Outside of the costume, Cherry was naked. She looked worn and frightened, but angry as well, watching Stone like he was a deadly snake, one she might kill if she found the chance.

I looked through slitted eyes as Cherry saw my crumpled form. Her eyes dropped in despair. I had no way to signal her without alerting Stone to my consciousness.

Stone rope-dragged Cherry to the far end of the structure, tying her to an iron hoop in the wall. My eyes searched the ground and saw a brown glint in the dirt a yard away, glass. I wormed through the mud, scraped at it with my fingernail, unearthing a semi-triangular shard from a beer bottle, shorter than my thumb. It was thick on one end where the wall of the bottle joined the butt end, pointed on the other. As a weapon, it was lacking - short and brittle - but it was something. I cupped it in my palm, shot a veiled glance at Stone.

He was staring at me.

“I saw you move,” he whispered.

He was reaching for a dark wooden bar when I closed my eyes, heard feet pounding my way. I made myself go limp, knowing what was coming.

The feet stopped beside the cage. The stick probed my back, jabbed my side.

Slashed down on my legs, the pain like a dozen simultaneous hornet stings.

Don’t move … don’t move …

The rod slashed down twice again. Finally satisfied I was unconscious, Stone padded back toward the dogs and prodded them with the stick. The emptiness in his eyes was spooky. Stone was foreign in time, inhabiting a world his body had left twenty years ago, but where his mind remained in a prison beyond anything of rock and iron. It was not the world of his miserable childhood, of the XFL, of the hole in the barn floor. Stone was in the twilight of all his worlds, and they intersected on these unholy grounds where, long ago, children had fought in the pit they called the grave.

When the dogs were foaming and furious, Stone went to Cherry and began untying the rope from the iron ring.

“Come on, Colonel,” he said, jerking her across the floor toward the pit.

“I’m not the Colonel,” Cherry gasped. “I’m—”

Stone calmly backhanded Cherry. She caromed off the wall, slipped in dogshit spread across the floor, fell to her knees. Stone grabbed the back of her hair, lifting. She groaned and fought to her feet, the hat sideways, glue tearing away. Stone replaced the hat atop her head, slapped it down. The blow must have been like a pile-driver, but Cherry stayed standing.

“Time to meet the boys, Colonel,” Stone said.

I wondered if I was seeing a fantasy created while he had retreated inside himself during his false abduction. He’d fantasized killing Powers by dressing her in whore garb, inverting logic by “baptizing” her in the pond. He’d crushed Burton beneath the kind of vehicle in which the man likely raped the young Teeter Gasper as he had William Taithering. Stone had fed poison to Tanner, a dark echo of the preacher feeding spoiled food to the boys in the camp.

I wondered what Stone imagined for the Colonel.

I heard a moan and saw Cherry stagger and seem to falter. It was a ruse. She snapped a kick into Stone’s belly that doubled him over. Cherry kicked again, catching Stone in his head. But Cherry’s kicks were nothing compared to punishment Stone had absorbed from professionals; his open hand swatted her like a troublesome fly. She spun away into the dirt.

“Get up, Colonel,” Stone whispered. “Up and up.”

Cherry tried to rise, hands squishing in the mud. Stone again lifted her to her feet with her hair, the hat tumbling away. He pushed Cherry into the pit and she sprawled across its mud-slick bottom. Stone retrieved Cherry’s clothes from the floor and used the dark stick to push them between the bars of the dog cage. The enraged animals shredded the cloth in seconds. Stone put his back to the cage and began skidding it over the floor to the pit, his heels digging into the floor.

“We’re going to be free,” he called over his shoulder to Cherry. “We’re free tonight, Colonel.”

Stone’s eyes glittered with an electric glow, haunted by his need to tear free of the bonds of his childhood. Stone grunted the cage toward the edge of the pit, the grave. The dogs tore at the metal, aching to sink their teeth into flesh.

Stone had only to release the latch and the dogs would cover Cherry. He stood back and took a final look at the scenario, an eerie smile on his face, beatific calm. My mind raced to fathom the shapes in Stone’s head. What had eleven-year-old Teeter Gasper seen in this place eighteen years ago? Who had he known?

Jimmie Hawkes.

With Stone’s eyes turned to his tableau, I stripped to white briefs and rolled the sides into straps, a white pouch over my genitals. Stone moved toward the cage and put his hand on the latch. The dogs fought at the door, establishing which came first to Cherry’s throat.

I dipped my finger in the mud at my feet and scrawled a dark shape on the white cloth, like a number, feverishly trying to recall what Jimmie Hawkes screamed in LaGrange.

“YEEEEEE-HAH!” I screamed maniacally, leaping from one side of the cage to the other. “PUT ON YOUR CUPS AND COVER YOUR PUPS!” The sound echoed through the barn. The dogs stopped fighting and looked my way, sensing more quarry.

“PIN A NUMBER ON YOUR DICK!” I howled. “BUST THEIR ASSES AND GET SOME EAT IN THE BELLY! EAT AND MORE EAT.”

Stone halted, his face turning to me. “Jimmie?” he said, confusion clouding his eyes.

“DOPE AND WHISKEY AND GETTIN’ ALL FRISKY! WIN AND FILL THE MOUTH-HOLE!”

“Jimmie? Is that you?”

I drummed down my body, jerking my hips, Stone was frozen in the black hole of his mind, mouth open and aghast at whatever images I was creating in his brain. His hand fell from the latch. I pointed my hand at him like I was delivering an ultimatum.

“READ THE DOG, BUDDY! THE DOG KNOWS THE FUTURE.” I bounced from side to side of the cage like a trapped animal. I stopped, stumbled as if seized by a terrible thought. I craned back my head and screamed.

“HERE COMES THE SNACK TRUCK!”

No, Stone mouthed, his face seized by fearful awe.

“HELP ME TEETER,” I cried. “I WANT OUT FROM THE GRAVE!”

Stone seemed as numb as a zombie as he plodded to my cage, yanked open the door. He came to me with arms wide.

“Jimm—”

My hand flicked out and slashed his left eye with the shard. When reflex pulled his hand to the eye, I jammed the shard so deep into the right eye I felt it hit bottom, whatever that was.

He screamed like a scalded banshee but instead of grabbing at his eye he closed his massive hands around my neck, as if everything in him had burned away but the instinct to fight. I jabbed at his face with the glass but he tucked it between his arms and all I could do was scrape at his crown. His hands seemed ready to meet in the center of my windpipe and I heard the roar of unconsciousness closing in, felt the final rush down the vortex. The roar turned to a series of noises I figured would be the last sounds I ever heard. It sounded like twigs breaking in a moonlit forest.

Was Crayline after me in the next life, too?

55

“You’re a hot dog, Ryder,” said the voice in the sky.

“And you just about got what hot dogs deserve. Cooked.”

Krenkler’s voice. It zoomed down to stop just past my splayed feet. I opened my eyes. The agent named Rourke was crouched beside me, palpating my neck.

“Nothing broke,” he said to Krenkler.

“You can’t win ‘em all.”

“Cherry!” I said, my head snapping upward.

“Outside getting medical attention,” Krenkler said. “She’s all right, outside of cuts and bruises.”

My eyes came to focus on a human form, horizontal and still, the body of Jessie Stone face-down in the mud of the barn floor. I smelled cordite in the air and realized the cracking twigs were gunshots.