Dark Water (Cooper M. Reid Book 1) (18 page)

He was sipping on his coffee as he drove half a mile down the road to the twenty-four hour Wal-Mart. He went inside quickly, afraid that if he gave himself enough time, he might very well talk himself out of what he had planned. Coffee in hand, he went about his shopping quickly. He passed only a few other shoppers as he made his way through the aisles. He didn’t think prying eyes would be much of a threat.  While the items it his basket probably seemed suspicious, he thought that they would likely go unnoticed by anyone that happened to be in a Wal-Mart as such an ungodly hour.

Even the cashier seemed not to care; she was a twenty-something blonde with a dark tan, bored out of her mind, and likely only motivated by visions of going to the beach in about seven hours. Cooper wheeled his purchases out to his car in a shopping cart and threw them in the back seat. There was a loud clatter as everything jostled together—the flashlight, the axe, the crowbar, the shovel, the box of garbage bags, and the sledgehammer.

He took one of the plastic bags from his shopping excursion to the front of the car and sat it in the passenger seat. He took out the large bottle of water and the flashlight batteries. He removed the third item from the bag and looked at it with a slight sense of distrust. It was the closest thing to his old equipment he had allowed himself to consider and he
truly
hoped it would work. If it didn’t, he thought he might be in for some very big trouble.

It made him think about what might happen if he died in the next few hours—which, he guessed, was a possibility. At some point, he supposed Stephanie would try to reach out to him, if for no other reason than to check on him. And even if she remained in the shadows, Jenny and Sam might wonder what happened to him after he had told them everything he knew about Douglass Pickman.

There were connections everywhere…from the Blackstocks to Mary Guthrie, and even to Jack, the lore-wielding tour guide at the visitor’s center. If he died, he thought
someone
might put things together.

He tried to imagine what the people he had once worked for might think if they discovered that not only had he resurfaced after disappearing for more than a year, but that he had
really
died while doing an investigation afterwards. The very idea and irony of it made him smile. Cooper knew they’d be more interested to know that the investigation had not been for personal gain; it hadn’t been for a book, an interview, or publicity. It had been to try to help grieving parents move on and, in the process, to potentially prevent the deaths of other kids in the future.

It was the first time he had given any real thought to the idea that by using his real name in these investigations (if there was another to follow this one), the people he had once worked for would probably find him before too long. What they might do to him once he was discovered was a toss-up. They’d either welcome him with open arms (despite his having nearly blown their cover publically on multiple occasions) or take him in a darkened alley and put a bullet in his head.

Cooper wasn’t particularly interested in either scenario.

He pulled out of the Wal-Mart lot and headed back towards Kill Devil Hills. When he passed by the turn-off that would lead him to the Blackstock’s house, he slowed and looked out to the two houses that he had spent time in within the last twelve hours. The lights were still on in the Blackstock’s home, but Mary’s was still dark.

Cooper figured he had another forty-five minutes before the sun came up—maybe an hour. If he was going to be successful at what he had planned, he figured he probably needed to get started before sunrise. After what had happened to the Blackstock’s last night, he could only wonder if something similar or even worse had happened at Mary’s home. He thought he should go by and check, but he simply didn’t have the time.

He drove on through the pre-dawn darkness, heading in the direction of Saddleback Campgrounds.

24

It was still dark when he reached the campground. The road that led onto the property was dark and vacant, showing no signs of life in the early morning darkness. He wasn’t at all surprised to find that a basic security gate had been drawn closed across the road just beyond the visitor’s center. He hadn’t thought to look for this when he had been here yesterday. Of course, he’d had no real idea that he would be returning, especially after business hours.

The gate consisted of a pair of simple hinge-operated rails. One sat on either side of the road, their red arms nearly touching three feet above the center of the pavement. Cooper pulled his car all the way over to the side of the road, stopping just before his front bumper kissed the pole that held the left portion of the gate.

He fished around in his glove compartment until he found a screwdriver. It was part of a small and mostly disorganized toolkit that he had thrown in at the last moment before leaving the place he had called home for nearly nine months after returning to civilization. With the screwdriver and his car keys in hand, he walked to the back of the car and popped the trunk. He took out a sturdy hiking backpack and spent the next few minutes doing his best to pack quickly for the task at hand.

He placed his bottle of water in the front compartment of the book bag and then took all of his purchases out of the car. He had assumed that most of it wasn’t going to fit in the bag but was pleased to find that the axe and crowbar fit without much of a fight so long as he left the top portion of the pack unzipped. The head of the axe jutted out as if he were some sort of medieval warrior. As for the sledgehammer and shovel, he was going to have to carry those by hand.

He took the one last remaining item out of the car—the one he had observed nervously in the car before leaving the Wal-Mart parking lot—and placed it in the front pouch along with the water. He was tempted to open it then and there but thought he’d wait until he was sure he’d need it. There was far too much of a risk of having an accident; if he lost this one item, he might very well be doomed.

He inserted the flashlight batteries into the flashlight and checked it. He aimed a flat white beam of light at the red barriers that sat across the road. Satisfied, he slid the flashlight into the small compartment with the water and zipped it up.

Finally, he used the screwdriver to remove the license plates from the car. He slid them down into the backpack where they clanged against the axe handle and the crowbar. If he had left  them on and someone called for a tow, the plates could easily be tracked when run through the system. They would be Lukas Nye of Salt Lake City, Utah. Mr. Nye did not exist, but it wouldn’t take very much effort to find out where the alias had come from. And taking that chance was risky.

The mastermind behind Cooper’s labyrinthine bank accounts had also made sure the plates were safe but, he had been quick to point out, the ruse was not bulletproof. Cooper wasn’t about to take those chances.

He gave the car a quick once-over and, as a final thought, went back to the glove compartment. He took out a small crumpled envelope and a pen. He wrote a quick note on it, hoping it would help rather that hurt his plans. He quickly scrawled:

Jack,

Not sure how much pull you have here, but this is your writer friend, This is my car. I’ll be back for it by the end of the day. Please see that it doesn’t get towed.

He rolled down the window and then rolled it back up, trapping the note between the glass and the frame. He then pocketed the keys and locked the doors. He then walked around the security rails and started walking down the tree-lined road that led to the trails.

A few minutes into his walk, he heard the first birdsong of the day. The sky had lightened just a bit since he had parked his car, but he thought dawn was till about twenty or thirty minutes away. Other than the early birds, the only sounds along the road were the gentle clanging of the crowbar and axe in his pack. He carried the sledgehammer and shovel in each hand, both tools propped against his shoulder.

He had walked less than half a mile, but the weight of the tools was already catching up to him. Back in the day, when he had just started as an FBI agent, he’d been a nearly perfect physical specimen and would have been able to run several miles with all of this weight on him. He’d started his career at just shy of six feet tall, weighing one hundred and seventy pounds. He’d never really been muscular, but always seemed to have massive reserves of strength.

But then he had been courted by the seedier undercurrents of the bureau and things had changed—not just physically but mentally. The stress had caught up to him. There had been more travel involved. He stopped working out as much and had put on a bit of extra weight. His strength had dwindled as he had replaced a rigorous workout routine with redeye flights to the next haunted destination or unexplained event.

After he had come back from his disappearance in Tilton, Kansas, Cooper had holed up in a location that only his mastermind friend knew about. He had come back from that other place that he couldn’t remember very weakened and slightly ill. After he’d gotten re-established and found a place to stay, he had done some basic training to build up his frame and endurance. He was nowhere near the chiseled FBI agent he had been eleven years ago, but he thought he was of a respectable build for a thirty-six year old that had spent the last several years either chasing the unknown or disappearing from the face of the earth.

Carrying the tools on his back and across his shoulder made him re-evaluate that, though.

He saw the first true traces of dawn when he reached the first sign along the trail. The white embossed letters looked almost like fog on the wooden sign in the scant light of dawn. A white arrow sat underneath a single word: HIKING.

Cooper took this road, the pavement giving way to dirt. Had it really been less than twenty-four hours since he had driven his car down here? It was hard to believe. It made him feel tired and altogether disconnected. He found himself wondering what Jack Paulson was doing right now.

Probably still sleeping,
Cooper thought.
Lucky bastard.

He walked on in the silence of early morning hours. He thought of Stephanie and wondered how long it would be before she reached out to him—
if
she would reach out to him. The scene on the rocks and the eerie connections found in Mary Guthrie’s guestbook had frightened her in a way that he had seen before in other people. He was certain that Stephanie would come around and accept it all, but he worried about how it might alter her as a person. She could easily become someone very much unlike the woman he currently knew.

He sort of hated the fact that he wished she was there with him as he huffed it down the dirt road towards the hiking trails.

Thinking of her, he checked his phone and saw that it was 5:54. With the knowledge of everything that was ahead of him in the course of the day, his body seemed to ache. When he realized that the day was already passing by with slow agony.

He started passing signs that boasted familiar names. Echo Trail, Hubbard Trail…and then the one he was looking for: Pickman’s Trail.

He gave the historical marker only a cursory glance. He stopped for a moment and looked down the thin trail that wound away from the main stretch and into the forest. He sat the sledgehammer and the shovel down, readjusted the weight of the pack on his back, and then picked the tools back up.

Cooper started down Pickman’s Trail and already felt like he was being watched.

***

When he reached the cavern entrance, he dropped the sledgehammer and shovel as if they had bitten him. He then slugged off the backpack and slowly dropped to his knees. The clatter of its contents filled the morning like alien music. He looked down to the tools and thought:
Am I really going to do this?

The answer, of course, was yes. And he knew he needed to start now. He was going to be making a good amount of noise in the next several minutes and he wanted to be done before the campground workers started milling in.

He approached the blockade and studied it again, trying to find the easiest solution to breaking through. He rolled his eyes at the Do Not Enter signs and the graffiti (
THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID)
as he went back to his tools.

He had no illusions of being able to pry the boards and the plywood supports away from the entrance; the bolts were far too huge for that. Because the boards and plywood were bolted to the rock face, he figured it would be easiest to just try obliterating the boards and then prying off what he could with the crowbar. After all, he wasn’t trying to remove the whole blockade. He just needed to break away enough of it to squeeze inside.

He attacked with the axe first, hitting the boards at the edges, hoping to cause the plywood beneath to splinter. It took a few swings until the boards started cracking, revealing the plywood sheets beneath. The sound was like a bomb in the silent morning, echoing in a report that seemed to never end. He had no problem imagining that people taking morning strolls along the beach in Kill Devil Hills could hear it.

When there was enough of the chipped and splintered plywood base revealed, he picked up the sledgehammer. He hefted it in his hands and then swung it at the plywood. He got lucky in that the plywood was mostly soft, resulting in either cheap product or weather damage, or both. Still, soft or not, the noise it made rivaled the commotion the axe had created.

Within four swings of the sledgehammer, the plywood cracked and fell apart. Behind it, there was only darkness. Cooper dropped the sledgehammer and selected the crowbar. He attacked the left side of the blockade, where he had already attacked with the axe and sledgehammer. He pried portions away from the rock, some coming off in small chunks while others splintered off in sections a foot or so long. When he reached the center of the chopped board, the remainder came off in a large chunk that fell to the ground.