Prayer for the Dead jb-1

by David Wiltse

  Although he tried, Dyce could remember little of his father. Nothing came back to him except the smell of liquor on hot breath, and a sense of fear. He could not picture his face clearly; he could not recall scenes or incidents. There was none of the vivid imagery that would come to him in his dreams-only the sense of fear. And then something else, something he had never felt before when he thought of his father. He looked up to be sure he was still alone. The grave diggers were closer now; their work was along the fence, one section away. Dyce turned his back to them to be sure they couldn’t see the tears in his eyes.

  I don’t know why I’m crying, he said to his father’s grave. But it’s not for you. Not for you. For grandfather, not for you. But he stayed beside his father’s grave much longer than he had planned, weeping silently at first, then sobbing as if his chest were being tom open.

  You were a monster, he cried in his mind. A monster! Grandfather told me, again and again. I know what you were. A beast without control, without love, without pity. You killed my mother, you tried to kill me, you mined our lives, grandfather had told him, like a chorus, like a litany.

  I do not cry for you! I can’t even remember you. There’s nothing of you in me, I am my mother’s child, I am grandfather’s child, I am not yours!

  When he left the cemetery, Dyce was alarmed at how long he had stayed. Time had seemed to fall away and he had had no idea of the hour that passed. He had been careless; he had made a mistake and for the strangest of reasons. He did not understand what had overcome him at his father’s grave, but he must not let such foolishness affect him in the future.

  He headed north, leaving Minnot in the direction of 1-91, which would take him through Massachusetts and Vermont and eventually to Montreal, but he got no farther than the edge of town where Main Street connected with Route 17, the feeder road to the thru-way. A state police car was parked there, its lights flashing, and behind it a brown Dodge. A uniformed trooper was leaning over the driver’s side of the lead car in a line of six waiting to pass. The driver’s door opened and an elderly man with a beard got out in obvious puzzlement. Another trooper and a man in a business suit came slowly down the line of cars, peering into each.

  Impatient drivers behind him were throwing their cars into reverse to back up and try alternate routes and Dyce joined them while the approaching trooper and suit-clad officer were still three cars away. In his mirror he saw the lead trooper wave a woman through with little more than a glance.

  They are faster than I realized, Dyce thought, and the FBI man was more resistant than I would have thought possible. The important thing was not to panic and run into their net. I must hide for a time, and to do that I will need a few things.

  The town center was clean of police. They will be close to the highways, he thought, trying to keep me in, not on the inside trying to flush me into the net.

  Dyce drove to a supermarket and walked quickly but without too much haste through the aisles. He wouldn’t need much; it shouldn’t be more than a few days and he could live on very little. There was a hardware store in the same lot so it would be one-stop shopping.

  A stock boy glanced up at him as he passed and Dyce felt his breath jerk in his chest. The boy was perfect, not really a boy but a young man, and his features were everything Dyce needed. Dyce made a brief detour to the pharmaceutical aisle for an impulse purchase before checking out.

  The farmer’s tractor was gone by the time Dyce returned, which was a good sign. Dyce would not have to waste any more time dealing with him and if he returned tomorrow, he would be excellent cover. Dyce needed all the time he could muster now because the police officer was large and heavy but he could no longer be allowed to stay in the corn and recover in his own good time.

  The extension ladder he had purchased at the hardware store had a rope and pulley, which allowed it to be levered to its full length. The pulley helped in lifting the cop up the ladder, too, but it was still very difficult and took a long time. By the time Dyce had hidden his own car and pulled the ladder in after him, it was growing dark and beginning to sprinkle. The rain would take care of any tracks he had left behind and the night would shield him from all but the most determined and skillful of pursuers. He was safe now and could see and hear anyone approaching, and if they approached too close, there was still a little room for them to keep the cop company.

  The rain brought out the smell of charcoal that still lingered after fifteen years. The sound of rain pattering overhead had always been comforting and for a moment he felt as safe and comfortable as if he were in his old room under the eaves, waiting for grandfather to come and give him his bath.

  He was excited.

  Hatcher dreaded making the call and he wanted to be alone when he did it. If groveling was called for, he could do it-it was for a larger cause than his own ego-but not with a witness. He had enough trouble with the men under him with this stupid duck business. He didn’t know where they got it or what it referred to, but he had overheard them use the term, he had caught the quacking sounds when they thought he was out of earshot. There was no need to add any further fuel for disrespect.

  At first he had planned to make the call from the radio in his car, but there was too big a chance someone else in the system would come in on his frequency. He did it finally from a pay phone, charging the call to his Bureau card.

  Becker sounded annoyed to hear from him.

  “We have a little problem here,” Hatcher said. “I thought you might want to offer your notions.”

  “What.” Not even a question, as if he knew things would get screwed up and Hatcher would be forced to ask for help. Hatcher realized he was already squeezing the telephone receiver. He tried to keep his tone light; don’t give the son of a bitch too much satisfaction.

  “It seems Dyce realized who Ty Hoban was and he-uh-he killed him.” The silence was thunderous.

  “You sent Ty Hoban in first? And alone?” Becker spoke in a choked whisper.

  “Hoban was an excellent man,” said Hatcher.

  “I know that. He’s not exactly the best man for undercover work in Waverly, Connecticut, though, is he?”

  “I was following policy, it was just A and D.”

  “Jesus Christ, Hatcher.”

  “He may have handled it wrong,” said Hatcher. “We’ll look into that.”

  “And Dyce got away,” said Becker.

  “We don’t think so.”

  “Good, then you have no problem.”

  “But we’re not sure.”

  Becker sighed and Hatcher squeezed his eyes closed, waiting for the sarcasm. Becker said nothing at all, which Hatcher decided was worse.

  “Your friend Terhune apparently spotted Dyce driving north past the Minnot airport and went in pursuit. We’ve sealed the area, and if he made his way to any major road, the state troopers haven’t spotted him yet. My guess is he didn’t get out; he would have had to do it awfully fast. And if he was in a hurry in the first place, he wouldn’t have been going through Minnot on the back roads. We think he’s holed up in the Minnot area someplace.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Well-me.”

  Again, Becker was silent. The bastard wasn’t going to help a bit. “And Washington. I’ve been in contact, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “And they confirmed my theory.”

  This time Becker laughed, a short, nasty bark.

  “You’re all right then, aren’t you?” Becker asked. “Ass covered and theory confirmed. What do you want from me that Washington can’t provide?”

  Hatcher seriously considered hanging up. Why give the bastard the satisfaction of asking? There was only one good reason-Becker might very well know the answer.

  “We were just wondering if you might have any notions-considering your closeness to the case-you know, just wondering if it might occur to you…”

  “What.”

  “Well-where to look.”

  Once more, the damning silence.


  “We’re following the standard procedures, of course. I’m getting more agents from New York and Boston, and we’ll go door to door starting in the morning. I mean, if he’s here, we’ll find him, but I, we, thought you might have some-insight-into how he might be thinking right about now.”

  This time Hatcher kept silent, too. He had asked him; he wasn’t going to beg. The silence stretched.

  “Ty Hoban is six-foot-four and black,” Becker said at last. “Did you think he wouldn’t be noticed?”

  “He was sent in to A and D, that’s all. He may have exceeded his brief; we’re looking into it.”

  “He would have been noticed anywhere within the town limits, you can’t blame him. Why not send a man in a clown suit to a funeral?”

  “I have decisions to make, and I make them.”

  “Yeah, and when it counts the most, they’re wrong,” Becker said. Hatcher breathed deeply and let it ride. “You’re a fucking menace. Hatcher.” Hatcher let that one ride, too, waiting. If Becker was belittling him, at least it meant he was still involved.

  Another pause. Hatcher studied the woman dashing with her dirty clothes to the laundromat across the street from the public phone. I’m getting wet. Hatcher thought. Why don’t they put pay phones in glass booths anymore? If Becker knows it’s raining he’s probably making me stand here on purpose.

  “Where did Dyce live when he was growing up?” Becker broke the silence at last.

  Got him, thought Hatcher. He was too good at it to turn his back on it. Or too involved in some way that Hatcher didn’t understand.

  “I don’t know.”

  “When he applied for work as an actuary he would have had to list his degree. Find out where he got it, wake some people up and see what he gave as a permanent address when he entered college. If it’s in Minnot, and I think it probably was, roust the town clerk out of bed and find out who lives in the house now. Then put a man on the local cemetery where his relatives are buried.”

  “The cemetery?”

  “Hatcher… An inconspicuous man, out of sight.”

  “I know that. Anything else?”

  “Try the house where he grew up.”

  “He wouldn’t go there if somebody else lives there now.”

  “Do what you want, then.”

  “I mean, you’re probably right-but why would he go there?”

  “Because something happened there. Why would he be back in Minnot in the first place? It was the first place he ran when he was in trouble. First to Waverly, which is close enough for him to drive over every day if he wanted to, then when Ty flushed him, he went straight to Minnot itself, not the highway. Something’s there he wants, or needs.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Don’t fuck it up again.”

  “I can have a plane at the airport for you in ten minutes,” Hatcher said.

  “I’m not coming.”

  “You’ll have a better feel for things if you’re here on the ground.”

  “I go down no more holes for you. Hatcher. I told you that already. Find him or not, it’s up to you now. It’s no longer any affair of mine.”

  “I understand,” said Hatcher. “There’s one other thing… Just after your friend the chief of police had someone call us and report that he had seen Dyce and was following him…?”

  This time Hatcher made Becker wait.

  “… Well, after that. Chief Terhune disappeared.”

  The silence had a very different quality to it this time. It was broken only when Becker hung up.

  The music came first, before the sound of the tractor, the thrumming of the bass notes cutting through the air as if they were connected directly to the auditor’s viscera. Dyce felt them before he actually heard them, and long before the rest of the music was audible. As it approached, the noise of the tractor obscured the sense of the music, but the steady pulse of the drums and bass came through everything.

  Jungle music, Dyce thought again. At grandfather’s house. It must be Birger Nordholm, although the music didn’t sound like anything he would listen to.

  With the noise of the tractor to cover the sound of his movements, Dyce crept to the edge and peered out as the tractor entered the yard. He glanced back once to make sure the cop was all right and saw him lying perfectly still on his back. Only the wheels of the tractor could be seen, huge and black and cleated, moving parallel to the house and across the yard-or the space that had once been yard but was now so overgrown with weeds and gouged and flattened by continual passings of the tractor that it was hard to give it a name. Travelling in a blare of racket, the tractor moved out of sight, heading toward the south field, which had once been scrubland where Dyce and grandfather had taken walks through stands of supple sumac, the weed of trees. Grandfather had cut and split the trunks and shaped them into arrows for the bow Dyce had fashioned from a fallen branch of the apple tree by the house. They had spent a summer shooting wayward shafts at a target painted on the barn, but never at a living thing. Grandfather did not approve of hunting, and Dyce was too kind of heart to want to hurt anything. When he cupped in his hands the bewildered moths that made their way into the house and released them out of doors, grandfather called Dyce a “softie,” but always with approval.

  Now the scrubland had been cleared and torn by Nordholm’s plow. Dyce had noticed the bushy, stunted tops of soybeans planted there when he drove to the neighbor’s cornfield where he hid his own car. For several hours he could faintly discern the sound of the tractor in the far distance, and when the wind turned and blew toward him, he could occasionally hear something of the music, a phrase or two of melody, or a few lines of the lyrics, not distinguishable as individual words but clearly a human voice. Twice he had started at the sound, thinking it was a real voice he heard, but there was no one there, not even a vehicle all morning on the long approach road that came through the fields to grandfather’s house, then past it to outlying farms. From his vantage point Dyce could see not only the approach road but much of the valley and a long stretch of the county road that led to town. Anyone coming would come from there and he would be able to see them miles away.

  At noon the tractor returned and stopped in front of the porch. Dyce could see him clearly as the driver descended and removed his cap, wiping his forehead with his sleeve. It was not Nordholm, but Nordholm’s son, grown now to his mid-twenties and every inch the offshoot of his father. Dyce struggled with the sounds that wanted to come out of his throat, beckoned by the perfect look of the boy. He could have been Dyce’s father himself, the way he kicked his boots against the stone steps, the way he hitched his pants before sitting with his back against the pillar, the way he stretched his legs and sighed as if they had been carrying a dreadful weight. The boy was thin like Dysen, and the sharp bones pressed against his skin so hard it looked as if it would be painful just to wear his face. The Adam’s apple was prominent in his throat when he swallowed and even the hair was right, blond and short and straight as a freshly ironed crease. With the cap off, his ears stuck out from his head.

  Dyce felt as if his father had somehow risen-from the dead after all, summoned not by Dyce and grandfather’s vigil of prayer, but by Dyce’s inexplicable tears at the graveside the day before.

  The cop lay still behind him, not moving, barely breathing, no longer a worrisome consideration. Dyce wanted young Nordholm, desired him so much, he could feel himself trembling. He had known it would build to this point again, the awful, irresistible yearning that had to be placated before it drove him crazy. He needed it and it had been presented to him in the form of perfection. In the dark, drained of color, still as death itself, the man would not just look like his father, this man would be Dysen as none of the others had ever quite been.

  He would take this one, he would give himself this one, perfect man, and he would make it last longer than ever, days and days and days. And the cop could be a sort of side attraction. An appetizer or a dessert.

  Dyce wiggled back
ward, still watching the farmer, until he reached the syringe. It was full and ready and all he needed was a way of getting down and appearing to the young man without scaring him off. Close enough to touch him, that’s all he needed to be. Then he would handle him so gently.

  Back at the edge, Dyce glanced up and saw three cars on the county road coming so fast that the first one was almost to the approach road before Dyce had noticed them. The farmer had pulled a bottle of bourbon from somewhere and was sipping from it while holding a sandwich in his other hand. He was oblivious to the cars, oblivious to Dyce stalking him.

  All three cars were on the approach road now, sending up plumes of dust. The lead car was state patrol and its lights were flashing, but Dyce heard no siren. The lights went off abruptly as the patrol car approached the farm. In the distance another patrol car appeared on the county road, this time following a civilian auto. Lights were flashing on that patrol car, too, but it was not chasing the other car; it was following it.

  The three lead autos tore into the drive and jerked to a halt as the Nordholm boy frantically sought to hide his liquor bottle.

  As the men who poured from the cars spun and braced him against the porch pillar, the bottle fell and clattered against the steps, but did not break.

  “Nordholm,” the boy sputtered in answer to the first in a volley of questions. “Daniel Nordholm. This is my farm, my dad’s farm. I didn’t do anything.”

  The second team of cars ripped into the drive. Dyce, now far out of sight, heard doors slam like volleys of gunfire. The other men were shouting questions and commands at the farmer, fear and urgency in their voices. Dyce did not know how the boy decided which questions to answer as he pleaded his innocence of everything and anything, his voice even more fearful than the other men’s.

  Finally one voice took over, asserting itself over the police and FBI.

  “The property is registered in the name of Roger Dysen,” said the voice.

  “Well-sure, but it’s ours.”

  “How is it yours?”