A hold-out, throwback, rural enclave.
The drive to the South Arm was treacherous. Snowdrifts from last night had been plowed from the highway and banked on the shoulders. Exposed wet tarmac overpowered salt and sand to freeze to black ice. The black dome above was pinpricked by stars, more and more punching through as the city retreated. Just before Massey Tunnel under the South Arm, DeClercq turned west off Highway 99 to the States onto the Steveston Highway, dividing rural and urban Richmond. The fake Dutch windmill of Fantasy Gardens slowly whirled in the ticky-tacky theme park to his right. Up the Steveston Highway in the Africa case, madman Gunter Schreck had led Zinc Chandler on a deadly car chase.
At Number 5 Road, DeClercq turned south to enter the farming belt. Less light, more dark, the deeper he penetrated. As he neared the river, mist belched toward him from the polluted water. Angling west on Dyke Road, he drove the crest of the levee parallel to the flow of the stream. The Benz fishtailed on the icy, snow-covered hump. Slip left and he'd drown in the river; slip right and he'd flip in the ditch. The headlamps shone like a lighthouse on a foggy sea. The wind whined upstream off the Pacific ahead. It swirled the mist into ghosts that drifted by the windows.
Foghorns groaned.
Skeletal trees passed.
Cottonwoods.
Poplars.
Maples . . .
The Mountie braked to a halt.
The maple trees grew wild in the overgrown garden beyond the wire-mesh fence. The fence was a checkered barrier that ran across the front of the lot and back down both sides to a muddy slough. A newer gate in the fence was padlocked and chained. Mr. Albert Stone was a paranoid man, or perhaps he just goi tired of Pacific Planter readers scampering through his garden, for the spikes atop the fence would rip genitals to shreds. Not that anyone would wish to enter now. The only structure visible on the miasmic slough was a rusting Quonset hut of corrugated iron, the roof dribbling orange streaks down the sides.
By the glow of the headlamps, the roof ran blood.
According to the map he used as a guide, Dyke Road dead-ended past the slough. DeClercq drove on to a gate across the road—from here on the dyke was for those on foot—and parked his car in the shelter of a riverbank woods.
He switched off the engine.
He sat in the dark.
Contemplating whether or not to get a telewarrant.
No, he decided.
The proper way to do this was by the book. If he had probable grounds to believe evidence of murder hid behind the fence, a formal search under warrant was the legal route. But all he suspected was evidence had been here a decade ago, when it had been seized by Al Flood and ended up in a burning tin and a garbage can. He had no reason to believe there was more evidence here, and if he got a warrant and the killer found out—a possibility if his hunch was right— a fruitless search tonight might motivate the Head-hunter to destroy evidence at a new lair.
He was fishing, pure and simple.
DeClercq checked his .38, then stepped out of the car. The clammy night smelled of brine and rotten fish. The fog caressed him like a widow's veil. He fetched a flashlight and tire iron from the trunk, then crunched along the crest of the dyke back the way he'd driven in, sweeping the eerie mist with the light until he saw a rowboat beached at the mouth of the slough. Commandeering it, he stepped in and pushed off.
A fishing village for more than a hundred years, Finn Slough is one of the last tidal communities on the West Coast. This sleepy little backwater on the Fraser River was founded by immigrant Finns in the 1880s and hasn't changed since. Bounded on the Richmond side by the dyke, bounded on the Fraser side by Gilmour Island, the murky, grassy, oily brown waters of the narrow slough rise and fall with the shifting tide. Like Charon, the mythical ferryman who transports the souls of the dead across the River Styx, DeClercq paddled up the stagnant bilge toward the underworld. The rising moon illuminated the vapor with deadlight. Like visions in a nightmare, grim gray images drifted by. Wonky pilings jutted like crooked teeth. Decrepit gangways on both flanks creaked and moaned. Ropes whipped the barnacles of a keelhauled hull. Deadheads thumped the boat and rocked DeClercq. A mangy dog on Gilmour Island growled at the moon. Shacks on stilts leaned to and fro, all ship-lap gray weathered by years, some old scow houses built by the Finns, some net sheds strung with gillnet webs. Beneath a wooden drawbridge the boat slipped on, removable planks above dripping on the Mountie. From a houseboat half sunk in mud, smoke curled from the chimney as someone cried out in pleasure or pain.
Ahead, the turbid pall parted to reveal a concrete bunker under the Quonset hut. The hut sat atop the bomb shelter like an undertaker's hat. Rickety wooden stairs descended the back of the bunker to a plank-and-piling pier on the slough. Serpents of mist climbed the stairs like a game of Snakes and Ladders in reverse. From the dyke and maple garden above, the shore sloped down to a sandbar choking the waterway. Beyond the bomb shelter, a grassy marsh of snowy mud joined dyke to island where the slough disappeared.
Robert shivered.
He had the creeps.
He shone the flashlight on the sandbar and saw where big leaf and sycamore maple leaves had wafted down from the garden on the wind. Had this been where the Headhunter scooped the bucket of sand in the Wilkes taunt? Mooring the boat to the dock, he pulled himself up on the pier. The stairs wobbled under his feet as he climbed to the Quonset hut. The hut was smaller than the bunker upon which it perched, so a concrete path angled around to a door in back.
The door was double-locked.
The hut had no windows.
The Mountie caught a whiff of something foul. His years as a homicide hotshot had acquainted him with the stench. Sniffing like a police dog tracking a fugitive, he descended the slimy steps to sweep the light behind. Between the bunker and the stairs was a three-foot gap. Set into the concrete wall was a wooden hatch. Decades of exposure to salty air had rusted the lock and rotted the wood.
The stink seeped from within.
Cooked human flesh.
Robert paused a moment to form a battle plan. What if the killer was on the hunt tonight? Stopping to get a warrant might cost more lives. Sycamore maple leaves mixed with sand and the horrid stench gave him probable grounds. This wasn't a dwelling house, and the owner was absent. No judge would deny exigent circumstances for a warrantless search. He decided it was safe to go in and justify himself later. Or do the search, get a warrant, then search "for the first time."
Pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
This takedown is revenge.
Bracing himself against the cold, he jumped into the water and sank knee-deep in sludge. He waded around to the hatch in the wall and wedged the tire iron in to pry it open. The lock tore through the rotten wood. The gaping square was above the high-tide mark, forcing him to monkey up the back of the stairs. He shone the flashlight down the throat of the hellhole, from the rancid bowels of which exuded the gagging smell. The concrete opening was three feet square. The passage sloped down before it straightened out. He couldn't see the far end of the subterranean tunnel. Ignoring claustrophobia, he sucked in a deep breath, then bridged the gap to wriggle headfirst into the hole. The mouth to hell swallowed him up like a fish does a worm.
Tire iron stuck up his sleeve and light gripped in his teeth, the Mountie, head arched back, pulled with his outstretched arms and pushed with his feet to inch down into the underworld. Green gunk sliming the walls turned glistening black where the light faded. Red eyes glared in the dark as rat shit squished under him. This side of the upturn where the passage leveled out, the shaft narrowed to constrict him even more. Get stuck in this dank, dark, cold, smelly squeeze, arms confined so they couldn't move, blood rushing to his head from the slope that thwarted backing out, and his ghastly death from starvation and terror would rival the mind snap of being buried alive.
Push it aside . . .
Keep moving . . .
Inch by inch . . .
Until the beam of the flashlight winked off a pin und
er his nose.
A pin from the jacket of someone who had burrowed in before.
A pin the Mountie had seen on many a lapel. A fifteen-year service pin from the VPD.
Flood, he thought.
The Vancouver cop had been heavier-set than him. Photos in the shoot-out file revealed that. Did Flood get stuck in these narrows and thrash about to smear his clothes with gunk and shit to grease the way out? Did squirming tear the pin from his lapel?
Robert wormed through the narrows and up the bend beyond.
Secured with a padlock, the end of the tunnel was blocked by crosshatched bars. Rust gave way to the tire iron, springing the barrier. So not to break the flashlight in his tumble, DeClercq extinguished and pocketed it before hauling himself out of the hellhole into hell itself.
He hit the floor six feet down to roll in a sticky goo. Slipping twice, he gained his feet and yanked the flashlight from his pocket. When he switched it on, seasoned cop though he was, he gasped in shock.
For here he stood face-to-face with a severed male head suspended by a hooked chain tangled in its hair. A head he recognized as hacked from one of the frat boys ambushed at UBC. Utter horror was frozen in the rictus of the mouth, the tongue bitten through at the instant of decapitation so it hung from the lower lip by just a thread of flesh. The gaze stared blankly from bloodshot whites. Blood ran from both nostrils down the chin. It still dripped from the neck as the blood-engorged brain drained.
Slung below in macrame and shielded from the drip, a candle pot could be lit to highlight the grisly trophy for atmosphere.
The sticky goo in which he'd slipped was the blood pool under the neck.
Footprints in the clotting pool led the Mountie to two more heads. Dangling at eye level with candle pots below, they, too, gazed directly at him, if eyes rolled back in their sockets can be said to gaze. Two trophies also hacked from the waylaid drunks, but where was the head harvested from the raped Engineer? Robert's mind's eye saw the killer roaming from one illuminated dead head to another, erotically stimulated from full-blown necrophilia.
He shone the light around.
The beam snatched details from the dark. Stacks of canned goods stored by Albert Stone. Tins ruptured from rust, spilling contents on the floor. Shelves of thirty-five-cent paperbacks, science fiction to eat time while the fallout settled. Hundreds of bottles of water gone murky over years. Rounds of concrete to roll across the tunnel down which he'd come as a radiation block, and across the stairwell climbing to the hut. The door atop the stairwell was steel with many locks. The paranoia bunker probably would withstand atomic attack, but what sort of survivor would emerge from it?
A mad mutant, he thought.
The sweep of the flashlight caught a breach in the wall to a back room. Stepping gingerly to keep from slipping in the blood, he crossed to the threshold and shone in the beam. Concrete floor, concrete walls, and concrete ceiling. The light reflected off an old-fashioned full-length mirror to one side, in front of which stood a mannequin draped in Red Serge. Tattered, spattered, and half a century old, the uniform was that of a corporal in the Mounted Police. Wrist and leg irons were bolted to the floor, and DeClercq had no doubt this was where Bron Wren had met his fate, sodomized repeatedly facing the mirror. A camcorder left of the threshold had taped his shrieking demise. Raised from the floor was a concrete slab that looked like an altar. The surface of the slab ran rivulets of red. In a semicircle beyond were seven sharpened stakes, rammed on which so the poles stuck up through the tops of the craniums was an arc of grinning skulls. The skulls were ivory with age and all stolen from women.
Greiner, Grabowski, Portman, the nun, Wilkes, and others, he thought.
In front of them a new arc was underway, with two fresh male skulls at one end.
Bron Wren and the raped Engineer.
Adorning the altar was a single candlestick and a large tarnished box. A brazier supporting a pot of sand stood nearby. A cushion on the concrete made the altar a workbench for headshrinker's art. A scalpel to remove the skin from the skull. A needle and thread to sew the skin into a pouch. A scoop to fill the pouch with sand from the hot pot. And thongs and rings to stitch shut the mouth and eyes. The shrunken head of Sean O'Connor slept in a box identical to the one that sent DeClercq the Wren taunt. Unwrapped, the paper under it was also addressed to him.
The Mountie raised the lid of the altar box.
Within was a carved duplicate of the fetish in the Adidas bag photographed in the garbage can out back of Flood's apartment. A similar Janus head with two small back-to-back demonic faces, protruding from the lips of which were eight-inch, rounded, upward-arcing tongues. DeClercq had heard the devils' tongues called the Horns of Venus in their generic form. The dual licks rested on saddle braces at both tips, with another pair of braces waiting for a missing twin.
The killer's on the hunt tonight, Robert thought.
Nestled around the fetish on a pillow of their own hair were dozens of shrunken heads hacked from hapless women. Asian, Caucasian, and African, with lips pierced by rings.
A sound upstairs caught Robert's attention.
He reached for his .38 and found it gone.
Lock by lock, the door from the Quonset hut was unlatched.
He must have lost the Smith in his tumble from the shaft.
He retraced his steps as hinges overhead squealed open.
He killed the flashlight and blindly felt around in the pool of blood for his gun.
Flickering glow from a hurricane lamp spilled down the stairs.
Devoured by darkness, Robert watched as the killer descended.
Boots, then pants, then hands . . .
Both hands full ...
The hurricane lamp in one hand with the beheading knife . . .
And in the other . . .
A bloody satchel hanging limp . . .
A twin for the fetish in the altar box
And a severed head gripped by the hair
Oh, my God!
He recognized the head.
Razor-head
The North
Shhhhewwww . . .
The Razor-head sank deep into Ghost Keeper's thigh, low enough to miss the body armor protecting his torso, but high enough to almost castrate him. His leg buckled and he tumbled from the sled, almost spiking his eye on the arrow sunk in Vern's back. The Mad Dog was about to blitzkrieg his team up the bank and into the bush after Winterman Snow when he saw the Cree go down in a spray of blood.
Shhhhewwww . . .
The second razor-head poked the Mad Dog dead center in the chest, then bounced off his armor as if he were Superman.
Ghost Keeper opened fire on the woods, blasting at the pines from which the arrows flew, snow puffing from branches hit by the shots, as moonlight glinted off the casings his pistol ejected.
A hail of gunfire ripped across the river, bullets zipping around them, hurling chips from the ice, five of the dogs pulling Ghost Keeper's sled yelping as they were hit, Wrangler snarling at the rebels coming toward them while trying to drag the dying malamutes forward to attack.
"Get him!" the Cree shouted, waving Rabidowski on after Winterman Snow. He fed another clip into the grip of his Smith and struggled around against the arrow to fire at the rebels.
The muzzle flashed.
Caught in a vise, the Mad Dog was forced to prioritize. A Member was down. There were rules. Unwritten but understood. Saving George was job one. Two sleds of weapons idle on the ice waited for the approaching four to haul them off to camp. The goal of this mission was to intercept and destroy these arms. That was job two. Winterman Snow was low man on the totem pole. Storming him
Shhhhewwww . . .
was no longer an option.
The third razor-head sliced clean through Sitka to drop the leader of the Mad Dog's team. With both sleds out of action, the Mounties were pinned down, caught in a hotbox of cross fire. Ghost Keeper's wound could bleed him to death.
The Cree toppled his sled to for
m a barricade, and drew the AR-15 from its waterproof pouch. A variant of the M-16, the assault rifle used by the U.S. Army, it sprayed a clip of thirty rounds—Pffdrdrdrdrdrdr!— at the rebels in three seconds. The four snowshoers hurled themselves prone.
SIG/Sauer in his fist and eyes sweeping the forest for any sign of Snow—was that the sound of retreating shuffles he heard in the lull while George reloaded?— the Mad Dog moved gingerly forward from the sled to the dead leader, each step a gamble he'd break through the crust and be leg-pinned as a target.
Clip after clip, as fast as he could reload, Ghost Keeper loosed a withering barrage of machine-gun fire. Only a fool out there in the open would raise his head to shoot back.
The Mad Dog cut the harness and tow rope to free the dead husky, then, gripping the collars of the first pair, led the surviving dogs across to the toppled sled of the other team. There he pulled the belt from his pants and cinched it around the Cree's thigh just above the arrow, a makeshift tourniquet that stemmed the flow of blood.George kept firing until he was out of clips.
The Mad Dog passed him the magazine cache from his provisions.
A burst of shots from the rebels pounded the slats of the overturned sled like xylophone bars, splintering through.
The Cree opened up again.
Heads out there ducked, and someone gasped.
On his belly the Mad Dog wriggled across the snow to the closer weapons sled. Cutting the tarp revealed a line of explosion signs: containers of high-octane fuel for flame throwers. Crawling back to cut Wrangler free from the dead dogs of Ghost Keeper's team, he gripped the malamute by the collar and led it over to lead his team of huskies. A good leader not in harness will lead anyway.
These were competition dogs.
Used to starting guns.
"In the basket!" the Mad Dog yelled to the, wounded man, who kept on firing as he was helped onto the sled. The Mad Dog slammed a clip into the other AR-15, then slung it over his shoulder while he yanked off a glove to hang two Thunder Flash grenades from his fingers by their pins. Climbing on back of the sled, he yanked the pins and tossed the bombs at the closer toboggan of weapons. "All right!" he ordered Wrangler and the team, the command galvanizing the dogs to jump forward and be off at full gait. The Cree braced himself for the jerk by stretching out on the sled. The Mad Dog turned and emptied the magazine of the AR-15 at the cans of flame-thrower fuel.
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