A Maidens Grave

minutes it would all be over.
     
    Lou Handy stared down at the phone and felt it for the first time that day: doubt.
    Son of a bitch.
    “Where is he?” he snarled, looking through the slaughterhouse.
    “Bonner? In with the girls,” Wilcox answered. “Or eating. I don’t know. What’s up?”
    “Something’s funny going on.” Handy paced back and forth. “I think maybe he cut a deal.” He told Wilcox what the U.S. attorney had said.
    “They’re offering us a deal?”
    “Some deal. Life in Leavenworth.”
    “Beats that little needle. The worst part is you piss. You know that? There’s nothing you can do to stop it. I tell you, I’m going out, I don’t want to piss my pants in front of everybody.”
    “Hey, homes.” Handy dropped his head, gazed coolly at his partner. “We’re getting out. Don’t you forget it.”
    “Right, sure.”
    “I think that prick’s been with ’em all along.”
    “Why?” Wilcox asked.
    “Why the fuck you think? Money. Cut down his hard time.”
    Wilcox cast his eyes into the dim back of the slaughterhouse. “Sonny’s an asshole but he wouldn’t do that.”
    “He did a while back.”
    “What?”
    “Give up somebody. A guy he did a job with.”
    “You knew that?” Wilcox asked, surprised.
    “Sure, I knew that,” Handy said angrily. “We needed him.”
    But how had Bonner gotten to the feds? Almost every minute of the big man’s time was accounted for from the moment of the breakout.
    Though not all of it, Handy now recalled. Bonner was the one who’d gone to pick up the car. After they’d gotten out of the prison Bonner had been gone for a half-hour while he picked up the wheels. Handy remembered thinking that it was taking him a long time and thinking, If he skips on us he’s going to die real fucking slow.
    Gone a half-hour to get a car eight blocks away. Plenty of time to call the feds.
    “But he’s a short-timer,” Wilcox pointed out. Bonner’s interstate transport sentence was four years.
    “The kind,” Handy countered, “they’d be most likely to cut a deal with. Feds never chop off sentences more’n a couple years.”
    Besides, Bonner had an incentive: sex offenders were the prisoners who most often woke up with glass shards shoved down their throat, or a tin-can-lid knife in their gut—or who didn’t wake up at all.
    Uncertainly Wilcox looked into the dim slaughterhouse. “Whatta you think?”
    “I think we oughta talk to him.”
    They walked through the main room, over the rotting ramps the livestock had once ambled along, past the long tables where the animals had been cut apart, the rusting guillotines. The two men stood in the doorway of the killing room. Bonner wasn’t there. They heard him standing not far away, pissing a solid stream into a well or sump pump.
    Handy stared at the room—the older woman, lying curled into a ball. The gasping girl and the pretty girl. And then there was Melanie, who stared back with eyes that tried to be defiant but were just plain scared. Then he realized something.
    “Where,” Handy said softly, “are the little ones?”
    He gazed at two empty pairs of black patent-leather shoes.
    Wilcox spat out, “Son of a bitch.” He ran into the hallway, following the tiny footprints in the dust.
    Melanie put her arms around the girl with the asthma and cowered against the wall. Just then Bonner came around the corner and stopped. “Hey, buddy.” He blinked uneasily, looking at Handy’s face.
    “Where are they, you fuck?”
    “Who?”
    “The little girls. The twins?”
    “I—” Bonner recoiled. “I was watching ’em. All this time. I swear.”
    “All this time?”
    “I took a piss is all. Look, Lou. They gotta be here someplace. We’ll find ’em.” The big man swallowed uneasily.
    Handy glared at Bonner, who started toward Melanie, shouting, “Where the fuck are they?” He pulled his pistol from his pocket and walked up to her.
    “Lou!” Wilcox was calling from the main room. “Jesus Christ.”
    “What?” Handy screamed, spinning around. “What the fuck is it?”
    “We got a worse problem than that. Look here.”
    Handy hurried back to Wilcox, who was pointing at the TV.
    “Holy Christ. Potter, that lying son of a bitch!”
    On the screen: A newscast, showing the perfect telephoto image of the front and side of the slaughterhouse. The reporters had snuck through the police line and had set up the camera on something close and tall—maybe that old windmill just to the