The Man on Little Sweden

by Sam Harding

  I’m just about to open the door, when I, once again, stop myself. The front door to the Butcher’s trailer suddenly opens, and outsteps the Butcher himself. He’s not bundled up like before, and is only wearing his track pants with a long-sleeve T-shirt. I can now see just how lanky he is, almost skeletal as he looks around like a stray cat about to steal a meal. Slowly, and in an obvious great deal of pain, the Butcher bends down and snags the envelope off the doormat with his right hand, his left hand bandaged and tucked tightly against his abdomen.

  Even at this distance, I can see how wide his eyes are as he tears into the envelope, not even bothering to retreat inside the trailer so that he can read it in private.

  It takes over a minute for him to read whatever the letter says, and when he’s done, I see him look up, his face twisted in clear anger. As if he can’t believe what he’s just read, he looks back down at the page and reads it again, taking another minute to do so. This time when he’s finished, he wads the paper up into a ball along with the envelope and stares up at the overhang covering the small porch. I can see his bony chest heaving up and down under his shirt, and then suddenly, he splits the cold air with a high-pitch scream, one unlike anything I have ever heard in my life.

  Movement catches my eye in a few of the surrounding trailers as residences look out their windows to see what the commotion is all about, but they quickly lose interest as if this isn’t the first time this has happened.

  I realize I’m breathing hard now as I watch the scene unfold on the porch, my heart-rate somehow increasing even more, my anger rising as my brain continuously reminds me I’m watching the killer of my wife and the kidnapper of my child. I find myself wondering what he had been thinking when he saw me at the crosswalk all those days ago, what was going on behind those silver eyes that stared at me like I was some sort of animal he couldn’t wait to hunt.

  Now I’m hunting you, motherfucker. I’m hunting you, and when I’m done with you, I’m going after her next.

  The Butcher finally stops screaming and, somehow, despite his obvious injuries, he lifts a folding chair in the air and smashes it down on the deck planks as hard as his broken body will allow. The metal snaps and twists on impact, leaving a clump of twisted bars and fabric never to be properly used again. He then turns to his door and limps back inside his house, and I’m about to follow, but he reemerges again, this time with his heavy winter coat draped over his shoulders.

  Slowly and painfully, the Butcher climbs down the steps of his porch and walks across his small patch of front yard before turning again to move in between his trailer and the neighbor’s.

  Although he’s disappeared from sight, I have an idea where he’s heading. Behind his trailer, there is a small patch of pine trees, leftovers from when the forest had been cleared out in order to put in the trailer park back in the 1970s. The trees go for nearly five-hundred yards before opening up into Solace City limits.

  I wait a few more seconds, giving the cripple enough time to get to the trees. I count outloud, backwards from five, and then once I hit zero, I exit my vehicle and make my way after him.

  I don’t know why he’s going into the trees, nor do I really care. All I do know, is that one way or another, I will deal with him and then I will confront Kate.

  This ends tonight.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  Blood In the Woods

  PICKING UP THE Butcher’s trail in the woods hadn’t been hard. Instead of following a set of footprints through the snow, I’m following one foot and one drag mark. The Butcher’s left foot seems to be carrying most of the weight, but his right leg is seemingly useless, leaving mini canyons through the powder, causing me to wonder why he chose to take this route into town and not just use his car.

  Had something in the letter from Kate demanded he do this? Is he taking orders from her? It doesn’t make sense, and the more I think about it, the more confused I become. The idea that the Christmas Eve Butcher and Kathryn Shultz are coconspirators makes my head spin, and I grow steadily angry with myself for the way I’d so quickly fallen for her. The way I’d allowed her into my house—the way I’d allowed her to become a mother to Thomas.

  Fuck!

  I move deeper into the trees, enveloped by shadows and snagging twigs and branches. I try to tread softly on the snow, but it’s so compact that my boots crunch with every step. What in reality is only a soft sound, sounds like a gunshot in my mind.

  The trail is painfully easy to follow until, suddenly, it isn’t. About a hundred yards into my track, the Butcher’s trail stops cold, completely vanishing as if he’s floated away like a ghost. I stand still, listening for footsteps, for breathing, for anything that can help me figure out where he’s gone to, but all I can hear is my own breathing, my own thoughts screaming at me to continue forward and stop him before he gets into town.

  Cold steel presses hard against my throat, and before I can react, I feel the bite of a blade sink into the first layer of skin, sending a warm trickle of blood snaking down my neck. My entire body seizes, and I think of going for my weapon, my left hand inching towards my left hip.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” a voice to my immediate right warns. It’s somewhat high-pitched and raspy at the same time. “You watched me from your car and then followed me all the way from my house, would be a shame if I bleed you out before we get a chance to talk.”

  I swallow hard and wince as the blade slides with the movement of my Adam’s apple. I clench my fists, hardly able to believe this man, who can hardly walk, was able to get the drop on me the way he had. Not only that, but he’d seen me in my car when I was watching him. He hadn’t gone into the woods for anything to do with the letter, he’d gone into the woods to lure me into a trap. And I’d fallen for it.

  “You don’t speak?” The Butcher asks. “I’d prefer it if you speak. It’s rather cold, Demon.”

  Demon? I think of the writing on West’s wall. “Are you going to kill me? Kill me like you killed my wife?”

  I hear the man sniff, and then feel his breath as he bends in closer to me, getting a closer look like a doctor examining a patient. I continue to look forward, not daring to move a muscle, not yet.

  “It’s you!” He laughs a squeaky laugh. “You’re the father of that little boy.” His voice suddenly grows deep and angry. “The son of Lucifer.”

  “I don’t know what makes you think I’m the devil’s son, but I can promise you, I’m not.”

  “Lies,” the Butcher softly hisses. His voice then goes back to normal, the high-pitched rasp. “But I cannot lie, therefore, I will grant you this truth: the death of your wife, as glorious as it was, was not done by my hand.”

  “Bullshit,” I snap. “You shot her in the face with a shotgun and then cut my fucking leg off. I remember—”

  “No,” he says, making a clicking sound with his tongue. “You remember a man, dressed in black, covered from head to toe. Not me, though, no, no. That was the work of my Master. My mentor and only friend.”

  “Your master?” I try to look over at him with just my eyes, but he’s too far to my right for my vision to pick up anything more than a dark blur.

  “Yes. My Master, you see, didn’t find me until fairly recently. His past works, glorious as they are, are not works of my own. This year is my first. This year, is a test, laid out by God, for me. For before this year, I was a nobody—a lost soul, desperately searching for my purpose in this world. But the Master—the Master found me and showed me the light. God’s light, you see?”

  I’ve been chasing a fake all along. A protégé, a delusional psychotic. Pieces of the puzzle start to fall into place, and I now understand why this year seemed so much different than the rest. The erratic behavior, the religious nonsense—the work of a delusional student, not the meticulous master.

  “And the woman?”

  “The woman?” He hissed, seemingly confused by the question.

  “The one who dropped off your letter. Is she you
r master?”

  “No,” the Butcher snapped. “No, she is not the master. I do not know her. Not in person.” He pushes the blade harder against my throat. “Got to follow the rules.”

  “What rules?” I’m forced to tilt my chin up to keep the blade from cutting deeper.

  “To not see the messenger, of course!” He clicks his tongue again. “The Master says the messenger is to remain private.”

  “So, if she’s not the Master, who is?”

  “No. I cannot. I will not. I cannot, will not, won’t say.”

  The blade pushes harder, cutting deeper, and I know now that at any second, he’s going to slash my throat and leave me to bleed out in the woods. He hasn’t disarmed me, and I know he hasn’t done so because he’s not fast enough to move from my right side to my left. He probably bet on me being right handed, just like most other people, but he’d been sorely mistaken.

  “In the name of God,” I hear him say, before taking a deep breath.

  I know this is it, it’s either now or never. I pivot hard to my right, facing my attacker head on while simultaneously raising my left arm to deflect the blade away from my throat. As I perform the maneuver, the Butcher must have caught on because he tries to slash at my now exposed carotid artery on the left side of my neck, but my parry with my left hand only leaves him with the satisfaction of giving me a superficial gash just under my jawline. It hurts like a motherfucker, but it’s not at all lethal.

  The Butcher tries to come back, recovering from the parry and lunging forward with the blade in an attempt to stab me in the midsection. I catch his wrists with both hands, the blade inches from my stomach, and deliver a front kick with my right leg, catching the Butcher just above the groin.

  He cries out in pain and drops the knife, the impact against his wounded body far more than he’s able to handle. I release his now empty hand, letting him fall backwards. His back slams against a tree and his feet slide out from under him, forcing him on his ass in a seated position.

  I go to reach for my weapon, not really sure if I plan to shoot him or not, but I see his right hand reach for something behind his back. I sidestep to my left, just as his hand starts to comes up with a silver pistol, just barely visible in the darkness. I pull my pistol from its holster and punch out, my aim faster than his, and I fire off two quick shots before he can even raise his weapon towards my chest. I don’t see where the two rounds hit, but I fire off two more shots just to be sure. I again sidestep to my left, just in case he’s still planning on shooting me, and turn on the tactical light mounted to the bottom of my pistol.

  The bright light illuminates everything before me, leaving no doubts as to where my bullets have hit. I’ve shot him in the face twice, once just above the nose and the other under the bottom lip. The other two shots are slightly lower, nearly touching each other towards the top of his sternum. The Butcher’s eyes are open, bulging from his skull like a fish out of water, blood pouring from his lips.

  I know he’s dead, but I keep my weapon on him anyway as I approach the body. First, I take control of his pistol, tossing it away and into the snow, well out of arms reach in case he somehow comes back to life, and then I start going through his pockets. I finally find what I’m looking for, wadded into a ball in the right pocket of his track pants.

  I think about reading the letter now under the illumination of my gun light, but then decide against it. I need to call this in first, need to do the right thing.

  The right thing, I think to myself as I put the wrinkled paper in my jacket pocket. Would I have still killed him had he not have pulled a gun on me?

  I pull my cellphone from my pocket and dial 911.

  Absolutely.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  Statement

  “SO, YOU EXPECT me to believe you were just walking through the woods? At night?” Detective William Blake stares at me, his eyes narrow, his analytical mind trying to find out if I’m full of shit.

  I’m sitting in the backseat of his unmarked car, not cuffed or anything, just there so that he can keep me where he wants me in case I answer a question in a way he can use to make me look like criminal.

  “Did you not hear the first part of my statement?” I shake my head in frustration. “I told you already that I followed him to his house.”

  “Right, and then you saw him get out of his car and head into the woods?”

  “That’s right. I recognized him at the pharmacy, a place I was at because I wanted to get some cold medicine for Thomas, my son, who’s having trouble sleeping. When I saw him leaving the pharmacy, I noticed his wounds were consistent with what had happened at the farmhouse in Cedar Falls, and I followed him. When I followed him into the woods, I was about to call 911 to report what I’d seen, when he put a knife to my throat.”

  “And then you killed him?”

  “After he tried to kill me. With a knife and a gun. Yes.” I grow even more impatient, badly wanting to read that letter and to find Kate. I’m doing the right thing, but I feel like I’m wasting my time, that I’m somehow letting her get away even though she was oblivious to my presence when she’d dropped off the letter.

  “And that’s the statement you’re going to stick to?”

  “Yes,” I say. “I know we’ve had our differences, Blake, but I’m not going to lie about this. I just killed a man in self-defense, there’s nothing to lie about.” Except for the letter, Kate, and the fact I’d been looking for him prior to finding him at the pharmacy.

  “You gave up your gun?”

  I nod, unhappy I’m down both my FAL and a pistol, now. “The initial responding officer took it for evidence, yes.”

  Blake nods, looks back towards the crime scene, a bright glow in the trees from where we sit on the road, on the opposite end of the trees from the Butcher’s house.

  “Keep your phone on you, Donovan.”

  “I’m free to go?”

  “Free to leave here, but not Solace County. Is that clear?”

  “I know the drill, Blake,” I say. “Hasn’t been that long.”

  “What—” He stops himself, as if thinking twice about asking me the question. “What do you think we’ll find when the warrant comes through and we search his trailer?”

  I think about the question for a moment and then shrug. “I honestly don’t know. Nothing good, I imagine.”

  Blake nods thoughtfully, and for the first time, I see him as a detective and not as an asshole, or as a suspect to a murder that I still don’t know who’s responsible for. “Looks like you were right all along, Donovan. About Irving—about fucking everything. I—I should have fucking listened to you.”

  “I appreciate you saying that. Can you give me a ride to my car?”

  “Outside his trailer?”

  “Please.”

  Blake thinks about this for a second, as if he’s trying to decide if my request will put him out of his way or not. Finally, he nods again. “Sure. Fuck it, why not?”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  Revelation

  I SIT IN silence, staring at the folded paper in my lap, my heart thumping in my chest, my hands shaking. I’ve been in the parking lot outside Kate’s apartment complex for the better part of ten minutes, trying to force myself to read the letter she’d dropped off at the Butcher protégé’s front door.

  Her BMW is parked next to me, and I can see that her apartment lights are on upstairs. Occasionally her shadow passes by the window, a black streak moving back and forth behind the white curtains. It’s nearly midnight, and I know she’ll eventually come downstairs and get into her car to head back to my place, but I want to see her before then. I don’t want her back at my house, I don’t want her anywhere near where Thomas and I live.

  Finally, after what seems like forever, I unfold the paper, and, using the lights in the parking lot to see, I begin to read.

  David, you have failed. You were tasked by God for the mission of a lifetime, a mission that would continue my tradition and brin
g forth a new era of righteousness. I had high hopes for you, as did God, but you proved to us both that you are incapable of ignoring your primal feelings and urges. You have chosen instant gratification over what is truly important, and for that, no matter how hard I try, I cannot forgive this. I cannot find it within myself to trust you again. Your task was to watch over the boy until six, and you instead chose to listen to a bloodlust instead of the Lord. It is with a heavy heart that I, your Master and friend, terminate this relationship and choose to part ways. I hope you find peace in your journey forward. I hope you find forgiveness in the Almighty for the sake of your soul. I will find another to replace you, one far stronger and in control of themselves. This is not personal, don’t take it as such.

  Goodbye. Do not contact me.

  Respectfully,

  A friend.

  I look up from the letter and up at Kate’s lit windows. Her shadow passes again and I feel myself boil with rage. This letter is all the proof I will ever need to know she has betrayed me. That she meticulously wormed her way into my life, just to hurt me even more than I’d already been hurt.

  She might not be the Butcher, but she’s just as guilty. She’s his messenger, his operative. What else is she to him? A friend? A lover, perhaps? The questions swirl in my head like an angry storm, questions I plan to ask her, questions she will answer, whether she wants to or not.

  Tonight, I will learn everything. Not just for myself, but for Thomas and for Dani.

  I wish I had a weapon, but my rifle, shotgun, and handgun are all gone now. Confiscated for evidence and probably gone forever. A part of me tells myself I won’t need a weapon, that it’s just Kate up there, but I know better. Kate isn’t, nor has she ever been what she seems to be, and because of this, I have no idea what else she may be capable of.