Friday morning, January 22
As they walked, Vargas told him he hadn’t been back out to shack since Tuesday night. He had put food and bottles of water just inside the door then locked the shack and left. That meant they had gone two full days without food or water. If Vargas’s memory could even be trusted at this point. What had Ben and the women endured? Was he even still alive?
A light gray was coloring the sky behind them. Louis looked at his watch. Six fifty-seven. One week gone. One week of opening doors to find nothing behind them. Now it was almost over.
“Is Byron really dead?” Vargas asked.
“What?”
“You guys lied to the TV about Austin Outlaw. Maybe you lied about Byron.”
“Yeah, he’s really dead.”
Vargas stopped, head down, his hand on a tree.
Louis came up behind him. The light was at Vargas’s back and Louis could make out tiny bits of human skin and blood in Vargas’s hair. The left shoulder of his denim jacket was stained black. The wound from where Joe had shot him had begun to
bleed again.
Louis poked Vargas with the
Glock. Vargas moved on.
“Do you think we were wrong?”
Vargas asked softly.
“Killing people is wrong.”
“No, I mean him and me. Do you think that was wrong?”
Louis didn’t want to answer him. But he didn’t want him to stop walking, either. “There’s no right or wrong to stuff like that,” he said.
Vargas was quiet for about twenty feet. “Uncle Leo thinks it’s wrong.”
“
Is that why you killed him?”
Vargas stopped again, head down. “Oh God...”
Was he just now remembering what he had done?
“Adam?”
“I shouldn’t have done that.”
“You shouldn’t have done any of this.
Walk.”
Vargas turned and moved on, still talking, more to himself than Louis.
“He said I was a stupid idiot and now he had a problem because there was a witness to me killing the woman. And he told me, you’re going to fix the problem, Adam, you’re going to find Outlaw and you’re going to kill him. I’ll give you more money, he said, but Austin Outlaw’s got to die.”
“Why’d you take the boy?” Louis asked.
Vargas shook his head. “We didn’t want to. We sat outside the black lady’s house for a whole day and we saw Outlaw put his suitcases in the trunk and put the kid in the car, too. So we figured he was taking him back to Miami with him.”
“He wasn’t,” Louis said.
Vargas ignored him. “But Byron didn’t want to make that long drive again, so we tried it at the park and we held onto the kid, figuring Outlaw would come back. But he never came. And when the kid told us it wasn’t his daddy out there with the money that night, we knew that the TV was lying to us and we had to get inside the house to find out for sure. That’s why we stole the cop’s uniform and that’s why —-”
“Shut up,” Louis said.
Vargas fell silent.
Louis
heard only the rain for a while until a dull sound rose from the graying sky. It grew louder and Louis looked up.
As the t
wo helicopters swept over the trees, Louis glimpsed the green and white colors of the Lee County Sheriff’s Department on the second one before they disappeared.
He looked back to see Va
rgas squinting up at the sky and he had the feeling Vargas was beginning to realize that there would be an end to this very soon.
“Where are they going?
” Vargas asked.
“They’ll land at
your cabin. Then they’ll start their search,” Louis said.
Va
rgas gave the sky a long look, then turned and moved on.
They had walked close to another quarter mile when Va
rgas stopped again, looked to his right, then dipped around a tree. Louis first thought he was trying to escape, but when he reached him, Vargas was standing in front of another shack.
It looked
the same as the first one. Small, gray, rotted wood. But this one had a padlock on the large rusted latch.
Louis moved quickly to the door, grabbing the lock.
“Where’s the key?”
Vargas patted his pockets. “I
...I must’ve lost it.”
Louis pressed his face to the wood, trying to see through the cracks. But they were too narrow and the inside too dark.
“Ben!” he shouted.
No answer.
“Ben! Are you in there? Is anyone in there?”
Nothing.
Louis stepped back and took aim at the lock. It took two more shots before the latch snapped loose from the brittle wood, and the door swung open by itself.
No one came out.
But Louis could hear someone crying. He clicked on the flashlight and stepped into the doorway.
A glint of metal...a bucket. A tumble of old dirty blankets on the wood floor. Plastic water bottles, fast-food wrappers. The smell of urine.
The beam picked up a face. Brown. Female.
She was cowering in the co
rner, hands covering her face. Her blouse and skirt were filthy, her feet bare. He swept the flashlight over the small shack. No one else.
Louis
glanced back at Vargas. He hadn’t moved. Louis held out his hand to the woman.
“I won’t hurt you,” he said softly. “Come out, please.”
She came out slowly, stepping out to the grass. Her black hair hung lank and dirty. Her hands, smeared with dried blood, were wrapped in fabric ripped from her skirt. Louis knew she had tried to claw her way out.
She blinked against the bleak light
, her body shaking in the cold rain. She saw Vargas and pulled back, terrified.
“He won’t hurt you,” Louis said.
Her eyes went to his Glock trained on Vargas. His expression was blank as he stared at the woman.
“Where are the others?” Louis asked her.
Her eyes were still on Vargas. “He took her.”
“Him?” Louis asked, pointing the
Glock at Vargas.
She shook her head. “No, a big man with gray hair and a mustache.”
“Who did he take? The other woman?” Louis asked.
“Yes,
Fubina. A man came three nights ago. He stripped her and took her outside. He called her a blackbird and he told her to run,” she said.
The woman was trembling.
She was cold but it was more than that. Louis knew in that moment why Leo Ryker had brought the women here -- not for sex but for sport. He had hunted them.
“What about
the little boy?” Louis asked.
“He
was here,” the woman said, “but he ran away.”
“When?”
“He broke one of the boards. He made a hole in the wood,” she said. “When he heard the helicopters he crawled out. He wanted me to go with him but I couldn’t fit through the little hole. He told me to wait here and he would come back with the police.”
Louis looked at the sky. The sun was up now, a soft white blur behind the gray clouds.
Ben had only heard the choppers. There was no way he could have known which way they were headed.
“
Did you see which way he went?” Louis asked.
She looked at the shack then started to
ward the back. Louis motioned for Vargas to move and they followed her.
She stopped and looked at a broken board in the back wall. The hole was no more than eight or nine inches wide.
“I watched him through the hole. He went that way,” she said, pointing south toward a dense thicket of trees and tall brush.
“
I need to go after him,” Louis said to the woman. “You’ll have to wait here.”
“No,
please no,” she said. Her eyes were wide, filling with tears.
“The police will be here soon.”
“No,” she said, grabbing his sleeve.
He pulled away gently. He took Susan’s revolver out of his pocket and shoved it in his belt. He quickly slipped off the camouflage jacket and wrapped the woman in it “Stay h
ere. I promise someone will come soon.”
He turned to Vargas. “Let’s go.”
Vargas was staring off into the brush, in the direction the woman had pointed. He was frozen in place.
“Vargas!”
No response.
“
Vargas, what’s wrong?”
“I can’t.”
“Can’t what?”
“Can’t go there.”
“Damn it! You’re going!” Louis grabbed for his arm but Vargas pulled back. He began to back away, his eyes tearing. He was mouthing something Louis didn’t at first understand. Then the words came out.
“I’ll be a good boy...I’ll be a good boy.”
The boars. He was talking about boars.
“Adam,
the boars won’t hurt you,” he said, trying to sound calm.
Vargas wasn’t moving
and Louis could see the fear in his face.
“Adam,” Louis said sharply.
“I can shoot the boars. They won’t hurt you.”
Vargas'
s eyes slowly focused back on Louis, then dropped to the revolver in his belt.
“I can’t do this,” Vargas whispered.
Louis looked at the woman standing there watching them, shivering in the camouflage jacket. He thought of Ben, somewhere out there in the woods, shivering and alone. And when he looked back at Vargas’s face he saw what he needed to do.
He pulled the revolver from his belt
, emptied the cartridges and put them in his jeans pocket. He held the gun out to Vargas.
Vargas stared at it for a moment then took it, resting it in the palm of his other hand. Louis could see something
shift in Vargas’s eyes, something that was close to courage move in to replace the fear.
But Vargas
still wouldn’t move. He was staring at Louis’s chest, staring at Joe’s badge hanging there.
Louis hesitated then s
lipped the chain up over his head and held it out to Vargas. As Vargas put it on, Louis fought back the sickening feeling in his gut at seeing Joe’s badge on the bastard’s chest.
“Let’
s go find the boy,” Louis said.
Starvation Prairie was an empty expanse of reedy brown grass and scrub b
ush, dotted with squat palmetto palms and spindly pines. There were no lush green plants, no splashes of colored flowers, no blue-shadowed marshes hiding white egrets. Whatever survived here did so only with the greatest grit and the lowest expectations. It was a place that was exactly like its name, a place somewhere just on the edge of death.
Louis heard a helicopter and looked up. Another chopper was co
ming from the east, but he knew it wouldn’t see them. It was searching too far north.
Vargas was slowing down, stumbling. The bloodstain on the ba
ck of his jacket had grown larger. He had been strangely quiet in the last thirty minutes. No more talk of Uncle Leo or Byron Ellis. No more humming. Then, suddenly, he started talking again.
“Why do you want to find the kid so bad if he isn’t even yours?” Vargas asked.
“Because I care about him.”
Va
rgas seemed to think about that for a minute before he spoke. “He’s lucky.”
Louis didn’t answer him.
A few more feet before he spoke again. “Is there gonna be a lot of cops there when we get back to the cabin?”
“Yes.”
“Am I going back to Raiford?”
“Yes.”
Vargas stopped. “They have the electric chair there, don’t they?”
Louis hesitated. “Yes.”
Vargas started moving again. For a moment, Louis thought he heard him humming again, then he stopped again. Louis came up next to him. He could see a dark shape in the distance. The third shack.
Louis tried to hurry, but Vargas was lagging and he didn’t know if it was fatigue or fear keeping him back. He pulled him along, finally letting go of him when they reached the shack.
Vargas sank down on the ground, exhausted. He was just sitting there slumped in the tall grass, staring at the shack.
Louis called out Ben’s name. There was no answer. He reached for the door then drew back.
He knew that smell. Decaying flesh. But there was something else, too. Chemicals...familiar, like a morgue.
He opened the door.
Oh, God.
Hand to his mouth, Louis backed off, a rotted stench filling his nostrils. He stood, gulping air, staring into the dark interior.
He drew his flashlight and shined it inside. The wood floor was stained a dark deep brown with old blood, but it was clean, swept.
Louis pulled the front of his sweatshirt over his nose and stepped inside, moving the flashlight over the walls.
Empty hooks. Flies buzzing.
The beam moved over the table.
Bottles. Bloodstains. Tiny pieces of dried flesh.
And a human head.
It was lying on its side, the long black hair tangled and matted. The skin was puffy, discolored, deeply dimpled on one side, smooth and preserved on the other. The eyes were flat. Black. It took Louis a moment to realize they were made of glass.
T
he flashlight beam was trembling. Louis realized his hand was shaking.
He knew this was the third Micronesian, the woman Leo Ryker had taken from the shack and hunted.
But what in the hell had been going on here? Had Leo Ryker looked for new thrills behind hunting? Had he tried to preserve a human head for his trophies?
Louis looked b
ack out at Vargas. He was sitting in the tall grass, sitting there staring at the shack, rocking slowly. Vargas had covered his head with his hands.
Louis backed out of the shack, closing the door.
No sign of Ben anywhere. They had walked for miles and now they were slowly making their way back to the cabin.
Louis heard a groan behind him and turned. Vargas had fallen. Louis walked back to him.
H
e lay face up in the brown grass, covered in mud and dried blood. His hair matted, pale skin dirty and swollen with bruises. The only thing brighter than the gold badge on his chest was his blue eyes.
Louis bent down and helped him to his feet
. They walked on, Louis using the rising sun to find their way back to the clearing.
He heard the muted
drone of a helicopter then the sharp bark of dogs. They stopped behind the trees, the cabin visible beyond. A helicopter sat on the ground. Louis could hear another in the air. There was a large four-wheel drive vehicle parked near the cabin. The cabin was crawling with cops.
But
there was a grimness to the scene, nothing of the exhilaration that came with a rescue. They hadn’t found Ben.
Louis looked at Vargas. “I need the badge back, Adam.”
Vargas took it off and dropped the badge in Louis’s hand. Louis slipped it over his head.
“And the gun,” Louis said.
“You ever heard the song ‘Blow out the Candles’?” he asked.
“No.”
A sound at the cabin drew Louis’s eye to the clearing. It was the loud squawk of a police radio. Maybe they had found Ben.
Louis
turned back to Vargas. But he was gone. And then Louis spotted him. He was sprinting away, breaking through the brush. But he wasn’t running away. He was heading straight toward the cabin, the revolver was raised in his hand.
The cops
at the cabin turned.
Vargas pointed the gun at them.
Louis rushed forward, his shouts drowned out by the dogs and helicopters. “It’s empty!” he yelled, waving his hands.
The two closest cops
drew their guns.
“Don’t shoot! It’s not loaded!”
His words were lost in the volley of gunshots.
Vargas was hit, dropping first to his knees then backward
to the ground, the revolver still clutched in his hand. Louis stopped running and raised his hands over his head.
“I’m a cop!” he yelled. He held out Joe’s badge.
The uniforms advanced and then they were all over him, throwing him to the ground. Knees jammed into his back and his face was shoved into the mud. He felt someone jerk the Glock from his belt.
He heard Sheriff Mobley close by, screaming at his deputies to back off. Then the cops were gone.
Louis rose to his knees. He glanced at Vargas then looked away, drawing a hard breath.
Mobley dropped down in front of him.
“What just happened here?”
“His gun wasn’t loaded,” Louis said.
“Where’d he get the damn gun?”
Louis closed his eyes
. “Is Ben here?”
“No. No sign of him. Kincaid, what the fuck’s going on here?”
“There’s a woman,” Louis said. “She’s in a shack out there. You need to —-”
“Where?”
“Northwest. Head northwest and go get the woman. She’s one of the...” Louis had to stop to pull in a ragged breath.
“One of what?”
“And there’s another shack, out on Starvation Prairie,” Louis said. “You need to go there, too. Leo Ryker was -—”
The voices suddenly changed. The talking turned to shouts. The shouts rose to cheers.
Louis struggled to his feet.
Out be
yond the cabin, maybe a hundred yards away, he saw them. Two figures, a woman and a boy. They were coming out of the trees, holding hands. Ben and the woman.
As
Louis moved toward them, he was flooded with a wave of relief so strong it brought tears to his eyes.
He wanted to scoop Ben up, hold him tight against him,
be the first face Ben saw. But he couldn’t get there. Uniforms blocked his way and he couldn’t break through.
And then Ben was gone
, picked up by cops and emergency personnel. He was hustled toward the helicopter, his small face barely visible above the shoulders, his eyes searching the crowd.
Louis called to him, but Ben didn’t hear him, didn’t see him.
The helicopter door slammed shut and the chopper lifted off, rising straight up, then swinging over the trees and disappearing into the thin fog.