the Milton side and cut through Cunningham Park and up along a path he’d found years before, when he’d gone there to dump hot weapons, or a car, or a body—whatever it was guys like Bubba dumped in the quarries.

He’d have a target scope on his rifle equipped with a light amplification device, and through the scope we’d all look like we stood in a misty seaweed world, moved within a photograph that was still developing before his eyes.

The walkie-talkie on Broussard’s hip went off, and the squawk was like a scream in the midst of all that quiet. He fumbled with it and brought it up to his mouth.

“Broussard.”

“This is Doyle. Sixteenth Precinct just received a call from a woman with a message for you. We think it’s the same woman who called Lionel McCready.”

“Copy. What’s the message?”

“You’re to walk to your right, Detective Broussard, up onto the southern cliffs. Kenzie and Gennaro are to walk to their left.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. Doyle out.”

Broussard clipped the walkie-talkie back on his hip, looked off at the line of cliffs on the far side of the water. “Divide and conquer.”

He looked at us, and his eyes were small and empty. He looked much younger than usual, nerves and fear stripping ten years from his face.

“Be careful,” Angie said.

“You too,” he said.

We stood there for another few seconds, as if by not moving we could stave off the inevitable, the moment when we’d discover whether Amanda McCready was alive or dead, the moment when all this hoping and planning would be out of our hands and whoever was hurt or lost or killed wouldn’t be up to us any longer.

“Well,” Broussard said. “Shit.” He shrugged and then walked off along the flat path, the flashlight beam bouncing in front of him through the dust.

Angie and I moved back from the edge about ten feet and followed the stone until a gap appeared and another granite slab rose six inches on the other side. I gripped her hand and we stepped over the gap and up onto the next slab, followed that stone another thirty feet until we met a wall.

It rose a good ten feet above us, and its creamy beige color was mixed with swirls of chocolate. It reminded me of a marble cake. A six-ton marble cake, but still.

We shone our flashlights to the left of it and found nothing but sheer mass back about thirty feet and into the trees. I brought the light back to the section in front of me, found cuts in the rock, as if layers had been chipped away in places like shale. A small lip about a foot wide opened like a smile two and a half feet up the face, and four feet above that I saw another, wider smile.

“Done much rock climbing lately?” I asked Angie.

“You’re not thinking…?” Her light beam danced across the rock face.

“Don’t see any alternative.” I handed her my flashlight and raised the toe of my shoe until it found the first small lip. I looked back over my shoulder at Angie. “I wouldn’t stand directly behind me, if I were you. I might be coming back down real quick.”

She shook her head and stepped to my left, kept both flashlights shining on the rock as I flexed the toe of my shoe against the lip and pushed up and down a couple of times to see if the smile crumbled. When it didn’t, I took a deep breath and pushed up off it, grabbed for the higher shelf. I got my fingers in there, and they slid on dust and rock salt and then popped back out again, and I bounced back off the rock face and fell on my ass.

“That was good,” Angie said. “You definitely have a genetic predisposition toward all things athletic.”

I stood and wiped the dust off my fingers, smeared it on my jeans. I scowled at Angie and tried again, and again I fell back on my ass.

“It’s getting nervous, though,” Angie said.

The third try, I actually held my fingers in the shelf for a good fifteen seconds before I lost my grip.

Angie’s lights shone down in my face as I looked up at the beast slab of stubborn granite.

“May I?” she said.

I took the flashlights from her, shone them on the rock. “Be my guest.”

She walked backward several feet and peered at the rock. She squatted and rose up and down on her haunches several times, stretched her torso from the small of her back, and flexed her fingers. Before I even knew what her plan was, she rose, took off, and ran full speed at the rock face. A few inches before she would have smacked into it like Wile E. Coyote into a painted-on door, her foot dug into the lower shelf, her right hand grabbed the upper one, and her small body vaulted up another two feet as her left arm slapped over the top.

She hung there for a good thirty seconds like that, pressed flat into the rock as if she’d been hurled there.

“Now what are you going to do?” I said.

“I thought I’d just lie here awhile.”

“That sounds like sarcasm.”

“Oh, you recognize it?”

“One of my talents.”

“Patrick,” she said, in a tone that reminded me of my mother and several nuns I’ve known, “get under me and push.”

I shoved one flashlight into my belt buckle, so that the light shone up into my face, and the other in my back pocket, stood under Angie, got both hands under her heels, and pushed up. Both flashlights together were probably heavier than she was. She shot up the rock face and I extended my arms until they were straight above my head and her heels left the palms. She turned around on top of the rock, looked down at me from her hands and knees, and extended her hand.

“Ready, my Olympian?”

I coughed into my hand. “Bitch.”

She withdrew the hand and smiled. “What was that?”

“I said I have to
switch
the other flashlight to my back pocket.”

“Oh.” She lowered the hand again. “Of course.”

After she’d pulled me up, we shone the lights across the top of the rock. It ran unbroken for at least twenty yards and was as smooth as a bowling ball. I lay on my stomach and stuck my head and flashlight over the edge, watching the cliff face drop straight and smooth another sixty-five feet to the water.

We were about midway up the north side of the quarry. Directly across the water was a row of cliffs and shelves, littered with graffiti and even a stray climber’s piton. The water, when under my beam, shimmered against the rock like heat waves off a summer road. It was the pale green I remembered, slightly milkier, but I knew the color was deceptive. Divers looking for a body in this water last summer had been forced to abandon their search when a high concentration of silt deposits combined with the natural lack of visibility in depths of more than one hundred and fifty feet made it impossible to see more than two to three feet in front of their faces. I brought my beam back across the water toward our side, skipped over a crumpled license plate floating in the green, a chunk of log that had been gnawed open in the center by animals until it resembled a canoe, and then the edge of something round and the color of flesh.

“Patrick,” Angie said.

“Wait a sec. Shine your light down here.” I darted my beam back to my right, back to where I’d seen the curve of flesh, found only more green water.

“Ange,” I said. “Now, for Christ’s sake.”

She lay on the rock beside me and flashed her light beside my own. Having to travel sixty-five feet down weakened the light, and the soft green of the water didn’t help much either. Our circles of light ran parallel like a pair of eyes and swayed back and forth across the water, then up and down, in tight squares.

“What did you see?”

“I don’t know. Could have been a rock….”

The coffee-brown bark of the log floated under my beam, then the license plate again, crumpled as if by thick angry hands.

Maybe it
had
been a rock. The white light, green water, and surrounding black could be playing tricks with my eyes. If it had been a body, we’d have found it by now. Besides, bodies don’t float. Not in the quarries.

“I got something.”

I tilted my wrist, followed Angie’s shaft of light, and the twin beams bathed the curved head and dead eyes of Amanda McCready’s doll, Pea. It floated on its back in the green water, its flower-print dress soiled and wet.

Oh, Jesus, I thought. No.

“Patrick,” Angie said, “she could be down there.”

“Wait—”

“She could be down there,” she repeated, and I heard a kicking sound as she rolled onto her back and pushed one shoe off her left heel.

“Angie. Wait. We’re supposed to—”

On the other side of the quarry, the tree line behind the cliffs exploded. Gunfire ripped through the branches, and light popped and erupted in sudden blasts of yellow and white.

“I’m pinned down! I’m pinned down!” Broussard’s voice screamed over the walkie-talkie. “Need immediate support! Repeat: Need immediate support!”

A chip of marble jumped off the cliff and into my cheek, and then suddenly the trees behind us buzzed and sheared their branches, and sparks and metallic pings popped off the rock face.

Angie and I rolled back from the edge and I grabbed my walkie-talkie. “This is Kenzie. We’re taking fire. Repeat: We are taking fire from the south side of the quarry.”

I rolled back farther into the darkness, saw my flashlight where I’d left it on the edge, still pointing its shaft of light out over the quarry. Whoever was shooting from the other side of the water was probably using the flashlight as a homing beacon.

“You hit?”

Angie shook her head. “No.”

“Be right back.”

“What?”

Another barrage of bullets hammered the rocks and trees behind us, and I held my breath, waited for a pause. When it came in a roar of silence, I scrambled through the dark and swung the back of my hand into the flashlight, sent it over the edge and dropping toward the water.

“Christ,” Angie said, as I scrambled back to her. “What do we do?”

“I don’t know. If they got LAD scopes on their rifles, we’re dead.”

The shooter opened up again. Leaves in the trees behind Angie leaped into the night and bullets spit into the trunks, snapped thin branches. The gunfire paused for a half second as the shooter realigned his aim, and then metal slapped the cliff face below us, just on the other side of the lip, hammering the rock like a hailstorm. One shift of the gun an inch or two up in the shooter’s arms, and the bullets would streak over the cliff top and into our faces.

“Need evac!” Broussard screamed over the walkie-talkie. “Immediately! Drawing fire from both sides!”

“Evac en route,” a calm, cold voice replied.

I depressed the transmit button as the gunfire stopped again. “Broussard.”

“Yeah. You two okay?”

“Pinned.”

“Me too.” From his end, I heard a sudden stream of bullets and when I looked across the quarry I could see the steady white flash of muzzle fire in the trees.

“Son of a bitch!” Broussard shouted.

Then the sky opened up and poured white light as two helicopters streaked over the center of the quarry, lights powerful enough to bathe a football stadium strapped to their noses. For a moment, I was blinded by the sheer mass of the sudden white glow. Everything lost its color and turned white with the light: white tree line, white cliff face, white water.

The fury of white was disrupted by a long, dark object as it arced from the tree line on the other side, somersaulted in the air, end over end, and then dropped over the cliff and toward the water. I followed its descent enough to identify it as a rifle before it disappeared from view, but still more gunfire burst from the tree line across the water from us.

And then it stopped. I searched the white light and just glimpsed the butt end of another rifle as it dropped through the night toward the water.

One helicopter banked above the tree line on Broussard’s side and I heard the chatter of automatic fire, heard Broussard scream over the walkie-talkie, “Hold your fire! Hold your fire, you fucking lunatic!”

The green treetops were shredding themselves in the white light, popping and snapping into the air, and then the chatter of the weapon fired from the helicopter stopped as the second helicopter banked and pointed its light directly in my face. The wind from its rotor blades found my body and knocked me off my feet, and Angie grabbed the walkie-talkie and said, “Back off. We’re fine. You are in the line of fire.”

The white light disappeared for a moment, and when my vision cleared and the wind lessened, I saw that the helicopter had drifted up about forty feet, hovered over the quarry, and dipped its light toward the water.

All gunfire had stopped. The fury of mechanical noise, though, had been replaced by the whine of copter turbines and the chop of rotors.

I looked into the pool of white and saw the green water churn, the chunk of log and license plate bounce off Amanda’s doll. I turned back toward Angie in time to see her kick her right shoe off her foot and pull her sweatshirt over her head at the same time. She wore only a black bra and blue jeans as she shivered in the crisp air and blew color into her cheeks.

“You’re not going down there,” I said.

“You’re right.” She nodded and bent toward her sweatshirt, and then she burst past me and by the time I spun toward her, she was airborne, kicking her legs and throwing her chest out in front of her. The helicopter canted to its right and Angie’s body twisted in the light and then straightened.

She dropped like a missile.

In the white light, her body was dark. With her hands clamped tight to her thighs, she looked like a slim statue as she plummeted.

She hit the water like a butcher knife, sliced in clean, and disappeared.

“We’ve got one in the water,” someone said over the walkie-talkie. “We’ve got one in the water.”

As if certain I’d follow her lead, the helicopter swung back in toward the cliff, turned to its right, and hovered there, jerking slightly from side to side but forming an immediate wall in front of me.

The trick to jumping off quarry cliffs has always been one of speed and lunging. You have to jump out as far as possible so that the air and gravity’s whims don’t push you back into the walls and outcroppings as you fall. With the helicopter in front of me, even if I could manage to dive below its legs, the downdraft would swat me into the cliff, leave me plastered there like a stain.