He is hauled up out of the hole, dragged over piles of dirt, and deposited facedown on the grass with his shirt ripped open and half the buttons torn off.
Held to the ground with a boot on his back, Lyon is staring at Claire’s bare black feet. She’s on tiptoes.
“Har … har … asshole.”
Then Carl removes the boot from Lyon’s back and kicks him in the ribs, getting him to turn over. The deputy is holding a huge flashlight in one hand, his other fat arm tight across Claire’s neck, keeping her up on her toes, Claire’s eyes white with fear.
When Lyon asks her if she’s all right, Carl tells him to shut up, shining the light in his eyes, blinding him.
“Goddamn it, Carl, you have no idea the trouble you’re causing for yourself. I got that coffin opened! Tomorrow morning this place is going to be crawling with reporters, I’ll have lawyers all over your fat ass —”
Carl kicks him hard in the stomach and then sniggers.
Lyon is back over on his hands and knees, trying to get his breath, waiting to find out if he’s going to vomit. He feels impotent, threatening Carl with reporters and lawyers. He should stand up and knock the fat man on his ass, that’s what he should do.
“Doc was right all along about this nigger girl being with you. Doc’s always right,” Carl says, shaking Claire back and forth like a rag doll. “Now I’m taking the two of you over to his place. Start walking to my car, asshole.” He nudges Lyon with the toe of his boot.
Lyon finally struggles to his feet and puts one hand in front of his eyes, trying to shade them from the blinding beam of Carl’s flashlight.
“John,” Claire says with a strangled voice, “don’t let him take me there, please.”
“All right, Carl, let her go.”
The deputy backhands him, delivering the blow casually, the way he might strike a woman. Blinded by the light, however, Lyon didn’t see the blow coming and the surprise of it causes him to drop back to his knees.
“Get up, pussy boy!” Then Carl increases the pressure on Claire’s neck, causing her to choke.
Remembering the Pomeranian’s attack, Lyon grabs for one of Carl’s legs, hugging it with both arms, Carl trying to kick free as Lyon starts biting the man’s massive calf muscle.
“Son of a bitch!” Keeping Claire in that choke hold, Carl begins beating on Lyon with the flashlight.
But Lyon holds on, still biting even though the heavy flashlight has opened wounds on his head, Lyon feeling the blood warm and sticky as it flows over his scalp.
Claire manages to slip out from under Carl’s arm but he immediately grabs her by the hair. He keeps beating on Lyon until the flashlight’s lense shatters, extinguishing the light. He tosses it away and draws his revolver.
Lyon turns loose of Carl’s leg and looks up. Even in this darkness, he can make out the tiny black O of the muzzle’s mouth.
“If it wasn’t for Doc wanting the both of you,” Carl grunts, “I’d blow you away right here. And I might do it anyway, asshole, so get moving.”
The deputy’s pudgy fingers are buried in Claire’s hair, keeping her well away from Lyon.
“Move!”
Not seeing that he has a choice, Lyon stands and begins walking up the hill toward the cemetery’s entrance.
Claire is trailing the deputy at arm’s length, being pulled along by her hair. “My God,” she says, “it’s my grandmother!”
Carl and Lyon both stop.
“My grandmother! Over there by her grave, she’s wearing her nurse’s uniform — can’t you see her?”
Lyon looks where Claire is pointing. “There is someone!” he says, trying to reinforce what he takes to be Claire’s effort to distract and frighten the deputy.
But Carl just laughs. “Doc believes in that voodoo shit, not me.” Then he jerks violently on Claire while keeping the revolver pointed in Lyon’s direction.
Still looking toward the grave, Lyon sees what appears to be a shooting star traveling the wrong way, shooting from the ground into the sky. “Jesus,” he whispers.
Just then a massive explosion high over their heads lights up the cemetery in a brilliant red. All three of them duck. Then another explosion, this one blue, followed by a series of white-bright detonations so loud that the three of them bend instinctively into crouches as all around them rain sparks and then burning chunks of paper and cardboard and wood.
Before anyone can speak, there’s another explosion, a blinding white light just ahead of a concussion that causes a piercing pain in their eardrums.
Carl tries to order Lyon to run for the patrol car but a quick series of overhead detonations leaves all three of them disoriented, blue and green and red sparks hitting the ground around them, one flaming chunk landing just a few feet in front of Lyon and then burning there like a small campfire.
This is why the cemetery was closed off. The town of Hameln is surrounded by high hills well-populated with houses and trailers. When fireworks are launched from the valley floor they are aimed up at the cemetery where the burning debris can fall without endangering anyone’s property.
After a brief pause the explosions resume, more than they can keep track of, rockets and starbursts and those white-bright detonations that hurt their ears and shake their flesh, each explosion producing the relatively harmless shower of sparks and then the more dangerous debris, some of it aflame and some of it merely charred, falling with heavy thuds all over the cemetery.
Although Carl is no longer pointing his pistol at Lyon, the deputy still has Claire by the hair, jerking her around with him as he steps back and forth in a futile effort to keep away from what’s raining on both of them.
Lyon jumps Carl. He hasn’t planned this attack, operating on instinct as he puts his arms around that fat neck, trying to bulldog the deputy to the ground, but of course Lyon weighs half of what Carl does and the two of them end up dancing in a tight circle, Lyon holding on to Carl the way a child might, flaming pieces of cardboard landing on both of them, the deputy finally falling backward on his ass but then managing to roll over on Lyon, trapping him beneath his suffocating bulk.
“Told you I was going to fuck you!” Carl screams, pressing more of his weight onto Lyon, who can’t breathe, who can’t even get enough air to speak, to surrender.
But then the deputy realizes that in the confusion of Lyon’s attack, Claire has escaped. Carl raises up in time to see her running away, Claire’s flight across the cemetery illuminated by a brilliant overhead display of red and blue starbursts.
Driving through the streets of Hameln, Carl is grim. “Doc is going to be pissed I ain’t bringing in your girlfriend, and it’s all your fault. I hope he kills you real slow.”
Bruised and burned, exhausted, his clothes torn, handcuffed, Lyon is behind the wire mesh in the backseat of the patrol car. “What you should do, Carl, is just keep driving. Take me to the nearest state police office. Turn yourself in. If you agree to testify against Quinndell they’ll go easy on you. I opened that coffin. Do you know what I found — or is Quinndell keeping you in the dark about that?”
But Carl’s not listening. “He was going to pay me twenty-five thousand dollars to bring the two of you in, now what am I getting, jack-shit, that’s what.”
Lyon can’t resist the cliché: “You won’t get away with this.”
“Doc’s been getting away with it for years.” He pulls into the driveway to the side of Quinndell’s house. “And now you got an appointment with Mr. Gigli.”
“Who?”
The deputy laughs.