The Man on Little Sweden

by Sam Harding

  There was no sound of a yelp this time, as a matter of fact, there was no sound at all. David waited a few moments, listening for breathing, movement, or the metallic clank of a pistol being manipulated, but he heard nothing at all from the bedroom. Slowly, David peaked around the corner of the hallway, and this time, nobody shot at him.

  There he was, Solace Police Detective (Ret.) Henry Q. West, lying flat on his back in the middle of the master bedroom. Blood poured from his tattered dark sweatpants in the area of his upper left leg, as well as the front of his throat that was now nothing more than a mangled mess of blood and tissue. The spread of the buckshot had also taken out a chunk of West’s lower jaw, exposing his teeth and what remained of his tongue. Next to the body lay a large silver .357 magnum revolver with a black rubber grip.

  David smiled broadly as he stood to full height and entered the bedroom. Under his breath he said the words he always said in moments like these. “In the name of God.”

  He thought about crouching over the body to examine it up close, when a stifled cry sounded from the bedroom across the hallway. Instinctively, David racked a third round into the shotgun and pointed it across the hallway. At first, he thought the cry had come from a female, but then it dawned on him that it actually sounded more like the cry of a cowering child.

  The demon child! The offspring of Lucifer.

  David stormed out of the room, across the hallway and into the second bedroom. Against the far wall, an unmade twin-sized bed with Toy Story bedsheets sat next to a dresser. Otherwise, save for a few scattered clothes, the room seemed empty, but David was sure of what he had heard. A smile spread across his face as he looked at the Toy Story bed and a voice in his head, perhaps one from God, told him what he needed to do.

  Holding the shotgun in his right hand, he reached down and lifted the bed’s mattress with his left, flipping blankets and pillows against the wall. As expected, under the springs of the bed-frame, lay a cowering, red-headed little boy. The moment the boy looked into David’s eyes, he realized he was not Henry West, and began screaming.

  “Shhhh,” David said, putting a finger to his lips. “Stop with the screaming. There will be plenty of time for that later.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  10:32 A.M.

  The first thing I notice when I get close to West’s house, is that I don’t see his SUV in the driveway. I haven’t visited West much over the years, even when we worked together, but I remember he’d once explained to me that kept his car parked outside so that he could use his garage as a gym instead. I was starting to believe that maybe the gym idea had been a bust, when I noticed through the falling snow that the front door of the house was wide open.

  At first, I thought nothing of it, but once I pulled in front of the house, I felt my blood run cold. I hear Kate gasp next to me, obviously seeing what I was seeing. The front door wasn’t just opened, it was bashed in, still barely hanging onto its lower hinge as it tipped inward. Even from where I sat in the car, I could see the wood from the doorjamb was splintered around the opening.

  Feeling myself begin to panic, I throw the car into park and bolt from the front seat, ignoring Kate’s cautionary words.

  It’s not even eleven in the morning and it’s already happened, the Butcher has struck and his target is my son.

  What I expect to find inside the house makes me sick to my stomach, but I continue to run towards the open door anyway, drawing my pistol even though I know the Butcher is already long gone.

  My prosthetic foot hits a sheet of ice buried underneath the snow and I fall hard onto my right knee, feeling the icy concrete of West’s walkway jar my kneecap. The pain shoots up through my leg, and in any ordinary situation, I’d probably have been limping from the jolt, but I get back to my feet and continue to run as if it had never happened. Adrenaline controls me now – adrenaline and fear.

  It’s like it’s three years ago, only this time, Dani won’t be there to buy my son enough time to run into the safety of the woods, and I not there to keep the Butcher from pursuing. This time, the only one my son has to rely on is West, but I know already that West is dead, and I fear with everything inside of me that my son is, too. Severed and displayed, as all the other little boys had been before.

  I bolt through the open doorway, my pistol at the ready, my eyes scanning for a target. My boot nearly slips on the wooden surface of the floor, but this time, I manage to keep myself from going to the ground. The living room to the right of me is clear, so I push forward into the TV room.

  I see no signs of anyone in the TV room except for the Frosty the Snowman kid’s special playing on the large flat screen at the front of the room. I pass the TV and enter the connecting kitchen, aiming both my weapon and my eyes in every direction I can think of: under the dinner table, behind the counter, and even in the pantry. All I find that show signs my son and Henry were recently here are two semi-empty bowls of Captain Crunch on the table, my son and West are nowhere to be seen.

  I hear a creak in the floor behind me and I spin around, my weapon up and finger on the trigger. I feel my breath catch in my throat, realizing Kathryn is in my sights, my front sight post hovering over her nose from no more than ten feet away. Her eyes widen in fear and she puts her hands in front of her face and flinches, as if she’s seriously anticipating me shooting her in the face.

  “Kate, what the fuck?” I half growl, half whisper.

  “I – I –”

  “I told you to stay in the car.”

  “No, you didn’t –”

  I don’t have time to realize I’m wrong, and surely don’t have time to apologize. As if she’s not even there, I walk around Kate and raise my weapon again, focusing on a dark hallway pushing beyond the living room, leading to the bathroom and bedrooms. Even though I’ve only been here a couple times, if my memory serves me right, the hallway T’s with a bedroom on either side and a bathroom directly in the middle.

  Just before stepping into the hall, a piece of red catches my eye on the rug in the TV room. Keeping my weapon high, I look down at the floor and see a spent 12-gauge shotgun shell laying on the ground. My knuckles turn white around the grip of my pistol and my pulse somehow manages to quicken even more than it already was.

  The shotgun shell briefly causes me flash back to three years ago. I’m standing in the kitchen of my own house now, the air filled with the stench of gunpowder, my poor, innocent Dani laying on the floor with half her face missing and a spent 12-gauge shell at my feet. The worst day of my whole life, a day I feel I’m reliving. Or at least a new version of it. When my mind takes me back to the present, I expect to see a masked man standing in front of me, wearing all black and holding a shotgun, but instead, I see an empty hallway leading into darkness.

  Sweat pours from my scalp despite the blizzard blowing in through the open door, and I force myself to push forward. I feel Kate’s presence not far behind me, but I’m too focused on what I’m doing to turn around and tell her to go away. I just keep moving, like a shark in the water, I don’t stop – I can’t stop.

  After a few feet into the darkness of the hall, I see the first real signs of a gunfight other than the spent shell in the TV room. The wall in front of me, next to the visibly empty bathroom, has been riddled with buckshot and I can see traces of blood around the damage and on the floor beneath it. On the wall to my left, at about head height, I see two holes from what I assume to be a large-caliber handgun, and on the wall to my left, are blown away pieces of drywall from where the rounds had come through. At least two people had exchanged rounds in this house, and either the blizzard had been so loud that nobody had heard it from nearby houses, or the cops were currently on their way and I’d just barely missed the Butcher.

  I creep to the end of the hallway and stand still for a moment as I try to figure out whether or not I should go left or right first. I toss a mental coin in my head, take a couple deep breaths, and hook to the left. I sweep into a small bedroom with my weapon high,
ready to blow away anyone I don’t recognize.

  But there’s nobody in the room. There are some toys on the floor in a neat pile at the foot of the bed – the bed. The twin-sized mattress is tilted upwards and pressed between the bed frame and the wall with a Toy Story blanket draped over the side of it. The springs in the frame look intact, but I can see by indentation in the bedroom carpet that the bed frame had recently been moved by about a foot. I’ve been doing detective work long enough to know that the bed had been moved for a purpose, and that purpose was to get to whatever – or whoever was underneath it.

  Thomas.

  I’m about to look through the room a little longer when I hear Kate scream from across the hallway. Why can’t she stay back? I silently say to myself as I bolt from Thomas’s room and into the hallway, my weapon up and at the ready.

  But I lower my pistol as soon as I see what it is that caused Kate to scream. I don’t even need to go into the master bedroom to see what it is that she’s seeing. Kate covers her mouth with both of her hands, and she slowly backs out of the bedroom until she finds the comfort of my body behind her. I squeeze her shoulder with my free hand and whisper into her ear, “Stay here. Please, don’t move, Kate,” and move into the bedroom.

  I’ve seen more murders than I can count, some gruesome, some not. But the fact this body belongs to a friend of mine, makes me sick to my stomach. Tears fill my eyes as I get closer, and I wonder if they’re for West, for my missing son, or for the fact what I’m seeing now is almost an identical image to how I last saw my wife.

  West is on his back, his eyes wide, and the majority of his lower jaw and the front of his throat is missing. There’s also a chunk of flesh missing from his inner left thigh with bright red arterial blood drying on the carpet underneath the wound. In the retired police officer’s hand, is an old Smith & Wesson 357 magnum revolver, the same kind cops used to carry back in the day.

  How could I explain this to his wife and kids? How will I be able to tell them Henry’s dead because of me? Because he was kind enough to watch my boy while I tried to get revenge for my own family?

  “Oh my God!”

  I turn around and see Kate standing in the doorway. I’m about to tell her to go back into the hallway, but she points at the wall on the other side of the room, cutting me off before I can say anything. I turn to see what she’s pointing at and gasp.

  Above the bed, smeared across the white wall, is a message written in blood. It’s as if the killer had stuck his hands into West’s open throat, like a writer would do with a feather pen in a glass of ink, before going to work. I can hear Kate gasp again, but I already know why.

  The bloody message is for me.

  DETECTIVE DONOVAN, SON OF LUCIFER. I HAVE YOUR SON. ARE YOU TRULY SO ARROGANT AS TO BELIEVE THIS TIME WILL BE DIFFERENT? I HAVE WAITED FOR THIS MOMENT FOR A LONG TIME, AND HAVE DECIDED I WISH TO PLAY A GAME. AT THE STRIKE OF 6, YOUR SON WILL BE ON DISPLAY FOR THE WORLD TO SEE. YOU HAVE UNTIL THEN TO GET HIM BACK. IF YOU CALL THE POLICE, I WILL KILL HIM AHEAD OF SCHEDULE.

  AN OLD FRIEND

  “Motherfucker,” I mumble, feeling my legs go weak. “Motherfucker!” I grab an empty vase from atop West’s dresser and smash it against the wall, blowing the piece of clay into a thousand tiny pieces.

  “Micah,” Kate comes up behind me and grabs my shoulders. “Micah, he’s alive! Thomas is alive.”

  I turn to face Kate, tears rolling down my face. “He’s going to kill him, Kate. Read the fucking message, he’s –”

  “He’s taunting you,” Kate says, her eyes drilling into mine. “This is all a game to him – or some sick version of a game. He sees you as an adversary, as an equal.”

  “How did he know, Kate? How the fuck did he know I was back on the case already? He found out right away – he knew I was looking into Irving, that’s why he framed him. He’s been one step ahead of me this entire time. How, Kate? How?” I feel myself beginning to lose control, but nevertheless, my questions are valid. How?

  “We’ll figure that out,” she replies, squeezing my shoulders even tighter. “But for now, we have to go, we have to –”

  “We can’t call the cops,” I say. “We just can’t.”

  “Micah, we have to –”

  “No! Think about it, Kate. How did he know about Lex? How did he know I was back on the case?” My God, I think to myself. Suddenly realizing the Solace County Police Department had just made the top of my suspect list – at least, a few individuals within the department.

  “You think the police are involved?”

  “I think someone in the department might be.”

  “Who?”

  My brain scrambles as I try to think. “Art, Blake, Jerry – I don’t know, Kate. I just don’t know. But it has to be one of them.” Although I don’t say it out loud, I realize out of anyone I know, Blake makes the most sense. He’s an asshole – but is he a killer?

  “Okay, fine,” she says, now pulling on my arm. “But if you’re not going to call the cops, then we need to get the hell out of here.”

  “We’ve only got until six –”

  “Then we’ve got some time to figure something out. He can't get far in this storm. Come on, Micah!” She pulls harder, doing all she can to force me away from the message and the body of my dead friend.

  I look down at West’s mangled body and say, “I’m so sorry, Henry,” as Kate virtually drags me from the bedroom.

  “I have a place we can go,” Kate says, still pulling me by the arm.

  “Where?”

  “An apartment in Solace. It’s where I go when I need time from dad.”

  I follow Kate, my body on autopilot as my brain scrambles to figure out what my next move should be. When we get to the battered front door, Kate lifts the door even on its single hinge and says, “Go outside, I’ll try to close it.”

  “Why?” It’s a stupid question, but my whirling mind is having a hard time catching up.

  “If we’re not going to call the cops –”

  “Then we need to make it look like everything’s fine here,” I say, completing her sentence. “Fine.”

  I step outside into the blizzard and see the storm has kicked up even harder to the point where I can’t even see the neighboring houses or the church across the street. I watch as Kate closes the door the best she can and then takes a piece of the splintered wood from the door frame and jamb it tightly under the door; the tight fit is just enough to keep the door in place.

  “I’m driving,” Kate says, moving for the car.

  “What?” I say in semi-protest.

  “Because you’re not right in the head, and I know how to get there. Now, let’s go.”

  Deciding not to argue, I follow Kate to my Bronco. By the time I reach the passenger side, my face is burning from my own tears freezing to my skin.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  11:03 A.M.

  THE LEVEL OF excitement David felt was unlike anything he’d felt in his entire life. For once, he was finally doing something worthwhile, something that actually meant something, something worthy of being proud of. But still, even though he knew he’d proven himself as a true soldier of God, he couldn’t help but wonder about the instructions of the Master from the night before.

  Why had he been instructed to take the boy and write the message in blood on the wall? And who was this Detective Donovan – this son of Lucifer? David badly wanted answers, and if he’d had his way, he would have merely killed the old cop and the boy together, completing his holy mission then and there – but The Master had other plans for him, which meant God also had other plans for him. He’d been assured that what he was doing was designed by God to hurt and humiliate the forces of Satan even more, and that displaying the boy’s corpse at six o’clock would be a mockery in and of itself by using the number making up the sign of the beast, 666 against them. But even still, to David, it made far more sense just to kill them and be done with it.

  David had been told many times
that it wasn’t just killing the demons that hurt the forces of Satan, but that humiliation and misdirection were also effective weapons. Just as he’d humiliated and misdirected the dark forces when he was ordered to place the mysterious journal in the bedroom of a man named Alexander Irving.

  But despite his impatience and lack of understanding, David knew the Lord worked in mysterious ways, and that often times the will of the Lord was not to be understood, but to be followed, and that to question the Word of God was just as equal to siding with Satan himself.

  And so, like a true soldier of the Almighty, David would do as he was told.

  Through the thick wall of the heavy snowfall, David saw the sign on the side of the road announcing his arrival into Cedar Falls. It was the northernmost incorporated County, leaving further north to the unincorporated towns until reaching the Canadian border. A city of only 1,500 residence, with a total of two full-time police officers, not including the chief, it made the perfect spot for David to hide with his prize.

  To his left, beyond a thin row of trees, he could just barely make out the Columbia river as it carved its way through the valley. Bald eagles sat in treetops overlooking the river, hoping to find breakfast in the icy waters. The small city ahead looked like some sort of western town; the buildings all old and outdated, most small restaurants, as well as a gas station with a convenient store. But, it was a few miles beyond city limits that David was interested in, well out of the way from any prying eyes, especially in weather like this.