Black Bird

by Greg Enslen

  Beaumont had been a lucky man, meeting her and convincing her to marry him, despite the fact that she had hated his job and hated the idea of being a policeman’s wife. But she had gotten past all of that in the five years since they had been wed, and now it looked like their life had taken a definite turn for the better. It was amazing how a baby can change one’s opinions about life.

  But Beaumont still found it difficult to think about having a happy, healthy life with this madman out here, running around loose. How could they be thinking about bringing a baby into this world when there were so many sickos out there, so many people who would kill for no reason? Over the past few weeks, he had begun to seriously doubt the intelligence of bringing a new baby into the world. What kind of a world was this, anyway?

  Of course, he hadn’t told Grace that. She was happy about the baby, very happy. They had gone to get the appropriate tests done, of course, and when the doctors had informed them only a couple of days ago that they would be having a boy, he and Grace had decided on the name of David Jonathan, somewhat of an homage to ancestors on both sides of their families. He had seen the nervousness in her eyes, though, when they had settled on a name; she knew of the dangers of her pregnancy, the doctors with their cautionary words about how her anatomy would make a natural birth extremely painful and dangerous. Somehow, giving the baby boy a name had made the fear more clear, more defined, yet easier to manage.

  But even knowing that he would be a father soon, even knowing that he would have a boy to throw around the pigskin with, even that knowledge couldn’t help him shake the notion that it was a bad idea, a very bad idea, to be having a baby, especially now. What if he couldn’t stop the Killer? What if Beaumont’s boy had to be born into a world that was populated with such sick people? Could his boy David ever adjust to such a topsy-turvy world?

  When Grace had first told him that she was pregnant, he had been overjoyed. He had had visions of them as a happy little family, happy to be living in a small town, a town that up until a few weeks ago had been a safe, secure place to raise a family. But ever since Jasper Fines had come into their lives, Beaumont had been thinking more and more about his family, about their safety.

  Sometimes he wondered (although only to himself - never in front of his men) if they would ever catch this guy. This guy was crafty, resourceful, smart; three dangerous attributes in any criminal. Beaumont hoped they would catch him, and soon. He had to catch this guy, if only to protect his wife and their son. He could never let anything like that happen to one of them.

  Not like what had happened to that little boy.

  Beaumont had been there. He had seen the dead little boy, his arms sprawled out like he was trying to hug the ground, trying to find something or someone in that dark field to help him. Beaumont he seen what this “Jasper Fines” character had done to that little boy, things that were beyond words, beyond understanding. And last night, Beaumont had had a horrible, gut-wrenching dream - a dream where Beaumont was wandering though that same dark field and he had been the one that found the body of the little boy, tossed behind a rickety tool shed, and one of the boy’s toes...

  But this time, in the dream, Beaumont had reached down and turned the body over, and it had been the face of his son. The eyes were glazed over and dead, but as Beaumont had watched with growing horror, his dead son’s hand had drifted up from the soggy ground and pointed a dirty finger up at him. It didn’t matter that Beaumont hadn’t seen his own sons’ face yet; he knew that it was his son. And his unborn son was blaming him for everything that had gone wrong in Liberty.

  Beaumont had been pushing himself hard for weeks, too hard, and he was running out of energy. He was tired, very tired, from too much work and too little sleep, and last night’s dream hadn’t helped. His leg hurt like hell, but Beaumont knew that this whole thing had to end, tonight. One way or another. He knew that he could chase this monster out of his town, if luck and careful planning was on Beaumont’s side.

  Beaumont looked back down at his map, tearing his thoughts away from his family. Highway 95 ran north to D.C. and south to Richmond, and he had roadblocks set up ten miles apart, five miles north and south of the junction with Highway 132. If Beaumont knew anything about criminals, he knew that he would probably try to hitch a ride, and then they could catch the guy.

  The guy. They didn’t even know this joker’s name, for Christ’s sake! He, The Killer, had given his name as “Jasper Fines”, but that had been an alias. A quick call to the state police had confirmed that. Most sheriffs’ offices didn’t rely on the state cops for much help, but Beaumont had found them indispensable on many occasions, including this one.

  Two of his citizens, butchered. A city councilman, found naked and bloody, thrown into a ditch like so much garbage. Two of his deputies in the hospital, one with a fractured skull and a broken nose, the other one shot twice. The doctors had told Beaumont that both of his deputies were very lucky to be alive.

  Himself, he was laid up in the back seat of his cruiser with a bum leg, encased in a pale gray leg cast that felt very heavy and looked incredibly big. It felt like a tree trunk. And not even a real name to hang it all on! Norma Jenkins, the female decoy at the supermarket, had given a fairly accurate description of the guy to their sketch artist, but that was all they had to go on. Copies of the sketch now adorned every signpost and telephone pole in Liberty, but so far it had turned up no new leads. “Jasper Fines” had been written at the top of each poster, but if this guy had doubled back to the west or kept heading east when he reached the road instead of hitching north or south, they’d never catch him, and then...

  No, that wasn’t the way to think. Even if Beaumont lost him, at least the monster would be gone, and his little town could go back to being normal. Bake sales, teenage pregnancies, and the occasional theft. This plan, to drive him out of the woods and into the roadblocks, it had to work. Then they would catch him and arrest him, and Beaumont could drive home, take his wife into his arms, and gingerly rest his hand on her growing stomach.

  Deputy Jenkins leaned her head in, the white bandage across her broken nose looking large in the pale moonlight. The rain had slowed and it looked like the clouds had started to break up, the rain was slowly being replaced by a thin glow of moonlight reflecting off the puddles on the pavement. “Brown’s calling in again, sir.” Her voice was odd, clipped, and the tone reminded Beaumont of the sound of someone with a really bad head cold or a sinus infection.

  “Good.” He awkwardly folded the map and painfully adjusted his leg to reach over the front seat and grab the radio handset.

  “Brown? What have you got for me, son?” His voice sounded hopeful and almost upbeat. Almost.

  A voice crackled back over the receiver, tinny and distant but still very familiar. “Nothing here yet, sir. We crossed the creek and picked up another trail, but it turned out to be nothing. We’re back at the creek, trying again.”

  Beaumont thought about it for a few seconds. “Forget the creek. Fan your men out in a north-south line and head in this direction. That’ll drive him to us, if he’s in front of you at all.”

  “Roger that, sir.” Brown replied. “Whatever you say. Are you all set up?”

  Beaumont smiled. He knew that Deputy Brown didn’t like this plan very much, but Brown would just have to deal with it. “Yeah, half the cars are here, and half are on the highway ten miles north of here up past 132, blocking the three north-bound lanes. We’re checking all the cars and trucks, so if he thumbs a ride, we’ll get him.” He didn’t like feeling like he was justifying himself or his plan to anybody, but Jes Brown was a pretty good deputy, even if he was headstrong and cocky. A few more years of supervision and the big man might turn out to be a pretty decent cop.

  He signed off and painfully climbed out of the back of his cruiser, trying to not bang the gray cast into anything. The cast was supposed to help the healing process, but he was having a lot of trouble imagining five more weeks of hobbling around like
a toddler. It had only proved to him that being injured on the job was much less glamorous than he had previously imagined. It felt like he was dragging a telephone pole around all the time.

  Sheriff William Beaumont hobbled awkwardly up behind Jenkins and the other deputies. She was studying another map laid out on the hood of a patrol car, and the others were just finishing checking a south-bound van. Here, the six lanes, three northbound and three southbound, were separated only by a flat grassy median. On the median, rutting around in the short grass, were a couple of dark birds of a species he couldn’t identify in the darkness - they looked like crows or maybe ravens. Or sparrows. Funny how you almost never see birds at night- he guessed black birds against a night sky were almost invisible.

  Other than their winged visitors, it had been a relatively quiet night, and so far, they hadn’t caused a traffic jam, at least not yet. Roadblocks on major highways often caused lots of trouble, and were precautions that were saved until the very last resort in most manhunts. He cleared his throat. “Are we set up?”

  The others turned around and assumed a more respectful stance. “Yes, sir,” Deputy Jenkins answered in her nasally voice. “Hollins, Jordan, and four cars are set up here, about ten miles north of here, blocking the three northbound lanes to Washington.” She indicated their position on the map. “We’re here,” she said, pointing again to a location about an inch or two south of the original. “We’re a little spread out to cover all the bases, but we don’t have as many men as I would like.” She seemed lost in her own thoughts for a moment as she looked around at the other deputies, but when she glanced up and saw the look on Beaumont’s face, she added a clipped, “Sir”.

  Beaumont chuckled softly and rubbed his face with one hand. “It’s okay, Jenkins. I know how much you want this guy, and believe me, so do the rest of us.” He thought for a moment. “How many do we have here?”

  She turned to do a quick head-count, and he noticed again how awkward the bandaged nose looked, bobbing slightly in the moonlight as she counted. “Eleven, sir.”

  Beaumont nodded. “Good.” He looked around for a moment and then continued. “He should be here within the next hour if he shows at all tonight. Except for the five of you checking vehicles, I want everyone else in their vehicles, in case he hijacks a car and we have to pursue.”

  Jenkins nodded and began directing the others. She and the four officers who had just finished inspecting the van stayed by the lead car, but the others headed off towards their own patrol cars.

  Jack was working his way through the trees at the side of the road when he spotted the group of police lights. They spun lazily atop six or seven cruisers, splashing the night, the trees, the shiny black pavement eerily with their bright lights. The red and blue lights seemed thoroughly out of place among the black trees and the darkness of the night sky. The rain had all but stopped, and the scattered moonlight trying to break its way through the thick clouds made the white paint of the police cars glow with an unearthly pale yellow.

  As he crept closer, he saw that the cars were positioned in to form a roadblock on the southbound side of the interstate. The three northbound lanes were marked with roadside flares, hissing and spitting their sparks onto the asphalt south of the roadblock. Evidently, they were also stopping the northbound traffic, too - probably to warn those drivers about picking up hitchhikers. As he watched, he saw a southbound van stopped and searched by several of Beaumont’s serious-looking deputies, and they allowed it to pass only after a very thorough going-over.

  Oh well, now he was glad he hadn’t tried to steal a car or kidnap someone - the cops were being too careful to let something stupid like that slip through.

  As he watched the little knot of patrol cars from the relative safety of a stand of pines just northeast of the roadblock, he saw Sheriff Beaumont climb out of the back of one of the patrol cars, the last one in the line. As Jack watched, he saw Beaumont hobble over to the group of deputies, one leg encased in a large grayish cast. He knew that he had hit him! Jack thought he had gotten him when Beaumont had fallen, but now he was sure.

  Beaumont was obviously having a lot of trouble maneuvering around in his cast, which meant he was at a distinct disadvantage. Good, Jack thought. This was as good a time as any to finish this. He smiled as he worked his way closer, carefully concealing himself behind the stands of trees and bushes until he was directly opposite the police cars.

  Sheriff Beaumont turned and started to make his way slowly back to his cruiser.

  Deputy Norma Jenkins called after him, and after a few seconds, came up behind him just before he reached his car. “Brown is on the horn again, sir.”

  “Thanks, Norma.” He saw that the other deputies were almost to their cars, and then he turned and grimaced as he bent from the hips and reached inside his squad car, pulling out the handset. He held it up to his mouth and thumbed the talk button. “Beaumont here.”

  Jack was almost even with Beaumont’s car, well back from the front of the roadblock. He was about forty or fifty feet from the Sheriff, screened by the group of trees he was hiding in and separated by the shoulder, three lanes of blacktop, and the grass median. Beaumont’s squad car was the last in the line of cars.

  Jack slowly crouched, one of his knees popping loudly, and set his green duffel bag to the ground, rummaging around in it blindly, feeling. He pulled both revolvers out, one in each hand, and then he flipped then both open to make sure they were both fully loaded, trying to be quiet as he went. Even in the darkness he could easily see the horrible scar on his left palm, and for a moment he wondered why he was doing what he was doing. He remembered the day he’d gotten that scar, and for a moment wondered why his life had taken the direction it had, starting with that bike ride. The scar had started everything...

  Jack shrugged and pushed those thoughts from his mind, shouldered his green duffel bag, and stood, waiting for the right moment to begin.

  “Brown here, sir. We’ve found his trail. He’s heading a little to the north, but still straight for the highway. Unless I miss my guess, and unless Hanson and the dogs are completely off base on this one, he should be coming out onto the road about a half mile or so north of your location.” Beaumont could hear it in his voice - Jes Brown wasn’t exactly pleased that the plan had worked, but there was a hint of pride in his voice that the Killer was all but captured. Hanson, another deputy under Beaumont, was their best tracker, and in combination with the bloodhounds, “Jasper Fines” had no chance of getting away.

  Beaumont smiled.

  “Good work, son. When he hits the road, he’ll have to go one way or the other, and then we’ll get him.” His mind was already planning what to do next: he should probably call the men at the other roadblock and tell them what was happening, and then he should probably call his wife to let her know that he was okay and check on the baby, and then...

  There was a long silence, and Beaumont was beginning to think that Brown had shut off his radio without signing off, maybe not hearing the Sheriff’s last comment.

  “Well, I certainly hope so, sir.”

  Jes Brown’s chuckle came over the radio, as clear and ominous as if the big deputy were standing right there on the wet pavement next to Beaumont, the sound so real and so close that it made the little hairs on the back of Beaumont’s neck stand up. “I’m getting real tired of tellin’ all the boys and their dogs to make so much noise. It was starting to give me a headache.”

  Beaumont’s stomach tightened. “What?”

  “Well”, Brown continued, “we’ve been making a whole lot of noise here, more than we needed to. The guys have really been whooping it up. We’re supposed to be driving him to you, right?”

  Beaumont froze in his tracks, the handset suddenly feeling very heavy in his hand. He grimaced as the realization struck him like a bolt of lightning from a cloudless blue sky.

  “You can’t do that,” Beaumont said frantically. “He’ll know what you’re doing! He’ll figure out you’r
e driving him and he’ll...”

  The first shot caught Beaumont square in the chest, jerking him around rudely and knocking him down behind the open door of his squad car.

  The other officers spun around at the sudden sound and futility reached for their side arms, but Jack quickly dropped three of them as he strode up the hill to the roadway. Surprise, utter surprise, was his ally. He marched up the hill, guns firing, and crossed the northbound lanes full of authority, his green duffel slung over his shoulder and forgotten. He looked just like the hero from one of those old westerns, except this hero was dressed in a dusty brown jacket, his boots clinking in the night. This hero had the look of a demon in his eyes.

  Other officers dove behind their cars or down the opposite embankment, and those were the ones that survived uninjured. Some of the other deputies tried to return fire, but Jack, buoyed by his good luck, seemed unstoppable, as if the bullets fired at him went wide simply because of his will. After a few short seconds of gunfire, a deep silence descended and seemed to cloak the dark road, broken only by Jack’s solid, echoing footsteps. The dark birds were long gone, scared into the night. Several wounded officers lay on the ground, groaning weakly, barely audible.

  Jack slowly walked over to them each in turn and kicked their guns away, squatting to pop the bullets from them, reloading his own guns and pocketing the rest of the bullets.

  One of them was a dark-haired woman with a large white bandage covering her nose. She was curled up, grasping one bleeding leg. Jack walked over to her and pointed the gun in her face. Her eyes were wide, her voice trapped in her throat. He smiled, recognizing her from the supermarket alley, and he held the gun in her face for a long, agonizing moment before he suddenly shouted, “BANG!”