Miles passed.
Then River slowed, almost to a crawl.
He kept that speed for more than two or three hundred yards and then said, “Bingo. There it is.”
He turned left onto an abandoned road that was hardly there.
“What is this?”
“It’s an ancient mining road,” River said. “There was quite an operation up here back in the day. I used to come up here and play when I was a kid.”
“How’d you get here?”
“Motorbike,” he said. “I’ve been riding since I was eight. Where we’re going is a few miles up. Have you ever been up here?”
“No.”
“You’re going to like it.”
“She better be there,” Wilde said.
“She is, don’t worry.”
Fifteen minutes later River brought the vehicle to a stop and killed the engine.
“We’re here.” He turned to January and said, “You wait here.”
“No,” Wilde said. “You come with us.”
They got out.
River got a flashlight and rope out of the trunk.
“What’s the rope for?”
“I lied to you about the shed,” River said. “She’s down a shaft. We lowered her down on a rope. She’s fine but she’s about twenty feet down. We’ll need to pull her up.”
Wilde pressed the barrel into River’s back.
“Let’s go.”
They walked, slowly, one foot at a time, with River sweeping the flashlight back and forth. There were lots of vertical shafts.
“Watch your step,” River said.
The weather hammered down.
River flickered the light on a shaft about fifteen steps away. “That’s the one. That’s where she is.”
Wilde’s eyes followed the beam.
It was then that the side of his head exploded.
River’s knuckles broke the skin wide-open and made direct contact with Wilde’s skull. Then the man’s python hands were around Wilde’s neck, viciously twisting it and forcing him to the ground.
The gun went off.
January screamed.
River turned and Wilde punched him.
Two bloody minutes later, Wilde was standing over River, training the gun down on the man’s head. January was two steps away, holding a bleeding shoulder.
Suddenly Wilde heard a voice.
It was coming from the shaft to his left, not the one River pointed out before.
“Don’t move!”
He headed over and shined the light in.
Alabama was on a wooden beam, thirty feet down.
There was no rope around her chest or anywhere in sight.
“Are you okay?”
“Help me, Wilde! I’m losing it!”
Wilde walked over to River.
“You’re going to go down and put a rope around her,” he said.
“You’re crazy,” he said. “She’s not even alive. She’s dead.”
Wilde fired the gun into the air.
“I’m not playing.”
He and January lowered River down on a rope to the beam.
“Do it!” Wilde shouted down.
River hesitated, then unwrapped the rope from around his chest and secured it around Alabama’s. Wilde and January pulled her up.
She put Wilde into a bear hug.
From the shaft Wilde heard muffled words.
They came from River.
“Pull me out. Hurry up.”
Wilde walked over and shined the flashlight down.
The beam wasn’t very big.
“It was just an accident that Alabama landed on that,” Wilde said. “You didn’t even know it was there.”
“I thought she was dead.”
“No you didn’t,” Wilde said. “You were burying her alive.”
“That’s not true. Pull me out. We had a deal.”
“That’s right,” Wilde said. “The deal was you go your way and I’ll go mine. So go your way. I’m not stopping you.”
Suddenly Alabama was next to him.
“Wilde, you can’t leave him there.”
“He tried to kill you.”
“I don’t care. Don’t do it.”
He exhaled, deciding.
Suddenly a shape darted at them.
Wilde saw it in his peripheral vision.
It was January charging with stiff arms, intent on pushing Wilde or Alabama or both of them into the shaft.
He grabbed Alabama’s waist and swung her to the ground.
The shape went over them.
Wilde grabbed the woman’s ankle with his right hand.
Her momentum propelled her forward and her torso disappeared into the shaft. She pushed wildly against the shaft wall, screaming.
Wilde dragged her out.
She rolled away from the hole and curled up in a ball.
Wilde grabbed the rope, dropped it down to River and said, “Tie it around your chest.”
River didn’t answer.
Wilde leaned over and shined the light down.
River was gone.
It wasn’t clear if he lost his footing or whether a rock fell on him from January’s commotion or something else happened altogether. The only thing that was clear was that he was gone.
132
Day Six
July 26, 1952
Saturday Night
Wilde liked the name Secret better than Emmanuelle so that’s what he called her. Saturday night he took her to the Bokaray. She wore a short black dress and white panties. In her left hand was a glass of wine. In Wilde’s was a double-shot of whiskey, his third.
They had a table in the corner.
The dance floor was sardine tight.
The band was good.
Perfume and cigarettes permeated the air.
Secret leaned close.
“I’m going to tell you something but you have to promise not to repeat it,” she said.
He shrugged.
“Whatever.”
“It’s sort of a completion of what I started to tell you the other day,” she said. “It’s about me and my agent, Sam Lenay.”
“Right, him.”
“River got his hooks into Lenay. To this day, I still don’t know how, but he did. Lenay brought me into it to get a job done. My job was to seduce a woman named Carmen Key.”
“Waverly’s sister?”
She nodded.
“She was going to be in a bar that night,” Secret said. “My job was to seduce her and get her to the roof of a certain building, supposedly to make out.”
Wilde raised an eyebrow.
“Are you a lesbian?”
“No.”
“Was she?”
“Yes,” Secret said. “I did what I was told, to help Lenay. I got the woman to the roof then slipped away.” She took a drink of wine. “The next day, I found out she got put in a red dress and dropped off the roof. I didn’t know that was going to happen. All I knew is that I was supposed to get her up onto the roof.”
“Did you know someone would be up there waiting for her?”
“Not specifically but I guess I assumed it. The dead woman’s sister, Waverly, ended up coming to town. I made it my mission to help her but I never told her my role in it. To this day she thinks that I was only a witness.”
Wilde considered it.
“That’s fair,” he said. “You didn’t know you were doing anything wrong when you did it. After it happened, you couldn’t undo it. About the best you could do at that point was help her. What about Lenay? Certainly he knew who was behind it-”
“He claims he didn’t,” Secret said. “He was being blackmailed but he didn’t know by who.”
“Blackmailed for what?”
“He’d never tell me,” Secret said.
“Waverly almost killed Bristol.”
Wilde cocked his head.
“She couldn’t kill anyone. She doesn’t have what it takes.”
“I’m glad you think so,” Secret said. “She got suckered into a trap. At the last minute, right before Bristol was going to shoot her, Jaden shot him. She did it with Waverly’s gun.”
“Are you serious?”
“You can’t tell anyone,” she said.
“I won’t.”
“It happened in a rental car,” she said. “They cleaned it up as good as new and turned it back in.”
Wilde lit a smoke.
“So I guess that means they took Bristol’s body out first.”
“That’s true. They buried him up in the mountains.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know and I don’t want to know,” Secret said.
“That’s pretty intense.”
“Jaden knew a lot of stuff about Bristol,” Secret said. “His firm was bidding for a Hong Kong project. He was strong-armed. He was told to withdraw his bid or else a woman he was seeing would be killed.”
“Strong-armed by who?”
“My guess is River,” she said. “River working for one of the other bidders. Anyway, Bristol was a stubborn man. He didn’t do it. Then it went down. His girl-a woman named Kava Every-was killed. She was dropped off a roof in a red dress.”
“That’s River.”
“River or Gapp,” Secret said. “Anyway, it wasn’t until then that Bristol took it seriously. He withdrew the bid before anyone else got killed.”
“So Waverly almost killed an innocent man.”
“Not entirely,” Secret said. “Bristol killed a woman in Cleveland, a woman named Bobbi Litton. He did it for Jaden. He did it the red-dress way, to make it look like a copycat.”
“Damn.”
“Right, damn,” Secret said. “Anyway, Jaden was indebted to him. When Waverly started closing in on Bristol, Jaden was his spy. She drew Waverly into a trap. The only thing that went wrong is that Bristol turned on Jaden at the last second. If he hadn’t done that, he’d still be alive today.”
“Interesting.”
“Jaden told all this to Waverly after the fact. That’s how I know, she told me.”