by Oliver Stark
‘You regret not checking the apartment?’ said Eddie.
‘I will if Lucy James isn’t in that truck, but I think she is,’ Tom replied.
‘You’re sure?’
‘No.’
‘We’ve got a lot riding on this one. I can call Lafayette and get them to take a look, what do you say?’
‘Yeah, you do that.’
‘Shit, we think this guy’s carrying a carcass, but if he’s not?’
‘Then I’ve just signed myself off the NYPD for life.’
As they got further and further from civilization, it became clear that Redtop knew exactly where he was going. It was hard going, all right. And then it got harder. Maurice’s truck disappeared.
The three following cars stopped. Mo’s van had just vanished. The drive back to the Interstate would take an hour, then it would take another hour to find a motel. It wasn’t on the agenda. Kasper led the cars about three miles up the road and the three dark saloons pulled into a yard on the edge of a pine wood. It was a working yard with a yellow digger and a hut of some kind.
The six men got out. It was cold. It was coming on for midnight and the chill was creeping deep beneath their clothes. They hadn’t dressed for a night on the mountains.
‘What are you two guys thinking?’ Kasper shouted across to Asa Shelton. They shook their heads and looked around.
‘Either he pulled off the road or he cut his lights and kept on going.’
‘You think someone could drive on these roads without lights?’ Kasper asked.
‘Maybe, if he knows the roads.’
Harper walked over to the wooden shack and took out a screwdriver. With a small torch, he unscrewed the padlock plate and opened the door. Outside, the other five men looked on as a light went on inside.
A minute later, all six men were in the wooden shack. It was a sizeable working hut, with a small stove, a table and some hard hats and logging gear. Kasper was going through the cupboards looking for food and the two Federal agents had set up their laptops. ‘I can’t believe we came out here with nothing to eat. It’s fucking unbelievable.’
Harper was standing by the large old map of the region on the board. ‘This is useful. Come take a look.’ The guys crowded around the map. ‘Here we are in this cut just under the mountainside. There’s one road going through the hill, so he’s got to be up here for only one reason. There’s a pig farm up the road. Looks a small operation. I say that’s where he’s heading. There’s nowhere else this road leads to. What do you say?’
They all nodded quietly. Harper was still one of the most respected detectives on the force.
‘Okay, then,’ said Harper. ‘If he saw our headlights in his mirror then he might have taken one of these old tracks. It takes him way off track but if he follows it round, it’ll come back to the farm. I think he’s got scared and taken the long road. So what I suggest we do is get ourselves up to the farm and dig in. If he’s coming, he’ll take a couple of hours to get around the mountain.’
‘Okay,’ said Eddie. ‘Let’s go watch some hogs!’
Chapter Eighty-Two
The Pig Farm, Upstate
November 30, 1.12 a.m.
When they arrived at the pig farm, the teams hid their cars up in the trees behind the farm and scoped out their positions. Harper and Kasper set up about two hundred metres above the hog field, looking down a gentle slope. The hog field was an enormous brown enclosure where the pigs churned up the earth as they ran around freely and lolled about in patches of mud.
There could have been a hundred bodies in that muddy mess and you’d never find them. At night, it appeared the hogs all went into the great barn at the end of the field. Eddie and Tom stared out into the darkness. It was a quiet, starlit night. The big old moon was full.
‘You think he’ll come?’ Tom asked.
‘He’s maybe sitting and watching. He’s a nervous cat,’ said Eddie.
‘Or he’s spending one more night with her,’ said Tom.
‘Jesus, is this not bad enough without imagining him fucking a corpse?’
‘The guy likes these bodies,’ said Tom.
‘I guess he does, but we don’t need to hear about it.’
Harper nodded. They both looked down over the darkened hillside.
Beside the barns were the two holding ponds. These great round vats of slurry and blood were as much as thirty feet deep and contained excrement, blood, old carcasses, afterbirth, urine, chemicals and drugs. They were a horrible cocktail of thick, viscous shit. And sitting above them in the hills, Harper knew that they stank to high heaven.
A couple of hours later Harper was standing on the edge of a clump of trees, staring up at the fading stars. Eddie was sitting on the ground with his eyes closed and a blanket around his shoulders. Every few minutes Harper took a look round with the binoculars.
A faint purple glow on the hillside opposite suggested dawn was not far away. The silence was more or less complete, with hardly a breeze. Then, in the distance, headlights appeared on the road.
Heart in his mouth, Harper raised the binoculars to his eyes and looked. He couldn’t make anything out except the lights and the fact that the vehicle was moving slowly. He radioed the other team members.
‘You seeing this?’
‘We’re seeing it.’
‘What you thinking?’
‘Could be our man.’
Tom looked again. Up ahead of the vehicle, the road split, with the dirt track leading to the hog field and the road heading on to the farmhouse.
‘How much you want to put on the high road?’
Garcia came back, ‘I’ll put a fifty on the high road.’
Shelton chipped in, ‘I’ll take some of that, Harper. A hundred on the high road.’
Harper smiled to himself. They all wanted this to work. ‘I’ll take your bets, gentlemen. This one’s coming our way.’
Three sets of binoculars were trained on the vehicle as it approached the fork in the road. If it did go low, they only had a few minutes to prepare. If high, they could all relax and Harper could go back to watching as a poor man.
The fork approached. The car ground to a halt. They stared in absolute silence. Was the driver looking for the right road or was it something else?
A minute passed.
‘Perhaps they’ve seen something,’ said Garcia.
They looked around. Harper spotted it first. There was a torch lying on the ground near to the two detectives. It glowed faintly in the grass.
He radioed quickly. ‘Garcia, for fuck’s sake, you’ve got a flashlight on over there. He’s looking at the light.’
The torch went out and they all waited with bated breath as the car sat five hundred metres away at the fork in the road. Would it put him off? Did he see it? It was only a faint glow. But he hadn’t driven on. He was cautious.
Harper knew in his gut it was him. Redtop. And Redtop didn’t know what to do. He was an indecisive soul and now he had seen something that raised enough of a question to throw him. He was probably waiting now. Seeing if the light went on again.
Tom kicked Eddie, who crawled to his feet and took the binoculars. ‘It’s a Mark 2 Ford pickup. It’s his truck.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Shape of the headlights.’
Tom radioed through, ‘Eddie reckons it’s a Mark 2 Ford pickup from the shape of the headlights.’
‘Okay,’ said Shelton, ‘if he gets scared we’ve got to go after him. If it’s him, he’ll have a body in the pickup and that’s got to be enough to nail him.’
They waited. The tension was unbearable. The car sat there, engine running, for fifteen minutes.
‘Christ, this guy’s cautious.’
They watched, desperate for a sign. The truck just sat and idled. Another fifteen minutes passed by.
‘Do we take him out?’ Garcia asked.
‘Sit still,’ said Harper. ‘Sit still.’
Another five minutes passed. He’d
been sitting there for over half an hour. Tom took the binoculars and put them up to his eye. The light was better now. The sun was still below the horizon but rising. Through the glasses he could make out very little at that distance, just a vague shape and no movement.
Forty minutes after the truck had stopped, it suddenly roared into life and sped down the dirt track.
‘All hands, get ready!’ called Harper.
The truck jumped and bumped down the path, hurtling at speed. When it got to the edge of the field, it slammed to a stop. The engine was left running.
They watched from the hill. Eddie had a rifle trained on the truck and Harper watched through binoculars.
‘No shooting, I want this guy alive,’ said Harper. ‘He’s useless to us dead. We need to catch him.’
They were all suited and booted and ready to roll, they just had to see him do something.
A large figure opened the driver’s door. He went round to the back of the truck. He was wearing a coat and hat.
‘Is it Redtop?’ asked Shelton.
Harper looked, but wasn’t a hundred per cent certain. ‘Can’t be sure.’
‘No one move until he’s away from the truck. We don’t want any car chases.’
The figure stood by the back tyre and leaned into the truck. He pulled out two canisters and took them into the field. Then he returned to the truck. He manhandled a heavy rolled-up sheet with what could be a body inside. He slung the roll over his shoulder and made towards the field.
At the fence he threw the roll over and then climbed across himself. He picked it up again with some difficulty and walked toward the barn.
‘Okay, guys, you know the routine. Let’s take this guy out. Go, go, go!’
They danced out of the hides and down the hillside, running at full speed, flashlights flickering across the ground. All three pairs descended from different directions towards the single figure in the field.
The figure stopped and turned. He saw the dancing lights coming at him from all directions. He dropped the roll, picked up the canisters and ran as fast as he could towards the barn. He was big, but quick when it mattered.
Mo entered the barn and shut and locked the door. Inside, his heavy frame gulped for air. He felt the terror gripping him. He was being chased down. Like an animal. The men chasing him had just entered the field. Mo looked around. What should he do? What could he do? There were hundreds of hogs in the barn, enormous animals, sitting lazily and snorting. Maurice ran to the feed store and office at the back. He smashed open the lock and looked inside. Nothing, nothing. He looked around at the two cans of gasoline. Nick wanted him to burn the body, but he couldn’t do that now. He had to escape. But how? Mo looked at the back wall of the barn. If he could burn his way out he might be able to run and hide in the woods. Mo took a can of gasoline and started to splash it all over the back wall. Then he took the matches Nick had given him and struck one. He heard the men shouting in the fields and he dropped the match. The vapours of the gasoline ignited with a loud whoosh. And Mo was surrounded by flames.
At the edge of the field the Feds were heading for the barn. One of them stopped at the roll and had a look at what was inside it. It was the body of a woman. This was their man and they had him cornered.
This was as near as they had ever been to catching someone who might be connected to the American Devil. The Feds went on. Eddie and Harper headed round the side of the barn. Eddie pulled his handgun out as he rounded the corner, fumbled and dropped it in the mud. ‘Goddamn shit!’ he said.
As the FBI special agents arrived at the barn door, they could see the glow inside. They couldn’t quite make it out, but it was flickering like a fire.
‘He’s going to burn the barn down,’ one agent called. ‘What’s he up to?’
Then they began to hear a noise. It was a terrifying sound, rising in a crescendo of high-pitched squeals. Something was happening inside. Hundreds of pigs began to panic and move around. Inside Mo was beating at the flames but he was just throwing up sparks, and lighting the straw all over the barn.
The Feds tried smashing the lock on the barn door but it was useless, and they finally opened the lock with two rounds. The shots just frightened the pigs even more. The Feds dragged the door wide open and smelled the stink of burning gasoline and straw. As the door pulled along its steel runners, the volume of the squealing rose and hit them — a terrible, high-pitched cry of pain and fear. They looked up and saw hundred of hogs, covered in flaming gasoline, stampeding towards them.
The hogs bolted, their wide white backs alight and glowing in red and blue and amber. The smell was rich with burning flesh and the stampede was brutal as the pigs trampled and herded their way out, running directly at the two Federal agents, who had skittered backwards and somehow tripped, and were now cowering in the mud at the side of the barn. Hundreds of flaming, panicking pigs brushed past them, virtually trampling their bodies into the mud.
The blazing hogs stampeded from the barn. They sparkled across the field like a howling, terrifying light show. Within seconds they were beyond the barn and bucking and kicking in every direction, screaming out their pain and horror in high mournful squeals as their flesh melted. The special agents, miraculously alive, began crawling away from the barn.
Garcia and Mason further back, tantalizingly near the fence, were not as lucky. Mason was hit from the side full-on by a huge sow travelling at speed and then several fiery pigs ran across him, jumping and cracking his ribs and then his head. He was dragged across the field, his clothes burning against his skin.
Eddie Kasper launched himself across the ground and sprinted towards Mason’s flaming body. It was hard keeping up his speed in the mud but he was just about quick enough and rolled Mason over and over in the mud, his face badly burnt.
Garcia was tossed by a headlong charge and his clothes caught the flaming gasoline as he passed over the pigs’ backs. He landed not too badly and stood in the darkness, flapping wildly at his clothes with his hands. Harper got to him in time and managed to get his coat off and wrap it around Garcia’s body. It saved his life.
Harper looked back at the barn, swiftly realizing that the stampede meant one thing. Maurice was still in there.
‘Eddie, look after these guys, call back-up. I’ve got to get this guy.’
Eddie nodded. Harper raced around the back of the barn and spotted Maurice running away towards the edge of the field. He was slow, though, and Harper knew he was faster.
He gave chase. He knew from the map that after the field were woods, which went on for miles all the way to the river. He didn’t want Mo to reach them, but he couldn’t take a shot at him either. They needed this guy alive.
In the forest it was hard. Harper couldn’t see and had to keep stopping to listen. There was no way to track Mo otherwise. He ran, stopped and listened, blindly following Mo’s lead.
Redtop was getting ahead now. Harper kept on. It was so dark in those deep pine woods, he couldn’t see more than five feet ahead.
He followed Mo for half an hour, getting no nearer but feeling his strength drain away. Then, through the trees, he saw the flames of the pig field again. They must have come full circle, either by accident or design. Maybe Mo had no idea where to go either, so was heading back to his van. Harper found the last of his strength and began closing in again as they re-entered the field.
In the gathering light of dawn Mo knew he couldn’t make it to the truck. He didn’t dare get caught, so he ran to one of the holding ponds and climbed up the side. He stopped at the top. The venomous vapours of the shit-pit were caustic in his nose and throat. He felt immediately dizzy. Harper approached slowly, his pistol by his side.
‘Maurice, give yourself up,’ he panted. ‘There’s nowhere to go.’ Mo turned, breathing heavily. He stared at Harper, who took another few steps forward. ‘Come on, we can help you. We can look after you. Don’t kill yourself. Come down.’
‘I didn’t do nothing. I didn’t hurt them. I pro
mise. I just looked after them. I didn’t ever hurt them.’
‘I’m sure you didn’t, Maurice, but what happened to Lottie?’
Mo looked round. He didn’t know what to say. ‘Tell him I’m sorry.’
‘Who? Tell who, Mo?’
‘I was supposed to give her water. I liked her a lot. I get to like them a lot.’
‘Who, Mo? I can’t tell him if I don’t know who he is.’
‘I only wanted to stroke them. I like how they feel. I like them all warm. I didn’t hurt them. I didn’t do it. I only wanted to pet them.’
For a moment Mo looked as though he might turn himself in. Harper climbed towards him with slow steps, reaching out with his arm. ‘Come down now, Maurice.’ He could see the fear and tears in Maurice’s eyes. He looked like a child. ‘Come on, you’re not in trouble. We’ll help you to make it all better.’ Harper was at the edge of the pool. Maurice was within reach. He put out his hand towards Maurice and Maurice’s big paw moved to meet it. Just before they touched, Maurice smiled. Then he threw himself backwards into the vast pit of venomous slurry. The pig shit closed over the dark figure in an instant. He was gone.
Chapter Eighty-Three
Downtown New York
December 1, 3.10 p.m.
The streets of the Financial District in New York are much like many other streets across America. The sidewalks are flanked by towers in light shades of concrete grey. Originality can be seen in the little early twentieth-century architectural flourishes around the entrances and windows, but these minor stylistic touches are secondary to the great power of economics and the need to maximize floor space.
Sebastian walked past the buildings, enjoying the sight of their stately confidence. He was carrying a suit bag and feeling good about things. He liked to walk and watch. The traffic streamed down the street and he looked at the rows of expensive cars parked up and down. He came to the entrance to Le Monte, a luxury hotel with a gold and green sign. It lacked any of the pomp of the old buildings and asserted its status with curly gold lettering and plush colours.
