At first, Tom couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing; the upheaval all around him looked more like a public square in Kandahar after a good shelling than his own little town here at home. His immediate thought, in spite of the bright blue autumn sky: Tornado.
Second thought: In October?
‘Sweet Christmas,’ Tiff said, shouldering open her door almost before Tom pulled the cruiser to a full stop. ‘What is happening around here today?’
He had no ideas worth sharing.
They hustled in together, past weeping friends and wailing neighbors, past hustling paramedics and disoriented-looking coaches and shell-shocked kids in pint-sized shoulder pads, finally parting each other’s company just inside the chain link gate: Tiff veering off toward Roy Webber’s makeshift medical station and a crowd of additional wounded; Tom toward his boss, Sheriff Dale Prescott, whom he spotted with the mayor; a middle-aged State Patrol sergeant; and a photographer in a hazmat suit just this side of the thirty-yard line.
Injured, he amended in his mind as he hurried toward them. Not wounded. Tornado victims get injured.
Because, seriously, what else could have happened here? The entire west corner of the new bleachers had been demolished. Galvanized steel piping poked this way and that, twisted and tangled like a fistful of pipe cleaners. The visitor’s goalpost – already cut off at the base and lowered to the ground – rested askew on its cross-brace. The uprights jutted from the turf at a low angle, like the horns of a bull preparing to charge.
Somehow, Big Glenn had been gored tip to tail on the heavy-gauge steel.
It was, without question, the most gruesome thing Tom Curnow had ever seen, and that included six months in combat – not to mention the ten years he’d spent since that time responding to motor vehicle accidents up and down Highway 6.
Law enforcement personnel from town, county, and state were gathered around the spot, along with EMTs from nearby Gretna. Tom saw his fellow county deputy Martina York and a young state trooper struggling with a polyvinyl tarp, doing their best to drape the skewered corpse from view. Meanwhile, Mel Frazee from town maintenance crouched amidst their ankles, working on the upright with a cutting torch.
Sheriff Prescott saw Tom coming. The State Patrol man nodded a greeting and moved along at a stride. Mayor Bobby Ford – starting center on Tom’s own high school football team before going straight into the grain-storage business, then local politics – looked like he’d swallowed something foul. The shooter in the hazmat suit snapped pictures of the ground behind them.
Either the photographer had overdressed for the occasion, or the sheriff and the mayor were flying in the face of advisable precaution, Tom had no way of knowing which. They were standing near a rimmed hole in the field, possibly four feet across, cordoned off with stake posts and police tape. The hole looked to Tom like nothing so much as an impact crater.
Then he got close enough to see inside.
‘Holy Jesus God,’ he said, staring. ‘What … is that?’
‘Ref,’ Mayor Bobby said, stifling a gulp with the back of his hand.
‘What’s left of him.’ Sheriff Prescott shook his head. ‘Some league kid down from Omaha. Just makin’ an extra buck on the weekend. Now look.’
‘But what happened to him?’ Tom looked around. ‘What happened to everybody? Carla wasn’t making any sense.’
‘That’s for damn sure going around,’ Bobby agreed.
‘Something about a—’
‘We figure the subject came in through the far gates there,’ Sheriff Prescott said, pointing. ‘Nobody saw him ’til he was halfway across the field. Just walkin’ right on across like nobody’s business, according to Jim Watson. Huge bastard. Flying high on something, musta been, least that’s what everybody thought at first.’
‘Carla said he was all covered in …’
‘Some kinda mud. Or … something. You heard that part right.’
‘Kids all say he smelled like a walking turd. Bunch of ’em are claiming—’
‘Can we give all that a rest, Bobby? One thing at a time.’
‘He had these weird eyes,’ Mayor Bobby went on. ‘Bright green, they said. Glowing, like.’
Tom stared at them. ‘Glowing green eyes.’
‘They all scattered like cats, thank Christ.’
‘Apparently that’s when the ref stepped in.’ The sheriff gestured toward the grisly crater in the ground three feet from where they stood. Then toward the near end zone, thirty yards downfield. ‘Subject stomped a mudhole in the poor sonofabitch before proceeding roughly thataway.’
‘Biglun was helping run the chains,’ Mayor Bobby said, lapsing briefly into townspeak for Big Glenn. His voice carried a sprinkling of community pride before it hitched and broke. He cleared his throat. ‘Caught up with the mud-caked motherhumper around the one-yard line.’
Tom’s head was spinning. Reluctantly, he peered once more into the hole. If not for a visible hand still clutching a flattened referee’s whistle, you’d have been hard-pressed to say with certainty that the pile of guts and bone in a pond of blood at the bottom of the crater had once been a human being. He saw scraps of striped fabric and an old joke crossed his overloaded mind: What’s black and white and red all over? He couldn’t even remember the actual punch line.
Tom looked between the sheriff and Bobby Ford. Looked back toward the goal post. ‘But how in God’s name …’
‘General consensus,’ Sheriff Prescott said, ‘seems to be that the subject picked his ass up and threw him in the air. What you’re looking at is how he came down.’
‘Dale.’
‘Just telling you what Jim Watson told me. Flung, was I believe the word he used.’
‘All 300 pounds of him,’ Mayor Bobby confirmed. ‘Check Marge Holman’s cell phone if you don’t believe it.’
‘Anyway,’ Prescott went on, shooting Bobby a grimace. ‘Everybody with a concealed-carry card opened fire from the damn stands after that.’ He gestured vaguely toward the nice new bleachers, which the town had voted in only just last spring. ‘Goddamn miracle nobody hit one of the kids. That’s when all that mess over there happened.’
In direct disregard for accepted forensic protocol – perhaps including basic common sense – Tom stooped and reached across the crime scene tape toward the hole in the field. He ran his bare finger through a globby smear of unusual-looking clay he’d spotted amidst the upturned turf.
‘Um, please don’t do that,’ said the photographer, voice muffled behind his filter mask.
Almost instantly, Tom’s finger went cold. He sniffed it reflexively – one of the dumber reflexes wired into the male of the species, it occurred to him – and nearly gagged at the odor: somewhere between a bucket full of pond water and a dead animal bloating in the sun.
And then his mind started playing tricks on him. Standing there, looking at his finger, Tom almost would have sworn that he felt the clay … squeezing him. He flicked his hand hard, quickly wiped his finger on his duty trousers. Shock and general confusion gave way to anger. ‘Do we have him?’
‘Have who?’
‘The doer,’ Tom said, brandishing his befouled index finger. ‘The turd-smelling shithead. Where is he now? Tell me we have him.’
‘Have it, I think is more like,’ Mayor Bobby said.
‘Bobby. Please, goddammit.’
‘Look around, Dale! Are you really going to stand there telling me you think a man did all this?’ He pointed to the soupy remains in the crater. ‘Did that? One man?’
‘Let’s at least try and keep ourselves sounding halfway like a couple prof—’
‘Fifty feet in the air, Dale. That’s how high Big Glenn went up.’ Mayor Bobby scrubbed a shaky hand through his hair. ‘Go back and look at Marge Holman’s cell phone one more time if you don’t believe it.’
Before Sheriff Prescott could answer, Tom heard the distant whop-whop-whop of a helicopter rotor and looked up to see his second chopper of the morning, this one from t
he Civil Air Patrol base north of town. Although, given the current state of things around him, something told Tom that the UNMC medevac would likely be making a return trip as well. Possibly a couple of them.
‘Anyway,’ the sheriff said, acknowledging the search-and-rescue bird as it banked slowly over their heads. ‘Workin’ on that now.’
Tom shielded his eyes from the sun, watching the chopper carve a widening circle in the sky over their town. He lowered his gaze and caught sight of Tiff near the concession stands, crouched down low to the pavement, pumping up a compression brace around the suddenly famous Marge Holman’s elevated right knee.
He took one last look at Big Glenn Rademacher. The man had been a friend – the same guy who’d sponsored Tom’s bid for the Junior Law Cadet Academy down in Lincoln, the summer between his junior and senior years of high school. The same guy who’d forked over for fundraiser popcorn, year in and year out, from just about every Cub Scout in town. Girl Scout cookies, too. He’d probably needed one of Mayor Bobby’s old grain elevators just to store the stuff. Now he was an unrecognizable mass cocooned in a neon-blue tarp, a fountain of sparks from Mel’s torch melting pockmarks in his garish shroud.
The sound of chopper blades slowly faded as the circle widened.
Tom said, ‘I’ll radio Douglas County.’
Then he turned and stalked back in the direction he’d come.
Sheriff Prescott said, ‘Where you running off to now?’
‘Speaking of shitheads,’ Tom called over his shoulder, ‘I can think of at least three more we need to see.’
‘Gentlemen.’ Anabeth reached between them and pulled the motel room door closed. ‘I believe our timetable has accelerated.’
Charley backed up into the room, looking more amazed than alarmed.
Ben felt just the opposite. But part of him wasn’t even completely sure why. ‘Well, that was fast.’
‘As getaway vehicles go, that one’s not ideal,’ Abe said. ‘Somebody was bound to call it in.’
‘That, or our good friend Deputy Curnow got Frerking to cough up his tracker app.’
‘Hmm.’ Abe looked skeptical. ‘Maybe.’
Ben nodded. Somehow, he didn’t think so, either.
One way to find out. He took Gordon’s prepaid from his pocket, pulled up the recent calls menu, and dialed the first number on the list.
Gordon answered on the first ring. ‘If this is a cop, the party you’re trying to reach is no longer …’
‘It’s me,’ Ben said. ‘What’s the word on Ajeet?’
‘Still in surgery,’ Gordon said. ‘Dude. Where are you? And what the hell did you do to my van?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Please do not give me that shit. The front end is clearly jacked up. Plus I can see a bunch of chimps with badges failing to break into it even as we speak.’
‘Never mind where am I,’ Ben said. ‘Where are you?’
‘Still at the hospital. Where else would I be?’
‘Then how—’
‘Son, I got fiber-optic cameras mounted in the roof lights, the side mirrors, the rear spoi—’
‘Never mind,’ Ben said. ‘Of course you do.’
‘I’m watching on my laptop right now. I swear, if that cream-filled flatfoot breaks out my window I’ll file a—’
‘So it wasn’t you, then.’
‘Wasn’t me what?’
‘Who told them where to find us.’
There came a long pause. ‘OK, I won’t lie. That hurts.’
‘Just checking,’ Ben said. ‘Listen, I’m sorry about the van. I promise I’ll pay for everyth—’
‘Especially considering you’re, like, all over the news right now.’
‘Gordon, I really am sorry, OK? It was completely unavoi …’ Ben stopped. ‘All over what news?’
Gordon dropped his voice to a lower tone. ‘You’ve been popping up on my alerts for an hour. All the local stations.’
‘I guess that makes sense. Saying what, exactly?’
‘You,’ Gordon informed him, ‘are to be considered armed and dangerous. Oh, also, your kid’s officially an Amber Alert.’
‘Please tell me you’re kidding.’
‘Sorry, man. They’re running your picture and everything. It’s the one from your work badge, I think. They’re calling you disgruntled.’
Ben closed his eyes. What had he expected? OK, yeah, technically he’d entered his ex-wife’s home without permission. And, given certain legally binding custody agreements, today probably didn’t quite fall under the ‘reasonable visitation’ heading where he and Charley were concerned. But through all of this, it had never once entered Ben’s mind that anyone might think to accuse him of kidnapping his own son. He’d left a note!
‘By the way, you never said you owned a guitar company,’ Gordon added. ‘How could it be that for two boring-ass years in Cubelandia you failed to inform us there was something sorta arguably cool about you?’
‘Listen, Gordon. Can you do me another favor?’
‘Oh, shit.’ On the other end of the line, Gordon’s voice dropped further, gaining a note of urgency. ‘Sorry, gotta go. Deputy Dawg just showed up back here again. With Omaha PD. And … yeah. He looks super pissed.’
‘Gordon …’
‘Good luck, man. They won’t hear shit from me. Keep it in the wind and check in next time you can. Frerking out.’
The line went dead in his ear. Ben put the phone back in his pocket.
‘Well?’ Abe asked.
‘Yeah,’ Ben said. ‘It wasn’t him.’
‘What a relief,’ Reuben Wasserman muttered from the corner. He hadn’t moved a muscle this whole time. Ben had almost forgotten he was still here.
‘OK,’ said Abe. ‘However they found us, it’s only a matter of time before they figure out we’re not over there. And it won’t be long after that before one of them looks across the highway, gets a bright idea, and thinks to check over here. So.’ She clapped her hands and rubbed them together. ‘Our need for a plan cannot be overstated.’
Ben looked at her. Something nagged at him – a vague feeling of pieces out of place, of mistakes being made – but he couldn’t quite pin the feeling down. ‘What sort of plan did you have in mind, exactly?’
‘A lightning-fast one, preferably.’ She snapped her fingers and pulled out her own phone. ‘How many Uber drivers do you think they’d have on a Saturday in a town this size?’
Charley looked confused. ‘Um, Dad?’
‘Yep?’
‘Are we running from the cops, too?’
Ben looked at his son.
Bingo, he thought.
That was it exactly.
EIGHTEEN
‘OK, back up,’ Anabeth said. ‘What am I missing?’
‘I’m just saying. Charley’s right.’
‘Right about what? You’re going to have to—’
‘Why are we running from the cops?’
‘Honestly, Ben, I guess I thought we’ve been on more or less the same page this whole time.’
‘I wasn’t thinking clearly before,’ Ben said. ‘Maybe I’m starting to now.’
While Abe had been digging bits of lead from his shoulder, he’d found himself with ample time for thinking. He’d squandered the bulk of that time on a useless recurring question: Why me?
But now he was beginning to see the same question from a different angle. These past few years, Ben had become so accustomed to identifying himself as the principal architect of his own misfortunes that his prevailing blamelessness in this situation was disorienting. But setting aside a little admittedly unauthorized dad time, had he even broken a law today?
Even Anabeth seemed stumped for an answer. ‘I’m still not sure I understand what you’re asking me.’
‘I haven’t done anything wrong.’
‘How is that relevant?’
‘Between the three of us, the water boy, the guys, and whatever corroborating evidence we find in the Fir
st Floor IT GoPro archive, shouldn’t we be running to the police?’
Abe tilted her head. ‘I can’t tell if that’s a serious suggestion.’
‘Look, obviously they’re not going to believe some crazy story about a mud monster from out of the past,’ he said. ‘But Gordon strung up hidden security cameras all the way around that van. Twenty bucks says there’s a hard drive rigged up somewhere in there with ten different angles on what happened back at Christine’s. And I know those guys were recording this morning – nobody under twenty-five thinks they did anything if they don’t put it on YouTube.’
‘Hey, Charley,’ Abe said. ‘You’re younger than twenty-five, right?’
‘I’ll be fourteen in three weeks.’
‘Ah! Happy Birthday.’ She reached out and gave his arm a friendly squeeze. ‘So if you went on YouTube and found a video of a mud monster from out of the past attacking people in the woods, what would you think about that?’
Charley shrugged. ‘I’d think it was fake.’
Abe raised her eyebrows at Ben.
‘Yeah, sure,’ Ben said. ‘Fine. But they’ll see something. The time code will put us at my place. Emergency logs will show what time we got to Ashland. I’d have needed a rocket launcher to do that kind of damage to my own house in that amount of time. Then there’s Dr Blotto over there.’ He jerked a thumb back toward Wasserman in the corner. ‘Him and his psycho-stalker scrapbook.’
‘Now you’ve gone back to being unkind.’
‘No good deed goes unpunished,’ Wasserman mumbled.
‘And don’t forget poor Jeeter.’ A horrible thought popped into Ben’s head: If he pulls through. He cursed himself for thinking it, even involuntarily. Then he felt angry for being placed in a position to think it in the first place. ‘As soon as he wakes up, he’ll tell the same story we do. And it happens to be the truth. What else is there?’
‘Well, let’s ponder,’ Abe said. ‘I can think of at least one thing.’
‘Which is?’
She smiled at Charley. ‘Blue eyes, do you think you could hang tight in here and keep Reuben company for me?’ A nod toward the bathroom. ‘I’d like to speak to your dad in private a minute.’
‘We can talk out here. They’re both part of this.’ Ben looked at Charley. ‘If you want.’
Kill Monster Page 14
