As I raised my head, a viselike arm wrapped my throat.
The phone flew from my hand.
My head was yanked backward. Something snapped in my neck. Rain pummeled my upturned face.
I struggled.
Rapid breathing in my ear blocked all other sounds. A noxious blend of oily hair, wet nylon, and stale cigarette smoke filled my nostrils.
Terrified, I kicked back with one heel. Connected.
The arm tightened, squeezing my trachea and cutting off air.
I gagged. Clawed.
I saw rain slicing diagonally across the sky. An antenna. A light on a pole.
Dark spots.
Lightning sparked.
Then the world went black.
The rain had stopped. Or had it?
Overhead I heard pinging, like nails hitting tin.
My mind groped for meaning.
I was inside. Under a roof.
Where?
How long had I been here?
Who had brought me to this place?
Angry vessels pounded the inside of my skull.
My mind offered only disconnected recollections.
Synapse: A narrow gap between haulers. Footsteps in the dark.
I raised my head.
My stomach lurched. I tasted bitterness and felt a tremor beneath my tongue.
I eased back down.
I smelled loamy earth. Vegetation. Felt cold hardness beneath my cheek.
Synapse: A body pressed tight against my back.
A real-time sensation intruded. Heat on my right ring finger.
I moved my hand. Tested the surface on which I lay.
Solid. Sandpaper-rough.
Concrete.
Synapse: A chokehold squeezing my throat. My fingers clawing, my lungs desperate for air.
I breathed deeply.
Opened my eyes.
Saw nothing but variations on darkness.
Using both palms, I raised one shoulder and shifted my hips.
Before I could sit, nausea overwhelmed me. I hung my head and threw up until my stomach muscles ached.
When I’d finished, I backhanded my mouth, rolled, and rose to all fours.
And vomited again until I could only spit bile.
I sat back on my haunches, listening.
Over the drumming rain, I heard what sounded like grinding gears, the thrum of an engine. Muffled by walls.
And another sound. Soft. Barely audible.
A moan? A growl?
Close.
Dear God!
Some other being shared my prison!
I felt a flutter in my chest, as if my heart had broken free and was beating at my rib cage.
I strained my ears. Heard no movement. No further sign of another presence.
Was I mistaken?
I rose to my knees and waited for my eyes to adjust. The only break in the inky blackness was a hairline strip of gray at floor level off to my left. Too little light to dilate my pupils.
I got to my feet. Paused again.
My gut cramped once more, but there was nothing left to purge.
Arms extended, I inched blindly toward what I hoped was a door.
My fingertips soon brushed something hard and smooth. Metal. Vertically ribbed.
I stepped to my right. The steel ribs now ran horizontally.
I felt around, found a discontinuity. Traced it up, over, down to the floor. A rectangle.
Aiming my shoulder at what I assumed was the rectangle’s center, I lunged.
Metal rattled, but the door held.
I tried again and again until my shoulder ached. Then I dropped to my back and kicked with my feet.
My efforts were useless. I hadn’t the strength of a toddler, and the door was metal.
I lay on the floor, limbs trembling, breath rasping in and out of my lungs.
My mouth was a desert. My head pounded. My gut was on fire.
Get out! Find the bastard who put you here!
The orders came from deep in my brain.
I rose again on rubber legs.
Dizziness sent the world spinning and triggered new nausea.
When I finished dry-heaving, I lurched forward once more.
And followed the wall. In ten feet, it met another. At the intersection, on the floor, slumped large plastic sacks.
I pressed my thumb to the nearest. The contents felt heavy but grainy, like oatmeal. I drew my nose close. Sniffed. Smelled a mixture of soil, clay, and dung.
Turning ninety degrees, I edged through the dark.
Two feet from the corner, a shovel hung from a hook roughly a yard above my head. Beside the shovel was a pitchfork. Then a hoe, another spade, a hand tiller, a hedge clipper, and a pruner. Below the tools were three coiled hoses.
My mind processed. An outdoor storage shed. Galvanized steel. One door. Bolted from the outside.
Tears threatened.
No!
The shed’s interior was relatively cool. I knew that wouldn’t last. When the rain stopped and the sun rose, the heat inside the windowless metal box would become unbearable.
Move!
Eight feet down, the second wall met a third.
I made the turn.
I’d taken two steps when the toe of my sneaker nudged an object on the floor. I prodded with my foot.
The thing felt firm. Yet yielding.
Familiar.
Another image fired up from my gray cells.
A corpse.
I shrank back.
Then, heart pounding, I squatted to examine the body.
I WORKED MY WAY UP THE TORSO TOWARD THE THROAT.
It was a man. His chest was broad, and his cheeks were rough with stubble.
I pressed my fingers to the flesh beneath his jaw.
No sign of a pulse.
Again and again I shifted my hand, searching for the throb of a carotid. Or jugular.
Nothing.
The man’s flesh felt cool, not cold. If he was dead, it hadn’t been for long.
Sweet Jesus! Who was he?
With trembling hands, I braille-read the facial features.
Shock sent adrenaline firing through me.
Galimore!
Breath frozen, I pressed my ear to his chest. A faint murmur? The rain was so loud, I couldn’t be sure.
Please God! Let him be alive!
I shivered. Then felt scalded.
My thoughts splintered into even tinier shards. Nothing made sense.
Galimore had not locked me in the shed. If he was a murderer or had partnered with a murderer, what was he doing here himself? Was he dead?
Galimore and I had a common enemy.
Who?
A wave of dizziness forced me down to my bum. I slumped back against the wall. Muddled words and images tumbled through my mind.
Two skeletons embracing in a makeshift grave. Two skulls with bullet holes centered at the back.
Grady Winge praying in the woods. Sitting at a table in the Speedway Media Center.
A ’sixty-five Petty-blue Mustang with a lime-green decal on the passenger side. Winge said it in ’ninety-eight. Repeated the exact phrase over a decade later.
Maddy Padgett standing by a pile of tires.
Padgett had been Cale Lovette’s lover. She was black. Lovette planned to quit the Patriot Posse.
A neon-lit bar. Slidell, yanking a man by his beard.
A cheesy Kmart apartment. Lynn Nolan wearing a tacky negligee.
The old guy said that thing about poisoning the system. Then Cale said something about it being too late. It was going to happen. Then the old guy said something about knowing your place.
Maddy Padgett, face tight with emotion.
Craig Bogan was a racist, a sexist. Cindi Gamble had flash. Again the bones.
Flash and bones.
A photo of a girl with a blond pixie bob and silver loops in her ears.
Craig Bogan in an armchair, stroking a cat.
Bogan sa
id ’sixty-five Petty-blue Mustang.
Not “a Mustang.” Or “a blue Mustang.” A ’sixty-five Petty-blue Mustang.
Ted Raines cringing on a couch.
Every fricking red seed has to be accounted for.
Red beads peeking from the neckline of a jumpsuit.
Galimore talking to a woman in sweaty black spandex. Reta Yountz. A handshake. Yountz’s bracelet jumping like a string of ladybugs doing a conga.
The world slid sideways.
I sucked in my breath.
Was that the message my id had been whispering?
Summoning what little strength I had left, I crawled to the door. Still on hands and knees, I pulled a paper from the back pocket of my jeans and unfolded it on the concrete. In the thin strip of light, I could see the picture and most of the text.
The article was titled “Rosary Pea: Abrus precatorius.” The image showed small red seeds with jet-black spots at one end. The text described them as resembling ladybugs.
In my delirium, atoms collided. Meshed.
Reta Yountz was wearing a bracelet made of rosary pea seeds.
Abrin comes from the rosary pea.
Wayne Gamble was poisoned with abrin.
Maddy Padgett made reference to a contract between Bogan and the Speedway. CB Botanicals. I was in a garden shed.
Padgett described Bogan as a redneck cracker who despised the idea of women and blacks in NASCAR. A man with a wicked temper.
Cindi Gamble was determined to race stock cars. Bogan had watched her race Bandoleros and knew that she could do it.
Nolan’s “old guy” at the Double Shot was Craig Bogan!
Bogan and Lovette weren’t planning a terrorist act. They were arguing about Cindi’s failure to know her place. The system being poisoned wasn’t a water supply. It was Bogan’s twisted vision of NASCAR.
The brutal truth slammed home.
Craig Bogan shot Cindi Gamble to stop her from driving NASCAR. He killed his own son because he and Cale were estranged, and he knew Cale would finger him as a suspect. He murdered Wayne Gamble because Gamble was asking too many questions and prodding the authorities to start a reinvestigation for discovery of new facts.
My vision blurred. My legs trembled.
I reached out to brace myself.
At that precise moment, a bolt slicked sideways.
Grating loudly, the door winged left.
I wobbled but didn’t topple.
A dark figure loomed in front of me, backlit by two powerful beams.
I drew in my arm and shielded my eyes.
Two muddy boots swam into focus.
“Well, well.” Bogan’s tone was bloodless. “Aren’t you the rugged one.”
I sat back on my haunches. Looked up.
Bogan was a black silhouette. One elbow angled out. Something in his hand. “Guess I underestimated you, little lady.”
Bogan shifted. Spread his feet.
Light glinted off a semiautomatic pistol pointed at my head.
Adrenaline-pumped blood made the rounds of my body. I felt a new surge of strength.
“The police are already searching for us.” To my pounding ears my voice sounded slurry.
“Let them search. Where you’re going, no one will find you.”
“We found Cale and Cindi.”
The razor face hardened into cold stone.
“You’ve already killed three people,” I said. “I suppose you don’t care about one more?”
“You forgetting your buddy over there?” Bogan flicked the gun toward Galimore.
I kept my mind pointed at one thought. Stall.
“Takes a special kind of man to shoot his own son.”
Bogan’s fingers tightened on the Glock.
“How’d you rope Winge in? Threaten to fire him? Appeal to his Patriot Posse loyalties?”
“Winge’s a fool.”
“Don’t have Grady to do your dirty work this time? To lie for you? To bury your dead kid and his girlfriend? You know he’ll break and implicate you.”
“Not if he wants to live, he won’t. Besides, it’s only the word of an accused suspect. There’s no evidence connecting me.”
“Good cover. The stranger in the Mustang. How long did you have to coach him to get it right?”
As we sparred, I tried looking past Bogan. The double beams were blinding. Headlights?
I listened for sounds. Heard no engines. No amplified voices. I assumed the race was long since over. Or else we weren’t at the Speedway.
“Your kind just can’t be happy with what you got.” Bogan’s face was pinched with loathing. “Always wanting more.”
“My kind? You mean women?”
I knew I should quit piling on words. Couldn’t stop myself.
“We scare the shit out of you, don’t we, Craig?”
“That’s it. You’re history.”
Before I could react, Bogan lunged, yanked me to my feet, and spun me into another chokehold. With a gloating laugh, he jammed the Glock into my ribs.
“Now who’s scared shitless?”
Bogan dragged me toward the lights, gouging the muzzle deeper with every forced step. It was the scene at the haulers’ all over again. Only this time my muscles were mush. I was like a moth flailing at a screen.
Rain was still falling. The ground was slick underfoot.
I heard traffic in the distance but couldn’t lower my eyes to check for landmarks.
We passed the source of the double beams. Headlights shone from a backhoe with enormous front and rear shovels.
Ten yards beyond the backhoe, Bogan halted, shifted the gun to my occiput, and forced my head down.
I blinked into a yawning wound in the earth.
The sinkhole!
The gears of my mind jammed with terror.
“Enjoy eternity in hell.” Bogan’s voice was pure venom.
I felt his body tense. The pistol was no longer jammed against my head. Hands clamped onto my shoulders.
“Kiss my ass!” I screamed, twisting and writhing with adrenaline-stoked terror. “You worthless piece of shit!”
Bogan’s right hand slipped on my wet nylon jacket. Slithered down the sleeve.
I wrenched my upper body sideways.
Bogan squeezed so tight, I thought my bones would shatter.
I cried out in pain.
Sliding the shoulder hand down my other arm, Bogan flexed both knees, lifted, and sailed me out over the edge.
My body flew sideways, then dropped. Time froze as I plummeted into inky blackness.
I hit hard on my right side, against an embankment partway down. The force of the impact sent me pinwheeling farther down, through muck and rubble. In seconds, I hit water.
Putrid liquid closed over me. I drew my knees to my chest and prayed that the pool was shallow.
Using my battered arms, I flayed the water and stopped my forward motion. I stroked my body vertical and extended my legs.
My sneakers touched bottom. I tested.
Terra not so firma. But solid enough so my feet were not sinking.
I stood in stagnant water up to my chest.
I smelled the sour reek of mud and rotten humus, the brown stench of things long dead.
Around me was tomblike darkness. Far above me the sky was a slightly paler black.
I had to get out. But how?
I waded to the point where I thought I’d entered the water. Explored with shaking hands.
The sides of the sinkhole were sharply angled. And slimy with sludge and putrid garbage.
Facing the bank, I lifted a leg that weighed a thousand pounds. Positioned my foot. Stretched my hands high and curled my fingers into claws.
Then I was spent.
My leg crumpled.
I collapsed and lay with my cheek and chest pressed to the mud.
A minute? An hour?
Somewhere, in another universe, an engine sputtered to life.
Gears rattled.
The engine gre
w louder.
The sinkhole seemed to wink.
I lifted my head.
Twin beams were slicing the darkness overhead.
My brain groped for meaning.
Steel screeched.
The engine churned.
Metal clanked.
I heard rumbling, like potatoes rolling down a chute.
A massive clod of dirt hit my back.
The wind was knocked from me.
As I fought the spasm in my chest, more soil avalanched down from above.
I tucked my head and wrapped my arms around it.
Bogan was filling the sinkhole! The monster was burying me alive!
Get to the far end!
I was dragging myself sideways along the bank when the engine backfired.
Muffled voices drifted down.
Or was I hallucinating?
The backhoe popped again.
Gears rattled.
The engine groaned, then cut off.
A small beam shot down from the lip of the sinkhole. Was joined by another. The small ovals danced the water, the muddy banks, finally settled on me.
“She’s here.”
“Sonofafrigginbitch.”
Slidell’s voice had never sounded so sweet.
I DIDN’T GET THE FULL STORY UNTIL PRESBYTERIAN HOSPITAL cut me loose three days later. By then Mark Martin had beaten twenty-to-one odds to win the Coca-Cola 600. Sandy Stupak had finished at number nineteen.
Completion of the Nationwide race had been postponed Friday night due to rain and the possibility of tornadoes. The following day Joey Frank crossed the line at number twenty-seven.
And the sun finally came out.
Katy had visited my bedside daily. Larabee dropped in. Charlie Hunt. Pete, sans Summer.
Hmm.
The sting on my finger wasn’t from a biting insect. Bogan had hit me with an abrin-coated dart. My mobile rang at the precise moment he aimed his little blow tube at my neck. Either the movement of my hand, the phone, or my jacket sleeve deflected the hit.
Karma? Fate? Blind-ass luck? Whatever. That kind of help is welcome any time.
Here’s a bit of irony. The caller was Summer. Another bout of wedding hysteria had saved my life.
The trace amount of abrin that had penetrated my skin caused vomiting, fever, headache, and disorientation. But I lived.
Galimore had also been poisoned. The prognosis was that, although further hospitalization was required, his recovery would proceed without complications.
Doctors figured either the abrin was degraded, incorrectly processed, or Bogan had put too little on the dart. Or maybe rain had diluted the toxin before or during delivery. Bottom line: the dosages were too low to be lethal to either of us.