Black Bird

by Greg Enslen

  BLACK

  BIRD

  a novel by

  Greg Enslen

  Black Bird, 2nd edition

  All Rights Reserved © 2003 for original printing by Greg Enslen. All Rights Reserved © 2003, 2010 for original printing and revised printing by Greg Enslen.

  No part of any version of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher and author.

  This book was originally published by iUniverse, Inc.

  For more information on the Author, including a list of books available for purchase and information on signed copies of books, please visit the author’s website at www.gregenslen.com.

  Printed by Lulu. For more information, please see www.lulu.com.

  Notes on this Second Edition

  This book was originally published in 2003, but ever since it came out, I've always wanted a chance to go back and make a few "tweaks" to the original. There have always been a few scenes I wanted to change, a few things that I wanted to remove, and a few aspects of the overarching story that I thought could benefit from more attention and more explanation.

  On the occasion of the publishing of my second book, "The Ghost of Blackwood Lane," it occurred to me that an updated edition would not be that difficult to produce - in fact, with advances in publishing in the intervening years, it would allow me to release a version of this book that would cost the reader significantly less than the original paperback, which retailed for $26.99.

  Hopefully, this edition finds more readers. For those who read the first edition, the original version of the story, I hope this edition lives up to the original and, fingers crossed, surpasses it.

  Dedication

  The first edition of this book was dedicated to several people, so I will repeat some of those here and add a couple of new ones. This book is dedicated to:

  · My wife Samantha, for always supporting my obsession with writing and listening to me prattle on at length about my various ideas. She pushed me to get this book published and for that, I thank her.

  · Neil Peart, Geddy Lee, and Alex Lifeson, members of the band Rush, for producing a masterful collection of albums over the past 40 years of the greatest rock-and-roll ever recorded. Their cerebral material goes a lot deeper than "Tom Sawyer" — their amazing studio albums and live recordings have inspired me, motivated me, and captivated me for as long as I can remember.

  · My beautiful kids: my son Alexander Bailey, and Annabelle Willow and Catherine Cordelia, my two beautiful daughters.

  · A new person to thank would be my sister, Pam Schwartz, for producing the new cover for the second edition. Thanks for pulling that together - it looks great!

  · And most of all, my parents, Al and Delores Enslen, for their unflagging support and hours of reading and re-reading (and re-reading) drafts of this book. Their suggestions and comments always made it better, more exciting, and more interesting. Thank you for your invaluable help in getting this big bad boy out the door!

  Part One:

  Before

  Prologue -

  April 1978

  Jack Terrington ran blindly, wheezing heavily, and stumbled down a small grassy hill, barely ducking in time to avoid crashing into a low-hanging tree branch.

  Heavy rain pattered to the soggy ground all around him, making the mud even more slippery, making each step more dangerous. He could easily hear the labored breathing of the dogs not far enough behind him.

  He reached the bottom of the small hill and splashed into a shallow, muddy creek that traced a path along the base of the hill. Turning, he ran upstream in the water for fifty yards or so before crossing to the other side and starting up another hill on the opposite bank.

  That should stall them, Jack thought.

  Or at least slow them down a few minutes.

  Even though it was a tired trick, overused bad movies, he knew that it actually did have some grounding in the world of non-fiction: dogs, even trained bloodhounds, often lose the scent of anything they are tracking when that scent-trail hits water. It had something to do with their ability to track scents only on solid ground, or something like that. That creek, and the rain, would help mask the trail he left behind.

  He ran, hitting the top of the second hill at a dead sprint, continuing up, over, and down the other side, weaving his way through a thick stand of trees. Above him, a small group of birds circled, dark against the sky. Jack wanted to look back, to see if the dogs had made it to the creek yet, but he didn’t have time. Blood from his forehead tried to get into his eyes, and he angrily wiped it away with one arm of his green coat.

  Jack was heading due east out of town, no looking back.

  Beyond the hill was a large open area, and he ran through a large muddy field that looked like it had been freshly plowed, his boots sloshing in the muck, kicking up mud and water. The short silver chains that looped beneath each of his boots usually clinked when he moved, but now the boots were silent, caked with mud.

  The dogs, their handlers, and the deputies were chasing him, but the creek should give him a little more breathing room. Jack had managed to elude them and avoid capture for several days now, but he had found out the hard way that the sheriff of this little town was smart. The sheriff had put the clues together much faster than Jack had thought possible, and now the little voice inside Jack’s head, the same little voice that sometimes gave him ideas and suggestions, that voice was wailing, shrilly screaming so loudly inside Jack’s head that it hurt.

  Find a way, ANY way out of this stupid little town.

  Liberty, Virginia was a quiet town about 60 miles southwest of Washington D.C., nestled into the rolling foothills east of the Shenandoah Mountains. Highway 132, the main road through town, ran west, curving and twisting up into the foothills and mountains before reaching Shenandoah National Park; the road also ran due east out of town through intermixed forests and farmland to Interstate-95, which in turn ran north to Washington D.C. and south to Richmond. Like many of the other small towns that he had been through, Jack had seen Liberty as just another wide spot in the road, full of stupid, sightless people.

  And the cops were usually the most blind.

  In Jack’s experience, it usually took the small-town cops at least a week or two to realize something was happening. This was the eighth or ninth little town Jack had been in in less than three years, and usually he came and went, no problem. But this time, things had been different. Jack had never seen anyone catch on to what was happening so quickly. This guy, this Sheriff Beaumont, he was smart.

  Now Jack was running.

  He’d spent the last 12 hours or so holed up in a grimy storage shed behind an abandoned house on the eastern edge of town. Jack had heard that the sheriff had formed several citizens’ search parties to search for him; Jack had guessed that Beaumont would assume he would head west, towards the safety of the Shenandoah Mountains and the expansive valley beyond. Guessing this, Jack had figured the smartest thing to do would be to travel due east, planning to take Highway 132 the fifteen miles or so out to Interstate-95, the main freeway, and catch a ride either south towards Richmond, or north to D.C. Usually he traveled the long distances by hitching from one small town to the next, catching rides with motorists and truck drivers that frequented the expansive stretches of lonely blacktop. Not only was hitching rides a terribly cheap and easy way to travel, but the people he caught rides with were usually just passing through the area and had very short memories.

  But that plan hadn’t worked, either. Beaumont must have somehow figured out how to get inside Jack’s head or something, because Jack heard on a radio that
the search party, or “posse” as it became known, had been called in from the foothills west of town and assigned to search the farmlands east of town, looking for Jack in the fields and forests that separated the town from the stretch of interstate to the east. They had cars, radios, dogs. They were probably all armed to the teeth.

  Jack had his brain, his green duffel bag with the guns, and little else.

  Jack rounded some trees, almost slipping and falling on the wet grass, and entered a small, wide clearing dotted with large puddles of rainwater. He ducked under the branches of an evergreen tree and dropped his big duffel bag, sitting down heavily on a mat of pine needles, planning to rest for only moment or two. His head was spinning and his breath was labored from running, but it was relatively dry under here, out of the pouring rain, and he could relax for a minute and think. He needed to think. He couldn’t hear the braying sounds of the dogs anymore, and figured that he probably had a few minutes to collect his thoughts. He was exhausted, but he needed to at least try to plan his next move - he couldn’t rely on luck and good fortune. Jack leaned back against the tree trunk, its bark moist from the rain, and he tried to think. His heart slowed its pounding in his chest.

  Should he go on to the Interstate and try to hitch a ride North to D.C.? South to Richmond? Should he maybe double back and try to slip through the lines that the posse had undoubtedly formed? He’d already had enough trouble crossing the County Line Bridge on 132 that formed the city limits of Liberty, and he thought if he went back and tried to cross the narrow bridge in the other direction, he would surely be seen. On the other hand, was there some other way, some other option that he had yet to consider?

  What he hadn’t considered was that he was very tired, or Jack would have caught himself nodding off only moments later.

  The bloodhounds had something, from the looks of them, but when they reached the creek, Deputy Brown knew immediately that the scent was lost. He knew that any dog could smell the minute particles that came off any person’s body as they moved about, and that bloodhounds in particular were the best breed in the business at finding and tracking those minute particles. But he also knew that that only worked if those minute particles fell and came to rest on a solid surface, like the ground or a street. A moving stream did a very good job of washing away any of the particles that might have fallen into it, erasing the trail completely, and this stream led downhill into the Anne River, the largest river in the area. If he was trying to get away by moving downstream and swimming the river, he was gone.

  Deputy Jes Brown cursed under his breath as he shook his head, and reached around to the back of his sizable belt for his radio, clicking its thumb trigger, still breathing heavy from the chase. The pouring rain had made it hard enough to track the man - the stream now made it impossible.

  A momentary pause, and then: “Beaumont here.”

  “Yeah, Chief. Brown here. We had him there for a while, a very fresh trail, but we just hit a creek and the dogs lost the scent.” Deputy Brown could see the dogs now, nervously sniffing around on both banks of the creek and rutting around in the low bushes that grew on this side of the small creek, their breath small clouds of steam in the cold, wet air. They looked ridiculous to him, as if they were simply trying to choose the perfect location to relieve themselves, but Deputy Brown knew better - they were trying to pick up any hint of the scent-trail again. Brown didn’t have much faith in these dogs or in his Sheriff’s crazy plan to trap this guy at the Interstate, for that matter, but he had kept that to himself. No need to cause any trouble, or jeopardize his career. Jes Brown rarely agreed with his boss or his bosses’ methods, but the townspeople seemed to like him, and Jes knew enough about small town politics to stay quiet. Beaumont wanted these dogs to make lots of noise, flush the guy out and towards the road, and Brown would make sure they made all the noise Beaumont could handle. But Brown still didn’t think it would work.

  Beaumont’s ragged, raspy voice came back. “Well, keep trying. Cross the creek and have the handlers take the dogs up and down the opposite bank until they pick up the scent again.” Deputy Brown could easily hear the labored breathing of Sheriff Beaumont, even over the radio; the wound from the bullet he had taken must be smarting him. “Got that?”

  “Yeah, Chief.” Brown replied, shaking his head and wishing for nothing more than pie and coffee at Juanita’s. The Sheriff was a rank amateur - even the few classes Deputy Jes Brown had had at the Academy down in Richmond had taught him better. But if they did catch the guy, Brown wanted to be right there to get some of the credit.

  Deputy Brown hooked his radio back onto the loop on his belt and stood in the heavy rain for a few moments longer, just watching the dogs rummaging around and he couldn’t help smiling as he whistled to summon the handlers and organize the next phase of the search. Whatever the boss wanted, he would get. Noise, and lots of it, would drive the Killer to the roadblock.

  The memories of the past four weeks washed over him like a comfortable wave, rocking him into a gentle slumber. Yet even as he slept lightly, some small part of his mind was still awake, listening for the dogs.

  Jack had chosen the little town of Liberty, Virginia at random, as he did each town in turn. He got the approximate location from a map bought at an Exxon station while hitching through northern Pennsylvania three weeks earlier.

  When he had first arrived in Liberty, it had looked like a harmless, simple town, something like a modern day Mayberry; he had half-expected to see Andy and Barney come strolling down the street on their way to that Diner they always went to.

  The town consisted of three dozen thin, crisscrossing streets with rustic, small-town names like ‘Oak’ and ‘Maple’ and ‘Dale’. There was a smallish downtown section with a cluster of quaint businesses and offices around a grassy town square, three or four stoplights, and one McDonalds, the lone sign of ‘modern’ encroachment. Didn’t these people know that it was 1978? This place looked like it was still trapped somewhere back in the early sixties, as if the town had somehow ignored the past 20 years.

  Jack had drifted quietly into town, and then, after a few days, he began looking, watching, waiting. But he grew less patient with each passing hour.

  Most of the time, it took the local authorities a while to figure out something was going on, and by the time they did, he had already satisfied his urges and left, moving on to some other small town. A body or two, or even a couple of mysterious disappearances, usually announced pretty loudly even to the hick police of these towns that something was wrong. But the police in these little towns were so used to dealing with the simple, petty crimes, like theft and wife beating and such, that when a real case came along, it usually took them a couple of weeks to even realize it was happening. Longer still to grasp its importance or to start piecing together the clues. It wasn’t too hard to understand, when most of the ‘authorities’ in these towns that were charged with public ‘safety’ were far too stupid to grasp much of anything.

  Jack, of course, never made it too easy or too obvious for them. He liked what he did. He did it because he needed to do it, wanted to do it, and he planned to continue doing it for as long as he could.

  But this Beaumont had thrown one serious wrench into Jack’s plans. After the first disappearance, the sheriff had immediately dropped everything else and began doggedly working to find some explanation behind the disappearance. When the missing boy, thirteen, was found dumped behind a tool shed on the south end of town, his throat cut, Beaumont had evidently mobilized his deputies, directing them to question any new people in town. Jack had heard the cops were asking around for new faces, and he had given the name “Jasper Fines” to anyone in town that had gotten curious enough to ask him; that lie, like so many others, had come naturally to his lips.

  When the second person disappeared a few days later, a thirty-eight year old city council member, a family man and respected member of the local business community, the citizens of Liberty had grown very vocal and demanded t
hat Beaumont spare no time or expense in hunting for “The Killer,” as he was now called. When the councilman’s body was found several days later, dumped in a shallow drainage ditch near the town’s water treatment station, the town had gone crazy.

  Jack knew he should have left then, but he wanted to take one more before he left. Maybe it was pride, or something else, but he wanted to prove to himself and the Sheriff that he could kill when and where he wanted, and not get caught.

  He packed up his few things and left the little hotel he’d stayed in, drifting around town, searching, but no one was out. Jack should have left then. He should’ve buried the bodies, or thrown them in a lake or a river to delay their discovery. But he had only been at this for a couple years and his ego got the better of his experience.

  After the man’s body had been found, things starting happening very quickly. Beaumont had ordered a dusk to dawn curfew. People were instructed to come out at night only when it was necessary. Sheriff Beaumont wrote columns in the paper, promising to end the worst violence that his town had ever known. He wrote with conviction, convincing the people in his town that if they followed his instructions to the letter, he would be successful in catching whoever was killing in their once-peaceful town.

  Two nights later, a very tired and hungry Jack Terrington had staked out the parking lot of a supermarket, looking. The town was shut down tight, but he reasoned that people would need food. Of course, he had no idea it was a setup. He watched for an hour or so before making his move, choosing a short female as she came out of the supermarket. He had concealed himself on one side of the building, in the shadows, but as she walked by, he had moved out of the shadows towards her. Looking around and seeing no one watching, he’d grabbed her roughly and pulled her down behind a metallic trash dumpster. One of the trashcan lids had slid off and clanged loudly to the pavement, and the sudden stink of old food and grease had erupted around him.