Clambering into the crawl space, she scraped her elbows and knees against the concrete. She shoved the letters and snapshots back into the hatbox and stuffed it behind the steamer trunk where it wouldn’t be seen. Then she grabbed the black felt box and scrambled on, wanting the amethyst now more than ever. Reaching the far wall, she tucked her knees to her chest, pressed the felt box to her heart and prayed for luck.
The stairwell stood directly across from the crawl space opening, so Shel could watch as the cellar door eased open. Two men descended slowly in the harsh lamplight. Shel watched them appear, glistening black shoes, neat gray suits. The Tigers of Bacchus. The smaller one had a lithe, wiry, tap-dancer body. A birthmark erupted from his eyebrow like a smear. The other one was huge, dough-faced, cracking his neck as he walked, like a fighter. With the toes of their shoes they nudged the suitcases, boxes, scattered debris, moving it out of their path.
The large one spotted the cubbyhole first. He tugged at the little one’s sleeve and pointed. They eased apart. From different sides of the room they advanced warily. Each man held his weapon against his leg. Their faces in the light, the eyes in particular, glistened from the bare bulb. The eyes were stony and tense and a little afraid. It made Shel like them just a little, a tremble of hope, they were human after all, like her. Afraid.
“I’ve got no beef with you,” she shouted, trying to claw herself further back into the crawl space. Her voice echoed in the cramped surround. The two men stepped closer.
From his pocket, the larger one withdrew a Baggie filled with chalky crystal, lobbing it gently in one hand. Upstairs, to the tune of “Ave Maria,” one of the others crooned the epitaph Vaya con Dios, laughing as the syllables and the melodic line coincided. Shel inched back, pressing herself against the cold wall, staring at the bony disfigured man squinting at her as though wondering if he knew her. Under her breath, she heard herself tell him, “Be civilized.”
The little one reached into his coat pocket and removed a photograph. Studying it briefly, he murmured something then passed it to the larger one, who held the Baggie between his teeth in order to free his hand. He took the picture, studied it, nodded, and handed it back. The little one gestured for Shel to come nearer.
It occurred to her then what a merciful gesture it must have been: one moment, Amethyst fleeing in terror. The next, turned to stone.
Chapter 16
Abatangelo lay the Sirkis on the seat beside him as he drove out the Delta Highway. He couldn’t shake the feeling that having it there was a sign of weakness. An indication of how much, as Cohn put it, he’d changed. In the old days, he’d driven cross-country with a trunk full of product, put down beach crew mutinies, settled scores with wholesalers trying to rob him blind. He’d never felt the need for a weapon till now. He’d been a natural at talking people down from stupid moves and besides, he was blessed, he could walk away, it was only money. Such was the insanity of youth and luck.
He headed down the gravel access road with his lights off. As he broke the first hill and the ranch house came into view he killed the motor, shifted into neutral and let the car glide. When it came to a stop he slipped it into park and dropped the gun into his pocket. Crouching, he ran toward the house.
Something was wrong with the door. It stood crooked in the frame, listing slightly in the porchlight. Moving closer, he saw that the hinge leaves were shorn from the doorjamb.
He scurried down the sideyard, running low, hoisting himself up at the window ledges. Every room lay dark and still. The backdoor remained locked and he broke a small glass pane with his fist. He picked away the glass, feeling through for the lock. Edging the door open, he went to his knees in the dark and crept through the entry.
In the kitchen the refrigerator door stood open, emitting a yellow droning light. Abatangelo could make out two shapes, one large, one small. He clicked on the overhead and withstood a surge of nausea. Bound and gagged with duct tape, a freckled, brown-haired woman he didn’t recognize and a cinnamon-skinned boy knelt lifeless, heaped together side by side. Each had gunshot wounds at the temple and the base of the neck. The woman’s wounds were black and pulpy; the boy’s were worse. On exit, one of the rounds had exploded, shattering his skull into a mangled knit of bloody hair and fissured bone and brain tissue.
Abatangelo lunged back through the entry and out the door, making it to the gravel before retching on his knees. Above him, the moon shone brief and clear through passing clouds. Dogs barked in the distance. He wiped his face with his hands, regained his feet and shambled back into the house.
The blood formed a common pool around the woman and boy. Ants caravanned from the wall to the bodies, scavenging through bone and hair. A coarse white powder, like cottonseed, glittered the bodies. Granules flecked their hair, their skin, their half-open eyes. Abatangelo moistened his finger and caught a taste from the bag crumpled at the dead woman’s side. It was acrid, chemical. Mix of some sort. They wanted it to look like a burn, whoever they were.
Looking elsewhere around the room he noticed a pair of shoes, the ones Shel had been wearing, beneath the breakfast nook table.
He pushed at the swinging door, made the hall and checked the rest of the house. He found a bedroom he thought might be hers: Wadded Kleenex dotted the floor; a pyramid of shoes in the closet. There was no recent sign of her.
In another bedroom he found a third body, this one a man. He moved closer, the bolt of sickness rising again. He wondered for a moment if it was Frank, then realized the man was too old. Overweight, graying hair, facedown on bloody sheets. Blood had congealed at his ears and nostrils. Blood spattered the wall behind. He’d probably been sleeping, Abatangelo thought, one shot to the small of the back, the other to the head. Wakened by one, killed by the other. There was mix scattered here, too, another discarded bag, flung against the man’s back.
A suit jacket lay flung in the corner. Abatangelo searched the pockets and found a wallet containing business cards: Roger C. Quenelle, Vice President, Acquisitions, Founders Financial. He had snapshots of two glaringly dissimilar teenage daughters and a wife whose face shot out like a sunflower from the ruffled neck of her blouse.
In the living room, a breeze rustled the bedsheet curtain, filling the house with cold air smelling of rain and manure and acacia blossom. On his way back through the kitchen Abatangelo spotted the cellar door ajar. The light was on.
He took the gun from his pocket and crabbed down the plank stair, back to the wall. A mindless debris cluttered the floor: faded clothes, twine, crumpled newspaper. Nothing was smashed or destroyed, there were no obvious signs of struggle, more like a search. He called Shel’s name, sifting through the litter. Moonlight through the window well angled across the far wall. Spotting the crawl space ledge, he edged toward it. As his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he detected, far back against the wall, a small felt box.
He tucked the gun in his waistband, pushed off from the floor, folded his body into the opening and crawled back across the concrete toward the wall. He recognized the box. The amethyst was gone. She’d crawled back here, he thought, trying to hide.
He checked the immediate vicinity for something else, a scrap of clothing, a blood smear, anything. He found only an empty prescription bottle and several mismatched capsules gluey to the touch; someone had spat them out instead of swallowing them. He gathered up the capsules, capped them inside the prescription bottle, pocketed it and the jewel box then crawled back to the cellar floor and returned to the kitchen upstairs, searching for the phone.