The Devil's Laughter

by William W. Johnstone

  Link stepped to the edge of the clearing and ended the teeth-grinding, nerve-destroying agony of the singer by shooting holes in the boom box. The silence was delicious.

  “Hey, man,” one young fellow said, staring at Link through vacant eyes. “I think I’ll just kill you for that.”

  “I don’t think so,” Link told him. He looked at the girl who had been jumping up and down with the loudmouth. “Take his belt off and tie your boyfriend’s hands behind his back.”

  “And if I don’t?” she slurred the words.

  Link shot up the ground by her feet. She danced a little jig. “All right, man!” she hollered. “Jesus, don’t be so hostile, man.”

  “Just do it. The girls tie the boys’ hands with belts. Do it, sweethearts.”

  “You want some pussy, man?” another girl asked.

  “Not with you; not even with the Ayatollah’s dick. Move, girls.”

  Reluctantly, the girls went to work.

  Link inspected the girls’ work. “Tighten them up, girls. And I mean tight.” After that, he made one girl tie the other girls’ wrists, then he carefully bound the last one.

  “Hey, man,” one lanky young man said, a smirk on his lips. “You can’t blame us for nothin’. The devil made us do it!”

  The group all burst out laughing.

  Link did not change his expression. The group stopped laughing when he said, “I was going to let you live. Now I’m not so sure about that.”

  “Hey, man,” one of the girls said.

  “Shut up! I don’t want to hear it.” Link gathered up their weapons and made a sack out of one of the teenager’s coats. “Move toward the road.”

  “What about our cars?” a young man asked.

  He very quickly shut his mouth when Link lifted the muzzle of the nasty little machine pistol.

  With the young men and women in the back of the truck, Link headed down the road. He cut off on a gravel-dirt road that he knew would eventually wind its way to the outskirts of town. He drove the back streets of the town until he came to an old church that had not been used in years. Link recalled that it had a basement that was windowless and with only one door. And it was steel.

  He herded the young people into the dank and sour-smelling basement. The girls recoiled when they heard the scurrying of rats.

  “Gross, man!” a girl said. “You’re not going to leave us all tied up down here, are you?”

  “There ain’t no lights in this place!” her young man said.

  “Right on one count, wrong on the other,” Link said, and slammed the steel door. He rammed the metal latch home tight and walked away. He could not hear the frantic screaming and kicking on the door ten feet away.

  Link knew he was facing a lot of killing later on. But he would prefer not to have to shoot young people if he could avoid it, even though he knew he was risking his own life by not doing so. If his plan worked, he would come back for the young Satanists later on. If it didn’t, he’d be dead and wouldn’t have to worry about it.

  He pulled the truck into the drive of a house and locked it up. He banged on the side door. No answer. “Hell with it,” he muttered. Weapon ready, he tried the doorknob. It turned and he stepped into a very neat kitchen. He found a man and a woman sitting in the den, staring at a blank TV screen. Occasionally, one would point and laugh and nod his or her head in agreement. Link stared at the screen. He could neither see nor hear a thing.

  The man and wife paid no attention to him. Link didn’t believe they were aware of his presence. He walked through the house and found two kids, about the same age as Billy and Betsy, sitting on the floor in a bedroom, staring at a blank screen.

  “Kids,” he said.

  No reaction.

  He clapped his hands sharply. They did not take their eyes off the blank screen.

  Shaking his head, not understanding any of what he was seeing, Link walked back into the den.

  “You mind if I use your phone?” he asked the man sitting in the recliner.

  The man stared at the screen.

  “Thank you,” Link said, wondering what in the world they were seeing and obviously hearing. He picked up the phone and was pleasantly surprised to find that it worked. He punched out the number of the local police. “Spencer,” he said to the man who answered.

  “Chief Spencer here.”

  “This is Link Donovan, you godless son of a bitch. I’m coming to kill you, Spencer.”

  Spencer hissed over the phone, “Then bring your ass on, Donovan. I’ll be assured a place by the master for bringing in your grinnin’ bloody head.”

  “Just checking to be sure, Spencer,” Link told the man. “I’d sure hate to blow away a good Christian fellow.”

  The chief laughed at him. “You’re a dead man, Donovan. You just don’t know it yet.”

  Link hung up the phone and checked his Uzi. With the chief and his men out of the way, the town could be declared reasonably safe and he could use the jail to house the young people he planned on bringing in alive.

  If they’d let him.

  Chapter 12

  Link found a floppy old cowboy hat in a hall closet and put it on, pulling the brim low. Since he almost never wore a hat and was driving a dead man’s truck, a quick glance might fool anyone, at least for a couple of seconds.

  Just as he pulled out onto a usually busy street, Link saw Gerard, Carla, and the two troopers driving slowly toward him. He pulled off the hat and jumped out, waving them down.

  “Man!” Gerard said, getting out on the passenger side. “Am I glad to see a friendly face.”

  Link looked at the bloody bandage on his arm. “Bad?”

  “Naw. Just a graze.”

  Link shook hands all the way around and hugged Carla. “Where’s Dee?” he asked.

  “We don’t know,” she said. “She might have gone up in the fire. They torched our house, Link.”

  “What’s the game plan, boss?” Dennis asked with a grin on his dirty face.

  “We reclaim the town.”

  “You mean we get to shoot punks legally?” Jeff asked. He rolled his eyes and looked heavenward. “Lord have mercy, but You have done smiled down upon these poor hardworkin’ po-lice.”

  Link told them where he’d put the first batch of older teenagers and about his plan for dealing with the rest of the young people in the coven.

  Gerard glanced at him. “You calming down in your old age, Link?”

  “Probably making a big mistake, but I think some of them might be worth saving. That’s just a guess.”

  “I agree with the mistake part,” Gerard said, a sour note to his words. “I’ll give them a chance to surrender, Link, but they better do it the first time. They damn sure won’t get a second chance.”

  Link looked at Carla. “What’s your plan, Carla?”

  “I stay with my man,” she said firmly. “I’ve been around guns all my life and I’m a better pistol shot than he is.” She cut her eyes to Gerard.

  “And she ain’t lyin’ about that,” Gerard said with a laugh.

  “Take it block by block,” Link said. “Let’s go.”

  “You lone-wolfing it, Link?” Dennis asked.

  “Yeah. I like it that way.”

  Link had not driven two blocks before he saw a gang of young people sitting on a front porch. They did not look real happy. They were probably just now realizing eternity is a long time to spend in the pits. They recognized the truck and waved. Link kept his face hidden and returned the wave. He turned down the next block and headed for town, parking in an alley behind the police station.

  Getting out of the truck, he stepped over the body of a young black woman, sprawled naked in the weeds. She had had some disgusting things done to her. Her hands were still cuffed behind her back. Using his key, Link removed the handcuffs and put them in his pocket.

  He heard laughter from inside the building. Someone cussed him soundly. Sounded like Spencer. He ducked into an alley just as the back door opened
and someone stepped out to urinate. The man laughed drunkenly and pissed on the body of the woman just as Link was pulling the pin on a grenade. When the man zipped up and staggered around to reenter the building, Link stepped out and chucked the grenade, rolling it between the man’s legs. The lover of Satan screamed out a warning about two seconds before the grenade blew.

  The man was blown out the back, propelled across the alley, and went crashing into a brick wall. He was unrecognizable from the effects of the HE grenade.

  Link stepped into the dusty and explosion-shattered hallway just as a man was getting up off the hall floor, the front of his uniform shirt bloody. He had a pistol in one hand. Link shot him and walked on toward the front.

  Spencer and two of his turncoat officers appeared in the dusty hallway. Link dropped to one knee and burned a full clip at them, the 9mm slugs knocking them back. Spencer staggered around and went crashing through the glass of the front office. He lay still on the sidewalk.

  Link carefully inspected the offices. There was no one left alive. He gathered up all the handcuffs he could find and walked back to the alley, to the truck. He drove over to the jail and shot the doorknob off the front door leading to the offices and the cells. Then he spent fifteen minutes trying to figure out how to work the electric cell locks. He wasn’t able to open them and gave up in frustration.

  “Hell with it,” he said, and found the cell keys hanging on a peg. He opened all the doors of the six cell blocks manually, then counted the bunks. Fifty. There were six big day rooms that would hold about fifty more.

  Link intended to fill it up.

  He drove back to the church and pulled the young people out of the basement. They all seemed very happy to be leaving that place.

  “I thought you people liked dark, spooky places?” Link asked, helping them up into the bed of the truck.

  “What are you gonna do with us?” a girl asked.

  “Put you in jail.”

  “The judge ordered that shut down,” a young man said.

  “The judge doesn’t have anything to say about it anymore,” Link told her, then shoved the punk into the bed and hooked the tailgate.

  He was halfway to the jail when Gerard flagged him down. He had the group of young men and women that had earlier waved at Link in the bed of his pickup. “They’ve decided they don’t want to play the devil’s game anymore,” he told Link. “Where are you going with your bunch?”

  “I reopened the jail a few minutes ago. After I took care of Chief Spencer and his bunch.”

  “I heard the explosion and the shooting. Figured it was you. I’ll follow you to the jail.”

  After the wishy-washy Satan worshipers had been locked down, Gerard said, “Carla found a camcorder with sound in one of the houses we investigated. She and Dennis and Jeff are going house to house, filming the men and women and kids sitting looking at those blank screens. Talking to them and filming their lack of response. That’s eerie, Link. Mind control?”

  “Has to be. She have lots of film?”

  Gerard grinned. “All that Wal-Mart had. We sort of borrowed several cases.”

  “You’re catching on.”

  “Link,” the chief deputy said, his smile fading, “I spoke with Tom by radio a few minutes after meeting up with you. I picked up a spare at the courthouse. He says you’re going to lone-wolf it tonight.”

  “Has to be, Gerard.”

  “Who says so?”

  “I ... I’m not really sure, Gerard. Satan might well be manipulating me. But I don’t think so. I am convinced that some ... higher power is somehow giving me orders ... instructions ... call it what you will. I’m convinced of it.”

  “Do you know what you have to do?”

  “Yes.”

  Gerard stared at him, waiting for him to elaborate. When Link didn’t, he asked, “Can you do it?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know. But I’ve got to try.” He looked at his watch. “In about sixteen hours it will be all over, Gerard. One way or the other. Come on, ol’ buddy. Let’s see that this town is secure.”

  There was no more killing for them in the town, not for that day, and Link was happy about that. He knew that come the night, it would turn bloody and awful.

  They checked the small hospital. The patients had been slaughtered in their beds, some shot, others bludgeoned, still others hacked to death.

  “Why?” Dennis asked, as Carla filmed the bloated hideousness in each blood-splattered room. “It’s all so ... senseless. Did the kids we have locked down do this?”

  “I don’t think so,” Link said. “A few of the young people might have had a hand in this, but they’re the hard-core element, not the ones that we have locked up. Chris Brooks, Jason Matisse, Sam Bradley, Frankie Marley, the Broussard girl – that bunch. ”I’ll deal with them tonight.“

  “And you’re sure you can do it?” Jeff asked.

  “No. But since I won’t be getting there ’fustest with the mostest,’ as Nathan Bedford Forrest is reported to have said, I’ll just have to be meaner and nastier and more vicious than those I’m fighting.”

  “I certainly think you qualify,” the trooper said dryly. “I surely do.”

  “Thank you,” Link replied.

  * * *

  Link and the others spent the last several hours before dark cruising the town.

  “Victory is ours. We have taken the town,” Jeff Miller said to Link as they slowly drove the streets. His words were sarcastic. “All five of us. The jail is jam-packed with young people. Now I’m more confused than ever. Come on, Link. Five people don’t take over a whole damn town! There must be several hundred of those coven members left. At least. Why don’t they come on in and take us?”

  Link shook his head. “I don’t know. My guess is they want me to attack the Romaire complex. They think that if they kill me, the rest of you will just roll over and let them kill you. But that’s illogical.” He laughed, but it held a bitter note. “There I go again, trying to put logic into this craziness. We still can’t call outside the town by phone. We can talk to other law enforcement people by radio, but our words are somehow misunderstood or changed. Nearly every time I think I’ve been right about something, it turns out I was wrong . . . or so it seems. I’ve preached to forget logic, then I turn right around and find myself doing it.”

  “Link, could all this be a game? Is this a sample of Satan’s humor? Is this all just a big joke to him?”

  Link thought about that for a couple of silent blocks. He nodded his head. “You might be right, Jeff. You just may have hit the nail on the head.”

  “Well, it’s a damn sick joke! My God, Link. How many people have died? How many lives have been ruined? And how many more lives will be lost or ruined before it’s over? A joke? Jesus Christ.”

  Link cut the wheel and headed out of town.

  “Where are we going?” Jeff asked.

  “I’ve been suckered,” Link said tightly. “Played for a fool. Damnit!” He hit the steering wheel hard with the heel of his hand. “They don’t care how many people they lose. They don’t care if all their soldiers get killed. They’ve kept me occupied all day and did it deliberately. They knew I’d come after them. Hell, they planned on my doing it. They counted on me doing it.” He floorboarded the gas pedal.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I knew something was wrong. I sensed it. Those two are southern-born and reared. Small town people. Guy wrote articles about hunting when he was a kid. The son of a bitch!”

  “Oh, shit!” Jeff said. “And he and Suzanne said they didn’t know anything about guns.”

  “Yeah.”

  Jeff keyed his walkie-talkie. “Tom. Come in, Tom. Talk to me, boy.”

  No response.

  Just out of town, the road was blocked, done so very effectively and carefully.

  “What’s going on?” Gerard’s voice popped out of the walkie-talkie.

  “We don’t know,” Jeff told him. “But we can’t raise an
ybody out at Link’s and the road’s blocked at Jefferson Crossing. We’re backtracking and we’ll take – ” He looked at Link.

  Link dropped the truck into four-wheel drive and said, “Across that field.”

  Jeff lifted the walkie-talkie. “Just get out to Link’s, Gerard. Best way you can.”

  As they neared Link’s house, both were expecting to see smoke spiraling into the sky. No smoke. “Well, they didn’t burn the place, anyway.”

  “Maybe you’re wrong, Link.”

  “I hope so. But I got a sinking feeling in my guts that I’m right. For a change.”

  “It might be a setup, Link. Could be an ambush.”

  “Maybe.” He slowed the truck and whipped into his drive by the shattered gates. The vehicle that had blocked the gates had been moved out of the way. Tom Halbert lay on the grass in a pool of blood. Halfway up the drive, Jimmy Hughes was crawling toward the house, shot in both legs. He was pulling himself along using only his hands.

  “I’ll see about Jimmy and Tom,” Jeff said, and bailed out of the truck.

  Link jumped out at the fence. Paul Morris limped down to meet him. “They hit us hard, Link,” the young man said. “It was a diversion. While the fighting was going on, Guy Banks and Suzanne Perrin grabbed Anne and the kids and hustled them out the back door. She knew about the booby traps in the woods and how to avoid them. After you left, she really played up to Tom, convincing him that in case we were overwhelmed, everybody ought to know how to get through the woods. It was a valid argument. Hell, I bought it. They haven’t been gone five minutes. The last sniper just pulled out.”

  “Nobody’s fault but my own,” Link said. “I should have put it together before now.”

  “Tom’s still alive!” Jeff shouted. “Come on, help me.”

  Link looked up at the sky.

  The sun was going down.

  “It’s insane!” Gerard told him. “Damnit, Link, they know you’re coming. They’ll be waiting for you.”