The Big Finish (22 page)

“A building full of dope, not weed, some kind of trumpet flower. Potent shit, I hear.”

“Yeah,” Thorn said. “I heard the same.”

“We got it all on video.”

“What video?”

“A little spy camera video,” Cassandra said. “Their drug operation, pill-making assembly line. We had one copy, it was on a laptop Dobbins got hold of when they raided our camp, so they’ve seen it, know it would destroy them. They think Flynn escaped with a copy.”

“Did he?”

She was slinging her arms now like a swimmer on the blocks.

“There’s no copy,” she said. “But I convinced them there was.”

“You did what? Why?”

“To fucking stay alive. I’m their bargaining chip. Me for the video, if they can get word to Flynn, they’ll offer him the swap. I convinced them it would work. Buying time, that’s all, because they’re never going to let me go. But now you’re here, the game’s changed. That’s what they’re arguing about in there, Cruz wants to execute me right now, Dobbins wants to wait and see how you perform. If you draw Flynn out of hiding. Either way I’m done.”

She looked at the wall where the voices were heating up again.

“If Flynn’s alive, why hasn’t he called in the cops?”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Tell me.”

“He wouldn’t get the cops involved because of me. If they stormed this place, took down Dobbins, I’d be riding in the same paddy wagon. Next day Dobbins is out on bail. No one ever hears from me again. That’s what Flynn’s got to be thinking. He’s protecting me. If he’s alive.”

Thorn walked to the door.

“Did you kill Cruz’s daughter? Push her off a roof?”

“She fed you that story?”

“Did you?”

“Hell no. Carmen, her daughter, I knew her in vet school, took her on a couple of incursions. She was a rah-rah go-getter. Too much so. She went overboard, people started worrying. She wanted to set everything on fire, hurt people. She was nuts, like her little sister, only more so. Finally we had to kick her out, and of course, she goes squealing to her mother. Two of my friends got ten-year sentences because we hurt the bitch’s feelings.”

“Who killed her?”

“Nobody killed her. She got so dark and miserable when we rejected her, she took a flying leap. Her old lady can’t accept it, so she puts it on me. Mother’s just as batshit as the two daughters.”

Thorn absorbed that for a five count and said, “Okay, can you run, the shape you’re in?”

“I can outrun your ass.”

Thorn pulled the plastic card from his back pocket.

“Follow me.”

“You even know where you are? The layout of this place?”

“We’re about to find out.”

Once he had the door unlocked, he put his eye to the crack. Down the platform toward the short stairway where he thought the back exit might be, a man stood smoking, looking out at the big floor of noisy pigs. A guy with a silver flat-top who despite his age looked very much in shape.

Thorn motioned Cassandra over and she looked out.

“Burkhart,” she whispered.

“Then we use the center aisle.”

“It won’t work. Too visible.”

“Trust me,” Thorn said. “You go first.”

“That asshole, Burkhart, he groped me three times a day. Stood there smirking with his fingers inside me, working me over.”

Thorn lay a hand on her shoulder, felt her tense at his touch.

“When we get out of here, we find Flynn, then deal with Burkhart. Deal with all of them. Now stay in front of me. Don’t look back, don’t stop, move as fast as you can.”

“Usually I give orders, I don’t take them.”

“Once won’t kill you. Now go.”

Thorn opened the door wide and Cassandra didn’t hesitate. At a lope, she headed down the central stairs toward the floor of the barn.

Thorn held back, staying inside the room, door ajar. Burkhart spotted her and yelled for her to stop. A few seconds later he came sprinting down the platform and Thorn caught him midstride, kicked his legs from under him.

Burkhart pitched headlong, banged his face against the pebbled steel. Thorn slipped out the door, measured the distance, took a skip step, and drove his shoe into Burkhart’s temple. The man groaned and rolled onto his back and Thorn was about to deliver a second kick, one for Cassandra’s sake, when the door to the center room opened.

Not waiting to see who it was, he swung down the stairway, using the handrails as parallel bars, slinging himself over the six steps and hitting the concrete floor in stride.

At the first pen, he halted, searched for a latch, hearing the footsteps behind him rattling the metal stairway. He found the clasp, threw open the gate, stepped in the pen, and herded the excited pigs onto the main floor.

He skipped the next two pens to build up a lead, then flipped the latch on the next pen, waved his arms and clapped and sent another fifty pigs scrambling out to block the passageway. Two more pens, a hundred more pigs, then he was out the double doors and into the chilly sunlight, Cassandra about fifty yards ahead, running with a long graceful gait across a green field toward what appeared to be the main entrance road. Her stride as light-footed and smooth as a veteran marathoner, eating up the distance with an effortless glide.

Problem was, she should’ve headed for cover, the nearby woods, some outbuildings, anywhere to hide, but she was too far ahead and running too fast for Thorn to call to her. So he followed her track, sprinting to catch up.

Maybe she knew something Thorn didn’t, the shortest route to safety, maybe she’d made a careful appraisal of the farm’s layout when she’d been transported there. Thorn’s memory of his arrival had been washed clean by the drug, so as he ran, he gave her the benefit of the doubt, hoping she had a good reason to be leading them in that direction.

He was gaining on her, nearly close enough to get her attention, when a gleaming black four-wheeler roared past him. Burkhart driving. Bouncing over the rutted gravel drive, gunning up behind Cassandra, then slowing to follow in her wake, staying just a couple of feet behind. He revved the engine as a taunt, to break her, make her surrender. But she didn’t. She kept running without a hitch in her rhythm, her arms pumping evenly, legs stretching out.

After another twenty yards, Burkhart pulled alongside Cassandra. She didn’t look over and didn’t break stride, just kept that gliding pace, lost in the easy athletic flow of her body, as if perhaps escape was no longer foremost on her mind, but instead she simply wanted to bask in this moment of exertion, delight in the stretch and flex of muscles she’d obviously nurtured for years.

TWENTY-TWO

BURKHART YELLED AT HER TO
stop, but she didn’t respond. He yelled again.

Another four-wheeler rumbled up to Thorn’s right side and held its speed just beyond his side vision. He didn’t look back, didn’t slow, kept going for Cassandra’s sake, to interfere with Burkhart any way he could.

They’d run nearly a half mile by the time Thorn closed in, choking on the whorls of dust Burkhart’s four-wheeler was spinning up. Gasping, exhausted, he kicked it up another notch, gave it what he had left, pulled to Cassandra’s side, and together they continued to race out the main drive with their escort of ATVs on either side.

“The woods,” Thorn managed to call out. “Left, left.”

The look she gave him said she disagreed, but she veered beside him off the road and together they entered a pasture, the ground growing suddenly soft. Inches of glop were coating the earth, their feet sinking to their ankles.

“Shit,” Cassandra yelled.

Yes. Pig manure, a thick layer of it, the four-wheelers still beside them in the sloppy muck. Thorn took a quick glance at the ATV dogging him. X-88 at the wheel, Cruz beside him.

“Good luck, Thorn,” Cassandra called and swerved back the way they’d come, back to the hard-packed ground of the entrance road.

His lungs were aching, legs weak, but as he watched Burkhart closing in on Cassandra, raising a handgun, yelling for her to stop, Thorn found another dose of reserve.

He swung around and caught up to them at the entrance gate. There was a narrow asphalt road just beyond the entry, a public thoroughfare it seemed, but no traffic in sight in either direction, no houses across the way. Cassandra stood in front of Burkhart’s four-wheeler, arms at her sides, taking deep slow breaths but not heaving the way Thorn was.

“All I ask,” she said, “bury me in the same hole you buried my friends.”

“Tough broad,” Burkhart said. “But I would’ve broken you. Another day or two, you’d’ve been on your knees, worshipping my cock.”

“In your dreams, old man.”

Thorn was only a couple of yards behind Burkhart. Back in the field of pig shit, X-88 had gotten stuck, and the two of them were slogging across the pasture, Cruz yelling for Burkhart to hold on. Don’t shoot. Hollering it again as they trudged.

Thorn aimed a roundhouse right at the side of Burkhart’s head, at the swollen lump where he’d kicked him minutes before. But from the corner of his eye, Burkhart must’ve seen it coming and ducked away. Thorn’s second shot clipped his chin and knocked him sideways, and before Burkhart could recover, Thorn was on him, chopping the pistol loose with his right hand, then pivoting hard and slamming his forearm flat into Burkhart’s nose. The blood flooded out and Thorn hauled the man from his perch on the four-wheeler and slammed him to the ground.

He climbed into the driver’s seat and yelled for Cassandra to get aboard. But she was more interested in Burkhart. On his hands and knees, he was looking up at her with blood flowing from his nose, running into his mouth, and dripping down his chin.

“Leave him, goddamn it, let’s go.”

Cassandra stepped close to Burkhart and spit a wad of phlegm in his face. Then spit another.

She turned and climbed onto the seat beside Thorn.

“All right,” she said. “I’m good.”

Thorn gunned the vehicle out the last twenty yards of gravel and was turning left onto the asphalt that he believed led back to Pine Haven, where they might find some measure of safety, when he heard the first gunshot, then another. A slug dinged the metal roll bar and sparks showered them. He ducked and Cassandra ducked beside him, her head squeezed up against the primitive dashboard, her hands gripping the hard plastic rail. Two more gunshots, then they were on the asphalt and heading east, both of them still bent low.

“Stay down!” he yelled at her.

When it came, the black Ford pickup truck appeared so suddenly beside them Thorn had no chance to evade. A deep ditch on the right, the truck on his left. Webb Dobbins behind the wheel, Cruz and X bouncing in the bed.

Thorn kept the four-wheeler throttled all the way up, but there was no way to outrun the pickup, no side roads ahead, and Dobbins was edging into his lane, bumping his running board into the steel cage of the four-wheeler, leaving behind a trail of sparks.

Thorn leaned over to Cassandra.

“I’m going to stop. Look for your chance and drive on.”

“What?”

“Do it.”

Thorn brought the four-wheeler to a gradual stop, and Dobbins halted the pickup beside him. Raising his hands straight above his head, Thorn stepped out of the ATV and walked to the front of Webb Dobbins’s pickup. As X and Cruz were climbing from the bed, Cassandra hit the gas and the four-wheeler roared away.

“Get her!” Cruz shouted. “Go, go, go.”

But Thorn’s chest was pressed against the pickup’s grill, hands high. No way for Dobbins to maneuver. Maybe Thorn’s calculation was right, that he was more valuable to them than Cassandra, or maybe he was about to find out otherwise.

Cruz and X trotted around the truck, Cruz shouting at Dobbins to run Thorn down if he had to, Cassandra was getting away, the roar of the ATV fading in the distance.

X rounded the passenger side of the pickup. He approached Thorn casually, his left hand upraised as if testing the air for raindrops. Two red tablets lay in the center of his palm.

“Forget it,” Thorn said. “No way that’s going to happen.”

“Oh, but it is. It is.”

With the nonchalance of someone trying not to spook a wild beast, X eased toward him. Thorn held his ground in front of the truck, listening to the rumble of Cassandra’s ATV recede.

Then Dobbins gunned the engine, tapping and releasing the accelerator, pushing the revs higher and higher.

“Time for your medicine, Grandpa.”

When X stepped within range, Thorn chose an angle and threw a jab at X’s jaw, but he sidestepped the blow, caught Thorn’s wrist, and slung him backward against the grill of the Ford pickup, then shouldered him solidly in place, leaning on Thorn with his hard belly, heavy and hot, grabbing a handful of hair in his right hand, cranking Thorn’s head back at an unbearable angle.

X-88 mashed him against the hood, and though Thorn grappled for X’s arm and wriggled against the suffocating weight, X was stronger, far stronger, younger by decades, heavier by fifty pounds, a rubbery power and leverage that was impossible to budge.

There’d been a time not long ago, golden years when Thorn would have squirmed loose, or found some clever maneuver to break free. But not anymore, not against this younger man who seemed to absorb pain, even relish it. The man’s strength and weight were smothering him, crushing the air from his lungs.

Maybe he couldn’t break X’s grip, but Thorn could damn well keep his mouth shut. He pressed his lips tight, clamped his jaw.

A sly smile came to X’s lips as if he’d seen this move before and knew exactly how to defeat it. Thorn felt it coming and tried to block it with his thigh, but was late by a fraction.

The big man’s knee thudded into Thorn’s groin, and he gasped, and damn it, X timed his move perfectly and clapped his left hand over Thorn’s open lips, kept it there with what felt like a well-practiced hammer lock, and Thorn tasted the acrid burn of the tablets on his tongue, the tiny pellets melting fast, and in the next slow seconds as Thorn struggled against the rigid hold and tried to spit out the tablets, X-88’s face began a leisurely dissolve, and the daylight grew gray, then a darker gray and darker still, with X’s hand pressed over his mouth, and as Thorn sank again into that altered state, a dreamlike slide, not so bad, not painful, kind of pleasant actually, giving himself over to the will of others, directed, bossed, all independence gone, all accountability, and that X-ray vision, yes, strangely, unexpectedly, he’d enjoyed that part before, and he was thinking a last thought, how glad he was that Sugar hadn’t come along and fallen into this same shithole, just as a strobe light began to flash as if some giant windmill was whirling in front of a pink sun, and X’s round ignorant face melted like ice cream on a summer day, and right before everything blurred into unreality, Thorn made a leap of logic based on nothing more than the immense pressure of X-88’s headlock, Thorn’s mouth forced open and covered by X’s hand. He had the answer to Deputy Randolph’s question back in St. Augustine, the mysterious mechanics the killer used to jam ground beef into the black kid’s mouth and keep it there.