Chapter 4 - THE SAFE HOUSE BY THE LEVEE
I didn't take Route 61 north toward the safety of St. Louis. I knew what men with money did to city roads: they made phone calls. Within ten minutes, every patrol cruiser between Evergreen and the Gateway Arch would be looking for a stolen red Dodge with a shattered rear window.
Instead, I cut west toward the river bottoms, following the gravel haul roads that serviced the grain elevators. This was land I knew. When I was sixteen, Rose and I lived in a rusted FEMA trailer outside Ste. Genevieve. I had spent two summers hauling diesel drums for the barge operators along these levees.
The rain turned the dirt road into grease. The Dodge’s rear end fishtailed violently as I wrestled the steering wheel, my arms burning from the strain. Behind us, the SUV had the advantage of all-wheel drive and four tons of computerized stability, but it was wide and heavy. On these narrow, ditch-flanked levee paths, weight was a liability.
"Turn here!" Marianne screamed, pointing at an overgrown spur that led into a stand of black willow.
"No," I barked. "That's a dead cut. It drops straight into a drainage canal. He wants us to go that way."
I hit the brakes just enough to let the Dodge’s nose dip, then snapped the wheel hard to the left, cutting across an open soy field that had been harvested down to gray stubble. The truck hit the furrowed dirt with a spine-compressing jolt. Mud exploded against the floorboards. The Dodge shivered, screamed in low gear, and plowed through the mud toward an abandoned limestone pump house sitting sixty yards from the river's edge.
The black SUV tried to follow, but its driver was used to interstate pavement. He carried too much speed into the turn. The massive vehicle slid sideways, its front tires digging deep into the Missouri gumbo, and with a sickening, heavy thud, it high-centered on the field's irrigation berm, its wheels spinning uselessly, flinging plumes of black earth fifty feet into the air.
I didn't wait to watch them dig it out.
I slammed the Dodge behind the pump house, killed the ignition, and pulled the emergency brake until the cable groaned.
"Out," I said, grabbing my backpack from the floor.
"Where are we going?" Marianne was shivering violently now, the wet cold having penetrated to her skin. Her stockings were shredded, her soles bleeding from the gravel.
"Down," I said.
The pump house was built during the Depression—reinforced concrete walls four feet thick, designed to survive the Mississippi’s worst floods. Beneath the main floor sat the old intake pit, accessible through a rusted iron trapdoor hidden under a layer of rotting grain sacks. I hauled the iron ring up with a grunt, revealing a square of pitch-black darkness that smelled of river mud and cold iron.
"I can't go down there," she gasped, backing away against the wet limestone wall. "It's... there's no light."
"There's no bullets down there either," I said. I grabbed her waist and lowered her onto the iron rungs of the ladder before she could argue. I climbed down after her, catching the heavy trapdoor with one hand and easing it down until the iron latch clicked into its rusted seat.
I pulled a small, battered penlight from my pack and clicked it on.
The circle of pale yellow light illuminated a space eight feet square. The water level was low—just a thin film of brown scum over cracked concrete. In the corner sat a dry wooden pallet I had hauled down here four years ago when Rose was coughing blood and I needed a place to stash two cartons of antibiotics I had bought off an unlicensed vet in Festus.
Marianne slid down against the concrete wall, pulling her knees to her chest. She looked up at me through wet, matted hair, her teeth chattering in the damp dark.
"You've been here before," she said.
"Rose died two miles from here," I told her, my voice echoing off the concrete. "In a dry cabin behind a bait shop. She had three dollars in her purse and a half-empty bottle of generic cough syrup. If she was a thief, she was the worst one in the history of Missouri."
Marianne closed her eyes. Two clean tracks cut through the soot and mud on her cheeks. "She wasn't a thief, Matthew. She was an accomplice who found a conscience too late. And she paid for it with every hour of her life."
"Why didn't you come looking sooner?" The question burst out of me, bitter and hot, burning away the cold. "You had money. You had that navy coat and your fancy lawyers. I spent three winters wearing bread bags inside my sneakers so my toes wouldn't rot off. Where the hell were you?"
Marianne looked at me, and in the small yellow beam of the flashlight, I saw something that silenced me.
She pulled back the lapel of her ruined coat, then the collar of her silk blouse. Across her collarbone, running from the hollow of her throat down toward her shoulder, was a thick, jagged ridge of pale scar tissue—the distinctive mark of an old, traumatic burn that had healed without proper plastic surgery.
"When you disappeared," she said, her voice dropping to a whisper that sounded like dead leaves scraping across concrete, "I went to the police. I named Julian. I told the district attorney that Victor had been poisoned, that his heart hadn't just 'given out' at thirty-one. Two nights later, my car was forced off the bridge over the Missouri River. It caught fire. I woke up in a private sanitarium in Iowa under a court-ordered psychiatric hold that Julian’s pet judges renewed every six months."
She pulled her blouse back up with shaking fingers.
May you like
"It took me fourteen years to get declared sane, Matthew. It took me another four to claw back enough of my trust allowance to hire investigators who weren't on Julian’s payroll. I didn't abandon you. I was in a cage of my own."
Above us, the heavy tread of combat boots struck the concrete floor of the pump house.
