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Why he noticed the culvert, he couldn’t say. Certainly he had passed it a thousand times in his long career patrolling these woods and hills and scattered houses. It was set back off the main road, although it could only be called a main road in a rural community like Wakefield, out of sight and undisturbed for who knew how long. He had stopped to ease his bladder, stepping into the woods and behind a tree. Silly really because the chance of a car coming along at this time of night and in these hills was roughly the same as winning the lottery, and relieved himself of the free coffee he had gotten from the 7’11 on tenth and main. It was a backwater town but even yokel locals need their Slurpies and Big Gulps.
Jim buttoned his pants and started back to the patrol car, his thick Huffy jacket blunting the chill breeze that flowed down the hillside like a flash flood. His breath came out in little clouds that wisped away in the wind. The trees, their leaves in mid change, rustled like nervous wings, the wind keening between them. Overhead the stars sent splintering rays of light that sparked like tiny explosions in the crystal cold air.
A stray shaft of moonlight reflected off of something in the grass and leaves. Most people would have ignored the shine, taking it for a candy wrapper or an old discarded beer can tossed from the road, but Jim was a deputy sheriff and something about the way the light refracted made a mental connection. After all he had been checking licenses in moonlight since before Carter was in office. He made his way back, pushing aside spindly branches and kicking through thick brush until he made it to the small clearing where he thought he had seen the glint. Pulling his flashlight he splashed it across the ground, and there it was, half in and half out, sitting at an odd angle in a patch of clover. The plastic was frayed and yellowed, making it hard to identify the picture. The words were a smudged blur of ink from who knows how many years of moisture making its way past the damaged plastic barrier. But it was a Minnesota Driver’s License all right. No mistaking the State’s official certificate that allowed people to drive the streets, smoke, drink and cash their checks.
He smiled at the small victory. It wasn’t like solving a murder, of course, but on graveyard shift, weeknight patrol, in a county that didn’t see all that much action anyway; it was just a little something to remind him that he still “had it”.
“Trained observer, that’s me,” he said with a chuckle. He slipped the old license into his front breast pocket and started back for the car. But then he noticed the culvert just a few yards off. It was stuck flush into the side of the hill and Jim could only surmise that it must connect plum through the mountain. There was a pile of growth and dead branches that had blown up against it, as well as an old rusted grate of straight iron bars set back a few feet beneath a canopy of crumbling concrete. A strong gust of cold, northern, wind struck him in the face, brushing his thinning hair back on his forehead. It was almost enough to make him decide to continue on back to the car. Instead he braced the wind and pushed on to the small cave-like structure.
Taking his black leather gloves from his back pocket he tugged them on. He would have put them on as soon as he got out of the car, but trying to button your pants with gloves on, after taking a leak, was like trying to swim wearing dress shoes. He grabbed hold of a thick branch and shoved it aside, loosing a small avalanche of dead leaves, dirt and peat moss. The dark hole of the culvert seemed to stare out at him. He shined his flashlight into the opening but the sticks and bars cast weird shadows that made it hard to make anything out. He started to move more of the branches aside, then thought, ‘what the heck am I doing?’ And straightened up. He stood there a few seconds, his eyes squinting against the breeze, chuffing gusts of steam that were instantly torn from his lips.
“Ah forget it,” he said, starting again for the car.
The sound came from behind him.
At first he thought it was Janet, calling from the radio mike that rested on the epaulet of his shirt beneath his coat, but then he remembered she had called out of service. There usually wasn’t much need for a dispatcher after ten or so. If a call came in after that it was automatically transferred to the State Patrol, who in turn transferred it to Jim’s pager, the wonders of modern technology. Then he thought; maybe it was the wind, although by that time a chill had started at the base of his neck and was goose-stepping grandly down his spine. He turned his head, ducking involuntarily, and gaped into the darkness.
“Somebody there?”
Nothing.
He looked about, shining his light in a fanning arc. There were trees, bushes, rocks, dirt, grass and the culvert.
The culvert.
But there was something else. He tilted his head to try and catch it again, hunching his shoulders and shying his ear away from the wind, and there it was. So faint. As though coming from far away, the other side of the hill maybe, and then again, this time closer. A voice, he thought. Tiny and afraid. Alone.
Jim gulped hard, feeling the hairs stand up on the back of his neck like bristles on a brush. Something moved to his right. The culvert was on his right. His head swiveled slowly, his eyes craning at the corners. And there was something, something deep in the darkness, as though at the bottom of a well. Something that moved. Not a drastic movement, rather the slow deliberate shifting of darkness that made it impossible to know if it were real or a trick of the eyes. Then he remembered his flashlight and swung it up, thumb punching the rubber “on” button and sending a shaft of light into the hole. At first he saw nothing more than scattered debris that doubled the branches and leaves in front of the grate, but as he peered deeper, straining with all his concentration, he thought he made out something… a lessening of shadows, or a spot of something light, at the very edge of his beam’s power.
He shoved his face closer to the bars, feeling a noticeable drop in temperature as he neared the opening. He had to get closer. There was definitely something… but the clutter was too much, making it impossible to get close enough to see. He pulled another branch from the lose dirt and threw it down the hill, then kicked at a pile of mottled and decomposing mulch, scattering it and loosing other sticks and branches.
Now it was a mission and he took to it. Ripping and pulling until he had cleared a substantial section in front of the rough grating. Breathing hard he leaned close, so close that his forehead brushed against the old bars, leaving a rusty smudge that looked like dried blood. The wind gusted again, pushing at his coat and tugging him away from the hole. His light played over the bars and into the emptiness, making it past the grate and into the tunnel itself. He had to duck to fit under the overhanging semi-circle of cement and was beginning to feel a crimp in the middle of his back. The wind howled in his ears. But he could almost make it out. Almost see it. There was something, he was certain of it now. Deeper still. He had to get closer. He grasped the bars in his hands and pulled. There was the gritty sound of crushed rocks grinding and the scrape of metal against stone. Sandy pebbles rained into his hair and dusted his gloves and coat.
They were loose. Not free but loose. As though the grate had been removed before but locked back into place by time and the elements. He re-gripped and bunched his shoulders in preparation, then put everything he had into it. The bars scraped and gave a few inches at the initial pull but then stopped, as though glued in place. Jim re-gripped and jerked backward, the screech of metal scrapping, louder than the wind. He went into a series of powerful, grunting, heaves, teeth gritted and fist locked tight, until the grate snapped out from the top recess with a spray of powdery dust. Two more jerks and the grate came loose from the bottom as well. He leaned it against the side of the culvert and shined the light into the cave.
Taking his first step, ducking low, his face brushed into a net of webs. He jumped back, forgetting the ceiling in his panic, and smacked his head along the rough textured cement. He let out an involuntary yelp and sat down hard. The palm of his left hand came down on an upturned stick and only his glove saved him from a nasty puncture. The flashlight bounced away, stroking the walls and ceiling in a crazy pattern. He clawed at the webs that clung to his face like sticky strands of nylon, ripping them from his forehead and cheeks, slapping at his face without even realizing it, in the universal pantomime that all people share in their fear of small, crawling, eight legged creatures. They were in his eyelashes, mucking them up so that even when he blinked in rapid succession and wiped them in a frenzy, there were still globby strings that clouded his vision. Finally he made himself calm down and sit still. Then he was able to think clearly enough to remove one glove, wincing at the bruise that had started to make itself known on his palm, and carefully pulled at each set of lashes, until they were clear. He stayed where he was for a minute, letting his heart slow and his breathing take on a semblance of normalcy. His Mag-Light was beyond reach, shinning stupidly at a blank wall that curved up and over. He reached back and took out his Mini-Mag, snapping it on. The radius was more narrow, but the light almost as strong. He saw there were webs going all the way back, far as the light could trace. Well, that took care of that. The mystery was over. No one could possibly have been in the culvert for years, maybe decades. The webs had been completely undisturbed before his blundering attempt to broach the caves defenses. He grunted as he made his feet, ducking as another strand of cobwebs stuck to his hair. He pulled out his long nightstick, some of the new guys carried those collapsible batons, but Jim was from the old school and didn’t trust any new fangled plastic-resin compound crud like that. Good old oak, that was the ticket. Black as night, hard as granite and a knurled grip that made it tough to get it away from him. He’d had a hippy fellow, long hair, dirty, blue shaded granny glasses with a scraggly beard and sandals, try and take it once, when the county hosted one of those stupid PHISH concerts in a farmer’s field. The hippy just reached out, pretty as you please, and grabbed hold of the end while Jim was looking the other way. The freak tried to jerk it away from him and the movement had caught Jim off guard so that he almost fell over, but then he caught himself and pulled back so hard that the skinny hippy guy just about flew out of his sandals. Jim swept up and out with the stick, just like he’d learned in the academy all those years back, and slapped that smelly PHISH-boy right across the bridge of the nose, snapping the glasses and giving the freak a new outlook on life and the law. They’d had no more trouble from the PHISH crowd that night. Jim had felt bad about hurting the boy, he wasn’t one for excessive force, but the boy had started it and lessons could sometimes be hard in this tough old world where it just didn’t pay for a guppy to try and act like a shark.
Jim spun the nightstick over his head like an off balance helicopter blade, clearing a section of spider webs, until he was able to stand up with only as much of a crouch as was needed to keep him from bloodying his noggin on the ceiling. Then he swept the weapon in wide arcs, catching a thick layer of webs on the wood surface and making a path to his flashlight. He picked it up, squinting into the recesses of the cave, realizing, with a slow shake of his head, that what he had seen from the entrance was the play of light and shifting wind on the webs. Now that he was inside, without the shadows of the bars to play their little tricks, he could easily see how the webs danced and writhed, their slender strands vibrating, as far down the shaft as he could see. He was just glad that no one was here to see him. He would never have lived it down. He would tell his wife about it in the morning of course, he trusted her with everything, and they would have a good laugh over coffee and eggs while the girls got ready for school, but this was the type of incident you didn’t tell your fellow cops or even your close buddies about for at least a few years. After that it was suddenly okay to joke about things that had happened in the past, no matter how silly or dumb, as though there were some sort of secret statute of limitation on stupidity and humiliation and once you reached it you were immune to ridicule. But that would be a long way down the road.
He began to back out, careful of his footing and then he caught the smell. It was perfume. He didn’t know the brand, Jim wasn’t the type of guy to know brands of ladies perfume, but there was no mistake. He looked about again, towards the opening, and there was the sound. So low in volume that it rode the whine of the wind like an echo. But it was no echo. It was a woman. And that smell, perfume, but underneath something else. Something old and dark and rancid. Like meat left out in the sun. As faint as the sound, but just as certainly there.
Jim’s flesh crawled up into goose pimples, and he was thankful that he had used the trees before entering the culvert. His mind tried to tell him it was just the wind and the dark and the creepy surroundings, but that stopped when he felt the warm breath whisper against his ear.
“Ughhhhh…” he spun around, backpedaling and grabbing for his gun all in the same instant. His feet became entangled in branches and dirt, his head scrapping the ceiling painfully, and he fell backward, the flashlight strafing a woman standing behind him, her face as white as death and her hair clotted in blood. A quick glimpse of dark holes for eyes and claw like fingers reaching out, and then darkness as the flashlight hit the wall of the tunnel, shattering the faceplate and bulb with the impact. The gun was in his hand somehow and he fired without thinking, the first time in his twenty three years on the force that he had fired his weapon in the line of duty, and the massive booms rocked off the walls and ceiling, deafening him. The muzzle flash of the repeated shots showed the woman coming at him in a series of strobes. Her mouth opening in a long screech, teeth pointed and deadly, skin as bloated and white as the belly of a maggot, blood pouring from her hair and streaming down her face. And with each shot she appeared magically closer, first on this side then on that, low, then high, bullets punching holes through her once white night gown. Blood gushing from her mouth, and the scream. Oh the scream! It was a screech from hell. Drowning out all but the shots themselves, bouncing off the walls and coming at him from all angles. A blast of freezing wind smashed into his face stealing his breath and crushing the air in his chest as though he had jumped into an ice locked lake in mid-winter. He continued to fire, pumping at the trigger mindlessly, all his training about sight picture and trigger pull completely forgotten. He jerked at the gun like a man working a hammer. Boom! Boom! Boom! Until she was on him, her red, red lips stretching wide in an inhuman grin as she covered his body with her own, all of it in stop action motion as the flash of exploding gunpowder brought instants of light to the darkness.
He felt her come into him. And the gun dropped from his cold fingers. He could feel her. Feel her hate. And he knew that it would kill him. No man could feel what he was feeling and go on living. It just wasn’t possible. Tears rolled down his cheeks and he crawled up to his knees in the darkness, trying to bring his hands together to pray. But then she flooded his mind and a barrage of images swept through him like some horrific tornado. He saw the events behind his eyes in the world of dream light. Only this was no dream. This was real. But not his reality, hers.
He saw her, felt her, as she was then, so many years ago. Dressed for bed in the same nightgown that he had seen racing at him in the cave, but this was before. Before the blood had splattered it making it a thing of nightmares. Now it was just a nightgown and pretty too, with lace at the neck and wrists. She was leaning over a little boy’s bed, a golden locket dangling from a short chain worn loosely on her neck, his hair tousled and brown. She kissed him gently on the cheek, before closing the door and sitting in a chair in front of a large mirror. She brushed her hair, not yet clotted with dried blood or streaming runnels of scarlet. Only hair. As brown as the boy’s and just as fine. Her lips were full and pink, her teeth white and even, no gushing of blood or pointed daggers seeking to rend flesh in their terrible kiss. She reminded Jim of Sarah, his wife, and felt a pang of sympathy for the woman, knowing what was to happen.
The man appeared in the mirror behind her without warning. It was her husband, the father of the boy. He was smiling. And then he struck her. The hammer punched a quarter-sized hole in her skull behind the right ear, knocking her from the settee to collapse on the hardwood floor in a sprawl. He swung again and her head jerked crazily. And again and again and again. Until everything grew dark and the last thing she saw, was the man she had loved, had shared a bed with, and with whom she had borne a child, walking down the hall towards her sweet babies room, the hammer still in his hand.
And then her hate swelled. Like a balloon filling with putrid gas until the thing must burst. Jim was certain he would burst with it, and that would be all right, because he didn’t know if he wanted to live with what he had just witnessed.
The cold left him.
He collapsed on the floor of the culvert, sticks poking into his stomach and chest. Darkness everywhere. Then he realized that he wasn’t breathing and forced himself to take in air. When he sat up his face was wet and the palm of his hand hurt dully. He felt around until he found his gun, the slide locked back holding an empty chamber. He shook his head and grunted, more to let himself know that he still could and because he needed some sound right now, than anything else. And then reached back for his Mini-Mag.
Something burned at his chest like a live coal, almost making him drop the flashlight, but he held on and dug at his pocket with the other hand, until he ripped the old, dilapidated license from his pocket. He stared at the picture, knowing, in his heart, who it was. His face set in a grim fixture, his jaws working a rhythmic tic. He thought of his wife and shined the light into the darkness. He saw the locket at once, disturbed from its resting place by the clumsiness of his antics. It was open. He reached out and picked it up, rubbing his thumb over the face of a little boy. He closed the old tarnished thing and slipped it into the pocket that had held the license. He looked again at the picture.
“He’s here, isn’t he?” he said into the darkness. “Somewhere close. That’s why you called to me.”
The wind picked up, its voice a hollow cry, or was it the wind? He felt her rage. It was the rage of betrayal, but worse, it was the rage of a mother who had reason to hate. A mother unable to protect her child.
“All right. I’ll do it. I’ll do it.” He knew that her bones were here, the flesh long since cleaned away. Nothing now but a few scraps of clothing and a skull with holes gaping through. That and one thing more.
Hate.
Well, maybe he could help put that hate to rest, so that she could find peace. He would try. He didn’t know how, exactly, but she must have called him for a reason, so he would trust her to show him the way.
He crushed the plastic card in his fist and left the cave.
He found no traffic on the mountain road and was just starting to cross Second Street, about two miles from the culvert, when he saw headlights blaze across a lush swath of trees to his right. An old, four door, Buick came barreling down the road. It was one forty in the morning and Jim knew that the drunks would be out, although not as many as on the weekend, and thought this might be the first of the bar closers heading home. The Buick fishtailed slightly as it rounded the bend, and then hit the brakes hard for a second, as the police cruiser came into view. Jim saw a balding head and wide eyes. The astonished face almost made him laugh for an instant but then recognition struck.
It was him.
Jim grabbed up the license off his clipboard and stared at the almost invisible picture. Could it be? Of course, it had to be. Why else had she led him here?
The Buick was a half-mile up the road when the police car’s flashing lights bathed the interior of the car with red and blue. The driver pulled over, trudging too far to the right, running over a good-sized rock and assorted brush, before over correcting and then leveling out and stopping at an angle to the road.
Jim could feel the rage building within him. He would have to be careful, look for whatever clues he could find, there had to be a way to bring this filth to justice. The dead demanded it.
The driver, the murderer, rolled down his window as Jim approached.
“Yes, sir? Did I do something wrong, officer?”
Jim could smell the alcohol as soon as the man spoke.
Only if you consider bashing a woman’s face in something wrong, you stinking piece of garbage, thought Jim, his jaw working the tic like a racehorse. He had to be careful, keep himself under control. The courts demanded evidence. He glanced into the backseat by force of habit and saw the hammer lying on the floorboard behind the driver’s seat.
Control slipped. He reached into the open window and grabbed the man by the shirt and dragged him half way out the window. The man screamed, shocked by the sudden attack, and then flopped onto the roadway, scraping his cheek.
“What the…?”
Jim kicked him in the face, knocking his head back into the car door, with a solid thunk. The man screamed again. Jim slashed his arm out and his nightstick caught the man on the side of the face, obliterating teeth in a misty spray.
“Oh-oh-oh,” the man choked out, spread forward on hands and knees as though looking for his missing teeth.
“How do you like it?” Yelled Jim into the man’s ear. “Not so fun when it’s happening to you is it big man?” Jim swung up with the stick, hard and fast, catching the man just above the lip. There was a horrible crunch, that was music to Jim, and then the man fell forward, groaning weakly. “Little bit tougher when it’s a man and not a woman you’re facing, right? Not a woman or a little boy?” Jim kicked him as hard as he could, the thick blunt toe of his boot striking the man’s temple. Blood pooled beneath the unmoving form. Jim almost stopped, but he remembered the girl as she brushed her long hair and the smile on the man’s face as he swung. He turned back and brought the nightstick down in a big looping arc, square on the base of the man’s skull. He kept swinging until the stick felt like a fifty-pound weight in his hand and his shoulder ached from the effort. He gave the man one last, meaningless kick and then rested against the car, his arms outstretched, bracing his weight against the doorpost.
How had that happened? He had meant only to talk to the man. To try and gather evidence for an arrest and latter conviction. But then he had seen the hammer and just… snapped!
Not that the man didn’t deserve it. It was exactly what he deserved. Justice. Far better than what the courts would have done. Still, the system wouldn’t see it that way. The system would see Jim as the bad guy. Jim and not the murderer of a woman and little boy. They would make a hero out of the murderer. A victim to be pitied.
He was still wearing his gloves so he didn’t have to worry about prints. He opened the door and picked the man up. His face was unrecognizable, a squashed melon that dripped. He shoved him into the open door and onto the passenger’s seat. Jim got behind the wheel and pulled the car off the road and behind the trees. Someone would find him soon enough, but there was nothing to link the dead man to Jim. He closed the door behind him and started away but then remembered the hammer. He opened the back door and reached in. There was no hammer. Just a rolled up newspaper from the day before. But it had looked like a hammer.
It didn’t matter. She had led him here. She was avenged. Justice had been rendered.
Jim pulled his cruiser back onto the road, thankful that his work was done. His shirt, coat, pants and gloves were splotched with blood. He would have to get rid of them, but that was okay. It was worth it. He headed for home where he had a freshly pressed uniform waiting for him in the laundry room.
A full-sized van crossed the road in front of his car, passing between the twin beams of his headlights. There was a man and a woman, older, perhaps in their sixties or seventies, in the front seats.
It was him.
Jim grabbed up the license again, his gloves leaving a red smear on the plastic. How long ago had he murdered her? Her nightgown was old, a design that hadn’t been worn in decades, with the high top neckline and lacy sleeves. And her body had long since decayed. The man would have to be old. Why he was not young even then. Jim remembered the face in the mirror and he was suddenly certain that it was the same as the man that had just passed in the van. Older to be sure, but that was right. He would be older, much older. He gunned the cruiser, his tires squealing on the pavement.
And the woman, his mistress of course. They had probably been in it together. Why else kill his wife and son? He sped up on the van, pulling even and then cranked the wheel far to the right. The front bumper of the patrol car caromed off the front corner panel of the van, denting metal and tearing off a long section of molding. The van swerved away and smashed into a ditch, the back end rising dramatically as the front crumpled into the far side of the gully. The van’s horn blared, long and loud.
He was on the old man before he could open the door. Jim smashed in the glass with his elbow, spraying the old couple with jagged, crystal like, chunks, then pulled the door open and grabbed the man’s gray hair in both hands. The woman screamed, her bifocals canted crazily on her terrified face, a thin drip of blood trickling from one eyebrow. He pulled the man out into the dirt, and kneed him in the crotch. Then shoved the frail old man’s head down and smashed his face with the same knee.
“How’s that feel, huh?” he screamed, furious. “You like that?” he pulled out the stick and swung at the side of the man’s head, but the old man was able to partially deflect the blow with an upraised arm. The heavy oak splintered the man’s forearm, leaving his hand and wrist to dangle grotesquely, like the long, limp neck of a dead bird. Jim swung again, enraged that his first blow had failed to kill the man, and this time there was nothing to stop the impact. The old man went down like a sack of grain, the van’s horn still blasting.
The old woman was screaming and holding something to her ear. It was a cell phone. He pulled out the gun and pointed it at her. She was crying and begging into the phone. Jim couldn’t make out her words, over the blaring of the horn, but he hoped she was asking for forgiveness for the terrible wrongs she had done in her life. Because she was about to pay for the murder of an innocent woman and a young boy. Vengeance is mine.
The roar of gunfire drowned out the sound of the horn.
Afterward, he sat in his car, the horn finally silent, looking at the picture on the license. He thought he could make out the shape of the man’s jaw, and a semblance of the hairline. It was so messed up he couldn’t be sure and the light was poor, he would be able to see more in the daylight. But he was almost certain he had been right, this time. Besides, she had led him to them so they must be involved somehow.
A part of his brain told him he should leave, that the old woman had been talking on the phone, and then, as if to confirm his thoughts, his pager hummed to life, sending a vibratory tingle through the thick leather of his belt. He read the message, nodding agreement when he saw that it was a 911 call with a woman screaming and possible shots fired. They would be sending backup from the State Patrol and maybe even a county mountie from neighboring Lewiston. He needed to leave. Only he didn’t. Instead he waited. She wanted him to wait. And she was good. She did what she did because it was necessary, he was sure of that. He had felt her, could still feel her in a way, as though a part of her had stayed with him. And there was nothing bad about her. There couldn’t be. She only wanted justice. So that she could rest.
Gary Peebles, from over in Lewiston was the first to arrive on scene, his siren blasting and his strobes flashing. The engine gunning, as he pushed the peddle to the metal, (as Gary was fond of saying), was almost as loud as the siren. The car came to a screeching halt thirty yards from the van. He got out cautiously, shotgun in hand. He chucked the slide back and then forward, seating a round, and advanced on the van, glancing over at the patrol car a few yards ahead. He saw Jim sitting in the seat and almost drew down on him, then relaxed when he saw who it was. Walking forward, his face turned pale when he saw the old man’s body lying in the rut. Gary rushed up to the van, shaking his head as he saw the old woman sitting in the passenger seat, the phone in her lap and one hand flopped on the dash. Blood still fresh on her face and blouse. He climbed partially in and felt for a pulse. When he came back out he was nearly white.
“Bad scene,” he muttered under his breath as he walked over to Jim. “Bad scene. Bad, bad scene.” He rested the shotgun, butt first, on the ground, and laid a hand on the top of the open doorpost. “You see anyone?” he asked Jim.
Jim was staring at something in his hands. Then he pursed his lips and looked up at Gary. “Why Gary? Why?” He stood up and came around the door. “Tell me that Gary, why?”
Gary looked back toward the van, so he never saw Jim pull the nightstick from its ring.
“I don’t know, man. People are crazy these days,” he said.
“She was a good woman,” said Jim, his voice low and steady.
“Probably so. Even if she wasn’t, how could someone do something like that to an old couple like them?”
“A good mother,” said Jim.
“Heck, probably a grandmother, maybe even a great grandmoth…”
Lights popped in a massive explosion as the club hit him in the back of the head. Gary fell forward, the shotgun dropping to the dirt. He landed on his shoulder, trapping his gun-hand beneath him. Blood dribbled out both ears and both nostrils.
“That’s how it felt, Gary. That’s just how it felt! She didn’t know it was coming either did she?” The stick came down on Gary’s upraised shoulder, crunching bone. He was too dazed to scream.
Another siren sounded in the distance.
“What did you do to the boy? Did you do this?” Thud! Another blast of fireworks deep in his brain and Gary was almost out. Some animal instinct fought on, moving his hand toward his gun. He had heard the siren for just a second but now there was a sickening, rushing sound that flooded his senses blocking out all external data. “Mama?” he groaned, not realizing that he had spoken at all. His fingers found the gun, gripping the handle like a safety line. He tried to pull it free, but his weight still pinned him to the ground.
“A little boy, Gary. Just a little boy and his mother. You make me sick. No, not sick. Mad.” He brought the stick down three more times, as hard as he could. The last blow must have severed something vital because blood sprayed in a thin, high-pressured, stream, wetting the side of Jim’s face. The stream stuttered into pulsing squirts, slowing quickly until it stopped altogether just as the next car arrived on scene.
Two troopers piled out of the cruiser, which had stopped behind Gary’s car, and rushed toward the van, not even seeing Jim. He didn’t recognize either of them, there were a lot of troopers he didn’t know, they didn’t mingle all that much, until he thought of the license. He scooped it out of the dirt and saw instantly that one of the men, the older of the two, had to be him. The picture had never been so clear. It was him. He grabbed Gary’s shotgun and leveled it at the man’s legs. He didn’t want to kill him with it, that would be too easy. He wanted him to feel what it was like for her. The trooper was just looking Jim’s way when the blast took him in the thighs. The multiple pellets ripped into the muscles of his legs, knocking them out from under him. He landed on his chest, his face smacking the asphalt, two teeth chipping sharply, and his nose smashing almost flat.
The second trooper fired twice without aiming, double tap. He was fresh from the academy; his third night on the road and his Field Training Officer had just been gunned down by another cop. He didn’t even think, just let his training take over. Pop! Pop! Just like that. Exactly as he had done on the range countless times and just like on the range, he saw two small holes open on the target, center mass. But unlike the targets of the range this target was still coming toward him, the giant bore of the shotgun lining him up like a Thanksgiving Day turkey.
Jim saw the first officer go down and then felt a stinging in his chest, not bad really, but sort of deep inside. If he had been wearing a vest the nine-millimeter slugs would have done no damage, but Jim had never worn a vest, they were too cumbersome, too restricting. One of those new fangled gadgets that he so hated. He stepped around the car, seeing the boy’s face for the first time. There was no question about it. It was the face on the license. The murderer. An exact match. Why, I could pick him out of a lineup, he thought. He was that sure. Fury boiled within him like a rabid thing. The boy had to pay. There had to be justice for the woman and her child.
There were two more smacks against his chest, this time it felt as if someone had punched him really hard. The breath went out of him and a strange grunt was pushed from his mouth. Blood dribbled past his lips and down his chin. He tried to pull the trigger of the shotgun, but it felt suddenly so heavy. Then something smashed into his hip, turning him to the side. He still carried the license between the ring finger and pinky of his right hand but he no longer needed it. The picture was branded in his mind. It was the old man, no the boy that had shot him. But the boy was too young, wasn’t he? Or was it the man with the hammer that wasn’t a hammer? Everything was getting cloudy. He wanted to go home and be with his wife and daughters. He wanted to tell them about the way he had gotten scared in the culvert and fell down. He could almost smell the coffee as she made breakfast, her hair tied back in a long tail and her bathrobe fluttering around her ankles. She was so pretty, so pretty. But then he remembered the woman in the cave. The blood caked hair and pointed teeth. A shudder ran through him and he was lying on his back, his breath coming in misty coughs. Lying on his back just like in the cave when the woman came into him, bringing her hate and her cry for vengeance. The stars glittered overhead but his vision was shrinking, growing smaller and smaller, as though he were falling down a long tunnel. Smaller and smaller until there was only a glimmer and then even that was gone and there was nothing but the dark. Just like in the cave. He knew he was dying, but that wasn’t really true was it? Because the truth was that he had already died. He had died when that bundled mass of long trapped hate had been released from its iron prison and found a host to carry out its mission. An impossible mission because the woman had died long ago and far away, her body and the body of her son being dumped a long way from home. The thing had no way of finding her murderer, if he even still lived. So she let her hate simmer, like a festering wound, waiting till it was ready to explode out at whatever she found. She would kill them all in her lust, hoping to come across the right one. It was just a matter of time. It didn’t matter how long, for time means nothing to the dead. And if he were already dead, then what matter that? They were all guilty. All the living. And her hate knew no bounds.
It left him then, like a heavy breath. Going back to its nesting place. Satisfied that it had taken a last victim before being forced out. Jim felt it go and a tear slipped down the side of his face. He could see nothing, but he felt the presence of the trooper as he knelt beside him, jerking the gun roughly from his hands. The license fell from his fingers and the boy picked it up.
“It’s you,” Jim mumbled, no longer believing it. “It’s you. Your picture.”
The rookie looked at the thing in his hand. It was an old discarded candy wrapper, maybe from a Mars bar or something like that, only it was too old and faded to be sure.
“Doesn’t look anything like me,” he said, looking down at the dying man. He went to help his partner.
A low buzzing sound was beginning to ring in Jim’s ears, it reminded him of the alarm buzzer, telling him it was time to get up, only it wasn’t. It was the exact opposite, his brain shutting down, telling him it was time to die. For a second he thought he could smell coffee and thought again how nice it would be to talk to his wife. He started to smile and then died.
Two days later Sheriff Marty Norvell sat at his desk, watching the wind blow the trees outside his office window. The day was overcast and gloomy. Sarah, Jim’s wife, had just left, taking a letter that contained all the information concerning Jim’s benefits in regards to his pension and so forth. She also took a small bag with his belongings that had been in his car and locker, minus the items needed to be kept for evidence.
Marty rolled the small trinket between his fingers, liking the feel of the cold metal as well as the rough texture of the old chain. It had cleaned up nicely. It didn’t really look to be worth much in terms of dollars and cents, it was just gold leaf after all, but it somehow felt right in his hand.
It had been in Jim’s pocket when they brought him into the Coroner’s office and Marty had taken it, thinking to give it to Sarah. But as he held it, he became convinced that it had never belonged to Jim. It belonged to someone else. So he kept it and when Sarah came in to collect Jim’s things, her eyes puffy and raw, her nose red, he laid it on the desk and pointed to it.
“Ever see that before?” he asked her. She said that she hadn’t and asked why.
“Found it near the crime scene,” he lied, although later he could not say exactly why he had chosen to lie. “Just wanted to see if it belonged to Jim.”
He still didn’t know why he had lied but it was good that he had. It didn’t belong to Jim, he was sure of that much at least. It couldn’t have belonged to Jim. For the hundredth time he popped the little catch on the side and opened the locket. The boy’s face was yellowed and worn, the ravages of time having taken their toll, but it was the fine face of a fine boy. Marty was sure that the boy’s mother must have been a good woman. A loving mother. Like his own mother, perhaps, God rest her soul. His mother had been a saint. He figured the boy’s mother to be from the same mold. And if anyone had tried to hurt his mother, the way Jim had hurt that old lady and her husband, the way the boy in the picture’s mother might have been hurt, why then that person had best just sit tight, because Marty knew a thing or two about payback. Yes sir, that he did.
Now why did I think that, he wondered. He had no reason to think the boy’s mother had met with ill will, ah but she had hadn’t she? It was the strangest thing, but somehow he believed she had indeed. The thought made him angry. Very angry.
The night winds blew over the darkened culvert, its iron bars rattling against the side of the cement wall where they now rested. The cobwebs were already in the process of being mended by the thousands of minions that inhabited the solemn black tunnel. A ways back the thing rested, its hate building slowly on itself. It was no longer completely coherent, having used so much of itself on the man. It was as if the expenditure had blown its continuity to shreds and now needed to mend the scattered pieces, much as the spiders were doing to the caves webs. But she had ventured out, looking for the one that had wronged her, and she had found some to pay for it. Some, but not enough. Never enough. There was so much more she had to offer. Already she was beginning to gather herself, enough so that she no longer thought of herself as just an it. She had waited so long, her hate burning, slowly at first, then building over the generations, until it raged like a blazing inferno. But now that she had tasted the sweet sugar of revenge she longed for more. So much more. And there was time, all the time of eternity. She had only to wait. Others would come, and they would listen, because they wanted to listen. They would see what they wanted to see, hear what they wanted to hear, smell the sweet perfume and gorge themselves on her perfect hate. And she would love them, for a time.
For now she would wait. But soon.
Soon.
Marty dropped the cold hunk of metal as though it had burned him, looking around into the hallway. It was empty. He could have sworn he heard someone laughing. Very quiet, very faint. Unpleasant, and not at all nice, but laughing just the same.
He thought of his mother and turned back to the locket and the picture of the boy.
The End
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