Broken Heartland

by J. M. Hayes

  “He tell you what happened to him?” Mad Dog might have asked Mark, but Mark was busy guzzling water.

  “Not really. Just that Galen locked him in there Friday night, a few hours after you left. Galen brought him food and water twice a day until last night. Nothing today.”

  “Can I have some more?” Mark had drained the first bottle.

  “Sure,” Mad Dog said. “But talk to us first. What’s going on out here? Why’d Galen stick you in that bin?”

  “I don’t know,” Mark said. “I finished chores at your place, then I drove around some, trying to decide what to do about….” The words trailed off and he twisted his head back to gaze longingly up at Pam. He sighed and Pam ran her fingers through his hair.

  “I always told you I would leave on my twenty-first birthday,” she said. “But I was here Friday night. You could have called.”

  Mark sighed again, puppy-sad eyes locked on her face. Mad Dog couldn’t take it anymore. He popped the tab on one of the sodas and offered it to Mark, holding it far enough away that the boy had to sit up and reach if he wanted it.

  Mark sat and took it.

  “So, what? Did you run into Galen somewhere? Did you come here?”

  “I drove by.” Mark paused to take a healthy swig of the soda. “When I saw the ambulance…. Well, naturally I stopped. I was afraid something had happened to Galen.”

  “Ambulance?” Mad Dog prompted.

  “Actually, I don’t remember that it had any markings, and there weren’t any flashing lights, but it looked just like one of those emergency rescue vehicles. Besides, they had somebody on a wheeled gurney right by it. So I pulled in and asked who was hurt and one of the guys with the gurney pulled a gun on me.”

  Mark stopped to gulp more soda.

  “And?” Mad Dog prompted.

  “Galen came out. Then they brought me down here and put me in the bin. I asked Galen why, but he never said. Told me he’d explain later. And then he stopped bringing me food and water today and that was it, until you two came and let me out.”

  Mark smiled, but only at Pam. “Say, how’d you find me? And why are you wearing those Siegrist Grain Company overalls…and where are your shoes?”

  ***

  Chairman Wynn wouldn’t do it. Heather English had suggested he find the sheriff and show him the medical records, explain Annie Gustafson’s story, and tell her dad what she’d left beside the beer at the Gas—Food.

  “Honey,” Wynn said. “I love your daddy, but this is my son we’re talking about. If Galen Siegrist was driving that bus, I need to talk to him. Maybe Galen ran that stop sign. Maybe he knows something that’ll prove the accident wasn’t my boy’s fault. If you think our sheriff should know all this stuff, you tell him. You’re the deputy.”

  The two Heathers had already worked their cell phones in an effort to pass the information along. The sheriff’s office phones remained stubbornly busy. Maybe a line was down.

  It wasn’t that windy today. If you lived somewhere other than Kansas you might call it windy, but not here. Phone and electric lines failed out in the middle of the prairie at all sorts of odd times. There weren’t enough customers to justify much of a maintenance program on thousands of miles of wire. “Fix it when it breaks” seemed to be the usual approach.

  The girls tried Englishman’s cell, too. It was still on voice mail. They left another message.

  “He’s right, you know,” Heather Lane said. “You are the deputy.”

  “What?” Heather English had been sure her sister would want to run the errand when the chairman refused. “I thought you were worried sick about Dad. Don’t you want to see for yourself that he’s all right?”

  “That dream.” Heather Two swept a hand at the sky, as if you only had to look at those cotton-ball clouds just right to understand her logic. “You had the dream, too. If yours was like mine, it wasn’t so much that Dad isn’t okay. It’s that something terrible was going to happen to him unless I prevented it.”

  “So? Go see him, tell him what he needs to know, then stick with him and keep him safe.”

  “You can do that,” Two said. “I have the feeling that bad something might happen at the Siegrist place. Maybe I need to go there to find out how to prevent it.”

  Deputy Heather felt the same. She wanted to solve this thing and keep her dad out of it. She already knew Englishman was safe back in Buffalo Springs. Now something told her she had to solve the mystery behind the school bus to keep him that way. But the Dodge station wagon and Wynn-Some’s wreck were all linked to it. And Englishman was not only her dad. Thanks to that badge she’d accepted, he was her boss. Someone had to tell him what they’d discovered.

  Apparently that someone was going to be her. She sighed. Maybe Heather and Chairman Wynn could solve this. If she stuck to Englishman’s side once she found him, she could see that he stayed out of trouble. Maybe splitting up like this wasn’t such a bad idea. Sooner or later, Englishman was going to find out about Siegrist. More kids from that bus were coming home. The sheriff could be talking to one of them right now, and then….

  “Okay, I’ll go tell Dad,” Heather said. “But what are you two going to do? Just walk up and bang on the door and demand that Galen explain what he was doing with that bus last night?”

  Two wouldn’t meet her gaze, but the chairman did. “What’s wrong with that?” he said. He put his hand on the butt of his revolver. “I can persuade him to talk if I have to.”

  “And get anything he tells you thrown out of court because you threatened him. You two need to be cautious. Anything Galen says can’t be coerced. You should just go hide behind the nearest windrow and scout the place out. Then call me before you do anything. Promise?”

  Two nodded. The chairman was more reluctant.

  “You want to help your son, right?”

  “Sure,” Wynn agreed. “We’ll take a look and report back to you. But if you’re coming out or bringing Englishman, don’t take too long. I got no patience today.”

  “We’ll call,” Heather Two said. “I swear.”

  ***

  It was true about the girls’ locker room. Several holes in the tunnel had clearly been drilled with serious peeping in mind. Not that the angle was good, or that the peeper would have been close enough for the kind of scrutiny available, a click of the mouse away, on today’s internet. But, back when this room and these peep holes were in use, it would have been far more thrilling to the person using them than any streaming video.

  A few yards farther on, the tunnel passed over the boys’ locker room. There were peep holes there, as well. That was a surprise. Had girls peeked at guys, too? Or guys at guys? Then the light filtering up though those holes illuminated the dried blood on the sheriff’s hands, the inevitable result of following where Chucky’s trail led, and the sheriff stopped caring who was looking or being looked at so long ago.

  They’d gone far enough, now, that Chucky’s trail was no longer so gruesomely fresh. But it was dusty in here. No one had followed these pipes, checking for leaks, lubricating valves, or spying on naked teenagers, for many years. Even in the gloom, Chucky’s route was clearer than if he’d left breadcrumbs.

  The sheriff took a moment to listen, again. He could hear lots of little noises now. Skittering sounds. Rats, maybe. Squirrels might have taken up residence in the attic and the walls. Or ghosts, perhaps, of all the students who survived the trauma of being imprisoned in this Guantanamo of the Plains. Or the joy of it. What a confused time high school was, your mind expanding and your body becoming adult, your consciousness caught between logic and the demands of hormones gone wild. How had they made it? How had all those students endured the psychopathology of being a teen? And, since the rest of them had, with varying degrees of success, why hadn’t Chucky?

  None of the sounds were of a human crawling. Nothing indicated Chucky was close by. Or that he wasn’t. Chucky could be just around the next corner, waiting to unload a clip in the sheriff’s face, or t
o thrust his blade in flesh one more time.

  The sheriff began moving again. He turned a corner and found himself under the study hall. A pair of iron grates flooded the tunnel with light. Nothing held them in place except their weight. Why hadn’t Chucky pushed one of them open and left this warren of twisting passages? Where was he going? What could he be planning to do to top what he’d already done?

  The sheriff was under the biology room when the highway patrol arrived. Or he thought it was biology. The siren sounded distant. When it stopped, a loudspeaker crackled. The words were garbled as they echoed off stone and brick and found their way into the service tunnel. Something about putting down a gun. Was Chucky out there? Could the boy be that far ahead of him? No way to know. No way to get out there fast enough to make a difference. The sheriff considered using his cell to call Doc to find out, then decided against it. For now, he still had a trail to follow. And not much farther. He’d crawled and twisted to the opposite end of the building, or nearly so. If he was right about where he was, there was only one more corner ahead.

  The sheriff rolled around it, behind his .38. This should be it. This should be the end of the tunnels.

  It was…but it wasn’t. A piece of metal he hadn’t expected was lying next to where the last of the pipes rose through the floor. Once, they had made the history room the coldest in the building.

  The sheriff scrambled across the final yards. When he was sure, he tore his cell out of his pocket, activated it, and dialed. It didn’t matter, now, whether Chucky heard him, knew the sheriff was just behind. The metal plate had stood between passageways—a door from yesterday’s heating system into today’s. Beyond it, the wide maw of the forced air vent from the new heating plant loomed. It was an avenue that could provide the sheriff, or Chucky ahead of him, with access to what was left of the Buffalo Springs student body. They were waiting in the false security of a lockdown, behind closed doors and windows, with never a moment’s thought given to the ducts Chucky Williams might use as a route toward the elimination of an entire generation of Benteen County’s youth.

  ***

  The Kansas Highway Patrol cruiser came in from the east. It hadn’t needed to slow down to pass through Buffalo Springs before it reached the high school. That was why it was going too fast, Doc decided, to make the turn into the parking lot. The turn wasn’t paved, and since most folks entered from the opposite direction, gravel had gradually gotten banked the wrong way for a high-speed turn from the east. Siren wailing, light bar strobing, tires smoking (until they left the blacktop), the cruiser veered rather than turned as it came through the gate.

  It didn’t quite make it. The driver’s side headlight exploded against the steel pole on the west side of the gate. The cruiser’s rear end hopped off the ground, then spun around to leave the vehicle butt first to the school. A cloud of dust and steam enveloped the car as it began frantically backing across the lot. The driver tried to throw it into one of those dramatic about faces, but the left front tire had blown and come off the rim and he only managed to gouge up a lot of dirt and end up sideways to the building before the engine sputtered and died and the siren turned to a squeak before it stopped.

  The driver’s door opened and a trooper got out. He had a shotgun in one hand and a microphone in the other.

  “Are you all right?” Doc called. He couldn’t see any blood. Under normal circumstances, he would have been at the man’s side as fast as he could get there, checking for injuries. Today, he’d promised Englishman he’d guard the stairwell and keep Chucky Williams from getting away if he somehow got by the sheriff.

  The trooper didn’t answer Doc. He raised the microphone to his lips as he pointed his scattergun Doc’s way. “Toss your weapon aside,” the amplified voice commanded, “then get down on the ground, face first.”

  It was a mistake. “No, wait. I’m the Benteen County coroner,” Doc said, as if that explained why he was standing beside the local high school with an ancient Luger in his hand.

  “I don’t care if you’re Jesus H. Christ,” the trooper said. “Toss the gun or eat buckshot.”

  It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. “There are dead kids in this building,” Doc said. “I’m guarding an exit for the sheriff.”

  The trooper didn’t care. Maybe he was angry, humiliated by what he’d done to his vehicle. Maybe he was on a power trip. Maybe he was just scared of what he was getting into. The officer dropped his microphone, racked the shotgun, and brought the weapon to his shoulder.

  Doc stopped arguing. He tossed the Luger and dropped to the ground. He spent a brief moment, while the gun was airborne and before he was hugging dirt, wishing he’d had time to set the safety before he threw it. This cop was going to shoot if that gun went off when it hit the ground.

  The Luger landed safely in a clump of grass and the trooper didn’t kill him. “You’ve got to cover the back of this building in case the killer tries to get out,” Doc said.

  “I got to do nothing, old man,” the officer replied. “Put your hands behind your back and shut up.”

  Doc’s cell phone started ringing. He’d promised to keep the line open in case Englishman needed to talk to him. He started to reach for where he’d clipped it to his belt.

  “Touch that and I’ll blow your head off.”

  Doc stopped. “But that’s probably the sheriff. If he’s calling, it’s important.”

  “Ask me if I care.” The trooper was on top of him now. The shotgun touched the back of Doc’s skull as the man kicked his arm, hard, and then bent and cuffed Doc tight enough to interfere with circulation. Doc decided not to complain. Apparently it wasn’t Chucky Williams who was likely to kill him today. It was a Kansas Highway Patrolman with an attitude as bad as his driving skills.

  “Careful, Officer,” Neuhauser called from where he’d ducked behind a nearby tree. “The old guy’s got a concealed weapon in his belt.”

  Doc had forgotten. He still had Neuhauser’s gun there. Doc had a bad feeling the patrolman wasn’t going to like that.

  ***

  “Do you think it’s safe to leave him here?” Mad Dog asked. He felt like he should give Pam an excuse to stay with Mark Brown.

  They had found a hiding place for Mark in another warehouse, one that was farther from the house and, if the dust and cobwebs on the machinery were any indication, one that wasn’t regularly used. They picked the cab of an old combine. It didn’t look like it had been out for the last wheat harvest, back in June. The milo crop was mostly cut, though one field stood ripe and ready just east of Galen’s house. Someone might show up to service this machine, but it was the best spot Mad Dog and Pam had been able to come up with.

  Mark’s opinion was that they should all get the hell out of there. The problem was, his keys had been confiscated, too. Mark’s truck was old enough that Mad Dog thought he might be able to hotwire it, but he wasn’t ready to try. His curiosity was up. He wanted to know what was going on out here before he ran from it. Besides, Mark’s truck wouldn’t be fast enough to outrun Galen’s Dodge, or much of anything else. And Mad Dog didn’t know where Hailey had gotten off to.

  “Mark doesn’t need a babysitter,” Pam said. “And I’m just as curious about what’s happening as you are.”

  For some reason, Mad Dog was inordinately pleased by her decision. Of course, it was probably just for the excitement and had nothing to do with which guy she’d rather be with.

  The flip side of having her join him was that they’d already had a gun pulled on them. A warning shot had been fired. And they’d been locked in that grain bin. Those were pretty good indicators that further snooping wasn’t the safest thing they could do. Still, he had the impression Galen hadn’t wanted to hurt Pam. Not kill her, anyway. He wasn’t so sure about himself. That was why he’d armed himself with a scoop shovel. It wouldn’t be much use against Galen’s pistol, but it made him feel better.

  “What are we waiting for?” Pam stuck her face up against a dusty window th
at looked out on the back of the first warehouse they’d entered. “The coast is clear. Let’s play spy.”

  “Hang on,” Mad Dog said. “We’ve been inside three of these warehouses now. There’s nothing interesting in them. I’m thinking we need to check the house, but there’s no vegetation around it for us to hide behind. How do we get there and how do we get in…without Galen filling us with lead?”

  “Follow me, mighty Cheyenne warrior.” The smile in her voice matched the one on her face. She was enjoying this. He wondered if she was taking it seriously enough. He wondered if he was.

  Pam led the way through an exit from this warehouse, then turned in a direction they hadn’t explored yet. It kept them behind one of the long steel buildings. Pam hugged it, staying in its shadow. That was a good decision. They got to the far end without being discovered by anything more dangerous than an occasional Mexican sandbur. The thorns hurt like sin and reminded Mad Dog how nice it would be to find boots to go with their coveralls.

  Pam stuck her head around the building’s corner and invited him to join her. “See. We’re on the garage side of the house now. No windows. And no one’s out in the yard.”

  Clever girl. Mad Dog would have told her so, but she was already halfway across the farm yard to the side of the garage. He followed. At the wall, he asked her, “Now what?”

  “I’m thinking we just let ourselves in the front door,” she said.

  That seemed too easy, but she was probably right. People in Benteen County didn’t use their front doors except for formal events. Front doors opened on living rooms, and those didn’t get much use either, except for entertaining.

  “When I was over here with Mark, we’d leave his truck back by the kitchen and go in its door. Aside from a house tour, we were never in the front room.”

  “And I don’t suppose the front door’s more likely to be locked than the ones to the warehouses.”