For half a minute, she could do no more than force breath into her lungs. The stink of burnt gunpowder in the closed space sickened her. She laid the flashlight beside her. Then, shifting the pistol to her left hand, she raised her right and slipped her fingers inside her jacket.

“Oh, God,” she gurgled, feeling warm fluid soaking her top. Then she felt the small, ridged hole a couple of inches below her left nipple. My heart is under that, she thought. I’m dead.

“Hey, lady,” said a soft voice. Harold’s voice. “Can you still talk?”

Caitlin squinted at the crack of light, searching for a target, but she saw nothing. She still wasn’t sure what had happened. Had Harold shot her? Or had someone standing behind him shot them both? Or had they shot her and knifed him?

“What happened?” she croaked.

“I know you’ve got more bullets. That Springfield holds ten.”

Caitlin didn’t want to believe that the boy had shot her. If he had, then she had no hope of getting out of here alive.

“What happened?” she asked. “Is somebody else out there?”

“No. And you owe me for that. Captain Ozan told me to call him when I got you out here, but I didn’t. And I ain’t gonna. I got a walkie-talkie right here, and I ain’t even turned it on. You’re a nice lady. You don’t need to go through that.”

A wracking sob burst from Caitlin’s throat. “You shot me?”

“I had to. But it’s way better than what could have happened, believe me. Pretty thing like you . . . they’d rape you for sure. All day long, front and back. Even shot like you are now. They don’t care. That Ozan, and Colonel Forrest, man . . . they’re sick.”

Gasping for breath, Caitlin tried to understand why a black man would be working for the likes of the Knox family.

“Look up to the left of those wired-up bones,” Harold said. “Shine my flashlight. You see what’s up there?”

Caitlin didn’t try to lift the light. But in a shaft thrown from the door, she saw a woman’s leather coat hanging on a nail, brown and tattered where the waist hem should have been.

“That ain’t what you think it is,” Harold said. “That’s a skin. That lady wasn’t much older than you, either. Mexican lady. She got in the wrong car one night. Po-lice car. Now there she is.”

Caitlin struggled to hold down the few bites of cheeseburger she’d eaten at the Crossroads Café. She thought of Terry Foreman waiting there, her bright cheerleader’s face lined with worry.

“Will you help me?” she asked, trying not to sound pathetic. “I’ll pay anything you ask. A hundred thousand dollars. Two hundred.”

“You shoulda said something sooner. It’s too late now.”

Caitlin thought of her father, sitting in his office in the glass tower high above Charlotte. “My father will pay you a million dollars if you take me to a hospital, Harold. A million dollars. No questions asked. I mean it. He doesn’t care about any of this crap. Not the bones . . . nothing. Only me.”

Caitlin realized she was crying.

“Shit,” Harold muttered from outside the fissure. “After what I done just now, your daddy would stake me to the ground and back his car over me.”

“He wouldn’t!”

“This ain’t what I wanted,” said the boy. “My brother’s stuck in Angola. Twenty-year sentence. Now that I done this, Colonel Forrest will get him out. Next month, when his parole hearing comes up.”

Caitlin finally understood what had happened. Harold Wallis was probably a low-level drug dealer. He’d recognized her the moment he saw her standing outside the service station with Terry, and he’d called someone in the Knox organization. Probably Captain Ozan. Ozan had made him a proposition, or given him an order, and he’d strolled into the café to make his pitch. And she’d been so gullible! She’d brushed Terry’s doubts aside like the fears of a nervous child. After all, wasn’t she on a crusade for justice? Justice for murdered black activists? Surely a young black man would be on the side of the angels.

Caitlin cursed as the pain in her chest intensified. She’d made an assumption based on race—exactly what she’d always told others not to do—and it had proved her undoing. The irony was that she’d made a positive assumption, and thus hadn’t seen it as an assumption at all.

“You won’t get away with this!” she screamed. Every word caused her agony, but she kept shouting. “Terry saw you at the café! She saw your driver’s license. They have security cameras back there! The FBI will find you, no matter where you go!”

“Lady, you got no idea how things work down here. Colonel Forrest can make them tapes disappear. He can make that Terry disappear if he wants to. She’s liable to be in a car with Captain Ozan right now, thinking he’s trying to save you.”

Caitlin moaned. She felt as though a strong man were pressing down on her breastbone.

“Colonel Forrest, he’s connected all over this state. Even up in Washington. That’s how it’s always been down here. My granddaddy told me that. Forrest’s daddy was just like him. He kept all the niggers round here in line for the Man.”

She wanted to speak, but her lungs felt like they’d shrunk to a quarter of their normal size. Maybe it’s panic, she thought.

“You still awake?” Harold called.

When she didn’t reply, he said, “Come on, now. Don’t play games with me.”

A terrifying thought came to her. “Harold, please,” she gasped. “I’m pregnant.”

The boy said nothing to this. Had she struck a chord of compassion?

“I just found out. I was . . . supposed to be getting married next week, and . . . I’m already pregnant. If you let me die here, you’re killing my baby, too.”

After a long silence, a spooked whisper said, “You’re lying.”

“I’m not,” Caitlin sobbed. “I wouldn’t lie about that.”

“Women lie about being with child all the time.”

“Oh, God,” she croaked. “Why don’t you just . . . fucking get it over with?”

“ ’Cause I know you’ve got more bullets. It’ll be over soon enough.”

She wondered why Harold had only shot her once. He must be worried about attracting attention, in case there were still deputies in the swamp. Honest deputies like Carl Sims. Harold had been genuinely frightened by the sounds of the boat motors during the trip in.

With desperate effort, Caitlin raised her pistol, then shut her eyes and fired two shots at the crack of light. Then she opened her eyes and watched for the slightest movement at the edge of the fissure.

A shadow deepened at the right edge of the crack.

She fired.

Harold cried out in pain, then screamed in fury.

Caitlin gritted her teeth and scooted about three feet to her left. Seconds later, the barrel of the .22 rifle appeared in the crack and orange flame shot from it. The impacting rounds knocked stinging wood chips into her face, but at least no lead struck her.

“Fuck you!” she yelled, and fired another round. “You missed!”

One shot left.

She waited for the barrel to appear again, but it didn’t. Twenty seconds later, she heard the trolling motor start up. Panic shot through her like a jolt of electric current. She tried to roll sideways and crawl across the dirt floor, but it was useless. Before she’d made it two feet, she heard the hum of the motor fading. Ten seconds later, all was silent.

But not for long. For some reason her ears began ringing, making a harsh sound like her junior-high-school bell, only this bell wouldn’t stop. She drew all the breath she could into her lungs, then slowly, agonizingly, forced herself back into a sitting position. She only managed it because the earth humped against the wall helped her get herself out of a prone position.

Taking the flashlight in her hand, she shone it around once more in hopes of finding something that might somehow help her. This time she played the beam around the seam where the trunk legs met the earth, where dirt and other organic matter had been mounded up in the darkest part of the cave. As the beam came closer to her, she realized that the mound she had clung to as she pulled herself up was not all made of earth.