A ledge of stone overhung the opening between the vestibule and the next cavern. She hesitated beneath it, right arm close to her side, the pistol pointed forward, and again raised her fingers from the lens. The light speared out at full strength, and she swept the room ahead. There was no immediate threat, no irregularities in the walls where a man might press out of sight and wait for her to pass.
The only tricky spot would be the fissure that bisected the space and had to be crossed on a plank. She could not remember how wide or deep it was. In her ascent, at other bridges, she had been wary, afraid that he might be hidden in a shallow cleft, waiting to shatter her with a barrage from below when she set foot on the plank. As close as she was now to the surface, every crossing of this kind became more dangerous than the one before it.
She damped the beam again and came out from under the overhang. The motion and the act were one, so that she heard him only in the fraction of a second during which he dropped from the ledge and fell on her, driving her to the floor. No time to turn and shoot. The Heckler flung from her hand, spinning across the floor. Flashlight rolling away as well. The breath having been driven out of her, for a moment she could not resist, all of his weight atop her, and she felt herself as close to death as ever she had been.
He could have finished her then, but he relented and forced her onto her back, straddling her and pincering her with his knees, his left hand around her throat, gripping with such ferocity that she could not get a full breath to replenish what had been knocked from her in the fall. In the backwash from the flashlight, his face was a surreal work of light and shadow, so fiercely configured by hatred and rage that he looked little like himself, looked hardly human, as though during his ascent he’d shed layer after layer of identity, until nothing remained but a primordial self, uncivilized and unreasoning, a being of pure and darkest emotions.
When he spoke, the words came in a tortured shriek, exploding in a spray of spittle. “He’s mine, and he always will be. Is that right? IS THAT RIGHT? He’s mine, and he always will be? You think so? What do you think now, you vicious bitch? Am I yours? Will I always be? No! YOU ARE MINE NOW.” He quoted his mother to Jane as though Jane had spoken those words, and if he knew the difference between her and Anabel, it was a difference that didn’t matter to him. She clawed at his hand on her throat, tearing the skin. A darkness not of the room but within her faded the perimeter of her vision as Hendrickson picked up something with his right hand and raised it high. A large bone. A human femur. Taken from some room she had not seen. At the broken end, wicked splinters encircled the hollow core in which marrow had once produced blood within the living bone. He might have descended into such dementia that he was no longer able to operate a gun, or maybe he hadn’t taken more than a single spare magazine when he’d set out in pursuit of her. But as she gazed up at his diabolic face, into eyes radiant with decadent desire and bloodlust, she knew that he abandoned the gun because it wasn’t personal. He needed this to be a hands-on murder, to smell her terror and feel her quake beneath him, to know intimately the warmth and consistency of her blood. Her vision dimmed further.
If there was one image she could take with her on leaving this world, it must be the face of her child, her sweet Travis, the face of innocence in answer to this evil countenance. He drove the jagged femur at her eyes, and perhaps it was the thought of Travis that electrified her, that gave her strength even when she didn’t have breath. She heaved against his pinning weight and turned her head, and the bone stabbed stone, spalling off splinters that prickled across her face.
Hatred boiling for decades had resulted in blackest malignity, which was the source of his inhuman strength, but when the bone cracked into the floor with such force, the reverberations coursing up his right arm for a moment weakened him, and the femur slipped from his numbed fingers. He wanted her blind and disfigured and dead. When he saw her alive and unmarked, his rage became so great that he lost even his animal cunning. He let go of her throat with his left hand and pulled his arm back and made a fist, and in so doing ceased to pincer her thighs with his knees. She drew her right leg out from under him, knee to her chest, and as his fist hammered down, she thrust her foot hard at his balls, missed the target, but landed the blow solidly in his groin. The kick unbalanced him, and his punch found only air. She thrust up and shoved him, he fell away from her, and she scrambled to her feet.
Gasping for breath, she backed off, scanning the floor for her pistol. It was lost in shadows, or maybe it had spun across the stone and into the fissure.
Hendrickson clambered to his feet with his back to her, spewing a sewage of obscenities unlike anything she’d heard before, as if he had no language anymore except for words that were scurrilous and filthy, lacking the presence of mind even to make of them coherent invective. He turned and saw her and came after her, and there was nothing for her to do but snatch up the femur. Some of the wicked points had snapped off the broken end, but at the same time the bone had further shattered, exposing other points as sharp as stilettos. He rushed her, and Jane didn’t retreat or stand her ground, but instead thrust forward to meet him. Reckless in his wrath, he was surprised by her assault and failed to knock her arm aside as she drove the jagged end of the leg bone into his throat.
She stepped quickly backward, leaving the bone embedded, and though blood ran from the wound, there was no arterial spurting, as she had hoped there would be. He stood stunned and swaying, one hand on the femur, working his mouth but producing no obscenities. She thought that he must go to his knees, but instead, gagging noisily, he pulled the bone from his throat and held it by the shank. He took a step toward her with the weapon, towering like the indestructible avatar of some cruel god. His foot came down on the flashlight, and he kicked it out of his way, his grin a crescent of darkness and red teeth.
Like a roulette wheel, the spinning light gave her one last hope of a win, coming to a stop so that the beam revealed the Heckler. She picked up the pistol, turned with it in a two-hand grip, and shot Booth Hendrickson three times as, hand fisted around the ancient femur, he came at her with the glee of a man who’d been shorn of his soul and all restraints therewith. When he was down and dead on the floor, she shot him twice again.
20
Pastor Milo assures them he has great respect for the FBI, in spite of some doubts he expresses about recent directors. As he escorts Jergen and Dubose among his parishioners, he explains to his people that no one should take photos with their phones to post on the Internet, as this might compromise these fine agents in any future vital undercover work to which they might be assigned.
Of all those present, only four think they might have seen the Honda from time to time. But just one, a grizzled specimen named Norbert Gossage, says anything that intrigues Jergen and Dubose.
“It’s a peculiar shade of green for a Honda,” says Gossage, scratching his bearded neck, “which is why I remember it at all.”
Dubose gives Jergen a look that expresses his doubt about the value of a Harvard education. “Yes, sir, you’re right about that.”
“Honda isn’t a car people spend bucks to customize,” says Gossage, working a finger in his left ear. “So you notice a thing like that special paint job. I used to see this one here”—he takes the finger out of his ear and taps the photo on the smartphone, as though it would never occur to him that Jergen will now have to sterilize the screen—“down in the south valley, around where Route 3 divides. I used to work in those parts.”
“Saw it where, exactly?” Dubose asks.
“Nowhere exactly. It was always on the move when I saw it.”
“You have any idea who might have been driving it?”
“Some fella. I never got a clear look at him. Truth is, I stayed out of his way when I saw him comin’. I don’t think he was ever properly taught how to drive. Other thing is, it’s been years since last I saw it.”