by Jude Hardin
CHAPTER TWO
GRIEVING PARENTS DIE IN FIERY CRASH
John Rock was sitting at a booth at Dairy Queen, drinking a cup of coffee and reading the newspaper. As he read the article on the front page of the Metro section, a series of images flashed through his mind like a scene from a horror movie.
In John Rock’s vision, a man named Jake Worthington had a nice little cabin on a nice little lake on the outskirts of a nice little town. It was his retirement home, his reward for working thirty years in a factory. He enjoyed his life, mostly, but today he had a headache, and the incessant pounding next door wasn’t making it any better.
It was a bright sunny Tuesday, and Jake should have been out on the lake fishing, but he hadn’t been himself lately. There were the voices, for one thing. Every time he turned on the air conditioner and went to take a nap, he would hear what sounded like a radio announcer in the distance. Like someone calling a ballgame or something. And when he closed his eyes anymore, whether he was napping or not, visions of human limbs and torsos and heads whirled through his mind like a bloody tornado from Hell.
And now that incessant pounding.
Like most of the people in this tiny lakefront community, the family who owned the house next door only used it for a weekend getaway. Rich folks. Their son was on break from college for the summer, and he was building a deck onto the back of the cabin.
Jake looked out the window and watched him work. The young man’s name was Colin, but for years Jake had been referring to him as the kid. Jake had been sort of a surrogate grandfather to him when he was younger. When the kid was five or six, he would show up at 5:30 in the morning sometimes with a worm pail or a cricket cage and eagerly bang on Jake’s front door until Jake dragged himself out of bed and answered and let him come in. The two of them would go out in Jake’s flat-bottom johnboat for hours, until the sun got too hot and the fish stopped biting.
“Thanks for being my grandpa,” the kid said one time back then. “My real grandpa’s not here anymore.”
“Did he move away?” Jake asked.
“He’s in Heaven,” the kid said. “Mommy says we’ll all be together again someday.”
“Well, I imagine your mom’s right,” Jake said. “I just imagine she’s right.”
The kid was all grown up now, twenty-one or twenty-two, and he hardly ever came to see Jake anymore. It had been years since Jake and the kid had gone out fishing together.
The kid usually had someone helping him work on the deck, but today he was alone. He had his shirt off and his back was tanned and sweaty and his muscles glistened in the hot sunlight.
Jake decided to walk over there for a minute. He took his tackle box with him.
“Hey, buddy,” Jake said.
The kid looked up. “Hey, Mr. Worthington. What’s up?”
“Thought you might want to go down in the shade and drop a line with me. I got a jug of iced tea we could take with us.”
“Sounds good, but I better keep working. I want to get this section done before the sun goes down. Come on over for a beer later.”
“I just might do that,” Jake said. “I just might do that.”
The kid went back to hammering. Jake picked up a scrap piece of two-by-four and swung it like a baseball bat into the back of the kid’s head. The kid fell face-first onto the deck and had a little seizure. Then he was still. Jake turned him on his back and nailed his hands to the deck.
“Try to keep working now,” Jake said.
The kid woke up squinting, the unforgiving August sun doing a number on his retinas. Jake just stood there holding the hammer. When the kid realized his hands were nailed to the deck, he started screaming.
Unfortunately it was Tuesday, and nobody was around to hear him.
“What are you doing?” the kid shouted. “Let me go! Pull these nails out!”
Jake didn’t say anything. He dropped to his knees and opened the tackle box. There were some wooden lures in there he’d had since the late sixties. The paint was faded and the hooks were rusty and he never used them anymore. He selected one and shoved it into the kid’s mouth to shut him up.
The kid’s eyes got big and he started making some noises that weren’t quite human, gurgling noises from the lip blood and tongue blood trickling down his throat.
He was a beautiful young man. Slim and tanned and muscular. He probably had a gym membership and a tanning bed membership, and he probably got a massage a couple of times a week. Jake pulled his filet knife from its sheath and sliced off the kid’s right nipple. The kid thrashed and kicked, and he could have gotten free if he’d wanted to tear his hands to pieces.
Apparently he didn’t want to. Maybe he thought there was still a chance Jake was going to let him live.
Jake went to work with the knife. He swiped the blade across the other nipple and then picked it off with his fingers like a pepperoni. He made a series of shallow cuts on the kid’s chest, just doodling, trying to decide what to do next.
The ears.
Jake kept his filet knife razor sharp, and it slid through the tough cartilage like butter. First the left, then the right. The kid looked funny now with no ears. Jake tried not to laugh, but he couldn’t help himself.
The kid’s eyes rolled back in his head. He was about to pass out. There was a small bottle of rubbing alcohol in the tackle box. Jake used it to clean reel parts, and as an antiseptic for the occasional finger puncture from a hook or a fin. He unscrewed the top and doused the kid with it, exacerbating the pain from all those little cuts exponentially and bringing the kid back to a high level of alertness.
Jake wanted him to feel every bit of what was coming next.
The kid wouldn’t keep his feet still, so Jake went ahead and nailed those to the deck as well. He didn’t bother taking the kid’s sneakers off, just nailed right through them. The kid kept trying to scream, but with the fat wooden six-hook lure in his mouth all he could manage was a whimper.
Hooks! Jake had plenty of those. Shiny new gold ones. He opened a pack of Eagle Claw “LAZER SHARP” worm hooks, pinched one out with his thumb and forefinger, threaded it into the kid’s left nostril and out through the side of his nose. It actually looked kind of nice. Jake thought perhaps he had inadvertently invented a new fashion trend. Well, if one hook looked good, then a dozen would look even better.
Jake went to work.
By the time he was finished, the kid had twelve new piercings on various parts of his body. Jake couldn’t do the nipples, of course, because those were already gone. Now he wished he had saved them for the pierce-fest. He did some more work with the knife, and then used an aluminum fish scaler to skin the kid’s legs.
The kid wasn’t looking so good. Jake supposed the wounds to his nostrils, along with those to his lips and tongue, had caused too much blood to drain into his throat. The kid was drowning.
Jake stood and marveled at the red puddle of mush in front of him, the grisly mound of raw flesh that used to be a human being. Had he really done that?
Oh, please dear God forgive me…
Jake didn’t know what had come over him. For the life of him, he didn’t know.
But John Rock did.
CHAPTER THREE
As far as John Rock was concerned, a fast food joint was the perfect place to have a cup of coffee. You could sit there as long as you wanted, there was always an abandoned newspaper lying around, and you didn’t have to leave a tip. Perfect. John finished his third refill, grabbed his backpack and walked out the door. He left the newspaper for the next drifter who wandered in.
There was a public library directly behind Dairy Queen, and John had planned to spend the morning there reading and surfing the web. So much for that. He crossed the street and strolled over to the building marked Police Department. He opened the door and stepped inside. It was cool and quiet and it smelled like clean floors. A female officer sat at a desk with a computer monitor and a telephone with lots of buttons on it. Her nametag said H. Par
ker. Late twenties or early thirties, short brown hair, blue eyes.
“May I help you?” she said.
“I need to speak to whoever’s in charge,” John said.
“Excuse me?”
“I need to speak to whoever’s in charge,” John said louder.
“If you could tell me the nature of your problem—”
“Are you in charge?”
“I’m the first person you need to talk to if you want to deal with the police today. If you don’t want to talk to me, you can leave.”
John sighed. “There’s going to be more murders around here.”
“Excuse me?” she said again.
“There’s going to be more murders around here,” John said louder.
She stood, rested her hand on her pistol grip, tried to look imposing. She might have been five-five. John was a foot taller and outweighed her by a hundred pounds. He could have swatted her like a gnat. Not that he would have. John Rock never hit women, even ones who happened to be cops.
“What are you talking about?” H. Parker said.
“A young man named Colin Smith was butchered by an old man named Jake Worthington at a lake house fifty miles south of here. Colin’s parents died in a car crash on the way home from his funeral. Nobody knows it yet, but that was a murder too. There’s going to be more.”
She smiled. “What are you, some kind of psychic?”
“Yes.”
She stopped smiling. “Look, the crash was an accident. The fuel tank ruptured and the car caught fire. Nobody could have planned that.”
“If you say so.”
“Is there anything else I can help you with today, sir?”
“I need to speak to whoever’s in charge.”
She looked him over. Khaki work clothes, tattered and stained. Craftsman boots and a yellow ballcap.
There were three identical khaki shirts and three identical pairs of khaki pants in John Rock’s backpack. He bathed and changed his clothes daily, and he went to the Laundromat twice a week. He worked when he needed to. He was not a bum. That’s what she was thinking, but she was wrong.
“Got some ID?” she said.
John opened his wallet, handed her his driver’s license.
“This is expired,” she said.
“That’s okay. I don’t drive anymore.”
“Is the address correct?”
“No.”
“Where do you live?”
“Here and there.”
“You’re homeless?”
“If that’s the word you like.”
She took a deep breath, exhaled slowly. “I’m going to let you talk to my sergeant,” she said.
“Is your sergeant in charge?”
“Yes.”
“Good. See, we could have saved a lot of time if you had just—”
“Excuse me.” A demand this time, not a question. It was her favorite phrase. She punched some numbers into the telephone and talked to someone briefly and then hung up.
A few minutes later a man wearing the cleanest and most sharply-pressed uniform John had ever seen opened the door marked POLICE ONLY. He was probably about John’s age. African American, gray around the temples, physically fit. He looked at John and said, “Leave the backpack.”
“The backpack goes where I go,” John said.
“You got any weapons in there?”
“I have a straight razor.”
“You gonna cut me with it?”
“No.”
“All right. Come on back.”
John followed him to an office with a steel gray desk and a coat rack and a file cabinet. There was a nylon policeman’s jacket and a policeman’s hat hanging on the coat rack. A laptop and a pencil caddy and some family photographs took up most of the space on the desk. The officer introduced himself as Sergeant Bryan Richardson. John Rock introduced himself as John Rock. They shook hands and then sat down.
“Why does your name sound familiar?” Sergeant Richardson asked.
“I was almost famous one time,” John said.
Richardson snapped his fingers. “Break on Through with John Rock. I remember that show. You talk to dead people, right?”
“They talk to me. Sometimes.”
“So what happened? Why aren’t you doing the show anymore?”
“They wanted a performing seal. I’m not one.”
“So what are you doing now?”
“I pick up jobs here and there.”
“I see,” Richardson said. “Well, what can I help you with today?”
“There’s going to be more murders around here,” John said.
Sergeant Richardson took one of the pencils from the caddy on the desk and scribbled something on a notepad. PICK UP DRY CLEANING. John read the block letters upside down from across the desk. It was a to-do list.
“Sorry,” Richardson said. “You were saying something about murders?”
“A young man named Colin Smith was butchered by an old man named Jake Worthington at a lake house fifty miles south of here. Colin’s parents died in a car crash on the way home from his funeral. Nobody knows it yet, but that was a murder too. There’s going to be more.”
“And how do you know this?”
“How do I know Colin’s parents were murdered? Or how do I know there’s going to be more.”
“Let’s start with Colin’s parents.”
“I read the article in the newspaper a while ago. When I read it, I just knew. It was no accident that Charles and Judy Smith burned to death in that car.”
“So what do you think happened?”
“I don’t know for sure, but if I had to guess I would say the truck driver at the scene was responsible.”
“That’s quite an accusation.”
“He was the only other person around. It had to have been him.”
“Or maybe it was just an accident, like the report says.”
“It wasn’t.”
“What makes you so sure?” Richardson asked.
“There’s an entity involved,” John said. “A female. She’s mad as hell about something.”
“An entity. You mean a ghost?”
“If that’s the word you like.”
“So you’re trying to tell me that a ghost was responsible for Colin Smith’s murder. Not Jake Worthington, who we have in custody, but a ghost. And you’re trying to tell me that this ghost was also responsible for Colin’s parents dying in a car crash the day of Colin’s funeral.”
“That’s it. In a nutshell.”
“And this ghost is going to kill again?”
“Definitely,” John said.
CHAPTER FOUR
Jeri Dawson hadn’t missed a day of work in over two years—practically a world’s record for a registered nurse working fulltime in a hospital and twice a month at a clinic.
Contrary to popular belief, doctors and nurses do get sick.
Today, Jeri was sick.
She had gotten up and taken some Tylenol and a decongestant, and had driven to work thinking she would be able to soldier through for twelve hours.
At 10:00am she took her own temperature. 102.8.
She called the nursing supervisor on the phone.
“Nursing office, this is Kris.”
“Kris, this is Jeri Dawson on nine south. I feel like crap. I’m going to have to take a sick day. I’m so sorry.”
“Are you sure?” Kris said. “We don’t have anybody to cover for you. If you leave now, the other nurses there are going to have to pick up your patients.”
“I have a temp, and I’m nauseated. Believe me, I would stay if I could.”
“Do you want to go to the ER?”
“It’s probably a virus,” Jeri said. “I just need to go home and stay in bed for a couple of days. I’ll be all right.”
“Okay, we’ll put you down for a personal leave day. Hope you feel better.”
“Thanks.”
Jeri wrote a report on her patients and handed it to the charge n
urse. She apologized, knowing how hard it was going to be on the other nurses. She called the nursing office again and requested an escort to the parking garage. She took the elevator to the ground floor and exited through the door by the cafeteria. A car marked SECURITY was waiting at the curb.
“I’m in the garage,” Jeri said.
“Hop in.”
Jeri had seen the officer around campus plenty of times. Tall skinny white guy in his early thirties. Always looked like he needed a shave. She got in the car and shut the door. The officer wheeled through the patient parking area, adhering to the posted speed limit of 10 mph.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Jeri.”
“I’m Sam.”
“Pleased to meet you, Sam.”
“Likewise. Look like you don’t feel too good.”
“I’m sick. That’s why I’m leaving work”
“Must be going around. My sister’s family had it last week. Liked to kill my brother-in-law. You married?”
“Yes.”
Sam looked disappointed. He exited the parking lot and took a left.
“Got any kids?” Sam asked.
“Three. Hey, the garage is that way.” She pointed in the other direction.
“I know where it is. I have another employee to pick up. Best to kill two birds, you know?”
Jeri didn’t say anything. She just wanted to get to her car and drive home and go to bed. Her husband wouldn’t be picking the kids up from daycare until 5:30, so that would give her several hours of uninterrupted rest. She hoped to shake this thing and be back to work at least by Saturday, her day at the clinic.
#
Sam pulled into the driveway of the partially-built Proton Therapy Center. Work on the facility had come to a screeching halt several months ago because a federal grant hadn’t come through. The hospital was in the process of filing again, and planned to resume construction as soon as possible. Or so they said.
It always boiled down to money, Sam thought. Bureaucratic red tape. How many people were going to die of cancer in the meantime? It was a damn shame. That’s what it was. A damn shame.
