The little man snorts, shakes his head. “Dead. Died when he was twelve. I never remarried.”
“Other children?” Shane asks.
“Just Seth.” He looks up, focuses on Shane. “If you call the FBI, or anyone else, he’ll die. Is that understood? He’ll die quite horribly. That’s really all I can tell you.”
Shane indicates that we should both sit. Put us on a level with Edwin Manning. Have a look into his sad, red-rimmed eyes, see what we can see.
“Has your son been abducted?” Shane asks, point-blank. “Is he being held for ransom? Is this about money?”
Manning shakes his head, clears his throat. “I can’t talk about it, not to you and not to anyone,” he says, as if reciting from a script. “That was made crystal clear. I have to do exactly what they say or he’ll die.”
Shane sits back, digesting Manning’s strangely laconic response. So far, almost every sentence ends in “die,” or contains the word “death” or “kill,” and yet the big guy doesn’t look the least bit discouraged. To the contrary, he has the slightly satisfied expression of a man whose assumptions have been confirmed.
“Okay,” Shane says. “We’ve established there is an abduction in progress, and that you believe your son’s life to be in danger. Have you received proof of life? An indication that Seth is still alive?”
Manning breaks eye contact, such as it is. His small, delicate jaw juts forward. “Stay out of this,” he says. “I read your card. If you’re former FBI you know what can happen.”
“What about Kelly?” I demand. Somehow I’m on my feet, trembling with anxiety and agitation. “Is she with your son? Is that what happened? Has she been kidnapped, too?”
Manning rubs his temples, avoids looking at me. “Never heard of her,” he says. “Seth never mentioned anyone by that name.”
For the first time I get a strong sense that he’s lying. He may not have met my daughter—what adult male brings home an underage girl to meet his daddy?—but he’s heard of her for sure. Mos def, as Kelly would say.
Shane leans in closer. His whole body seems to come into sharp focus, as if to demonstrate that he could, if provoked, crush the smaller man like bug.
“Are you aware that your son originally made contact with Mrs. Garner’s sixteen-year-old daughter on the Internet? That he took her skydiving, and apparently gave her flying lessons, all without her mother’s consent?”
Manning shakes his head. “I can’t discuss this.”
Shane leans closer still. His voice becomes softer, but somehow no less forceful. “You are in deep trouble, sir. You are out of your depth. Let me help.”
“I can’t do that. Leave my house at once, both of you.”
“Tell me what happened,” Shane suggests. “I’ll take it from there.”
Edwin Manning suddenly erupts, shaking his head so hard he almost spins out of the seat. “Go away!” he insists. “I don’t know about your daughter,” he says, turning to me, meeting my eyes for the first time. “If she’s with Seth, they’ll kill her, too. Do you understand? You have to let me handle this. You must. It’s the only way.”
Shane’s hands are suddenly gripping my upper arms, pulling me away. Anticipating, almost before I quite know it myself, that I’m about to launch myself at Manning, scratch out his lying eyes.
“We’re leaving,” Shane announces. “If you change your mind, call me. I can help.”
Couple miles down the road, heading out of the millionaire enclave, Shane pulls over so I can throw up. Kneeling in the darkness by the side of the road, the taste of dirty pennies in my mouth. Shane keeping back, not tempted to hold my head, because he knows what’s going on, why this has happened.
It’s not fear that’s makes me sick. It’s anger.
20. In The Bunker
Twelve hundred miles to the south, Ricky Lang heads for the bunker. A concrete cube, ready-made and then buried under a load of dirt and gravel long before Ricky was born. Supposedly it dates from the Cuban missile crisis. Some crazy white man shit, blow the whole world to pieces. The way he heard, a Cuban contractor buried the thing, all in a panic, convinced Fidel was coming to town on a rocket. Kept his family there for a few weeks, then walked away, never looked back. Whatever, Ricky’s been familiar with the bunker since he was a kid, when he used to play hide the weenie with some of the trailer girls down there. The trailer park is long gone, but the bunker still exists and you never know when a secure location will come in handy. Especially one that cannot be detected from the air.
Ricky is keenly aware that any fool with a computer can Google a satellite image these days, check out your backyard, see if you mowed the grass. He’s made sure the Beechcraft is concealed in a hangar, that activity in and around the airfield is kept to a minimum. The place is probably still under some sort of minimum DEA satellite photo surveillance from the bad old days. Nothing to draw their attention now—he made it his personal business to clean up the tribal drug trade. Couple of the stubborn old farts thought it was still a going concern, had to be fed to the gators. The others soon saw the error of their ways, agreed to live on tribal income and whatever they’d managed to hide in the ground.
Gator bait was usually ripe chicken, but like they say, everything tastes like chicken once you take the skin off.
“Smells bad down there,” Roy warns him, approaching the bunker.
Ricky stops, looks Roy in the eye. “White shit smells different from people shit, you ever notice? One sniff, I can tell.”
“Oh yeah?” Roy responds, glancing away. “The boy don’t know whether he’s coming or going, or where he’s at.”
“Uh-huh,” says Ricky. “Dug, you bring them loppers?”
“Yeah, Chief,” says Dug, bringing up the rear, letting the big-branch loppers bump against his trouser leg. Seems to think carrying the loppers is some sort of game he can win, if only he can figure it out.
Ricky holds out his hand, stops Dug in his tracks. “Ain’t no chief to you,” he says. “I am chief to my own people, only to them.”
No surprise, Dug looks confused, seeking help from his brother, who shrugs as if to say Roll with it.
“You got the key?” Ricky asks. “Open says me.”
Ricky’s laughing as Roy fumbles with the key. Neither brother registering the humor in “open says me,” puns and wordplay not being their thing. Which, in Ricky Lang’s febrile mind makes the Whittle twins more amusing than the usual swamp crackers, a tribe he has made use of, and thoroughly mistrusted, for his entire life. Started out helping his father, Tito Lang, swap tanned hides for the whiskey the crackers made in their hidden stills. Saw the contempt in their colorless eyes—drunk Indians selling their birthright for the poison that would surely kill them. A poison self-administered, and no different in its outcome than the hot bullets so many of the people fired into their own brains as punctuation to their defiled lives.
“Wait,” says Ricky, cocking an ear. “You hear that?”
Strange noises emanating from the bunker. Sounds like children keening. In his mind it feels like the transmission has slipped, can’t get in gear to the next thought. Stuck on children keening, eee eee eee.
“That’s the ventilation pipe,” Roy reminds him. “Wind goes across the top, makes a weird noise.”
Keening becomes wind and his mind moves on.
“Open the door,” he says.
Out comes the nasty smell. To Ricky a white smell. “Need to empty the bucket,” he points out.
“He