She shushed him the way a mother does to calm a frightened child. “James, my sweet little Pickle, come here and let Mother make it all better. I can take all the pain away. Listen to my words. I only want to help you. Will you listen to your mother? Will you do what she says?”
“Yes. Of course,” he said. Or perhaps he’d only thought the words.
He fell forward into the void. And as the blackness enfolded him, he could see the figure was not his mother at all. It was something huge, with a brightly colored face. They were somewhere else now. The colors swirled and shifted on the creature’s face. James wanted to float in them, to let them wash all over his body. But most of all, he wanted to obey.
5
Corbin watched as the tow truck dropped into gear. The rear end shuddered and bucked. Wheels scraped on loose gravel, slipping and catching on the grade of the hill. They found purchase, and the truck lurched forward. The rusty length of chain attached to the wreck tightened, pulling the overturned Ford off its roof and onto its tires as the truck breasted the hill and climbed back up onto the road. The wrecked Ford Custom righted and settled, shedding shrapnel to the ground in a chorus of shrill sounds. Then it was still.
No more than twenty feet away from the tow truck, Hank Barrett, Gilchrist’s local physician, was loading Danny’s body, covered in a white sheet, into the back of Buck Ryerson’s Buick hearse-ambulance combination, with the help of Buck. Virgil Gillespie, the photographer, had already come and gone.
“What now, Chief?” Billy Porter asked. Billy was a third-year officer in his mid-twenties. He was of average height, with a slender, athletic build and a smart face that didn’t always match his personality. He scratched the top of his head, looking back toward the hearse. “Kid’s head was nearly gone. I ain’t never seen nothing like that before.” He burped, covering his mouth with his forearm, then dropped it with a shameful look in his eyes. “I don’t usually get sick like that. I just ain’t never seen—”
“You’ll be fine,” Corbin said. “Shake it off.”
Billy’s eyes dropped for a moment but quickly lifted. “None of this don’t make no sense. The road’s so narrow. He’d have to be going real fast to get mangled that way, and maybe not even that would be enough. What do you figure happened?”
“Probably was going real fast, as you said,” Corbin said, not quite buying his own words. “We’ve had some complaints about kids speeding up and down this road, coming from Big Bath, all boozed up. It was bound to happen sooner or later.”
“Yeah, but those are high school boys, Chief. Danny was older. I heard he’d just graduated college and was about to start school to be a pharmacist. I can’t imagine…”
Corbin looked at him, understanding where the train of thought had been heading. “I know. It doesn’t seem right he’d be out getting drunk and racing around like that. People make mistakes, though, I guess.”
Hesitating, Billy said, “I suppose.”
Corbin pinched his lower lip between his thumb and index finger, the way he did sometimes when he was thinking. “I’m hungry. You hungry? I think there’s an apple in my cruiser. Go up and fetch it. And tell Buck and Hank they can head out when they’re finished.”
Billy looked at Corbin with a dumb-flat expression, then blinked twice. When Corbin didn’t look back at him, he headed up the hill to do as he’d been asked.
“How much more time you gonna need, Corb?” Nate Osterman yelled down as Billy went past him, walking up. Nate was standing up on the road at the back of his tow truck, hands tucked into the pockets of his grease-stained coveralls.
“Give us twenty, then you can haul it away to the station,” Corbin said across his shoulder. “Until then, I don’t want to hear a word.”
Nate didn’t respond, only ran a hand over his head and went back and sat in the cab of his truck.
Nate Osterman was a drunk who, more than likely, had been halfway through his nightly case of beer when he got the call to come out. Chances were, he was itching to get back and finish off the other half, if he hadn’t already been doing so in his truck.
Corbin sighed, then clicked on his flashlight and swept it over the car and the ground around it. The dirt near the car and where the body had been lying was scored with deep gouges, likely made by the car as it careened down the embankment. Then something occurred to him. The marks on the ground made a connection in his mind. It was a simple thing, but that was the way it worked in real-life police work, not like it did in fictional police stories. The simple details always revealed the most. It was the little things that were easily overlooked.
He walked a few feet up the hill until he could see the surface of the road. He flashed his light on the ground, searching. There had been a little bit of traffic from their cars coming and going, but nothing that should’ve hid or erased what he knew should be there.
“What’re you looking for?” Billy asked as he returned.
“You find my dinner?” Corbin asked, not looking at him. He was focused on the road, slowly walking along the embankment, halfway up it.
“Yeah, I got it,” Billy said, minding his footing on the hill’s loose terrain and digging in his heels. “Just an apple? That what you call dinner?”
“Meryl’s got me watching my figure. Says fruit’s good for me. Bring it here. Say, Billy, does it strike you as odd that there ain’t a single skid mark in the dirt? Just these strange little diagonal marks.” He turned to Billy and took the apple. “Seems to me like this fella must’ve hit something in the road, since I don’t see any signs he veered off and clipped anything on the shoulder.”
“Not sure I follow, Chief.”
“If it was something in the road that he hit, why the hell didn’t he put on his brakes before running into it? Anything that’d cause a wreck like this one is something a man would see coming, I’d think… drunk or not.”
“Yeah,” Billy said, sounding unsure. “That makes sense to me, I suppose. If it was a coon or something, I wouldn’t go putting both feet on the brakes or cutting the wheel into a ditch. But a deer? Sure, that can do some real hurt to a car. I’d try to avoid that.”
“Me too.” Corbin continued along the embankment. He couldn’t find a single sign that Danny had even tried to stop. But there also wasn’t anything to suggest that he had hit an animal, either—no blood, no hair… no corpse. Although he knew if the car had struck something big enough to cause an accident like this one, there was a good chance it could’ve taken off running into the woods. It probably wouldn’t get very far before succumbing to its injuries, though.
Corbin shuffled down the hill and inspected the front of the car, specifically the grill. No trace of hair or blood. It didn’t look like the vehicle had struck anything with a pulse. In every accident he had seen involving an animal, it had left traces behind on the car, usually tufts of coarse hair, almost always on the grill.
“See anything?” Billy asked.
Corbin straightened and turned around, flashing his light at Billy. He finally took a bite of the apple. “I see a car accident that don’t make a lot of sense. And lots of blood.” He moved the light down to Billy’s feet. “You’re stepping in it.”
“Aww jeez.” Billy took a quick step back, checking the bottoms of his boots.
Corbin could smell the mineral scent of the blood in the dirt, mixed with the oily undertones of spilled gasoline from the car. There was another smell, too, one that had been only faintly present when he’d first arrived but had since become more pronounced. It smelled almost like wet ash and spoiled meat.
He took another bite of his apple, then cocked his arm back and threw the half-eaten fruit into the woods. “I hate apples. They hurt my gums.”
Billy didn’t say anything to that; he was still trying to get the blood off the bottom of his boots, scuffing them in the dirt and checking with his flashlight.
A door slammed up on the road and an engine started. Hank was standing at the top of the embankment. “We’re going t
o get the body back to the funeral home, if you don’t need us anymore.”
“Yeah, you two can get on out of here,” Corbin said. “I’ll meet you there soon. Maybe give the coroner a call and let him know he’ll have to meet us at Buck’s.”
“All right,” Hank said, then turned and went back to the hearse. He got in, and Buck drove them both away.
Corbin glanced around, looking at everything but seeing nothing. He felt in a daze. The whole thing didn’t sit right. As far as he should be concerned, it was a simple car accident. Open and shut. Sure, there would be a difficult call to make to the kid’s parents, but after that, it would all be behind him. So why couldn’t he shake the feeling that there was something more to this?
He went back to the embankment and carefully made his way up it. He started walking along the shoulder, searching for anything out of the ordinary, some small detail that didn’t quite belong, anything that might speak to how the kid’s car ended up upside down and in a ditch without a single sign that he’d touched the brakes. He didn’t know what he was looking for, only that he would know it when he saw it.
Maybe it had been a stroke or a heart attack. The kid was young, true, but stranger things had happened.
As it turned out, what he was looking for was on a tree nestled in a thicket of brush a few feet off the shoulder. There was a peculiar pattern in the side of the tree’s bark—indentations of some kind. He went up to it to take a better look. The mark started at the side of it and wrapped around the back all the way to the other side. The side facing the road, however, was free of markings. He touched a piece of the flaking bark near one of the oddly shaped indents. He pushed down with the tip of his finger. It was damp and slightly spongy. The exposed tree flesh was fresh, not gray and hardened with time. The wound was recent.
“Billy, come have a look at this,” he said. “Quit worrying about your shoes.”
Billy, still fixated on the blood on his boots, stopped wiping his soles in the dirt and came up the hill. “What is it?”
“Look.” Corbin painted the spot on the tree with his flashlight. “What do you make of this?”
“Make of what?”
“These marks,” Corbin said. “They look new, don’t they?”
Billy leaned in closer and touched the scored bark with his finger. “Yeah, they’re pretty fresh, I guess. Maybe a piece of the car hit it. Didn’t you say that Jim found the bumper in the road?”
“Yeah, but I don’t think it’s that,” Corbin said. “It looks like something was wrapped around the tree… tight. Take a look at how the marks go almost all the way around.”
“What the hell would be wrapped around it?” Billy asked.
“I haven’t a clue,” Corbin said. “Wait here a second.”
He went to the other side of the road and started searching. At first he looked directly across from where he had found his first little out-of-place detail. Sometimes he thought of them like small fingerholds, each one bringing him farther up the mountain.
He started to make his way down the road, heading in the direction away from town. Once again, it didn’t take long. The second tree, which was at an angle from where Billy was still standing, was much larger than the first and had a thicker skin of bark, but the markings were visible on it just the same—a ring of odd imprints three quarters of the way around. And like on the other tree, the side facing the road was strangely free of the marks. Only that wasn’t exactly accurate. The section where the bark was left untouched wasn’t squarely facing the road; it was facing the other tree.
“Ain’t that interesting,” Corbin said under his breath, then clicked his tongue against his teeth. He flashed his light to where Billy was standing next to the tree across the road. Billy had returned to wiping off his boots in the dirt.
“You about done, Corb?” Nate Osterman asked, leaning his head out of the tow truck. “I wouldn’t mind gettin home soon. It’s gonna be a bear pullin that wreck up this embankment. You seen how steep it is.”
Corbin lowered his flashlight and looked over at Nate. “All right, go ahead. Hook it up and bring it to the station. Randy will unlock the gate for you when you get there. You can take it around to the back lot.”
“Appreciate it, Corb.” The truck’s door squealed open and Nate hopped out, a beer can clattering to the ground behind him. He picked it up and tossed it back in the cab of the truck, attempting to conceal it.
“I’m going to pretend I didn’t see that,” Corbin said, his tone that of a fed-up teacher dealing with a habitually unruly student. “And I’m going to ignore it because I know you’ll hold off on getting completely pissed until you haul my evidence back to the station. Do we understand each other? No more drinking. We got one car accident tonight, and I don’t need another.”
Nate rubbed the back of his head, refusing eye contact. “I ain’t had but the one—”
“And it better be the last one,” Corbin interrupted. “You hear me?”
“Yeah, Corb, whatever you say,” Nate said, sounding very much like a scolded child.
“Good. Now go on and get to it.” Corbin went back across the road as Nate set to work hooking up the wreck.
“You see anything over there?” Billy asked when Corbin returned.
When Corbin was a kid, he and his brother used to play army games in the woods behind his house. Sometimes, when they were really getting into it, they would try to set small booby traps for each other. His brother’s favorite used to be to use a piece of their father’s fishing line to tie a tripwire across the main path behind the house and see if Corbin would stumble into it. That was the first thing that had come to Corbin’s mind when he saw those markings on the trees: someone had tied a tripwire across the path. But it was just a wild hunch. Too early to be sure.
Corbin looked at him. “No,” he said. “I didn’t find a thing.”
For now, he would keep his hunches to himself.
6
It was almost four o’clock in the morning, and Corbin hadn’t slept in nearly twenty-four hours. He was standing in the basement morgue of Buck Ryerson’s funeral home, sipping a cup of weak black coffee while Hank finished looking at the body from the car wreck. Satisfied, he pulled the sheet back up over the kid’s waxy, pale face.
A call had been placed to the county ME, and Danny Metzger’s parents had been notified. They had already come and gone, making a positive identification of their son. Mrs. Metzger had fainted when Hank peeled back the white sheet and she saw her boy lying there with his Silly Putty skin and a caved-in skull. Hank had draped a towel over the worst parts, but he couldn’t hide it all.
Carter Metzger, who owned the local butcher shop, had tried to remain strong—and he had held it together at first—but eventually he broke down in tears. When they left, they had been in no better shape, and Corbin really felt for them. He couldn’t imagine having to bury a child.
Hank went to the small sink and washed his hands. “I don’t think you need a doctor to tell you how this boy died. His head was crushed. And if that didn’t do it, the injuries to his neck would have. His carotid and his jugular were both severed. So take your pick. Must’ve been going a sight over the speed limit, if you want my opinion.”
Henry “Hank” Barrett was a man of generous height and girth, with leathery sun-cured skin. He was in his mid-sixties and wore square dark-rimmed glasses and a military crop of silver hair.
“Something’s not sitting right with me.” Corbin was leaning against a steel support column in the center of the room. He yawned and rubbed the heel of his palm into each of his eyes, one at a time. A fountain of lights flashed behind the lids. The coffee wasn’t helping any, but he hadn’t expected it to.
Hank looked across his shoulder as he washed his hands. “Why? What’s the matter?”
“I wish I knew. It just feels… wrong, I guess.”
“Well, seems clear to me, but I won’t tell you your job.” Hank picked up a towel above the sink and started to d
ry his hands. “Want another opinion, this one as your personal physician?”
“No. But I get the feeling that won’t stop you,” Corbin said.
“Go home and get some sleep. The autopsy will give you an official cause, if they decide to do one. They might not since he was practically decapitated and it looks pretty obvious that it was a car accident.”
“All right.” Corbin sighed. It wasn’t the cause of death that didn’t sit right with him; it was the accident itself. “Will you excuse me a moment? Coffee went right on through.”
“Don’t let me stop you,” Hank said.
Billy Porter was sitting in a desk chair by the door, pale-faced, hat in his lap, when Corbin turned around. He had almost forgotten Billy was there.
“I never thought a car accident could do that to a person,” Billy said tonelessly, eyes avoiding the body on the steel table. He pulled a pack of Clark’s Teaberry gum from his pocket and popped a piece in his mouth.
“Yup, it’s a bad one,” Corbin said.
Billy looked up at him. “Sorry, Chief.”
“You won’t get sick again, will you?”
“No, I’ll be fine… promise. Caught me by surprise earlier. That’s all it was.”
“You sure?”
“I’ll be fine.”
Corbin scratched the side of his face. “Okay. I’ll be right back.”
He walked out into the hall, opened the bathroom door, and went in, closing it behind him. He locked the door and went to the sink. Turning on the faucet, he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror. Below his eyes looked like crescents of deeply bruised flesh. Bending down, he christened his face, then patted it dry with a paper towel. He brought a handful of water to his mouth, rinsed, and spat. That done, he dipped two fingers into his breast pocket and pulled out the Benzedrine inhaler. He hated having to use it—it felt like some sort of cheater’s last resort—but duty called, and the coffee wasn’t pulling its weight. He removed the cap and put the end of the inhaler to his nose, pressed a finger against his open nostril, creating a seal, and breathed in deep, head angled back. His skin immediately flushed warm, especially the tops of his ears.
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