He set the light down on a shelf, pointing at himself. As usual, he was dressed head to toe in camouflage. He held his arms out, palms up, I guess to show he was unarmed, though I knew there were probably several weapons tucked into each of his many pockets. “Big Jim ast me to keep a eye out for you, make sure you didn’t get into any trouble you couldn’t handle. I heard y’all was up at Cave Springs Church, so I come up to check on you’uns. Time I got there, the entrance was all blocked up. I didn’t know if you know’d about this other entrance — hell, I didn’t know if y’all was even alive still — but all I knowed to do was get in here as far as this squeeze and start hollerin’, see if anybody hollered back. Figured if I could get you this close, I could get you out somehow.”
I felt ashamed. Far from being too trusting, I’d been way too suspicious. “Well, I’m out, but I don’t think Art can squeeze through the way I did. You got an idea how we can get him out?”
“I got me some blasting caps in the back of the truck, but that seems a little chancy right here — roof looks kindly unstable.”
Blasting caps? Maybe I hadn’t been too suspicious after all. “Waylon,” I said, “we’ve had enough blasting to last us awhile.”
“Yeah, I reckon so. I b’lieve we’ll have to get him out the old-fashioned way.”
Art’s voice echoed hollowly from the other side of the crevice. “What, you gonna starve me out? That might take about six months.”
Waylon laughed. “Naw, ain’t got time for that. Got to get you’uns back on the job quicker’n ’at.” He fished around in the rear quadrant of his capacious pants and hauled out a hand sledge and a stout chisel. The man was like a human Swiss Army knife. “Few good whacks with this ought to do the trick. Y’all might want to step back aways, in case I underestimate my own strength.” Art and I both gave him plenty of room.
Slipping an elastic strap around his scalp, Waylon switched on a heavy-duty headlamp and leaned in toward one side of the crevice. I heard a low, humming sound, and then, astonishingly, Waylon began to sing. He had a rich bass baritone that filled the cave with a haunting song: “In the deep dark hills of eastern Kentucky/That’s the place where I trace my bloodline./And it’s there I read on a hillside gravestone/‘You’ll never leave Harlan alive.’”
Sparks flew as the hammer blows rang out in time to the mournful ballad. Every half-dozen or so blows, a chunk of rock would crack off and clatter to the floor. “Where the sun comes up”—CLANG—“About ten in the morning”—CLANG—“The sun goes down”—CLANG—“About three in the day”—CLANG—“You fill your cup”—CLANG—“With whatever bitter brew you’re drinking”—CLANG—“And spend your life diggin’ coal”—CLANG—“from the bottom of your grave.”
Waylon paused, shifting his stance to attack the other wall. His hair and beard dripped with sweat. “Lucky thing this is such a small piece we got to widen,” he huffed. “Much bigger, and I might pull a John Henry, die with my hammer in my hand.”
I seriously doubted that.
After ten minutes and two ballads, Waylon stepped back and sized up his handiwork. “Art, come on up and see if maybe you can shinny through that. I knocked off them knobby parts in the skinniest places. If that ain’t enough, it’s gonna take a lot more work to widen. Careful, though — they’s some sharp edges now.”
Art sidled up to the crack, and after a few adjustments and contortions — only slightly more severe than Sheriff Kitchings had required to shoehorn his belly into the crystal grotto — he popped through. Waylon grinned. “You fellers always have this much excitement on a case? This forensic shit keeps a man hoppin’, don’t it?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Sometimes it’s a real blast.”
Waylon chuckled, Art groaned, and I said a silent prayer of thanks to be back in the land of bad puns.
Waylon led us a hundred yards up a gently sloping tunnel; for the latter half of the trek, an irregular oval of light grew larger and brighter. “Uh-oh,” said Art from behind me.
“What? We’re almost out.”
“We’re ascending toward a bright, white light. Last time that happened to me, they had to hook jumper cables to my heart. Maybe we weren’t as lucky in that second cave-in as we thought.”
“If we were dead, we’d be climbing a big marble staircase.”
“Marble? We’re inside a mountain in Cooke County; I’m guessing the afterlife’s a little more rustic here, too.”
Before I could think up a retort we emerged, squinting and blinking, into the glare of the late September afternoon. Overhead, the sky shone electric blue; around us, the dogwood and tulip poplar leaves blazed red and yellow. Scrambling up out of a small sinkhole, we angled along a hillside for perhaps a quarter-mile, then scrambled down one end of the bluff behind Cave Springs Primitive Baptist Church. The church looked just as we’d left it, just as it probably had for the past fifty years or more. Beside it, though, my truck bore a fresh coating of limestone dust.
Waylon’s truck was parked beside mine. It looked freshly washed. Unless he’d somehow scrubbed it after the explosions, Waylon was telling the truth: by the time he’d arrived, the cave’s entrance had been blasted long enough for the dust to settle.
“Let’s get the hell out of Dodge,” said Art.
“Wait a second — I’ve got an idea. You still got your forensics kit?”
“Are you kidding? After that big production you made of hauling it up by your bootstraps, I knew I’d never hear the end of it if I left it behind. Why?”
“Come with me.”
I led him back to the cave’s entrance. Just as I’d expected, there in the mud beside the spring was a fresh set of boot prints. They led into the mouth of the cave, vanishing beneath the fresh rockfall.
“Eureka,” said Art as he knelt down and set about taking a cast from the clearest of the several prints. “Look familiar?” They didn’t, but it could have been a familiar pair of feet inside an unfamiliar pair of boots.
I studied the surrounding area. As far as I could tell, the tracks led into the cave — but didn’t lead back out again. “You think he’s still in there? Got caught in his own cave-in?”
Art shrugged. “Maybe. Kinda hope so. But maybe he slipped out the back before setting off that second blast. Or maybe he’s coming out the same way we just did.”
I shook my head. “Doubt it. If he’d been in there with us, seems like he’d’ve come after us. Anybody that’s packing explosives is surely carrying a gun, too. He’d have shot us before we climbed up out of the grotto. The thing I can’t figure out is, why not just shoot us in the first place?”
“Too suspicious. Cave-in could be passed off as an accident. Bullet holes are harder to explain — might bring an angry mob of vigilante UT professors up here hankering for vengeance. If the cave-in plan had worked, though, our bodies might be buried under a hundred tons of rock. We might go down as ‘missing, presumed dead’ or some such.” I was beginning to grasp Cooke County’s colorful reputation among my law enforcement colleagues. “Hey, you want your laces back? Or do you like the freedom of movement you get with your feet sliding around inside those boots?”
I’d clean forgotten. Taking the laces from Art, I used the rear bumper of my truck as a prop as I relaced my boots. As I retied the laces, I glanced once more at the church’s rock sign, and I saw something I hadn’t noticed earlier. Beneath the church’s name, in paint so faded I could barely read it, was a line of script. I called to Art and pointed. Over my shoulder, I heard his low whistle of amazement.
“I’ll be damned,” I said.
“Possibly,” he agreed. “But I don’t think you’ll be the only one. There might be a Kitchings or two down there to keep you company by the fire.”