by Tim Waggoner
Tyrone was a short, stout man who could’ve been anywhere from fifty to eighty. His white hair was long and unkempt, his beard likewise, though both were clean. Beneath the trench coat he wore a white T-shirt — which Dale knew from their long acquaintance would be freshly laundered — along with jeans and tennis shoes. He looked every bit the stereotype of a homeless person, and as far as Dale knew, Tyrone might well live on the streets. But there was nothing stereotypical about this man.
Dale didn’t ask Tyrone if Joanne had spotted him. Not only did he already know the answer, but the question would’ve been an insult to Tyrone’s pride.
Dale moved up close behind Tyrone so he could look over the man’s shoulder. The trench coat smelled of decades’ worth of mildew, and Dale was forced to breathe through his mouth if he wanted to remain in proximity to Tyrone. He didn’t want to get any closer to the mouth of the alley, though. Dale was good at what he did, but he knew he was nowhere close to Tyrone’s league when it came to staying out of sight, and he didn’t want Joanne — or worse, Marshall Cross — to know he was watching them. Besides, he didn’t want to block Tyrone’s view. That would be rude.
There wasn’t much traffic this time of morning, but even so, Dale wasn’t able to make out any of the conversation taking place across the street. His hearing had never been the greatest, and it only seemed to be getting worse as the years went by. But that was all right. He could always get Joanne to fill him in later. He was here for a different reason.
“I was here last night,” Tyrone said. “Well, technically I wasn’t here. I was sitting in Holloways’ doorway.”
“You saw what happened.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes. But I’ve told you before, Dale. It’s my job to witness. Not to interfere.”
“I’m not asking you to interfere. I’m asking you to share what you know. Isn’t that what being a witness is all about?”
Tyrone didn’t respond right away, and while Dale couldn’t see the man’s facial expression from where he stood, he knew Tyrone was smiling ruefully.
“You always use the same argument.”
“That’s because it always works.”
Tyrone chuckled, a hoarse, almost tubercular sound. “We’re two of a kind, aren’t we? Though I watch in hiding and you in plain sight. We’re like the blind men and the elephant. We each see pieces of the whole. So how did you find out about Debbie Coulter’s car? Police scanner? Or did Sheriff Talon call and give you a head’s up?”
“This is embarrassing to admit, but as I walked out of the Echo office today, I saw Marshall Cross drive by. I followed on foot and saw him meet Debbie outside the café. I figured you’d be around somewhere — you always are when something interesting is going on — so I decided to poke around in some likely hiding places until I found you.”
Across the street, something had upset Debbie. She turned and ran inside the café. Joanne spoke with Marshall for a moment before following Debbie inside. Marshall didn’t leave, though. He kept standing there, watching as Ronnie continued his laboriously meticulous photography of the defaced Ford.
“You wouldn’t have found me if I hadn’t wanted you to,” Tyrone said. There was no braggadocio in his voice. He was simply stating a fact.
“I know. So … what happened?”
“You go first,” Tyrone said. “Despite your flattering portrayal of me, I can only get so far so fast on foot. I know something happened outside town last night. I saw the paramedic van leave the county building at 2:58 a.m.”
Dale had never seen Tyrone wear a watch, yet he somehow always knew the precise time.
Dale told him about the murder. Though he knew Joanne wouldn’t approve, he didn’t hold back a single detail. It was the only way to make sure Tyrone would do the same when it was his turn.
Just as Dale finished with his story, he saw Ronnie Doyle drop his camera onto the asphalt, watched plastic fragments break off the casing. Ronnie himself quickly went down after it, falling first to his knees, then pitching forward onto his hands. He crouched there on all fours, head lowered, shivering as if caught in a blast of winter air, features twisted into a mask of utter revulsion.
Marshall Cross stood with his arms folded, impassively regarding Ronnie. And then, though Dale hadn’t been able to make out anything else that had been said across the street that morning, he quite clearly heard Ronnie whisper a single word.
“Yes.”
• • •
Ronnie tried to go about his work while pretending Marshall Cross wasn’t standing there watching his every move. He didn’t glance in Marshall’s direction, made sure that the man wasn’t visible through the camera lens as he lined up his shots. But it didn’t help. Ronnie could feel Marshall’s gaze on him, tracking his every move, like a hawk perched on a telephone pole, eyeing a field mouse he’s considering making a quick snack of. Ronnie felt a slight pressure in his head, and then his skin began to itch, as if hundred of tiny insects were lightly crawling over the surface of his body. He told himself he was just feeling anxious, that the sensation was all in his mind, and he did his best to try to ignore it. But the itching grew in intensity until it became a fiery pain, as if the insects — thousand of them, now — were sinking hook-like pincers into his flesh and tearing away tiny chunks of meat.
Ronnie gritted his teeth and a soft whine escaped his throat. It was the kind of sound a small, frightened dog might make just before it squirted a stream of urine onto the ground. Sweat-beads formed on his forehead and began sliding down the slides of his face, trickling down his neck. He hated sweating, couldn’t stand the way it made his clothes cling cold and damp against his body. He wanted nothing more than to drop the camera onto the ground and start scratching, raking fingernails over his flesh to dislodge the maddening biting things that he knew couldn’t be real, but which he felt nevertheless.
But instead he gritted his teeth harder until his fillings started to ache, and he forced himself to breathe evenly as he struggled to concentrate on taking the next photograph. Sheriff Talon was depending on him to do this job, and Ronnie had never let her down before, and he sure as hell didn’t intend to now.
“Something wrong, Ronnie?” Marshall asked. Underneath the man’s tone of cool detachment, Ronnie thought he heard dark amusement. “You seem a trifle uncomfortable.”
The burning sensation increased, and Ronnie ground his teeth together so hard one of the fillings in his back molars cracked. A tiny lance of pain shot through his tooth, but it was nothing compared to agonizing fire blazing across his skin. The camera shook in his trembling hands, making the world seen through the viewfinder appear as if it were caught in the throes of an earthquake. His breath now came in ragged gasps. It felt as if he’d been coated head to toe in liquid flame.
“I can make it go away.”
Ronnie heard Marshall’s words as if they came from a great distance, and though he had no rational reason to believe them, he did. Ronnie’s family had moved to Cross County when he was eleven. He was a clean boy even then. An especially clean boy. But he hadn’t yet taken to washing his hands so many times a day that the skin became red, chapped, and fissured with cracks. Hadn’t yet started wearing the surgical mask when he went outside, the mask that would become his second — and in some ways truest — face. After he started school, it wasn’t long before the other children began telling him stories about the Crosses with ghoulish enthusiasm. They lived in a castle outside town, their kids were all home-schooled, they didn’t attend any of the churches in town, and some folks said they had a family chapel of some sort in their fortress home. But to whom — or what — they prayed to, no one knew. Warnings came with the tales as well, passed along with none of the mischievous glee of the stories. The kids turned dead serious, and their hushed tones and furtive glances around as they spoke — as if they feared someone, the wrong someone — might overhear, frightened young Ronnie more than all the lurid rumors about the Crosses combined.
When a Cros
s asks you to do something, you should. But when a Cross tells you to do something, you’ve got to.
There would be a pause then, and the advice-giver’s voice always fell to a whisper.
They can make you.
And so now, over forty years later, Ronnie believed Marshall could do as he said, believed from the top of his flaming scalp to the bottoms of his fire-seared feet.
“Something’s happening, Ronnie. Something that involves Family business.”
Though it was difficult for Ronnie to make out Marshall’s voice through the red haze of pain that enshrouded his mind, he was still able to hear the way Marshall stressed the word Family.
“Joanne’s good at what she does, and normally we’re content to let her go about her job without any interference on our part. But whatever’s going on is too important for us to stand by and wait for the wheels of justice to turn on their own. Joanne won’t like us taking an active hand in her investigation, and because of this, she will no doubt be reluctant to share whatever information she discovers. That’s where you come in, Ronnie.”
Ronnie’s breath was coming in ragged bursts now — huh-huh-huh-huh-huh! — and a far-off corner of his mind that wasn’t consumed by pain and terror wondered if he were on the verge of hyperventilating.
“I need someone to keep me apprised of Joanne’s progress. Someone who’ll tell me everything — and who will of course keep our arrangement secret from the good Sheriff. Do that for me, and the pain will go away. It won’t even be a memory.”
Ronnie wanted to tell Marshall yes, wanted to cry out that he’d do anything, anything at all, if Marshall would stop the pain. But Marshall Cross didn’t understand who he was dealing with. Ronnie lived a life of complete control: ordered, regulated, sterilized … as germ-free, contact-free, and disturbance-free as it was possible for a human being to get. Ronnie wanted to say yes and end the agony, but he wanted to do right by Sheriff Talon even more.
And he understood control.
And so he fought to ignore the pain that held him in its blazing grip, and he managed to gasp out a single word.
“Nuh … No.”
Marshall’s gaze filled with regret. “I’m sorry you feel that way, Ronnie. I truly do. I’d hoped it wouldn’t come to this.”
Ronnie felt that odd pressure inside his head again, and suddenly as if a switch had been thrown somewhere inside his brain, the pain ceased. The sudden absence of sensation was so startling that he drew in a gasping breath. He stood stunned for a moment, not quite able to bring himself to believe it was really over.
And it wasn’t.
His hands were ungloved, his face unmasked, and he stood naked in the morning sun. But his skin wasn’t completely exposed to the air. He was covered with thick, foul-smelling, brownish-green muck, and with horror he realized he was slathered in feces. And that wasn’t the whole of it. Wriggling white things that could only be maggots crawled in and out of the filth, and Ronnie could feel them writhe against his skin. He held his breath to keep from inhaling the stench, and he squeezed his eyes shut to keep the maggots from getting at his eyes. He tried not to think of the millions … no, billions of germs that were crawling all over him right now, furiously seeking a way to get inside his body where they could begin to multiply.
The pain had been agonizing, but Ronnie could deal with pain. After all, it was just a sensation, and sensations could be ignored. But this … this was too much for him. He started shuddering and couldn’t stop. Tears streamed from the corners of his eyes, their moisture doing little wash the muck from his face. The camera, which he hadn’t realized he was still holding, slipped from his fingers and fell to the ground. Seconds later, Ronnie was down on his hands and knees. Another few seconds after that, he whispered a single word.
It turned out Ronnie had been wrong about Marshall Cross. He’d known precisely what sort of man he’d been dealing with.
CHAPTER SIX
Joanne found Debbie standing behind the counter, wiping her eyes with a handful of napkins. She tried not to think about everything Debbie might’ve touched on her way inside — the front door handle, the counter, who knew what else — and the evidence she might’ve destroyed by doing so. Instead, she walked over to the counter and sat on a stool directly in front of Debbie.
“You okay?”
Debbie dabbed at her eyes one more time before nodding.
“Tell me what else happened last night,” she said. “Please.”
Joanne knew she shouldn’t, that she should first question Debbie about what had happened here at the café so that her memory wouldn’t be compromised. She would undoubtedly interpret what happened here at the café differently once she learned about the murder. Maybe only in some small, unimportant ways, but maybe in some major ones. It was a mistake, and Joanne knew it, but she decided to tell Debbie what she wanted to know. The woman had suffered so much over the years, and Joanne couldn’t bring herself to add to that suffering, even if only for a few moments.
She thought Debbie might start crying again as she listened to the details of last night’s murder, but instead the woman grew calmer the more Joanne spoke. When she finished, Debbie regarded her silently for a moment, her expression unreadable.
“You don’t know who the boy is … was?”
“Not yet. And so far no missing persons reports have come in.”
“And he had Carl’s mark on him. But he wasn’t found on the Deveraux Farm.”
Joanne didn’t respond, as she sensed Debbie wasn’t asking questions so much as thinking aloud.
“It’s sad,” said Debbie. “I mean, someone died last night, and I should feel sorry for him, but my first reaction is to hope that maybe Carl wasn’t a killer after all. That someone else was responsible and my baby was innocent. I know he was guilty. He told me so, and I believed him. But here I stand, ready to forget all of that on the slim chance my boy’s memory might be redeemed.” Debbie gave Joanne a small, sad smile. “Pretty goddamned pathetic, huh?”
“Not at all. It just means that despite everything, you still love your son.” Joanne paused and took a breath as she prepared to shift gears. “I hate to do this right now, but I have to ask you some questions about what happened here last night.”
“Sure, I understand. You want me to brew some coffee?”
Joanne wanted to say that Debbie shouldn’t touch anything else in the café, but then she figured what were the odds that whoever had broken in last night had messed with the coffee machine? Besides, given how little sleep Joanne had last night, she needed all the caffeine she could get.
“Sounds good.”
Debbie went to work and a few minutes later the two women sat side by side at the counter, two steaming mugs of coffee in front of them, the rich aroma hanging pleasantly in the air. The atmosphere seemed far too cozy, too normal, considering what they were about to discuss. Joanne started with the question that had been foremost on her mind since the moment she’d received Ronnie’s call.
“Why did you wait until this morning to report the break-in?”
Debbie held her mug cupped in her hands, and she gazed down at its contents as if she might find answers, or at least a measure of reassurance, in its black depths.
“I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I was scared. So scared that I guess I didn’t want to face it, you know? It was easier to tell myself that it was just another cruel practical joke that had gone too far. By the time I walked home, I’d convinced myself that it was no big deal, and I decided to come in early today and clean up the mess before opening.”
Debbie had lived out in the country for decades, but a couple years ago — after one too many rubber knives coated with red-paint blood had been left in her mailbox — she’d sold her house and moved into another on the south side of town, where there were neighborhood watch programs and more regular sheriff patrols. A longish walk, but still doable for an out-of-shape middle-aged woman, especially if she was wired from adrenaline.
“Wh
at changed your mind about reporting the incident?” Joanne asked.
“After I got home, I couldn’t sleep. I just lay in bed and stared at the ceiling, going over what happened, and the more I thought about it, the more it seemed different than all those other times. It probably sounds stupid, but even though I never saw anyone during the break-in, I could feel their hatred. It was like the air was thick with it, you know? Like the way it gets when a storm’s rolling in.”
Joanne couldn’t have put it better herself. A storm was indeed descending on Cross County — a goddamned big one. And she wondered if there was anyplace where its citizens could find shelter.
• • •
Dale started to move past Tyrone, intending to leave the alley and rush across the street to Ronnie’s aid. But Tyrone grabbed hold of his arm and held him back.
“Wait,” Tyrone whispered.
Dale hesitated long enough to see Ronnie push back onto his heels. The deputy sat like that for a moment while he got himself together, and then he gathered up the camera he’d dropped, along with the pieces that had broken off. He stood, swaying for an instant as if he might collapse again, but then he grew steadier, and it looked like he was going to be able to remain on his feet.
“What happened?” Dale asked.
“You know. Marshall did something to him.”
It was a simple declaration, but one fraught with meaning. Tyrone was right. Dale did know, better than almost anyone — anyone whose surname wasn’t Cross, that is. But as intrigued as he was to know the precise nature of what had been done to Ronnie, he needed some information from Tyrone first.
“You were about to tell me what you saw last night.”
Tyrone smiled. “I was?” But then he went on to tell Dale what he had witnessed from his vantage point sitting in the doorway of Holloway’s Cards and Notions.
