Sunken Graves, Alan Lee [all ebook reader .txt] 📗

The life of Craig Lewis and the safety of Daisy. Those women already buried or burned, a hook in her mouth.

The career of Coach Murray and journalist Kabir Patel. And Lynch’s children.

And his own sanity.

Jennings drew close enough to the main homestead to see the lights, use them for bearing, redirect himself north. He stumbled onto a paved road and followed it to a clearing where someone had felled trees with an ax. He risked the heavy Maglite for a moment and realized he stood next to a construction site, clearly future stables.

Consulting Google Earth, there was a field…that way. In a fit of madness, Jennings tugged an ax from its burial in a chopping stump. It wasn’t an ax, he saw, but an old splitting maul with a long handle. Not the ideal weapon but he took it with him.

Jennings left the forest and walked into what looked like an old cornfield, acres wide and deep. The moon was hidden with heavy clouds and each step was taken by faith, unwilling for his flashlight to act as a signal beacon. Somehow the field felt more godforsaken than the forest and his skin crawled. No heavens above, just a ceiling of rain.

The toes of his right foot began to squish in his shoe. He zigzagged through the scrubby brush, walking half a mile this way and that, wondering what he should be looking for, until the ground gave way and he stumbled. A ditch? He set the maul down and slid his flashlight under his shirt and clicked it on, providing just enough ambient glow to make out details.

He stood in a depression. Three feet wide and twenty feet long, shallower at the far ends, a foot deep at the middle. In the depression, the vegetation was sparse and immature. Like a giant had recently scooped off a thin chunk of earth.

What caused a depression? Resettled dirt, something buried? A pipe? Cables? No, it was only this spot.

Maybe a grave.

Jennings felt like the thought came from outside his body.

I suspect Peter kills prostitutes who anger him.

Women buried in California.

Jennings’ hands trembled, but not from the cold. It took him three tries to mark his exact location on his phone. Because there was a chance he was standing on an unmarked gravesite. And if so, he had proof.

Proof! This was all a game of proof, the private detective had said.

Was there more?

Another ten minutes of searching and his feet found a smoother path. Again he shoved the flashlight under his shirt and ignited the bulb with fingers trembling from the cold. He was walking along tracks made by a machine, maybe a bulldozer, the tracks smoothed by multiple trips.

He followed the tracks. His sodden clothes had long been heavy but he felt the weight now.

The tracks ended at a dig site. The machine, a small bulldozer or Bobcat, had plowed up a furrow in the field. A trench. Twenty feet long, deeper in the middle, maybe four feet so far. Mounds of dirt were piled at both ends of the trench.

The Bobcat had run through the trench over and over, deepening it, pushing the excess earth to the far sides. Excavating something? Was something underground he needed access to? Was this a future construction site? Or maybe Lynch had another victim planned.

He dropped the maul into the mud and carefully walked down the steep incline. The walls came up to his chest at the bottom and he crouched. Shined the flashlight around.

There was nothing. The sides of the furrow were marred by uneven half circles, evidence of manual digging with a shovel.

He groaned and clenched his eyes shut. Despite his best efforts, his body demanded he reckon with the ugly reality, the specter that he may be crouching in a nascent grave planned for Daisy. Or maybe himself. He gulped down nausea.

Jennings was climbing from the trench when he noticed light scattering along the ground. And in the raindrops.

He twisted to identify the source, swallowing panic, and his prosthetic foot slipped. He slapped the trench’s incline hard, mud spurting, and he slid down to the bottom again. Scrambling to regain his feet. Peering over the trench’s wall.

A bright beam in the trees. Had to be a flashlight, casting long shadows through the trunks and limning the downpour.

Jennings cursed and spit water. Some absurd instinct wanted to grab the Falcon handheld radio on his shoulder and report the enemy. He was in a perfectly defensible position…except he had no firearm and no radio and no special forces backup. He was no longer a Green Beret; he was an unarmed, one-legged interloper covered in mud.

The source of light was growing closer.

Jennings didn’t trust the treacherous incline and he was already filthy so he squirmed over the side of the trench using upper body strength. The earth was freezing.

Whoever was coming had cleared the tree line. Jennings couldn’t see anything beyond the awful light. He scrambled behind the farthest mound and crouched. Held the heavy Maglite like a club.

He’d lost the maul, dammit, on the other side of the trench.

Waiting and shivering and peering around the mound. The challenging flashlight bobbed closer and larger. He kept his eyes off the glare, watching in his peripheral.

Without prompting, his mind ran through the Ranger rules. If you cannot satisfy yourself as to the enemy’s number and strength, conceal yourself. Don’t stand up when the enemy’s coming. Kneel down or hide. Let the enemy come close enough to touch and then finish him.

He knew who the man had to be. It was inevitable; life kept smashing them together. But was he armed? The man stopped near the lip of the trench, twenty feet away, his beam searching the ground.

Peter Lynch. His face was half-hidden in the hood of his Gore-Tex rain jacket. His flashlight came to rest straight down.

The ambient light was enough for Jennings to see the glint of his eyes, the spots in Lynch’s beard not yet grown in. What the hell was Lynch