Dylan had bought the truck because it was the same age as him, and something felt right about that. Having a vehicle under him that had grown up on the same track, with lots of secrets and stories to share. He’d put in a new radio, sound system, tires, shocks, and custom bed liner, and had waxed, polished, and rubbed until the finish looked showroom new and rain fled from the paint before it could even bead up. But he’d never done anything, not a damn thing, about the upholstery, and now there was a tear down the center of the passenger seat, leaving him to wonder what he could and should have done differently.
Kind of like what was bringing him back to the reservation now. He was glad he had the truck to think about during the drive, because it spared him too much further contemplation of what Ela and the Lost Boys were up to. She had been playing him the whole time, ever since they’d first met, in Providence. Had almost surely set him up as a suspect in the murder of that construction foreman.
Then why rescue me, clipping the baling wire with a cutter she just happened to bring along? Why drive all the way to Shavano Park to face my father and Caitlin?
Dylan slid through the woods, past waist-high concrete pillars marking the beginning of Comanche land, his dad’s Smith & Wesson nine-millimeter scratching at his skin. His iPhone was probably back in Ela’s root cellar, so he’d bought one of those cheap phones at a drugstore on his way up to the rez, just in case he needed it.
His route brought him back to White Eagle’s property, where he could finish checking out that shed, or maybe confront the old man about whatever he was really up to. He heard the flutter and then lapping sounds of the waterfall next to White Eagle’s home, and he clung to the cover of the trees the rest of the way. Dylan stopped there and pressed out a text, starting with, IT’S DYLAN, since his father wouldn’t recognize the throwaway phone’s number. He kept it short and sweet, his mind having cleared enough to realize he was in over his head here and needed his dad to dig him out.
No one was in sight when Dylan reached the edge of the clearing—no sign of Ela, White Eagle, or any of the Lost Boys. The door leading into the shed he’d inspected was open, blown by the wind against the frame, where it rattled on impact with the hasp. Walking out into the clearing under cover of night was one thing. Doing it now, with light streaming everywhere, presented an entirely different challenge.
His dad had warned him not to find a false sense of security in a gun, to never do anything with one in his possession that he wouldn’t do without one. But Dylan couldn’t help but feel emboldened by the steel of the nine-millimeter heating up against his skin. Like a flashlight cutting through the dark, its presence propelled him out into the clearing, where he clung as much as possible to the shadows that shook and trembled in cadence with the wind rustling through the trees that cast them.
He reached the shed and pressed himself against its back side, closest to the woods, safe from being seen by anyone who might be about. When no new sounds came to signal such a presence, Dylan sidestepped around the shed’s perimeter to the unlocked door. Peering inside through the crack between door and frame, he saw that the shed appeared to be unchanged from the previous night. Then the wind caught the door and widened the gap just enough to let a shaft of light pour past Dylan.
It illuminated the dark gravel floor. Only, a central square of it looked even darker.
The gravel had been shoveled aside, revealing a hatch that was now propped up to provide access to some secret underground chamber. Impossible to tell how long it had been here, though the scent of freshly dug earth suggested maybe not too long. Maybe.
Perhaps again reassured by the Smith & Wesson, Dylan slid all the way inside the shed, just before the door clanged against the hasp once more. The shaft of light had been reduced to a sliver, but it still was enough for him to see a ladder descending into the darkness, maybe going all the way down to Dante’s nine circles of hell, which he knew well from another of his classes at Brown.
Who said football players couldn’t be smart?
He’d played lacrosse in high school, too, after squandering years on youth soccer. Sports had always come easy to him, in large part because of a fearless nature on the playing field, which belied his modest size. He took after his mother in that respect, instead of his father. And it was that same nature that led Dylan to position himself in place over the ladder, grasping its top-mounted handles as he lowered his feet several rungs down. If he’d known for sure that the Lost Boys were down there, maybe he would have just closed the hatch and sealed it, trapping them, as apt payback for what they’d done to him the night before. Ela, though, could be down there too, and beyond that, Dylan reminded himself, there was a greater mission here: to get to the bottom of whatever was going on and why it had led her to use him the way she clearly had.
Dylan descended slowly and cautiously, careful to keep his boots from clacking against the wooden rungs. Whatever light he’d been using was pretty much gone at around what looked to be the halfway point. But shortly after that he glimpsed the naked spray of lantern light and thought he caught the faint smell of kerosene in the cooling air.