The Bone Tree (68 page)

Caitlin cursed as the pain in her chest intensified. She’d made an assumption based on race—exactly what she’d always told others not to do—and it had proved her undoing. The irony was that she’d made a
positive
assumption, and thus hadn’t seen it as an assumption at all.

“
You won’t get away with this!
” she screamed. Every word caused her agony, but she kept shouting. “Terry saw you at the café! She saw your
driver’s license
. They have security cameras back there! The FBI will find you, no matter where you go!”

“Lady, you got no idea how things work down here. Colonel Forrest can make them tapes disappear. He can make that Terry disappear if he wants to. She’s liable to be in a car with Captain Ozan right now, thinking he’s trying to save you.”

Caitlin moaned. She felt as though a strong man were pressing down on her breastbone.

“Colonel Forrest, he’s connected all over this state. Even up in Washington. That’s how it’s always been down here. My granddaddy told me that. Forrest’s daddy was just like him. He kept all the niggers round here in line for the Man.”

She wanted to speak, but her lungs felt like they’d shrunk to a quarter of their normal size.
Maybe it’s panic,
she thought.

“You still awake?” Harold called.

When she didn’t reply, he said, “Come on, now. Don’t play games with me.”

A terrifying thought came to her. “Harold, please,” she gasped. “I’m pregnant.”

The boy said nothing to this. Had she struck a chord of compassion?

“I just found out. I was . . . supposed to be getting married next week, and . . . I’m already pregnant. If you let me die here, you’re killing my baby, too.”

After a long silence, a spooked whisper said, “You’re lying.”

“I’m not,” Caitlin sobbed. “I wouldn’t lie about that.”

“Women lie about being with child all the time.”

“Oh, God,” she croaked. “Why don’t you just . . . fucking get it over with?”

“ ’Cause I know you’ve got more bullets. It’ll be over soon enough.”

She wondered why Harold had only shot her once. He must be worried about attracting attention, in case there were still deputies in the swamp. Honest deputies like Carl Sims. Harold had been genuinely frightened by the sounds of the boat motors during the trip in.

With desperate effort, Caitlin raised her pistol, then shut her eyes and fired two shots at the crack of light. Then she opened her eyes and watched for the slightest movement at the edge of the fissure.

A shadow deepened at the right edge of the crack.

She fired.

Harold cried out in pain, then screamed in fury.

Caitlin gritted her teeth and scooted about three feet to her left. Seconds later, the barrel of the .22 rifle appeared in the crack and orange flame shot from it. The impacting rounds knocked stinging wood chips into her face, but at least no lead struck her.

“
Fuck you!
” she yelled, and fired another round. “You missed!”

One shot left.

She waited for the barrel to appear again, but it didn’t. Twenty seconds later, she heard the trolling motor start up. Panic shot through her like a jolt of electric current. She tried to roll sideways and crawl across the dirt floor, but it was useless. Before she’d made it two feet, she heard the hum of the motor fading. Ten seconds later, all was silent.

But not for long. For some reason her ears began ringing, making a harsh sound like her junior-high-school bell, only this bell wouldn’t stop. She drew all the breath she could into her lungs, then slowly, agonizingly, forced herself back into a sitting position. She only managed it because the earth humped against the wall helped her get herself out of a prone position.

Taking the flashlight in her hand, she shone it around once more in hopes of finding something that might somehow help her. This time she played the beam around the seam where the trunk legs met the earth, where dirt and other organic matter had been mounded up in the darkest part of the cave. As the beam came closer to her, she realized that the mound she had clung to as she pulled herself up was not all made of earth.

It was human.

There was a body lying facedown against the wall of the tree. Whoever that person was, they had to be dead. He or she had not stirred during the gunfight, and that could mean only one thing.

Knowing she was probably only minutes from death herself, Caitlin let her body fall sideways, then used her elbows to crawl close enough to the head to shine her light on it. The hair was gray and white. She steeled herself against her fear, then held the flashlight closer with her left hand, took hold of the hair with her right, and pulled the head as far back as she could. The moment the beam fell on the face, she recognized what would have been—but now would never be—her father-in-law.

Tom Cage.

HIGHWAY 24 IS A
serpentine track of asphalt cut through deep, encroaching woods and bordered by eleven-foot game fences. With the leaden sky above and no other cars in sight, it feels like I’m driving through some Central European country during the darkest days of the
Cold War. But somewhere between the tiny hamlet of Lessley and Lake Mary, the Lusahatcha County Sheriff’s Department JetRanger swoops out of the sky ahead and drops toward the wet asphalt like a gunship on a strafing run.

I brake as hard as I dare, and finally skid to a stop mere yards from where Danny McDavitt has flared the helicopter to land. Grabbing my pistol from my glove box, I shove it into my belt, then snatch up my cell phone, leap from the car, and run to the chopper as it settles onto the road.

Carl pulls me through the side hatch and starts strapping a four-point harness over my chest.

“Any signs of Caitlin’s cell signal?” I ask.

The deputy points to the headset muffling his ears, then slaps an identical one over my head.

“
What’d you say?
” he asks, working at my harness buckles.

“Have you seen any sign of Caitlin’s cell signal?”

“Not yet.”

“Kaiser called. The last tower her phone pinged was four miles west of here. I don’t think she’s far away.”

“Yeah, well. I don’t want to bring you down, but you haven’t seen that swamp yet.” Carl slaps my chest, then gives McDavitt a thumbs-up.

“You secure, Mayor?” asks the pilot.

“Go!” I shout. “
Get her up!
”

The JetRanger rises slowly at first, but then its nose tips forward and we beat our way into the dark sky like a mother hawk in search of a lost fledgling.

CAITLIN SAT WITH
her back against the inner wall of the Bone Tree, staring at Tom’s motionless face. She’d recoiled in horror upon first recognizing the corpse as Penn’s father. But then, realizing that he might be the last person she would ever see, she’d placed her hand on his cheek and murmured a prayer. As she did, she realized Tom could not have been dead long, because his cheek was not yet cold.

Then he breathed on her wrist.

At first she jumped back in terror, but then she understood what that breath meant. Leaning over the body, she spoke Tom’s name, shook him, then pinched his cheek, hard—but nothing brought him around. His breaths were faint and frighteningly far between. He might be so close to death that he could not be revived—even by doctors. That would explain why he hadn’t stirred during the gunfire.

Caitlin knew she needed to attend to her own injury, but the terrible truth was that without Tom’s knowledge and skill, she wouldn’t live more than a few minutes. The pain in her chest had begun to drive out all thought when an obvious realization struck her.

Tom is diabetic.

If he’d been dumped here without food, he might have gone into diabetic shock. Low blood sugar could send a diabetic into a coma . . . even kill them. And if Tom had gone hours without sugar—

Shifting her body painfully, Caitlin dug her hand into her pants pocket, searching for the peppermints she and Jordan had stolen from the Lusahatcha sheriff’s office.

She had one left.

Her hands shook terribly as she unwrapped the cellophane, but she finally got it out. Since Tom was unconscious, she forced his mouth open and pushed the peppermint between his tongue and the roof of his mouth. He might choke on the candy, but she could address that if it happened.

If she was right, then that sugar was his only hope.

The next minutes passed with the slowness of a nightmare. Tom did not move or make a sound. Caitlin, by contrast, grew steadily more agitated. She stared down at the hole in her chest, which she’d exposed by removing her jacket and shirt. It was so small, the skin hardly puckered around it, though a little distended rim of flesh had begun to swell under a slow but steady flow of blood. As best she could tell, the bullet had grazed the lower left edge of her sternum and passed between two ribs, entering her chest just below her bra. She hadn’t known whether the slug had passed through her body entirely until she’d gotten her shirt off and seen that its back was free of blood.

The bullet was still in her chest.

Caitlin knew enough anatomy to understand that her heart, lungs, and several major blood vessels might lie in the path of that chunk of lead. Yet she was still alive and conscious. For the first couple of minutes after Harold fled, breathing had become a little easier. But now it seemed harder to fill her lungs with each passing breath. The pressure in her chest felt like the flat of someone’s hand pressing down on her sternum, harder and harder.

She checked her cell phone for the hundredth time: still no reception.

I’ve got to get outside this tree,
she thought, with a last hopeless look at Tom.
I’ve got to find a signal. . . .

With a supreme act of will, she packed her phone into her jacket, then managed to flex her thighs hard enough to slide her back up the inner wall of the tree and get to her feet. Using the wall as a brace, she slid her way around to the crack in the trunk and turned sideways. She’d planned to marshal her strength for a few moments, but as soon as she was at a right angle to the crack, she fell through, crashing to the ground with an impact that blacked out her vision for a few seconds.

“
Unnghh,
” she groaned, feeling tears on her face. “This is bad.” Even as she said this, a thought went through her mind.
What would Jordan do?

“Jordan wouldn’t be here,” she said. “TSTL, that’s me. Too Stupid To Live.”

She rolled onto her stomach, reached into the pocket of her fallen jacket, and pulled her phone up to her face. The LCD still read
NO SERVICE
. Fighting back panic, she looked around the tree.

The rain had stopped.

All she saw were more cypress trees jutting from the black water,
the largest of them standing on tufts of earth. Between the trees, an endless mere stretched into the distance. She couldn’t walk through that water, and she hadn’t the strength to swim it. Even if she had, she’d seen enough alligators during the ride in to know that slogging through a swamp trailing blood wasn’t a good idea.

You have to climb,
said a voice in her head.
Get high enough, and your phone will find a tower.
. . .

“I can’t
climb,
” she wailed with self-disgust. “I can’t even walk.”

It wasn’t a matter of will. The pain in her chest was so intense that she’d be lucky to stand again.

There are people nearby,
she thought.
Within gunshot range. Fire the bullet you have left and hope to attract attention.
This idea wasn’t completely stupid, except for the fact that she’d left her pistol back inside the tree.
If I can’t get out of here on my own, then I have to stay alive until somebody comes for me. Terry will call someone eventually.

Caitlin thought back to a night two months ago, when she’d been trapped in a building with another woman and death seemed certain. She’d summoned extraordinary strength that night, and done things most people wouldn’t have been able to do. The police and paramedics had told her that. She was a survivor; she’d proved it in spades. But somehow the bullet in her chest made a mockery of all her confidence. A tiny lump of lead fired from a plinking gun, a child’s rifle. But a plain old .22 could kill you if it hit a vital organ or artery.

The bullet,
she thought in a haze of confusion.
That’s my problem.

Bracing herself for further pain, she fought her way onto her knees and elbows, then crawled to the wall of the cypress trunk and sat against it, just beside the fissure.

What would Tom do if he were conscious? Call a fucking medevac chopper, that’s what. But the phones don’t work. So what else? He’d do what he could on the spot. The bullet obviously hit something important. The pressure’s increasing, so I must be bleeding. Unless my lung has collapsed. . . .

“Pneumothorax,” she whispered, recalling Tom telling her how he’d once saved a car accident victim on the side of a highway by punching a hypodermic needle between his ribs and reinflating the lung.

Sucking chest wound—

She stopped laboring to breathe and forced herself to listen. Then she slowly drew in a lungful of air. She heard no wheeze from the hole
in her chest.
Not my lung,
she thought.
Which is good, because I don’t have a needle anyway.

What else could it be?

The bullet had punched through her chest on the left side of what Tom had always called the “midline.” Caitlin was pretty sure the aorta lay under that hole, as well as her heart.
If he’d hit my aorta,
she thought,
I’d be dead now. What else could the bullet have hit? I
must
be bleeding internally—

A wave of terror hit her as she imagined drowning in her own blood. She saw Penn looking down at her dead body, a froth of clotted blood on her face and chest. Seconds or minutes later she realized that her brain was wavering between consciousness and sleep.
That’s not sleep,
she realized.
That’s death. Think, goddamn it. THINK!

A strange sound came from the interior of the tree. It sounded like a cat with something caught in its throat. An electric shock of possibility flashed through her. Could Tom be choking? If he was choking . . . he was
alive
.

Caitlin started to crawl back through the opening but found she couldn’t move. Tears of desperation flowed down her face.

“Hello?” called a rough voice from the darkness inside the tree.

“
Tom!
” she cried, sobbing with relief. “It’s Caitlin! Can you hear me?”

A moan of pain came from the opening. Then Tom said, “Where are you?”

“Outside! I can’t move! I’m in trouble. Can you get outside the tree?”

“I don’t know. My hands are tied behind me. Handcuffed, I think. Is anybody else out there?”

“No. And I’m shot. In the chest.”

Tom was silent. Then he said, “Hold on, darling. I’m coming.”

Half a minute later, Tom Cage knee-walked through the opening in the trunk of the cypress, his hands bound behind him. With his dirty gray face and bloody clothes, he looked like a man who’d just crawled out of his own grave. But to Caitlin he looked like an angel. Her angel didn’t waste time with small talk, either. His eyes were on her chest as he lurched toward her.

“How long ago did that happen?”

“Eight or ten minutes?” she wheezed. “I’m not sure. It was a .22 rifle.”

Tom tucked his chin into his chest as he studied the wound, but then he looked up at Caitlin’s neck.

“What is it?” she asked anxiously.

“Are you having trouble breathing?”

She nodded.

“And pressure in the neck?”

She nodded again, her fear blooming into panic.

Tom leaned forward and studied the right side of her neck. The second he did, she saw his eye darken.

“What is it?”

“Your jugular veins are distended. Touch your neck.”

She put her hand against the skin beneath her jaw, and the bottom dropped out of her stomach. Tom was right—one blood vessel felt like a hose filled near to bursting.

“What’s the matter with me?”

Tom laid his right ear against her chest and pressed it hard against her. “I can barely hear your heart. It’s pericardial tamponade.”

“What’s that?”

“The bullet probably nicked your heart.”

Caitlin shut her eyes tight, trying not to scream.

“Take it easy,” Tom said in his reassuring voice. “Not all heart wounds are fatal. When the heart is hit by something that doesn’t destroy its ability to pump outright, it bleeds into the pericardium—the protective sac around it. As blood flows into the sac, it creates external pressure on the heart, like a crushing fist. What you feel now is that pressure making it harder for your heart to beat.”

Caitlin’s stomach fluttered again. “How long until it stops altogether?”

“That depends on the rate of bleeding. Never, if I have anything to do with it. Do you have any tools with you? Anything?”

“Not much. What do you need?”

“In an ideal world? A six-inch needle to aspirate the excess blood.”

“Sorry, fresh out. Will anything else work?”

Tom bit his lip and looked around the muddy tussock beneath the tree. “We need a tube of some kind, the longer the better.”

“Like a reed?”

“In principle, but it has to be rigid. A reed wouldn’t be near strong enough.”

As he searched the edge of the water with his eyes, she dug into her pocket and fished out the multi-tool Jordan had given her when they
parted. With spastic fingers she unfolded knife blades, screwdrivers, a bottle opener, scissors . . . everything but what she needed. Nothing even
resembled
a needle.

“What’s that you’ve got?” Tom asked.

“A multi-tool. Nothing hollow on it, though.”

“We can use that knife blade. We still need a tube, though. Without it . . .”

“I’m dead.”

Tom grimaced but didn’t argue the point. Instead, he kept searching the area around the tree, although what he hoped to find, Caitlin had no idea.

What else do I have?
she thought desperately.
A useless cell phone . . .

She remembered the handheld walkie-talkie Mose had carried, with its old-time metal antenna. If she’d taken that, she could snap off the antenna, shove the tube into the bullet hole, and ask Tom to suck the blood out of her pericardium like a gangbanger siphoning gas from a Mercedes. Of course, if she had a walkie-talkie, they could radio Danny McDavitt to airlift them out of this fucking swamp—the deus ex machina of her dreams.

She blinked in silent shock.
Harold said he had a walkie-talkie.

Caitlin struggled to her knees, then scanned the ground like a strung-out addict hunting a dropped bag of crack. She saw nothing other than a cigarette butt near a footprint in the mud. No walkie-talkie.

“How’s your breathing?” Tom asked, turning back to her.

“Somebody’s sitting on my chest.”

“I want you to sit down. Your blood pressure’s going to drop as the pericardium fills. Do you feel light-headed?”

She went still, her panic morphing into something close to shock. As carefully as she could, she leaned back against the tree and sat down. She fell harder than she’d intended, scraping her back and landing on something that jabbed her right buttock. Leaning to her left so that she could reach whatever it was, her fingers touched hard plastic, then froze. Wedged tight along the vertical seam of her right pocket was the clear Bic ballpoint she’d borrowed from the waitress in the café.

“Tom!” she cried, taking it out and extending her hand to him. “I hope to God you can pull some kind of MacGyver shit with this thing.”

“Hallelujah!” he said, moving back to her. “It’s thick, but it’s about the best we could hope for.”

“You mean it’s thicker than the bullet hole?”

“We’ll find out. With a .22, the track through your body will have swelled shut, but not permanently. Which means . . .”

“What? Tell me!”

“To drain the pericardium, you’ve got to get the tip of that pen barrel to it. To get
that
tube to your pericardium, you’ll have to reopen the wound.”

“So?”

“The pain will be severe. And with my hands cuffed behind me, I can’t do the procedure.”

“Then tell
me
what to do!”

Tom stared at her for a few seconds, then at the wound. He shook his head slowly. When she began to sob, he sighed and said, “Take the ink tube out of the pen barrel and throw it on the ground. Then open that knife and get ready to use it.”

Caitlin stuck the pen’s point between her teeth, bit down, and yanked out the ink-filled insert. Then she slid a fingernail under the edge of the blue end cap and popped it out. What remained was a strong hexagonal tube about six inches long. Awfully thick for a needle, but better than nothing.