by Ninie Hammon
When the coffee was done, she added a dash of cream to a cup, wondering why Jelly was taking so long in the yard. She unfastened the deadbolt and pulled the door open.
“Jelly!” she called out. “Come on in and have some break—”
That’s when she chanced to look down. Sitting on the porch at her feet was a cardboard box probably twice the size of a shoe box. It had brown stains down one side, and the lid was ajar. Ella bent over and lifted the lid off the box.
Her hand went numb, and she didn’t even feel herself drop the cup. Didn’t hear it clatter to the floor. Didn’t feel the hot splash of coffee on her foot.
Then Ella Fletcher began to scream, to shriek, her face so contorted with horror that she didn’t look a thing like Tweetie Bird’s grandmother anymore.
An hour later, Caverna County Sheriff William Cunningham stood in Ella’s kitchen doorway, staring at the contents of the box that still sat on the porch where she’d found it. The sheriff wasn’t a tall man, but he was broad and thick, built like an oil drum. The premature gray in his hair had washed down into his lumberjack beard that extended two inches below his chin, and hound dog jowls made him look ten years older than forty-five. Today he felt even older than he looked.
Ella was upstairs. Dr. Clements had come by and given her a shot of something to calm her down, and two of her daughters were with her now, trying to soothe her. Harold Fletcher stood by the sheriff’s side, dressed in a robe and slippers. The sheriff didn’t think he looked good—his face was gray—but he’d been the one who called 911.
“What kind of person does something like this?” Harold asked.
“I got no idea,” the sheriff said. He hadn’t touched the box, of course. It was evidence, and the boys from the Kentucky State Police forensics lab would be here soon to go over it with tweezers—a grizzly job, he thought. He wouldn’t want to have to remove the pieces of that dog one by one from the box. And from what the sheriff could tell, there were lots of pieces—two set apart from the rest. The dog’s eyeballs rested in two paper cupcake holders between its severed head and tail.
One of the sheriff’s deputies came into the kitchen and touched the sheriff on the shoulder. “Dispatch says you need to go to Franklin’s Department Store,” he said.
“I’m busy here. If they got a shoplifter, tell them to—”
“It’s not a shoplifter. It’s…something else.”
“Something else” turned out to be three hysterical customers, two frantic store employees and one three-foot-long black snake. Well, one snake they’d found before they called the sheriff. Since then, employees and deputies had turned up four more snakes—two in shoe boxes, one in the pocket of a man’s suit jacket and another draped like a necklace around a mannequin in the storage room. They were still looking for others.
As soon as the sheriff walked in, all three women started babbling at the same time in an unintelligible cacophony that resolved itself into simple story. Mildred Hart, Rose Tungate and Sophie Walsh had been at the door when the store opened this morning, eager to take advantage of the store’s Buy One, Get One Free sale. Mildred had headed toward the dresses while Rose and Sophie busied themselves digging through a large bin piled with clearance priced “accessories.” Scarves, purses, patterned pantyhose, gloves—that kind of thing.
“I was digging around in the bin,” Rose said, “and I found—I thought it was a belt!” Her face screwed up in a look of revulsion. “I touched it—pulled it out and—” Her voice broke, and she fell into Mildred’s arms and started to sob.
While the sheriff was taking statements from the employees, that same deputy—the one who’d been at the Fletchers' house—stepped up beside him and spoke softly in his ear. “There’s more,” he said.
“What more?” the sheriff blustered, then turned away when he saw that everyone in the building had heard his outburst. “What more?” he asked again, softer.
“We just got a call from the manager of Bracken Park,” he said. “He’s closed the city swimming pool.”
“There aren’t snakes—”
“No, sir. No snakes. He closed it because somebody dumped a barrel of sewage in the water.”
The sheriff looked at his watch. It wasn’t even ten o’clock.
By six o’clock that evening, when he added up what he hoped was the final tally, there had been half a dozen acts of vandalism besides the pool sewage—spray-painted swastikas, desecrated churches, blood poured all over the altar at St. Dominic’s, slashed tires on fire trucks and ambulances, a trash can full of garter snakes in the girls’ bathroom at Harper’s Drive-In. Stevie Holiday’s pet rabbit had been set on fire. And eleven dogs had been executed.
All the dogs had been mutilated in some way for the maximum horror effect, and their bodies left for their masters to find. Four were big dogs—two German shepherds, a Rottweiler and the Websters' guard dog—a pit bull that patrolled the backyard, guarding the small marijuana patch George was under the illusion nobody knew he grew for his wife who had cancer. All had had their throats slit. There’d been no forensic evidence to speak of. They’d made casts of footprints at three of the crime scenes—that could have been anybody’s—found no fingerprints at all. Everything has been wiped clean. The state police lab would go over everything and issue a report, of course, but the sheriff knew in his gut they’d find nothing.
The whole town was teetering on the brink of mass hysteria, and he did not have a single suspect. Not one. Nobody had seen or heard anything!
When the knock came at his closed office door, the sheriff considered not answering it. He only wanted to sit in the late afternoon sun streaming through his window and not talk to anybody about anything.
“Come in,” he said.
Bishop Washington opened the door and stepped in, quickly filling the small space. At least he seemed to. The huge man was as gentle as he was big, though, and the sheriff had come to like and respect him during the past months’ futile search for Bishop’s missing son.
“You got a minute, Bill?” he asked.
“No. But sit down and I’ll find one.”
Bishop eased down into the small chair, looked as uncomfortable as an elephant sitting on a football.
“I heard what’s going on.”
“As far as I can tell, the only person in the whole county who hasn’t heard about it is Ambrose Pendleton, who went out fishing last week in the east branch of the Big Puddle and nobody’s seen him since.”
“You got any idea who’s responsible?”
“Not a clue. Do you?”
Bishop looked uncomfortable. He’d taken off his baseball cap that read Bradford’s Ridge All-Stars and was unconsciously crumpling it in his big hands. “Not no evidence, nothing like that. But you might want to…look into the whereabouts of some boys that’s on my team. They’s six of them from Brewster Academy.”
“Because …?”
“They’s mean as snakes, that’s why. I am one hundred percent certain there ain’t no limit to the awful they’s capable of.”
“Wait a minute…aren’t you coaching twelve-year-olds?”
“Uh-huh.”
The beginning of hope that had surged in the sheriff’s chest, quickly drained away. “That lets them off the hook, then. Just kids. You must not have heard—four of the dogs that were killed were big dogs, German Shepherds and a pit bull. I don’t imagine those animals went gently into that good night. They only found the last one a little while ago. I figure the owners were using it for dog fighting. I can’t prove that, but what other reason would they have to own a ninety pound Rottweiler so vicious they have to keep it locked in a kennel behind a twenty foot protection fence? They finally found it with its throat slit. It took them all day to find it because the body was left draped across a tree limb twenty-five feet off the ground. No kids in the world could have pulled that off.”
“These could have.”
The sheriff’s smile was tired, but not nearly as tired as he felt. He
stood and looked at Bishop—a good man, only trying to help. “Don’t I wish it was as easy as a gang of rowdy boys. Right now, I can’t figure how a platoon of Army Rangers could have pulled all this off in one night. No sign of a struggle anywhere. No blood spatter, no mess. Everything clean and neat. Got into locked buildings, backyards and over fences. Unless one of your kids is Superman…”
Bishop looked uncomfortable. “Just check ’em out, Bill. That’s all I’m sayin’. Find out where they was when all this happened.”
The sheriff sighed, made a mental note to add this to the list of crackpot solutions he’d been hearing since sunup.
Of course, Bradford’s Ridge made the news the next day, would have been the lead story on every channel if the governor’s helicopter hadn’t crashed right after lunch. The stations sent the big guns to cover that, but two second-stringer crews of TV reporters showed up in Bradford’s Ridge toting cameras on their shoulders, filming interviews with the sheriff and the people whose dogs had been killed. The story didn’t make the six o’clock, but it did make the eleven o’clock news as well as the front pages of the Louisville Courier-Journal—a big story because it was Ohio’s governor who was nearly killed—and below the fold in the Cincinnati Inquirer. The reporters came up with all manner of wacky theories—might as well have blamed a tribe of gypsies or space aliens. Or a gang of twelve-year-old boys.
CHAPTER 20
2011
Harrelton Ohio Police Department Major Charles Everett Crocker wasn’t sure exactly what he’d been expecting when he told Jack he wanted to know “what was really going on,” but whatever it was, it fell way short of this.
There were a lot of ways you could go with a story like Crock’d just heard. A shared delusion. Happened, sometimes. He’d seen it.
But that explanation didn’t feel right in that place in his belly somewhere slightly south of his navel, the residence of what police officers the world over called “a cop’s gut.” Crock’s was particularly sensitive. He almost always knew when a situation was about to go sideways so you’d best jump out of the way before you got hit by the shift, or when some squirrelly little dude with a small brain and a big gun was actually going to use it. His cop’s gut had kicked in three months ago when the goings-on with Jack hadn’t stacked up any neater than a pile of cats.
The major’s gut was telling him right now that these people weren’t crazy. He was sure he’d sleep better nights if he could convince himself they were, but the trouble with your gut was it never shut up. Like a nagging wife, it kept after you until you finally listened to the truth. Crocker suspected…no, he knew he’d just heard the truth in long-johns with the butt flap down. And the only thing his nagging internal organs would allow him to do with that was adjust his own thinking to the reality of it. What was true was true, and that was that.
Besides, there was the other side that had brought him here tonight. He had his own stories to tell about the…go ahead, quit chewing on it and spit it out.
“I’ve had some experiences myself with the…supernatural.”
He held the word out there for a moment like a dead fish on a stick. Nobody flinched. Well, one of them flinched. He flinched, but the others didn’t bat an eye.
“What I thought happened to me…what did happen to me…wasn’t like what you’re describing, though. There are armies on both sides of this war and I believe I’ve had a run-in or two over the years with the white-hat dudes, the good guys.”
“Angels,” Theresa said.
Again, nobody but Crocker batted an eye. He batted both of them, flapped the lids up and down like he was trying to send smoke signals. He opened his mouth to say that “angels” was a stretch, but said instead, “I’ve never told anybody about it.”
“Course you ain’t.” Theresa was impatient. “Don’t nobody ever tell anybody else ’bout such things. They’s happening all over the place but everybody’s so afraid of lookin’ foolish, they don’t say nothin', which is just the way ole Clubfoot likes it.”
“Have you seen creatures of light?” The words came from the emaciated young woman sitting beside Daniel Burke on the couch, her fingers unconsciously entwined with his, a bid for comfort in a world where all comfort was gone. She leaned forward as she asked the question. It was clear a lot was riding on his response.
And Crocker knew he was about to disappoint.
“It’s not like that. I haven’t seen ‘creatures’ of any kind—light or dark. What I’ve seen have been ordinary people…but somehow more than that.”
Nobody offered any comment on that so he plunged ahead.
“The first time was when I was a kid. Just eight years old and I knew I was going to die.”
He’d sneaked off to go swimming alone and had gotten a cramp.
“I could barely keep my head above water when this guy came out of nowhere. He wasn’t there and then he was. A big guy, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans and boots—big, tall cowboy boots made out of shiny black leather with red trim on the top. I remember that part distinctly because I knew he couldn’t swim with boots on.”
The man raced across the strip of mud in front of the swimming hole just as Crock went under and couldn’t get back to the surface.
“He grabbed me, dragged me to the shore and carried me to the top of the riverbank. Then I closed my eyes—just a blink—but when I opened them again, the man was gone.
“I tried to convince myself that he was some passing stranger, but that didn’t work.” Crock paused for a beat. “See…there weren’t any boot prints in the mud. You could see one set of prints, bare feet—mine. Those big ol’ cowboy boots would have left prints.”
Crocker was looking down at his hands in his lap as he told the last part, suddenly embarrassed by the simplicity of his story.
“You’s thinking that what you seen ain’t dramatic or nothing so it can’t be real,” Theresa said, her voice soft. Chill bumps pebbled Crock’s arms. That's exactly what he'd been thinking. “Most times when the Lord sends his angels, it ain’t dramatic. They don’t float in the sky, a whole flock of them like they done over the baby Jesus. They just keep a little boy from drowning when God’s got bidness he wants that boy to do later on in life.”
Crock didn’t like that ‘business later on in life’ part, but he kept talking.
“There were other times. I was in a car wreck, came to with a broken leg and flames all around me. Then somebody yanked the car door open and dragged me out—right before that car went off like a bottle rocket. I was lying on the grass at the side of the road with so much blood in my eyes I couldn’t see anything…except black cowboy boots.”
He had other stories but they all begged an answer to the question, a polished stone of wonder he’d wallowed around in his mind for so long all the rough edges had been sanded smooth. He’d never before had anybody he could ask the question because he’d never before told anybody about the…say it, go on say it…the angel.
“Why?”
He didn’t mean for it to come out sounding as anguished as it did, but the torment he’d felt in his soul all these years gushed out with the question. “Why would…God…send an angel to save me when—”
“When they’s so many other people he don’t save? Important people, maybe, like Dr. King.” Theresa glanced at the framed picture of Dr. Martin Luther King on the wall. “Innocent children like —” she looked at Daniel--"Mary Anne.” Crocker saw Daniel wince. “Or necessary people like my Bishop, people other folks need to help them do what God’s assigned ’em to do?”
She’d been talking to all of them, but now she spoke only to Crocker. “Why’d God save you and not them?”
He leaned forward, not breathing. Finally an answer!
“I ain’t got no idea, sugar.”
“You don’t know? You mean there’s no reason—”
“I never said there wasn’t no reason. God don’t do nothing ’thout a reason. But you got to understand somethin’ or you gone spend your whole life
miserable, lookin’ for answers when ain’t none to find.” She looked deep into his eyes. “Major Crocker, the God of the universe don’t owe you an explanation for what he does. He’s God. You ain’t.”
The room fell completely silent. Then Jack’s voice, sharp and pointed, stabbed into the quiet.
“You’re not required to like that explanation, by the way,” he said. “You can still do what has to be done and not like it one bit. As a matter of fact, you can do what you’re supposed to do and be so furious...”
It was almost like Jack suddenly realized he had actually spoken out loud, and he dropped his gaze to the floor.
“Some things haven’t changed in twenty-six years,” Daniel put in, sliding into the conversation effortlessly, shielding Jack. “He didn’t like it when we were twelve years old—did he, Becca?”
Daniel continued to talk, and Crocker saw a look of gratitude wash over Jack’s face. He suspected this might not be the first time Daniel Burke had swooped in and taken the heat off his friend.
Theresa spoke to Crock again. “Major, a man totally taken over by a prince of darkness is ’bout to be made a justice on the United States Supreme Court—unless we stop him.” She looked pointedly at every person in the room. “Just the four”—she fixed her gaze squarely on him—“the five of us. That make any sense to you?”
******
First thing Wednesday morning, Jack was summoned into Crock’s office. The major’d had all night to chew on what he’d heard, and Jack wondered—
“Appears it’s up to you and me to figure out how Chapman Whitworth orchestrated getting all three of you up to your tighty whities in alligators—in one day.” Crock popped a cinnamon toothpick into his mouth. “Which is probably a record of some kind if there’s a Guinness Book of Dastardly Deeds.”
Just like that, Crock was in.
“Soo…” Crock cleared his throat and spoke in his police-major voice. “Sergeant Carpenter, because the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms is investigating you in connection with a mass murder case, I am putting you on temporary suspension. You’re off patrol. You’ll be assigned duties…at my discretion.”