The Skeleton's Knee (42 page)

He stared at me for a moment, the smile fading from his face. “Are you putting me on?”

“No—I’m quite serious, and I’m running out of time.”

Something in my voice or expression must have done the trick, because he bent down to the bag at his feet and came out with a monstrous telephoto lens that he quickly snapped onto one of the camera bodies around his neck. He then slipped it off and handed it to me. “It’s the biggest one I’ve got. You’re not going anywhere with it, are you?”

“Only along the edge here. Stay with me. If I spot the person I’m after, I’ll pass you the camera and get out of your hair.”

He nodded and stepped back slightly to give me more room.

I hefted the camera up to eye level and began scanning the faces of the crowd on the bank opposite me. Beyond them, across a distant, overgrown field, I could see the dimly lit top of the barn where I’d parked my truck.

It was an impressive lens—high-quality, one thousand millimeters, very clear. Even in this light, it functioned well, allowing me a distinct close-up view of even the most distant faces. As I moved from one person to the next, carefully sweeping from left to right, I began to feel more optimistic. Given enough time and enough light, finding Susan Pendergast again became a possibility—assuming she was here at all.

Of course, hers wasn’t the only face I was seeking, and I knew that if Shattuck was also searching for her, he, too, would be on high ground, studying the crowd. I had therefore begun my sweep with the people on the crest of the amphitheater.

That, as it turned out, was a piece of incredible luck, not for what I saw on that crest but in the distance behind it. Over the shoulder of one of the spectators I’d focused on, in the field separating the distant road from where we stood, I caught the blur of something bobbing up and down.

I refocused the lens. The bobbing turned into a man, his back to me, running toward the barn, a telltale ponytail swinging from side to side.

“Shit,” I muttered, and handed the camera back to its owner.

“You found him?”

I didn’t pause to answer. I was sprinting off as fast as I could, a good quarter mile behind.

I hadn’t seen Susan, but the absolute certainty that Shattuck had beaten me to her was utterly clear to me. The quiet, almost unnoticed death of a backwoods hermit with a false name and a secret stash of money had led me here with fate’s inexorable momentum. I had stood by in ignorance while Kevin Shilly had been cruelly murdered. Was I again too late to stop the murder of the one person left I had the power to save?

I discovered a narrow trail that cut through the field and the line of trees that bordered the road, making my progress better than I’d expected. Nevertheless, when I reached the road, it was empty.

I crossed the road to my truck, listening, my gun now in my hand, hoping for some sign to tell me where Shattuck had gone. Instinctively, as if drawn by its magnetic mass, my eyes went to the huge dark barn and to the museum door I’d pushed open earlier to look inside: I had closed that door behind me. It now stood open.

I went up the steps silently, pausing just outside, my back against the wall, trying to remember the layout I’d only just glimpsed before. Directly opposite the door was a broad set of stairs leading up to the museum; to the left was a gift-shop area, with bins full of prints, metal postcard racks, and various T-shirt displays. Beyond that had been three other doorways too dark to see into. To the right of the entrance was either a wall or another door—I couldn’t remember.

I took a deep breath, gripped my gun with both hands, and swung inside, pivoting on my heel so that I ended up crouching at the foot of the stairs, my back against the wall, facing both the upstairs and the darkened gift-shop area. Almost immediately, I heard the single soft scrape of a foot somewhere above me.

I moved up the stairs slowly, my attention focused ahead, but also aware of any movement from beyond the gift shop. The wood beneath me was ancient, worn, and scarred, but solid and utterly silent, all the creaks and groans long ago beaten out of it.

The steps led up through the floor above, so that I had to crouch just below floor level and stick my head up quickly for a fast survey. What I saw was the source of dreams and nightmares—a huge, looming dark cavern of a room, columned and laced overhead by giant wooden support posts and beams—a classic monument of timber-frame construction, with bracing and counter-bracing made of massive hand-adzed, tree-sized poles, linked in countless mortise and tenon joints. It was a structure of cathedral-like complexity, and all of it—the posts, the walls, the ceilings, and the two galleries lining the central aisle—was covered or populated with the
papier-mâché
manifestations of decades of whimsy-driven puppeteers. Masks of humans, clowns, animals, and demons hung everywhere; bodies made of sheets fell from enormous, pale, frozen-faced heads like stalactites; serried ranks of twelve-foot human forms, some with the faces of gargoyles, stood guard by the dozen; and everywhere, from every angle, row after tightly packed row of those large, dark, sightless eyes stared out at whatever passed before them.

Susan Pendergast, if she was here, had chosen well—this was a place of confusion and befuddlement, of hope for the pursued and despair for the pursuer, where stillness and silence reigned, where movement meant revelation and death.

And yet move I had to if I was to finally thwart one man’s twenty-four years of rage and save the life of a woman who’d made living an act of survival.

The two parallel floor-level galleries I’d noticed during my quick inspection were each separated from the central aisle by continuous three-foot-high wooden barricades, also festooned with decorative baubles, masks, and designs. Both galleries contained a variety of three-dimensional set pieces—frozen, puppet-peopled scenes of diners at table, animals at play, or simply a crowd of people gathered as in an audience. They were dense and layered and offered a protective maze of cover, assuming I could reach them.

I figured Shattuck knew I was here and that he was watching where I was hiding as carefully as he was searching for Susan. To try stealth to reach cover, therefore, was obvious folly. Dark as it was—and it was difficult seeing even the nearest wall in any detail—I would still be visible to anyone watching. An explosive entry, with a scramble to safety, seemed the only alternative. It also might destabilize Shattuck’s stalking of Susan enough to give her an advantage of some kind.

I firmly planted my feet on the steps, rocked forward slightly, and launched myself in a sprinter’s half-crouch toward the three-foot barricade of the nearest gallery. I sailed over it in a dive, tucking my head in to land in a somersault, and crashed into a trio of puppets sitting around a small linen-covered table. I landed in a tangled sprawl amid hollow oversized bodies, a cloud of dust, and fragments of broken wood. Spurred on by the fear of a bullet, I twisted onto all fours and crawled as swiftly and silently as possible away from my calamitous landing site.

There was no bullet, however, nor any sound whatsoever. Stealthily now, I repositioned myself farther up the gallery, under the billowing skirts of a lady twice my height in Colonial dress, still hearing no more than my own quiet breathing. I rose slowly up the center of the puppet, alongside the central wooden pole on which she hung, careful not to touch the fabric surrounding me. Moving in slow motion, I pulled out my Swiss Army pocketknife and, using the small scissors blade, meticulously and quietly cut a tiny window in front of my right eye.

Through this opening, I had a fairly broad view of both the gallery opposite and the barn’s central aisle, as far as the gloom allowed. The problem was, of course, that unless something moved out there, I was confronted with only an army of lifeless, empty, oversized shells.

I didn’t think Susan would give herself away; she had chosen this spot, and knew the value of stillness within it. Nor did I intend to move; I’d secured a near perfect observation post. The role of hunter was exclusively Shattuck’s—it was his field to explore and his choice to risk exposure.

Or so I thought.

Far to the left, near the staircase, I saw something move—slightly, with no more urgency that the sweep of a clock’s minute hand. I closed my eyes briefly to intensify their sensitivity to the dark. In the brief moment following their reopening, I saw the figure of a man in profile, shifting with the subtlety of a cloud’s shadow on the moon. He was tall, lean, darkly dressed, his hair close-cropped.

Someone else was here beside Susan, Shattuck, and me. Instinctively, I realized the Outfit had risen to the challenge I had thrown down in Chicago.

Now there were two hunters, one prey, and me.

Never before had I played in a lethal chess game of this kind, where all the players stood apart, unallied, and potentially at risk from one another. I would later recall what happened next only in super-compressed bits of memory—like a series of blurred snapshots taken so close together that the action of one bleeds into the next.

It began with the cellular phone in my pocket going off like an alarm clock. Reaching for my pocket but still frozen to my small observation hole, I saw Shattuck materialize from the gallery opposite me as if from nowhere—a puppet come lethally alive. His legs were slightly apart and braced, his body gently curved, both his arms straight out ahead of him in a perfect shooter’s stance, with his gun aimed straight at me. But the explosion, when it came, was from the left, and the accompanying white-hot muzzle flash revealed the shooter standing as a mirror image of Shattuck, his gun pointing at the first thing he’d seen appear, unintentionally saving my life. Behind him, just over his shoulder, I also saw Susan’s startled white face among the masks on the wall near the stairs.

There was another blinding eruption, from Shattuck’s skewed gun, triggered by the effect of the mobster’s bullet passing through his head. In a second frozen image, I saw him twisted in midair, his eyes wide, his mouth open in surprise, the side of his head ill-defined and blurry, etched in crimson.

The two shots were a split second apart, and my reaction—stimulated by the knowledge that Shattuck had caught the first bullet only because he’d moved first, and that I was next in line—followed almost as fast. Realizing I couldn’t fire my own pistol without the possibility of hitting Susan, I grabbed the center pole beside me, lifted the puppet off the hook on which it was hanging, and running forward, tilted the whole thing like a knight’s lance toward the shooter and threw it.

Now clear of the puppet’s skirts, I saw Shattuck’s killer diving to one side to avoid my missile, just as Susan dropped from the railing around the stairwell to the floor below. I was suddenly faced with a choice: to apprehend a fugitive I’d been after for days or to try to stop a contract killer who would next be gunning for me. After the smallest of hesitations, I chose Susan.

My choice was not as irrational as it first appeared. We were both after Susan Pendergast. If I could keep up with her, the man behind me was sure to follow, giving me, if I was lucky, another chance to deal with him.

Susan had cut right at the bottom of the stairs, into the gloom of the nearest of the three doorways beyond the gift-shop area. I followed, throwing the still-chirping phone to one side as I went, and blundered into her in the middle of a long, almost totally blackened hallway. She shied away from me, lashing out ineffectually with her fists.

“It’s me—Joe Gunther. Goddamn it—cut it out.”

She stopped at hearing my name, and I quickly grabbed her elbow and continued down the passage, which I could barely see was lined by crowds of puppets arranged like those upstairs. These, however, were all human-sized or smaller, since the ceiling was almost perilously low.

“Is there another way out?” I whispered.

I felt Susan shaking her head beside me. “I don’t know.”

We reached the end of the hallway and found a connector passage linking the three parallel galleries that fed into the gift shop. I propelled her into the middle passage and stopped, weighing our slim options, wondering when help would arrive.

Susan tried to shake free of my grasp.

“Stay put,” I growled at her quietly.

“Why? I’m screwed either way.”

“You are if he finds us. Why did you deposit the hundred thousand dollars in the hearse driver’s bank?”

The question startled her, more because of where it was being asked than because of its substance. But it was a question I needed answered—to know, just for myself, the nature of the woman beside me and the extent of her guilt. I was forming a plan, but it risked allowing Billie to escape. I wasn’t going to let that happen if I couldn’t live with the consequences.

“Jesus Christ—I shot the man. It’s the only good use that stupid money’s been put to.” She seemed to understand the debate going on in my head. I felt her hand grip my upper arm in an earnest plea. “I knew if you found me, Shattuck would, too. Destroying David’s skeleton seemed the only way.”

“You killed David, didn’t you?”

She was silent for a moment. I knew that, ironically, the two of us held a momentary advantage over our stalker, who by now was reconnoitering the layout of the gift-shop area. Upstairs, there’d been one way in and out. Here, there were three. As soon as he committed himself to one of the passageways, the other two would be left open as escape routes. He was not going to move precipitously.

“To save Sean’s life,” she finally murmured, her voice seemingly sapped of energy. Despite the crimes she may have committed, I had never overlooked Gail’s high opinion of her or my own first impression when we’d met days ago. Her politics and mine might not have agreed, but her commitment to the welfare of others—including the driver she’d inadvertently wounded—spoke well of her.

But I was to get no more. The luxury of time that our predator’s caution had allowed us vanished with the loud squealing of wood scraping against wood.

Susan stiffened next to me.

“He’s blocking two of the three doors at the other end,” I said. “I expected that.”