The Night Parade(79)

“So much for job security,” David said.

Yet as they drew closer, David realized there was something too . . . authentic . . . about the slouching human form strung up to the post in that field—the weighty slump of the head, the articulated fingers protruding from the sleeves, the bulk and musculature of the thighs in its sun-faded overalls. Beyond the scarecrow, David glimpsed several more out in the field. These others had the same distressing qualities as the first, and there were the coppery stains of blood on the clothes of a few of them. He wondered if he was seeing things accurately.

“Those scarecrows look all right to you?” he asked Ellie.

She pressed her nose against the glass of the passenger window, her breath fogging it up. “They look creepy,” was all she said after a moment.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

He decided not to push the issue.

Ten minutes later, they drove past a succession of small farmhouses. The lawns were all overgrown and there appeared to be no livestock in any of the pens. There were vehicles in some of the driveways or parked along patches of grass behind the houses, yet David got the distinct impression that these houses were empty. This thought was only confirmed when he noted the red X’s painted over each front door.

The road emptied them out in the center of a small two-street town. Clapboard buildings ran the length of both streets, squalid mom-and-pop storefronts that appeared neglected and forgotten despite the OPEN signs in some of the windows. The most inviting appeared to be a small sandwich shop, so David parked the car.

“Put your hat back on,” he said. “And this time, use the right bathroom.” He winked at her. Then he slid the Glock out from beneath his seat and wedged it down into his pants against the small of his back.

Ellie grabbed the shoe box and opened her door.

“Wait,” he said. “Leave that here.”

“I won’t.”

“It’ll look too weird, you hauling around a shoe box like that. We don’t want to do anything that might cause someone to remember us later.”

“I won’t leave them behind again.” Her tone was firm, her eyes heavy on him. He knew better than to argue with her when she had her mind set. Her mother had been the same way.

“Okay,” he relented.

They entered the sandwich shop, which was no bigger than the claustrophobic little office David had shared with the other instructors in his department back at the college, and went straight to the rear. There were no tables, just a wall-length counter where two burly men sat eating sandwiches and drinking coffee. Keno played on a TV screen behind the counter. The air smelled of grease.

“Restrooms?” David asked the man in the white apron behind the counter.

“You sick?” asked the man. He was scrutinizing David’s face.

“No.”

“Your kid?”

“He’s clean.”

The man pointed to a shabby rectangular cutout in the drywall that couldn’t precisely be called a doorway. “End of the hall,” he said. “You want some menus?”

Because the tone of the man’s voice suggested the bathrooms were for paying customers only, David said, “Sure.”

The man placed two menus on the counter in front of two vacant stools while David led Ellie through the cutout in the wall and down a narrow, unlit corridor. There was a single door at the end of the hall with the word RESTROOM written on it in black marker.

Ellie went first, then waited out in the hall while he used the toilet. The bathroom itself was no bigger than a shower stall, the toilet—and a good section of the wall behind it—caked in black grime. There was a single window here that looked out upon the row of shops and the road they had taken coming into town. Massive black flies, each one the size of a small grape, thumped senselessly against the windowpane.

The sink looked about ready to give him tetanus, so he decided to forgo washing his hands. In the streaky mirror over the sink he glimpsed his haunted reflection—sunken eyes, poorly dyed hair, beard stubble shading the lower half of his face. The bridge of his nose was still swollen from when he’d rammed his head into Cooper’s chest while trying to wrench the gun from him. But at least it hadn’t started bleeding again.

Dead man walking, said the head-voice. And he wondered just how true that was.

I’m not going to let those bastards get to me. They won’t trick me into having a nervous breakdown. They won’t trick me into turning around and driving back to them. They won’t.

He was just about to leave when he glanced back out the window again. Through the haze of flies, he saw two police cars come rolling up the street. They slowed down as they approached the front of the sandwich shop. One car braked in the middle of the street while the other pulled up alongside the Oldsmobile.

Shit . . .

Both cops got out. Their guns weren’t drawn but they had their hands to their hips, ready to draw at a moment’s notice. The cop who’d parked alongside the Olds—a stocky black guy with a goatee—peered in through the Oldsmobile’s windshield. He said something inaudible to his partner. The partner—a young kid in mirrored sunglasses—pointed to the license plate.

Shit-shit-shit!

David opened the bathroom door. Ellie stood there, gazing up at some foul graffiti someone had scrawled on the wall in black marker. “Get in here,” he said, his voice a tense whisper.