Bone Rattle by Marc Cameron (best ereader for pdf .TXT) 📕

“I don’t know,” Van Dyke said. “The big guy seems like a mystery to me. I mean, have you ever even seen him smile?”

“Not often,” she said. “But when he does, you know you’ve earned it.”

“He married?”

Lola gave a soft belly laugh. “When it comes to his personal life, that dude is Fort Knox and the NSA all rolled into an enigmatic ball. But tactically, you can always count on him to do the right thing, right now. He does have kind of a resting-killer face, but you have to work pretty hard to offend him personally. I’ll tell you what, though, he will flat pull the head right off of anybody who mistreats someone he thinks is the underdog.” Lola glanced up to make sure she had Van Dyke’s attention. “An underdog like, say, your sister-in-law.”

“That again?” Van Dyke waved her away. “I’m gonna have to call bullshit. In this scenario, my brother was the underdog. His son is the underdog. If anybody needs their head pulled off, it’s little Lori Lush.”

“You say so.” Lola shrugged. “But it seems to me she’s trying. How many people do you know who don’t even do—”

Lola held up a fist, signaling Van Dyke to freeze. A glint of metal caught her eye – and it could only be one thing.

Scuffs in the duff and moss had led her through the twilight forest to a large hemlock. The space on the uphill side of the tree looked different. Needles, twigs, and other debris had been moved around a great deal, piled up here and there to reveal fresh dirt underneath.

“Someone knelt here,” Lola said.

But it was the glint of metal that had caught her eye. Something shiny pressed into the dirt, almost hidden.

Fired brass.

Lola used her pen to pick it up and passed it back to Van Dyke when she found another.

“Rectangular primer strike,” the detective observed. “Glock.” She dumped the spent casing in her vest pocket and continued to watch the surrounding woods for threats.

“Cutter’s,” Lola said, searching the undergrowth, trying to suss out what had gone on here from the signs on the ground.

“I thought he carried that big revolver.”

“His grandpa’s,” Lola said, still searching the ground. “Technically, that’s his backup. Per policy he has to carry a Glock, but if he resorted to…” She dropped to her knees next to a wide stump a dozen feet to the right of the hemlock, seeing something out of place, wanting a closer look.

“So,” Van Dyke said. “They had a firefight here, but there are no bodies, so something happened to break off the fight.”

“Here we go,” Lola said, pushing aside some rotten wood at the base of the stump to reveal two spent .357 cases.

“This is what I was looking for.”

Cutter had reloaded here – maybe just topped off after a couple of shots, Lola couldn’t tell. She decided not to take the time to search for more brass.

The spent ammo lit a fire in Lola’s belly. Arliss Cutter was the most capable guy she’d ever worked for or with, but he was in trouble now. She could feel it in her gut. And if there’s one thing Cutter had instilled in her, it was to trust that niggling gut when it spoke to her.

The terrain steepened considerably. Rotten logs bigger around than her waist crisscrossed the forest floor. Blacks and greens and browns ruled the day, smudging back other colors. The skids and scuffs in the ground grew deeper, more widely spaced. Lola imagined Cutter and Lori running. But were they running from someone or after them? Cutter would have done some of his tracking voodoo and figured it out. The bastard. He made it look so easy.

The tracks suddenly cut left into a depression that Lola guessed was an old trail. The ground leveled some, running along an exposed granite face just taller than her head. It was easier going here and she had to remind herself not to run faster than she could read the ground.

Then the tracks stopped.

A slab of moss-covered earth had sluffed down the mountain on a slurry of mud and gravel fifteen feet across.

“What do you think?” Van Dyke asked, breathing heavily from the fast climb. “Landslide?”

“Yep,” Lola said.

But what had caused it? She skirted the loose gravel and rock, and found tracks on the other side, leading along the same overgrown trail.

“Let’s hurry,” Lola said, pointing up the mountain, urgency welling in her belly. “This slide looks fresh. Cutter’s close. I can feel it.”

Chapter 48

Under normal circumstances – above ground where people were meant to live – the tiny candle flame beside Donita Willets’s cot would have hardly been noticed. Down here, in the darkness of her underground prison, it was bright enough she could turn off her headlamp unless she was reading. The little flame served three purposes. It told her there was oxygen, chased the darkness away from her little nest, and kept her from sliding any further into insanity.

Pacing beside her cot, she checked her phone. The intense glow from the screen reflected off her face, which she knew was slightly scrunched from the helmet straps. She’d thought of taking it off, but the frequent clatter of rocks falling from the high ceiling made her decide to sleep in it.

She kept the phone on airplane mode to save battery, but switched that off for a few seconds. Maybe a miracle signal would somehow beam down through the portal at the far end of the huge man-made cavern and bounce around on the rocks until it found her.

There was nothing, of course, but living in a pit could make you think crazy stuff.

She switched back to airplane mode and consoled herself by swiping through some pics – Levi in his boat on a sunny day, looking happy; some old ones of her mom during the all-too-infrequent healthy times between rehab and falling off the wagon.

Sighing, she switched off the phone and set it gently under the rolled jacket she used as