The arcade is even more crowded. Loud country rock music playing, the cacophony of video games all going at once, and big fat men with Caterpillar Tractor caps, hunched over pinball machines, jerking and twitching furiously. Frankie looks for the bathrooms.
He sees a sign in the far corner, an arrow pointing the way to the restrooms. Frankie elbows his way through the throngs, then makes his way down a narrow corridor to the ladies room door. He waits.
A black woman comes out.
“Excuse me?” Frankie says, working up the nerve.
“Yeah, sweetie?”
“You see another lady in there with a scarf on her head?”
The black woman shrugs. “Sorry, sweetie. Nobody in there but me and a little old stool.”
The black woman walks away.
Frankie stands there for a second, puzzled. Aunt Nikki must have gone back out to the car. Frankie must have missed her coming the other way through the crowded arcade. Frankie turns and walks out.
By the time he gets back outside, he’s shivering. He trudges down the third row of cars, boots crunching, and he gets all the way to the end of the lot without seeing the Pontiac. He turns around and backtracks, and he scans the other rows. There are plenty of pickups, old sedans, and semis. But no idling Pontiac Tempest station wagon.
Panic pumps through his veins.
He starts jogging up and down the aisles, frantically searching for the Pontiac, his breath pluming through the hole in his ski mask. He searches and searches and searches, and he refuses to believe that his Aunt Nikki would leave him there. She would never do that. There has to be a logical explanation. There has to be.
Now his side is aching from all the running, his lungs sore from the frozen air rushing in and out. He sits down on the curb by the entrance, breathing hard, terrified, jittery as a hen in a foxhole.
Sudden noises behind him.
Three gigantic leather-clad people are coming out the Stuckey’s exit, weaving drunk, their breaths showing in noxious puffs of smoke and liquor. A bulky fat man with a long, straggly beard, a bosomy woman with peroxide-blonde hair, and a lean, weathered man with a scarred face and a bandanna around his head. Their boots jangle as they crackle through the ice, their tight leather pants making whispery noises.
“Motherfucker can eat shit and die,” the buxom woman is saying.
“I’ll fucking show him what pain is,” the weathered man says.
All at once their milky gazes find Frankie sitting alone on the curb. “Aaawwwwwww,” the woman purrs drunkenly. “Look at the whittle boy, ain’t he darlin’.”
Horrified, Frankie springs to his feet and rushes off across the parking lot.
There’s a vast concrete staging area adjacent to the Stuckey’s, drenched in sodium vapor light, crowded with countless semi-trailers lined up for either refueling or servicing or rest breaks. Frankie sprints along the rows of Kenworths and Diamond Reos, and eventually crosses the property line into the darkness of the neighboring farm.
He uses the highway as a guide, and he runs southward for quite a while.
The ground along the edge of the field is frozen stiff, his boots slipping and sliding awkwardly on the hard-pack, but he keeps going. His lungs ache. His eyes sting. Even inside his mittens, his hands are numb. But he keeps going at a steady jog, refusing to stop.
He knows this much: Aunt Nikki’s farm is just outside of Funks Grove, Illinois, which is a straight shot down Highway 55. Maybe ten miles or so. If Frankie stays on course, following the highway, he will run right into it.
By the time he reaches the first billboard, his side is aching so severely he has to slow to a walk. Very few cars have passed. He limps down a gentle slope, then follows a frozen creek. He is alone now. More alone than he has ever been in his life.
And that’s when the first trickle of cold dread runs through his guts.
Somebody is following him.
For a while, he figures the sounds are mere echoes of his own boots crunching over the icy ground. Like the feeling he gets when he comes up the basement stairs at his aunt and uncle’s old farmhouse, when he hears his own footsteps, and then hears something else behind them, like a second set of footsteps, and there’s that little momentary tickle of fear in his heart. But right now, that tickle is becoming a virtual flood of terror coursing through him.
There truly seem to be footsteps behind him, and he barely has the courage to look back over his shoulder to see who it is. He is filled with a primal sort of infantile terror, the same kind of fear that first gripped him when he was five, and Helen Janus took him to see 101 Dalmatians, and Cruella De Vil had first slunk onto the screen. The same kind that had flowed down his spine when he was eight and had gotten lost at the K-Mart while his mom dickered with a clerk in the garden center. The same kind that had paralyzed him when he was ten and was nearly bitten by the mutant snake at the Heart of Illinois Fair freak show.
He manages to pause next to a skeletal oak tree, catching his breath, throwing a furtive glance back the way he had come. In the moonlit shadows, he sees nothing. No menacing figures in black leather. No maniacs on the loose. Nothing but a rickety, windblown fence, a few scattered bare trees and acres of snow-covered farmland. The hills in the distance are a luminous blue.
The highway is a silent river of black ice winding all the way back to the horizon-glow of Bloomington.
Frankie lets out a pained sigh of relief and continues on his way.
A moment later, the footsteps return. Louder than ever. And Frankie stiffens with adrenaline and fear. He turns and runs headlong across the icy fields, his heart galloping in his chest, his eyes tearing from the wind and the cold. He sees a barn in the middle distance. A yellow light is burning in one of the ground-floor windows.
Frankie runs toward it.
He reaches the barn, a mammoth conglomerate of old worm-eaten siding, and he goes around to the double doors at one end. Something is moving inside it. There’s a low rumble like an engine or a transformer, maybe a heater. The doors are open a crack, and there’s a fire burning somewhere inside. The orange flame flickers and shifts in the gap, sending a slash of warmth across the indigo night.
Frankie opens the doors.
The blood is everywhere, spattered across the barn’s rough-hewn walls, pooled on the dirt floor, smeared on the bales of hay that are strewn haphazardly across the length of the place. It looks like a tornado has recently touched down. A fire has started near an overturned oil lamp, and there’s that low buzzing noise like a huge electrical transformer. Then Frankie’s gaze falls upon the first body.
It’s lying in a heap under a long wooden table, its legs curled inward against its ravaged belly, its oval head limp against the floor. Its big brown eyes are open and glassy and staring up at the ceiling beams. The calf looks as though it’s been eviscerated by a chainsaw, its entrails spilling out in a bloody knot.
Other carcasses are splayed across the inside of the barn, some of them on the floor, some of them on the table, some of them wedged up in the throats of support beams. Mangled chickens, a couple more calves, even a few hogs. The air is thick with the soupy smell of death, and there’s a delicate veil of steam coming off some of the remains.
Frankie realizes his feet are moving, slowly, reflexively, backing away from the massacre. And that’s when he sees the source of the low, droning noise.
A wild dog is huddled just inside the doors, hunched in a threatening posture, its feral eyes shimmering a phosphorous amber in the firelight. The thing is growling at Frankie. The dog’s coat is the color of moldy, wet ash, and it’s huge, some kind of German Shepherd-wolf mix. Its black lips are curling away from prehistoric-looking fangs.
Frankie lunges through the open doors.
A gigantic man in a down coat and cowboy hat is waiting for Frankie outside the doors. The man raises a shotgun and either grimaces or grins—it’s hard to tell—his face a shadow beneath his hat, his yellow teeth glimmering. He utters something like,
“Whoever so lies with the beasts in the field shall be unclean, sayeth the Lord!”
Frankie turns and runs away.
He runs for all he is worth, and he gets maybe a hundred yards away when the first blast rings out—a sonic boom that shatters the icy night air and makes Frankie jump midstride, nearly tumbling into the snow. Somehow Frankie manages to keep sprinting toward the tree line. He reaches a dark copse of elms and vanishes in the shadows.
Now he’s truly lost in a whirlwind of darkness and terror. He swims through the thicket, the bony arms of tree branches and undergrowth clawing at him, and he finally makes it to the other side.
A road looms ahead of him.
He starts down it, and he runs along the ice-varnished shoulder until his lungs are about to burst. He hears gravel crunching behind him. A beam of light slicing through the darkness. Frankie whirls, and his legs tangle, and he careens to the ground.
Now he can barely see. His head is a block of ice. Maybe even racked by a concussion. He gazes back at the road behind him through bleary eyes.
They’re coming for him: three, maybe four, maybe as many as a half-dozen enormous men in uniform, walking in lockstep on the icy macadam like giant black monoliths, their boots making rhythmic cracking noises. Their shoulders are impossibly broad, and they have no faces—only shimmering black pools of nothingness under the bills of their hats. They’re coming for Frankie, coming to take him to jail.
The sleep police.
Frankie opens his mouth to scream.
A giant gloved hand swoops down and covers his mouth, cutting off his voice.
The darkness devours him.
He wakes up some time later; it’s hard to know how long. Maybe a day. Maybe a week. Eyes fluttering open, he manages to focus on the faded buttercup wallpaper, the pine dresser with its yellowed doily and the bentwood rocker in the corner. He’s in Aunt Nikki’s room, and rays of winter sunlight filter through the ruffled country curtains. He feels hot, feverish, his hands and feet bandaged.
There are four other people in the room, hovering over the bed: Aunt Nikki, Uncle Andreas, little Doctor Moser with his coke-bottle glasses, and Sheriff Simms in his gray county uniform. Frankie manages to speak, and he tells the whole story, and the others listen intently. Aunt Nikki is devastated that she lost Frankie in the crowded Stuckey’s, and Uncle Adreas is trying to hide his tears, and Doc Moser is inspecting Frankie’s frostbitten hands.
But Sheriff Simms is quietly standing back with his arms folded, a weary smile on his face. He’s the one who found Frankie wandering the snow fields, frostbitten and delirious. He’s the one who saved Frankie’s life. The sheriff is a hero.
Or is he?
In the weeks that follow, Frankie gets better. The frostbite heals, and the nightmares fade, and Frankie goes back to normal activities. But little does he know, a seed has been planted in his subconscious.
The following summer, he goes to camp, and the following school year he enters the eighth grade and gets straight A’s. He even kindles an interest in girls. But deep beneath the surface, his obsession is growing.
Upon entering high school, he becomes extremely popular with the young ladies: he’s darkly handsome, quiet, thoughtful, gentle, sensitive, and polite—all the things for which the rest of the beer-swilling, hormone-wired boys are ill equipped. But very few girls know about Frankie’s obsession. Starting with the trauma of his mother’s murderous breakdown—and sealed with that fateful winter’s night along a lonely highway—young Frankie becomes fixated on violence.
He loathes violence. He detests it. Violence ruined his life. Violence destroyed his mother, and violence obliterated his family. But for Frankie Janus, violence is more than an isolated experience. It is more than just something that happened to him. Violence is woven into every fiber of his being, like a genetic defect, like autism or spina bifida. And the only way he knows how to live with it is to encapsulate it, and study it, and understand it.
He decides that he wants to be the one who catalogues the misery, labels the bloodstains, photographs the murder scenes, and bags the evidence. And as he wends his way through his higher education, he becomes a ravenous reader of everything criminal—criminal psychology, the criminal codes, forensic science, even dime store crime novels—everything from Dashiel Hammett to Dostoyevsky.
Eventually Frank Janus becomes one of the very few people walking the streets with a badge and a gun who is literally destined to do that very thing.
He becomes Fate itself, heading toward some inexorable finale of blood and tears, the very same violent end he always feared and detested...
...and it all starts tonight...
...right here...
...right now.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
BOOM! The fanfare rings out, an atonal symphony flooding the dark orchestra pit: cymbals erupting, timpani drums exploding in a cacophony of pain and terror and noise, a pinwheel of garish Day-Glo colors—crash!-crash!-CRASH!
Frank jerked awake in the darkness, his heart about to burst, the small of his back pressed against a moist stone wall. He sat up, blinking away the fog, trying desperately to see. He reached out reflexively for something to hold onto, something to steady him, but he found nothing.
His hands clutched at the air.
The muffled sound of thunder rattled the floor suddenly, the storm raging nearby. But where? Where was he? He was shivering furiously, but it wasn’t from fear. He was actually cold. In fact, he was freezing. He had been dreaming of a boyhood trauma on a wintry night. Was that why he was so cold? He felt along the damp stone beneath him. He couldn’t see a thing. His hands were wet, and they were trembling convulsively.
Eyes adjusting to the darkness, he saw that he was in an empty room piled with rubble. Scarred brick walls, no windows, the door missing. The walls were shiny with something, but it was too dark to identify it. Pain jolted up the tendons of his arms, throbbed in the back of his neck. He was so cold. His hospital togs were soaked through to the bone.
Lightning flickered suddenly—
—and in the sudden burst of illumination, Frank saw the blood. It was all over him, splattered across the front of his tunic, soaking the arms, deep scarlet-black stains. It was on the walls too.
Frank slammed backward against the back wall, gasping, panic seizing him. The lightning faded. Frank tried to stand up, but he was shivering so violently now that he could hardly coordinate his movements. His arms ached. He felt as if he was in a giant walk-in freezer. His hands were oily with blood, and he tried to wipe them on his pants, but he was shaking like a man with cerebral palsy.
Lightning flashed again—
—and the words scrawled in his own blood yammered at him. They were written across the moldering brick in huge, looping cursive letters: I’m a bad boy! I killed Jane Doe! I want to go to sleep! I’m a bad boy! I want to go to sleep! I need to go to sleep forever!
More lightning.
And that’s when Frank saw the wounds on his wrists—deep, ragged, diagonal slash marks—and the glint of a broken bottle on the floor next to him, and all at once the gravity of the situation was becoming clear to him. He struggled to stand up. His legs were weak and frozen stiff, and his wrists were throbbing unmercifully, but the adrenaline was juicing through him now as well.
He managed to stumble over to the doorway and gaze out across the darkness of the main room—a deserted, rat-infested hovel of trash, cinders, and narrow shafts of dirty sodium light coming through the cracked walls and boarded windows. Frank recognized the place immediately, the memory piercing the haze of his pain and terror.
“My God,” he uttered in a broken voice, pressing his wounded wrists against his chest to staunch the bleeding. It was the abandoned Jewel warehouse where they had found the second Jane Doe.
Sudden pain stabbed up arms, his wrists stinging. How much blood had he lost? How long had he been unconscious this time? Had the pain awakened him? Frank remembered trying to make it up to Chlo
e’s place on the north side, and then getting dizzy. He remembered pulling the squad car between two buildings off Western Avenue, but then everything went pitch black.
The squad car.
Frank staggered across the filth, cradling his bloody wrists, searching for the exit, the lightning fizzing and popping and flickering outside. For a moment the dark warehouse turned silver like a photo negative, and a wave of nausea curled through Frank’s belly. He had to find the squad car quickly if he was going to survive.
He was already going into shock.
In the far corner of the warehouse, a sheet of black plastic was flapping in the wind. Frank pushed his way through it and stumbled into the rain. The storm had picked up. It was coming down in Biblical proportions now, a steady, billowing typhoon of water. Thunder rattled the heavens, bolts of lightning fracturing across the sky.
The squad car was sitting in the darkness about fifty feet away, where Frank had left it, its front end canted against the edge of a garbage dumpster. It was dark and silent. Frank hurried over to it, the rain washing the blood from his arms.
He got inside it and found the wireless cellular clipped to a hook under the dash.
He punched in a number with blood-slick fingers.
“Chloe?” Frank said after hearing a click, and a familiar voice on the other end.
“Frank?” Her voice was as taught as a banjo string.
“Yeah, listen—”
“Frank, what is going on? There’s a thing on the news, the phone has been ringing—”
“Chloe, listen, I’m sorry, I’ll explain everything when I see you, but I’m bleeding pretty badly right now, and I think I’m gonna need to go to the emergency room as soon as possible—”
“Frank, my God. I can’t—I mean—what is it that you want me to do?”
“I need you to meet me outside the St. Francis ER as soon as you can—”
“That’s right down the street—”
“Please just listen! I might only have a couple minutes until I go into shock.”
The Sleep Police Page 14
