Chapter 8 - The Confrontation at Sunrise
Miller hit the brakes.
The heavy SUV slid sideways across the loose gravel, its tires shrieking against the hardpan beneath, coming to a halt twenty yards from the mouth of the shaft. The dust cloud rolled forward, engulfing the Polaris in an ochre fog that smelled of vaporized hydrocarbons and raw diesel.
Cross was out the passenger door before the suspension had settled, his patrol rifle leveled over the hood, the green aiming laser painting a bright dot on Austin’s sternum.
"Drop the detonator!" Cross shouted. "Drop it right now! Hands where I can see them!"
Austin didn't look at Cross. He looked past the rifle barrel, through the cracked windshield of the Tahoe, directly at me.
"Monica!" he shouted, his voice cracking with a high, hysterical edge that was swallowed by the desert wind. "Did you bring the ledger, Mon? Did you bring the certification for Arthur Sterling?"
Elena was already moving.
She shoved her door open, stepping out into the freezing wind, her service sidearm—an old Beretta 92FS she had carried in the military—held in a two-handed low-ready stance.
"Step away from the shaft, Austin," Elena said. Her voice was not loud, but it had the density of frozen steel. "Step away from my sister."
Austin looked at Elena, then at the gold pin on her collar, and a grotesque, lopsided grin spread across his face.
"The nurse," he laughed, the sound wet and ragged. "The nurse from the third floor. Did you bring the chart, Elena? Did you bring Leah’s discharge papers? Because I looked for them. I looked for them in her nightstand, but there was nothing there. Just fifty dollars and a silver cross."
"Austin," I said, shoving my door open, my hands catching the aluminum crutches as I dragged my braced leg out onto the gravel.
The pain from my knee was an abstraction now, a distant siren screaming in a house that was already on fire. I planted the rubber crutch tips into the sand, levering my weight forward until I stood upright in the high-beam glare.
"Monica, get back in the vehicle!" Miller barked from the driver’s side, his Glock drawn and pointed at Austin’s head.
I ignored him.
I took one hitching, mechanical step forward, the titanium pins in my hip grinding against the iliac bone with a sound like two river stones rubbing together in a bucket.
"Austin," I said, my voice steady, conversational, the voice I had used when we were twelve and he was standing on the high railing of the Shelter Island pier, terrified to jump. "The blasting cap won't work."
Austin’s thumb twitched on the red plastic housing of the detonator. "You’re lying. I wired it myself. Two bridge-wire squibs in parallel at thirty feet. The whole chamber is soaked in eighty gallons of number two fuel oil."
"I’m not talking about the wiring, Austin," I said, taking another step. "I’m talking about the geology. Grandfather didn't sink this shaft into solid granite. It’s an alluvial sandstone formation with high clay saturation. If you drop the charge, the shockwave won't collapse the walls inward. The explosive gas will vent up the cribbing like an eight-inch mortar tube."
Austin’s eyes flicked to the wooden frame between his boots.
"You’re standing on the bore, Austin," I said, stopping ten feet away, leaning all my weight onto the right crutch. "If you twist that handle, you won't bury Leah. You’ll just turn yourself into forty pounds of bone fragments spread across two square miles of BLM scrub."
"You think I care?" he screamed, his hands shaking so violently that the yellow spool of cord rolled off the timber and tumbled into the dark hole with a soft, hollow thump. "You think I’m going to sit in a concrete box in Corcoran while Arthur Sterling takes Chloe to Europe? You think I’m going to let some two-bit municipal detective parade me through the courthouse in orange slippers while our mother sits in Mount Helix and tells her bridge club that she never had a son?"
"Evelyn gave you up, Austin," I said.
The silence that followed was so complete that the wind through the ocotillo branches sounded like paper tearing.
Austin froze. "What?"
"She gave you up thirty minutes after Miller pulled the Selectric from the library," I said, the lie coming off my tongue with the smooth, frictionless perfection of a double-entry balance sheet. "She told them you stole the ribbon. She told them you forged her signature on the deed transfer. She told them you had a gambling debt in Tijuana and that she tried to save you, but you were 'rotten from the crib.'"
"She... she wouldn't," he whispered, the color draining from his face until the grease on his cheeks looked like charcoal marks on a corpse. "She signed the license. She told me to buy the excavator. She said... she said a family without a name isn't a family at all."
"She’s in the holding cell on Broadway right now, Austin," Elena said, stepping past my shoulder, her Beretta never wavering from the center of his forehead. "Drinking Earl Grey. Telling her lawyer that you were an accident that she spent thirty years trying to clean up."
Austin looked down at the red plastic box in his hands.
The manic energy that had held him upright seemed to drain out through the soles of his boots, leaving behind a hollow, terrified boy in a canvas coat that was two sizes too large for him.
"She told me Leah was going to ruin everything," he whimpered, tears cutting pale, crooked tracks through the dust on his cheeks. "She said Arthur Sterling’s lawyers would run the tax records back twenty years. She said... she said if they found the marriage, the trust would be voided. She gave me the keys to the truck, Monica. She gave me the keys and she told me: Go to the desert, Austin. And don't come back until the ground is flat."
"Drop the box, Austin," Miller said, moving forward with the handcuffs already clicking open in his left palm.
Austin looked at me one last time.
"I loved her, Mon," he whispered. "In the beginning. Before the towers."
His fingers opened.
May you like
The red blasting machine slipped from his grasp, hitting the hardpan with a dull plastic clatter.
Before the box had stopped rolling, Cross hit him from the left, driving his shoulder into Austin’s ribs, pinning him face-down into the alkaline sand while Miller drove a knee between his shoulder blades, the steel cuffs ratcheting shut with three sharp, surgical clicks that echoed across the empty badlands.
