“Sweetheart, I want you to do me a favor. I want you and your sister to put some clothes in your backpacks, just enough for a sleepover. Also put some juice boxes and some of those snack bars in your lunch boxes.”
“A sleepover?” Gwen chirped, very excited by the news. “Where?”
I didn’t know. It didn’t matter. I wanted my family out of town. With any luck, I could look back on this call and laugh at my foolishness.
“It’s a surprise, sweetheart. Just tell your sister and try to wake your mother up.”
5
Terrible thoughts rode with me across town. I called Les’s house three times but only got the machine. I’d hoped to have Les pick up the girls and then make up an excuse for why his family and mine should be out of town for the night. I didn’t have a clue what I would have said, but it didn’t matter. The Mayflowers were not answering.
I wasn’t prepared to believe the worst. It was not yet sunset, but it was coming fast. Les may have decided to take the family to his parents’ place up north, just to get Maggie out of town for a couple days, away from the memories of what Douglas Sykes had done to her. I tried his cell phone, but it went into his voice mail after the third ring. My thoughts being what they were, I imagined Les saw my name on the caller ID and turned the phone off. He’d said all he’d intended to say to me earlier and now wanted some peace with his family.
I left a message on his cell phone, demanding that he call me or meet me at the station. I had a big favor to ask. Since Lisa was likely to be in no condition to get my daughters out of town, my hope was to convince Les to do it. His family and mine needed to be far away from Luther’s Bend before night fell: that was the only thing I could be certain of.
Instead of driving straight home, I made a detour, drove east until I picked up Whitehall Road. I wasn’t sure what I expected to see in the park, but that was where all of the trouble had begun, where Douglas Sykes had snatched Maggie, and I imagined that if his pack did exist, they might just start where he’d started.
I slowed as I approached the playground area, noticing a family gathered on the deep sand amid the swingsets, the jungle gym, and the tube-sprouting treehouse. It occurred to me that they were just out for a picnic, though the weather seemed a bit cool for that. Two kids, an elderly woman that was probably their grandmother, and a rather odd grouping of adults, ranging from late twenties to middle age, loitered there.
But as I approached them, every member of the family turned toward the car. Their manner of dress was incongruent, both with the weather and with each other. A slender man with a tattoo on his shoulder wore no shirt at all. He looked like he’d been plucked right out of the trailer park, dangling cigarette and mullet intact. I noticed with more than a little fear that his skin hung loose from his bones. Though the sagging flesh was not nearly so pronounced as it had been on Sykes, it was enough to send my heart into my throat. Next to the white-trash guy stood a strikingly handsome man, perhaps a full decade older than I am. The man wore his silver hair smoothed back. In his polo shirt and khaki slacks, he looked like a bank executive on vacation. Even the two children came from different cultures. One was an Asian boy with short hair and tattered jeans. The other child, a girl, was much older, possibly Hispanic or Native American. She wore a very pretty blue summer dress and no shoes. Her left arm was missing below the elbow.
I drew closer and the old woman lifted her nose into the air as if taking a deep breath. Then she lowered her gaze and bared her teeth at me in a cruel grimace. The others wore disdain and anger. Only the older man, the one who looked like an executive, only his face didn’t change. He was weighing the situation, mentally calculating some unknown equation; it burned like embers in his eyes.
Normally, I would have stopped and questioned strangers if they looked out of place in my town or, at the very least, given them a wave to let them know they were on my radar. Instead, I stepped on the gas and sped away.
—
My daughters met me at the door with hugs and kisses to my cheek. Both were wearing their Powerpuff Girl backpacks, excited and eager to be going for a “surprise” sleepover. I held them close, smelling their hair, feeling their little hearts beating against me.
“Are you all ready?” I asked.
“Yes, Daddy,” they said in unison.
“Good. Is your mother ready?”
Gwen’s face grew serious and she shook her head. Dru’s head fell, chin to chest.
“Mommy’s asleep. She said she didn’t want to go,” Gwen said. “She said she wanted to be left alone.”
I looked out the window, checked the day’s darkening. There wasn’t much time, but I couldn’t just leave Lisa behind. Not now that I’d brought Sykes’s scent into my home.
“Okay, young ladies,” I said, manufacturing the biggest smile I could. “You two go get in the car, and you lock the doors. Mommy and Daddy will be out in just a minute.”
I watched them until they got to the car. Gwen helped her younger sister into the backseat before joining her there. Then she wriggled between the front seats and reached for the driver’s-side door. I saw the lock pin drop and disappear. Satisfied, I ran up the stairs and burst into the bedroom I shared with my wife.
Lisa bolted up in the bed, startled, looking around the room with her heavy-lidded gaze. Upon recognizing me, her face twisted sourly, and she dropped back to the pillow.
“Get up,” I said, stomping across the room to the bed.
“Leave me alone. I have a migraine.”
“Stop the shit, Lisa. This is serious.”
“I’m sick.”
“I don’t doubt that, but we have got to leave, right now.”
“Just go away and let me sleep.”
“Lisa, I’m saying this once, and then I’m going to carry you out of here. The lunatic that killed Arthur is still out there, and now he’s after me. That means he’s after you and the girls, too. So get your ass out of that bed and come on!”
It was a functional lie, certainly as close to the truth as I could get without having to spend thirty minutes defending my sanity. Still, it didn’t work.
“Just go,” she mumbled.
I reached down, intending to scoop her out of the bed. I’d carry her to the car if I had to. But Lisa rolled, throwing her elbow in the process, and it clipped my chin good and hard. She continued to roll over and slapped her palm across my cheek.
“Leave me alone! You son of a bitch, don’t you ever touch me!”
“Fuck this, I don’t have time for your tantrums.”
“Where do you go at lunch, Bill?” Lisa asked, her face a tight mask of loathing. “You want to tell me that?”
“I go to Les’s shop. We have lunch and play cards.”
“No, Bill, you don’t. I call the shop. No one answers. So where do you go? Where are you in the mornings when you’re supposed to be at the gym or at night when you’re supposed to be working late?”
“Lisa, this is not the time. Didn’t you hear what I said?”
“How long, Bill? How long have you been doing this to your family?”
“For fuck’s sake, Lisa, there is a killer out there.”
“I don’t give a shit,” she screamed. Tears were flowing freely from her eyes. “You’ve been killing this family, and I want to know how long it’s been going on. Who is she?”
“I wish there was another woman, Lisa. I do. Then I could march her in here and maybe you’d stop poisoning yourself with those goddamn pills. Maybe you’d start caring about your daughters enough to spend time with them instead of curled up here in your fucking bed. But there is no other woman, Lisa. She doesn’t exist.”
“You fucking liar.”
God knows my behavior was not above reproach, but another woman had nothing to do with it. I thought about my daughters, alone in the car. They needed me. What was left of my wife wasn’t going to leave, at least not with me. I backed away.
“Fucking liar,” Lisa said through thick sobs, f
alling back to the bed and clutching a pillow to her face. “You fucking liar.”
—
After setting my girls up in my office, I used the phone on Duke’s desk to call State Trooper Coltraine. He’d left a message for me; the news wasn’t good. His men found the bodies from the night before, from the rest area—three men, a woman and two little boys. Their remains were found about a mile into the forest.
“They were stripped clean,” Coltraine said. “Hollowed out. Christ, Bill, I never saw anything like it. They were all laid out in a neat row…like a fucking buffet. You got any idea what kind of animal does a thing like that?”
Of course I had an idea.
“Look,” I told him, “we still have that guy in custody, Sykes, the one we’re certain grabbed Maggie. I spent some time with him this afternoon, and I’m sure he’s connected to the murders. Maybe he has an accomplice, maybe more than one. You might want to get over here and haul him up to Marrenville to get some answers. I can’t get much out of him.”
More than anything, I wanted Sykes gone, but if that wasn’t to be the case, then I wanted a good number of troopers on hand to help me fight off his enemies.
“I’ll send a car,” the trooper said. “We’re still collecting forensics up here and we’re running thin on manpower, but if your guy knows something, we’d better know it, too.”
“Any idea of when we can expect you?”
“ASAP,” Coltraine said.
I hung up the phone, sunset only minutes away. Where the hell was Les? My men were gathered in the front office, all of them looking at me like I was about to read off lottery numbers. Duke and Ed sat on the edge of a desk. Bucky sat in a chair. They wanted to know why I’d called all of them together. I needed to tell them something.
Shame and embarrassment will make you do a lot of stupid things. For instance, instead of warning everyone at the station what was coming down on us for fear of looking like a fool (after all, I was going on the word of a lunatic), I instructed my men that we had word of a gang coming through town. Duke nodded his head, patted his holstered gun, and kept gnawing on a toothpick. Bucky looked over the rim of his glasses, eyeing me like I was only slightly saner than the guy we had in back, and Ed said, “Usually, they just keep passing if you don’t give ’em any trouble.”
Ed was always shooting his mouth off. I should have expected him to question the thin story I laid out, but I was hoping my authority would carry it off.
When confronted with this logic, I embellished the story. “That would normally be true, Ed, but it seems our friend Mr. Sykes pulled some shit with one of their kids. They are coming here, and they’re coming for him.”
This seemed to work in the short term. Now Ed, too, was nodding. On the plus side, my men would be at the ready, and if everything I believed, including Sykes, turned out to be wrong, I wouldn’t go down in town history as the sheriff two slugs short of a clip. On the bad side, none of us had any idea what to expect once the pack arrived.
I wanted to talk to Sykes before they did.
My daughters, Dru and Gwen, were playing in my office, busy fighting aliens on my computer. So I told the boys to gear up with the shotguns—an order that made Duke’s eyes twinkle—and I let myself into the holding area.
“Stupid fuck is outta luck.” Sykes said, his voice low and growling. The prisoner paced the cell, four steps forward and four back. He looked at the floor, his hands flapping against his thighs.
“I think you might be right about that pack.”
“I might…be right. I might…be right,” Sykes sang. “Is the cocksucker getting scared?”
“Watch your mouth, Sykes.”
“Apology…scatology.” The speed of his pacing increased. His palms swatted loudly against his jeans. Fingers clutched denim. Released.
“Look, I can’t protect you if you don’t tell me how to stop these things.”
“Protect me? You’ll be lining my belly before the night’s out. Or one of theirs. Either way, you’ll be sliding out instead of in.”
“What are you fishing for, Sykes?”
He stopped pacing and spun on me. “Let me out of this fucking cell!” he cried, saliva spraying over his lips. “Let me out of here or I’ll tell your redneck posse. I’ll tell them everything.”
“Why don’t you just tell me how to stop this pack, instead of creating some sick fantasy about my personal life?”
“His scent was all over you last night, Bill.” Sykes walked up the bars, grasped them in his hands. His fingers worked furiously on them like he was trying to draw milk from an udder. “There’s no fantasy there. He arrived before you and that stink was on him. When you showed up it threw me, because the scents were so much the same. For a minute, I couldn’t tell the two of you apart. You carried so many of the same scents as little Maggie’s father, but you weren’t him. You’d been with him, though. Oh, you spent a lot of time…with him.”
I checked over my shoulder to make sure the door to the holding area was secured. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“What is it, Bill? A quickie in a roadside motel once a week so you can keep the evil beastie under control? Does he just jack you off, or are you giving him the goods? Do you kiss and coo? Do you like his taste? He’s such a strong man, a big man. Do you like Mayflower pinning you down and forcing his cock in so you can pretend it’s not what you want?”
“Shut your filthy mouth.” My head swam in a tide of red. I kept checking the door to make sure no one entered the room. But what if they were outside, listening? I had to shut him up. He didn’t know anything about me, about my life, about Les. He was a fucking monster. What in the hell could he possibly know about it?
“Does he grunt your name when he’s fucking you, or does he call you ‘baby’?”
Sykes smacked his lips loudly, making wet kissing noises. He licked his lips, sending flecks of spittle to the ground. Then he laughed, stepping back to the center of the cell.
I unclipped the holster restraint, grabbed the butt of my gun. It seemed my skull had become a hive for swarming wasps; they buzzed and stung, colliding in my head with fierce agitation. My vision blurred. I paced the hall and fidgeted madly, just as Sykes had done moments before, trying to get myself under control.
My only clear thoughts were: He has to shut up. Someone will hear him.
“Did it drive your wife into the arms of a real man, Bill? Did it send her out looking for a dick that didn’t taste like Mayflower’s shit? Or did she just drown herself in a few bottles of wine a night like my lovely dead bride?”
That was when I snapped. Twenty-four hours of turmoil churned to the surface, stabbing at my head and chest, leaving me enraged and irrational. My eyes filled with Lisa’s angry face, her doped stare. Sykes was screaming at me, only it was Lisa’s voice I heard.
“…you fucking liar. I know, Bill. You think I don’t, but I know. You haven’t touched me in years. Not like a man would. Where do you go for lunch, Bill? Where do you GO?”
I heard the shot even before I realized I had drawn my weapon. Sykes’s body jerked to the left. He stumbled back and hit the wall. Behind me, a commotion rose at the door. Keys jangled, and Duke and Ed and Bucky shouted my name.
“Nice try,” I said, holstering my weapon. Sykes glared at me from the back of his cage. I’d shot wide, aiming into the adjoining cell, where a cloud of dust from the wounded wall settled. The fucker could taunt me all he wanted, but he wasn’t getting off that easy.
“Stupid Billy,” he said. “Silly Willy.”
Sykes slid down the wall and sat his ass on the floor, his legs splayed, his eyes staring blankly at the space between his feet.
The door to the holding area burst open. Duke and Ed pushed their way in, weapons drawn, while Bucky hung back a few steps and fumbled with the catch on his holster. Duke and Ed peered into the cell. It took them a bit of time to realize that our prisoner was not dead. They were all asking me what happened. My brain and hear
t were so beaten up by the last few minutes that I didn’t have an immediate answer. Instead, I stumbled out of the holding area into the main office.
There, standing in the open doorway, was Les Mayflower.
—
“Hey, Bill.”
I was grateful to see Les unharmed, but he stood in the doorway like an accusation, a confirmation, and I had to look away. Even when I walked up to him at the door, I looked down, focused on our shoes pointing at the space between us.
“I never thanked you,” he said. “For Maggie, I mean. Everything is just kind of jumbled up right now, and I know I was a jerk to you earlier. I didn’t mean anything.”
“It’s okay,” I told him. “But we’ve got some trouble coming this way. I need you to do me a favor, if you can.”
“If I can,” Les said cautiously.
“I want you to stay out of town tonight. Maybe go on out to the Comfort Inn in Charlesville. And I need you to take Gwen and Dru with you.”
Les’s face scrunched up in confusion. “What’s going on, Bill?”
“I don’t have time to explain it all, but please, just do this for me.”
I walked away from Les toward my office where my daughters played. I opened the door, and my daughters looked up at me, wearing frightened expressions. They sat on the couch in my office, clutching at each other. I’d already forgotten about the gunshot. It must have terrified them. I hurried across the room, gathered them into a hug to let them know everything was going to be okay.
Another lie.
Les kept asking me questions. I evaded most of them, not wanting to frighten the girls any more than I already had. While I gathered up their things, I told Gwen and Dru that they were going to stay with the Mayflowers. That was their surprise, and it made quick work of relieving their frightened expressions.
“Bill, I don’t know…” Les said.
I grabbed his arm, slapped the girls’ backpacks into his chest. He held them there with a big hand.
Dark Screams, Volume 9 Page 14