Then through the earpiece of his phone came the unmistakable sound of a police cruiser’s engine revving. The sound was deep and throaty and powerful, and Mike heard Manning exclaim, “Yeah, baby,” and the picture began to come into focus. Sharon wasn’t at Mercy Hospital at all; she likely wasn’t even in Orono. Mike knew she would never have walked away and left their prisoner/witness unguarded, so she must have convinced another Paskagankee cop to make the drive to Orono, and then hopped into her cruiser and headed north, anxious to get back to where the action was. Somewhere along the way, she had crossed paths with Manning.
Mike cursed, angry at himself. He, of all people, should have expected this. It simply was not in Sharon Dupont’s nature to sit on the sidelines with an investigation beckoning. It was that need to be involved which had made her simultaneously such a good cop and such a frustrating girlfriend.
When she had been a girlfriend.
He tamped down on his fear—it wasn’t easy to do—and ran a quick timeline through his head. Undoubtedly Sharon had placed the call to whoever she badgered into taking her place almost immediately upon arriving at the hospital. Given a few minutes to convince someone to come, and then the time it would take that officer to drive there, Mike determined Sharon was likely either already back in Paskagankee or close to it.
He clamped his hand over the mouthpiece of his cell phone. He certainly didn’t want to alert Manning to the fact his every word was being monitored, although as quickly as the revenant seemed to be coming apart, Mike wondered if it would even matter to him if he knew he could be heard.
Mike thought hard. Interrogating Raven Tahoma would have to wait. With the information he had gotten from Don Running Bear’s widow, there didn’t seem to be a pressing need to speak with her, anyway, at least not right away. Finding Sharon and Earl Manning was now the clear priority.
Pete Kendall walked out the front door of the house and broke into a trot when he spotted Mike. “Hey, boss, I’ve got a question for ya.”
Mike shook his head and raised a finger to his lips in the universal “Be quiet” gesture, and Kendall stopped in his tracks. “What is it?” he said softly, obviously puzzled.
“I’ve got a lead I need to check out. Can you handle things here?”
“Of course, but where are you heading?”
“I need to take a quick drive toward Orono. There’s been a possible Manning sighting.” All Kendall knew—indeed, all anyone on the Paskagankee Police Department besides Sharon knew—was that lifelong Paskagankee resident and longtime minor troublemaker Earl Manning had been implicated in the murder of the victim whose throat had nearly been ripped out in the basement of this home. Any explanation involving sacred Navajo ceremonial stones and reanimated corpses would have to wait. It would take up too much precious time and likely wouldn’t be believed, anyway.
Mike continued, “I don’t want to pull anyone off the crime scene investigation here for what is probably a wild goose chase, so I’m going to drive out there myself. I’ll be back as quickly as I can.”
He gave his second-in-command a long once-over and nodded, satisfied by what he saw. Despite being under thirty years of age and one of the younger officers on the force, Kendall was a solid cop and a good investigator. “The Staties I called should be here soon. Make sure nobody touches the body until the evidence techs do their thing.”
Kendall nodded, staring inquisitively at the cell phone in Mike’s hand, still with the mouthpiece covered up. “Of course. Are you okay, Chief?”
Now it was Mike’s turn to nod. He was getting impatient. If he had any chance of catching up to Manning, he had to leave now. Should have left three minutes ago, in fact. “I’m fine,” he said, “but I can’t afford to hang out here any longer. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
He turned on his heel and slid behind the wheel of his cruiser, wondering whether his statement contained any truth at all. “An unstoppable killer,” was how Kai Running Bear had described Earl Manning. If Mike managed to catch up to him, what were the odds he would survive?
He pushed those thoughts to the back of his mind as he fired up his cruiser and backed quickly down the driveway. The car hit the pavement and he spun the wheel in his hand and shifted into Drive and goosed the engine, taking one look back toward the beaten-down house with a dead body lying in the basement. Pete Kendall stared back at him, a look of bewildered concern on his face.
42
Manning hit the gas and Sharon felt the G-forces pushing her into the back of the bench seat. Next to her, Brett Parker had screwed his eyes tightly shut, an expression of distaste on his face, as if wishing he could extricate himself from this situation through sheer force of will. Sharon knew how he felt.
The car weaved along the road and she prayed they would not encounter anyone traveling in the opposite direction. If that happened, the odds of surviving the inevitable head-on collision would be practically nil, both for them and for the unwitting victim driving the other car.
Where the hell did he think he was going? Parker had said Manning was holding out hope that the billionaire could use his contacts and his money to reverse the damage that had been done to him somehow. But Parker Software’s base of operations was about as far away as it could be and still be on this continent—Seattle, Washington. Did he really think he was going to drive all the way across the country?
She didn’t have to wait long to find out. Manning slammed on the brakes and wrenched the wheel to the right and this time she was ready for it; she had no desire to revisit her close encounter a few moments ago with the wire mesh separating the front seat from the back of the cruiser. Sharon lowered her shoulder and twisted sideways, taking the brunt of her collision with her shoulder and back.
Parker wasn’t so lucky. His eyes flew open but he was helpless to prevent himself from being thrown directly into the mesh again, and this time a gash ripped open on his cheek and he screamed in pain and fear and probably frustration, too.
Manning didn’t seem to notice. His head lolled on his shoulder and he punched the accelerator again and steered the car like a missile into a gap in the thick forest that seemed much too small to accommodate the still fast-moving cruiser. Branches scraped the molded steel of the car’s body, sounding almost exactly like Parker’s screams. The car bounced and jolted along the narrow trail until finally it lurched to a stop in a cloud of dust.
They were parked in a fire lane. Sharon was intimately familiar with the system of trails surrounding Paskagankee from her days as a teenaged addict and alcoholic, having taken advantage of their solitude many times in her unending quest to get high or drunk. It was a trail just like this one she had been drinking on with her friends that night all those years ago when she had slept with Earl Manning in exchange for his free beer. Hell, maybe it had been this exact one. She wasn’t sure, they all looked the same.
The memory of that awful night came rushing back and Sharon had to force herself out of the past and back to the present. Fixating on long-ago memories of the victim she had once been were counterproductive and, at the moment, dangerous. If she were to stand even the remotest chance of getting out of this seemingly impossible situation, she would need to keep her wits about her.
The front door of the cruiser opened and Manning stepped out, disappearing from view through the side window as he dropped straight down, crumpling in a heap on the forest floor. Then he reappeared, hanging onto the side of the car for balance, grinning like a Halloween Jack O’Lantern. He pulled the rear door open and Sharon thought about jumping him; leaping out of the back seat kicking and punching and trying to put him down that way. With his balance rapidly deteriorating, it seemed like something she might be able to pull off.
But there was one glaring hole in that potential plan: It would be impossible to kill Earl Manning, impossible even to injure him, meaning even if she were able to knock him down and escape, Brett Parker would still be at his mercy. The billionaire was at the moment slumped down in th
e back seat of the cruiser staring steadfastly out the window in the opposite direction and seemed to be in no condition to make a mad dash anywhere. Sharon knew she couldn’t live with his death on her conscience if she managed to escape and Manning took out his anger on the civilian she left behind.
And then the moment was gone anyway, as Manning reached into the car and dragged her out by the collar of her uniform shirt, then kicked the door closed. Despite his increasing issues with bodily coordination his grip was still strong and sure, and Sharon felt herself propelled through the air, landing in a heap a few feet from the car.
She hit the ground and rolled, climbing immediately to her knees, only to look up and see Manning looming over her. He swayed and rocked like he was being pushed by a high wind but he locked eyes with her, and Sharon knew things were about to get immeasurably worse, at least for her. “Let’s share the front seat,” he said in a low growl.
Rising slowly, Sharon brushed twigs and pine needles off her uniform, thinking hard, knowing there must be a way out of this seemingly hopeless situation, but not having a clue what it might be. The forest had gone silent, the insects and birds and small animals in the woods seemingly waiting to see what would happen next.
How did you fight an opponent who could not be harmed? Sharon thought about what she had told Parker, who had abandoned his inspection of the forest and now watched the drama developing outside the cruiser with a kind of detached resignation. “Stay calm and wait for a break,” she had told him, but that was total bullshit. There was no break coming.
Manning wrapped a bony arm around Sharon’s waist and steered her toward the driver’s side door. He was acting simultaneously threatening and bizarrely chivalrous. The stench was overwhelming, it rolled off his ruined body in waves, and she felt hot, acidy bile work its way up her gullet. She clamped her jaw and swallowed hard and avoided puking all over her captor, at least for now.
Manning bent down at the cruiser’s front door and his tattered shirt billowed open. Sharon could see clearly the gaping hole in the center of his chest where his heart had once resided and where Josh Parmalee, Parker’s security guy, had shot him. The skin was ripped and puckered and greyish-green, splinters of shattered rib bone thrusting obscenely through the hole when he moved.
And this time Sharon couldn’t help it. She gagged and coughed and then vomited, spewing chunks of her partially digested lunch and greenish-yellow stomach acid all over Manning’s filthy jeans and threadbare shoes. Normally the puke smell was among the worst things Sharon could imagine, but right now she savored it, inhaling it like a starving man might breathe in the aroma of a grilled steak. The smell was disgusting, but far better than the alternative, a temporary respite from the odor of death and corruption enveloping Earl Manning like a noxious cloud.
Manning either didn’t notice the vomit or didn’t care. He tossed Sharon into the cruiser, expending barely more effort than a flick of his wrist, and she crashed down across the molded plastic center console between the two front seats, her knee smashing the onboard mobile data computer, cracking the screen and knocking the unit to the floor, breaking it right off its stand. Her body slid along the cloth seats, her momentum stopped only by the passenger door when she impacted it with the crown of her head.
Manning followed immediately behind, his body dropping onto Sharon’s, driving her hip into the console, causing her to cry out in pain. “Shut up,” Manning grunted, fumbling with her belt buckle with his left hand while slapping his right hand over her mouth. Sharon had the absurd thought that the guy sure hadn’t improved much as a lover over the years.
She kicked and bucked, trying to throw him off, wondering whether he would even react if she was lucky enough to catch him in the groin with her knee. Her heavy boot sole connected with his shin with a satisfying crack and he grunted, whether in pain or annoyance Sharon could not tell.
But either way it didn’t stop him. He continued fumbling with her belt and finally Sharon heard the buckle give way and then felt her uniform slacks unzip and she knew she was seconds away from being raped, and not just raped, but raped and violated by a dead husk, a lifeless shell of a former human being, and she would be raped while staring helplessly up at the steering wheel of her own police cruiser, at the steering wheel and the dashboard and the goddamned box containing the sacred stone that was at the heart of this whole impossible misadventure, tucked neatly and safely into the corner where the dashboard and the windshield intersected at the far left side of the vehicle. She would be raped, and there was nothing she could—
—wait a second.
Wait just a goddamned second.
The box.
She tried desperately to force her panicked mind to think clearly, knowing a clear head likely represented her only chance for living beyond the next few hideous minutes, and just like that a plan sprang to life in her mind. It took shape as if by magic, and it was a damned unlikely plan at that, one which she had no way of knowing would even work.
But that didn’t matter, because right now, with a dead man yanking her pants down and his cold bony hands scraping her skin and the threat of the worst experience of her life staring her straight in the eyes, followed by an agonizing death—Sharon knew if Earl Manning raped her right now she would never survive, nor would she want to—this plan represented hope. It represented the possibility of survival and the end of this nightmare, and whether it could really work or not was almost irrelevant, because it was all Sharon had to hold on to, and she clung to her hastily devised plan for all she was worth.
She knew exactly what she had to do, and knew she would get only one try. She stopped struggling, stopped resisting, let her arms and legs go limp. She needed to convince the dead shell that once was Earl Manning that she had given up hope, and Sharon figured that shouldn’t be too difficult to pull off, because she damned near had.
For a long couple of seconds the frenzy of activity stopped entirely. Manning clearly had not expected this development and seemed suddenly unsure of how to proceed. Sharon panted, gasping for breath, winded from her struggle. She forced herself to lie still while the dead weight atop her body shifted. Manning wasn’t panting or breathing heavily—wasn’t breathing at all, in fact—and for one awful moment as Sharon contemplated that fact she thought she was going to puke again, which of course would mean choking to death on her own vomit, with Manning’s skeletal hand clamped over her mouth.
But she didn’t puke, and the feeling of nausea began to pass, and Manning began to move once again. He hadn’t said a word since ordering Sharon to shut up, but she could sense he believed he had beaten her down and broken her resistance, that it would now be clear sailing because she had resigned herself to her pending fate. Sharon wondered how anyone could be so deluded as to believe any woman would ever stop fighting against an attack like the one Earl Manning was perpetrating. His current status as a cold, unbreathing corpse made the situation worse, but it would barely have been more palatable had blood been pumping through his veins.
Manning’s cold left hand scratched her thighs as he struggled to slide her pants down her legs, and Sharon eased her knees together. The horrifying fact was that in order for her plan to stand any chance of working, she needed to allow him to proceed. In a force of will greater than any she had ever exerted, she allowed the monster to ease her uniform pants over her hips and knees and down to her ankles. She prayed he would not yet reach for the waistband of her panties. If that happened, the iron will she was somehow exerting would break and she knew she would not be able to stop herself from struggling.
Her only hope was that it wouldn’t get that far.
It didn’t. Manning placed a hand on either side of Sharon’s prone form, pushing against the stained cloth of the cruiser’s bench seat, raising his upper body off hers. His cracked lips parted in a hideous smile of triumph and he said, “That’s more like it,” in a gravelly rumble as he reached for his own belt buckle.
And that was when Sharon mad
e her move. Manning hadn’t given her the perfect opening—it was barely an opening at all—but she had no idea whether she would get another. So she took it. She thrust her right hand at the center of his chest as if to throw a punch, but instead of making a fist, Sharon clustered the tips of her fingers together as tightly as she could, forming them into a point, turning her arm into something like a makeshift arrow.
Her hand tore through the remains of Manning’s shirt like it wasn’t even there and plunged deep into the dead man’s chest. Her knuckle scraped a fragment of thin, unyielding mass, probably a rib bone. Sharon felt the vomit coming again and tried to close her mind off to the sheer horror and insanity of her situation, failing this time, and again showering Manning with puke, just seconds after he had removed his hand from her mouth.
Her stomach acid and digestive juices splattered off Manning and rained down on her and she ignored it. She pivoted her wrist and wrapped her slim fingers around the rib bone, praying she could maintain her grip. Then she clamped her left hand around her right wrist and yanked upward, propelling the emaciated corpse directly into the passenger side door and closed window. Manning’s head struck the glass with a hollow-sounding thunk and then bounced off.
He let out a surprised “uhhh,” and the force of his momentum caused him to roll partially off Sharon, the left side of his upper body tumbling into the cruiser’s foot well, his hip jammed against the mobile data computer’s metal mounting brace.
Sharon yanked her hand out of Manning’s chest, ignoring the dry sucking sound that followed, amazed that even during this moment of extreme stress she had the presence of mind to think, I’m going to have to wash that hand with a belt sander. Then she shoved him hard against the brace, struggling, no match for his immense strength as he began moving to regain his position. All she needed was to keep him incapacitated for a couple of seconds and she began to fear she would not be able to manage even that.
Revenant Page 21
