The Watcher: A Tony Hunter Novel

by H. Leslie Simmons

  When she was aware again she was in a dark place, so dark that she could not see anything around her. She tried to raise her hand to look at it but could not move it. Her hands were apparently tied behind her. Although she could not see to confirm it she was sure that she was naked. Some kind of cloth covered her mouth and brushed against her nose. She could still breath but barely. Oh my God she thought, what kind of nut am I dealing with. She tried to get up but found that her feet had been tied together also. She could troll over but there was no way she could get enough leverage to get to her feet. At first she was Just afraid of what was happening to her. Later she began to fear that she was alone and that no one would ever find her. Her throat was dry and the thought came to that she would die here in this black hole from thirst. She didn’t want to die but most of all she was afraid of how she would die; alone, in fear and pain, with no hope of rescue. She lay there in the dark for a long time but had no way of knowing how long.

  At last some light came into the space where she was lying. It was just a little at first, then it got lighter. She could see the space darkly. There were walls on two sides of the space that looked like they were carved out of solid rock. On a third side the space stretched into total darkness like a deep well. The fourth side was the source of the light. The roof and floor were the same kind of carved rock. It looked to her like she was in a cave. Maybe she thought she could roll toward the light and maybe that would get her out of this cave. She could also see that the cloth that was covering her mouth was actually her panties.

  She rolled over several times and was able to get closer to the light. After several additional rolls, she could see an opening in the cave where the light was coming in. It must be daylight she was seeing. She had been in this hole all night and the sun was just rising. If she could just get out in the open maybe somebody would see her. They would have to just stumble on her because with the panties stuffed into her mouth she could barely speak loud enough to hear herself. There was no way she would be able to yell out for help. She tried to spit out the panties but that just made them go deeper into her throat. If she kept trying that she was afraid that they would go in deep enough to cut off her breathing completely.

  She rolled out of the cave into what looked like deep woods with large pine and oak trees all around he. Nobody was going to find her there. She had just about given up hope when she heard the sound of someone coming. Hope came back and she tried again to wipe the gag from her mouth. As the sounds of someone coming through the brush got closer she turned on her side facing the sound.

  From behind a large oak a man came into view. She was elated, but her elation disappeared rapidly when she saw the man. It was the dark man from the night before. She tried to speak to him, to ask him what he wanted, but all she could get out was a gurgle.

  Quickly the man came to her side and pulled her upright by dragging her by the hair. He twisted her head to the right and pulled it back exposing her neck. She felt a cold sharp pain in her neck and felt her blood cascading down onto her naked breast. She called out for her daddy but the only answer was a sawing sound like paper being torn and severe pain searing around her neck just before her world disappeared.

  Chapter 9

  Maria woke Tony at twelve minutes before six with a nudge. He was groggy but she soon woke him up with a touch here and there. A half hour later, happy, but more wiped out than he was before she woke him, he pulled the cover back up and started to turn over away from her.

  “Tony” she whispered in his ear.

  He turned back toward her beginning to wake up again and reached for her.

  She moved away. “I would really like to accommodate you, Honey, but it’s getting late. I have to go to work and besides you have a date with Thad to catch tonight’s super.”

  After downing two eggs over easy and a slice of ham, Tony was sitting on the porch swing with the morning edition of the Richmond Times Dispatch trying to wake up with his second a cup of strong black coffee when Maria came in with her own a cup and sat next to him. “What time is Thad due?”

  “He’ll be down at the beach at about seven thirty. Say Maria what do you think about that young girl that turned up missing?” He pointed to a small article on page four of the local section of the Richmond Times Dispatch.

  “We think she’s a runaway.”

  “Don’t you cops investigate disappearances?”

  “Of course, Honey. We just don’t think this is anything other than a runaway. It has all the earmarks. She went to bed as usual. The next morning when her mother went to wake her, she was not there. So, she went missing in the middle of the night when no stranger has been seen in the neighborhood. She didn’t take anything with her.”

  “Had she been known to talk about running away?”

  “No. But that’s not unusual. Youngsters don’t always tell their friends what they plan to do. Even if they do, their friends won’t rat on them. Runaways usually show up in a couple of days. The news people go bananas when this kind of thing happens and try to get everybody all excited about it. I guess it sells papers. In a few days when the kid reappears they print two column inches on page 12. It has ceased to be news.

  “All the same it reminds me of what happened here when we were both kids.”

  “Why. Do you think there’s a relationship?”

  “Seems to me that it started out the same way. First a girl goes missing, then another. Then in a few days all Hell breaks loose.”

  “Well, Honey, if all Hell breaks loose then we will consider it more seriously. Right now, we are treating this case as a runaway. Now give me a kiss, I’m on duty in a half hour.

  “Have a good day, and I hope all Hell doesn’t break loose on your shift.

  “See you tonight. Catch a lot of bass for supper. Afterwards we can finish what we started this morning.”

  “Love to, but I suspect dinner will more likely be Crappie. He walked with her to the front door and watched as her squad car went down the driveway and out onto the road to town.

  Chapter 10

  Exactly on time Thad’s boat pulled up next to the beach at the bottom of Tony’s hill and Tony loaded his fishing gear in. Thad was dressed in a pair of wet boots and pants.

  “Looks like you intend to wade for the fish,” Tony said.

  “Good morning, Partner. are you ready to grab a mass of bass this fine morning?”

  “I’m ready and I brought lure for them, but I suspect after a while of no strikes we will go to the Crappie lures.

  “Oh ye of little faith.

  “As Thad started to outboard and pulled away from the beach, Tony’s smart phone sang him a tune. He started to ignore it, then realized that he was due a call from his agent. “I’d better take this, Thad. It’s from my agent about the book I’m supposed to be getting deeply into, but have hardly started. Hello Bart, how are things with you this bright morning. Kind of early for you, isn’t it?”

  “Come on Tony. Where’s my book.”

  “Your book? I thought it was mine.”

  “Always the wise ass aren’t you. Barnes is giving me a fit about this, as you well know. What am I supposed to tell them?”

  “The book isn’t even due for four more months.”

  “You were supposed to get me an up to date for them last week.”

  “Bart we have been working together for eighteen years. You know that I do not issue parts of a book before It’s finished. Horror novels don’t work that way. I’m going to be changing the thing right up to the last minute. Give them an early copy and they will demand that the book follow it. That’s also, as I have told you a dozen times, the reason that I refuse to give anybody an outline. Right now, I’m not sure how the thing is going to end. You will just have to stall them.”

  “Suppose they decide to scrape the book altogether.”

  “Come on, Bart. Do you really think that after I have given them eight best sellers that they are going to dump me now? They are too astute at their bus
iness to do anything that dumb. If it turns out that I am wrong and they are that stupid, there are a half dozen other publishers that would jump at the chance to publish a Tony Hunter horror novel. Stall them, Bart. Look I’m in the middle of an important meeting down here right now and you are keeping my friends cooling their heels with this. So, I’m going to let you go now. I’ll talk to you later this week.” Without waiting for a reply, he touched the phone hang-up button cutting the call off.

  “Are you always that abrupt?” Thad said.

  “Not usually, but he’s beginning to annoy me with this.”

  “Any chance that he might tell you to find another agent?”

  “Not likely. What I said about the publisher applies to him as well. I have had three agents call me this year about my agent status. I suspect that Bart complained to one of them about me being hard to get along with. The publishing world is small, Thad. Everybody knows everybody else. Publishing is also small financially. I read a few years ago that the income of general motors exceeds the entire income from publishing world wide. That may not be still true but I’ll bet it applies to Microsoft or any of the big computer related businesses out there today. The publishing industry is relatively small, so a best-selling author is big stuff to a publisher and even bigger stuff to an agency. Mind if I change the subject?”

  “Of course not. We are almost to my favorite fishing spot anyway. What do you have on your mind?”

  “Have you heard about the girl that disappeared yesterday.”

  “I read it in the paper this morning. Sounds like a girl ran away from home to me.”

  “That’s what Maria said the other cops think too. I’m not so sure. Remember what happened here thirty years ago?”

  “Remind me.”

  “I was twelve that year. A girl a little older than me was killed. At first everybody thought that she had just run away until they found her mutilated body. Then at about four o’clock on a Friday evening in early October just after they found her body, I went down to the river to find my friends. Did you ever go to the river when you were young Thad?”

  “I was usually at the library when most of you young ones were at the swimming hole.”

  “Well that Friday afternoon the shadows were lengthening when I left Main Street and strolled down Eternal Lane to the cemetery. Did you ever go there?”

  “I had a few family members there so I went occasionally but not often and I never went swimming in the river where you and your friends used to go so often.”

  “Of course when they built the dam for the lake they moved the entire cemetery up to where it is now, so there’s no way to see it like it was then. Once through the gate I began to step more briskly as I headed toward the far end of the cemetery and the steep hill leading down to the river.

  The place always made me feel like my hair would stand straight up at any minute, especially when I was alone. I usually walked as fast as I could through the old cemetery. I always breathed a sigh of relief when I got past the stones and rusty iron fences that surrounded family plots and started down the steep hill past the spring to the old canal.”

  Tony hesitated in his narrative. He remembered very clearly what happened that day but wasn’t sure he wanted to tell Thad about it in detail. Thad would probably think it was all his imagination and laugh it off. But it was a lot more than his imagination.

  “Tony. Are you with me? We are just about to the fishing hole. Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. I was just thinking about something that happened to me on the way down to the river that afternoon, but it’s not important.”

  “So how does your trip to the river that day relate to what may be happening now?”

  “I’m not sure. I kind of wanted to get your opinion about it.”

  “Well shoot. I’m willing to listen soon as I get this lure in the water.”

  Tony cast his line in to the south of the boat and let it sink. “Now of course, the canal is all under the lake but then it was a wide ditch cut into the steep bank uphill from the river. It had fifty foot Virginia pines growing in the middle of it where barges once floated down to Petersburg. The river side of the canal had been built up to form a six-foot-high wall between the canal and the steep drop down to the river. It was necessary to climb down into the canal and climb back up to the river bank. Over the years, people had cut steps into both side walls and filled them in with rocks to make a stable stair up and back down. I was a little spooked by something I thought I saw up in the cemetery.

  “Well, what did you see?”

  “Nothing really. You would think I was just a kid with a big imagination.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised at that. You still are. But about what you thought you saw back then, what do you think now? It begins to sound like the beginning of a story from one of your books.”

  “I’ve wondered about it all these years. I wasn’t really sure even back then. One thing I did know then was that my friends were not there that day. But by then I was trapped. If I went back up the hill, I’d probably run into whatever I had seen up there.

  “As I began to go over the canal wall, I saw Craig Cook and two of his buddies, Tom Price and Lee Sanders, lying face down on the opposite canal bank looking over the top of the bank down toward the river. Craig, Tom, and Lee were not the guys I was looking for. They were all older than me and tended to pick on me a bit, especially Craig. Lee turned around and saw me. I started to tell them what had happened to me up in the cemetery, but he held his fingers over his lips and waved for me to join them on the canal bank. I started over toward them walking normally, but Lee skidded over to me and dragged me to the ground.

  “I crawled up to where they were. They were staring over the top of the hill down onto the river. I looked over as well.

  “There was a girl and a boy on the rocks below. I recognized the girl right away. The boy I had to think a bit. Then I knew who he was, too. He was Joquan Brown, a football star at the high school in Petersburg. The girl was my grandparent’s next door neighbor, Lisa Demarco. They were as naked as the day they were born.

  “We watched the pair for at least twenty minutes. Then Craig grabbed a stone from the canal bank, and stood up. The other two followed him. On his command, they each hurled their stones at the couple on the rocks below. None of them could throw a stone that far, but the effect was all the same. When the stones hit, Brown stood up away from Lisa, looked up to where we were on the canal bank and shook his fist. They quickly grabbed up their clothes, ran toward the far river bank, up the bank on that side of the river, and disappeared into the woods.

  “I went home intending to tell my parents what had happened, but by the time I reached home a half hour later, I was no longer sure what I had seen in the cemetery and I didn’t want to say anything about Lisa, so I didn’t tell my parents anything.”

  “Do you still doubt what you saw? Thad said.

  “I think I have always had a very active imagination. It takes me back there when I hear about a little girl disappearing I sure hope there is no relationship as Maria thinks. There is one thing though, I have never used the incident in one of my books. I get too traumatized when I try to write it down.”

  “But I still don’t see what this has to do with what’s happening now.”

  “That was the last time anybody saw either Lisa or Brown alive.”

  Chapter 11

  Five hours later Thad drove his boat up onto the beach and Tony got out and pulled it up further. “Stop in and have a sandwich and maybe a drink?”

  “Sounds like a plan to me. Maybe we can clean these fish before I take any of them home. Helen will appreciate that.”

  Tony pulled the boat further up onto the beach and dropped the anchor into the sand. As they walked toward the house, Tony saw a figure run from the beach into the underbrush at the top of the beach. It looked like a man but was too far away to identify. He was carrying a round bundle in one hand that bounced as he ran.

 
; On the beach lay a form that Tony couldn’t at first make out. “Hey. What do we have here?” As they approached the form it became apparent that there was something sinister there. The form looked like a nude girl. Tony reached for her and began to turn her over. “My God,” he said. Bile filled his mouth and he spat it out. He walked to the water’s edge and vomited his last beer into the lake.

  Thad had his cell phone out and was dialing 911 before Tony got back to where the girl was lying. While Thad was talking to the 911 operator, Tony called Maria.

  Then they examined the girl’s body more carefully. She appeared to be young though it was actually hard to tell. She was naked. Her body had been ripped open and her innards spilled out over her white skin. Her neck showed ragged tissue as if torn rather than cut and her head was nowhere to be seen. Tony looked around in the bushes but still saw no head.

  “Careful,” Thad said. Don’t touch or move anything. This is clearly a crime scene.”

  Tony knew better than to disturb the scene. He had done enough research for his novels and had been on several real crime scenes including one that had happened recently when he and the kids next door had opened the casket of a teacher named Victor Boston that had been also found on his beach. He had been chastised and banned from his own beach by the cops, lead by his old buddy from high school, now police lieutenant, Joe Marshall, and by Maria. The incident had been the beginning of his relationship with Maria. As Tony ruminated about Martin Boston, aka the man in the box, he went to lean against the dead tree that still lay on the beach after being downed by the hurricane that sent him to the hospital and began his experience with Alexander Belikosie, the man who could not die. As he had done that day he heard the far-off wail of a siren followed soon by three uniformed cops descending quickly down the steps from his neighbor Tom Barker’s house to the south.

  The first was Joe Marshall, who was rapidly followed by officers DeShawn Barns and Ransom Parker.