A String of Beads (Jane Whitefield, #8)(112)

“What about you?” said Mattie.

“If I hide the car well enough, they might think they guessed wrong and go back toward Hanover. If they find the car, I’ll try to get them to go after me.”

“Can’t you go with us?” said Chelsea.

Jane said, “The entrance is up ahead. I see buildings. Get ready.”

The road swept downward and dissolved onto a wide, flat, empty plateau of a parking lot with two low buildings on the right side. The small, barn-like red one had a low fence in front of it and big, white cutout letters over the door that could be read in the moonlight: MINE MUSEUM. The long building beside it looked like a store. Jane stopped by the fence and stared into the dark space beyond. There was a hill with a large, cavernous opening. “There it is. Go.”

Mattie, Jimmy, and Chelsea got out and ran for the opening. Jane could see the dim luminescence of a circle of moonlight far ahead of them, and realized this was not a cave, but a tunnel dug through the hillside leading to the bottom of the open-pit. Jane drove along the buildings looking ahead for some opening in the trees beyond where the road would resume, but she approached the end of the lot, and there was only a great emptiness ahead where her headlights shone into the air but hit nothing.

At the end of the parking lot she turned right into a weedy field, still searching for the mouth of a road for two hundred feet. There was nothing but brush, and then trees beyond that. She drove through the field until she reached a thicket of young trees, and pulled as far into it as she could, stopped, and turned off the headlights. She got out and looked for something to use as cover. The car was dark colored and dusty from the gravel road, but it wasn’t invisible. She ran into the woods and found some broken, dead pine boughs and a floor of pine needles. She dragged the boughs out and tossed them over the car, went back a second time for more, and then went back a third time, took off her jacket, lay it down and scooped pine needles into it, then carried it back and dumped them onto the roof of the car. She went back and refilled it twice, spreading them over the trunk and roof.

As she moved farther into the woods for more boughs, she saw the lights appear. As the SUV bumped up over the last rise of the forest, its headlights shot up into the sky, and then dipped low as the vehicle coasted down the last hill into the parking lot. Jane stepped deeper into the foliage to watch.

The silver SUV moved slowly onto the flat expanse, heading along the low buildings, slowing to a stop a couple of times, once by the museum building and then at the long store building. The men seemed to be looking in the windows for signs that someone was inside. As they went on, Jane backed up inside the edge of the woods to stay out of their sight.

The SUV stopped at the end of the parking lot, its lights shining off into the empty space. From here she could see better, and she realized that ahead of the SUV the land dropped off sharply. There was only the clear black sky filled with stars, and below it, a vague dark smear of distant mountains. Then the headlights went off.

Jane lay down in the weeds as the doors of the SUV opened. The dome lights came on, and she watched four men get out. Finally she got a good look at them. They were wearing blue jeans, dark shirts, and windbreaker jackets. It occurred to her that they had probably not worn them because they’d expected to be out here in the woods, but to cover their guns. One of the men took a pistol out of the car and put it into the back of his belt, and another went to the rear hatch of the SUV, opened it, and took a rifle out of the storage space. The rifle had the distinctive shape of an AR-15 clone, with an extralong magazine extending under the receiver and a flash suppressor on the muzzle.

Jane felt the tension in her chest growing and tightening. She wished she had taken the time to bring the shotgun from the apartment herself. The four men were all standing in the glow of the SUV’s dome lights. If she’d had the shotgun she would have aimed her first shot at the man with the rifle, and that might have given her time to fire again.

Jane had given the three pistols to her runners, and that left her unarmed except for her lock-blade pocketknife. She watched as the man in the back reached into the storage space again and took out flashlights. He handed them to his companions, who took them and tried them out, letting the beams dance on the ground at their feet, and then sweep the area randomly. The men began to walk toward the tunnel into the mine.

Jane moved down to the place where she had left the car. She knelt and reached up under the car to the inner side of the right wheel, got some sooty black grease on her hand, and then moved her fingers in a wavy line from her hairline to her chin, got more, and smeared it on the other side of her face, got more for her neck, and the backs of her hands. When she was painted, she moved after the men.

Jane climbed higher up the rising ground, stalking them, watching where they went. They used their flashlights, trying to keep from stumbling over stones or stepping in mud, making no attempt to remain unseen. They weren’t expecting a fight. They were here for a massacre.

She watched them stop at the mouth of the tunnel and shine their flashlights into it for a minute or two. She could see a small, narrow stream of water in the tunnel, a bit of mud, a stony surface with some loose stones. Then the man with the rifle separated from the others and began to climb the hill to the right of the tunnel entrance. Jane understood. He would find a high vantage point. While the others flushed out their victims on the floor of the mine, he would take the kill shots from above. Jimmy, Mattie, and Chelsea might be able to stay hidden for a while. They might even manage to ambush one of the men entering the mine, since the men weren’t expecting resistance. But they couldn’t do anything to the man above with the rifle, and his weapon gave him overwhelming firepower.