by Sean Lynch
Sean lynch
WOUNDED PREY
This book is respectfully dedicated to that rare breed of police detective who track sex offenders. These cops truly hunt in the dark places.
CHAPTER 1
Nevada, Iowa. November, 1987
Vernon Slocum sat waiting in the driver’s seat of a stolen Ford station wagon. When he saw the children his eyes narrowed.
They were right on time.
The wagon was parked on University Drive, less than a block from Franklin Roosevelt Elementary School. The engine was running. Both of Slocum’s hands were thrust into the pockets of his faded green army jacket. His left hand was a clenched fist. His right hand gripped a government-model .45 caliber pistol.
Slocum was a large man at six feet two inches. What gave him the appearance of even greater stature was the girth of his chest and shoulders; a product of his Germanic ancestry and a lifetime of physical labor. His breathing was uneven and his nostrils flared.
He sat up straighter in the driver’s seat when the group of second graders came into view. They were accompanied by two adults. An elderly matron was in the lead, and a student aide of no more than twenty-one brought up the rear. The procession was returning from a field trip. The youngsters were bundled in mittens and scarves and clutching leaves and other local flora in their tiny hands.
The children neared where Slocum had strategically parked his car.
He checked the ignition to ensure the screwdriver was still in place. The first teacher, leading the procession, saw the battered station wagon and began scrutinizing its lone occupant suspiciously. She saw a large, disheveled man with a tight crew-cut, unshaven face, and dark eyes.
Slocum felt the teacher’s challenging gaze and knew it was time to act. With agility and speed unusual for a man his size, he burst from the stolen Ford. He moved towards the children, leaving the driver’s door open.
The elder teacher saw him approach and stopped, the first signs of alarm wrinkling her face. The children continued on, oblivious to anything but their playful thoughts.
Slocum gained the sidewalk in a few powerful strides, ignoring the frightened eyes of the teacher.
He grabbed for the hair of seven year-old Tiffany Meade. In her red mittens was a sheaf of autumn leaves which were to be the mainstay of her science project. She’d selected them on the basis of their still-green appearance, despite the lateness of the season.
He caught the girl’s shoulder-length hair and pulled her to him. The force of his seizure wrenched the breath from her lungs. The old teacher screamed and released her hold on the two children she held at either side. Slocum encircled the girl’s neck with his left arm and drew the .45, thumbing off the safety.
The teacher ran at Slocum with arms extended, her face contorted.
“No!”
Her shriek, part command and part plea, shattered the serenity of the crisp November morning. Slocum waited until she was at arm’s length to fire. The heavy slug struck her above the right eye, and her head snapped back violently. He didn’t remain to watch her fall. He made off with his struggling cargo, his pistol trailing smoke. He strode towards the car while stuffing the handgun into his coat pocket.
Slocum didn’t notice the terrified wails of an entire second grade class; the sound couldn’t penetrate the roar in his head. And he didn’t see the still-green autumn leaves fall gently to the ground from Tiffany’s thrashing hands.
CHAPTER 2
Kearns ran along the river, the steady pounding of his neoprene-soled shoes creating a pleasant rhythm. He’d been running for just over ten minutes and was beginning to even his pace and regulate his breathing. From here on, for the next twenty minutes or so, it would be smooth sailing. The first ten minutes were the hardest.
Once he despised running. A hitch in the army as an infantryman did little to alter that sentiment.
It took the Iowa Law Enforcement Academy and a charismatic physical training instructor to instill an affinity for running. It had been several months since he’d graduated the police academy, and he was now a rookie deputy sheriff in rural Story County. Unlike his academy classmates he still ran regularly, even though there was no longer an army drill sergeant or police academy PT instructor to mandate it.
Kearns jogged along the Skunk River and turned onto University Drive. The Franklin Roosevelt Elementary School lay ahead.
He took the air in slow, through his nose, and watched his breath leave in a visible plume. It was late November, and winter was still a few weeks away. Though the TV weatherman raved about the mild weather central Iowa was experiencing, he could feel the coming season in the sting of his lungs. Folks were saying it was going to be a hard one.
He chuckled to himself. He couldn’t remember when an Iowa winter wasn’t a hard one. Looking far ahead, Kearns yielded the sidewalk to a group of schoolchildren who were hogging it; a wandering mob herded by two harried adults.
He gave them a glance, and went back to focusing on that point on the ground avid runners seem unable to look away from. He jerked his head up with a start when he heard the scream.
It was a short scream. The word, “No!” was all he heard. But in its tone was a stark, bone-chilling quality that made Kearns unconsciously break stride. He held his breath to listen better. It was what he saw, however, that brought him to a complete stop.
Approximately seventy yards ahead a large man was holding a child. Kearns could see the child’s legs kicking spastically, well off the ground. The man wore a green army jacket, and all Kearns could see was his back. The man retreated towards a clunky-looking station wagon parked nearby. An elderly woman, perhaps the one who’d screamed, ran towards the man with her arms outstretched. In her every move, even from his distance, Kearns sensed desperate terror.
Deputy Kevin Kearns instinctively started running again, this time in a sprint. His heart raced as the drama unfolded before him. Suddenly everything seemed to be occurring in slow-motion. He ran with all his strength, but felt he would never reach the children.
He formed no plan of action for his arrival. All his concentration was focused on simply getting there. His legs pumped furiously and he stretched his arms to lengthen his stride. The elderly woman’s outstretched fingers almost reached the jumbo-sized man holding the child.
To his horror, the man drew a pistol from his coat pocket and leveled it point-blank at the approaching woman.
With twenty yards to go, Kearns saw the flash of the pistol’s muzzle. The sound of the gunshot reached him a split-second later. The woman’s head jerked and she stopped in mid-stride, crumbling to the ground. The big man turned away and began walking towards the car. He seemed oblivious to the weight of the child struggling in his grasp.
CHAPTER 3
Slocum caught motion from out of the corner of his eye and whirled, causing the girl’s short legs to swirl in an arc. He saw a man running at him full speed. The man was medium-sized, with a muscular frame under a set of gray sweats. He was young, in his early twenties, with short, military cut hair. Slocum’s eyes locked with those of the approaching man’s. They were innocent eyes, eyes unlike his own, eyes that belonged to a man who had never drawn fresh blood.
Slocum braced for the impact.
Kearns lowered his head and hit the bulky figure in a running low tackle with every bit of momentum his hundred-yard/thousand mile sprint had summoned. Kearns, the big man, and the little girl hit the ground in a pile of flailing arms and legs.
Kearns was dimly aware of children screaming and scampering around him. He rolled in an effort to regain his feet. He realized the man must outweigh his own one hundred and eighty pounds by at least fifty.
Kearns got up and watched his opponent do the same. He marveled at how the big man shrugg
ed off the collision. Kearns squared-off, and saw the man reach into his pocket for his pistol; the same pistol which moments before had cut down a defenseless woman. There was no time to think. As a drill sergeant once taught him, it was kill or be killed.
He closed, clasping the man’s right arm with his left. At the same time he brought up a knee into the larger man’s groin. He was rewarded with a grunt and felt hot breath on his face. He also felt the hard steel of the pistol in the man’s pocket and clenched with all his might over the hand holding it.
Dazed by the groin shot, the man swung a quick left to the deputy’s head. Kearns saw it coming and ducked, taking most of the momentum away from the punch. It still hit him hard, and stars danced in his head. He sent out a right hook of his own, and followed up with a headbutt to the man’s nose. Though he knew they were powerful shots, they seemingly had no effect.
Kearns realized he couldn’t match his adversary’s strength. With rising panic he felt his grip on the gun-hand slip. If he didn’t stop the man from drawing his pistol, he would join the courageous teacher in death on the sidewalk.
The little girl was crawling on her hands and knees away from the two men locked in mortal combat a few feet from her. She tried desperately to scream. There were tears of anguish in her eyes, but she’d yet to recover her breath.
Kearns hammered away at his foe’s head with his right fist, punches that bloodied the distorted face. In his adversary’s eyes he saw hypnotic darkness. It momentarily distracted him.
The giant seemed able to withstand a tremendous amount of punishment. With a Herculean shove he pushed the deputy, catching him off balance. Both went down, the larger of the two men on top.
Kearns knew it was over. He fell backwards and lost his grip on the gun-hand. He groped desperately with both of his hands to regain his restraining grip on the pistol. He felt a vice-like hand clamp his throat.
His eyes widened as he saw the pistol emerge from the coat pocket. He recognized it as a US government .45, the same model he’d been issued in the army. With all the strength he could muster he strained against the weight of the large man straddling his chest. Kearns could almost feel the bullet enter his skull and winced; death was a trigger-squeeze away.
The man’s face was a bloody pulp. He cleared the pistol from his pocket and brought the gun-butt down on Kearns’ head. The blow landed over his left ear, on the temple, and rendered him instantly unconscious. Switching the pistol slightly in his hand to get his finger in the trigger guard, he pressed the muzzle against Kearns’ forehead.
An instant before he pulled the trigger, the man again sensed motion out of the corner of his eye. Looking away from Kearns’ inert body he saw Tiffany Meade get to her feet.
Forgetting the deputy, the man rose to his own feet. In several quick strides he had the youngster once again in his grasp. She shrieked and struggled. He was more dazed by his encounter with the deputy than Kearns would ever know, and he silenced the girl with a savage punch to the head. The second grader went limp in his arms.
The man looked around. People were running out of the school. He ran to the idling station wagon and hurled his unconscious bundle into the car. He got in and slammed the door with a jolt.
Kearns fought himself groggily to consciousness; splashes of color and unidentifiable sounds overlaid the agony in his head. He couldn’t get up, and for a moment fought the overwhelming urge to vomit. Blood ran freely down the left side of his face, obscuring his vision in that eye. What images he could see through his right eye were out of focus.
He tried to push himself up but his arms wouldn’t work. He heard a car door slam, very near him, and rolled over on his back to bring his right eye towards the origin of the sound.
He saw the mass of the station wagon bearing down on him. Kearns rolled again, hard, with the last vestiges of his dwindling strength. He felt the crunch of tires as the car grazed past, missing him by inches. He looked up in time to see the station wagon screeching away. He dimly noticed the car had no license plates.
Pain seared through his head, and he felt consciousness slip away again. His cheek hit the ground, remarkably to him, with no sensation from the impact.
The last image Kearns saw through his fading vision was a leaf, oddly green for so late in autumn.
CHAPTER 4
Slocum drove away from the school and the carnage he’d wreaked there. The seemingly lifeless form of a seven year-old girl bounced on the passenger seat as he gained speed.
He wiped snot and blood from his nose. He knew it was broken by the shooting pain he experienced when his forearm brushed the tip. There were seeping cuts over both eyebrows and his eyes were beginning to swell. Slocum was no stranger to pain, and willed the rising tide of hurt from the front of his mind into one of its many dark recesses.
Slocum took a direct route to the viaduct which spanned the Des Moines River. He eased the station wagon off the street and onto an unpaved road near the railroad tracks, out of public view.
Slocum pressed a finger none too gently against the neck of the girl. Her breathing was shallow and her pulse weak, but she was alive. Slocum breathed a sigh of relief.
It was too early for death.
He drove the station wagon directly under one of the huge concrete pylons that formed the bridge’s legs. Parked near the wall was a beat-up Dodge pick-up truck. It was an inconspicuous vehicle in a part of the country where people made their living from one facet of agriculture or another.
Slocum got out of the Ford pulling the girl towards him across the seat by her legs. A faint groan emerged from the child’s lips. He took her roughly in his arms and carried her to the truck, opening the door with his elbow. He placed the semi-conscious child on the passenger seat as he’d done in the station wagon. Reaching past her and onto the truck’s floor, he grabbed a canvas tarpaulin and completely covered the inert girl. The key was already in the Dodge’s ignition, and a moment later he was pulling out of the gravel lot and back onto the street.
He shifted through the Dodge’s gears and picked up speed. He struggled out of the faded green army jacket and set it aside. Under it he wore a sweat-stained shirt, its ragged sleeves rolled up past thick, muscular forearms. A squatting bulldog wearing a campaign hat and a snarl sat above the letters USMC, tattooed on his right forearm. Slocum shrugged into a plaid work-shirt, pulling the collar up. He added a John Deere baseball cap in green and yellow, and wiped the blood from his face with a grease-stained rag. He finished by tucking his pistol into his waistband.
He was almost out of town. He passed the minimart and the First Presbyterian Church with its pointed roof. He reached over and removed the tarp from the girl. An ugly bruise was forming along the child’s jawline where he’d silenced her frantic struggling.
Slocum’s breathing got irregular for the second time that morning. His vision started to narrow, and within the confines of the warm cab of the Dodge he could smell the acrid scent where the little girl had urinated on herself.
The scent of urine.
He involuntarily rocked back and forth. Whining sounds emanated from his mouth. His eyes closed, and he remembered how his own urine smelled when his father struck him with the hickory switch. The smell of urine also brought back the sound and thunder of mortar rounds slamming into the earth, and the screams of the dying. He breathed deeply the familiar musk and became lost in a maelstrom of stark, hell-wrought images.
The crunch of gravel and the angry blare of a horn snapped him back to reality. The smell of urine vanished as he opened his eyes and straightened the steering wheel.
He’d faded again. The truck edged over the center divider, narrowly missing another oncoming pick-up truck. Slocum steadied his hands on the wheel. He shook his head to clear the cobwebs from his mind.
He squeezed a Pall Mall from a wrinkled pack on the dash and lit it with a worn Zippo lighter extracted from a hip pocket. On one side of the Zippo was engraved an eagle, globe and anchor.
CH
APTER 5
Kearns woke to the sound of an amplified voice asking for Doctor Somebody to please report somewhere, and to a blinding white light. His mouth felt thick and his head felt like it weighed a ton. He tried to sit up and found restraining hands pushing him gently back onto whatever it was he was lying on.
Gradually his vision cleared, and through his right eye he could see a rubber-gloved hand over his face at close proximity. He couldn’t see at all through his left eye. He realized he was in a hospital. The person wearing the rubber gloves dragged stitches through his scalp.
“Where am I?”
A deep voice answered from out of view. “You’re in the hospital, Kevin. You’ve taken quite a thump on the head.”
He recognized the voice of his boss, Sergeant Dick Evers, a former trooper who’d retired from the state police and joined the sheriff’s department a couple of years ago. Kearns could feel the tingle of anesthetic on his head as the rubber-gloved hands tugged stitches through his skin. He realized the blinding light he’d awakened to was the spotlight framing the physician’s face. It prevented him from knowing the identity, or even the sex, of the attending doctor.
“How long have I been out?”
“About an hour,” said Evers’ bodiless voice.
“What happened?”
“You were there; you tell me. But you’d better talk fast. The sheriff’s on his way, and there’s gonna be State Division of Criminal Investigation boys coming shortly. There’s also more reporters than you could shake a stick at. It’s a regular parade. Buck’ll be in heaven.”
Evers was referring to Sheriff Robert “Buck” Coates, their Commander-in-Chief. Buck wasn’t liked by his men, and his swaggering style did little to endear him to anyone else. Sheriff Buck spent most of his off-duty time at the Elk’s Lodge in varying stages of intoxication, nurturing voter support along with his Kessler’s. Anywhere the press could be found, Buck Coates could be found too.