Stunned, Caitlin wavered, then fell to her knees, trying to draw breath.
“Don’t fight it,” Harold said. “I don’t want to have to shoot you again.”
From pure instinct, she raised her pistol and fired five rounds at the shadow in the opening. The blasts of her pistol deafened and blinded her, but they must have driven her guide away from the tree, because a few moments later, her traumatized retinas again perceived the blue-gray light of the crack. Every instinct told her to lie down and try to catch her breath, but what remained of her reason argued that doing so would mean death.
Flattening her left hand on the cool floor, she struggled unsteadily to her feet, even as someone turned a giant screw at the center of her chest, driving it into her heart. She nearly collapsed twice, but somehow she managed to stay erect.
Her plan was to stagger through the crack with her pistol in front of her, then take the boy’s boat by force. She told her right foot to take the first step, but more primitive fibers than her cerebral cortex now had control of her brain. After two labored breaths, she backpedaled until she collided with the wall of the Bone Tree, then sat down hard.
For half a minute, she could do no more than force breath into her lungs. The stink of burnt gunpowder in the closed space sickened her. She laid the flashlight beside her. Then, shifting the pistol to her left hand, she raised her right and slipped her fingers inside her jacket.
“Oh, God,” she gurgled, feeling warm fluid soaking her top. Then she felt the small, ridged hole a couple of inches below her left nipple. My heart is under that, she thought. I’m dead.
“Hey, lady,” said a soft voice. Harold’s voice. “Can you still talk?”
Caitlin squinted at the crack of light, searching for a target, but she saw nothing. She still wasn’t sure what had happened. Had Harold shot her? Or had someone standing behind him shot them both? Or had they shot her and knifed him?
“What happened?” she croaked.
“I know you’ve got more bullets. That Springfield holds ten.”
Caitlin didn’t want to believe that the boy had shot her. If he had, then she had no hope of getting out of here alive.
“What happened?” she asked. “Is somebody else out there?”
“No. And you owe me for that. Captain Ozan told me to call him when I got you out here, but I didn’t. And I ain’t gonna. I got a walkie-talkie right here, and I ain’t even turned it on. You’re a nice lady. You don’t need to go through that.”
A wracking sob burst from Caitlin’s throat. “You shot me?”
“I had to. But it’s way better than what could have happened, believe me. Pretty thing like you . . . they’d rape you for sure. All day long, front and back. Even shot like you are now. They don’t care. That Ozan, and Colonel Forrest, man . . . they’re sick.”
Gasping for breath, Caitlin tried to understand why a black man would be working for the likes of the Knox family.
“Look up to the left of those wired-up bones,” Harold said. “Shine my flashlight. You see what’s up there?”
Caitlin didn’t try to lift the light. But in a shaft thrown from the door, she saw a woman’s leather coat hanging on a nail, brown and tattered where the waist hem should have been.
“That ain’t what you think it is,” Harold said. “That’s a skin. That lady wasn’t much older than you, either. Mexican lady. She got in the wrong car one night. Po-lice car. Now there she is.”
Caitlin struggled to hold down the few bites of cheeseburger she’d eaten at the Crossroads Café. She thought of Terry Foreman waiting there, her bright cheerleader’s face lined with worry.
“Will you help me?” she asked, trying not to sound pathetic. “I’ll pay anything you ask. A hundred thousand dollars. Two hundred.”
“You shoulda said something sooner. It’s too late now.”
Caitlin thought of her father, sitting in his office in the glass tower high above Charlotte. “My father will pay you a million dollars if you take me to a hospital, Harold. A million dollars. No questions asked. I mean it. He doesn’t care about any of this crap. Not the bones . . . nothing. Only me.”
Caitlin realized she was crying.
“Shit,” Harold muttered from outside the fissure. “After what I done just now, your daddy would stake me to the ground and back his car over me.”
“He wouldn’t!”
“This ain’t what I wanted,” said the boy. “My brother’s stuck in Angola. Twenty-year sentence. Now that I done this, Colonel Forrest will get him out. Next month, when his parole hearing comes up.”
Caitlin finally understood what had happened. Harold Wallis was probably a low-level drug dealer. He’d recognized her the moment he saw her standing outside the service station with Terry, and he’d called someone in the Knox organization. Probably Captain Ozan. Ozan had made him a proposition, or given him an order, and he’d strolled into the café to make his pitch. And she’d been so gullible! She’d brushed Terry’s doubts aside like the fears of a nervous child. After all, wasn’t she on a crusade for justice? Justice for murdered black activists? Surely a young black man would be on the side of the angels.
Caitlin cursed as the pain in her chest intensified. She’d made an assumption based on race—exactly what she’d always told others not to do—and it had proved her undoing. The irony was that she’d made a positive assumption, and thus hadn’t seen it as an assumption at all.
“You won’t get away with this!” she screamed. Every word caused her agony, but she kept shouting. “Terry saw you at the café! She saw your driver’s license. They have security cameras back there! The FBI will find you, no matter where you go!”
“Lady, you got no idea how things work down here. Colonel Forrest can make them tapes disappear. He can make that Terry disappear if he wants to. She’s liable to be in a car with Captain Ozan right now, thinking he’s trying to save you.”