Carved in Bone - Jefferson Bass [31]
But the chuckle died in my throat a moment later when the big man said, “Stop the car right here, Doc.” I felt myself freeze up, unable to speak or act. The world seemed to shrink, until nothing remained but a green tunnel, a gray gravel track, and a steering wheel gripped by a pair of white-knuckled hands that might or might not have been my own. Another hand reached in from somewhere and cut the ignition switch. The car drifted to a stop on the gravel, the only sounds the crunch of gravel under the tires and the rush of blood in my head. Then even those sounds were gone, and the tunnel of green faded to black.
WHEN I AWOKE, I felt myself curiously confined. The air was dank and hot and close against my face, depleted of oxygen, yet my arms were cooled by a breeze. The darkness was softened by fuzzy globules of light. As my eyes shifted focus, instinctively seeking some definable shape, the globules sharpened into myriad pinpoints of daylight, viewed through the weave of fabric. My thoughts regained their focus, too, and I recognized the damp, acrid smell of sweat. A pungent camouflage cap was stretched tightly from my chin to my forehead. My arms twitched as if to bat it away, but they would not move. I jerked against whatever was restraining them and began thrashing my head.
“Easy, there, Doc, you’re gonna hurt yourself that way,” rumbled the deep voice to my left. “We’re nearly there, so just sit tight a minute. I told you I weren’t gonna hurt you, and I ain’t, but they’s some things you need not to see, in case somebody was to ast you about ’em later.”
I slumped back against the seat and fought to rein in my panicked breathing.
The car stopped, and the cap came off of my face. I shut my eyes against the light, then opened them to see Waylon leaning toward me with a hunting knife. He reached down and deftly flicked the knife against strips of duct tape—printed, like the rest of his ensemble, with a camouflage pattern—binding my wrists to my thighs.
“Sorry I had to do that,” he said. “I didn’t want to have to fight you to get you here. That wouldn’t be healthy for you, and Big Jim wouldn’t be none too happy with me, neither.”
Big Jim? I could scarcely imagine the immensity of a man that a behemoth like Waylon would refer to as “Big.”
He got out of the Cherokee and came around to open the door for me, as if he were some backwoods chauffeur instead of an abductor. I paused, struggling to make sense of it all, then gave up and got out and followed him.
We had parked in a small clearing of grass, surrounded on all sides by kudzu, a vine that is notorious in the South for engulfing trees, barns, broken-down vehicles, and—I’d heard it sworn to be true—even the occasional napping cow. At one edge of the clearing stood a weathered farmhouse, its sides and front porch fringed with vines. More of the ropy tendrils were already creeping onto the roof at the back of the house and spiraling up the mast of a small satellite dish. As I followed Waylon up the steps, he kicked at the vines snaking around the base of the porch. “Damn stuff grows two foot a day in the summer,” Waylon said. “Turn your back on this house for a week, and it’d be gone. You’d never find it again.”
The side of Waylon’s fist tapped the door frame twice, and the house shuddered. “Boss? We’re here,” he called through the screen door into a dark room beyond.
“Thank you, Waylon. How about keeping an eye on things to make sure we’re not disturbed?”
“Yessir.” With a swiftness and stealth that belied his size, Waylon slipped off one end of the porch and melted into the kudzu vines hanging from what had once been trees at the edge of the clearing.
The screen door screeched open, and a man stepped onto the silver-gray boards of the porch. “Dr. Brockton, I’m Jim O’Conner. Thank you for coming. I apologize for sending Waylon to shanghai you that way.”
I felt an almost electric jolt go through my body. My captor stood perhaps five-five in his cowboy boots; if he didn’t take them off to weigh, he might tip