The Midnight Ground

by Eric Dontigney

  “I set him on fire, but that’s not the point. I tried calling Paul after Tucker—well, took his leave. I couldn’t reach him. Or Helena.”

  Patty frowned. “Helena? Oh, that woman who’s been around. Pretty, looks like she could run a marathon?”

  “That’s her.”

  “Friend of yours?”

  I hemmed and hawed for a second. “She’s, sure, we’ll say friend. She’s not an enemy, anyway.”

  “You think he went after them?”

  “I think he took Abby and they got in the way.”

  “Why would Tucker take Abby?”

  I gritted my teeth. “Because he’s not really Tucker anymore. Not in any meaningful way, at any rate. He’s been possessed.”

  “Hartworth,” said Patty, frustration in her voice.

  Tick-tock. Tick-tock. More time bled away. My overtaxed patience splintered.

  “If I’m right, it doesn’t matter why he did it! He’s already hurt or killed two people and kidnapped a teenage girl.”

  Chapter 42

  Maybe it was my words or the ragged edge of fury in my voice, but Patty jerked and I saw the reality of the situation drive home for her. It all crossed her face in a second or two. First there was shock, then the truth that it didn’t matter if I was crazy because people could be in real danger. She had a responsibility to act if people were in danger. She stowed her disbelief and walked over to a cabinet. She unlocked it and pulled out a black, pump-action shotgun. She fed rounds into it faster than I could believe. She checked the safety and set the shotgun onto the desk. Then she reached back into the cabinet, drew something out, and threw it at me. I caught it on reflex and then held it out.

  “A bulletproof vest?”

  “Put it on, under your shirt,” she ordered.

  I stood there doing nothing. “Huh?”

  “Shirt off,” she said, glaring at me.

  I did as I was told and took my shirt off. I fumbled with the straps on the vest and felt stupid. I could set a man on fire with nothing but some chalk, but a basic piece of police equipment was beyond me.

  “Oh for God’s sake,” said Patty.

  She came over and snatched the vest from my hands. She bustled around me and then stopped. I felt a gentle prod on my back and winced.

  “Are these new bruises?” She asked.

  “Tucker’s work,” I grumbled.

  A few seconds later, she had the vest wrapped around my torso. Somewhere along the line I realized she didn’t have her shirt on either, just a utilitarian bra. The sight was so unexpected that I froze. I’m not one of those sex obsessed guys who loses all rational thought at the mere thought or sight of breasts. I’d seen plenty along the way, but I’d never associated putting on tactical gear with boobs either. It didn’t help that I’d been thinking of Patty all along in terms of her position. She was gender cop, not gender woman. Also, inevitable back pain aside, Patty hadn’t been lying. Her bosoms could stun a man into submission, and I was a hell of a lot closer than thirty paces.

  It hit me that I was staring, openly, blatantly, shamelessly staring, and had been for a good ten seconds. I jerked my eyes toward her face. I expected annoyance or possibly anger, but she looked amused and maybe a touch pleased, too. Women confounded me. It took me a few more moments to realize something else. She’d just stood there the whole time and let me leer at her like a teenage boy. What was that about? I tried to think of something to say other than a lame-ass apology that I wasn’t entirely sure was appropriate.

  “I did warn you,” she said.

  “So you did.”

  I picked up my shirt and put it back on, while Patty slid into a vest that had to have been custom made for her. I focused on my shirt buttons while she got her uniform shirt back on. I looked up when she grabbed the shotgun off her desk. All the playfulness was gone, replaced by an almost frightening non-expression.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  She walked toward the door. I walked to her desk.

  “You forgot something,” I said with all the compassion I could muster.

  She stopped, but didn’t turn around. She hadn’t forgotten. Symbols have power and the sheriff’s badge had particular meaning to her. Taking up the symbol meant taking responsibility for that power. At some level, she knew that and wasn’t ready to take the step. I couldn’t afford to wait for her to be ready. I picked the badge up and took it over to her. I held it out. Her non-expression started to crack around the edges, pain and fear creeping into it by degrees. That was when I realized who the man I’d seen with Marcy had been. With decades of age and cares stripped away, it was no wonder I hadn’t recognized poor, dead Barnes. He’d given me a message for Patty, but the message and the story behind it would likely shatter her self-control. I gave her the part that mattered.

  “Be brave. It’s what he would have wanted.”

  She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and nodded.

  “Alright,” she said, handing me the shotgun to hold.

  She unpinned the deputy’s badge from her shirt and put it in a pocket. She took the Sheriff’s badge from my outstretched hand. I watched for about three seconds as she tried to pin it on, her hands trembling. That was no good.

  “Here,” I said, handing her back the shotgun.

  I took the badge from her fingers and pinned it to her shirt. I didn’t make a big show of it, just slid the pin through the material and closed the clasp. I made sure it was straight and then opened the door. Patty bowed her head for a moment. When she looked up, the non-expression was back in place. She marched down the stairs and out the front door to protect the citizens. That was when Patty became the sheriff.

  I insisted on driving my own car. There was too much to do and I’d burned a lot of time at the police station. I’d need to split off on my own at some point, and I didn’t want to get stuck without transport. I followed her to Paul and Abby’s cottage. She pulled off the road before we got close enough to see the cottage and got out. I followed suit. She squinted up the road before looking my way.

  “Stay here for a minute,” she said.

  “Why?”

  She shot me a dark look. “Because I damn well told you to do it.”

  I wondered what got her riled in such a hurry. I tried to see it from her position and then it made a lot of sense. We were on her professional turf, walking into what could be a volatile or lethal situation. I knew nothing about how law enforcement handled those situations, or how to avoid contaminating a crime scene, or how to subdue a person without flagrantly violating their rights. For that matter, I didn’t even really know what constituted someone’s civil rights. My question wasn’t just stupid or a waste of time. It suggested that I questioned her competence.

  “Right. Sorry,” I said. “I get it. Idiot civilian stays where he’s less likely to get shot in the head. Professional law enforcement officer goes to check things out.”

  My moment of insight must have earned me a brownie point or two, because she flashed me a little smile. She disappeared for about five minutes. She looked grim when she reappeared. My stomach lurched.

  “What did you see?”

  “Nothing I like. The front door is hanging open, and I didn’t see any movement inside.”

  “Shit,” I said, straining uselessly to see through the shrubs and trees.

  “You said you don’t know much about guns. What do you know?”

  I frowned. I suspected brutal honesty was the way to go. “I know enough not to shoot myself or someone else by accident, but I’m no kind of marksman. I haven’t so much as fired a gun in years.”

  “Handguns?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Mostly nine-millimeter. Couple of forty-fives way back in the day.”

  Patty nodded and popped the trunk. She dug around for a minute before she came up with a compact semi-automatic handgun. She checked the chamber and the safety, slid in a magazine, chambered a round, rechecked the safety, and then offered me the weapon. I didn’t take
it.

  “Take the gun, Hartworth,” she ordered.

  I reached out and took it from her. I checked the safety, too. I hefted the gun and was a little surprised by the weight. Handguns were always heavier than I expected. I remembered to hold the gun by the side of my leg, finger off the trigger. You can’t accidentally shoot yourself if you don’t keep your finger on the trigger. Patty looked me up and down. Then she reached into her pocket and pulled out the deputy’s badge. She grabbed my shirt and started pinning the badge to it.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I demanded. “You can’t just make me a deputy. I don’t know anything about being a cop.”

  “I’m not making you a deputy,” she said, swatting my hand away from the badge, “but you look like you could be one. If there is someone waiting up there, I’d rather they think there are two armed cops approaching, than one cop and whatever you actually are.”

  “Oh,” I said. “In that case, bravo for deviousness.”

  She dug around inside the car for a minute and came up with a pair of sunglasses. “Put these on. They’ll make you a little less recognizable. Normally, we’d come in from two sides. Since you don’t have any legal authority to shoot someone, though, I want you to stick to my back. Keep the gun pointed down or straight up. Do not shoot unless you are in imminent danger. If you are in that kind of danger, shoot first. We’ll deal with questions later. It’s a nine-millimeter, so you know what to expect from it. You’ve got one in the chamber and nine in the magazine. Unless the other person is all jacked-up on drugs, a round from that should be enough to kill them, or cause them enough pain to stop.”

  I thought about the way the demon in Tucker shrugged off the pain of those burns. The shotgun in Patty’s hands started looking very desirable.

  “Basically, keep the safety on and my mouth shut. Don’t do anything to anyone unless there is no other choice.”

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  “Well then, I’m your huckleberry.”

  “Jesus, Hartworth, do you even know what that means?”

  “It means I’m the person you’re looking for. I like to read, remember?”

  “Let’s go, huckleberry.”

  The approach to the cottage was tense. There was a fair amount of cover along the road, but the place was surrounded by lawn on all four sides. It looked great from a customer perspective a few days earlier. It looked like a tactical nightmare when you thought there could be someone inside with a hunting rifle. In the end, there was no choice but to cover the distance as fast as we could manage in odd, three-step bursts. Every third step we changed direction, took three steps, changed direction again, and took three more steps. Patty said it made it harder to shoot you. I believed her. Or, she said it to make me feel better, and I chose to believe her. Either way, it felt like an eternity, every step like something out of a slow motion sequence in a movie, only with terror. Lots and lots of terror rolled through me as we moved across that lawn.

  I’d been a pretend cop for all of about five minutes and had a whole new appreciation for how scary their jobs really were. I’d always thought a lot of cops did things they shouldn’t. Still, the kind of terror I felt coursing through me right then made it easier to see how some rookie could overreact. I made sure my finger stayed well-clear of the trigger. Patty announced herself as a police officer, got no response, but also didn’t get shot at, thank God, and went through the front door first. She veered right. I went in behind her and turned to watch the other side of the room. A few seconds went by and then I heard Patty.

  “Hartworth, get your ass in here.”

  Her voice was low, tight, and harsh. I turned and moved toward her, that same terror-driven slow-motion feeling coming over me. I stopped when I saw two forms on the floor. One was Paul. The other was Helena. They were both covered in blood.

  Chapter 43

  I’ve confronted more than my fair share of violence over the years. I’ve seen people get killed because they tried to double cross the wrong thing. Often, they were operating in blind ignorance of who or what they were crossing, which just proves the value of the advice to know thine enemy. I’ve seen random street violence and, once or twice, the not at all random violence of organized military and paramilitary operations. In all honesty, I’ve doled out an above-the-mean amount of physical and magical brutality. For the most part, it happens fast and with a minimum of rational thought. I generally did my best to get the hell away from it as fast as I could afterwards. I’d been operating under the assumption that I was more or less inured to the impact of violence.

  As I stood there and looked down at Helena and Paul, I discovered how very wrong I was about that. It was different when you actually knew and cared about the people on the receiving end. Not that watching strangers die was easy, that should never be easy, but you could distance yourself from it. Giving a crap about the victims turned off most of my higher brain functions, while my emotions swirled in a cyclonic madness that blended pain, grief, and disbelief into a chest-constricting band. I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t think, but I could hate. Unspeakable, uncontrollable hatred burned across my psyche and ignited my nervous system. It was for the best that we didn’t find someone standing over them. I’d have executed that person on the spot. Echoes from somewhere started to bleed into my maelstrom.

  “Goddammit Hartworth, check their pulses!”

  Pulses? Dead bodies didn’t have pulses, said some factoid obsessed part of my mind. It took a moment or two for the implication to reach me inside the emotional storm. My subconscious got the message first and, by the time my conscious caught up, I was kneeling on the floor by Helena. They couldn’t be alive, could they? There was so much blood. I pressed two fingers to the side of Helena’s neck. I waited, breath held, and then the breath exploded out of me as I felt the thump-thump of a pulse against my fingertips. The thump-thump repeated itself several times, steady and reliable. I turned to Paul and did the same thing, fingers pressed beneath his collar. As I waited, I realized that the old man was clutching a poker in his hand. It had blood on the end. He hadn’t gone down gently. I felt his pulse and heaved a sigh of pure relief.

  “They’re both alive,” I said, fighting off an urge to weep uncontrollably and simultaneously howl in a triumph. “I think Helena’s just unconscious. Paul needs an ambulance, right now. His pulse is irregular and, shit, thready. That’s the word.”

  “Stay with them. I need to check the rest of the house.”

  “They need help!”

  “It won’t do them any good if we all get killed by someone hiding in here,” she said, calm, certain, and damnably right.

  I ground my teeth in frustration, but nodded. Concern was overwhelming common sense, which was a good way to get dead. I experienced an odd moment of clarity. My reaction was exactly why civilians weren’t needed or wanted at crime scenes until after police swept the area. I was no stranger to violence, but I hadn’t been trained to think through the visceral, emotional response. I would have ignored the obvious danger in a bid to help. It was the intuitive reaction and probably helped along by the fact that I worked by myself most of the time. My experiences were confined to rationally managing risks to myself, not managing risks to a group while under emotional stress. Patty watched me for a second, probably trying to gauge the odds of me doing something stupid, before she moved away.

  While Patty secured the rest of the house, opening doors with audible bangs, I hovered by Helena and Paul. I checked their pulses a lot more often than necessary, every few seconds or so. After a minute or two of that, it sank in that they weren’t dead. The fear, emotional pain, and adrenaline started to drain away. It left me feeling exhausted and very shaky. I hadn’t even done anything strenuous and I wanted to sleep for a month. I tried to focus. They weren’t dead, but where had the blood come from? I forced myself to start checking both of them for cuts and gashes. I didn’t see any, but I also didn’t dare move them.

  Patty came back. “The house
is clear, as near as I can tell. Unless there’s a demon in here somewhere.”

  I thought she meant it to be funny, but I wasn’t in a joking mood. “Pray there isn’t.”

  She went a little pale. “Ambulance is on the way.”

  Helena came around before the ambulance arrived and was drifting toward coherence by the time the paramedics came through the door. I stayed out of the way while the paramedics did their jobs and hoped like hell they wouldn’t demand Helena go to the hospital before I talked to her. Maybe God was paying attention to me right then, or maybe Helena noticed me staring and willing her not to leave. The paramedics might have insisted Helena go, but they were a lot more concerned about Paul’s condition. He had a nasty cut across his chest that accounted for some of the blood.

  After Patty assured them that she’d see to it Helena saw a doctor sooner than later, the paramedics wheeled Paul out. I waited until I heard the sirens getting quiet before I focused on Helena. She stared down at her bloodied clothes and looked ready to vomit at any second. It wasn’t the blood itself that bothered her. I knew she wasn’t squeamish that way.

  “He took her, didn’t he?” I asked.

  Helena nodded.

  Patty chimed in. “Was it Tucker Smith?”

  “I don’t know. I’d never seen him before.”

  I opened my mouth to describe him, but Patty shook her head at me.

  “Can you tell me what he looked like?” Patty asked.

  Helena thought for a second. “Lean guy with dark hair. Needs a shave. Likes his hunting knife.”

  Patty jotted down some notes. “Can you tell me what happened? How you ended up here?”

  I wanted to scream. I could feel an invisible timer ticking down, and I needed to ask my own questions. I held my tongue, though. Interrupting would waste time no one could afford to lose. I started impatiently tapping a foot and forced myself to be still. Helena pressed gingerly at a swollen lump on her head, winced, and sucked in a breath. She gave Patty a rueful look and gestured at the lump.