The Bone House - Brian Freeman [137]
Mark felt the breath leave his chest. He knew with a terrible clarity that there was really no hope now. No chance of this ending well, of him walking away alive and free. Reich was no immature kid like
Troy who was in over his head. When the sheriff ran out of bile, the gun in his hand would spit a bullet into Mark's heart.
'He was your best friend,' Mark said.
'That's right, I killed my best friend because of you.'
'Because of me?'
'Because you're a liar,' Reich told him. 'Because you had to hide behind a ghost in order to cover up your own crime. Pete was willing to give up everything to make sure you paid the price. I couldn't let him do that, but I'll make sure you pay. That's what Pete would want. That's why I can live with what I've done.'
Mark shook his head and slowly held up his hands. 'Sheriff, I swear I don't know what the hell you're talking about.'
'He's talking about Harris Bone,' Cab Bolton said.
Reich whipped his light toward the voice that rose from the cemetery graves, but he didn't take his eyes off Mark or lower the gun even an inch. In the beam, Mark saw Cab Bolton ten feet away, next to the gray tower of a bell-shaped tombstone. Tresa huddled next to him, her face red with anger and tears.
'Bolton,' Reich hissed.
'What now, Sheriff?' Cab demanded. 'Are you going to kill me, too? First Hoffman, then Bradley, then me?'
Reich's eyes darted furiously between Mark and Cab. He was a man looking for a way out and not finding one.
'The girl, too?' Cab went on. 'Could you shoot the girl? How many more people are you willing to kill to keep the secret?'
'Get the hell out of here,' Reich ordered him. 'Take Tresa with you. You have no idea what this is about.'
'Harris Bone,' Cab repeated. 'That's what this is about. Peter Hoffman couldn't handle the guilt anymore, could he? When he thought Bradley was hiding behind Harris to get away with murder; he decided to tell the truth. Hoffman wasn't about to let Delia Fischer get robbed of justice. He wasn't going to let some defense attorney use Harris to get an acquittal. He knew Glory didn't come face to face with Harris Bone in Florida. That was a lie. That's what he wanted to tell me.'
'Goddamn you, Bolton,' Reich said. 'You couldn't let it go, could you? What the hell did you do?'
'I found him, Sheriff,' Cab replied, i found him in that hole where the two of you left him to rot. Harris Bone never escaped. He never ran. You and Peter Hoffman killed him.'
In the miles since they left the county courthouse in Sturgeon Bay, Harris Bone hadn't said a word. He sat silently in the back of the squad car, his balding head hung forward, his hands and ankles cuffed. His jail clothes were baggy on his frame. Harris had never been a large man, but he'd shrunk inside his skin in the months since the fire, until he was almost a skeleton.
Reich watched his headlights tunneling through the night. He was south of Kewaunee in the midst of flat, dormant farmlands. It was January, during one of the frigid winter stretches, with temperatures falling into the teens below zero when the sun went down. The season had been mostly snowless, leaving the ground barren and hard, swept clean by the bitter wind.
He glanced in the mirror with hard eyes.
'You should look outside, Harris. You won't be seeing open country again for the rest of your life. Just eighty square feet of concrete for twenty-three hours a day.'
Harris didn't acknowledge him.
'I'd watch my back in there if I were you. Big-ass gang killers don't like a man who burns up his wife and family.'
Harris finally looked up with sunken eyes. 'Shut the hell up, Felix.'
'Oh, don't start mouthing off. That's a bad lesson. You shoot off your mouth in there, and bad things are likely to happen.'
'Thanks for the advice.'
Reich heard the sarcasm, and he didn't care. 'A lot of people think you're getting off easy, sitting on the taxpayer's dime for the next forty years. That doesn't feel like