Recap: Lester and Ranger search through the night. They find the house, but there is noone there. Just a freshly dug grave in the backyard.
Ranger
I don't shock easily. Not anymore. Having a friend blown away right next to you has a tendency to put other things into perspective. But when I entered the backyard and saw the hill of dirt in front of me, I just stopped. The world came crashing down around my ears. I stared, not having any idea what to do. What could I do? I was too late. I'd failed.
A minute later Lester came up behind me, also staring at the mound. "What do you want to do?"
I shook my head. "I don't know. Because I don't know enough. Any chance she's not in there?"
"We can check upstairs, but she's not on the first floor. But she was here at some point, no question about that." I handed him the transmitter, a long curly brown hair still caught in it.
Tank
Ranger and I have been through some strange shit together. Caves, deserts, jungles, and an unspeakable incident that still leaves me with a fear of mice. But Vampires? This was some new shit and I was getting tired of it. I had never seen Ranger this desperate.
We had searched timeshare communities up and down the shore, but they were all dark and abandoned. This search felt impossible, but if there was one person I wasn't going to give up on in my life, it was Ranger.
My phone rang. This early in the morning it was a lot more likely to be someone I knew than an important call about my car's warranty. I looked at the screen. Ranger, of course. "Yo"
"We found her."
"That's great! Is she OK?"
Silence. Fuck, if she was dead he was going to blame himself and never get over it. He had enough eating at him.
"We don't know. We need more information."
"Should I call off the search?"
"Yes. I need you to join me. But I also need you to grab some supplies on the way."
Ranger
I explained what I needed to Tank, and called Cal next. I'd had him watching Jimmy Alpha to make sure he didn't run off. "Is he still there?" I asked.
"He's there. And he might have trouble leaving without a distributor cap. "
"I need to talk to him" I told Cal, "he needs to be intimidated enough that he answers my questions, but not so intimidated that he can't talk. Tell him I sent you, that may loosen his tongue."
Tank
There are some places you expect to go shopping when you work for Ranger. First stop, the Army/Navy surplus store, normal. Second stop, camping supply store, why not? We practice maneuvers in the Pine Barrens sometimes. The third stop, a theater supply company, was a new one for me though. Of course, vampires were a new one as well. I loaded up my purchases and headed for the address Ranger had given me.
"This has been a weird fucking day" I mumbled to myself.
Hal
I banged on the front door until a rumpled looking man opened it. He seemed like he hadn't gotten any sleep at all. He looked up at me. And up. I can always tell when someone realizes I've got the skull tattoo, their eyes change. I held out the phone. "Ranger wants to talk to you. I suggest you corporate."
Without taking his eyes off me, he took the phone and raised it to his ear. "Hello?" he croaked.
I couldn't hear what Ranger said clearly, but I did catch the word 'grave'. What the hell had happened?
Alpha turned away, mumbling into the phone. I couldn't hear either side anymore. After a couple minutes he came back and handed me my phone. "He hung up on me!"
I nodded. "He does that."
Ranger
I hung up the phone and talked to Lester. "I think Benito sleeps during the day. But he doesn't usually sleep underground. He stays in his apartment, and it's on the second floor."
Lester looked at the mound. "So who's there? Ramirez, Stephanie, or both?"
Ranger shook his head. "Not sure. We'll take precautions as if they are both there."
"And what does that mean?"
"Whoever is under there, we are going to dig them out. And we have to hurry. We need to be back in Trenton by sundown."
Tank
Funny thing about special forces. You dig a lot of holes. Fox holes, latrine holes, and occasionally graves. Preferably for your enemies, not your friends. But this was the oddest hole I had ever dug.
As soon as I had arrived with my myriad supplies Ranger had snapped into motion. Within a few minutes a large 10-person tent had been erected over the mound of dirt. Then the black theater backdrop curtain had been laid over it. This resulted in a surprisingly dark space inside the tent. Ranger turned on a battery powered lantern and then pulled out a multitool from his cargo pants, and cut a hole in the floor where the mound was.
"We don't know who is down there. Could be Ramirez. Could be Stephanie. Could be both." Ranger said to me, Bobby, and Lester. "We proceed as if they are both down there, taking care that no direct sunlight gets in. When you dig, if you feel anything,, stop. We don't want to risk hurting her."
Lester
Digging in sand sucks. You can't just pile it next to the hole, it falls back in. And in the tent, spacious as it was for sleeping, wasn't the best environment for manual labor. Especially with it covered in heavy fabric. Despite the cold air outside, it was boiling in the tent from our body heat and muggy from our heavy breathing.
We had worked out a system. Tank, Bobby, and I took turns digging, with the other two hauling away the sand to the far side of the tent where it wouldn't fall back. Ranger dug all the time. We offered to give him a break, or at least go wrap his blistering hands. But he refused, even though we could all see how exhausted he was.
Every foot or so of sand we removed, we stopped and Ranger would carefully probe the sand with a long metal stick he had found in the kitchen of the house. I think it was intended for roasting marshmallows. He felt for a change in the resistance, trying to assure himself that he wasn't going to plow a shovel into her. Then we'd clear another foot of sand and he'd do it again.
By early afternoon we were almost 5 feet down. Twice we had needed to stop, cover the hole with more blackout fabric, and open the tent to haul away the sand. We just couldn't keep it in piles away from the main hole. Ranger kept checking his watch, digging a little faster each time he did.
The walls kept falling in on us, forcing us to dig far more than if we had been in proper dirt where we could have gone straight down. But around 3 Ranger finally felt something different when he probed. He let out a whoop of triumph, and switched from a regular shovel to some plastic ones from a bin of beach toys. Watching a fully grown man put all his concentration into excavation with children's toys was a sight to see.
Ranger
My mind had fully transitioned to tunnel vision hours ago. But finally we were close. I nearly cried with relief when I felt something slightly unyielding as I probed the sand. Then it was a frenzy of plastic shovels, castle-shaped buckets, and using my hands to gently move away the sand. I remembered a documentary I once watched about archaeologists who used toothbrushes to clear artifacts and felt some kinship with them.
Soon a bit of fabric stuck out of the sand. I brushed away more, revealing an arm. It was thick and corded with muscle, the arm of an athlete. I pulled on it, clearing more sand and slowly dragging up the frame of Benito Ramirez. And wrapped in his arms, with a chunk torn out of her neck and blood covering her face, was the cold, stiff body of Stephanie Plum.
