J.M.J.
Author's note: Thank you for continuing to read! Thank you especially to MargaretA66, Candylou, ErinJordan, max2013, and caseykam for your reviews on the previous chapter! We're getting close to the end now, and I do have to warn you…Well, I don't want to give spoilers, but please don't hate me. If you really feel that you need a warning of what's going to happen before you read it, you can always send me a PM. Thank you again! God bless!
Chapter XXIII
Callie cast one last look back at Joe and Angelo before she rounded a slight bend in the gorge that took her out of sight of them. It was rough going and she realized that traveling a quarter of a mile over this terrain would take much longer than normal and that would distort her sense of how far she had gone. She hoped the tunnel wouldn't be hard to find. If she passed it, who knew how far she would go before she would decide that she must have gone farther than a quarter of a mile? On the other hand, she might overestimate how far she had gone and turn around before she reached the tunnel, thinking she had passed it already.
She hardly had time to worry about all of that before she heard a sound that drove all thoughts of this tunnel from her head: a gunshot. She froze like a deer alerted to the presence of a wolf, her head held high and her eyes wide to take in any sight of the danger. Of course, she wouldn't be able to see anything, since the shot had come from behind her, from where she had left Joe alone with Angelo. The first thing she thought was that Angelo had been armed and had suddenly decided to shoot Joe. Without thinking about how it was the stupidest thing she could do at the moment, she turned around and made a wild dash back.
As she rounded the corner again, she saw Joe lying face-down and unmoving, while Angelo stood over him with a gun still in his hand and an expression that Callie neither could nor wanted to understand. She let out a cry of anguish and tried to run to Joe's side, but Angelo stopped her before she could reach him.
"I was wondering if you'd come back," Angelo said, gripping her around the waist with one arm.
Callie tried to pull his arm away. "Let go! Let me go! Why did you do it? He gave you the picture, didn't he? Why would you do it?"
She wasn't successful in loosening his grip, and Angelo gave her a hard shake.
"Stop that screaming," Angelo told her. "Knock it off! He jumped me. I didn't have a choice."
"Joe! Joe!" Callie tried to rouse him, but Joe still didn't move. The pit of her stomach knotted. She had been right. Angelo had killed Joe. She seemed to suddenly have no strength left. If Angelo hadn't been holding her, she probably would have fallen. She started to weep.
Angelo stuffed the gun into his waistband and then put his hand over Callie's nose and mouth. "Would you knock it off with the bawling? I swear…" He trailed off as he looked at Joe again. "Okay. Think."
Callie realized that these last two words hadn't been directed at her, but she really didn't care. She was too much in shock even to have any kind of coherent thoughts about Joe. The closest she could come to coherency was wishing that it was Frank who was holding her instead of Angelo and not in a restraining grip, but in a comforting embrace, and that they were back in their apartment in Bayport and the last few weeks had all been nothing more than a bad dream. She wished it so hard that she almost half-expected it to happen.
Instead, Angelo picked up a second gun that was lying on the ground, tucked it into his belt along with the other one, and began to drag her along in the opposite direction from what he had told her to go to look for Tony. He kept telling her to be quiet, but she couldn't restrain her tears. With his hand over her face, she was almost choking on the tears. How far they went, Callie couldn't have guessed, but it couldn't have been far. Callie was doing nothing to hold herself up, let alone move forward, and so Angelo was forced to awkwardly half-drag, half-carry her. Over that kind of terrain, it must have been exhausting work.
Finally, he threw her on the ground, breathing hard, and took out his gun once more. Callie was still crying, but the shock had worn down enough that she was no longer borderline hysterical. Even so, she could think of very little beyond the image of Joe lying there in the dust, unmoving. If she had been less shocked by the whole thing, she would have realized that there was no blood and that perhaps it wasn't all as she had assumed at first, but she hadn't even noticed that detail.
"If you're going to bawl, at least do it a little quieter," Angelo complained. "I'm going to need to hear myself think."
He took out a cell phone and started dialing a number. It was then that Callie realized that he was no longer holding her. On impulse, she made a move to get up, but Angelo sprang at her and held her down. He pressed the muzzle of the gun against her head. Enough of Callie's sense had been restored for her to understand that she needed to cooperate with Angelo, whether she liked it or not.
Angelo finished placing his call. He set the phone on speaker and set it on the ground so that he'd have both hands free to wrangle his prisoner. Callie heard the ring back and then a female voice answer.
"Yeah?"
"No names," Angelo said. "We're on speaker and we've got an audience."
"What did you do now?" The woman sounded intensely annoyed.
"I finally got the meeting, but it went sideways. I don't know if Joe's dead or not and I've got Callie here. We're close to the mine."
The woman swore. "Are you kidding me? Can't you do one single thing right?" She let out an inarticulate groan of frustration.
"Hey, look, I did my best. You said to keep them guessing."
"Keep them guessing. That doesn't mean you have to keep changing your mind. You've got me just as confused as you've got them."
"Yeah, well, if you had all the big plans, you could have been the one to stay here and I could have gone to Florida."
"You know why that wouldn't work." The woman paused and seemed to compose herself. "We can argue about this later, when we don't have a female Hardy listening. Did you hurt her?"
"I don't think so. She's still blubbering about her brother-in-law. She's sure he's dead."
"If he is, so much the better."
"Speak for yourself. You really think his brother and his old man won't hunt me to the ends of the earth if I killed him?"
"I literally don't care if they do. It's not going to take that long now, and it'll be even quicker if you did manage to kill one of the Hardys. What about Prito?"
"He's still alive, for now."
"Okay. Tie the Hardy woman up somewhere her darling husband will find her. I want her to tell him what's happened. And I want you to finish off Prito. You can leave him somewhere that they'll find him, too."
"No!" Callie protested.
Angelo clapped a hand over her mouth. "Quiet!" Then he spoke into the phone again. "Is that necessary? If I killed Joe…"
"But you said you don't know if you did or not. The Hardys need to know the price for messing with us. There needs to be blood on the floor for that. It's the only thing they'll listen to."
"Well, all right. You know the pledge we took."
"I know it. Trust me. This is necessary."
Angelo ended the call. Then he dragged Callie to her feet and forced her along again, making her do a little more of the work this time. After a while, they reached a hole in the side of the gorge, just high enough for a man to crawl into and a little wider than necessary for that purpose.
"That's the real way to the mine shaft," Angelo explained. "The way I sent you was the wrong way. You weren't supposed to find Tony. No one was ever going to find him. Anyway, when your husband or the police or whoever find you, tell them to look in there for him. You can give him a nice funeral, at least, if you can dig him out." He reached into the hole and pulled out a roll of duct tape, which he started using to bind Callie's hands together.
"Please, you don't have to do this," Callie protested. "Don't kill him. Please! It's not…" She was cut off by Angelo putting a piece of duct tape over her mouth.
HBHBHBHBHB
Time no longer meant anything to Tony. He was in that dark mine with no sunlight to be seen. There was no way of telling whether it was day or night or how many days or weeks he had spent down here. He had spent some of that time unconscious, blacked out from the pain, but whether that totaled in the minutes or hours, he didn't know. He thought most of the time had been spent in a kind of half-daze, where he certainly wasn't fully conscious, but he wasn't really unconscious, either.
After having his foot broken and realizing that Angelo really did intend to kill him, he had completely lost his self-control. What was the point anymore? He had wept and asked Why? aloud at least a dozen times. It wasn't fair. He didn't want to die like this, alone and in pain and with no chance to even say goodbye to his parents or sisters or friends. There was so much left that he wanted to do and to see and to accomplish. It wasn't fair. What had he done to deserve something like this? It wasn't fair. It wasn't fair. It wasn't fair!
But the injustice was only part of it. Now that Tony had thrown aside all pretences and realized that anything but real, brutal honesty was pointless, he knew that he was afraid, much more afraid than he had expected to be. He'd thought about dying before this, of course. Back home, he and his sisters, Maria and Katherine, used to go and visit the cemetery where their grandparents were buried to pray for them and to clear off any weeds that were growing in the hallowed ground and to put out fresh flowers. Tony had sometimes taken a minute to stop and think about dying himself someday, a long, long time in the future. Then, too, he had a brush or two with danger. There wasn't one among the Hardys' friends who hadn't. Yet all those times had been full of adrenaline and a fight to stay alive. It hadn't been like this, sitting in the dark, wracked with pain, and waiting to die. All those other times, it had been over almost before he had realized what was happening, and he had walked away, making a mental note that this was a good reminder that you never knew how much time you had left and he ought to prepare himself better, which would usually result in a few weeks of religious fervor and then settling back into the normal routine of life.
That had not been sufficient preparation, he realized now. If it had been, he wouldn't be curled up on the floor of this cave, crying like a child. He'd be sitting up, at least, facing his fate with dignity and courage. Now it was too late, too late to set anything right or correct any mistakes. For all the times he had thought on the surface that he could die suddenly at any time, he had never really believed it. He had always taken it for granted that he'd live a long life. But no, not just that. He wasn't so sure now that he had every really believed he was going to die at all. Now that he took an honest look at it, he didn't think he'd be any more ready to die at eighty than he was right now.
"Oh, God, what an idiot I've been," he muttered.
It wasn't much of a prayer, but it was enough to remind him of the rosary beads he had gone to such pains to retrieve. Gingerly, he reached into his pocket and took them out. The old, familiar feel of the beads between his fingers was a comfort, as if some small part of his life had survived, after all. He settled down into the slow, rhythmic prayer, more mouthing the words than saying them aloud. As he went, slowly, bit by bit, he regained some of his composure. He couldn't stop the tears entirely, but they weren't a frantic, desperate plea of "Why me?" anymore.
As he calmed down and regained control of himself, Tony didn't allow himself to use it as license to push the thought of dying to the back of his mind and occupy himself with other things, even the idea of escaping. Technically, it was still possible, even if it seemed unlikely, that he might get rescued or that Angelo would change his mind and not kill him after all. But there was no need to prepare for those possibilities; if they happened, he would have plenty of time to process the surprise. It was far more likely that Angelo would come back at any time and kill him, and he wanted to be ready when it happened.
He believed in an afterlife, and one that could either be eternal joy or eternal suffering, depending on how a person had spent his or her life. Tony had believed it since childhood, but now that he was practically on the threshold of that afterlife, it was the only thing that made sense. The trouble was that such an afterlife meant that everything he did mattered. If there was no afterlife and people simply ceased to exist when they died or if there was an afterlife that was the same for everyone—whether it was eternal bliss like some Christians believed or eternal boredom like most of the old pagans had believed—then it wouldn't matter what Tony did from here on out. Nothing he could do at this point could make life better or easier for anyone else. Most likely, no one would even know how he had spent his last few minutes. It wouldn't matter whether he had spent them curled up, sobbing, or if he had met his end with courage. That is, it wouldn't matter unless he was going to face judgment in a matter of minutes or days.
It was both a frightening thought and a comforting one. It meant he couldn't, even now, give in to despair, but it also meant that there was something to live these last minutes or hours or days for. There was a dignity in it, the dignity of a battle to be won. It wasn't a mere animal fight to survive; those sorts of fights could be won by those who put no effort into them or lost by those who gave it their best. It was against his own fears and weaknesses, and that would be won, so long as he fought it in the right way. For that matter, whether he lived or died, he could still win that fight. What was more, it was a fight that mattered.
Then, almost as if it was a thought that came from outside him, Tony remembered certain things he had done that he shouldn't have. They hadn't seemed like such big things to him, but maybe they were worse than he realized. If only he was dying in a hospital where a priest could come and see him instead of all alone in a cave! That almost sent him once again into a crippling fit of anxiety, but he continued praying, and eventually the fears lightened. He couldn't change where he was, so he would simply have to make the best of it. He made up his mind that if he did somehow survive this—at least long enough to go to that hospital—he would insist on having a priest visit him so he could make his confession. In the meantime, he thought of all the things he would confess, if he got the chance, and resolved that if he survived, he would keep from doing them again. Frankly, he didn't feel inclined to do them again.
How long this went on, he couldn't say. Anyone watching him wouldn't have seen anything change, but Tony felt as if everything had changed. He was still afraid, but it wasn't a crippling fear. The tears had dried on his face, leaving sticky trails on his cheeks, but he didn't think any more would be coming. For the first time since he had been captured, he felt like a human being again.
Then Tony heard footsteps approaching and he braced himself. Angelo was finally coming.
