Coggins had calmed too easily when he had found out that Alice wasn’t being held in the room with Corina, he had been too quick to relax following Sheriff White’s meager promises to find her.
Now Paul was beginning to think that maybe Coggins had given up completely, convinced that Alice not being here was a testament to the fact that she was dead, her head lopped off like Nancy’s. And Alice had been the only thing that tethered the man to this world. If Paul’s assumptions were correct, then once that lifeline was severed, his deputy was apt to do something stupid.
Incredibly stupid.
“Alice?” Donnie replied. He used his free hand to flutter like a wounded bird. “Alice is gone. Flew away.”
Paul’s eyes narrowed.
He said gone, not dead.
He hoped that Coggins had picked up on the man’s choice of words. Given the way his jaw was clenched, however, Paul doubted it.
Sheriff White decided to try one last time to get through to Donnie.
“Greg or Donnie, or whatever the fuck you want to be called, what happened to Kent… it was horrible. Just goddamn horrible. But, fuck, everyone lost something—in the storm or from the damn crackers. This place…” He kept his eyes trained on Donnie when he spoke, hoping for something, a crack, a schism, a reaction other than the lecherous grin to indicate that he was getting through to him. “I mean, my god man, my fucking girlfriend’s head was put in a bag! In a fucking bag!”
And then Donnie did react, only it was far from the reaction he expected.
The man laughed, a high-pitched shrill that made Sheriff White’s ears ring.
Greg Griddle, the man with the perfect hair who had stood beside him in battle against the parasites that had infected Askergan County was truly and unequivocally mad.
And like everything else in the county, Sheriff White hadn’t noticed.
He cleared his throat, and this time when he spoke, he lowered his voice an octave.
“If you shoot Coggins, I’ll fucking kill you. No shot in the arm, no wound and take you into custody. I’ll put an inch of lead right between your fucking eyes. You got that?”
Donnie, clearly surprised by this sudden change in tone, turned slightly, affording the Sheriff his first good look at the man since he had pulled himself out from his hiding spot beneath the desk.
He was less than a shadow of his former self the day he had arrived with round-faced Kent, telling what at the time was a fantastical story of creatures attacking the boys out at the Wharfburn estate.
No, he wasn’t a shadow; Donnie Wandry was a wavering apparition of madness and delirium.
His face was slick with sweat, his wide eyes encircled by dark smudges. His hair was a complete mess, his mouth a thin, pale line on his face.
“One shot and this room will fill with bikers, no matter what is going on outside. One shot, and he will come,” Donnie offered as a warning.
Sheriff White swallowed hard, his mind turning to the rumors he had heard about he, about the Crab.
But this momentary sensation of fear was quickly usurped by anger.
The man before him had killed Nancy. Fucking decapitated her of all things. For nearly a week now, Paul had tried to push the fury he felt to the back of his mind, to bury it there, to try and stay level-headed for the sake of the County.
And for a time it had worked.
His eyes flicked up to the two empty chains.
That time was over.
Nancy had hung from the ceiling. Of the seven or eight skins that were stitched together, the one on the left seemed the freshest, the corners still soft and pliable.
He even thought he saw a mole on the spot over the loose skin that he could imagine might have been her left breast. Blinking rapidly, he tried to make the mirage vanish, but it was still there.
It was Nancy’s flesh.
Or maybe it wasn’t.
It didn’t matter now.
“You’re going to pay for—” Donnie began, wagging his gun, indicating for Coggins to move to the other side of the desk.
Sheriff Paul White completely lost it.
“Put the fucking gun down!” he screamed at the top of his lungs. “You fucking put the—”
Donnie, shocked by the sudden intensity of his shouts, turned toward him, the hand holding the gun veering away from Coggins for just a split-second.
It was a split-second he would regret.
Sheriff White pulled the trigger and Sabra’s great room exploded with the sound of a gunshot.
Chapter 41
Dirk was fading in and out of consciousness. One moment he would feel sleepy and his eyelids would droop and then close and the next moment he would feel his breathing slow and they would snap open again. The sequence was making him feel queasy and that, combined with the bumps in whatever dirt road they were traveling on, had him on the verge of vomiting.
The two other men in the car were speaking to each other in low voices, but he couldn’t make out the words. And even if he could hear them, he probably wouldn’t have paid them much head; his thoughts were preoccupied with a time long ago.
Just a few weeks before Timmy the Tiger’s fourth birthday, Dirk and his wife and son had taken a rare vacation. The three of them had driven to Martha’s Vineyard as opposed to flying to save some cash, and had splurged on a cottage only a half mile from the beach. It was nothing special; in fact, it was probably the smallest and least expensive home on the entire island, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was the sun on their faces, the sea breeze in their noses. Time together as a family. After the long drive, they had gone straight to the beach to stretch and get some fresh air. Dirk had laid on his beach chair with a book, but must have dozed off, because the next thing he knew was that there was something scraping its way across his bare chest. His police training kicked in and he awoke instantly, only to be greeted by the two tiny, shining black eyes.
He screamed and leapt out of his lounger, sending the three-inch juvenile crab airborne. Adrenaline coursing through his system, he heard laughter and whipped his head around. Lauren was in stitches, gripping her sides, laughing so hard that she started making the seal barking noise that came out when she really got going.
Dirk had lunged for her then, but Timmy squealed from somewhere off to his left, and he changed course.
He ran after Timmy instead, who was himself laughing so hard that his cheeks were tight and red like two overripe cherries.
For an almost five-year-old, Timmy could run. Eventually, however, Dirk’s long strides helped him catch up and then, while they were still running, he scooped the skinny boy up in his arms, made a sharp right, and headed directly to the shore. It was early June, the off-season rate was the only reason they could afford to rent even the modest cottage, and they were lucky if the water temperature crept into the low seventies.
Timmy shrieked when he was tossed in, all the while Dirk was teasing him, telling him he was so bad, so, so bad.
Later, when he and Timmy were drying off, his son had turned to him and asked, “What makes someone bad, Daddy?”
Dirk frowned, wondering if he had gone too far with the teasing.
“What do you mean?”
“Mommy says that you catch bad guys at work.”
Dirk tousled his son’s hair.
“I didn’t mean that you are bad, Timmy. I was only messing around. You’re a good kid.”
Timmy gently pushed his hand away.
“I know, Daddy. But what makes the bad people you catch bad?”
Dirk stared into his son’s bright blue eyes before answering. It was a strange question for a kid his age, but he had always been impressed by the boy’s curiosity and he had the insight of someone much older.
And he had made a decision long ago never to lie to the boy, and to speak to him as an adult.
“Well, someone is defined by the things they do, I guess. So, in a way, if you do bad things, then you’re probably a bad person. Not always, of course—people make mistakes—but
most of the time.”
Timmy shook his head.
“What I mean is, why do they do the bad things?”
Dirk sat up and wiped some sand from his palms by slapping them together.
“There’s no easy answer to that. Sometimes… sometimes people are just put in bad situations. Other times, they just make the wrong decision. And then there are just plain bad people, people who are born bad and who stay that way.”
Timmy mulled this over for a few seconds before nodding.
“Okay, Daddy,” he said.
“And then there are the real bad ones, the really, really bad ones who put crabs on their dads when they’re sleeping!”
Father Carter’s Mercedes struck a pothole, and Dirk groaned when he was jostled awake again. The tears that rolled off his cheeks felt oddly cool when they landed on the arm draped across his mid-section.
One more thing left to do, he thought. Just one more thing…
Now, along with the blood still coming out of the wound in his stomach, he heard a soft bubbling sound as if someone had tossed a dash of baking powder into a jar of vinegar.
His stomach acid was leaking out of the bullet hole and he knew he didn’t have much time left.
Still, he couldn’t have asked for a better scenario. Heading back to the estate where Mickey would be waiting was the ideal case; if Father Carter had instead decided to dump him at the side of the road to die, all would have been lost.
Dirk grunted and tried his best to straighten from a slouched position. Ribbons of pain radiated throughout his body, but he grit his teeth and somehow managed to remain conscious.
One more thing…
Squinting hard into the night, he thought he could make out the front of the estate not fifty yards from them. He could also see the cartel gangbangers’ car, the rusted Tempo with thick black smoke rising from the hood. Occasionally he also heard the crack of gunfire and was surprised that the shooting had gone on for this long. After all, he had only seen three gangbangers and there were so many of the damn bikers.
But Dirk knew better than to trust his internal clock. He had experienced time’s liquid quality on more than one occasion in the field, the ability of it to dilate or stretch out during times of intense stress. Still, he thought that maybe it had only been about fifteen minutes since he had been shot and had been driven back here.
In the distance, he heard the muted wail of sirens creating the night’s soundtrack, and the sky had acquired a purple hue from their flashing lights. His window of opportunity was closing; it had become more of a porthole of chance.
There was no way that Father Carter would be caught at the estate when the police arrived.
“I’m going to pull up as close as I can get,” Carter said, cutting the lights. “We’ll just push the body out, and you make sure that he’s dead. Then we need to get the fuck out of here. Remember to stay low, they’re still firing.”
In his periphery, Dirk saw Pike nod.
“Here, I’ll pull up—”
Dirk closed his eyes again, this time not thinking about his family, but of the man in the front seat, the one who had betrayed him, given him away, had cost him everything.
The man who didn’t even recognize him.
After a long, slow exhale, Dirk sprung to action. He lunged over the front seat, using his left arm to grab Carter by the throat and then forced the man’s head toward the driver’s side window. Carter croaked and cried out, but as predicted, with his body twisting in that direction, the man’s right foot came down hard on the gas pedal.
Dirk drove his other fist into the man’s right thigh, causing the car to accelerate even more rapidly.
The Mercedes shot forward so suddenly that Dirk was almost thrown against the backseat.
“Pike!” Carter croaked.
Dirk squeezed even tighter.
Also as predicated, the man to his right grabbed his arm, and tried to wrench him off the priest. But Dirk bore down, utilizing all of the strength that he could possibly muster.
His fingers were buried so deeply in the soft skin of Carter’s throat, wrapping around his trachea, that he could feel every one of his ragged breaths.
“Let go!” Pike yelled. He released his grip on Dirk’s arm, and instead snaked a forearm across his throat.
Knowing that he only had a few seconds before he was choked out, Dirk forced all of his weight on top of the back of the driver’s seat. Something deep within the cream colored leather cracked dully.
Lights were whipping by them on either side of the car now, and at long last Carter took his hands off the wheel and grabbed at Dirk’s hand on his throat.
Dirk was spent, and as the forearm on his neck tightened and his pulse started to feel like a drum inside his temples, he let go of Carter’s neck.
The man sputtered and coughed, and Dirk leaned backward. Without him pushing down on Carter’s thigh, his leg came off the accelerator and the car began to slow.
But Dirk wasn’t done yet.
He lunged again, driving a fist into the back of Carter’s head. It wasn’t much of a blow; given his state and the fact that Pike was holding him tightly, choking him out, it was a surprise that he could land anything at all. But it was hard enough that Carter was pushed forward. In order to protect his face, his hands went out in front of him and jambed awkwardly into the steering wheel.
The Mercedes’s tires struck something and for a brief second before he lost consciousness, Dirk felt himself becoming airborne.
And then a light, a bright, vibrant light shone through the windshield.
The light at the end of the tunnel, he thought wryly.
He had no doubt that this was, quite literally, the end of the road. The light continued to get brighter until Dirk was forced to close his eyes for fear of going blind.
A split-second later, his body was launched forward and the sound of twisting, bending metal joined the drumbeat in his head.
Chapter 42
Warm blood speckled Coggins’s face and stained the front of his ACPD uniform. For several seconds after the shot had been fired, he found himself unable to move, save from blinking rapidly in an attempt to clear the blood from his eyes.
Am I… am I dead? He thought with a surprising calmness. As if to prove to himself that he wasn’t, he brought his fingers up to his face and rubbed at the warm wetness.
It was tacky on his fingertips.
Donnie Wandry stumbled backward, and Coggins realized for the first time that he hadn’t actually been shot—the blood was Donnie’s. The gun slipped from his thin fingers and clanged to the ground, and then he staggered. Coggins didn’t know if it was instinct, compassion, or just plain dumb luck, but for some reason instead of shying away from the dying man, he opened his arms and allowed Donnie to fall into them.
Coggins braced himself as the man’s entire weight pressed against his chest. Confused, unsure of what happened and what to do next, Donnie looked up at him. The wildness in his eyes of a few moments ago was gone.
In its place was a deep sadness, and a creeping darkness that seemed to fill the whites like ink dropped into milk.
“My son… I’m going to see him now. I’m going to see Kent,” he whispered, blood spilling from the corners of his mouth as he spoke.
Donnie sighed, and his eyes closed. For a second, Coggins thought that he had died in his arms. But then his lips started moving, and Coggins had to focus, to block out the sound of gunshots and of bikers running in the hallway, in order to make out the words. And even then he wasn’t sure of what he heard.
“…can you hear the waves? Can you smell the ocean? We’ll go fishing in the Marrow, Kent… fishing like we used to…”
A strangled croak seeped from Donnie’s slack mouth, and then he went still. Coggins lowered him to the ground, and as he did he noticed a flayed, silver dollar-sized hole in the man’s chest, just above his left pectoral muscle.
Only when Donnie was resting on the ground did he look up at
Sheriff White.
The man’s dark complexion had turned an ashen gray hue. The gun that he had used to kill Donnie was trembling in his outstretched hand, smoke still rising from the barrel.
It was the first time he had killed a man, Coggins realized. His thoughts turned back to a time long ago, of him leaping over a felled octogenarian, taking the stairs in twos as he hurried toward Yori’s strangled cry.
He never did find out if the Mexican he had bludgeoned with his fists had died, but he didn’t think it mattered. The sickness over what he had done, justified or not, had manifested as a drinking binge from which he had barely recovered.
The consequences for a man as broken as Sheriff White, however, might even be more disastrous.
“Thank you,” Coggins said quietly, which, for some reason felt strangely dishonest coming from him. He tilted his head skyward as shouts echoed up and down the hallway. Then he leveled his eyes at his old friend again. “You should go.”
The comment seemed to shock Paul back to reality and his brow furrowed. A tinge of color, of deep caramel, tickled the gray edges of his cheeks.
“What do you mean I need to go? We need to go, Coggins. We need to get the fuck out of here. And fast.” His voice was surprisingly strong, assertive, given what had just happened.
As if reinforcing his words, someone bellowed from just outside the door. Coggins glanced in that direction, looking over top of the body of the biker with the smashed face. Then he went back to the desk. Almost immediately, he noticed the large red button tucked just under the sill. He pressed it, and the sound of some hidden reticulating gears inside the ceiling creaked to life.
The chain started to slacken and Corina’s still unconscious body was slowly lowered onto Paul’s shoulder. It was amazing that given what had happened, the Sheriff hadn’t once let go of the girl’s legs.
He was one of the good guys. Coggins, not so much. He reached over and grabbed the shotgun off the desk, and pumped it with one hand. Then he turned toward the door.
“Coggins!” the Sheriff yelled from behind him. “Let’s go, let’s get the fuck out of here!”
Stitches (Insatiable Series Book 5) Page 17
