Devoted, page 20
Something else the bad man said was true.
You know how hot your mommy is? Way too hot to waste her life with a dummy like you.
If he never went home, she would be free of him. If he stayed here in Castle Wyvern, his mom could have a better life with someone who could tell her that he loved her. She could travel places she liked to go and not worry anymore about what might happen to her dummy child. He was smart, but he was nevertheless a dummy: dumb, mute, speechless, full of learning and full of so many feelings that mattered not at all because he couldn’t share any of what he knew and felt with anyone.
In the throbbing of the silent storm light, under the soundless flights of dragons, in the unearthly quiet of the high tower room, where he could no longer hear the crackle of the reeds under him or his own heartbeat or his breath drawn and expelled, he suddenly heard a voice.
“I’m coming, boy, I’m almost there.”
He lowered his stare from the windows without glass panes and saw the dog again, not curled on the floor this time, but sitting up, a harness around it as if it was riding in car.
“Don’t cry, boy, don’t be afraid. I’m almost there.”
65
Upon being told of the extraordinary home invasion and violence at the Bookman residence, the sheriff had assumed that this incident and the Spader-Klineman murders might involve the same perpetrator. He at once ordered blockades on Greenbriar Road. They were looking for a red Dodge Demon fleeing the scene, a high-end aftermarket job with the power to outrun any vehicle in law-enforcement’s fleet.
Four men had been assigned to each roadblock, the first one approximately two miles south of the Bookman property, the other a mile and a half to the north. The southern post was fully manned almost at once, and two deputies with one car established a half-adequate barrier at the northern position.
Nathan Palmer, if it was Nathan Palmer, had been harried from the Bookman house by the sound of approaching sirens. It was thought that he had gone west on foot, across the backyard of the property and into the forest rather than risk the highway with patrol cars swarming it. He’d surely arrived in his Dodge Demon, however, and secreted it somewhere in the vicinity; he would attempt to circle through the trees to the vehicle.
For the past half hour, traffic on Greenbriar Road had been halted and subjected to inspection. Now deputies Walter Colt and Freeman Johnson, the first to arrive at the Bookman residence, departed the house and drove north to fortify that roadblock.
Freeman rode shotgun. An ardent woodsman—hiker, fisherman—as well as a deputy, he possessed an acute awareness of the patterns of nature. The forest-service road they passed on the right appeared as dark in its depths as the bowels of a leviathan. The sidewash of the headlights penetrated only a few feet, yet Freeman detected a visual discordance amid an otherwise vertical blackness of night-shrouded trees.
“Hold it, turn around,” he said. “Something back there on that forest-service road.”
Walter Colt slowed, hung a U-turn, cruised south for a short distance, turned left onto the narrow dirt lane, and clicked the headlamps to high beams. With the light boring directly into the woods, what had been concealed to all but Freeman’s intuition now stood revealed approximately sixty or seventy feet from the paved highway: a red sedan.
As the patrol car coasted slowly through the trees and the sedan before them was revealed to be a Dodge, Walter Colt snatched up the police-radio microphone and reported the find. He stopped ten feet short of the perpetrator’s vehicle and shifted into park and put on the emergency brake, but he left the engine running.
Neither Johnson nor Colt had been at the scene of the Spader and Klineman murders the previous afternoon, but they had heard that the woman had apparently been ravaged by animals or carrion-eating birds, perhaps vultures, after her death. They realized that if the attack at the Bookman house involved the same perp, he was both reckless and uncommonly violent, although they were not yet aware that he was something far beyond their combined thirty-six years of law-enforcement experience.
In addition to a shotgun clamped muzzle up to the dashboard, left of the front passenger seat, there was also a four-foot-long cattle prod for use on animals only. Pinehaven County was home to more wild animals than people, and some of the former were powerful predators, most notably mountain lions, but also bears and coyotes. In Freeman Johnson’s experience, there had also been a runaway bull twice, a tiger kept illegally by an idiot who thought it would always be as gentle as a kitten, and a badly abused pit bull that understandably turned savagely against all humankind. Deputies didn’t encounter such dangerous creatures every day or even weekly. But because it had long been the policy of the sheriff’s department not to shoot any animals except in the most extreme circumstances, there were times when the electric prod was essential.
Although the Dodge Demon was dark and silent and seemingly untenanted in the headlight beams that pierced its windows, Colt and Johnson exited the patrol car with guns drawn.
To an extent, the wildwoods raised walls against the power of the wind, although these ramparts weren’t impervious. A lesser but still-insistent tempest shivered across the forest floor, thrashing whatever undergrowth it found, and a stronger gale fiercely shook the higher boughs of the evergreens. Translated by the deep canopy of needled branches, the upper currents of air sounded like rushing water, as though a great river surged overhead, and within that susurration arose thin shrieks, hollow groans, cries of seeming anguish, as if the river were the Styx, sweeping legions of souls from the world of the living to the land of the dead.
Freeman and his partner approached the Dodge with caution, but they also ceaselessly surveyed the eclipsed woods beyond the light provided by their car. That gloom seemed somehow different from any that Freeman had known before, like the fabled outer dark beyond all hope of Eden.
If the moment felt fraught with unnatural or even supernatural threat, then the attack came in harmony with the mood, the assailant dropping from a branch high above their line of sight, like a winged devil. He crashed hard into Walter Colt and drove him to the ground at the back of the Dodge. The deputy’s gun flew from his hand, hit spang on the bumper of the car, and spun away into the shuddering brush.
In shock, Freeman reeled back a step, two steps, as Colt heaved and rolled to get atop of—or cast off—his attacker. The deputy was the bigger of the two, but it was at once evident, from the snarling ferocity of his assailant, that size and combat training might not be enough to beat back the assault.
The tangled, thrashing bodies in a frantic struggle allowed Freeman no easy shot, in fact no shot at all. He stepped forward to join the fray, intending to club Nathan Palmer on the head with the barrel of his pistol. He halted when Walter Colt screamed. As long as he’d known the man, Colt had never shown fear, never issued a complaint about pain, remained always the definition of stoic. This wasn’t merely a scream of pain, but also of pure terror, and carried on it were words: “He’s biting, he’s biting!”
In the glare of the headlights, Colt’s left hand was gloved in blood—not just his left, both hands—blood on his face, too, the assailant snapping at his throat, Colt fending him off with bleeding hands, attacker slamming a knee into his victim’s crotch, slamming and slamming. Palmer glanced once at Freeman, and a slick mass of bloody saliva slid from his mouth, across a curve of grinning teeth, his fierce glare bright with animal eyeshine.
With no clear shot, in the clutches of fright, Freeman returned to the patrol car, grabbed the cattle prod, which would deliver a high-voltage low-amperage charge, enough to dissuade a bear or bull, maybe enough to kill a man if applied relentlessly. He was back at the scene in three seconds. Colt was still screaming. Department rules forbade the use of the prod on a human being. Fuck the rules. He jammed the copper prongs into Palmer’s back.
In contact with his attacker, Walter Colt would receive a hard but less disabling subsidiary shock, but there was no helping that. The maniac howled, and Freeman stung him again, and Palmer fell off his victim, facedown on the dirt track.
Gasping, groaning, Colt tried with only a little success to overcome the shock, to hitch away from his assailant.
Palmer should remain paralyzed for twenty to thirty seconds and be disoriented, largely helpless, for a minute or more after that.
Freeman slipped a thick plastic zip-tie handcuff from his utility belt. He dropped to one knee beside the prostrate attacker, intending to bind the bastard’s wrists tight together behind his back.
Palmer flailed, rolled over, tried to sit up, hissing with the fury of a taunted serpent.
Heart knocking so hard that it shook his arms, zip tie slipping from his sweat-slick fingers, Freeman scrambled backward, snatched up the cattle prod. He jammed the copper terminals into the maniac’s abdomen. Palmer clawed the hard-packed earth, scoring it as if his fingers were talons and the ground mere sand. Freeman shocked him again, again, and Palmer tossed his head, the cords in his neck standing out like steel cables, and Freeman gave him yet another jolt, a longer one. At last Palmer collapsed, unconscious or dead; Freeman didn’t care which.
He knelt and rolled Palmer facedown and zip tied the man’s hands behind his back. He drew the plastic straps tighter than regulations allowed, then used a second zip tie, even though he’d never heard tell of anyone breaking free of one. He tightened a zip tie around each of the man’s ankles and connected them with a third.
At last, he felt for a pulse in Palmer’s neck and regretted that he detected one.
During all of that, Walter Colt had managed to crawl to the patrol car and sit with his back against the front fender on the starboard side. He was bleeding from both hands, and the little finger on his left had been bitten off. The forefinger hung loose but was still attached by a shred of flesh. The ball of his chin had been bitten so severely that it wobbled as though it would fall off the bone. He was crying like a child, maybe in physiological shock.
Freeman Johnson hurried around to the driver’s door and got behind the wheel and grabbed the mic. He called for an ambulance—“officer down, critical wounds”—gave his position, and asked for backup—“as much damn backup as you can get me”—because the batteries in the prod must be nearly depleted. The plastic cuffs would hold; they always held. But someone was going to have to get a bite block in Palmer’s mouth before they transported him, and Freeman wasn’t going to do that without plenty of assistance.
He got out of the car, retrieved the emergency medical kit from the trunk, went around to Walter, and knelt at his side. The hands were bleeding but not so bad that a tourniquet was required before the EMTs got here. He gave Walter two spools of gauze to squeeze lightly in his fists, to apply pressure to the wounds in his palms. Nothing could be done about the chin.
“Ambulance in route, buddy. They’ll be here in a five minutes, not long, sooner than five.”
“Jesus God,” Walter said, his voice breaking.
Already, Palmer was stirring. He cursed and tried to turn over. He strained his bound wrists and kicked his shackled legs. He arched his back impossibly, as if he might be able to lock his vertebrae in sequence, like a snake, and curl his upper body erect, but he could not, and so he cursed more furiously.
“For God’s sake, what is he?” Walter asked. “Shoot the freak, kill him while you can.”
His partner’s uncharacteristic fear further chilled Freeman. He rose to his feet and retrieved the cattle prod and stood ready as sirens rose in the distance. Backup.
No moon or stars above the narrow service road, the cool wind roaring overhead like the caissons of Armageddon, the forest deep and black and crawling with mystery as it had never previously been for Freeman Johnson.
66
Police car lightbars flung off glisters of red and blue that washed across the windshield and the dashboard of the Range Rover.
Kipp and Ben sat in a line of cars at a blockade, northbound on Greenbriar Road.
Ben waited more patiently than Kipp, who panted with anxiety.
“What’s wrong, fella?”
Ben didn’t know about the boy, that the boy had been screaming and was now almost silent on the Wire, issuing only a pitiable sound of perfect despair.
Two species on this planet had been bonded for many thousands of years. Maybe more than a hundred thousand. Dogs and people.
Dogs had been at the side of human beings for millennia before horses or cats.
They had hunted together when hunting had been essential for survival.
They had protected each other from all threats in a primitive world where nature was even crueler than it was now.
Of all the creatures on Earth, only people and dogs engaged joyfully in play all the days of their lives.
In the relationship between humanity and dogs, some mutual destiny existed that had not yet been fulfilled.
That was what Dorothy had believed.
She had been sure that Kipp and the others in the Mysterium must represent the next stage in that human-canine destiny, that they would change the world.
And now this boy, unknowingly, was able to use the Wire. Which might mean that, in the near future, the human-dog bond would knit the two species more tightly together.
Kipp felt that an event of historic importance loomed.
The police went slowly from vehicle to vehicle, questioning the drivers, looking in the trunks of the cars.
A historic event loomed, and the police delayed traffic on Greenbriar Road, and if Kipp became any more frustrated, he would need to get out and pee.
67
Deputy Carrickton and her partner, Deputy Argento, were gone, Megan’s statement having been deemed adequate by Sheriff Hayden Eckman.
With the assistance of Argento, the sheriff had set right the overturned highboy and settled on the edge of the armchair, to speak with Megan while she remained at Woody’s bedside.
Having entered the room with a sense of the antagonism between Megan and Carrickton, he apologized for his deputy’s aggressive style of questioning, but also excused it by asserting that the woman was one of the best in his department.
Megan had once met the previous sheriff, Lyle Sheldrake, a low-key folksy man with a leathery face and white hair that glowed as if irradiated. She hadn’t known him, but those who had long experience of him said that he was a dedicated and honest man—whom Eckman had run against and defeated in a campaign of low character. Now, even as the new sheriff sought to smooth away what irritation Carrickton had caused, he struck Megan as oleaginous, not trustworthy. These days, Americans seemed attracted to such politicians if they were exceptionally gifted at virtue signaling while they slandered their opponents.
Eckman didn’t want to rehash all that Megan told Carrickton, but he was intently interested that she knew her attacker and that his name was Lee Shacket. “To the best of your knowledge, Ms. Bookman, has he ever used the name Nathan Palmer?”
“No, not to my knowledge. But I wouldn’t know, really. The last time I saw him was at a corporate affair with my husband eight years ago, and before that . . . thirteen years since I knew him socially.”
“You said he was the CEO of Refine, Inc., part of Dorian Purcell’s empire?”
“That’s right.”
“Are you aware of the catastrophic fire at Refine’s operation outside Springville, Utah?”
“No. I avoid the news, Sheriff. There’s nothing I can do about the people who make it, and I’m determined to keep my art positive in a world that increasingly isn’t.”
“Well, he may be on the run from responsibility for the deaths of ninety-two people at that facility.”
She grimaced, but there was nothing she could say about such a tragedy that would mean anything to anyone. “Then you’ve even more reason to find him quickly. There’s something gone very wrong with him.”
“Do you have a photograph of this Lee Shacket?”
“I’m sure you can find one online.”
“No doubt. But all we have now is a driver’s license he was carrying. It’s in the name Nathan Palmer. If you have a photo, Ms. Bookman, I could confirm in a minute that they’re one and the same.”
“It’s Mrs. Bookman.”
“Yes, of course. If you prefer.”
“Lee Shacket was at our wedding. The album I kept has a few snapshots of him. He still looks much the same—except he’s dyed his hair. He had a beard for a long while, though not back when I knew him, so it’s just the hair that’s changed from the photos.”
“Could you show that album to me?”
“I’m not leaving Woody. Go downstairs to the study. On one of the bookshelves are eight or ten photo albums. It’s the white one with gold trim. Bring it to me, and I’ll find Lee Shacket for you.”
In the sheriff’s absence, she spoke softly to Woody, assuring him that they were safe now, that Shacket would be found and would not be returning. Those assurances, however, were hopes rather than certainties, and perhaps the boy detected the difference, for he did not return from whatever deep place in his psyche he had gone.
The wind howled down on the house, not a nature sound empty of meaning, but a shriek of blackest madness, conjuring in Megan’s mind a painting by the eighteenth-century Spanish master Francisco Goya, Saturn Devouring His Children, a nihilistic image of such insane violence that it was capable of inspiring genuine fear in the viewer and weeks of nightmares.
