“Is that why you didn’t sleep last night?”
“I sat up in bed with a gun. And I’ll do that every night until they come. And then we’ll see. We’ll just see.”
“Mr. Crane. You’ve got to get hold of yourself. You should get some rest.”
“I’m fine.”
“I don’t think you really know what’s happening here in Greenwood.”
“Do you?”
“No. I might have an idea, though.”
“Yes? What?”
“I told you you started me thinking. It’s about all I’ve been able to do at night, is think. I drove Harry away — he’s the gentleman employed at Kemco, I’d been seeing — and I’ve jeopardized some longstanding friendships, by asking embarrassing questions of people like Ralph Foster, a local merchant who’s the part-time mayor. All because you got me thinking. It made me consider some of the research Ms. Boone has done... the illnesses. Take for example the skin rashes. I’ve seen more children with skin rashes in the last three years than in all my previous years of teaching combined. And then there’s the inordinate number of absences we’ve had at Greenwood Elementary, the past several years. Chronic attendance problems that I think have been misinterpreted. There have been PTA meetings at which parents have been castigated for letting their children play sick. At these meetings always a few indignant parents would insist that they have done no such thing: that a sick child is a sick child and a sick child stays home. But with changing mores in this country, attendance problems have naturally been considered a disciplinary problem, not a health problem.”
“I have a friend,” Crane said, “who wondered why the children and spouses of Kemco employees would be affected by negligent conditions at a plant twenty-some miles away.”
“The same thought occurred to me. Do you remember my mentioning to you that the school is built on ground donated to the city by Kemco?”
“Yes...”
“The school grounds, and the playground across the street, as well... land given the city twenty years ago by Kemco.”
“Yes.”
“Do you know what the west edge of Greenwood was, twenty years ago?”
“No.”
“A household dump. A landfill. Operated by Kemco, for use by the city as its dump, and for Kemco’s own disposal of certain nonhazardous wastes. Or so the mayor told me. But a thought crossed my mind... if Kemco is engaging in illegal dumping of hazardous wastes today, a time of environmental concern... what do you suppose they were doing twenty years ago?”
Crane was shaking. He felt himself shaking. Was this what Mary Beth and the others had discovered? Was this what Boone had discovered? Why her book was burned? Why she now lay in a coma?
“So one has to wonder,” Mrs. Price was saying. “What’s buried across the street, under the playground? Last month I saw children playing over there — they picked up rocks and threw them at the sidewalk and watched the pretty colors the ‘fire rocks’ made.”
He had seen that. Crane had seen that and at the time thought nothing of it: Billy and his friends hurling that rock at the sidewalk and the flash of bright color.
“One has to wonder,” Mrs. Price said. She pointed at the floor. “What’s buried down there?”
Chapter Twenty-Four
They pulled him out of bed and onto the floor and had the tape over his mouth before he was fully awake.
He didn’t remember falling asleep. He’d watched everything there was to watch on television, which had taken him till around two. He’d read some magazines and started a paperback and had read until his burning eyes wouldn’t let him read any longer. It wasn’t like he hadn’t had any sleep: he’d slept for two hours this afternoon, after seeing Mrs. Price. When his travel alarm had woken him, he’d walked downtown to eat at that pizza place again and walked back to the room to watch TV and read and wait in bed with the reading lamp on and the gun in his hand.
The gun was in somebody else’s hand, now. It was in the hand of one of the two men who’d pulled him out of bed. The one who had put the tape on his mouth. The other man was beside Crane, on the floor by the bed, tying Crane’s hands in front of him.
They wore ski masks, red-and-black, a matched set. The one with Crane’s gun was a tall skinny guy in a green-and black-plaid hunting jacket; the other one, standing up now, pulling Crane up by the arm, wasn’t as tall, but was wide in the shoulders and wore a black quilted mountain vest and long-sleeved dirty black sweatshirt that hugged his massive arms.
The truckers.
The two men he and Boone had seen dumping drums of waste, in Pennsylvania, weeks ago.
Crane dove head first into the tall skinny guy, gun or no gun, knocking the wind out of him, knocking him down, scrambled over him, got on his feet again, got to the door, but it was closed, and with his hands tied he couldn’t open it, and by the time he thought of trying for a window to fling himself through, the bruiser was on him, grabbing both his elbows behind him and pulling his arms back like chicken wings. The pain was sharp; nearly blacked him out.
The skinny one got up, recovered the gun, went over to the lamp. Switched it off. Then he walked to the door, opened it, peeked out, looked to the right, to the left, nodded to the bruiser, who kept hold of Crane’s elbows from behind and walked him out into the motel parking lot.
The motel’s sign was off. There was no one around; it had to be three-thirty or four in the morning. Still, the two men were cautious. They walked him down to the place where the parking lot went around the back end of the building, where they had parked a battered old pick-up truck, with a couple of steel drums in the back, fifty-five-gallon barrels like the ones the waste had been dumped in.
The skinny one lowered the tailgate and climbed up on the bed of the pick-up. Then the bruiser lifted Crane up to him, like a child from one parent to another, the bruiser’s hands on Crane’s waist, the skinny guy pulling Crane up and in by one arm, which hurt nearly as much as having his elbows yanked back. He felt an involuntary cry come out of him and get caught by the slash of tape across his mouth.
Then the bruiser climbed up and locked Crane around the waist from behind and lifted him up and set him inside one of the steel drums.
Crane just stood there, the rim coming up to his rib cage, and looked back at the masked faces of the trucker; for the first time he noticed how cold it was: he was in his T-shirt and jeans and it was fucking cold.
Then the bruiser started pushing on Crane’s shoulders, shoving him down, and finally Crane got the picture: they wanted him down inside the drum. He resisted for a moment, but it was useless. He crouched within the drum, squeezing himself in, tucking his knees up between the loop of his arms, his hands bound at the wrist by rope, his knuckles scraping the steel of the drum. The steel of its rounded sides seemed to touch him everywhere, in fact, but still he managed to sit, the top of his head six inches or more from the top of the barrel, and he looked up.
And saw the lid coming down.
He couldn’t have felt more helpless. The sound of the lid being hammered down wasn’t really loud: they were tapping the lid in place with a pair of hammers, doing it easily, not wanting to attract attention; but he never heard anything louder. He never heard anything that echoed so.
He stared up at total blackness.
He sat in total silence.
No, not total silence: there was his own breathing, a desperate, snorting sound, breathing through his nose. Already the air seemed stale. Already his muscles seemed cramped. Already claustrophobia was closing in.
Then, another sound: the motor starting up.