The Monster Novels: Stinger, the Wolf's Hour, and Mine

by Robert R. McCammon

  Earl Van Diver lifted his hands. Then he pointed to his throat and moved his finger toward the Buick’s trunk.

  “Now he wants to talk,” Didi said. Under her clothes she had broken out in a cold sweat. She would have shot him if she’d had to, but the idea of violence made her stomach clench. “Open it,” she told him. “Real slow.” She kept the gun against his back as he unlocked the trunk. Laura and Didi saw the listening dish, the tape recorder, and the sniper’s rifle. Van Diver opened a small gray plastic case and took out a cord with a plug on one end and a miniature speaker on the other. He slid the plug’s prongs into his throat socket with practiced ease, and then he clicked a switch on the back of the speaker and adjusted a volume control. He lifted the speaker up before Didi’s face.

  His mouth moved, the veins standing out in his throat. “The last person who called me a pig,” the metallic voice rasped, “fell down a flight of stairs and broke his neck. You knew him by one of his names: Raymond Fletcher.”

  The name stunned her for a few seconds. Dr. Raymond Fletcher had done the plastic surgery on her face.

  “Walk to the car.” Didi slammed the Buick’s trunk shut and shoved Van Diver toward the BMW. When Van Diver was in the backseat with Didi beside him, the gun trained on him, and Laura sitting behind the wheel, Didi said, “Okay, I want to hear it. How’d you find me?”

  Van Diver watched the IHOP’s door, but his voice filtered through the speaker in his hand. “A policeman friend of mine was working undercover on Fletcher in Miami, trying to catch him doing surgery on people who wanted to disappear. Fletcher called himself Raymond Barnes, and he was working on a lot of Mafia and federal-case clients. My friend was a computer hacker. He cracked Barnes’s computer files and dug around in them. Everything was in code, and it took maybe five months to figure it out. Barnes kept all his case records, back to when he’d first started in ’seventy. Your name came up, and the work you’d had done in St. Louis. That’s when I got involved. Unofficially.” His black eyes fixed on Didi. “By the time I got to Miami, my friend was found floating in Biscayne Bay with his face blowtorched. So I went to visit the good doctor, and we went to his office to have a nice long talk.”

  “He didn’t know where I was!” Didi said. “I’d moved three times since I had my face changed!”

  “You came to Barnes with a letter of recommendation from an ex-Weatherman named Stewart McGalvin. Stewart lived in Philadelphia. He taught classes in pottery. It’s amazing what surgical instruments can do, isn’t it?”

  Didi swallowed thickly. “What happened to Stewart?”

  “Oh,” the voice from the speaker said, “he drowned himself in the bathtub. He was the tight-lipped type. His wife…well, she must’ve shot herself in the head when she found him.”

  “You son of a bitch!” Didi shouted, and she pressed the gun’s barrel against his throat socket.

  “Careful,” the speaker’s voice cautioned. “I’m sensitive there.”

  “You killed my friends! I ought to blow your damned head off!”

  “You won’t,” Van Diver said calmly. “Maybe you could cripple me, but you don’t have any killing left in you, Bedelia. How did you put it? ‘I didn’t need a prison cell. I carry one around with me.’ I got into your house to plant a microphone bug. I’ve been watching your house for almost four years, Bedelia. I even moved from New Jersey to be close to you.”

  “How’d you find me if Stewart didn’t tell you anything?”

  “His wife remembered you. You’d sent her a set of plates. Nice work. She mailed you a check for six cups to go with them. She had the canceled check, made out to Diane Daniells. The First Bank of Ann Arbor’s stamp was on the back, and your signature. When I saw you for the first time, Bedelia, I wanted to sing. Do you understand how a person can love someone and hate them at the same time?”

  “No.”

  “I can. See, you were always a rung on the ladder. That’s all. You were a hope—however slim—to find Mary Terror. I watched you come and go, I checked your mailbox, I camped in the woods outside your house. And when you went on your trip, I knew something important was going on. You’d never left Ann Arbor before. Mary was in the news. I knew. I knew.” The voice through the speaker was terrible, and bright tears glistened in Earl Van Diver’s eyes. “This is what my life is about, Bedelia,” he said. “Executing Mary Terror.”

  Laura had been listening with fascinated horror, and at that moment she saw the object of Van Diver’s attention emerge from the IHOP with David’s bassinet in her arms.

  “Mary,” Van Diver’s voice whispered. A tear streaked down his cheek, over the gnarled scar tissue of his mouth. “There you are.”

  Mary had just finished her meal of pancakes, eggs, hash browns, and two cups of black coffee. She’d fed Drummer, and changed his diaper in the bathroom. Drummer was content now, sucking on his pacifier, a little bundle of warmth. “Good baby,” Mary said. “You’re a good baby boy, aren’t—” And then she looked up and saw the BMW sitting there in the parking lot, not far from her van, and her legs seized up. She saw Laura Clayborne at the wheel, Didi sitting in the back with a man she didn’t recognize. “Goddamn it!” she snarled. How the hell had they found her? She held Drummer with one arm, and her other hand snaked into her shoulder bag and touched the Colt, the Compact Magnum automatic farther down amid the baby things. Blow out the tires! she thought, enraged. Shoot that bitch in the face, and kill Didi, too! She took a couple of strides toward the BMW, but then she stopped. The sounds of the shots would bring other people out of the IHOP. Somebody would get her tag number. No, she couldn’t open fire here. It would be stupid, when she knew at last where Lord Jack was waiting. Smiling thinly, she walked to the BMW and Laura Clayborne got out.

  They stood about twenty feet apart, like two wary animals, as the wind swirled around them and sliced to their bones. Laura’s gaze found a Smiley Face button on Mary’s sweater, pinned over the heart.

  Mary brought the Colt out and rested it against Drummer’s side, because she saw that Didi was holding a gun. “You must have good radar,” she said to Laura.

  “I’ll follow you all the way to California if I have to.”

  “You will have to.” She looked at the Go home scratched on the windshield. “Somebody gave you some good advice. You ought to go home before you get hurt.”

  Laura saw the woman’s bloodshot eyes, her face lined and weary. “You can’t keep driving without sleep. Sooner or later you’ll nod off behind the wheel.”

  Mary had been planning on finding a motel to crash in when she reached Illinois. The No-Doz and coffee had charged her up, but she knew she was going to need rest in a few hours. “I’ve gone two days straight without sleep before, when I—”

  “Was young?” Laura interrupted. “You can’t make it all the way to California.”

  “You can’t follow me all the way, either.”

  “I’ve got a co-pilot.”

  “I’ve got a pretty little baby boy.” Mary’s smile tightened. “You’d better pray I don’t run off the road.”

  Laura took another step closer. Mary’s eyes narrowed, but she didn’t retreat. “You understand this,” Laura said, her voice husky with rage. “If you hurt my baby, I’ll kill you. If it’s the last thing I do on this earth, I’ll kill you.”

  Nothing was going to be gained standing in this parking lot wasting time, Mary thought. She had to get back on the interstate and head west again. Later on she’d figure out a way to shake her trackers. She began to back toward the van, the Colt still resting against Drummer’s side and the baby’s cheeks flushed with the sharp cold.

  “Mary?”

  It was a man’s voice. The man in the backseat of Laura’s car. But there was something strange and metallic about it: the voice of a steel-throated robot.

  She saw the man staring at her, his face carved into a pallid, scarred grin and his eyes the color of midnight. “Mary?” the robot voice spoke again. “You made me suffer.”
<
br />   Mary stopped her retreat.

  “You made me suffer. Do you remember, Mary? That night in Linden?”

  The voice—almost disembodied, and made directionless by the swirl and sweep of the wind—caused the rise of chill bumps on the back of Mary Terror’s neck.

  “I killed Edward,” he said. “I was aiming at you. I got excited after all these years. But I’ll get you, Mary.” The volume suddenly cranked up to a soulless shout: “I’LL GET YOU, MARY!”

  She backed quickly to her van as Laura got behind the BMW’s wheel. Mary put Drummer down and started the engine. The BMW’s engine roared to life an instant later. Then Mary backed out of the parking slot, the black coffee sloshing in her belly, and she wheeled the van in the direction of I-94 West. Laura said to Didi, “Take his keys and get him out of here.”

  Didi worked the Buick’s keys from Van Diver’s fist, the automatic jammed against his side. “You’ll never take her without me,” Van Diver said. “She’ll kill both of you before the day’s over.”

  “Get him out!”

  “You put me out,” he said, “and the first thing I’ll do is call the Michigan highway patrol. Then the FBI. They’ll set a roadblock for her before she makes the Illinois line. You think Mary’s going to give your baby up without a fight?”

  Laura reached back, grabbed the cord, and yanked the speaker’s plug from Van Diver’s throat. “Out!” she told him.

  “He can still write,” Didi realized. “We’d have to break the bastard’s fingers.”

  There was no time for further argument. Laura let off the parking brake and drove after Mary Terror. Van Diver made a gasping noise, but his attempt to tell Laura about the magnetic homer and the receiver unit in his car was stillborn. Laura stepped hard on the accelerator, leaving the IHOP behind and racing after the van. Didi kept the pistol pressed into Van Diver’s side. That was all right with him. Sooner or later she’d have to relax. Both these women had soft white throats, and he had hands and teeth.

  Nothing and no one was going to stop him from killing Mary Terror. If he had to dispose of these women to take control of the car, so be it. He had no code now but vengeance, and whoever wandered in the path of its fire would be reduced to ashes.

  Laura saw the van ahead, slowing for its turn onto I-94 West. She followed it, and in another moment she veered into the lane behind Mary and let the speed wind up to sixty-five. The car and the van stayed about fifty yards apart, the highway getting crowded with morning traffic. In the van, Mary looked at the BMW’s bashed front fender in her sideview mirror. The memory of that metallic voice still chilled her. You made me suffer, it had said. That night in Linden.

  Do you remember, Mary?

  She did remember. A bullet tearing a pig’s cheek, and a second bullet mangling his throat.

  Suffer.

  This was far out, she thought. Groovy weirdness. She recalled reading about the pig in Didi’s photo album, but she couldn’t remember his name. Didn’t matter, though. He was as crazy as Laura if he thought he could stop her. She was trekking to California with Drummer, and no one was going to get in her way and live. She’d watch her speed and be a good girl for the highway patrol piggies, and she’d figure out how to take care once and for all of Laura Clayhead, Benedict Bedelia, and the sufferer.

  She went on, arrowing along the gray highway toward the promised land, with the BMW in dogged pursuit.

  3

  Good Boys

  SOUTH OF CHICAGO’S SPRAWL, I-94 became I-80, but the high-way still aimed across the flatlands of Illinois. Mary had to pull into another gas station near Joliet, and Laura—who’d gone the last ten miles with her fuel warning light on—pulled in after her and filled up the tank while Didi held the gun on Earl Van Diver. “I need to use the bathroom,” Van Diver said through his speaker, and Didi said, “Sure. Go ahead,” and handed him one of the paper cups.

  Laura got into the backseat with Van Diver while Didi relieved herself in the bathroom, and then Didi took the wheel. Within fifteen minutes the car and the van were back on the highway again, both keeping a steady sixty-five and fifty yards apart. Van Diver closed his eyes and slept, a soft, groaning noise coming from his mouth every so often, and Laura had a chance to relax, if only in body and not in mind. The miles reeled off and the exits went past, and Didi felt the car shudder as the winds hit them in hard crosscurrents.

  At two o’clock in the afternoon, with Moline, Illinois, twenty miles ahead, the sky was the color of wet cotton, and wandering shards of yellowish light speared through holes in the clouds. Mary Terror, her system raw with caffeine, nevertheless felt the weariness starting to overtake her. Drummer was tired and hungry, too, and kept crying with a high, thin wail that she couldn’t block out. She gauged the BMW behind her, and watched the Geneseo exit coming up. It was time to make the move, she decided. She kept in the left lane, making no indication that she had her eye on the exit. When it was almost too late to turn, she stepped on the brake, veered the van across two lanes in front of a Millbrook bread truck whose driver pounded his horn and displayed his command of expletives, and then Mary was speeding up the exit ramp and the BMW had flashed past.

  Didi shouted, “Oh, shit!” and hit the brake pedal. Laura, roused from an uneasy sleep in which snipers on rooftops took aim at Mary Terror and David on a balcony, saw Didi struggling with the wheel, the van no longer in front of them, and instantly realized what had happened. Van Diver’s eyes came open, his senses as alert as those of a predatory animal, and he looked back and saw the van turning to the right off the exit ramp. “SHE’S GETTING AWAY!” the metallic voice roared, the speaker at top volume.

  “No, she’s not!” Didi fought the car across the lanes, the tires shrieking and other cars blowing their horns and dodging around her. Didi got the BMW into the emergency lane, put it into reverse, and started backing toward the Geneseo exit. In another moment she was speeding up the ramp, and at the intersection she took a hard right that threw Van Diver into Laura and crushed Laura against the door. Then she was racing north along a county highway that cut across flat, winter-browned fields, a few clusters of tract housing on either side and a factory in the distance, its chimneys spouting gray smoke above the horizon. Didi passed a Subaru, almost blowing it off the road, and she saw the van about a half mile ahead. She kept giving the engine gas, the distance rapidly closing.

  Mary saw the BMW approaching. The van didn’t have enough power, there was no way to outrace the car, and there was nowhere to hide on this straight, flat road. Drummer was crying steadily, and rage flew up inside Mary like sparks swirling from a bonfire. “SHUT UP! SHUT UP!” she screamed at the baby, but he wouldn’t be quiet. She saw a sign on the left: Wentzel Brothers Lumber. A red arrow pointed along a narrower road, and the lumberyard stood surrounded by brown fields. “Okay, come on!” Mary shouted, and as she took the turn she lifted the Colt out of her shoulder bag and laid it on the passenger seat.

  She went between a pair of open iron gates that had a sign saying WARNING! GUARD DOGS! The lumberyard was maybe four or five acres across, a maze of timber stacked anywhere from six to ten feet high. There was a trailer, before which was parked a pickup truck, a forklift, and a brown Oldsmobile Cutlass with rust-eaten sides. Mary turned the van deeper into the maze, her tires throwing up dust from the unpaved surface. She pulled up alongside a long, green-painted cinderblock building with high, dirty windows, and she got out, holding Drummer’s bassinet and the Colt revolver. She searched for a good killing ground, the dust roiling around her and the crying baby. As soon as she stepped around behind the building, she was met with a fusillade of barking as loud as howitzer shells. Within a dogpen topped by a green plastic canopy were two stocky, muscular pit bulls, one dark brown and the other splotched with white and gray. They threw themselves against the pen’s wire mesh, their white fangs bared and their bodies trembling with fury. Beyond the dogpen were more stacks of lumber, piles of tarpaulins, and other odds and ends.

  “Jes
us H. Christ!” a man bellowed, coming from around a pile of timber. “What the hell’s goin’ on with you boys?” He was big-bellied and wore overalls and a red plaid jacket, and he stopped next to the cage when he saw Mary’s gun.

  Mary shot him, as much of an involuntary reaction as the pounding of her heart. The bullet hit him like a punch to the chest, and he went down on his butt on the ground, the color leaching from his face.

  The noise of the shot and the violence of the man’s fall sent the pit bulls into paroxysms of rage. They ran back and forth in the pen, colliding with each other then caroming off, their barking savage and their beady eyes on Mary and the infant.

  Didi hit the brake as she saw the van, and the BMW skidded to a stop. Laura was out first. She could hear the hoarse, rapid barking of dogs, and she started running toward the sound with the automatic gripped in her hand.

  Didi and Van Diver got out, and Van Diver did not fail to notice the keys left in the ignition. Behind the cinderblock building, Laura found the dogpen and the man lying on his back on the ground, blood on his chest just below his collarbone. He was breathing harshly, his eyes glassy with shock. The pit bulls raged behind the wire mesh, running back and forth over their territory, and Laura saw the beef bones of past meals scattered about on the ground. Laura carefully walked on between the high stacks of lumber, her gaze searching for Mary. She stopped abruptly, listening. The dogs were barking loudly, but had she heard the sound of David’s crying? She went on, wary step after wary step, her knuckles white around the gun’s grip and her heavy coat blowing around her.

  Back near the car, Van Diver hesitated and let Didi walk on. Mary Terror’s van was parked next to the building, and Bedelia Morse was between Van Diver and the van. She carried no weapon, but she’d been a blood-spilling member of the Storm Front. It would take a quick snap of her neck, he thought, to send her to her reward, and then he could plan on getting the gun away from Laura. He made up his mind: three seconds of judge, jury, and executioner.