* * *
Following the directions Sarah Kiel had given Rachael, Ben turned off the state route onto a narrow, poorly maintained macadam lane that climbed a steep slope. The lane led deeper into the forest, where the deciduous trees gave way entirely to evergreens, many of which were ancient and huge. They drove half a mile, passing widely separated driveways that served houses and summer cottages. A couple of structures were fully visible, though most could barely be seen between the trees or were entirely hidden by foliage and forest shadows.
The farther they went, the less the sun intruded upon the forest floor, and Rachael's mood darkened at the same rate as the landscape. She held the thirty-two pistol in her lap and peered anxiously ahead.
The pavement ended, but the road continued with a gravel surface for more than another quarter of a mile. They passed just two more driveways, plus two Dodge Chargers and a small motor home parked in a lay-by near one driveway, before coming to a closed gate. Made of steel pipe, painted sky blue, and padlocked, the gate was unattached to any fence and served only to limit vehicular access to the road beyond, which further declined in quality from gravel to dirt.
Wired securely to the center of the barrier, a black-and-red sign warned:
no trespassing
private property
“Just like Sarah told you,” Ben said.
Beyond the gate lay Eric Leben's property, his secret retreat. The cabin was not visible, for it was another quarter of a mile up the mountainside, entirely screened by trees from this angle.
“It's still not too late to turn back,” Rachael said.
“Yes, it is,” Ben said.
She bit her lip and nodded grimly. She carefully switched off the double safeties on her pistol.
* * *
Eric used the electric opener to take the lid off a large can of Progresso minestrone, realized he needed a pot in which to heat it, but was shaking too badly to wait any longer, so he just drank the cold soup out of the can, threw the can aside, wiping absentmindedly at the broth that dripped off his chin. He kept no fresh food in the cabin, only a few frozen things, mostly canned goods, so he opened a family-size Dinty Moore beef stew, and he ate that cold, too, all of it, so fast he kept choking on it.
He chewed the beef with something akin to manic glee, taking a strangely intense pleasure from the tearing and rending of the meat between his teeth. It was a pleasure unlike any he had experienced before — primal, savage — and it both delighted and frightened him.
Although the stew was fully cooked, requiring only reheating, and although it was laden with spices and preservatives, Eric could smell the traces of blood remaining in the beef. Though the blood content was minuscule and thoroughly cooked, Eric perceived it not merely as a vague scent but as a strong, nearly overpowering odor, a thrilling and thoroughly delicious organic incense, which caused him to shudder with excitement. He breathed deeply and was dizzied by the blood fragrance, and on his tongue it was ambrosian.
When he finished the cold beef stew, which took only a couple of minutes, he opened a can of chili and ate that even more quickly, then another can of soup, chicken noodle this time, and finally he began to take the sharp edge off his hunger. He unscrewed the lid from a jar of peanut butter, scooped some out with his fingers, and ate it. He did not like it as well as he liked the meat, but he knew it was good for him, rich in the nutrients that his racing metabolism required. He consumed more, cleaned out most of the jar, then threw it aside and stood for a moment, gasping for breath, exhausted from eating.
The queer, painless fire continued to burn in him, but the hunger had substantially abated.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw his uncle Barry Hampstead sitting in a chair at the small kitchen table, grinning at him. This time, instead of ignoring the phantom, Eric turned toward it, took a couple of steps closer, and said, “What do you want here, you son of a bitch?” His voice was gravelly, not at all like it had once been. “What're you grinning at, you goddamn pervert? You get the hell out of here.”
Uncle Barry actually began to fade away, although that was not surprising: He was only an illusion born of degenerated brain cells.
Unreal flames, feeding on shadows, danced in the darkness beyond the cellar door, which Eric had evidently left open when he had come back upstairs with the Wildcard file. He watched the shadowfires. As before, he felt some mystery beckoning, and he was afraid. However, emboldened by his success in chasing away Barry Hampstead's shade, he started toward the flickering red and silver flames, figuring either to dispel them or to see, at last, what lay within them.
Then he remembered the armchair in the living room, the window, the lookout he had been keeping. He had been distracted from that important task by a chain of events: the unusually brutal headache, the changes he had felt in his face, the macabre reflection in the mirror, the Wildcard file, his sudden crippling hunger, Uncle Barry's apparition, and now the false fires beyond the cellar door. He could not concentrate on one thing for any length of time, and he cried out in frustration at this latest evidence of mental dysfunction.
He moved back across the kitchen, kicking aside an empty Dinty Moore beef stew can and a couple of soup cans, heading for the living room and his abandoned guardpost.
* * *
Reeeeee, reeeeee, reeeeee… The one-note songs of the cicadas, monotonous to the human ear but most likely rich in meaning to other insects, echoed shrilly yet hollowly through the high forest.
Standing beside the rental car, keeping a wary eye on the woods around them, Ben distributed four extra shotgun shells and eight extra rounds for the Combat Magnum in the pockets of his jeans.
Rachael emptied out her purse and filled it with three boxes of ammunition, one for each of their guns. That was surely an excessive supply — but Ben did not suggest that she take any less.
He carried the shotgun under one arm. Given the slightest provocation, he could swing it up and fire in a fraction of a second.
Rachael carried the thirty-two pistol and the Combat Magnum, one in each hand. She wanted Ben to carry both the Remington and the.357, but he could not handle both efficiently, and he preferred the shotgun.
They moved off into the brush just far enough to slip around the padlocked gate, returning to the dirt track on the other side.
Ahead, the road rose under a canopy of pine limbs, flanked by rock-lined drainage ditches bristling with dead dry weeds that had sprung up during the rainy season and withered during the arid spring and summer. About two hundred yards above them, the lane took a sharp turn to the right and disappeared. According to Sarah Kiel, the lane ran straight and true beyond the bend, directly to the cabin, which was approximately another two hundred yards from that point.
“Do you think it's safe to approach right out on the road like this?” Rachael whispered, even though they were still so far from the cabin that their normal speaking voices could not possibly have carried to Eric.
Ben found himself whispering, too. “It'll be okay at least until we reach the bend. As long as we can't see him, he can't see us.”
She still looked worried.
He said, “If he's even up there.”
“He's up there,” she said.
“Maybe.”
“He's up there,” she insisted, pointing to vague tire tracks in the thin layer of dust that covered the hard-packed dirt road.
Ben nodded. He had seen the same thing.
“Waiting,” Rachael said.
“Not necessarily.”
“Waiting.”
“He could be recuperating.”
“No.”
“Incapacitated.”
“No. He's ready for us.”
She was probably right about that as well. He sensed the same thing she did: oncoming trouble.
Curiously, though they stood in the shadows of the trees, the nearly invisible scar along her jawline, where Eric had once cut her with a broken glass, was visible, more visible than it usually was i
n ordinary light. In fact, to Ben, it seemed to glow softly, as if the scar responded to the nearness of the one who had inflicted it, much the way that a man's arthritic joints might alert him to an oncoming storm. Imagination, of course. The scar was no more prominent now than it had been an hour ago. The illusion of prominence was just an indication of how much he feared losing her.
In the car, on the drive up from the lake, he had tried his best to persuade her to remain behind and let him handle Eric alone. She was opposed to that idea — possibly because she feared losing Ben as much as he feared losing her.
They started up the lane.
Ben looked nervously left and right as they went, uncomfortably aware that the heavily forested mountainside, gloomy even at midday, provided countless hiding places — ambush points — very close to them on both sides.
The air was heavily laced with the odor of evergreen sap, the crisp and appealing fragrance of dry pine needles, and the musty scent of some rotting deadwood.
Reeeeee, reeeeee, reeeeee…
* * *
He had returned to the armchair with a pair of binoculars that he had remembered were in the bedroom closet. Only minutes after settling down at the window, before his dysfunctioning thought processes could take off on yet another tangent, he saw movement two hundred yards below, at the sharp bend in the road. He played with the focus knob, pulling the scene in clearer, and in spite of the depth of the shadows at that point along the lane, he saw the two people in perfect detail: Rachael and the bastard she had been sleeping with, Shadway.
He had not known whom he expected — other than Seitz, Knowls, and the men of Geneplan — but he had certainly not expected Rachael and Shadway. He was stunned and could not imagine how she had learned of this place, though he knew that the answer would be obvious to him if his mind had been functioning normally.
They were crouched along the bank that flanked the road down there, fairly well concealed. But they had to reveal a little of themselves in order to get a good look at the cabin, and what little they revealed was enough for Eric to identify them in the magnified field of the binoculars.
The sight of Rachael enraged him, for she had rejected him, the only woman in his adult life to reject him — the bitch, the ungrateful stinking bitch! — and she turned her back on his money, too. Even worse: in the miasmal swamp of his deranged mind, she was responsible for his death, had virtually killed him by angering him to distraction and then letting him rush out onto Main Street, into the path of the truck. He could believe she had actually planned his death in order to inherit the very fortune on which she'd claimed to have no designs. Yes, of course, why not? And now there she was with her lover, with the man she had been fucking behind his back, and she had clearly come to finish the job that the garbage truck had started.
They pulled back beyond the bend, but a few seconds later he saw movement in the brush, to the left of the road, and he caught a glimpse of them moving off into the trees. They were going to make a cautious indirect approach.
Eric dropped the binoculars and shoved up from the armchair, stood swaying, in the grip of a rage so great that he almost felt crushed by it. Steel bands tightened across his chest, and for a moment he could not draw his breath. Then the bands snapped, and he sucked in great lungsful of air. He said, “Oh, Rachael, Rachael,” in a voice that sounded as if it were echoing up from hell. He liked the sound of it, so he said her name again: “Rachael, Rachael…”
From the floor beside the chair, he plucked up the ax.
He realized that he could not handle the ax and both knives, so he chose the butcher's knife and left the other blade behind.
He would go out the back way. Circle around. Slip up on them through the woods. He had the cunning to do it. He felt as if he had been born to stalk and kill.
Hurrying across the living room toward the kitchen, Eric saw an image of himself in his mind's eye: He was ramming the knife deep into her guts, then ripping it upward, tearing open her flat young belly. He made a shrill sound of eagerness and almost fell over the empty soup and stew cans in his haste to reach the back door. He would cut her cut her cut. And when she dropped to the ground with the knife in her belly, he would go at her with the ax, use the blunt edge of it first, smashing her bones to splinters, breaking her arms and legs, and then he would turn the wondrous shiny instrument over in his hands — his strange and powerful new hands! — and use the sharp edge.
By the time he reached the rear door and yanked it open and went out of the house, he was in the grip of that reptilian fury that he had feared only a short while ago, a cold and calculating fury, called forth out of genetic memories of inhuman ancestors. Having at last surrendered to that primeval rage, he was surprised to discover that it felt good.
22
WAITING FOR THE STONE
Jerry Peake should have been asleep on his feet, for he had been up all night. But seeing Anson Sharp humiliated had revitalized him better than eight hours in the sheets could have. He felt marvelous.
He stood with Sharp in the corridor outside Sarah Kiel's hospital room, waiting for Felsen Kiel to come and tell them what they needed to know. Peake required considerable restraint to keep from laughing at his boss's vindictive grousing about the farmer from Kansas.
“If he wasn't a know-nothing shit-kicker, I'd come down so hard on him that his teeth would still be vibrating next Christmas,” Sharp said. “But what's the point, huh? He's just a thick-headed Kansas plowboy who doesn't know any better. No point talking to a brick wall, Peake. No point getting angry with a brick wall.”
“Right,” Peake said.
Pacing back and forth in front of Sarah's closed door, glowering at the nurses who passed in the corridor, Sharp said, “You know, those farm families way out there on the plains, they get strange 'cause they breed too much among themselves, cousin to cousin, that sort of thing, which makes them more stupid generation by generation. But not only stupid, Peake. That inbreeding makes them stubborn as mules.”
“Mr. Kiel sure does seem stubborn,” Peake said.
“Just a dim-witted shit-kicker, so what's the point of wasting energy breaking his butt? He wouldn't learn his lesson anyway.”
Peake could not risk an answer. He required almost superhuman determination to keep a grin off his face.
Six or eight times during the next half hour, Sharp said, “Besides, it's faster to let him get the information out of the girl. She's a dim bulb herself, a drugged-up little whore who's probably had syphilis and clap so often her brain's like oatmeal. I figured it'd take us hours to get anything out of her. But when that shit-kicker came into the room, and I heard the girl say 'Daddy' in that happy-shaky little voice, I knew he'd get out of her what we needed a lot faster than we could get it. Let him do our job for us, I thought.”
Jerry Peake marveled at the deputy director's boldness in trying to reshape Peake's perception of what had actually happened in Sarah's room. Then again, maybe Sharp was beginning to believe that he had not backed down and had cleverly manipulated The Stone, getting the best of him. He was fruitcake enough to buy his own lies.
Once, Sharp put a hand on Peake s shoulder, not in a comradely manner but to be sure of his subordinate's attention. “Listen, Peake, don't you get the wrong idea about the way I came on with that little whore. The foul language I used, the threats, the little bit of hurt I caused her when I squeezed her hand… the way I touched her… didn't mean a thing. Just a technique, you know. A good method for getting quick answers. If this wasn't a national security crisis, I'd never have tried that stuff. But sometimes, in special situations like this, we have to do things for our country that maybe neither we nor our country would ordinarily approve of. We understand each other?”
“Yes, sir. Of course.” Surprised by his own ability to fake naïveté and admiration, and to do it convincingly, Peake said, “I'm amazed you'd worry that I'd misunderstand. I'd never have thought of such an approach myself. But the moment you went to work on h
er… well, I knew what you were doing, and I admired your interrogation skills. I see this case as an opportunity, sir. I mean, the chance to work with you, which I figured would be a very valuable learning experience, which it has been — even more valuable than I'd hoped.”
For a moment Sharp's marble-hard green eyes fixed on Peake with evident suspicion. Then the deputy director decided to take him at his word, for he relaxed a bit and said, ''Good. I'm glad you feel that way, Peake. This is a nasty business sometimes. It can even make you feel dirty now and then, what you have to do, but it's for the country, and that's what we always have to keep in mind.”
“Yes, sir. I always keep that in mind.”
Sharp nodded and began to pace and grumble again.
But Peake knew that Sharp had enjoyed intimidating and hurting Sarah Kiel and had immensely enjoyed touching her. He knew that Sharp was a sadist and a pedophile, for he had seen those dark aspects of his boss surge clearly to the surface in that hospital room. No matter what lies Sharp told him, Jerry Peake was never going to forget what he had seen. Knowing these things about the deputy director gave Peake an enormous advantage — though, as yet, he had absolutely no idea how to benefit from what he had learned.
He had also learned that Sharp was, at heart, a coward. In spite of his bullying ways and impressive physical appearance, the deputy director would back down in a crunch, even against a smaller man like The Stone, as long as the smaller man stood up to him with conviction. Sharp had no compunctions about violence and would resort to it when he thought he was fully protected by his government position or when his adversary was sufficiently weak and unthreatening, but he would back off if he believed he faced the slightest chance of being hurt himself. Possessing that knowledge, Peake had another big advantage, but he did not yet see a way to use that one, either.
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