by Ninie Hammon
He hated how corny that last part sounded, and took considerable razzing about it from fellow officers. But he had been just doing his job—a job he knew and understood and that made sense. The rest of this…what? Insanity? No, it wasn’t insane. He could deal with crazy. But how do you deal with a fuzzy childhood that had in the past week started molting, losing its fur covering in bits and hunks? He supposed eventually there’d be nothing left but the bare dog underneath, and he was certain that it was one ugly mutt.
Only a week ago, he’d gone running into a school, armed and focused on cold, hard reality—and had raced through the looking glass and into Wonderland. Something fundamental had shifted in the universe, or in Jack’s ability to perceive the true nature of the universe, he didn’t know which. Now, he felt vulnerable and exposed, no longer the man with a gun who was in charge, but the dude with a clipboard on the sidelines trying to figure out the rules of the game the big boys were playing.
Major Crocker plopped a file of papers on the table in front of him.
“I’m trying to wrap this all up and put this case to bed,” he said. “You wouldn’t be making stuff up just to give an old man indigestion, now would you?”
Crock picked up a mug inscribed with a picture of two dinosaurs looking out over the water at a retreating ark. Beneath were the words, “Oh crap, was that today?” He poured coffee into it, took a big gulp, made a face and set the mug beside Jack’s Snoopy mug of half-drunk, cold coffee on the squad room table.
“Tastes like yak pee,” Crock grumbled.
“Drunk a lot of yak pee, have you?”
“So you’re saying you were on a Little League team in 1985 with the shooter,” Crocker said. “Not just you, but the father of the little girl you shot. And the shooter had a picture of that team”—Crocker fished inside a folder in his other hand, came out with a photocopy of the picture and dropped it on top of the report—“and he walked right past it as he left the house that morning packing guns, chains and a padlock on his way to off a classroom full of ten-year-olds—that right?”
“It’s all there in the report.”
Jack had an office, but he rarely used it, only when he needed to close the door so he could ream out some patrolman for sloppy paperwork or careless procedure. He joined the men who reported to him in loathing the former, but was a tyrant when it came to officer safety. Sloppiness could get you yelled at; carelessness could get you killed. He preferred to do his own paperwork at the table that held the ancient coffee pot, mugs and a ragtag assortment of condiments in a Spiderman cup in the back of the squad room. He liked to be in the center of what was going on, not holed up in some windowless cave. He had a distinct aversion to closed-in spaces. Translate that: he was full-bore claustrophobic, avoided elevators whenever he could, hated to fly, even disliked revolving doors, though you could see through the walls.
Jack drew in a deep breath.
“Actually, it’s not all in the report. I just found out a couple of other interesting tidbits.” Crocker lifted an eyebrow as his signal for Jack to go on. “I got curious, got to wondering what happened to all the other boys on that team. So I spent all last week digging. Of the eighteen pictured here, five are dead now.”
“Doesn’t say much for the health benefits of playing Little League baseball.” Crocker observed.
“One manages a car dealership. One’s in a Texas nuthouse. One drives a taxi. One’s a fisherman and one has a Roto-Rooter franchise—little worker minions, living worker minion lives—at least the ones with names that weren’t too blurred to read, or that I haven’t heard back on yet.”
“But you did find out something interesting about somebody.”
“Two somebodies.” Jack picked up the photo copy of the team picture and pointed to a boy on the second row, third from the left. “This is Walter Stephenson. He’s a long-haul trucker based in Little Falls, Minnesota, and this”—he indicated a boy on the far end of the front row—“is Roger Willingham, who owns a shoe store in Bakersfield, California.”
“Sound like guys right off a terrorist watch list to me. What have they done to lift themselves up out of minion-dom?”
Jack found that his chest was tight, making it hard to talk without sounding breathy.
“Stephenson parked his eighteen-wheeler on the street in front of his house, spent twelve hours building a bomb in his basement, and then climbed back into his rig and drove it—loaded with wilting lettuce he never delivered—to Savannah, Georgia, where he decided to celebrate the Fourth of July by blowing up a multi-plex movie theatre.”
Crocker pulled out a chair and sat at the table opposite Jack. The other officers in the room stopped their chatter to listen.
“And Willingham flipped the sign from open to closed on the front door of his store, got into his car and drove straight through for twenty-three hours to Saint Louis so he could set fire to a daycare center.”
“Ok, you got my attention,” Crocker said. “What’s the rest of it?”
“The rest of it is that these fine gentlemen both committed their ‘random acts of madness’ in the fourteen days since the Carlisle shooting.”
Crocker didn’t have a comeback for that one.
“What was the body count?”
“Just two—Stephenson and Willingham. They were both amateurs and total idiots. Stephenson apparently made himself a dynamite vest—they still don’t know what kind of detonator he was using, but security camera footage shows he didn’t get far. He yelled he was wired, everybody scattered, he took two steps into the theatre lobby and boom! Accidental detonation.”
“Ouch,” Ramirez said. “That’ll leave a mark.”
“They identified him from his truck in the parking lot—but nobody else had serious injuries.”
“And the shoe salesman?”
“Willingham was after some kid. He showed up at a day care and took the place hostage, splashed gasoline everywhere, and said if they didn’t produce the little girl, he’d strike a match.”
“His kid?”
“Probably, but they’re still checking. Can’t ask Willingham, though. He walked in front of a window and a police sniper capped him.”
Crocker ran his hand over his head as if there were hair on it. Jack had always thought the major bore a striking resemblance to Elmer Fudd, and often had to quash the refrain that played in his head—kill da waaaabbit…kill da waaaabbit.
“What are the odds of all this being a coincidence?” the major said.
“That must have been one kick-ass Little League team—a preacher, three mass murderer wannabes and Carpenter,” said Patrolman Peterson. He leaned back in his chair and sailed a paper clip across the room at Ramirez. “The good, the bad and the ugly.”
Images suddenly formed in Jack’s mind as crisp and real as the faces of the men sitting near him, the smell of coffee burning in the bottom of the glass pot and the sound of Peterson’s honking laugh. It was a flashback. He’d had them before. But this one wasn’t Somalia.
It’s hot, sticky, but not Africa hot. Kentucky-summer hot. There’s shade nearby beneath a gigantic oak tree, but he’s not standing in it. Neither is the white boy beside him—Daniel Burke!—or the little girl named Becca. The three of them are squinting in the sunshine, surrounded by—encircled by a group of boys. One of them, a redheaded kid bigger than all the others, starts the chant. He pokes his finger into Daniel’s chest.
“The good…”
He turns to Jack and jabs him in the chest.
“…the bad…”
Then he turns to the little girl. He doesn’t poke her in the chest, though, actually seems reluctant to touch her. He wags his finger in her face instead.
“…and the ugly!”
The other boys in the circle laugh.
Jack launches himself at the redheaded kid, plows into his chest and knocks him to the ground. He is able to punch the boy in the face once, a good, solid hit, smashes his lip and makes it bleed, before the boy roars in maniacal
rage, a sound more feral than human.
Jack looks into the boy’s eyes and time pauses. In that frozen moment, Jack doesn’t see the anger he expects to see in the pale blue eyes. He sees fear. But it’s not fear of Jack. It is an abject terror unlike anything Jack has ever seen in the eyes of another human being, a terror unlike any fear Jack has ever imagined. Only for a second, though. Then it vanishes and the eyes change, narrow to slits that look like the eyes of some savage beast, an animal from another time or place—eyes that don’t even look human. The total foreignness of the eyes stabs a chill into Jack’s heart, an irrational, bogeyman fear. It’s as if he’s looked through a crack into the deep dark lair of some unthinkable evil.
Jack suddenly feels himself flying through the air. The redheaded boy has flung him off like a ragdoll. From flat on his back on the ground, the boy has launched Jack into the air above him, knocked him twenty feet backward, where he slams into the trunk of a tree with the force of being hit by a truck.
Jack slides down the tree to the ground with a grunt, all the air knocked out of his lungs. The other boys are on him then. They yank him to his feet, their own eyes mirroring the primal hatred he sees in the redheaded kid—Cole Stuart.
The fingers of the boys gripping him dig into his flesh like the talons of eagles, the strength of their grip cutting off the circulation in both arms.
They don’t drag Jack, they lift him off the ground as if he were made of paper mache. Cole gets to his feet and the other boys hurl Jack across the space separating them, where he lands with a plop in the dirt in front of the redheaded boy. Cole reaches down, grabs Jack by the hair with one hand, and lifts him up into the air like a mouse by the tail, holds him out so they are at eye level.
Those eyes, those horrible eyes, all beast, no humanity anywhere!
Cole slams his fist into Jack’s belly. The pain is excruciating. Jack tries to lift his arms to swing at Cole, but he has no strength and no breath. Cole holds him there, dangling, hits him in the belly again, like a prizefighter punching a bag.
Jack sees black spots in front of his eyes, hears Daniel as if from a great distance, cry, “Leave him alone!”
The redheaded kid lets go his grip on Jack, and he drops in a heap on the ground, still unable to move or breathe. Then Cole turns on Daniel.
“You want some of this?” he growls.
Daniel is a big kid, though soft, not tough like Jack. But he stands his ground.
“If you think you can take me, yeah,” Daniel says.
The redheaded kid snarls and swings at Daniel, who is surprisingly nimble, and ducks away so Cole only lands a glancing blow on his cheek. But even that is staggering, and Daniel falls back—into the waiting arms of other boys who have circled behind him. Each boy takes an arm and they suspend Daniel between them as Cole hones in on him.
Jack has enough of his breath back to stagger to his feet and dive at Cole. Without even looking, the redheaded kid backhands him, a casual blow that smashes Jack’s mouth, bloodies his nose and loosens his front teeth as it knocks him flat on his back on the ground. The boys not holding Daniel descend on him, kicking him and he rolls into a ball in the dirt, trying to protect his head.
“Stop it!” the little girl cries. “That’s enough.”
Then her voice changes, or seems to. When she speaks again, there is such power and authority in her words everyone freezes. “Stop! Now. Leave, all of you. Go!”
Jack squints up at her from the ground, the sun in his eyes, and thinks as he has thought a thousand times before that Becca Hawkins is the most beautiful creature who ever walked the earth.
Her hair is the pale blonde of that movie star who’s trying to hold her skirt down as air blows up under it on a calendar picture he’d seen once in Richardson’s Garage. It hangs down her back, silk from an ear of corn, all the way to her waist. Her face is delicate, her features so fragile they look like they were carved out of blown glass. Wide sea-green eyes, with lashes that lay like fans on her cheeks, pale skin so fair it’s almost transparent. And now, with the sun at her back, a halo encircles her head that lights her face in a fierce brilliance.
The attacking boys falter. They stop hitting and kicking to stand looking at her, their faces unreadable.
“And if we don’t?” snarls the redheaded kid. But the threat is meaningless and even he seems to know it.
She says nothing, merely looks at them all. Jack rolls over, staggers to his feet, blood pouring down his chin and dripping on his shirt. He reaches over and helps Daniel up, noting as he does that the preacher’s son will be packing a glowing shiner in church in the morning.
“Let’s go,” says the redheaded kid. “Gotta be careful. Can’t hurt anybody. Can’t leave a mark.”
All the others turn to leave, except the blond kid, whose lip is stuck out as if he’s pouting. Jacob Dumas spits in the dirt and takes a step toward Jack, his eyes open way too wide.
“Uh uh. I’m gonna get me some dark meat.”
The redheaded kid is on him in a second, grabs his arm and spins him around. “You’re not—!”
And instantly they are at each other, biting and hitting and kicking like animals. The others join in the fray, either trying to drag them apart, or getting in their own licks. The savageness and brutality is stunning, as is the ferocity and strength of the combatants. Blood and hunks of hair fly. Dumas bites off a piece of someone’s ear. A boy is launched six feet into the air—amid grunts and sounds like growls.
Jack, Daniel and Becca back away from them in shock, forgotten in the spontaneous combustion that set the group of boys against each other.
“Losers,” Daniel says, but his voice is shaky. Jack and Daniel have never spoken of it aloud, even to each other. But their thoughts don’t need words. What twelve-year-old can hit like Cole Stuart?
When Daniel turns to Becca, Jack sees on his face the same adoration that must be painted on his own.
Jack dusts his hands on his pants and looks at the two of them.
No, there are three of them.
The Jack sitting in the squad room smelling burned coffee, who stood as a spectator to the vivid flashback, could see what the boys—and maybe the girl, too—could not. There was a figure standing beside Becca. A figure made of such bright light it was impossible to look at it straight on, a form that glowed with a brilliance that set Becca’s pale hair sparkling.
And then it was all gone, the whole scene a puff of frosted breath on a cold morning that instantly disappeared.
<
CHAPTER 15
“Is there something in the water in Bradford’s Ridge, Kentucky?” Ramirez asked as he ducked the flying paperclip Peterson had launched at him. “Mass murderers and politicians.” He paused for a beat. “Which are pretty much the same thing, come to think of it.”
Jack felt momentarily disoriented, like he’d felt in those first months after he’d returned from Somalia, when reality tended to blink on and off like a Joe’s Beer Joint sign. This had been different, though. This had been a memory-on-steroids, not a true flashback—a memory more vivid than any he’d ever had, with a visceral texture that was chillingly real. He’d been able to smell the hot grass, and the sweating boys, feel the heat on his neck and the pain of the punches in the gut.
Of course, it wasn’t simply a memory, because he’d distorted parts of it, made it into a fantasy—no, nightmare. It couldn’t have happened the way this scene had played out in his head, with a kid knocking him twenty feet across the grass into a tree, and holding him up by the hair with one hand.
So why had his mind gone to the trouble of changing those parts, stretching, elongating and exaggerating the incident? And why was the “memory” unlike a real memory or flashback in viewpoint? Jack had been both a participant and an observer, he’d been inside the drama and on the sidelines, too, watching his younger self from the perspective of adulthood.
From that perspective he saw what the boy did not. He saw the creature of light beside Becca
, a vision stranger than anything he’d ever seen in his life.
At least he thought it was stranger than anything he’d ever seen. He had, after all, completely lost the whole summer when he was twelve years old. This was the first memory he’d ever had of it. He didn’t know how he knew the scene he’d watched had taken place that summer, but he was certain nonetheless. It was the most vivid memory of any event from his whole fuzzy, foggy childhood. That it had erupted out of his head the way it had was shocking. And that’s how it’d felt, like it had been catapulted out of his unconscious mind into the mental world where he was awake and aware. Expelled, almost. Flung out into the light from some dark depth.
Why?
As simple as making a connection between the two good-bad-and-ugly remarks? He didn’t think so.
When he tuned back into the conversation, he groaned audibly. The memory/flashback had taken long enough for the discussion to go where it invariably did. Any time Bradford’s Ridge, Kentucky, was mentioned, the conversation progressed in one of two directions, both subjects Jack never wanted to talk about. The first was the fire at Twin Oaks, the deadliest nursing home fire in U.S. history. The second was Bradford’s Ridge native son Chapman Whitworth—which, essentially, was the same conversation.
“Yeah, but you gotta admit Whitworth had some stones even as a kid, hauling those old people out of there with his hair on fire!” Peterson said.
Ramirez imitated a commanding voice, “You’ll have to go through me!”
Jack rolled his eyes. Even at the time it’d sounded canned, rehearsed and phony, a Clint Eastwood make-my-day line. And even with the video as proof, Jack had remained steadfastly unimpressed—who said that kind of macho crap in real life, facing real danger? Apparently, the answer to that question was Chapman Whitworth, the man who, shortly after saying the words—and certainly because he’d said them—was elected to the United States Senate.