Sticks and Stones

by Michael Hiebert

  He tilted his head at me. “You . . . know who Tommy Stork is? And I said nothin’ about the Stickman. What’s goin’ on, Abe?”

  Of course I knew who Tommy Stork was, I’d been studying my mother’s files on this case probably near on as much as she had. “I . . . well . . .” I decided there was no point in lying. Besides, my mother already knew. It only got better from there. “I kinda spent two weeks goin’ through my mom’s files and readin’ ’bout the case.”

  Concern fell over Jonathon. “Reading what about the case, exactly?”

  “Well, I pretty near have to say I”—I scratched the back of my neck, which had suddenly gotten very itchy—“I pretty much read all of it.”

  Now it was his turn for his eyes to go wide. “You read it all? What the hell were you thinkin’? Your ma’s gonna turn into a ballistic missile when she finds out!”

  My eyes dropped to the shag carpet. “She already knows.”

  “That you read them all? And she’s okay with that?”

  I looked back at him and nodded. “Yeah. I mean, not completely okay, but she took it a lot better than I expected.”

  “She took it a lot freakin’ better than I expected, too,” he said. “Now, Abe, we have to focus. I need a phone book.”

  “No, you don’t,” I said. “I can tell you exactly where Tommy Stork lives.”

  “You know?”

  “Well, not off by heart, but there’s a report on him in one of the top three folders in the kitchen with his address written on it.”

  While he finished tying up his second shoe, I raced to the kitchen and rifled through the files. Sure enough, Tommy Stork’s report was right where I remembered it. Outside the window the night looked pitch-black. I wished everyone was at home right now, watching TV together. All cozy in the living room. Heck, I’d even settle for having to spend the night listening to Dan.

  Just before I handed Jonathon Tommy Stork’s report, I looked at the address on it. “Oh, maybe he moved.”

  “What do you mean?” That concern had fallen back again.

  “I didn’t notice before, but my mom has written a different address beside it. He’s on Woodpecker Wind.”

  “Not wind, Abe. Wind. Like Blind, only with a W. And I know where that is. It’s down there in Blue Jay Maples. Me and some buddies used to race all around them roads when we first got our licenses. Kind of stupid thinking back on it now, though. Anyway, I have to go, Abe.” He gave me a hug. Jonathon had never hugged me before, and now I was more scared than ever.

  He pointed at me after opening the door. “Be brave, you got that, young man? Your sister needs you to be brave.”

  I just nodded. I had no idea what to say to something like that.

  Before he closed the door, he said one more thing to me. “You stay put, you got that? No matter what. You don’t leave this house.”

  Again, I nodded in silence.

  “I’m serious, Abe.”

  So was I. Where the hell did he think I’d want to go, out to find the Stickman myself? I thought the whole lot of them were crazy, especially Jonathon. At least my mother got paid for doing stupid things.

  Jonathon pulled the door closed, and immediately I was cast in shadow.

  I stood there, all alone in the darkness, and started to cry.

  Somehow, that felt just right.

  CHAPTER 58

  It was all too familiar as Leah came right up the road to Tommy Stork’s shotgun shack. Like a play she’d seen from outside the theater, but it was loud enough that she heard practically every line of it.

  Darkness had rolled in fast since she’d left the police station. It was a clear sky and the moon was cut in half, looking like it just came out of a celestial ice cream scoop. Yeah, sure, thought Leah. And the stars are all candy sprinkles.

  She wasn’t in the mood for ice cream and candy.

  The letter with the T.S., exactly like the one Chris said came when Leah’s pa shot out Harry Stork’s heart. Only, everyone seemed quite sure this letter was in the same handwriting as the last two. Was that more evidence pointing at this being a different Stickman? Leah had pretty much exhausted that theory. She was sick of even running through all the ridiculous scenarios it would take to completely exonerate her pa. She had to admit, first to his memory and then to herself, he’d made a mistake. That was all it was. An honest mistake.

  But it was one of them mistakes there was no coming back from.

  She pulled her Bonneville to the side of the road a ways before Tommy’s shack. The other two cars—Dan’s and Chris’s squad car—were parked along the same side, only farther up. Nobody had parked right in front of the house. That wasn’t something you were taught in cop school, just something you worked out for yourself, which was probably the definition of common sense. You didn’t want to announce to the world that you were there for Tommy, and you didn’t want your vehicle to be a target if he started thinking he was at the shooting range.

  She walked all the way up, past Tommy’s property, to where the three men were gathered around the squad car. At least two lights were turned on inside of Tommy’s shack. Their light seemed to come out of the windows at crazy angles, giving the place a sort of fun house atmosphere.

  “Why’d you leave the lights on?” Leah asked.

  “I’m not paying the electrical,” Ethan said. “And he’s jack-rabbitted out of here.”

  Leah jerked a thumb behind her. “That Fairmont in the yard’s his. It’s still here, so I doubt he’s far. I only met Tommy Stork once, but he didn’t peg me as the type of guy who went on too many nature hikes.” The Milky Way continued shining across the sky overhead. Any other time, it would have looked beautiful. Tonight, it reminded Leah of a noose.

  “Well, I reckon him being close is good news for us,” Ethan said. “Because he ain’t in that shack. It may have been blacker than the ace of spades when we went in, but I went through every square inch of that place. That puts my dollar on your hunch ’bout that barn. You know, I’ve been lookin’ at it. It’s not a good place. I can feel it. And it feels, I dunno. Like it knows we’re here and it’s watching us.”

  Leah frowned. “Let me tell you, somethin’. I certainly understand when something feels somehow ‘off.’ ” She felt the exact same way every time she pulled that sheet out of her pocket with the list of the thirty-nine suspects from Grell Memorial. She wondered if she’d ever figure out that one.

  The trunk to Chris’s squad car was open, its lights brightening up that small part of the road. Ethan walked back and pulled out three walkie-talkies. He handed one to Dan and one to Leah.

  “What about me?” Chris asked.

  “You won’t need one. You’re on my team.”

  “Okay, well, I’ll carry it.”

  Ethan showed no sign of handing it over. “You’re on my team, I said. You don’t run my team. I run my team. You’re the guy who doesn’t get to talk on the walkie-talkie.”

  “Why don’t we have four?” Chris asked.

  “Because only three of us work at the goddamn department! Now, come here, all of you.” Leaving the trunk open, Ethan walked to the front of Chris’s car, where they all gathered around the hood and bent over.

  It almost felt like a damn football huddle to Leah. Everyone blocked out a lot of the night’s light, and now she couldn’t see her GD hand two feet in front of her face.

  “Now, listen,” Ethan said. “There’s two ways to do this. The right way and the wrong way. We’re gonna make damn sure we do it the right way, you hear?”

  Leah cast a glance over to Tommy’s shack. The door sat askew on the frame, barely holding on to the top hinge. A very large boot hole went almost near on all the way through. She’d predicted right. That would’ve been Ethan.

  “Now, none of us have put eyes on the rest of that structure,” Ethan continued. “I’m willin’ to bet there’s some windows in the back—probably missing some glass—and at least one side door, possibly two. Now, the part that makes this wh
ole thing hard is that there hayloft.”

  They all turned and took a look at the rotted wood and broken clapboards barely standing in the gentle breeze. The light of the half moon caught the edge of the hayloft and lit up the opening like a cold white spike. That was why Leah could see the hay so well. But that light came to an abrupt end. It went in one solid line, from the bright moon to a shivering black.

  “What’s so hard about the hayloft?” Chris asked.

  “If he’s got her up there? We’ll be like over-plump turkeys late for the dinner party. He’ll have nothin’ but clear shots at all of us, and we can’t see shit all. For that matter, how the hell would we even get up there, even if we somehow managed to get that close without him seein’ us?”

  He waited for Chris to speak, but after a moment of silence, Ethan gave up. He squinted in the darkness, trying to get a better look. “Can any of you tell if those front doors are locked?”

  “I think there’s a rope or a chain running through the hasps,” Leah said. “At least that’s what I reckoned I saw when I pulled up. Might’ve been a shadow or somethin’.”

  “Doesn’t mean they’re locked. I wouldn’t think the whole place, the way it stands, is even worth as much as a lock.”

  “True,” Dan said, raising his eyebrows. He’d come up along beside Leah and now caught her attention discreetly. “How are you holdin’ up?” he whispered.

  She closed her eyes and smiled sadly with a nod. “I’m keepin’ in there.”

  His arm went around her. “Good girl. We’ll figure this out.”

  And all Leah could think was, Please don’t promise, please don’t promise. For God’s sake, please don’t promise.

  “So I say we do it this way,” Ethan said, laying out a plan Leah was near on positive he was making up on the fly. “Two of us will take those front doors, providing they’re not locked. I want the other two to each go around on either side. Leah, you take the left. Dan, you . . . the other one.”

  “The right?”

  Ethan nodded. “If there turns out to be no other way in and those front doors are locked, well, then . . . we have another problem.”

  “Which is?” Chris asked.

  “Same as the problem with the goddamn hayloft, Chris. We shoot out those locks, we may as well just paint a target on our bloody foreheads.”

  Chris went stone-faced.

  “All right,” Ethan said. “I’m guessin’ at least one of you’s gonna find a doorway. I’m guessin’ if there even is still a door attached to the doorway, that it will likely be unlocked. I want you both to radio me back and tell me the situation. I won’t be goin’ in those front doors . . . and neither will Chris . . . until we hear ’bout your situations.”

  “Okay,” Dan said, clipping his walkie-talkie to his belt. “What if all the doors are unlocked and we hit the place and find nobody inside?”

  Ethan sneered at him. “Yeah, you always gotta be the one jackass who takes the party out of the parade, ain’t you? If that happens, we must assume our killer is up in that hayloft.”

  “There’s probably a ladder,” Chris said.

  Ethan just shook his head at him. “You really think you’re gonna climb a ladder after bustin’ into an old barn that probably echoes like the call of some banshee wolf and have the guy holed up in the hayloft not hear you? And then, you think you’re goin’ to climb up twenty feet on some rickety ladder and somehow take this guy by surprise?”

  Chris went back to being stone-faced.

  “One last thing,” Ethan said. “Before anyone tries the doors or anythin’ else, remember what I told you. There’s a smart way of doing this, and then there’s the stupid way. We’re goin’ to settle on doing things the smart way. So, I would like Leah and Dan to please walk all the way around the left side of the structure, and me and Chris will go around the right until we all meet at the back. Then we’ll have a much better idea of what we’re lookin’ at here. And if—Jesus, I hesitate to even say this—but if you find a window and you feel it’s safe, try to sneak a peek inside so you can get a better read on our situation. Y’all got that?”

  Everyone but Leah nodded. She was too busy fighting off bad thoughts. The realization had fully come to her that this was real. All this was really happening. Since she’d seen the Stickman’s letter, she’d been in a cloudy daze. Now everything hit her like a dump truck. All of it. All at once. Hard and fast.

  Her body trembled. She could be moments away from seeing her baby girl lying tied up or worse ... Closing her eyes, she struggled not to think about the “or worse” possibility. Choking her thoughts back, she noticed Dan staring.

  “What is it?” he asked. “You okay?”

  Her tears returned. “I don’t know, Dan. I really ... I don’t. I don’t know. I’m not sure I can do this.”

  Dan glanced at Ethan and Chris already starting for the barn. “Yes, you can do this,” he said quietly. “You can. Just try not to think the worst.”

  She took a big breath.

  “We okay?” Ethan asked, turning around from about twenty paces up.

  “We’re good,” Dan answered. He looked back into Leah’s eyes, lowering his voice. “Yeah, we’re good. We’re gonna be all right.”

  Leah wiped the tears from her face and steeled herself, even though her head felt like she was in an evil carnival from some horror movie where every step you take just springs a new trap. Her mind kept flashing through all the times she hadn’t been quick enough to stop the killer, starting with Samantha Hughes and going all the way back to the Cornstalk Killer case and Ruby Mae Vickers over a decade ago. So much blood. So many bodies. Her pulse began to race again. What if Caroline . . . No. She stopped that thought right in its tracks. She needed to calm down. She needed control.

  Something happened then that caused Leah to look back the way they had come, back to the three cars parked on the edge of the road, each one at least a block and a half away from Tommy’s shotgun shack. Back to that row of forest way off in the distance looking like a line of giant sentries in the night, with a half-dozen fields bridging the space between her and them, the darkness painting the fields into lakes. And back to that ramshackle shotgun house that Leah really would have no problem firing a bullet straight through. That house with the door barely hanging on, like some soccer kid’s tooth after getting kicked in the mouth with a pair of cleats during practice. And those crazy lamps the guys had left on.

  The house looked like it was grinning at her. And she hated that grin.

  But it wasn’t the grin that made her look back. She didn’t know what it was. A sound, maybe? A bird? There were no cars on the road, other than theirs. But something made her turn back. Maybe it was her gut instinct. Maybe it had finally decided to return.

  Or maybe it was that voice she always heard. The one that never really answered her questions but just brought her peace. That voice that sounded like her pa’s.

  Whatever it was, she most certainly did turn back, and, in that second, just as her eyes drifted across Tommy’s shack, she saw movement inside. Something blurred across the spray of lamplight coming screeching through the cockeyed space left open by that dangling door.

  Now everyone was at least two dozen paces in front of her, all approaching the barn just as quiet as cats. But there was no point in being quiet anymore. Tommy Stork obviously knew they were there. He’d managed to get out of his house and hide until . . . until Leah had led them on a wild-goose chase.

  “He’s in his house!” Leah shouted. “He’s back in his goddamn house! He’s seen us!”

  CHAPTER 59

  Jonathon’s car bounced over the small rise on his way down Maple Drive toward Blue Jay Maples. As the car’s suspension descended, he heard the hood slam down hard, but he so didn’t care about his car right now. All he could think of was Carry and whether or not she was okay. He should never have let her go for that snack run on her own. The worst part? He wasn’t even hungry. And that was then. Now, the way his stomac
h felt? He didn’t expect he’d ever eat again.

  The drive was a wash of outside house lights streaking by him in the dark. His vision had pretty near tunneled to nothing but the patch of road ahead of him. And his mind was clearer than he remembered it being in a long time. It felt like a clock. That inevitability of time sooner or later catching up with wherever you thought you could run and feel safe.

  He and Carry had even joked about her ma putting in another curfew like she had while searching for the Cornstalk Killer, and Jonathon had told her this one was different because this time the killer was going for older people, not kids. But why would Jonathon ever trust a cold-blooded killer not to throw a changeup pitch at him? The man was mad. By nature, he was unpredictable.

  And Jonathon and Carry had laughed. With the strength of dragons. With that thought, Jonathon thought back through all the tales he’d read over the years, starting with fairy tales when he was a child and progressing into high fantasy novels as he got older.

  There was a thing about dragons. He realized it now.

  No matter how big their roar or how sharp their teeth, they always turned out to have a soft spot, somewhere.

  Maybe it wasn’t him and Carry who were the dragons at all. Maybe it was the Stickman. This Tommy Stork or whatever his name was. He was the one with the princess. He was the one whose tower Jonathon was now speeding toward as he took the turnoff into Blue Jay Maples.

  Luckily for him, he’d spent a lot of time driving around these streets. When he first got his license, he and two of his friends would come out here at night and “rat race” each other around the S-shaped streets, without caring about their speed or even their headlights. The cops never came out this far, they knew that.

  Of course, back then Jonathon had thought they were invincible. That they always would be.

  Now the world seemed nothing but fragile, as though made from blown glass, and all it would take would be one careless person to let it slip from their fingers and fall to the floor.