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Dark Screams, Volume 9

Page 11

by Dark Screams- Volume 9 (retail) (epub)


  Bucky was a good kid, but wouldn’t last in law enforcement. He was a book-smart guy with a sharp brain but nerves like tinsel. Police work, even in a tiny pimple of a town like Luther’s Bend, wasn’t the job for him. I always hoped he would discover that on his own.

  They came at me with questions, and I did what I could to fill in the gaps. Bucky winced when I described the condition of Arthur Milton’s body. “Totally f’ed up,” Duke said with excitement, sounding like I’d just described a particularly spectacular event at a monster truck rally. Bucky just looked worried and uncomfortable. When I told them about the perp, their eyes grew narrow with suspicion. I even caught them exchanging a look.

  “A mask?” Duke said. “How’d he eat up Arthur wearing a mask?”

  “That’s what the state boys are trying to figure out. For now, I want you two to get on the phones and let folks know that we have a curfew in place. No one under eighteen is to be out past sunset. Call the schools and have Janey post it to our website.”

  “You said his head looked like a dog or a wolf?” Bucky asked.

  “Not his head, the mask,” I corrected.

  “Could it have been a jackal?” he asked.

  “Bucky, I don’t even know what a jackal looks like.”

  “It looks like a dog.”

  “Wouldn’t that be covered by me saying the mask looked like a dog?”

  Duke made a snorting sound and slapped Bucky’s shoulder playfully. “Go ahead and ask another, Einstein. It’s not like Bill has anything else to do this morning.”

  “Sorry,” Bucky said. “The description just reminded me of something.”

  I must have been punch-drunk with exhaustion because I almost let that comment slide, almost dismissed Bucky to get back to his desk and start the phone calls. I was even walking past him, headed for my office, ready to start in on my report. I didn’t stop until I reached the threshold. Only then did I focus in on the fact that I was in the middle of a murder investigation. If Bucky had information that might move the investigation along for the state boys, I had to hear him out.

  “Well, you said his body looked human,” Bucky said nervously. He sat in a chair on the other side of my desk, fidgeting with the bow of his glasses. “And the head was canine. One of the primary figures of Egyptian mythology fits that description. They called him Anubis. He was a god of death or something. I don’t remember exactly.”

  And there I was thinking that Bob had been nuts for saying werewolf. Now one of my own deputies was saying we had an Egyptian god in our little community.

  It turns out that wasn’t exactly what he was saying.

  “People obsess on a lot of different things, Bill,” Bucky continued. “Maybe our guy is obsessed with Egyptology or something, might belong to some kind of cult. His costume might actually be integral to his psychology. I don’t know. It’s just that your description got me to thinking.”

  “You got a picture of this Anubis?”

  “They’ll have pictures on the Internet,” he said. “Just Google the name and hit the image tab.”

  And there it was. Sort of. It wasn’t exactly what I’d seen, but it was damned close. The muzzle in the pictures was longer and thinner than the one I’d seen on the perp. The ears on Arthur’s killer weren’t as pronounced as those in the image, which stood high and pointed above the head. In fact, I don’t even remember clearly what his ears had looked like, but the general features of a snout and the heavy brow and the muscular body were similar. All of the images that appeared showed this Anubis thing as being black, so the color was also wrong, but the overall impression was the same.

  The likelihood that some insane mummy cult prowled Luther’s Bend was a stretch to say the least. I was way too tired to realize exactly how silly it sounded, so I figured it was a viable avenue of investigation: no more ridiculous than looking for the Wolfman.

  “You might have something,” I told Bucky. His eyes lit up like a kid seeing a new bicycle. “Do some research. Put your thoughts together. We’ll talk about it later.”

  Pleased and excited with the assignment, Bucky hurried from my office. Duke offered to stay on for a few more hours so I could rest, and I took him up on it. I wanted to see my kids. I was at the end of the longest day of my life and all I wanted was to have it over with.

  —

  “I’m sorry,” Lisa said when I walked through the door. She wrapped her arms around my neck and held me close. “I’m so sorry. I wasn’t thinking straight last night. You know what my migraines do to me.”

  “It’s okay,” I told her.

  I was in no mood to get into the whole “migraine” argument. (I didn’t know a single doctor that would prescribe vodka and Xanax as a migraine treatment, but I kept my mouth shut on the subject.) My head was full of bad thoughts, terrible images. All I wanted was to crawl into bed and hope to sleep through the worst of the nightmares I knew were waiting for me.

  “Did Duke call you?”

  “No, I saw it on the news. You looked just awful.”

  I was on the news? I didn’t remember seeing cameras; I certainly didn’t speak to any reporters.

  “They were interviewing one of the state troopers, and I saw you come out of the woods over to the park.”

  “You heard about Arthur?”

  “Yes,” Lisa said. “God, I couldn’t believe it. But Maggie is safe. That’s something.”

  “I should call Les Mayflower.”

  “He already called to thank you. He’s going to be home with Maggie and Vivian for the day. He said it might be better if you called his cell, though. A lot of people were trying to get through.”

  I knew that was right. When a crisis came down, the lines between friends and family blurred, and the good folks that knew Les, whether related by blood or not, would be offering any help they could.

  “How are the girls?”

  “They’re fine. Still in bed.”

  It was after eight in the morning. Usually, Gwen and Dru were already in high gear by then. “At this hour?”

  “I gave them something to help them sleep. They were so upset about little Maggie.”

  The term “I saw red” suddenly made a lot of sense to me. Lisa, standing only a foot away from me, twinkled out of focus, blurred at the edges to a soft pink as the booming of my heart climbed my neck to nest at my temples. My entire body trembled.

  “You what?”

  “Just an Ambien. I split it in half for them.”

  “You gave our daughters sleeping pills?”

  “Well, would you rather they were up all night crying?” Lisa asked, her voice rising to the argument.

  “Jesus Christ, Lisa, if you want to fuck up your own head, then by all means carry on, but you will not teach our children to hide their problems under prescriptions. What the hell were you thinking?”

  “I thought I was helping.”

  “Helping?”

  “Fine, Bill. Whatever. I poisoned them, okay? I’m a terrible mother and a horrible wife.”

  “Not this again.”

  “Everything I do is wrong.”

  “You drugged our kids, Lisa. Maybe if you weren’t so wrapped up in your own shit, you’d see how completely fucked up that is. They are children, Lisa. Do you get that? Do you get that they are going to have problems and disappointments, and they are going to be scared, and they have to learn to deal with those things? If they don’t, they’re going to end up…”

  Yes, the end of that sentence was like you. But I couldn’t bring myself to say it. With all of the problems we’d endured over the last few years, it didn’t need to be said. It was an avenue of argument we’d been up and down too many times.

  Lisa was already walking away. She threw open the door to the coat closet, grabbed her jacket, and headed for the front door.

  “I have to be back to work in a few hours,” I called.

  The door slammed in reply.

  —

  The problems between us weren’t new
. The last few years had seen Lisa drifting further away from our daughters and me, drinking more, getting prescriptions for god knows what from Dr. Laughlin out at the clinic. She used to drink a glass of wine in the evening once the girls were put to bed. I didn’t think anything about it. Hell, I’d go through a few beers a night myself. At some point, she replaced her glass of wine with a glass of vodka. It was a straight shot downhill from there.

  Back then I traveled some. Actually, I traveled quite a bit, I suppose. I’d take off for a weekend of fishing or hunting, or go on up to Marrenville for a seminar on law enforcement. At least one weekend a month I kissed Lisa and the girls goodbye, climbed in my car, and hit the road.

  Lisa didn’t let me know my travel upset her until it got to the point she was fed up with it. Maybe I was just too dense to notice subtle hints, if she had indeed given me any. I’m not certain. I was just back from a fishing trip with Les Mayflower, hadn’t even stored my tackle box yet, and she met me in the garage with a scowl. She clutched a glass of vodka in one hand, the knuckles white from strain.

  “Your daughter nearly got run down by a truck,” Lisa said, her voice wavering with barely restrained fury.

  The news startled me so badly I dropped my tackle box. “Is she okay? What happened?”

  “Dru was playing in the street, not watching what she was doing, as usual, and that Colton kid with the Dodge came tearing down the road.”

  “Weren’t you watching her?” I asked.

  “I can’t do everything, Bill! Gwen needed my help with her homework and Dru wanted to play. What was I supposed to do? I told her stay out of the road, but she’s a child, and she doesn’t listen. They never listen, and you’re never around. You’re out in the woods with Les, or over to his shop playing poker with those rednecks from Lowrey, or up in Marrenville with your cop buddies. Did you ever think that I might like a weekend in the city?”

  “I go there for work,” I said as my only defense.

  “Well, good for you. You have work. I’ve been working every minute of every day since Gwen was born. Maybe I’d like to get away, do some shopping, have someone else fix a meal for a change.”

  Even as the tirade progressed, I was aware of the fact that nothing more was said about Dru or the truck that nearly ran her down, which led me to believe that Lisa was exaggerating the severity of the incident. Still, that didn’t change the underlying message she delivered: You’re a bad husband and a bad father. That message came through as clear as a pistol report on a mountaintop.

  Guilt hit me pretty hard. Her attack was wholly unexpected and completely devastating. My gut was hollowed out, my head buzzing. Up until that point, I thought our life together was a good one, stable and secure and comfortable the way a family was supposed to be. Growing up, I watched my father pack his tackle box or his shotgun nearly every weekend. Weeknights he got together with his cronies at the barbershop, played cards or checkers, drank beer, until it was time to come home for some sleep. My mother never complained, never once looked out of sorts about it.

  This life was what I knew; it never occurred to me that it might somehow be wrong.

  But there was the gnawing, burrowing guilt, which to me was as good as an ax when it came to hobbling a guy.

  So I made a promise to Lisa. I promised to spend more time with her and with the girls. And that’s exactly what I did.

  My being around the house didn’t help. If anything, it just made things worse. Lisa’s migraines started a couple months later. She took pills and drank herself through the sickness. At first, I was understanding and doted on her. I made dinner when I got home from the station, helped the girls with their homework, spent weekends playing with them in the park. I did what I could and didn’t resent a single moment of it.

  But Lisa kept on drifting, or maybe she was drowning. Whatever the case, I tried. It only drove her further away.

  —

  Upstairs, I checked on Gwen and Dru. They looked so peaceful, so beautiful. Obviously our argument had not disturbed them, and for that I was grateful. I kissed them both on the forehead, felt their breath on my chin.

  I started to cry. Frustration. Relief. Fear. It all poured out of me, and I left the room so my sobs would not wake them.

  After a quick shower, I climbed into bed. Though the idea of sleep seemed impossible, I drifted off immediately, and the nightmares I expected never came.

  3

  I drove to the station under a sky of angry clouds. Their gray cast reminded me of the man I’d seen the night before, the color of his skin. More than twelve hours had passed since seeing that freak hunched over Arthur with a good chunk of the man in his mouth, but already my mind was rearranging things. After all, I’d come upon that scene quickly. My lantern had cast such a harsh beam that his features and subtleties were bound to wash out. There had been no muzzle, I told myself, no pronounced brow. Some of those body builder types had strange looking faces; it was a side effect of all the steroids they pumped into their bodies. It sank their cheeks, tightened their skin so that it stretched over the bone in a wholly unnatural way. I’d seen it plenty of times in workout magazines back when I was trying to figure out exactly what all of those machines at City Fitness were for.

  If I had seen anything resembling a muzzle it was a mask, as I’d first suspected.

  And what if Emily Salem’s description was accurate and we had a second crazy running around Luther’s Bend? I’d have to get a better description from Emily and shoot that out over the wires, maybe hold a town meeting to instruct parents and their children about protecting themselves from sexual predators.

  There was a lot of work waiting for me. I’d have preferred to be at home watching SpongeBob SquarePants with my girls, listening to Dru’s laughter and Gwen’s shrill and excited impersonations of the boxy yellow character.

  A news van sat parked in the lot at the station house. I felt a sudden vice of nerves squeezing my belly when I saw it. I didn’t want to talk to the press. Anytime there had been trouble in the past, the state boys had handled it. If it wasn’t big enough for them, then it wasn’t big enough for the news.

  I drove on past. At the next intersection, I made a U-turn and pulled my car to the curb. I called Les Mayflower, keeping my eye on the side of the station house. The blandness of the structure hit me then. It was a single-story box made from sand-colored bricks, broken only by small rectangular windows. The frosted glass, reinforced by a mesh of wires, provided extra light for the holding cells. As I considered the dull manufacture of the building, a shadow moved across the pane of the first cell, and my heart beat faster. More action from the night before? Or was Duke giving a guided tour to the press? Either way, just seeing the movement disturbed me.

  “Hey, Bill,” Les said. He sounded as exhausted as I felt.

  “How are you holding up?” I asked. “Is Maggie okay?”

  “She…uhm…she’s fine. I mean, physically. He didn’t…well…there were no signs of…”

  His daughter hadn’t been sexually assaulted. My head grew light with relief.

  “She’s still pretty shaken up, and her wrists are a bit raw from those ropes, but we’re all praying and thanking God. It could have been…well…we’re grateful things turned out the way they did.”

  “So am I,” I said, not including my feeling about Arthur Milton’s brutal murder. “And what about you? Are you okay?”

  “Not so much,” Les said. “This whole thing has got me to thinking…you know…about my life, about life in general, I guess. I need to change some things.”

  The way he said that agitated my nerves further. He was very upset, and with good reason, but I felt like he was about to make some great proclamation. I wasn’t sure what that would mean, and he wasn’t ready to tell me.

  “Look,” he said. “We’ll talk later. I’m trying to head neighbors off before they get to the door. Everybody is being so wonderful, but Maggie needs her rest. So let’s talk later.”

  “We’l
l have lunch in a couple days, once things have calmed down a little.”

  “Sure,” Les said, sounding distracted and uneasy. “You better let me go. The Salems are coming up the walk.”

  “Take care of yourself, Les.”

  I rang off and stared at the back of the station house, dread seeping through me like cold sludge. Too many things were going to change, I felt that.

  Maybe it was time for a change, but I wasn’t ready for it.

  —

  I walked into a nest of activity. Half a dozen strangers gathered in the main room. Duke was speaking quietly to three of them, while the other three looked around as if bored.

  “Here he is,” Duke said when he saw me.

  Suddenly, all six of the strangers were coming at me like starving bums chasing down a doughnut. One of the men hoisted a camera to his shoulder and hustled around the reception counter. A light popped in my eyes. Voices swooped at me like birds.

  Questions came in a torrent, babbled with such speed and volume that the actual queries were lost amid the noise. They called my name—Sheriff Cranston…Sheriff Cranston—as if I was standing across the street and not inches from them. It was the only thing I made out initially, because the rest got lost in that flood.

  “Hold on,” I said. “Who are you people?”

  “Have you identified the suspect?” a handsome young man with bleached hair and a deep tan asked. The question set off another chorus of demands from the others. The blond guy, insisting to be heard, shouted, “Do you believe you’ve captured the man responsible for the murder of Arthur Milton?”

  “They’re from the press,” Duke shouted over the crowd. “Can’t you tell by them curved beaks?”

  None of the faces belonged to employees of our local paper. Journalists from the city? I had to be impressed with the determination it had taken for them to make it down to Luther’s Bend so quickly, but I still wasn’t ready to deal with their questions, especially since I wasn’t sure what they were talking about.

  “Well, then,” I said, eyeing a particularly frantic looking little man with a sweaty bald head, “I guess I’m going to have to ask you to wait outside for a few minutes.”

 

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