The Wolf

by Alex Grecian

  “But at what cost?”

  Heinrich moved the machine gun away from Bear, pointing it at Travis.

  “I didn’t make this place,” he said. “But I took my father’s demented hobby and made it work. Everything I’ve done is for the good of this town and this county. I provide jobs, I provide infrastructure. My father’s not going to live forever, and I’m all these people have. They need me.”

  “Your brother was right about you,” Travis said.

  “Enough,” Heinrich said. “I didn’t want to kill you, because that’s gonna cause a lot of problems, a lot of attention. But I don’t really see that I have much choice at this point.”

  He pulled the trigger and fired another burst that went wide over their heads. Skottie and Travis both ducked and scrambled for cover behind a pew.

  “Ataku!”

  Heinrich raised the Kalashnikov again, but stopped and turned away as a sound like thunder rocked the church. An engine roared and tires squealed as the wall behind the altar bulged inward and broke, stones crumbling and wooden studs splintering. Heinrich backed away and fell against the podium. Through a new hole in the wall, they could see the chrome grille and bright green hood of a van. The window above them, with its depiction of an electrifying tempest, came out of its casing whole, plummeted to the floor, and shattered into a thousand glittering pieces. Rain arrowed in at them through the perfect round hole above, life imitating art. The van disappeared as the driver backed it up, then slammed forward at the wall again, smashing all the way through. It hung up on the shattered remains of the wall, its tires spinning three feet above the ground on a stony ledge. The engine ground as the driver tried to back away, and the van bucked up and down, but couldn’t get enough traction to break free.

  The iconic lightning bolt above the altar trembled.

  “Heinrich!” Travis stood and waved his hands. He pointed at the altar. “Move!”

  Heinrich looked up just as the bolt tore free from its base. It toppled over on him and continued down to the floor, where it broke apart. When the dust settled, Heinrich lay bleeding but conscious, grabbing feebly at the carpet.

  Bear turned in a circle and sat down, craning his neck so that he could see Travis, looking for some kind of assurance.

  Travis grabbed his Eclipse off the floor and ran past the dog, kicking the Kalashnikov under a pew. When he got to the wall, he jumped up on the front bumper of the van and scrambled over the hood and out into the compound. The engine was still grinding, the tires still spinning, kicking up wet sod and mud in a diminishing spray. Several parishioners were approaching the van from behind, but they were moving cautiously. The driver’s-side door was swinging loose on its hinges, and crushed glass from the windshield littered the shrubbery.

  Behind him, Travis could see Skottie inside the church, leaning over Heinrich. She stood up and shouted something, but he couldn’t hear her over the sound of the engine.

  “What?” Travis shouted.

  “He said she’s in the basement! They have her down there!”

  “Go. Take Bear.”

  She nodded and disappeared from sight.

  Travis pulled the van’s door free and stuck his gun in at the driver, but the familiar figure hunched over the steering wheel didn’t move. Travis stepped around to the back of the van where the doors were hanging open. Inside, drawers and cabinets installed around the walls of the van had come open, spilling medical supplies and tools. The windows had been covered on the inside with sheets of black metal, and there were manacles bolted to the floor. Whatever evil purposes the vehicle had once been used for, it had been altered in such a way that it had resisted the EMP effect.

  Travis went back to the cab and pushed Ransom’s head off the steering wheel. He got his father under the arms and pulled him out of the van. As soon as Ransom’s foot came off the accelerator, the tires stopped spinning and the van went quiet. Travis gathered his father up like a sleeping child.

  A man in a brown shirt came running at him across the grass. Travis saw him from the corner of his eye and pivoted, driving his elbow into the man’s throat. Ransom’s limp body threw Travis off and he adjusted his stance as the brown shirt went down on one knee, his hands coming up in an effort to ward off the next blow. Travis kicked him in the face. The man twitched once and went still, his chest rising and falling steadily. Travis could feel blood pounding against his skull, hear it throbbing behind his ears. He stepped backward, resisting the urge to keep going, to grind the unconscious man into the mud. He closed his eyes and concentrated on his breathing, on the cool raindrops sliding down his face.

  When he could think clearly, he carried Ransom back inside the church, laid his father on a pew, and checked for a pulse. It was weak. Ransom’s body was unnaturally still; it lacked the subtle signs of life, the tiny shudder of straining muscle, the rise and fall of the diaphragm, the flutter of eyelashes. Ransom had always been proud of his wardrobe: his bespoke suits, monk strap shoes, and the tiny martini-glass tie tack with its emerald olive that Arletta had given him on their fifth anniversary. Now he wore a University of Kansas sweatshirt and dirty track pants. White stubble had replaced Ransom’s long silver hair.

  Travis touched the odd crescent-shape wound on his father’s temple. He recognized it as the same injury Margaret Weber had suffered before she had been put in the lake, and he realized that the first time he had spoken with Heinrich Goodman in the church nave, Ransom must have been nearby enduring pain and torture.

  Travis put his hand on Ransom’s chest and whispered, “I am sorry, Father. Perhaps Judah would have found you in time. Mi malsukcesis.”

  There was a clatter of rock and metal. Deputy Griffith scrambled over the hood of the van and jumped down onto the wet red carpet.

  “Hey, my radio died,” he said. “I figured I better come in.” He looked around. “Damn, this place is ruined.”

  Travis wiped his eyes and stood, broken glass crunching under his boots, the carpet squelching. The lightning bolt sculpture had ripped the altar apart and smashed the podium, but Heinrich was nowhere to be seen. The Kalashnikov no longer lay where Travis had kicked it.

  He moved toward the open door next to the altar, his grief and anger forced aside by a jolt of adrenaline. At least, he thought, Skottie had Bear with her.

  “Hey!” Quincy pointed at Ransom’s unmoving body. “Who’s that? Is he okay?”

  Travis turned around. “That is my father. And, no, I do not think he is okay.”

  “Lemme take a look, amigo.”

  Quincy knelt on the floor in front of the pew and unbuttoned Ransom’s shirt.

  “Have you had training as a paramedic?” Travis said.

  “A few basic courses the sheriff made us take.” Quincy looked up at him, and Travis saw that the skin around his eyes was dark and swollen. “You know, I killed that lady out there.”

  “If you had not, she would have killed me.”

  “I know.”

  “Skottie needs my help.”

  “Go find her,” Quincy said. “I got this.”

  “I will be right back.”

  The door was standing open and Travis went through in a hurry. He stepped out into empty air and almost fell down a staircase in the dark. He put a hand against the wall and moved down slowly, feeling ahead for each new step until he reached the bottom. His footfalls echoed, giving him the impression he was in a large unoccupied room with no furniture.

  “Bear?”

  A moment later, Travis heard the soft click of Bear’s nails and felt the moist snuffling of a muzzle on the palm of his hand.

  Skottie’s voice floated out of the darkness. “Travis, move to your left. There’s a partition and three steps. Be careful. I fell down them and just about broke my arm.”

  Travis grabbed Bear’s mane to orient himself and followed Skottie’s directions. Once he had descended the steps, he entered a larger area that had a series of small windows up near the ceiling that let a bit of light in. He could
see Skottie outlined against the far wall.

  “Heinrich has disappeared,” Travis said.

  “He didn’t come this way,” she said. “Unless he snuck past me in the dark. There’s a kitchen over here. And a closet down there at the other end of what seems like a meeting hall. It’s hard to tell, but I think it’s just full of folding chairs and tables and Christmas pageant stuff. I can’t find Maddy. But there’s a door here. There’s more steps and another door at the bottom. It’s metal and I can’t open it.”

  Travis reached for his lock picks.

  12

  “We got your weapons,” Sheriff Goodman said. “All them guns you had stashed away? We took ’em.” This was not technically true, since he and Travis had left the guns where they were on church property, but Goodman felt that having seen them was good enough. They were supposed to be a secret and were probably less valuable the more people knew about them.

  He looked around at the men surrounding the truck. He was holding his gun loose in his hands, not aiming it at anyone, but ready to use it if he had to. Most of the crowd had obeyed him and dropped their weapons, and even those who hadn’t seemed to have lost the will to fight. He was the son of Reverend Rudy, and even though he had been excommunicated, it was clear that no one knew how to treat him. They were confused and leaderless.

  Behind them, the church wall was still settling in around the remains of the bright green van, but Goodman had seen Travis take someone out of the cab. Quincy had followed him inside the church, and Goodman knew he needed to buy them some time.

  “We took your truck, too,” he said. “The other one with all the people in it. Yeah, those folks are gonna tell everybody in the world what you been up to.” He smacked the stock of the Kalashnikov with his palm for emphasis. “But there’s a couple people missing. Maybe more than a couple. You got a little black girl somewheres. And an old guy. There’s a nice lady, too, name of Rachel Bloom. Hell, just bring out everybody you got stashed here.”

  There was a low murmur at the back of the throng as people moved aside to make way for a huge man. His dirty brown shirt was too tight and rode high on his belly, the buttons straining to remain fastened. He had a single bushy eyebrow that hid his eyes and a heavy shadow on his jaw from five o’clock some previous day. He had a machete in one hand and a pistol in the other.

  “Stanley Mayhew,” Goodman said.

  “You remember me?”

  “You’re kinda hard to forget, Stanley.”

  “I missed you round here,” Stanley said. “You was always good to me.”

  “I’d sure hate to have to fight you, Stanley.”

  Stanley snorted.

  A bony little man shook his fist. “Get him, Stan!”

  “Stanley, I got snipers all around the fence there,” Goodman said.

  “I ain’t gonna fight you, Kurt.”

  “Well, that’s a relief,” Goodman said. “I had a bad feeling about that.”

  “But they didn’t have to kill Lou-Ellen.”

  Goodman glanced at the feet of the dead lady near the church doors. They were all he could see of the body. The rest of her had fallen into the hedge.

  “That was Lou-Ellen? The years have not been kind.”

  “Me and her had a thing,” Stanley said.

  “Oh, sorry.”

  Stanley shrugged. “You’re lookin’ for the lady?”

  Goodman nodded. “You got her?”

  “Yeah, they had me put her stuff in one house and her in the house next door.” He pointed to a back door at the other end of the pool. “I been watching her most nights.”

  “What about the others?”

  “Only girls I seen are the ones they bring through end of every month. Wasn’t no black kid with ’em.”

  “Every month? You know what kinda jail time you folks are lookin’ at? Human trafficking is about as serious as it gets.”

  “Yeah, I don’t know. I just do my job. Make sure things stay peaceful. Only one left here’s the lady.”

  “You wouldn’t be kiddin’ me, would you, Stanley?”

  “Man, who cares? I’m outta here. This place is done.”

  He shrugged again, then turned, loped away through the silent crowd toward the gate. Goodman raised his gun and pointed it at the giant’s back. Then he shook his head and lowered it. Arresting Stanley was a problem for another day. Rachel Bloom wasn’t a resident of Paradise Flats, but Goodman was still responsible for her safety, and she needed immediate help.

  “Serve and protect,” he said to himself. “Who knew it would come to this?”

  The throng of parishioners had already begun to drift away. Their perimeter had been breached, their church had been ruined, and the scariest guy any of them knew had just turned tail and fled. A lot had changed in a short amount of time, and the realization that they were facing prison sentences had shattered their notions of superiority. Some were following Stanley out to the fence; others were wandering aimlessly. Robbed of their self-righteous anger, they seemed pathetic. Brown had been a poor choice of uniform color. They looked like scouts without a map. At some point they would gather their belongings and leave, but Goodman knew he would eventually have to find them all, starting with Stanley.

  The house Stanley had pointed out was next to the one Goodman and Travis had come through to gain entrance to the churchyard. Goodman tried the knob and it turned. The door swung open, and he stepped into a kitchen identical to the one next door. He flicked a switch on the wall above the sink before remembering that the electricity was dead. There was enough ambient light through the windows that he was able to pick out shapes and shadows. He crept silently through to the living room, wishing he had Travis’s big dog with him. There was a television against the wall and a couch opposite it, but no other furnishings. A pile of empty beer cans and a greasy pizza box littered the floor beside the couch. Goodman went to the bottom of the staircase and listened. There was no sound, but there was an undefinable sense of heaviness in the air, someone else breathing somewhere. He gripped his gun tight and took the steps two at a time, watching the landing above for movement.

  There were four doors on the second floor. One was open and led to a bathroom. The other three were closed. Goodman moved down the hall, stopping outside each door to listen. Behind the last door he heard a soft noise, fabric shifting, tendons creaking, and he reached out, turned the knob, then pushed the door open and flattened himself against the wall beside it.

  Nothing happened.

  He counted to ten, braced the machine gun against his shoulder, and entered the room in a running crouch. The walls were painted flat white and were bare of decoration. New indoor/outdoor carpeting covered the floor. Three sets of metal bunk beds filled the space, one each against the side walls and the third in the center, leaving a double walkway between them. A pasteboard chest of drawers was shoved under a window on the wall across from him.

  A woman lay on the bottom middle bunk, her wrists handcuffed to a chain that ran to the rail above her head. Her dark hair was bedraggled, her face pale, and her red sweater torn and dirty. A strip of duct tape covered her mouth, and she breathed loudly through her nose.

  “Mrs. Bloom?”

  She didn’t react.

  He knelt beside the bed, placed the gun on the floor next to him, reached out, and gently shook her.

  “Rachel?”

  There was still no response. He carefully peeled the tape off her face and stuck it to the side of the bed.

  He sat back on his heels and watched Rachel’s face, wondering who had drugged her. Stanley or Heinrich? Maybe Rudy himself? On the most basic level, there was no escaping the knowledge that his family was responsible for this. How many girls had been shipped through the compound every month? Taken through the middle of Burden County right under his nose? He thought of his friend’s missing daughter, the case he had never solved and that now seemed unsolvable. He thought of his daughter, his mother, his sister who had never had the chance to know Ma
gda, of all the women who were important to him—who had shaped him—any of whom might have taken Rachel Bloom’s place, chained to a bed, or packed into a truck like cattle. He remembered that Heinrich had never married, never had children, and he realized what a blessing that was. How many times had Uncle Heinrich visited them when Angela was a child? What wriggling wormlike visions had gone through Heinrich’s head at the dinner table? Goodman’s stomach turned. He had never been comfortable with emotions other than anger, and now he felt himself translating his shame and confusion to something more easily understood, something he could act on.

  He rattled the chain and cursed himself for his lack of foresight. He had left his bolt cutters in the garage after finding the EMP device. A trip back to the garage would take too long. He considered kicking the bed rails apart to free the chain, but he was afraid Rachel might be hurt in the process. His best hope was that her captor had stashed the key to the cuffs somewhere nearby.

  A rolling suitcase sat next to an overstuffed black duffel bag beside the door. He had passed them on the way into the room without paying much attention. Now he unzipped the bag and saw toiletries, folded T-shirts, socks balled up in pairs. Nothing of interest. But the suitcase was packed with hundred-dollar bills. Goodman didn’t even try to estimate how much money it might add up to.

  He stood and went to the dresser, opened the top drawer. Inside was clutter, like a shoe box in a flea market or the souvenir collection of a madman: a tiny stuffed bear with a red heart sewn on its chest, a locket on a silver chain, a mood ring that wouldn’t have fit his pinky finger, a pair of glasses with rose-tinted lenses and a broken temple bar, a satin ballet slipper, a pink plastic coin purse with a cartoon cat on the side … A jumble of heartbreaking keepsakes.

  Goodman picked up the coin purse and unfastened the clasp. It held a tube of bubble gum–flavored lip gloss, a house key, and a photo strip from a carnival booth: three pictures showing a pair of little girls mugging for the camera.

  A voice from the doorway startled him and he dropped the purse. “If you’re looking for the key to the handcuffs, it’s not in there.”