Stutter Creek

by Ann Swann

  “Sorry,” Dean said. “You were in the area. I don’t know you, and I don’t know what’s going on here. Sit tight, we’ll be right back.”

  Woody James nodded his agreement and they eased their doors the rest of the way open.

  In that instant, John also made a split-second decision. “Turk!” he commanded. “Find the woman!” Then he jerked his head toward the half-open passenger-side door. He ducked as the huge Shepherd shot over the seat, clearing the doorframe and knocking Woody James to the ground as he crashed into the backs of his knees.

  “Don’t shoot!” Dean yelled as James, on his belly, trained his sights on the hindquarters of the disappearing canine.

  “Wish you hadn’t done that,” she said to John. “If the dog gets in the Chief’s way on that mountain, he’ll shoot first and ask questions later. At least I know I would.”

  “Beth isn’t in that cabin. She wouldn’t be sitting in the dark. Besides, if she was in there, Turk would have gone in. He wouldn’t have passed it by.”

  Detective James was dusting himself off. “So you think he’s actually tracking her?”

  John nodded. “I know he is.”

  “Let’s check the cabin,” Dean said. “No more shenanigans from you.” She pointed her chin at John. Then she radioed dispatch again, and told them about the situation with Turk. She did it more to protect the Chief and his officer than to protect the dog. He was huge. If he came lunging out of the forest near the officers, there was no telling who might get shot.

  John had taken their measure. He knew now that if he did decide to escape, they would not shoot him in the back. He would wait to see what they found inside Beth’s cabin before he acted; but if things didn’t seem right, he’d already decided he would kick out the window and follow Turk. He could think of no reason the missing girl’s car should be at Beth’s cabin if Beth wasn’t there. And it had been barely an hour since he had been here himself. Beth had not mentioned having plans with the young woman who was now listed as missing. And then there was that episode when Turk had alerted near the cabin for seemingly no reason.

  The lead detective approached the front door while the junior detective slipped around behind.

  John watched anxiously.

  Suddenly, lights blazed inside the cabin and he could see their silhouettes searching from room to room. Then they were back.

  “Signs of a struggle,” Dean said. “Small amount of blood on the floor, back door screen was sprung and hanging open.”

  “Someone took her up the mountain,” James added. “And we know it wasn’t you; footprints were far too small.”

  John sat up straighter. He had been in a half-crouch, ready to launch himself out the window if necessary. “Take these cuffs off and let’s get after Turk.”

  “How will we track him?” Detective James asked as he removed the handcuffs.

  John pulled a slim silver dog whistle from his pocket. “He’ll come and get us.” He blew into the mouthpiece silently.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Beth fought her rising panic. Where was he? What was he doing? She sat as still as possible, hoping the kidnapper couldn’t hear her heart pounding inside the cage of her ribs.

  The silence was a weight; it pressed against her skin as surely as if she’d been fathoms deep in the ocean. In fact, somewhere she could hear the faint drip, drip, drip of water and while she was concentrating on its location, he found her.

  He loomed out of the darkness like the shadow from her nightmare, pushing her over onto her back, grinding her still-bound hands and arms into the rough surface of the cave floor. Rocks and sharp pieces of shale cut into her flesh, and all she could hear was his harsh breathing as he struggled to remove her jeans.

  She kicked and fought more wildly than even she would’ve have believed possible. Until he hit her.

  It was a hard, glancing blow to her nose and cheek that brought tears to her eyes and clogged her nose with bloody mucus. He ripped at her with the steak knife, attempting to cut off her clothes, slicing her skin along with the fabric.

  She cried a muffled cry and thrashed and twisted and kicked until, somehow, the knife skittered away across the floor. It was so dark she couldn’t see him until he came at her again. This time he grappled with her until he found her neck, digging in with his fingers, squeezing and squeezing, hanging on as she thrashed and kicked.

  And between his hands, the tape on her mouth, and the bloody mucus clogging her nose, Beth couldn’t breathe at all.

  Her movements grew weaker . . .

  But still, there were thrashing sounds.

  It was a great tremendous thrashing and crashing that she knew at once had to be Turk charging up the mountain, tearing through the underbrush toward the cave just as he had charged at her in her own driveway.

  In her mind she cried out to him and to John and to her father but mostly to God. Please God let him get here in time.

  The man let out a string of disbelieving curses under his breath as the noise grew closer and closer. His fingers loosened and she could hear him scuttling toward the entrance to see what was coming.

  She rolled over onto her knees, gasping for air, and pressed her back into the cave wall, somehow managing to gain her feet. Her jeans were halfway down her legs and she scraped them down with her feet and said a silent thank you when she was able to kick them away without falling. She gagged and swallowed the bloody mucus clogging the back of her throat, but more took its place.

  Any moment, she thought. Turk will rush through the entrance at any moment. She held her breath and listened . . . the crashing sounds were growing fainter. He was going the wrong direction. It sounded as if he was going back down.

  She hung her head. She prayed that her dizziness was the reason she couldn’t hear the dog anymore—but no time to wonder.

  The maniac was coming at her again. This time she was on her feet and she lashed out at him with a sideways kick as soon as her peripheral vision told her he was within range. Suddenly, Beth realized that her dad’s colored lights were swirling about the cave, lighting the man’s silhouette each time he got close to her.

  She heard growling coming from somewhere and for a moment she was sure that Turk had returned. But it wasn’t Turk. It was her. The growling was coming from beneath the tape still covering her mouth.

  ***

  When Detective James freed him, John blew the silent whistle and then took off up the mountain trail at a dead run. The handcuffs still dangled from one wrist. He would worry about that later. Already he could sense that Turk was returning. It wasn’t that he could hear him from that distance; it was that he could sense a shift in the air that separated them. His lug-soled boots dug into the springy earth, and he was certain he could feel the earth pushing back, spurring him on.

  In his mind, Detective Woody James was thinking, praying, that he hadn’t just released a killer. The big man had taken off as if he’d been shot from a circus cannon. The detective had the feeling there would be no slowing him either, short of a well-placed bullet. What if he and the small man were accomplices? Neither of them had mentioned the fact that there were two vehicles but only one set of footprints that could’ve belonged to a lightweight woman. Could the killer be a woman? What if the heavier set of prints belonged to the woman in the cabin, and the lighter set belonged to the girl? So many possibilities. His first big case, and he may have just released the killer.

  “It’s not him,” Detective Dean said, as if she could read his mind—when in reality—she probably could read his face. “Serial killers don’t usually have trained dogs.” She scowled. “Not that polite, anyhow.”

  They continued up the mountain cautiously, hands on their weapons.

  Chief Brown knew Blue Cave was nearby. He just couldn’t find the entrance in the darkness. In fact, he had gone too far. Both he and Officer Hagar were now above the cave and they had lost the tracks.

  They headed back down slowly; their feet occasionally slipping an
d sliding in the mucky patches of half-melted snow and wet leaves. It was a lot trickier going downhill.

  They stopped abruptly when they heard Turk crashing through the underbrush. Chief Brown assumed it was a buck or maybe even a bear just out of hibernation. He and Hagar pulled their weapons at the same time.

  The chief motioned the officer behind him. He shined the flashlight toward the sound, but then the noise stopped and began to move away back down the mountain.

  Both men exhaled shakily.

  The chief began to wonder if searching in the darkness was wise. Then he imagined Allie’s face, and he knew the search would go on. Just have to be even more careful, he thought, as he holstered his pistol. That’s when the dispatcher relayed the message from the detective about Turk.

  “That animal we heard must’ve been him,” Chief Brown whispered. “Glad I didn’t shoot.”

  Halfway up the trail, John stopped, too. He was listening to the forest. And he was waiting for Turk to find him. In a matter of moments, the big dog was there. This time they both headed up the pitch-dark trail, swiftly and silently. John kept his hand on Turk’s collar so they wouldn’t get separated.

  Inside the cave, Kurt pulled the remaining length of cord from his coat pocket and stretched it between his hands like a garrote. The knife he’d taken from the cabin was gone. He’d been unable to locate it in the darkness.

  It didn’t matter. He intended to finish the job right now. He crept toward the wall where the woman was cowering. Those damn fireflies had followed him into the cave. He’d never seen anything like it—they seemed to glow with all the colors of a Christmas tree. Must be hallucinating, he thought. Certainly wouldn’t be the first time; maybe it was an acid flashback or something. Nevertheless, he swatted at them as if they really were multicolored insects.

  Beth thought she could outsmart the man with her dad’s help. Since she could see the colored lights around him, she thought she could make it to the entrance and slip outside to hide in the brush. She was almost certain Turk had been looking for her. If she could stay hidden from the kidnapper long enough, she was sure the big dog would find her.

  Carefully, even more quietly than the dripping of moisture off the cave’s ceiling, Beth eased her feet across the floor until she was crouching right next to the lighter shade of darkness that signified the cave’s opening. She could feel a cold draft coming through from outside. From out of the silence, she heard a soft moan. Perhaps the boy was alive after all. She had to go. She had to get help for herself and for him.

  Inhaling as deeply and quietly as her clogged nose would allow, Beth stepped through the opening and into the night. She was no longer thinking, now she was just doing. Without another moment’s thought, she slid through the draft and was gone.

  Kurt was right behind her. He had realized what she was doing, but when Danny moaned, Kurt had hesitated, and that hesitation afforded her the fraction of a second she needed to disappear.

  Desperately, Kurt flipped the noose of cord sideways and downward just past the last place he had seen her crouched outside the cave.

  Beth gagged as the cord skimmed over her face like a lethal thread thrown by a giant spider. She tried to jerk free, but that made it worse. Kurt yanked upward with both hands and Beth’s world fell away. Colored lights were everywhere, in her eyes, in her head, in the air around her. She couldn’t breathe at all. He had won.

  Suddenly Turk exploded from his master’s grasp and launched himself up the remaining thirty feet of ground. In three gigantic leaps, he crashed solidly into the man like a fur-covered freight train. One hundred fifty pounds of teeth and muscle took him down. The impact was accompanied by a nightmare of guttural snarling, gnashing, and crushing. It sounded as if the guy’s flesh was being ripped straight off the bone.

  Powerful flashlights lit up the scene as a scream of agony split the night like an axe splitting dry wood. The screaming went on and on as Turk dragged the bad guy around the clearing by his forearm. He was waiting on that one word from John that would okay the kill.

  Beth lurched forward into the thorny brush as the cord fell harmlessly away from her throat. She sucked in as much precious air as her nostrils would allow, but her vision was still iffy. This time the spots in front of her eyes had nothing to do with her father; they were purely from lack of oxygen.

  Over the sounds of the melee, a man’s voice could be heard shouting, “Call off your dog before he kills the guy!”

  Beth wanted to say, “No! Don’t you dare call off the dog.” But she couldn’t say anything, her mouth was still covered with filthy dirt and leaf encrusted tape.

  The Chief was right, John knew he couldn’t risk having Turk put down simply for doing his job. This wasn’t Kazakhstan. With a sharp command he instructed the dog to “drop and release.” Turk let go and dropped to the ground.

  The man rolled to his feet dripping blood and cradling one crushed and mangled arm in the crook of the other. He raced directly between the two men, the Chief, who had come hurrying upon the scene from above the cave, and John, who had come upon the scene from below the cave. Neither man had yet seen Beth lying in the brush. But just when the kidnapper appeared to be about to vanish into the trees, John snagged his jacket.

  The forward motion pulled them both off balance and down they went.

  Suddenly they were upside down rolling head over feet down the mountain. Somehow John grasped the short chain that had been connecting the handcuffs on his wrists and now it was cutting right into the kidnapper’s windpipe, one end still fastened around John’s big wrist, the other securely grasped inside his opposite fist. Together, they rolled over and over and over down the steep trail until they came to a violent stop in a stand of slender saplings. There was no fight left in the twisted little man.

  He was dead.

  Detective Woody James found them just as John disentangled himself from the suspect. The young detective did not know what to say or where to start. He put two fingers to the suspect’s neck, checking for a pulse, but he found nothing. When the senior detective caught up, Detective James was just unlocking his bloody cuffs from John’s wrist. The big man explained what had happened.

  Kendra Dean nodded. “Saved the taxpayers the trouble and expense of a trial.” The she indicated the cuffs. “Those will go into an evidence bag.”

  Detective James pulled clear plastic gloves and a brown paper bag from a pouch on his belt.

  “Beth?” John gasped, head down, heaving.

  But neither detective knew where she was. Then Turk was beside him and he simply allowed the dog to lead him back up the trail to where Beth lay, still bound, valiantly attempting to pry the tape off her mouth by grinding her face into the wet earth.

  John knelt beside her and gently helped her stand.

  Jerking her head from side to side, she let him know that the tape on her mouth had to come off first.

  Chief Brown was there with his flashlight. He’d already alerted dispatch for an ambulance and the Medical Examiner, and as soon as one side of the tape was peeled up, Beth cried, “There’s a boy in there. I think he’s still alive!”

  The Chief started toward the cave. “What about Allie?”

  Beth yanked her head sharply. The remainder of the tape ripped away taking a layer of skin off her bottom lip. “What do you mean?” she asked, tasting blood. “What about Allie?”

  “They think he may have taken her,” John explained, indicating the crumpled figure lying halfway down the slope.

  Beth followed his glance. “Is he dead?” Her voice was rough.

  John nodded. He, too, was covered in dirt, scratches, and damp leafy debris. But his calloused fingers were working deftly at the knot binding her wrists together. “Did you see the girl, Allie?” The knot came free and he pulled her to his chest as she grimaced at the pins and needles flooding her hands. Rubbing them gently, John continued, “Her car was at your cabin when we got there.”

  Beth shook her head, confused. �
�That can’t be. She wasn’t there.”

  Then the Chief was shouting for someone to come and help him with the boy. “He’s barely breathing. Eric, tell that ambulance to hurry!”

  The two detectives rushed to the cave to lend their flashlights to the darkness. The Chief had already pulled his utility knife and cut the cords tying the boy’s feet and hands together.

  Suddenly, massive barking from the rear of the cave ricocheted off the walls as Turk alerted his master to the location of someone else.

  John and Beth rushed inside, and, with the aid of Woody James, shined the police issued megawatts down into the abyss.

  “Help,” a tiny voice cried. “Please!”

  Allie was crammed onto a jagged ledge ten feet below the lip of the shaft. The beams of the flashlights reflected dully off the remains of the silver tape still tangled in her blonde hair. She had spent the last couple of hours wondering if the sounds above her were real or if they were in her head. She’d banged it pretty hard when she leapt.

  Later, she told them that she’d remembered the shelf when she jumped up to run away from her captor, but she hadn’t known if she could land on it, or if she would just careen off and crash all the way to the bottom. “I took a chance,” she told them later. “I knew I was going to die anyway.” They were all amazed at her bravery and her presence of mind. Her ability to keep her wits about her had undoubtedly saved her life.

  With gear from Chief Brown’s patrol car, John and Woody James were able to fashion a rope “chair” for Allie to sit in while they carefully hoisted her to the surface. She looked a lot worse than she sounded. But of course she hadn’t had the chance to tell them about the struggle in the car and the horrible sprint up the mountain. Chief Brown and Officer Hagar already knew about that, though. Those were the tracks they had been following all along.