Still Life with Crows

by Preston; Child

  Tad cleared his throat. “Excuse me, folks, but we’ve got a tornado warning in effect for all of Cry County. Force 2, even force 3, tornadoes possible. Time to head home.”

  The reporters and camera crews had already fled the coming storm, and he found himself looking upon a roomful of the usual. Melton Rasmussen; Swede Cahill and his wife, Gladys; Art Ridder. Smit Ludwig was absent, which was a little odd. He was the one person you’d most expect to find. Maybe he was out on some storm-related story. If so, he’d better get his rear end to shelter.

  Rasmussen was the first to react. “Any news on the killings?” he asked.

  The question hung in the air and Tad faced a roomful of expectant faces. He was taken aback: here, even with the threat of tornadoes, the killings were still the first thing on everyone’s mind. This was why Maisie’s was full: Tad had seen cows do it, bunching up when they got scared.

  “Well, we’ve—” Tad stopped himself. The sheriff would definitely have his ass on a platter if he mentioned the upcoming operation.

  “We’re following up some excellent leads,” he finished up with the usual line, knowing how lame it must sound.

  “That’s just what you’ve been saying for a goddamned week,” said Mel, standing up, his face red.

  “Easy, Mel,” said Swede Cahill.

  “Well, we’ve got a better lead now,” Tad said defensively.

  “Abetter lead. Did you hear that, Art?”

  Art Ridder was sitting at the bar nursing a cup of coffee. His look was definitely not friendly. He eased his butt around on the chrome seat and faced Tad. “The sheriff said he had a plan, some way of catching the murderer and getting the experimental field back to Medicine Creek. Tad, I want to know what the hell this plan of his is, or whether he was just blowing smoke.”

  “I’m not at liberty to discuss his plans,” said Tad. “And anyway, the important thing is that there’s a tornado warning in effect for—”

  “The hell with the warning,” said Ridder. “I want to see some action on these killings.”

  “Sheriff Hazen’s making progress.”

  “Progress? Where’s he been? I haven’t seen hide nor hair of him all day.”

  “He’s been in Deeper, pursuing a lead—”

  Suddenly the swinging doors to the kitchen burst open and Maisie appeared behind the counter. “Art Ridder, you shut your trap,” she barked. “Lay off Tad here. He’s just doing his job.”

  “Now look here, Maisie—”

  “Don’t ‘look here, Maisie’ me, Art Ridder. I’m wise to your bullying ways and you won’t do it in here. And you, Mel, you know better. Lay off.”

  The room fell into a guilty silence.

  “There’s a tornado warning out,” continued Maisie. “You all know what that means. You got five minutes to clear out. You can settle up later. I’m shuttering my windows and heading down to the basement. The rest of you’d better do the same if you don’t want to find yourselves over the rainbow before the night is out.”

  She turned and went back into the kitchen, smacking the swinging doors together and causing everyone to jump.

  “Get to a safe place of shelter,” Tad said, looking around at the assembly, remembering the list in his manual. “Get in the basement, under a worktable or concrete washtub or staircase. Avoid windows. Bring a flashlight, potable water, and a portable radio with batteries. The warning’s in effect until midnight, but they may extend it, you never know. This is one heck of a storm.”

  As the place cleared out, Tad went into the back, looking for Maisie.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  Maisie waved her hand dismissively. She looked more haggard than he remembered ever seeing her. “Tad, I don’t know if I should mention this, but Smit’s missing.”

  “I kinda wondered about that.”

  “There was a reporter who waited for him until closing last night. Smit wasn’t here for breakfast or lunch. It’s not like him to stay away like that, not without saying something. I called his home and the paper, but there’s no answer.”

  “I’ll look into it,” Tad said.

  Maisie nodded. “Probably nothing.”

  “Yeah. Probably nothing.” Tad went back out into the restaurant, shuttered the windows, then made for the door. Hand on the knob, he turned back. “You get in that basement now, Maisie, okay?”

  “On my way,” Maisie’s voice came drifting back from down the stairs.

  Just as Tad returned to the sheriff’s office, the call came from the county dispatcher. Mrs. Fernald Higgs had called. Her boy had seen a monster in his room. When he screamed and turned on the light, the monster ran away. The boy was hysterical and so was Mrs. Higgs.

  Tad listened incredulously until the dispatcher had finished.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” he said.

  “She wants the sheriff out there,” the dispatcher ended lamely.

  Tad could hardly believe it. “We’ve got a serial killer loose and a frontful of tornadoes on their way, and you want me to check out amonster? ”

  There was a silence. “Hey,” said the dispatcher, “I’m just doing my job. You know I have to report everything. Mrs. Higgs says the monster left a footprint.”

  Tad lowered the radio momentarily.Jesus Christ.

  He looked at his watch. Eight-thirty. He could be out to the Higgs place and back in twenty minutes.

  With a sigh, he raised the radio once again. “All right,” he said. “I’ll check it out.”

  Fifty-One

  By the time Tad arrived at the Higgs residence, old man Higgs had returned home and whaled his boy, and the kid was sitting angrily in the corner, eyes dry, little fists clenched. Mrs. Higgs was flitting about in the background, worried, wringing her hands, her mouth compressed. Higgs himself sat at the kitchen table, face set, eating a potato.

  “I’m here about the, ah, report,” Tad said as he came in, taking his hat off.

  “Forget the report,” said the old man. “I’m sorry you were bothered.”

  Tad went over to the boy and knelt down. “You okay?”

  The boy nodded, his face flaming red. He had blond hair and very blue eyes.

  “Hillis, I don’t want any more talk of monsters, hear?” the farmer said.

  Mrs. Higgs sat down, got up. “I’m sorry, Deputy Tad, do you want a cup of coffee?”

  “No thanks, ma’am.”

  He looked at the kid again and spoke softly. “What’d you see?”

  The kid said nothing.

  “Don’t be talking about any monsters,” growled the farmer.

  Tad leaned closer.

  “Isaw it,” said the boy defiantly.

  “What’d you say?” the farmer roared.

  Tad turned to Mrs. Higgs. “Show me the footprint, if you will, ma’am.”

  Mrs. Higgs rose nervously.

  The farmer said, “He ain’t talking about monsters still, is he? By jingo, I’ll whale him a second time. Calling the police about a monster!”

  Mrs. Higgs brought Tad through the small parlor to the back of the house and scuttled into the boy’s room. She pointed at the window. “Iknow I shut the window before I put Hill to bed, but when he screamed and I came in I saw it was open. And when I went to shut it I saw a footprint in the flowerbed.”

  Tad could hear Higgs’s voice raised in the kitchen. “It’s goddamned embarrassing, having the sheriff come calling over a bad dream.”

  Tad raised the window. The moment he did so, the wind came shrieking in, grabbing the curtains and tossing them wildly around. Tad put his head out the window and looked down.

  In the faint light from the room he could see a bed of carefully tended zinnias. Several of them had been roughly flattened by a large, elongated mark. It might be a footprint, but then again, it might not be.

  He went back through the parlor, exited the side door, and walked around the edge of the house, leaning toward the clapboards for cover, until he’d reached the boy’s window. Snapping on his
flashlight, he knelt by the flowerbed.

  The impression was smudged and had been eroded by the storm, but it did, in fact, strongly resemble a footprint.

  He straightened up, angling his flashlight away from the house. There was another mark, then another and another. With his flashlight, he followed their direction. About a quarter mile distant—beyond the frenzied, tossing sea of corn—were the faint lights of the Gro-Bain plant. The storm warnings had shut the plant down early and it now lay empty.

  As he watched, the lights abruptly winked out.

  He turned. The lights in the Higgs house were out, too. But the glow of light from Medicine Creek was still visible.

  Blackout.

  He trudged around the side of the farmhouse again and went in the door.

  “It appears there may, in fact, have been an intruder,” he said.

  The farmer muttered angrily but didn’t say anything. Mrs. Higgs was already lighting candles.

  “We’re also under a tornado warning. I’m going to ask you to shut and lock your doors and windows. Head for the basement the moment the wind gets any worse. If you have a battery-powered radio, keep it tuned to the emergency channel.”

  The farmer grunted acknowledgment. He didn’t need anybody telling him what to do in case of a twister.

  Tad got back in his car and sat for a moment, thinking. The big cruiser rocked back and forth to the gusting of the wind. It was nine o’clock. Hazen and his team would be in town by now. He unhooked the radio and called in.

  “That you, Tad?”

  “Yeah. You back at the station, Sheriff?”

  “Not yet. Storm blew down a tree on the Deeper Road and knocked out a couple of repeater stations.”

  Tad quickly explained the situation.

  “Monsters, huh?” Hazen chuckled. There was an awful lot of noise in the background.

  “You know 911, they have to report everything. I’m sorry if I—”

  “Don’t apologize. You did right. What’s the upshot?”

  “It appears there may have been an intruder. The kid’s scream might have startled him. He seems to have headed away in the direction of the Gro-Bain plant. Which, by the way, just lost power.”

  “Probably that Cahill kid and his friends again. Remember that egging last month? We don’t want those boys out on a night like this. They take advantage of a blackout to go helling around, they could end up getting skulled by a flying tree. As long as you’re out there, why don’t you check out the plant? There’s still time. Keep in touch.”

  “Right.”

  “And Tad?”

  “Yes?”

  “You haven’t seen that man Pendergast, have you?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Looks like he blew town after I served him with that C-and-D.”

  “No doubt.”

  “We’re going to hit the cave at ten. Get back by then to cover the office.”

  “Got it.”

  Tad signed off and started up the car. He felt a certain relief. Now he had an even better reason not to go into the cave after the killer. As for Gro-Bain, they hadn’t had a night guard since the last one started working days. He would just check the entrances: as long as they were all locked, and there was no sign of activity, his job would be done.

  He pointed the car south, toward the dark, low outline of the plant.

  Fifty-Two

  Tad eased his squad car into the plant’s parking lot. Heavy gusts blasted across the empty asphalt, carrying with them bits of straw and ruined husks of corn. Ribbons of rain cascaded here and there, coming and going in sudden sheets. A line of fat raindrops passed over the cruiser, from front to back, with a machine-gun cadence. Beyond the parking lot, he could hear waves of wind ripping through the cornfields surrounding the plant. He peered out at the blackness over the corn, half hoping for, half dreading, the sight of a daggerlike funnel cloud. But he could see nothing.

  The sheriff had said he suspected Andy Cahill and his friends of terrorizing the Higgs homestead. Privately, Tad thought Hazen’s own son Brad and his gang were the more likely suspects. Scaring little kids, egging buildings, was more their style. The son would never be the man his father was. Tad wondered what he’d do if he ran into the sheriff’s son outside the plant. Now, that could prove to be more than a little awkward.

  He eased the car up to the low outline of the plant and stopped, engine idling. Even through the closed windows, the wind screeched and moaned like a beast in pain. The plant was dim against the murk, sunken in the corn, dark and deserted.

  Looking at the low, sinister building, what had seemed like a routine check was beginning to seem less appealing to Tad. Why the heck hadn’t Gro-Bain hired another night watchman? It wasn’t fair that the burden of private security fell on the sheriff’s department.

  Tad passed a hand through his closely cropped hair. No help for it now. He’d just do a quick check to make sure none of the doors had been forced, then he’d check Smit Ludwig’s place and head on back to the station.

  He cracked the cruiser door open, and the wind pushed it back at him with an angry howl. Pulling his hat down and raising his collar, he pushed harder at the door, then ducked out, face against the storm, making for the loading docks. As he ran, he could hear something banging in the wind. Reaching the shelter of the building, he pushed his hat back on his head and switched on his flashlight, then made his way along the cinderblock wall. The banging got louder.

  It was when he reached the top of the loading dock stairs that his light revealed an open door, swinging and banging on broken hinges.

  Shit.

  Tad stood there, the beam of the flashlight playing over the shattered lock and mangled hinges. Somebody had really done a number on it. Normally, he would call for backup. But where was he going to get backup on a night like this? Any law enforcement officers that weren’t going into the cave after the killer would be out working the tornado watch. Maybe he should just forget about it, come back in the morning.

  He imagined explaining that decision to the darkening face of Sheriff Hazen and decided it was not an acceptable option. Hazen was constantly harping on him that he needed more pluck, more initiative.

  This was nothing, really, to be concerned about. The killer was safely bottled up in the cave. Kids like Brad Hazen were always breaking into the plant for fun, even when the night watchman was there. It had happened several times before, most notably last Halloween—half a dozen hoodlums from Deeper who thought it would be fun to T.P. their rival town’s major employer.

  Tad felt a wash of irritation. It was a hell of a night to pull crap like that. He pushed through the broken door, making as much noise as possible, and shone his light around the receiving area.

  “This is the police,” he called out in his sternest voice. “Please identify yourselves.”

  The only answer was the echo of his own voice coming back at him from the blackness.

  Moving forward carefully, letting his light drift from left to right, he exited the loading bay and walked along the catwalk leading into the plant proper. It was very dark and smelled strongly of chlorine, and as he walked beneath a partition he felt, rather than saw, the ceiling suddenly rise to a great height. He paused to run the beam of his light along the conveyor belt that snaked through the plant like an endless metal road, back and forth, up and down, on at least three different levels. Emerging first from a small, tiled room attached to the stunning area, the “line” ran through several freestanding structures within the plant, buildings within buildings: the Scalder, the Plucker, the Box Washer. Tad remembered their names from his previous visits. It was the kind of thing you didn’t forget too quickly.

  He shone his light back toward the tiled room. This small structure, the first within the plant, was the Blood Room. Its door was ajar.

  “This is the police,” he rapped out a second time, advancing a few more steps. Outside, the shriek of the wind answered faintly.

  Transferring his flashl
ight to his left hand, Tad unsnapped the leather guard on his service holster, let his palm rest lightly on the handle of his piece. Not that there would be any call for it, of course. But it felt reassuring, just the same.

  He turned and shone his light around again, licking the beam off the gleaming assembly line, off the tubes and pressure hoses that snaked up the gray-painted walls. The plant was vast, cavernous, and his light penetrated less than a third of it. But the place was silent, and what he could see looked decidedly empty.

  Tad felt a certain relief. The kids had probably run for it at the first sign of his cruiser.

  He glanced at his watch: almost quarter after nine. Hazen would be at the sheriff’s office by now, preparing for the ten-o’clock raid. He’d followed through, and found nothing. Any further time here would be wasted. He’d check out Smit Ludwig’s place, then get back.

  It was as he turned to leave that he heard the noise.

  He paused, listening. There it was again: a kind of giggle, or wet snicker. It seemed to come from the Blood Room, queerly distorted by the stainless steel floor and tiled walls.

  Christ, the kids were hiding in there.

  He shone his flashlight at the open door of the Blood Room. The conveyor belt emerged from a wide porthole above the door, dangling hooks winking in his beam, throwing cruel misshapen shadows over the entrance.

  “All right,” he said, “come out of there. All of you.”

  Another snort.

  “I’m going to count to three, and if you don’t come out you’ll be in serious trouble, and that’s a promise.”

  This was ridiculous, wasting his time like this in the middle of a tornado warning. He was going to throw the book at those kids. Deeper scum, he was sure of it now.

  “One.”

  No response.

  “Two.”

  He waited, but there was nothing but silence from the half-open door.

  “Three.” Tad moved swiftly and purposefully toward the door, his boots echoing on the slick tile floor. He kicked the door wide with a hollow boom that echoed crazily around the vast interior of the plant.