Detective Carson Ryder Thriller Series Books 7-9: Buried Alive, Her Last Scream, The Killing Game. J. Kerley A.
is it, Judd?” I asked. “Speak up.”
“I was, uh, thinking. My cousin is the county representative for the state environment agency. He checks new installations of septic tanks and goes in after the tanks have been installed to see if they’re done right …” He paused, still unsure of himself.
“Go on, Judd,” I said. “We need every idea we can get.”
“Uh, well, I was just thinking … what if the later person is like a killing inspector or something?”
Beale had entered during Caudill’s appraisal, bags in hand and confectioner’s sugar smearing his face. He started laughing uncontrollably.
Caudill shrunk down in his seat. I wrote Killing Inspector? in my notebook and underscored it twice.
It was four in the afternoon when we left the meeting, heads spinning. We were standing in the lodge parking lot looking over the steep cliffs and mulling the new information when Harry called.
“You were dead on, Carson,” he said, after giving me a brief rundown of the action. “You should have seen Oakes’s face when Babe came strutting out from the back of the house, grinning like he owned the mortgage on Oakes’s soul.”
“The perils of a guilty conscience,” I said, buoyed by Harry’s sprawling and cheerful voice. “How Oakes get enlisted?”
“A couple ex-cons showed up a week before Crayline was brought to the Institute for hypnosis. Hardcore Aryan types, the kind of assholes who think Bobby Lee Crayline’s something to aspire to. They brought a carrot and stick. The carrot was fifty grand if Oakes bought in. The stick was, Don’t help Bobby Lee, and he’ll take it real hard.”
“Fifty grand is nothing compared to being on Crayline’s shit list,” I said.
“Like you figured, Carson, the hay bales were the hiding place. Oakes drove away from the madness, brought Bobby Lee to the farm, hid him in a dug-out dirt hole under the house. The space was about the size of a coffin. Get this: Crayline stayed there seven weeks.”
“Seven weeks?”
“When the roadblocks were taken down and everybody thought Crayline was five states away, he slipped out.”
I tried to imagine the willpower it would take to stay almost motionless for one week, unable to stretch, starving, bitten by insects, voiding yourself, all in a casketsized hole in the ground.
I said, “Crayline say anything to Oakes before he booked?”
“Oakes asked Bobby what he planned to do with his new freedom. Bobby Lee said he was going to kill history, Carson. His exact words.”
“Kill history?”
“You got any idea what that means, bro?”
“Nope, brother. And I don’t want to.”
Harry had a call on the second line and I reluctantly let him get back to business. I walked to Cherry. She looked at me expectantly.
“You were smiling during the call. Good news about Mix-up?”
“Just some input on a case far from here, the one I referred to earlier.” I felt my shoulders slump, like someone was letting the air out of my body.
Cherry studied my face. “I know just what you need, Ryder. A fix. Just like what I need. Good thing my dealer is about a minute away.”
She drove down the steep hill. Instead of pulling to the highway she continued straight a quarter mile, ending up at an acre of asphalt, a parking lot. To the left was a wooden cottage with a sign saying SKYLIFT TICKET OFFICE – SOUVENIR SHOP. Towering beside it was a huge and horizontal steel wheel. The slow-spinning wheel was running cables to a rocky peak about a half-mile distant. Suspended from the lift’s cables were red park benches, basically, some heading up, others returning from the top. Most were empty, the lateness of the hour, I figured.
I swallowed hard and followed Cherry into the cottage, saw racks of souvenir T-shirts, caps, postcards. A smiling man stood behind a cash register. He was in his sixties, round-faced and pot-bellied, wearing a Natural Bridge cap that looked fresh from a rack.
“This is Bob Quint,” Cherry said, nodding to the capped man. “He’s my dealer.”
“Been a while since you’ve had a fix, Donna,” the guy said. “At least on my watch.”
“Twenty-seven days. No wonder I’ve been such a bitch.” She rummaged in her purse for some bills. “I need to get a ticket for my friend here.”
“You don’t need a ticket?” I asked.
“Donna has a lifetime pass,” Bob said, winking at Cherry. “Something we worked out a few years back.”
Ticket secured, Cherry yanked me out the door like a toy wagon. “We need to get on before anyone else shows up.”
“Why?”
She ignored my question, tugging me out to the platform where a teenager took our tickets. A bench coming down the mountain swirled in a circle, came around and we jumped aboard. The kid dropped a heavy restraining bar across our laps and whoosh, up and away we went.
At first we skimmed the ground, no higher than twenty feet, following a path rising toward the mountain, a hundred-foot-wide swath cleared of trees, looking like a golf fairway. To the sides the trees were thick and dark. A small creek ran at the woodsy edge to my right. We passed beside a huge boulder. Previous riders had pitched coins atop it for fun. The surface glittered. I wondered if I could jump to it and make my escape.
“What was that about a lifetime pass?” I asked Cherry.
“It’s a long story,” she said, watching a cardinal in a nearby tree, a dot of red in the green.
“Edit,” I said.
“Bob and his wife Cindy own the lift, not the state, which receives a cut of the proceeds from passengers and the concessions. The skylift cost a helluva lot. When the previous owners wanted to retire, Bob put together financing from several places but was still two hundred grand short. He made a naïve decision.”
“Borrowed from a shady source?”
She nodded. “The interest jumped from manageable to oppressive in six months. It looked like the lender might grab the lift, which was the plan all along. I renegotiated the deal with the lender, grabbing his attention by offering ten-plus.”
“Per cent interest?”
“Years in prison.”
The ground began to fall away. Suddenly we were fifty feet up. Eighty. A hundred. I cleared my throat and checked the firmness of the restraining bar. We passed one of the cable supports. I wondered when it had last been maintained.
“You look nervous, Ryder. Don’t you have the hots for rock climbing?”
“I’m fine,” I said, forcing a yawn. “I imagine a skylift gets inspected at regular intervals, right?”
Cherry patted my arm. “It’s steel. The supports are rooted in bedrock. But you feel safer hanging your life off a tiny bolt fifty feet up. Is that sweat on your forehead?”
I mumbled something. She laughed. “You know what’s going on here?” she said.
I looked past my dangling shoes. The ground had dropped away another twenty feet.
“What?”
“It’s control. You’re in control when you climb. You have no control over the lift. That’s it, right?”
I didn’t answer, afraid my voice would squeak. I looked ahead. The lifting cables ceased paralleling