Tango Key (44 page)

"The windows weren't covered before," she whispered. "I think we should go around to the back and enter from the rear, if there's another door."

They slipped through the trees toward the right side of the house, their shoes whispering against pine needles. The brush and wildflowers were thick here; periwinkles and dandelions blanketed the ground. A trellis covered most of this side of the house, and ivy had claimed it, radiating across it in tentacles that exploded in occasional bursts of bright purple buds—passionflowers.

They paused at the corner of the house, where the passionflower vine had curved around to cover most of the back, embedding itself in the old wood. There were windows here. Kincaid checked to make sure the one closest to them was covered; it was. They moved on at a crouch and reached the second window. It wasn't covered. They stooped and waddled past it and reached the door. The screen door stood partially ajar, sagging heavily on only one hinge, so its lower edge would scrape against the ground when opened all the way. The heavy wooden door behind it was closed.

Aline pulled up on the screen door to prevent it from scraping and then brought it toward herself as Kincaid slipped around it. He pressed his ear to the wood, listening. His bare hand closed over the knob. Turned it. Aline held her breath, certain that in the next second, or the next, the door would fly open, pulling Kincaid with it, and there Murphy would be, a saw raised above his head, his grin madder than a hatter's.

Kincaid listened again. Then he pressed the sole of his shoe against the door. It flew inward, slamming against the wall, and he leaped into the room with astonishing agility, poised in the classical police firing stance, the barrel of his .357 slicing through the air from one end of the room to the other.

"It's clear," he said softly, and she stepped in behind him.

It took her eyes a moment to adjust to the dark inside, and when they did, the first thing she saw was the checkered cloth on the table and the bouquet of periwinkles in a plastic cup in the center of it. Then she saw the huge pot on one of the burners, the bottles of water along the back of the counter, three lanterns, the dish rack. She opened the cabinets above the sink: cans, packages of food, paper plates, pots and pans. And on the floor to her right, a cooler in which perishables and chips of ice floated like little ships. The floor had been swept. Under the sink there were things like Clorox and Comet.

Someone was living here, but there was something chillingly pathetic about the obvious attempts at order, at neatness, in a place that needed far more to even approach being habitable.

"Allie, look at this." Kincaid tugged on a pair of handcuffs attached to the arm of the wooden chair at the far end of the table. They rattled. The sight of them stirred the memory of Murphy and Eve in the clearing, of his hand dark against the white of her buttocks.

Kincaid turned, shining his flashlight into the adjoining room. The furniture was the same old stuff that had been here earlier, but blankets covered the windows. The bags of supplies that Murphy and Eve had carried in here that night were nowhere in sight.

They moved silently from the living room to the hall, pausing in the bathroom doorway. Kincaid's flashlight slid from a maroon mat on the floor, a matching maroon towel draped on the rack, to things on the back of the toilet: a hairbrush and comb, toothbrush and toothpaste, a man's shaving case, soap.

Aline and Kincaid exchanged a glance, but he didn't say anything. He touched her arm and nodded toward the hall.

In the back bedroom, the mattress on the platform now had sheets on it, a blanket, two pillows. A square wooden table at the head of the platform had a lantern on it and several paperbacks. She glanced at the titles quickly, frowning at one, knowing there was something important about it, but she didn't know what it was. A chair stood near the window, a strand of rope tied to the left armrest and another strand tied to the right front leg.

They went into the smaller bedroom. The bureau she and Kincaid had searched the night they'd spied on Murphy and Eve had been moved in front of the closet door. Aline checked the drawers; nothing had been removed.

Kincaid leaned into the bureau and shoved it away from the door. Blankets had been pressed against the crack at the bottom. Aline whipped them up, turned the knob, but it didn't give. She peered through the old-fashioned keyhole, but it was too dark to see anything. "Will your bobby-pin trick work on this?" Kincaid asked.

"A penknife would work better."

He brought out a Swiss Army knife and she tried four of the attachments before one worked. The lock gave with a reluctant click and the door swung open. A fetid stink rolled out—of urine, heat, sweat. A blanket was bunched on the floor, and next to it was a bare pillow. At the far end of the closet was an empty plastic water jug, and the wood around it was damp. Above, on the shelf, were the supplies Murphy and Eve had left here, but the bag that had contained the jugs of water was torn open.

"What do you make of this?" She whispered it because she couldn't bring herself to speak any louder. This place frightened her bone-deep, and it wasn't just the closet and its smell, the bunched-up blanket, the handcuffs and bits of rope, the strange attempts to make the place livable. It was the imperceptible things—the residue of violence that she sensed, the glutinous feel of the air. It was as if unspeakable things had occurred here and had forever poisoned the place like fallout.

"I don't know. It looks like someone was sleeping in here, but why? And why would the bureau be against the door? Why was the door locked? If the point was to keep people out of the closet, then it seems there should be something valuable in here, wouldn't you say?"

"But what? We have the frog."

"I don't know what." They removed the bags from the shelf, carried them out into the room, and started going through them. When they yielded nothing, they returned to the closet and checked the rest of the shelf. Kincaid was so tall that all he had to do was roll onto the balls of his feet to see over the edge of the shelf. He sidled the entire length of the shelf, probably six feet or more. "Nothing. Not a goddamn thing." He set the flashlight on the floor, aimed at the ceiling. The light oozed down the sides of the closet, offering more illumination. He rapped his knuckles several times against the wall.

"What're you doing?"

"Following a hunch."

"About what?"

"I don't know. I've just got a weird feeling in my gut."

She knelt behind him and began knocking her own knuckles against the wall and after a few minutes said, "Kincaid, listen." She rapped the wall about four feet up from the floor. Hollow, definitely hollow. Kincaid scooped up the flashlight and shone it on the area she'd tapped. A vertical ridge defined it, and when Kincaid pressed his hand against it, the thing slid open.

He poked his head through the opening. "There's a manhole cover in the floor. Lemme get it open." He leaned over, working at it while she held the flashlight above his head. A moment later it popped open, revealing a wooden ladder that descended too far for the light to reach.

"It's Pleskin's bomb shelter, Kincaid, that's what this is. Jesus, we found Pleskin's bomb shelter."

"And I'm betting someone else did, too." He climbed through the opening, then helped her through. He started down the ladder as she knelt at the circular opening in the floor, then she passed him the flashlight. She watched the orb of light growing dimmer, smaller, as the darkness around her got tighter and deeper.

"It must be forty feet down, Al." His voice echoed eerily. She had a sudden visage of the flashlight suddenly blinking out and the ubiquitous darkness claiming them completely. Kincaid's grasp on the ladder would slip. He would fall. He would tumble through the seemingly bottomless blackness and finally strike the floor of the nightmare, the feverish underside of old man Pleskin's paranoia.

"Kincaid? Keep talking to me," she called.

"I'm almost down. When I reach bottom, I'll shine the light up so you can see."

She counted the seconds. Five . . . six . . . eight, then: "Kincaid?"

In response, the light climbed up the ladder, and she started down. She felt like Persephone, descending into Pluto's underworld, into the depths of old man Pleskin's mind. The air got cooler but mustier. Sweat sprang across the palms of her hands, her back. Once, she glanced back and down and saw Kincaid at the foot of the ladder, motioning with his fingers.
C 'mon, c 'mon.
Why didn't he say something? She wanted to hear the sound of his voice. But when she reached the bottom of the ladder and he swung the flashlight through the room, she understood his silence. She gasped.

The room, which was almost as large as the house itself, looked as though a lunatic had torn through it. A glass vase was in shards on the floor, matchbooks scattered around it.

Several of the cartons had been ripped open, their contents strewn around the coffee table. A Japanese fabric screen to the left that had set the toilet and sink off from the rest of the room had toppled into the end of the couch. The center of it had been shredded by whatever or whoever had fallen through it. To the right, near the kitchen area, cans and boxes had been swept off shelves and littered the floor. A drawer of utensils had been overturned. Puddles of water glistened around the half-dozen or more plastic jugs on the floor. It wasn't until they moved closer and the beam of the flashlight fixed on one of the jugs that she realized it had been stabbed repeatedly, stabbed with such savagery that the tip of the knife beside it had chipped off.

"Goddamn," Kincaid whispered. "They're all either chipped or bent back." He picked up another jug; it looked like it had gone through a shredder machine.

Aline stepped back and nearly slipped in a puddle of peaches. The dread that had been coiled inside her ever since she'd started down the ladder suddenly sprang loose. She shuddered, rubbed her hands over her arms. "Kincaid, I think we'd better get out of here. Whoever did this might be back."

But he wasn't listening to her. He was crouched at the open cabinet doors under the sink, shining the flashlight on something. Now he poked his head inside. "Allie, c'mere. Take a look at this."

He pointed. He had found another opening. The only thing she could see was a wall on the other side. "No way," she whispered. "No goddamn way am I going in there."

"Then stay here and I'll go."

The idea of staying in this room by herself was not particularly appealing either. And she sure as hell didn't want to climb that ladder again and emerge alone in that filthy, terrible closet.

"We'll just check it out quick and then head back to the barn." Kincaid passed her the flashlight, pulled in his shoulders, and nosed through the opening.

July 6, 8:22 P.M.

"N
o touch," Eve hisses at the things in the dark that rub up against her. "No touch no touch."

She inches forward through the dark on her knees, her belly, her knees again, clutching the meat cleaver, blinking back tears. Her nose drips. Saliva oozes through her broken teeth. She lost one of her candles when she stumbled a while ago and pinwheeled her arms to keep her balance. The candle flew off somewhere into the dark behind her. When she reached into the waistband of her jeans for the second candle, it had broken into pieces, and the piece with the wick on it was gone. She doesn't know what happened to the matchbooks she had. But the one in her shirt pocket has just several matches left. She hasn't counted them; she's afraid to. She will light a match only when she absolutely has to, when the dark begins to lick at her, when the things rub up against her. She doesn't know what these things are because she can never see them. They scurry away from the light.

She's crawling now. Her fingers slide through a puddle of water. She feels the thing sliding over the back of her hand. Whimpering, she slams her hand against the tunnel wall, smashing it, and giggles. "There, you thupid bug, you thupid thupid bug."

She wipes her hand against her jeans and gropes in her pocket for the matches. Light. She needs light. She strikes the match but forgets to close the cover and the matchbook bursts into flames, and it startles her so badly she flings it away from her. It burns brightly just beyond the puddle, casting a pumpkin light over the walls, against the low ceiling. "Nonono," she whispers, shaking her head as the matchbook hisses and spits. She lunges for it, grabs it, hoping there's at least one match that didn't catch, one little ole match, that's all, just one. She shakes it, trying to put out the flame. The smell of the burning cardboard stinks up the tunnel. The plumes of smoke make her eyes tear, and then the flame is out and she pats the hot remains.

Gone, all gone. All the matches are gone. She hurls the spent matchbook away from her and frantically searches her pockets for another matchbook, maybe one she missed when she looked earlier. There has to be one. Please, please let me find one.

And she does. It's in the back pocket of her jeans. It's soggy from all the puddles she has sat in, but she brings it out, tears off a match, and is careful to close the cover before striking it. Nothing happens. She strikes it again, again. It crumbles in her hand. "Bad. Bad match." She crumples the book in her hand, drops it, presses the edge of the meat cleaver against it, and moves the blade back and forth, back and forth, sawing the matchbook to bits. She grins as the blade scrapes the concrete. She is going to saw the bad matchbook into the concrete so it will never be bad again. She'll show it who's boss.