C Box - Below Zero

“An upside-down car. I can see the tires. It’s got to be them.”

Then she heard something else. Either a rock dislodging or a car door slamming.

She breathed deeply and closed her eyes. If she lay still, maybe they wouldn’t see her against the tree. Or, like Robert, they’d think she was dead.

“D’you see anybody?” Chase asked, his voice low but bolder, as if he was starting to believe there were no survivors.

“Nobody I can see.”

“I hope Robert isn’t dead,” Chase said, “because I want to kill him.”

Corey laughed harshly. He was very close. She cracked an eye and saw him as he pushed into the clearing through a pine bough on the other side of the car.

“Jesus,” he said. “How many times did it roll over to get all the way down here?”

“Not enough,” Chase said. “Are Robert and Stenko in there? Is our money in there?”

She knew they wouldn’t let her live if they found her. She just hoped they’d just kill her and nothing else.

She thought of her sisters and how much she’d like to see them again. How she never would. She wished Stenko would come back. Even Robert. No, not Robert.

“The car’s empty!” Corey hissed. She couldn’t see him and she assumed he’d dropped to all fours on the other side of the vehicle to look inside.

“You’re kidding!” Chase said, emerging from the trees on the right side. He had a gun in his hand.

“No, man, I’m not kidding. There’s no Stenko, no Robert, no money. Even that girl is gone. Where in the hell did they go? How in the hell did they get out?”

“Shit,” Chase barked. “This is why I hate seat belts.”

Corey stood up and she could feel his eyes lock with hers. He raised his hand and pointed. “There’s the girl.”

“What?”

“I see that girl. She’s over against that big tree.”

“Where?”

Corey shook his finger at her. “There.”

She’d never felt more helpless.

“I bet she knows where those bastards went,” Chase said, walking around the car toward her. His face was expressionless, his eyes dark coals. The lack of feeling or emotion on his face scared her more than if he’d been snarling, because he approached her as if he had a routine job to do and wanted to finish it so he could go on to the next task.

When he was ten feet away he raised his pistol and she could see the black O of the muzzle.

“Where’d they go, bitch?” Chase said. Corey walked up behind him. It was obvious by the way Corey looked at her expectantly that he had no intention of stopping what was about to happen. Especially if she didn’t talk.

She moaned and felt hot tears cut through the grime on her cheeks.

And suddenly there was a red fist-sized hole in Chase’s chest accompanied by a massive BOOM that seemed to shake the earth. Blood, bone, and tissue spattered the grass. Chase’s eyes rolled up in his head and he dropped straight down as if he were a mountain climber whose rope had been severed.

Corey cursed and wheeled around, fumbling at the back of his pants for a pistol grip.

“Freeze and put your hands up where I can see ’em!” a man shouted as he came out from under the branches of a tree in a crouch. He had a rifle or a shotgun-a shotgun-and he wore a red shirt and a gray cowboy hat. There was a badge on his breast that caught a glint from the sun.

Corey stiffened and slowly released his hold on his gun behind his back. He said, “Okay, okay, you don’t have to shoot.”

The man with the hat and badge stood up and walked stiff-legged toward Corey, aiming at him down the barrel of his shotgun as he closed the distance between them. His face was white, and he looked determined. His eyes were hard, but there was something pleasant and a little sad about his face.

“Get down on the ground on your belly,” he said to Corey, “hands on the top of your head, fingers laced.”

“My brother,” Corey said, his voice a plaintive cry, “you killed my brother.”

“Wasn’t me,” the man said. “Now get down like I told you.”

At the same time a blond man appeared from the trees holding a giant silver revolver with both hands. He was bigger than the man with the shotgun.

Corey dropped to his knees, then flopped forward with his hands on his head. The man in the hat was quickly on top of him, flinging Corey’s gun into the brush and yanking on one wrist at a time to snap on handcuffs.

Only when he was done and he was sure Corey Talich had no more weapons on him did he pause and look up at her.

She managed to say, “Thank you.” Her voice was a croak.

The expression on his face was anguished. He said, “Who are you? Where’s April?”

The blond man with the ponytail slowly shook his head.

The heavy beat of helicopter rotors coming over the mountain drowned out any more questions.

Rapid City, South Dakota

MARYBETH WAS THE ONLY ONE ALLOWED BY THE HOSPITAL staff to go see the girl who had been admitted that afternoon under the name of Janie Doe. A nurse told Joe that unknown female patients under the age of eighteen received that moniker at Rapid City Regional Hospital.

He sat with Sheridan and Lucy in the reception room. Not until he realized he’d read the front page of the Rapid City Journal for the fourth time without retaining anything did he toss it aside. His eyes burned with lack of sleep, and he was dirty, tired, depressed, and thoroughly flummoxed. Sheridan slept fitfully on a couch, overcome by exhaustion and emotion. Once, when she was crying in her sleep, Lucy went over and sat next to her and put her hand on her older sister’s head and stroked her hair.

The late-summer sun was ballooning outside the west windows and throwing discordantly festive peach-colored light into the room. Joe refused to be impressed. As it got later and the sun went behind the Black Hills, the hospital seemed to rest as well. Others in the reception area left one by one after visiting whomever they were there to see.

Joe smiled at Lucy. “Hungry? It’s past dinnertime.”

Lucy, who was always hungry, shook her head no.

“How are you doing?” he asked her.

She shrugged and pursed her lips, the precursor to crying herself. “I’m sorry I got so mad at you and Mom,” she said.

“It’s okay. You just wanted to help.”

“I wanted to see April again,” she said, and the tears came.

Joe said, “Come here,” and held out his hand. She slid away from Sheridan and sat next to him and burrowed into his side. He put his arm around her and his muscle memory told him it wasn’t Lucy at all but a much older girl. The Lucy he remembered was small, a thin stalk with downy white-blond hair. It was as if she’d grown into an adolescent overnight.

“How can it not be her?” Lucy asked after a while.

“I don’t know.”

“Does it mean April is still out there somewhere? Is this the wrong girl you found?”

He squeezed her tighter. “I don’t know who she is or why she said she told us she was April. I don’t know if the real April is out there or not. For whatever reason, she pretended to be April to all of us.”

“It’s just so unfair,” Lucy said. “To make us believe like that.”

Joe said, “There has to be a reason, but we don’t know what it is. Maybe your mom will find out something.”