With another growl of pain and effort, Orthus dug his back claws into the dirt and lunged forward. He landed on the ground by my knees, panting from his effort, but finally free of his accidental grave. I barely noticed. Something in Allen’s last few statements was nagging at the back of my brain. Something about Murdock helping Bowman load the box onto the helicopter…
“Okay…last question…really important.” I clenched my jaw shut to stop the chattering, but it didn’t work. “After they loaded the box…did anyone other than the p-pilot and copilot get o-on the helicopter?” I was still working on Devich’s “inside job” theory, but I was running out of time alone with the wraith, as Bowman drew closer with every step.
“Not that I saw,” Allen said. “But by then the other men were getting all riled up again. They didn’t want to let the helicopter take off, and the foreman was trying to hold them back. I guess it’s possible someone else got on. But if so, I didn’t see it.”
“What about M-murdock?” I glanced from Orthus to Bowman, then back to the wraith. “C-could he have gotten on board…in all the commotion?”
“Yeah!” Allen nodded enthusiastically, his face lit up with the sudden memory. “Hedidget on. He helped the foreman guide the box on from inside the helicopter. The guys who usually drive the forklifts were both at the front of the riot. One had a bloody nose, and the other one was the guy who hit his head on the concrete opening. So the foreman had to load it, and the other guy guided him.”
“So you saw him get on the chopper?” I asked to verify, and Allen nodded. “Did you actually see him getoff?”
This gave him pause, and he stared off to the side, trying to remember. I smiled to realize how many of our habits don’t necessarily die when we do. I knew that one from personal experience.
“Noooo,” Allen finally said, shaking his head slowly. “I can’t say for sure that I remember him getting off the helicopter. But he must have. Why would he stay on? He was the only one who didn’t have any interest in the box.”
Andthatwas where my theory fell apart…
“I take it you know this dog?” Bowman said, just feet away now. “That you’re talking to him to keep him company, and not chatting up Natalie’s ghost.”
Giving the foreman a job to do had obviously brought him back to his senses.
“Yeah, I know h-him.” I chose to ignore the ghost comment altogether. Selective hearing was a horrible thing to waste.
“You’re going to freeze.” Bowman frowned, taking in my hunched posture and uncontrollable shaking. “Come inside and have some more coffee.”
I nodded. “Soon.” After we’d disposed of the bodies. But my hands came first. “The c-cuffs are…t-too tight.” He’d never be able to get the cutters between my skin and the metal. “Cut the chain b-between them.” I eyed the huge sheers in sudden apprehension. They’d go through my wrist much easier than through metal. “C-carefully,” I amended.
I tried to stand, but with numb legs and useless hands, I overbalanced and nearly fell flat on my face.
Bowman grabbed my arm and pulled me up. My side screamed in protest of the rough handling, but that was nothing compared to my embarrassment over needing help in the first place.
“Turn around, and I’ll give it a shot. This was the newest pair in the shop, so they ought to do the trick.”
“If you cut me, I’ll k-kick your ass all the w-way to the next l-l-life,” I said. I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t let a strange man near me with what amounted to a huge pair of scissors without warning him about what would happen if he screwed up. The lady who cut my hair always got the same speech.
Without waiting for his reaction, I turned my back on Bowman and stretched my arms as far from my backside as I could, struggling to hold them steady in spite of the shivering.
“This should only take a second,” he said.
“Th-there’s something I c-can’t understand about this whole treasure pit/mysterious box thing,” I said, trying to distract myself from the metallic squeal as he lifted the bolt cutters into place. I felt them skip off the chain, as my hands shook, and images of a bloody stump at the end of my arm stirred nausea in the pit of my stomach.
“Yeah, what’s that?”
“W-what made you g-g-guys so desperate to get your hands on the b-box? I mean, it’s not l-l-like it’s carved from g-gold or anything, r-right?”
“Not that I could tell.” Something tugged down on the handcuffs, sudden and harsh. Metal squealed, then snapped. My hands fell to my sides, and just like that, I was free. I still wore a set of steel bracelets, but I’d regained the use of my hands and arms. The rest could wait.
Rolling my shoulders to loosen them, I turned to find Bowman holding the heavy cutters in one thick, gloved hand. “It was a normal enough box, I guess. Except that it was big, and it was fucking heavy. It looked like it was carved from a single slab of stone, with some kind of writing on it.”
“If that was an ordinary box, I’m the ghost of Elvis,” Allen said, interrupting my thoughts as I rubbed my wrists beneath the steel hoops.
I glanced up at him, struck by the oddly intense quality of his voice. And by the fact that a man who died more than a hundred years ago knew who Elvis was.
“He’s half-right.” The wraith met my eyes with a serious gaze. “Itwasmade of stone, with an elaborate, fitted lid. The sides and top were fancy, carved with designs, and with letters I couldn’t read. Didn’t even recognize. It was a…what’s the word? Kind of like a fancy coffin, you know?”
“Sarcophagus,” I whispered, my vision narrowing to include almost nothing but his face. “That box is a fucking sarcophagus.”
TWELVE
