>>>>>>
Solstice Day 4:00 p.m.
GET THE FUCK DOWN
It was a long, slow walk back to the house. Wooly, for good reason, was showing some reluctance to return. He was still buzzed from the rock and still carrying on about solstice traditions. In some places, he was saying, they celebrated midsummer by crowning the Oak King, the god of the waxing year. But the festivities were short-lived, because as soon as he as crowned, let me get you told on this, his reign was over, and his rival—the Holly King, god of the waning year—began to take over.
That’s what he was talking about when it all went down.
We were winding around the swamps of the hidden lake—I could smell them, I could see patches of reeds through the trees—and the whole forest started to vibrate. Some sonic boom shattered the silence and nothing else existed but noise, but I didn’t know what it was until I heard a ricochet splinter off a tree trunk behind me.
Then I knew.
I ran and rolled into the swamp-side trees as bullets tore the woods apart. Flat to the ground, I could see pinpoints of rifle fire flaring from a jagged wall of pines on the other side of the trail. Whoever was shooting was shooting full on. The bullets kept kicking dirt in my face; leaves and bits of bark were raining on my head.
I got the Glock out and went to return fire, but at that point I realized something large and fleshy was taking up a lot of my sightline. Wooly was still standing on the path. He hadn’t moved. He was just standing there in the middle of the bullet hail.
“What’re you doing?”
“I’m ready,” he yelled back. “I’m ready for it.”
“Get down!”
He shook his head. “I’m ready to go.”
Fucking idiot and his fucking acceptance. Never do anything halfway.
I fired into the pines. Moments later I saw something moving—the shooter going for better position. For a second the sun caught a glint of something. Light hair. Tufts of light hair.
Now he was firing back, scattering shots all over the place. Who was he aiming for? Me or the numbnuts standing out there?
“Get the fuck down!”
“It’s all right,” said Wooly.
“Fucking move!”
“I can’t get hurt out here. I can only die in the house.”
What the hell was this, tragedy or comedy?
I let a round loose and jumped out of the trees, running at Wooly with my shoulder down. I hit him low—center of gravity, etc.—but it was still like trying to tackle a bus. We stumbled across the trail like dancers in the world’s worst ballet, and the whole sloppy effort finally ended when we crashed into the trees and bushes on the other side and collapsed on the ground.
“Am I dead?” he said.
“Shut up. Lay still.” I looked up the woods, waiting to take more fire.
Wooly was feeling his face. “I’m not dead.”
“Not quite.”
“I knew it. It can’t happen out here, only in the house.”
“You could get shot out here and then die in the house.”
Now he looked worried. “I hadn’t thought a that.”
“Just shut up.”
Silence instantly took over. Five seconds later it was feeling weird. Why wasn’t the guy shooting? Then I realized—he couldn’t see us anymore. We’d landed on his side of the woods. We were blocked out by the walls of pines.
Ten more seconds of nothing went by. Then I heard a little crunch, somebody stepping on a twig. The shooter was coming this way. There was another crunch, followed by branches snapping back, the sound of somebody moving fast. But the sounds were getting smaller, further away. He was taking off.
“Stay here. Don’t move.”
Wooly didn’t answer, but he looked like he wouldn’t dare to breathe.
I plunged deeper into the woods, sidestepping whatever roots and loose twigs I could while I trailed after the noises. I couldn’t tell where the shooter was going—from the sounds he seemed to be running some crazy zigzag. The ground at one point rose to a hill that was ringed at the top with rhododendrons. Once I got past the flowers and started sloping down, I could see the outlines of houses, a street. The guy was heading for civilization.
I’d just gotten off the hill when I heard metal slam. Three seconds later an engine started. The last line of trees let me out on a paved road. A dark Grand Cherokee—maybe black, maybe blue—was sitting maybe 200 feet away. The driver gunned the motor, spun into a 180 and sped off away from me.
I Glocked him. I aimed for the tires and just kept squeezing until one of them blew and the car whipped into the trees on the right side of the road. The impact was solid and sick. One massive crunch of metal and smashing of glass and it was over.
By the time I got to the car the driver’s head was bent over the back of the seat and his eyes were closed. I didn’t recognize him at first. The first thing I saw was the gash that had opened up between his eyebrows, irrigating his tan-dry face with flows of blood. Then I keyed in on the rest of his head. Spiked blond hair. Strangely sexless bronzed skin.
I remembered him on the fifth floor of the Executive Center, coming out of the Trident office with his partner Monte Slater. I remembered him saying Wooly’s got lots of enemies. He’s going for like the world’s enemy record.
Bogash. Gary Bogash, The blank, shiny hustler whose face was now a blood map of rivers and tributaries.
I wasn’t gonna let him die on me.
I opened the door. No seat belt—guy was a real shit for brains to be driving like that. His rifle, a Marlin XL7, was in plain sight—it had fallen to the floor on the passenger’s side. I reached for his throat, going to feel for a pulse in the carotid with my left hand, keeping the Glock in my right.
I’m going to assume he had a pulse. I’m going to assume he had a fast pulse, cause a second later he had his fingers locked around my gun hand and his right arm was swinging a knife at my neck. I just had time to block the blade with my left shoulder.
It didn’t hurt right away. In fact, the first thing I felt as the metal broke through to muscle was how stunningly cold the blade was against the heat of the day. It wasn’t until I staggered out of the car and felt the blood releasing and saw the Glock drop out of my other hand that the pain really started.
Bogash came out of the driver’s seat like a spring. Bastard had the balls to be smiling at me. But it wasn’t a smirk. It was more like a huckster’s all-knowing smile. Maybe the lines of his own blood created the effect, but the smile seemed to say I know what’s going on and you don’t.
He saw the Glock on the ground. As he bent over to get it I lunged at him. He stood up and waved me off with the knife. Again he went for the Glock and the same thing happened again. It was like he’d decided to stretch his legs by doing knee bends.
He forgot about the Glock. The knife was good enough. He started stalking after me, taking slashes at me, making me jump back every time he swung the blade and each time I jumped it hurt like fucking hell. Each jump was like a punch that sent pain right into my windpipe.
Thing about pain is, it’s such a great motivator. I couldn’t keep going on like this. Something had to change. When he got ready to charge again I charged into him instead. Only I stopped short as he went to defend himself, and just before he hammered the knife in my chest I kicked him in the kneecap. The pain froze him, held him long enough for another kick, this time in the balls. He doubled over as the air whooshed out of him. I reached behind him, grabbed his belt and started swinging him, just kept spinning him in circles until we worked our way back to the Grand Cherokee and I slammed him into the side of the car.
Then I clamped onto that spiked hair and smashed his skull into the roof. Did it once, then again, then again and again and again. I was paying back. I was thinking about the shit we’d all been through over the past long days, about his smile, about Jen and Ralphie Freeny, about Roy Freeny’s tattooed head, about what Roy had done to Nickie all those years ago, and I
just kept driving his head into the roof until the dark paint was splattered with new blood and I made myself so sick I threw up.
>>>>>>
Solstice Day 6:45 p.m.
HE TOOK EVERYTHING AWAY
I was trying to keep myself awake in the Hidden Lake Hospital waiting room with some putridly awful coffee I’d bought from the vending machine. At least I thought it was putridly awful. Some people might prefer coffee that’s both weak and bitter. If so, this was their cup of tea.
So far I’d called the house about 80 times. Wooly was fine. He’d been fine since one of the Hidden Lake cops had managed to find him wandering in the woods and had brought him back, and he was still fine. Disoriented, but fine. Nickie said she and Genevieve were fine too. Well fine, I said, then I’d keep hanging around until I heard what Gary Bogash had to say.
I called Jen. The house was also fine, though she’d seen a cop bringing Wooly home. What happened? I told her about the ambush but assured her everything was, yes, fine. How about you? she said.
I wasn’t bad. They’d cleaned out my shoulder and stitched me up—which took about the amount of time usually reserved for open-heart surgery—and they wanted to send me off somewhere for at least a day of observation. I refused. Not on this day.
Bogash, of course, didn’t have that choice. They were treating him under police guard for a concussion and multiple facial fractures. Once they got him set, he’d be taken to the police station and get booked on multiple charges of attempted murder. From there, they’d haul his ass to a hospital with a prison wing.
They’d put Bogash in the first unit off the waiting room. At one point I drifted back there, just to see. He was propped in a bed, head heavily bandaged, though dried streaks of blood were still tracking around his eyes and ears and down his neck. Alex Tarkashian was questioning him, the two cops dutifully patrolling the side of the bed. Bogash was looking at Alex like he was forcing his eyes to stay open as wide as possible.
Back to the waiting room. Half dozen people restless in plastic chairs, whispered conversations, scuff marks on the floor, fingerprints on the window glass, a twisted-up latex glove left on a pile of diabetes brochures.
An old man with pitted cheeks was standing near me, sipping on something in a paper bag. Trying to be slick about it, but holding the bag to his face like he was talking into it. He’d brought his wife in, he said, when she started having convulsions.
“My wife,” he confided, “is an al-cay-holic.”
Alex came out, tucking his pad back into his shirt pocket, his face reflecting orange from the sun outside. He walked over.
“How is he?”
“Not a friend of Wooly’s,” he said. “But talkative. I said to him, just give us some small help here. He did.”
Alex dropped money in the vending machine, waited for the coffee to drip in the cup.
“It’s all about Trident?”
He nodded. “Says Wooly destroyed the business, decimated it. There was some test he did for them?”
“Yeah. For their textiles.”
“He says Wooly took everything away from them, just grabbed it out of their hands. Says he pressed them until it hurt and just kept pressing.”
He took a sip of the coffee and immediately tossed it in the trash.
“He’s even blaming Wooly for Monte’s death. Says he drove him to suicide. He calls it murder.”
“I get the feeling there’s not much remorse.”
“Not a trickle. He said, and I quote, I’ll blow his fucking head off his body. I’ll blow his fucking head off his fat fucking neck.”
We paced around the waiting room, Alex saying that with things looking squared away here, he was getting ready to go back to the stationhouse. He had to get prepped for Bogash’s processing and transfer and formal arraignment.
“So much shit going on in this town,” he said, “I can’t keep track of it all.”
We were back at the first unit. I took another look inside. The two cops by the bed, Bogash staring off into lifeless space, totally tuned out and whispering something to himself.
Alex was giving me a head to toe glance. “Don’t you look like shit.”
“I just wanna sleep, all I wanna do.”
“So do it.”
“Not till this day is done. Even then, I don’t think I’ll ever catch up.”
“You should be taking something for the pain.”
“Aspirin’s good enough.”
“No it isn’t.”
“Until the day’s over it is.”
“It is over. This day is done. Get out of here and get on with it.”
>>>>>>
Solstice Day 8:00 p.m.
THE SKI MASK
The sky over the hospital parking lot was starting to turn to dusk mud. Light was fading, the world was losing a dimension. Who the hell knows, maybe Alex was right. Maybe the day was over. One thing I did know, though—Alex had done right by me. He’d given me my Glock back. He’d had one of the cops get my car and leave it at the hospital. I climbed inside, my shoulder slowly filling with hurt, and drove off.
Stopped at a light a few blocks away, dying pink light reflecting off the pond to my right. The swans were craning their heads like mortgage bankers filled with wonder.
Despite myself, I was feeling a certain relief. I could almost believe that the longest day of the year was coming to an end.
I had to pass through downtown to get back to the house. As I hit the commercial district I caught a sudden serious craving for coffee. Good coffee. Real coffee. My need for a taste was junkie-bad.
By common consensus, Wings ‘N Things was supposed to serve a nice brew. I pulled over, found a space on the same street where Bogash had used us and the rest of the town for target practice. Very decent dinner crowd in Wings ‘N Things, new plate glass on the windows. I went to the take-out counter, ordered a regular, paid up and waited.
The pain in my shoulder was making my nose runny. I reached across the counter for the black box of paper napkins. Odd thing about the counter top. It had a shiny, pearlescent surface with some weird reflective properties. As I passed my hand over it, I saw something like a clump of smoke traveling just below my fingers. I moved my hand again. What I was seeing was a reflection of my hand, but it appeared to be floating above the counter, suspended in the air like a hologram. Fucking fascinating. I kept moving my hand back and forth. It was like watching a ghost image hover over the counter. I know I must’ve looked like an imbecile but I couldn’t stop.
Even when my cell went off, I answered it with my gimpy left hand. The right was still gliding with its spirit twin. I heard the panic in Alex’s voice, but it didn’t really register. It couldn’t break the spell.
He’s gone, Alex was screaming. He got away. Don’t ask me what the fuck happened, but he got away.
I don’t know what was worse, the point where I thought I was losing my mind or the point when I realized I wasn’t.
“What?”
He’s gone—Bogash. GONE.
“Gone how?”
I don’t know. Said he had to go to the bathroom. My guys, they got him out of bed, supposed to cuff him and walk him over. Next thing, he’s got one of their guns and they’re in cuffs. Few moments, that’s all it took.
Words were coming back to me. Wooly sitting in my boss’ office last week, talking about the efficiency of the local cops. Your average fudgy turd has more brainpower.
“Where he now?”
GONE. He’s GONE.
“How long ago?”
Like 10 minutes ago. My guys fanned out looking for him, once they got themselves freed, but it looks like he took a nurse’s car.
I was wandering out the door like driftwood, somebody yelling at me about coffee—hey, you forgot your coffee.
“So he does a number on your guys and he runs away.”
That’s what I’m saying.
“With a concussion and broken bones?”
That’s just his head. T
he rest of him I guess is fine.
All that was left of the sun outside was a red bruise in the western sky. I told Alex I’d stay in touch, then I got in the car and headed to Wooly’s. There was no blood left in my body—it was all nitrogen ice. I didn’t know the what or the why of what was going on, but I wasn’t gonna let it happen.
>>>>>>
I hit 70 in five seconds and was just starting to get up to real speed when the cell sounded. Alex with an update? No, Jen’s prepaid number.
Her voice was halfway between whispering and crying. There’s somebody here. There’s a man here, on the property. He just got here.
“Bandages on his head? Or spiked hair?”
I don’t know, I can’t tell. He’s got something over his head. He’s got a ski mask over his head.
“You sure? It’s getting dark—you sure?”
It’s a ski mask. I can see it. He’s here. He’s sneaking around the back of the house.
“Get away from there. Move back into the woods.”
No. You need me here.
“Then don’t go near the house. Don’t go anywhere near there.
I’m staying right here.
I was pushing 90 when I switched her off and started dialing the house. What was Bogash doing with a ski mask? Everybody already knew who he was.
I was mid-dial when the phone rang again.
He went inside, Jen said. I just saw him. He just broke in.
“Where?”
The kitchen door, I think. Yeah, the kitchen door. He just broke in.
“You stay where you are, you understand? Do not go near there.”
I tried the house again, my heart beating like somebody was tossing rocks against the inside of my chest. No answer. I went to Nickie’s cell. One ring, two. She usually picks up on the second ring. A third ring, a fourth. The voicemail clicked on. Fuck me.
I was three blocks away and I couldn’t breathe. Doing 100, 110, I was helpless. I was fated to fail. The prediction was going to come true, no matter what. The prediction was just sitting out there, patiently waiting to come to pass, patiently waiting with plenty of time to kill.
The Dead Have A Thousand Dreams Page 15