Ralph stepped out from behind the sign, Glock held in both hands. “Stop right there, Jack, and let go of the rifle.”
Jack skidded and stumbled to a halt thirty feet away, but he continued to hold the rifle by the barrel. That wasn’t okay, but Ralph could live with it. If Hoskins started to raise it, however, his life was going to end.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Jack said. “Like my old granddad used to say, was you born dumb or did you just grow that way?”
“I have no appetite for your bullshit. You killed two men and wounded another one. Shot them from ambush.”
“They never should have come here,” Jack said, “but since they did, they got what they deserved for messing in with what didn’t concern them.”
“And what would that be, Mr. Hoskins?” Holly asked.
Hoskins’s lips cracked and oozed tiny beads of blood when he smiled. “Tat-Man. As I think you know. Meddling bitch.”
“Okay, now that you’ve got that out of your system,” Ralph said, “put the rifle down. You’ve done enough damage with it. Just drop it. If you bend over, you’ll fall on your face. Was it a snake that got you?”
“The snake was just a little extra. You need to leave, Ralph. Both of you need to leave. Or else he’ll poison you like he poisoned me. A word to the wise.”
Holly took a step closer to Jack. “How did he poison you?” Ralph put a warning hand on her arm.
“Just touched me. Back of the neck. That was all it took.” He shook his head in tired wonder. “Out at that barn in Canning Township.” His voice rose, trembling with outrage. “Where you sent me!”
Ralph shook his head. “It must have been the chief, Jack. I didn’t know anything about it. I’m not going to tell you again to put the gun down. You’re done with this.”
Jack considered . . . or seemed to. Then he lifted the rifle very slowly, going hand over hand down the barrel toward the trigger housing. “I’m not going the way my mother did. Nosir, I am not. I’ll shoot your friend there first, Ralph, then you. Unless you stop me.”
“Jack, don’t. Last warning.”
“Stick your warning up your—”
He was trying to point the gun at Holly. She didn’t move. Ralph stepped in front of her and fired three times, the reports deafening in the tight space. One for Howie, one for Alec, one for Yune. The distance was a trifle long for a pistol, but the Glock was a good gun and he’d never had any trouble qualifying on the range. Jack Hoskins went down, and to Ralph, the expression on his dying face looked like relief.
17
Ralph sat down on a jutting lip of rock across from the sign, breathing hard. Holly went to Hoskins, knelt, and rolled him over. She had a look, then came back. “He was bitten more than once.”
“Must have been a rattler, and a big one.”
“Something else poisoned him first. Something worse than any snake. He called it Tat-Man, we call it the outsider. El Cuco. We need to finish this.”
Ralph thought of Howie and Alec, lying dead on the other side of this godforsaken chunk of rock. They had families. And Yune—still alive but wounded, suffering, probably in shock by now—also had a family.
“I suppose you’re right. Want this pistol? I can take his rifle, if you do.”
Holly shook her head.
“All right. Let’s do this.”
18
Past the first turning, the Ahiga path widened and began to descend. There were pictographs on both sides. Some of the ancient images had been embellished or entirely covered with spraypaint tags.
“He’ll know we’re coming,” Holly said.
“I know. We should have brought one of those flashes.”
She reached into one of her voluminous side pockets—the one that had been sagging—and pulled out one of the stubby Home Depot UV flashlights.
“You’re sort of amazing,” Ralph said. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a couple of hardhats in there, do you?”
“No offense, but your sense of humor is a little weak, Ralph. You should work on that.”
Around the next turning of the path, they came to a natural hollow in the rock about four feet off the ground. Above it, fading letters in black paint read WE WILL NEVER FORGET. Inside the niche was a dusty vase with thin branches jutting from it like skeletal fingers. The petals that had once adorned those branches were long gone, but something else remained. Scattered around the bottom of the vase were half a dozen toy versions of Chief Ahiga, like the one that had been left behind when the Jamieson twins had crawled into the bowels of the earth, never to be found. The toys were yellow with age, and the sun had cracked the plastic.
“People have been here,” Holly said. “Kids I’d say, based on the spraypaint tags. But they never vandalized this.”
“Never even touched it, from the look,” Ralph said. “Come on. Yune’s on the other side with a bullet wound and a busted elbow.”
“Yes, and I’m sure he’s in great pain. But we need to be careful. That means moving slowly.”
Ralph took her by the elbow. “If this guy gets both of us, that leaves Yune on his own. Maybe you should go back.”
She pointed to the sky, where black smoke from the burning SUV was rising. “Someone will see that, and they’ll come. And if something happens to us, Yune’s the only one who will know why.”
She shook his hand loose and began walking up the path. Ralph spared one more look for the little shrine, undisturbed all these years, and then followed her.
19
Just when Ralph thought the Ahiga path was going to lead them to nowhere but the back of the gift shop, it took an acute lefthand turn, almost doubling back on itself, and ended at what looked for all the world like the entrance to some suburbanite’s toolshed. Only the green paint was flaked and fading, and the windowless door in the center of it stood ajar. The door was flanked by warning signs. The plastic that encased them had bleared over time, but they were still readable: ABSOLUTELY NO TRESPASSING on the left, and THIS PROPERTY CONDEMNED BY ORDER OF MARYSVILLE TOWN COUNCIL on the right.
Ralph went to the door, Glock ready. He motioned Holly to stand against the path’s rocky side, then swung the door open, bending at the knees and bringing his gun to bear as he did so. Inside was a small entryway, empty except for the litter of boards that had been torn away from a six-foot fissure leading into darkness. The splintered ends were still attached to the rock by more of those huge, time-rusted bolts.
“Ralph, look at this. It’s interesting.”
She was holding the door and bending to examine the lock, which had been pretty well destroyed. It didn’t look like the work of a crowbar or tire iron to Ralph; he thought someone had hammered it with a rock until it finally gave.
“What, Holly?”
“It’s a one-way, do you see? Only locked if you’re on the outside. Somebody was hoping the Jamieson twins, or some of the first rescue party, were still alive. If they found their way here, they wanted to make sure they weren’t locked in.”
“But no one ever did.”
“No.” She crossed the entryway to the fissure in the rock. “Can you smell that?”