At last, Parmer sat back. “You want to give her a try, Cork?”
He’d been waiting for this moment, but now that it was here, he felt suddenly weak, unequal to the task. He shook his head. “You go ahead.”
Parmer braced himself and gave the handle a steady pull. Nothing happened. He relaxed, settled himself once more, and again pulled hard. This time the mechanism gave. He shoved the door open fully, leaving a gaping entry. Inside was utterly dark, and from it poured the foul stench of entombed putrefaction.
“We’ll need a flashlight,” Quinn said. He disappeared.
Parmer was studying Cork. “You okay?”
Cork didn’t answer. He was thinking, Not Jo. That’s not Jo inside. He felt himself reeling, falling backward. Suddenly he was staring at the pure blue rectangle of sky framed by the edges of the pit, and for a moment he was back on Iron Lake as a kid on a raft on a summer day staring up and thinking that in heaven the angels must be dressed in fabric made from the sky, it was so perfect.
Then Parmer’s voice brought him back. “Just stay down, Cork.”
Quinn clambered into the hole. “Whoa, what happened?”
“He fainted,” Parmer said.
Quinn waved a hand briskly in front of his own face. “It’s the smell. Enough to gag anyone.”
“I’m fine.” Cork sat up and leaned back against the side of the pit.
“Here, have some water,” Parmer said.
He gave Cork the bottle he’d used to wash the handle mechanism clean. There were still a few swallows in it. Cork finished the water, and Parmer said to Quinn, “There’s another bottle in my knapsack in the truck.”
“Got it,” Quinn said and took off.
Cork sat looking at the open door and feeling faint again. “I don’t think I can go in there, Hugh.”
“No reason you have to, Cork. Let Quinn and me handle that. You just stay here.”
“I should go,” Cork said.
“No, you’ve come as far as you need to. What’s in there, you don’t have to see.”
“I should go,” Cork said again. “But honest to God, Hugh, I can’t.”
“I understand.”
Quinn came back. He handed the bottled water to Cork.
“Okay?” Parmer said.
Cork nodded.
“Dewey, you and me are going inside,” Parmer said.
“All right.” Quinn accepted the situation without comment.
The two men stood up. Quinn set his rifle against the fuselage, turned on the flashlight he’d retrieved from his truck, and led the way into the plane.
Cork tried to drink some water, but his throat was dry and he choked. He stared at the black beyond the door and forced himself not to imagine what was inside. He heard Quinn and Parmer talking in voices too low for him to catch the words. He felt the tension in him building, roiling up from the pit of his stomach.
And then Parmer stood in the doorway of the plane, eyeing Cork in an odd way.
Every muscle in Cork’s body had drawn taut, and he felt ready to explode. “Well?”
“They’re in there,” Parmer replied. His face held a puzzled look. “They’re all in there except for one, Cork. Your wife’s not on this plane.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
Cork staggered up. “What did you say?”
Parmer shook his head in bewilderment. “She’s not in there, Cork. Jo’s not in there.”
Quinn came out looking grim and unsteady. “Christ, enough to give anybody nightmares.”
Cork grasped Quinn by the shoulders. “Did you see her?”
“No,” Quinn replied. “Five bodies. They’ll be a bitch to ID, but all definitely male.”
Cork grabbed the flashlight from Quinn and pushed between the two men into the foul-smelling plane.
What greeted him was an eerie scene. The cockpit was empty. He’d expected that. In the cabin, the passengers sat in their seats, still wearing the oxygen masks that had deployed from the compartments above. The skin of their faces had drawn back, and skeletal grins peeked out from the sides of the masks. Their eye sockets were empty, and they seemed to watch Cork with black stares. The liquefaction of internal organs had caused the bodies to collapse inward, giving them an exaggerated gauntness. They hadn’t decomposed a great deal, the result, Cork supposed, of the airless crypt where they’d been entombed. He walked slowly between the seats until he came to one that was empty, next to a window, where he saw a briefcase lying on the floor.
“Cork, what happened here?”
He turned and found Parmer just inside the door, Quinn at his back.
“Shot,” Cork said. “All of them in the head at close range. Small caliber. A twenty-two would be my guess. The bullet stays inside the skull, ricochets off the bone, and destroys the brain. Work of professionals.”
Parmer stared at the dead men, sitting before him in a repose that seemed almost peaceful. “You’re telling me that they just sat there like that and let someone execute them?”
“That’s exactly what I’m telling you.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Where’s your wife?” Quinn asked.
“She was here.” Cork leaned over the body next to the empty seat. From the long gray hair, he was pretty sure it had been George LeDuc. He lifted the briefcase from the floor. “This is hers.” He pointed to the cushion of the empty seat. “I don’t see any blood. Maybe she wasn’t shot like the others.”
“Then where is she?” Quinn persisted. He seemed perturbed that she wasn’t there.
Cork didn’t have an answer. He felt almost giddy. Jo’s mysterious absence from that macabre scene was the first glimmer of hope he’d had since the plane went missing.
“This smell’s making me sick,” Quinn said. “Let’s get out of here.”
Cork took a long last look around, then followed the others. Outside, his two companions stood motionless at the top of the pit. As he climbed the crude steps to join them, he saw what had made them freeze. A couple of men stood facing them, holding handguns.
“That’s right, O’Connor,” one of the men said. “Come on up and join the party.”
Cork stood next to Parmer, kicking himself for letting his guard down. He was thinking they must have been hiding among the rocks of the canyon wall, waiting for their chance, and when all three men had entered the plane, they’d wasted no time in seizing the advantage. He was thinking about the rifle still in the pit, propped against the fuselage. He was thinking that, given a moment of distraction, he could be in the pit with that rifle.
One of the men was tall and slender with brooding lips and sleepy eyelids that made him look tragically poetic. The other, the one who’d spoken, was like a washing machine-plain, square, and efficient. Cork recognized him. He’d seen him before, in the Turtleback restaurant in Rice Lake, ordering Leinenkugel’s on the waitress’s recommendation, and again that same night, framed in the rain-streaked window of a car that passed Parmer’s Navigator only moments before the front tire blew.
“You’re a hard one to get rid of, O’Connor,” the man said. “I kind of admire that, don’t you, Mike?”
“Makes me warm all over, Gully,” Mike said.
“I was being sincere, Mike. Then you have to go and interject uncalled-for sarcasm. That’s disrespect.”
“Whatever,” Mike said.
“We’d have made an appearance earlier,” Gully said, speaking toward Cork and the others, “but I hate to interrupt good men while they’re working. Also saved us the trouble of digging a hole for your bodies. Now we can just toss you in with the others, fill that hole back up, nobody’s the wiser.”
Quinn suddenly began walking toward the two men. “Jesus,” he said. “You almost blew it. O’Connor spotted your tire tracks on the way here.” He took a stance next to Mike.
Cork said, “Dewey?”
Quinn shrugged and smiled affably. “Services to the highest bidder.”