Though Rusty’s mother appeared hesitant to leave the boy alone with a stranger, she wasn’t really reluctant at all. Her body language screamed that she was desperate to put as much distance as she could between her and the freckle-faced little boy in the big chair.
As soon as the door closed behind her and the sheriff, Crock sat down on the edge of the desk facing the boy and tossed the cinnamon toothpick he’d been chewing into a trash basket. This was an office, not a typical interrogation room. The nameplate on the desk read Juanita Torres, administrative assistant. It was a small, stuffy, windowless room cluttered with the paraphernalia common to all secretaries—Crock still called them that. There was a tape dispenser, Post-it notes, scissors, stapler and a pad of the little pink “While you were out” notes for phone messages. Did people still use those? You’d think that even in a backwater hamlet like Bradford’s Ridge, Kentucky, voicemail would have rendered them obsolete. Apparently not.
A huge aquarium, four feet by six feet, rested on a stand across from the desk. Illuminated with its own light, the murky water was teeming with aquatic life, the obligatory goldfish and guppies plus four or five other varieties of colorful fish Crock couldn’t identify. A small turtle climbed on a rock on the bottom. The air breather on the tank offered comforting plunk-swish white noise, and the watery blue glow from it mitigated, at least a little bit, the sallow yellow illumination from the lone overhead fluorescent bulb.
“Can I get you anything?” Crock asked. “Would you like a soft drink? I think the root beer slot in the machine down the hall still has cans.”
The boy didn’t answer, just looked at Crock.
It was unnerving, but Crock didn’t let his discomfort show.
“I’m an A&W fan myself,” Crock said. “House brand root beer tastes like swamp water. You sure you don’t want anything?”
“Go get yourself a root beer if you want one,” the boy said. “Judging from that fat belly, you’ve sucked down more than a few already.”
With great effort, Crock kept his reaction off his face.
“Yeah, but I’ve already had my quota for the morning—two for breakfast along with a dozen doughnuts and a piece of cherry pie. Cherries are a fruit, you know, so technically I tapped a couple of food groups.”
“Why are you here?” the boy asked. “What do you want from me?”
“Just want to chat, that’s all.”
“You didn’t drive all the way down here from Cincinnati to chat with a snot-nosed eight-year-old kid.” The casual reference to himself in third person added another layer of otherworldliness to the scene.
Then he saw it, only for a second. Or thought he did. Might have imagined it. Yeah, probably imagined it. But for a moment there seemed to be a shadow behind the boy, like the “ghosts” cast behind people in a flashed picture. Only the shadow wasn’t in the shape of a boy. It wasn’t in the shape of anything recognizable.
“You ever go exploring in the caves?”
Crock’s bluntness was rewarded with the shock and surprise he was hoping for. And alarm. Definitely alarm.
“No, I never go in the caves. Nobody does. They’re dangerous. You could get lost in there and never be found.”
“Yeah, that’s what I hear, but they’re caves, for crying out loud. Nothing cooler to explore than a cave. A remote cave, maybe, one nobody’s been in before.”
“I told you I don’t ever go in the caves.”
“Not even once? You and Ariel and Cassidy out playing in the woods and you come upon—”
The look that distorted the child’s features was one Crock was certain he would carry to his grave. Rage, loathing, hatred all wrapped up and poured undiluted onto the features of an innocent freckled face, twisting and molding it into a sneer of such revulsion Crock couldn’t help pulling back from it.
“Those caves are dangerous, all right, fat man.” The voice that spoke the words was a growl, an animal sound, from the throat of a wolf with dripping fangs, ready to pounce. “More dangerous than you could possibly imagine.”
The air in the room instantly became too thick to breathe and Crock was suddenly sucking in a substance his lungs couldn’t process. Dark shapes fluttered around the edges of his vision in the darkness of the room. Darkness. In the gloom, the boy’s eyes shone. They were brown. Not a pretty chocolate brown or caramel color. They were muddy, the color of stagnant water, a pond with green slime along the edge, water that more than one stray creature had wandered into and drowned.
Water closes over his head and he flails with his arms and legs, trying to get his head back up into the air. The breath strains at his lungs and the terror in his chest is so huge there’s hardly room for any air at all. He kicks frantically, trying to propel his body upward, but he only sinks farther. The pressure to breathe has become unbearable. Sunlight streams down through the water above, refracted into a shower of silver spangles, a shaft of brilliance that he knows will be the last thing he ever sees.
Then there is bright all around him. Hands grab his arm, yanking him upward, and he somehow manages to hold onto that breath until his head breaks the surface into the air. He gasps air in great heaving lungfuls, then catches a bit of water and strangles, coughs, feels himself hauled to shore as if he weighed no more than a loaf of bread. There is water in Crock’s eyes; he can’t see. But as the man who saved him lays him gently on his back on the riverbank, he catches a glimpse of one thing in crisp focus. The man is wearing black cowboy boots.
The memory was there and then gone between one heartbeat and another. But that was enough. The darkness receded from around Crock’s vision, the oppression in the room lifted, and he drew in a breath—not the gasp of a drowning boy but the relieved sigh of one to whom evil has come way too close.
The look that had curdled the boy’s features was gone as quickly as it had appeared, leaving them innocent and totally blank.
“You ever explored a cave, Mister?” The too-sweet childishness was cloying. “What’s it like in a cave?” Rusty slid down off the seat of the chair and began to wander aimlessly around the room. He fingered the paperweight on the desk and lifted the little glass ball next to it that was filled with a Currier and Ives scene. He turned it upside down and shook it and snow began to fall from the sky. “I’d be too scared to go in a cave. I bet it’s real dark in there. Mommy always turns on my nightlight at night because I’m afraid of the dark.”
Crock turned and watched as the boy made a circuit around the room. He stopped at the desk beside Crock, picked up the Post-it notes and began tearing off one after another as he spoke.
“What was the cave you went exploring in? Was it dangerous?”
“The only cave I was ever in was Carlsbad Caverns, and—”
Crock caught the movement out of the corner of his eye. Or maybe just sensed it. Cop’s instinct. The boy was lightning fast. He snatched up the scissors off the desktop, turned and stabbed them at Crock in a single motion so fluid it was hard to follow.
All Crock could do was deflect. He reached out and knocked the scissors aside, so the motion that would have plunged the six inches of sharp blade into his heart plunged downward instead, and he felt a white-hot dagger of pain in his thigh.
The boy made a horrible, guttural sound, yanked the scissors out of Crock’s leg and stabbed again at his chest. Crock staggered down off the desk and shoved the child away before the blade found its target. The force of the shove sent the boy flying across the room, where he collided with the aquarium, knocking it off its stand to crash to the floor in a flood of rank, fish-food-smelling water.
The boy was drenched, lying on his back amid dying, flopping fish. He had lost his grip on the scissors when he fell, but as fast as a rattlesnake, he leapt to pick them up off the floor and started for Crock with them upraised, his eyes gleaming, his teeth bared.
The door flew open then, officers and staff responding to the sound of the crash, and the adults were frozen in place by the sight of the child advancing on Crock with the bloody scissors.
“You’ll die, you fat pig,” the voice that came from the child’s mouth said. “I’ll kill you, cut your heart out and—”
Finally, one of the deputies moved and his response unfroze the other officers. Three of them tried to grab the boy, but he turned and plunged the scissors into the chest of the first man who reached him. The deputy looked down in surprise at the scissors sticking out of his shirt below the badge on his right side, then sank to the floor and fell over into the puddle of aquarium water.
The other officers advanced on the boy, but the kid fought like a wild animal. He bit the second officer, tore out a hunk of flesh from his hand and spat it out on the floor as the man howled in pain. Wet and as slippery as an eel, the boy dodged around them, slipped out of their grasping hands and made for the door, jumping over the body of the officer lying in a growing puddle of blood.
Crock reached out, grabbed him by the back of his skinny neck and yanked him off his feet. The boy kicked and flailed frantically, but Crock had lifted him off the floor and was holding the child out from his body the way you’d hold a dead mouse by the tail.
The room was suddenly filled with people.
Someone was screaming—a woman, shrieking, “Rusty! Rusty! What have you done to my boy?”
Other hands took the boy out of Crock’s grasp. The child continued to writhe and twist. He kicked, spat and tried to bite them. It took five big men to subdue him—one on each side gripping an arm or leg and another behind with his fingers encircling the boy’s neck so when he tried to wriggle free, the movement choked him.
Crock heard the wail of a siren—an ambulance. Someone had had the good judgment to summon one. He looked down and saw that his whole pants leg was drenched in blood. But it was the officer on the floor he was concerned about. The sheriff—when did he get here?—turned the man over on his back where he lay in a puddle of water and blood, gasping, every breath producing a bubbly red spittle on his lips that dripped down his chin.
“You hang in there, Ed,” the sheriff told him. “Ambulance is on its way. You’re gonna be just fine.”
Crock knew the officer wouldn’t make it to the hospital alive.
“Crock!”
Jack was standing wide-eyed in the doorway. Then Crock discovered that his legs didn’t want to hold him upright anymore and he sank down into the water on the floor beside the dying deputy.
Jeff Kendrick checked into the downtown Sheraton after he left the hospital. He couldn’t face going home, not yet, but he was exhausted, dead on his feet. He hadn’t slept in…he didn’t know how long. Forty-eight hours? More? The lack of sleep had set his head spinning, and he had to think, to make a plan. He collapsed on the bed in his hotel room, didn’t pull the bedspread back or take his shoes off, merely lay where he had fallen, closed his eyes, and blessed darkness took him.
They came for him then, thousands of them—roaches and spiders and beetles. A blanket of them a foot deep swarmed over his body and his face so thick he couldn’t see light through them. They crawled up his nostrils and into his ears. He tried to scream, but when he opened his mouth, they crawled in, jamming themselves in so tight he couldn’t close it. And they kept coming, crawling through his mouth and down his throat. He beat at them, trying to knock them off, but there were too many. The skin on his neck began to stretch out, swelling with wriggling lumps as they packed his throat. He couldn’t breathe. They were crawling into his stomach now, filling his lungs and—
Jeff sat bolt upright on the bed, gasping for breath, batting at the horrors all over him, spitting out…
There was nothing in his mouth. Nothing on him. It had been a nightmare. He sat panting, his face wet—was he crying? Then he leapt up and paced. Back and forth. Back and forth.
Bugs. And rats! Biting Theresa, eating Theresa. And then there was Daniel. Andi’s daddy gone!
The buzzing in his head grew louder and louder, flies on a rotting corpse. His breathing began to hitch in and out in an irregular rhythm that he could not control. Bugs and rats and death.
The gift that keeps on giving from Chapman Wainwright Whitworth. He had to be stopped. But Jeff’s head was spinning and he couldn’t plan—
Suddenly, the plan and the will to implement it was just there. He didn’t have to figure it out. It appeared in his mind as seamless as a file downloaded off the Internet. He already knew what had to be done, had already decided that part. Now, he knew how. He accepted the fact of it without question. No second-guessing, no doubt.
The High Court of Common Sense and the Commissioner of Reasonable Behavior made halfhearted attempts to sway him as he drove across Cincinnati to the sleazy part of town. But Jeff could barely hear their pleas. It was as if they were on a pier, shouting to him as he sat on a raft being carried out to sea by the tide. Even if he’d heard and listened to them, it wouldn’t have mattered. He was being carried along by a current so powerful that he could not have returned to the dock—to sanity, maybe?—even if he tried. And he didn’t have a paddle.
His life and the purpose of it had been distilled into a single pure, shining thing. Jeff Kendrick was about that shining thing, that deed, that act of retribution that would pay for all that had come before.
He found himself at a bar on Conrad Street, where the debris of trash and empty bottles from the Saturday night crowd still littered the parking lot. He had no memory of driving there. He was in the hotel room and then he was there. Nothing in between. The bar wouldn’t open until Sunday evening, of course, but the proprietor lived in an apartment on the back side with an entrance off the alley, and Jeff banged on the door until the man answered—in his skivvies, bleary-eyed, with bedhead tangling his thick black hair and a sheet crease across his beard-stubbled right cheek. Jeff had defended him on a drug charge a year ago and he’d never paid the outstanding balance on his bill. Jeff told him he could forget the bill, that he’d trade that for what he needed and the man willingly agreed.
Back in his car, he hit Google on his cell phone, got the number and called the Cincinnati campaign headquarters of the Chapman Whitworth for President Campaign—Making America Safe from Without and Within. Mild threats and an indignant do-you-know-who-I-am? got his call kicked upstairs from the barely pubescent volunteer manning the phone bank to one of Whitworth’s aides.
Jeff was brief and clear. He needed an appointment with Mr. Whitworth today.
The man almost laughed in Jeff’s face.
“I’m sorry Mr.…what did you say your name was…Kendrick? I’m sorry, Mr. Kendrick, but Mr. Whitworth can’t possibly squeeze you in. He doesn’t land in Cincinnati until four o’clock and he’s booked solid until he’s introduced with the other candidates at the Better Day Society ball tomorrow night.
“He’ll see me today,” Jeff told the man. “Tell him I want to talk to him about a video shot by a mutual friend—Corrine Talbot. I only need five minutes of his time.”
Jeff waited on hold and was not at all surprised a few minutes later to hear that Chapman Whitworth would be able to shoehorn him into his schedule today after all. Would Jeff join him for an early dinner at Andolini’s Restaurant?
Jeff would. Perfect.
And then…?
Beyond was only blankness, the color of a computer screen that wouldn’t make the universal computer-starting boing because the hard drive was fried. His future was a gray blankness. But that was okay. It had really been that way since the day he’d dropped scalding coffee into his lap when the breaking news report on WCIN described a shooting at Voice of Hope Community Church. He’d stared at the family picture of Emily, Daniel and Andi on the screen—the photo that’d been on the front of last year’s Christmas card—and listened as the news anchor told him that Emily Burke was dead.
In truth, Jeff had died that day, too. Like a gyroscope, the momentum of his spinning life kept him upright for a time afterward, but now he was running out of steam, beginning to wobble, about to topple over. When he did, there was no life force to start him spinning again, so maybe he should use another bullet out of the chamber of the gun he’d gotten from the drug dealer to turn his own screen permanently dark.
Maybe he would do just that.
But first Chapman Whitworth had to die.