“Where’s the child, Nathan?” I asked.
He cracked one eye and glared up at us. The rope had pulled him into an elongated bow shape, and he was probably having trouble breathing. Broke my heart. He’d dropped Mose without a qualm with a long-range rifle shot and then taken Carrie back to his camp so that he could throw her into this alien geographical feature, where she would absolutely never be found. After he had gratified himself. The fact that they had a semi-permanent camp up here meant they’d done all this before.
“Where’s the little girl, Nathan?” I asked again. I kicked the rope, which had the effect of squeezing his purple hands.
He grunted with the pain. “Ain’t no girl,” he said, finally.
“Your bearded buddy said you brought one up here-he’s dead, by the way, along with his pal who had the big dog on the leash-so where is she? You throw her down this hole?”
“Y’all go to hell,” he said, closing the puffy eye.
“Cam, look,” Carrie said. She was pointing down into the lava-glass funnel. Way down there, in the water and at the edge of the lava walls, a tiny white object had appeared. It looked like a piece of paper, but it wasn’t. I suddenly had a very bad feeling.
“What’s that down there, Nathan? Down there in the water?”
Nathan tried to look down but couldn’t. His arms had to be just about screaming by now, but I had zero sympathy.
“Get on the very end of that rope,” I told Carrie. “Belay it around that tree right there, and then I’m going to drop this bastard.”
Carrie did exactly as I asked. I took up the tension on the rope, she wrapped the very end of it around the tree, and then I let go. Nathan slid down the side of the tube like a luge rider, yelling all the way. He hit the water below with a clumsy splash and disappeared until the rope snapped taut, and then he burst back up to the surface. Without hands, he couldn’t swim, so he went right back down again. I let him do this three times and then hauled in on the rope until his arms and head remained above water. I gave him a minute to breathe and then told him to go get the white thing that was floating about ten feet from him. He looked small and helpless all the way down there, which I thought was just about perfect.
He refused to move, so I tied off the rope to keep his head above water and then went and got my rifle.
“Cam,” Carrie began, but I waved her off.
“I want him talking, but he needs some encouragement,” I said. I knelt down at the lip of the lava tube and put a round three inches from his face. The sound effects were interesting, as was the knifelike slash of the bullet into the water right next to his face. I fired two more rounds, each one a little closer, and he finally yelled, “All right.”
I gave him some slack with the rope, and he crabbed sideways with his body and then reached down to pick up the white thing. It became obvious that his hands weren’t working anymore as he kept dropping it. I yelled down for him to grab it with his teeth, and, when he did, we both pulled on that rope with all we had. Nathan wasn’t a little guy, but the hole wasn’t vertical, either. Being wet, he slid up that glassine surface with very little friction. When his face got to the top, framed by his two straining arms, I stared at the white thing he held in his teeth.
So did Carrie. She began to curse him in a low monotone, using words I hadn’t heard since the Marines. Then I saw what it was: that frilly little cap that Honey Dee had worn when she came up to the cave and brought us the message from Grinny, the one with the crude yellow bees embroidered on it. This evil motherfucker had thrown her down there to her death. And she hadn’t been the first, as I kept reminding myself.
Nathan heard our reaction and for the first time looked afraid. I had trouble framing the words. “What-have-you-done?” I said through clenched teeth.
“She was a bleeder,” he said, spitting out the bonnet. It stuck to the lava wall like a piece of wet toilet paper. “No good to us. Grinny said trash her, so that’s what I done.”
“So it’s true?” I said. “You make those poor goddamned women pay for their drugs in kids? And then you sell them as sex objects?”
He gave a long sigh, as if he knew it was all over and there was no more point in playing the role of tough guy. He looked up at us with that one working eye, and I’d have sworn he was laughing at us.
“Better,” he said.
Better? That’s what Mingo had said.
“What the hell does that mean, better?”
“We sell ’em for parts.”
I heard Carrie gasp, and then she was reaching for her knife to cut the rope. I grabbed her hand and yelled “No” at her. She fought me, reaching by me to cut that rope. She almost succeeded. The hell of it was I wanted her to cut that rope.
“He needs to die,” she snapped.
“Sure he does. But think about it: Think about the evidence that has to be down there in that water. They’ve been using this place for years.”
Nathan had closed his eyes again as the pain of being hung by his hands reasserted itself. Carrie glared down at him with a face like Medusa.
“Look,” I said. “The one thing we’ve never been able to get is physical evidence. Down there is the mother lode. They’ll convict this bastard, and then he’s going upstate, where they’ll lock him up for life as a child killer. Think of what the cons will do to him. Especially if his hands don’t work any more.”
“Some goddamned lawyer will get him off,” she muttered, but she had lowered the knife.
I sat back on my haunches and looked down at yet another minion of hell. “That so-called doctor will talk,” I said. “The doctor who took those kids into a lab at night and cut them up like stew meat. And we’ll make sure the story’s out there, so no bureaucrats can pull any more rugs over this mess. But first we have to find Grinny and the rest of them.”
“Prison’s not good enough,” she said.
“Yes, it will be,” I said. “If he gets life, they’ll have to box him up so the rest of the cons can’t get to him. He’ll live in an eight-by-six concrete room for the rest of his life. And if he gets the needle, he still gets to live in that box for a decade or so, only this time in the death house. Our killing him would be a mercy, and this bastard doesn’t deserve mercy of any kind.”
I stood up and pulled her back from the lip of the lava tube. “What are we going to do right now?” she said.
“We’re going to go back to our camp and check on Mose. Then we’ll fire that EPIRB. For this mess, we need a crowd.”
“And him?”
“Let him hang for a while.”
We lowered Nathan back down to midway in the tube and then tied him off.
A crowd was what we got. The first helicopter arrived right at the end of the two-hour response window, as advertised. He couldn’t land, but he did put down a rescue paramedic. While the bird flew around in lazy circles overhead, we explained what we had on the ground and that we needed Sam King and his SBI team here in a hurry, preferably before dark. Carrie did most of the talking. The medic checked Mose out and said he was stable and qualified for air transport. The helo came in and they did a rescue hoist. Mose was shocky from that big whack in the chest, but he managed a grin at Carrie, who held his hand until the hoist was ready.
Then the shepherds and I went back to the ambush site to mark the location of the two bodies there. Carrie stayed back at our camp. The paramedic had left her a radio, and she briefed the rescue pilots as they flew back to the nearest hospital on what to tell the cops. Then, while we waited for the SBI, we went back down to Nathan’s camp near the lava tube.
We debated bringing him out of the tube. Carrie really liked the idea of letting him just hang there, but his hands were now a dark purple, and I didn’t want him going off to some hospital to fight gangrene for a month. She, on the other hand, had this interesting theory of how his hands might just come off, and she wanted to watch. In the end we hauled him out of the glass hole and tied him to a tree. I left the shepherds to watch him, and then we trudged back up to our original camp to wait for the circus.