World of Trouble (The Last Policeman #3)(28)

“You must leave,” he says again.

“Wait, though,” I manage, heaving breath, peering up at him. “Wait. I need to ask you a couple of questions.”

“No.” His brows darken. Rain drips down around the brim of his hat. “No.”

“I’m looking for a man or men who—”

“No. Stop.” He pushes at me again with the pitchfork, right in the chest, and the pain dances up my rib cage, into my brain, like a fork of lightning. I picture myself pinned to the road, wriggling, stuck into the ground like an insect. Still, I talk, I keep talking, I don’t know why.

“I’m looking for someone who did some concrete work.”

“You must leave.”

The man starts muttering to himself in a foreign language. Swedish? No. I try to remember what I know about Amish people. German? The man bows his head, clasps his hands together and keeps talking in the low, guttural stream of speech, and while he is doing that I struggle to my feet, get dizzy, fall down.

Blood covers my eyes now, and I wipe it away with my knuckles. I lean forward and heave awful breaths, my throat as dry as insulation, my stomach clenching and unclenching. I’m wondering where the Asian guys are, his employees or friends. I shake my head to try and clear it, and I am rewarded with a new pulse of pain and disorientation. “I’m looking for some men who did concrete work at a police station, up in Rotary.” I talk slowly, word by word, while blood dribbles out of the sides of my mouth, like I’m a monster who just ate something.

The Amish guy doesn’t answer, he keeps talking to his joined hands. He’s praying, or maybe he’s crazy, maybe he’s just talking to himself, channeling voices. He appears to be a man teetering on the edge of something. He’s tall and sturdily constructed, with a wide chest that looks as if built with broad wood beams. Thick beard, thick gray hair beneath the hat. Wide, strong neck. A face stern and lined, the face of the underground king in a scary tale for children.

The rain comes down in billowing curtains, blowing hard across his face. The pitchfork trembles in his clenched fist.

“Please,” I say, but then the man lowers the pitchfork and raises the rifle instead.

“Forgive me,” he says. “Jesus Christ, forgive me.”

I bury my chin in my chest, wriggle my head away from the nose of gun. Still—still I am afraid to die. Even now. I smell it, the rank smell of my own terror, billowing up around me like a fog.

“Jesus Christ, forgive me,” he says again, and I’m pretty sure he isn’t asking me to forgive him, he’s not saying “Jesus Christ” for emphasis. He’s asking Jesus Christ to forgive him, for whatever he’s done, for what he’s about to do.

“Sir,” I say, as quickly and clearly as I can manage. “My sister is missing. I have to find her. That’s all. I have to find her before the end of the world.”

The old eyes widen, and he crouches and puts his face right down next to mine. Lays down the rifle and gingerly wipes blood from around my eyes with his fingertips. “You mustn’t say those words.”

I’m confused. I cough blood. I look around for Houdini, and my eyes find him a little space away in the corn, stumbling and rising, stumbling and rising, shaking raindrops from his dirty coat.

The big man walks to the saddlebag, unbuttons it and takes out a small sack. He dumps out the contents, charcoal briquettes, and they fall with a series of horse-manure thuds onto the gravel path.

“Sir?”

He lifts the bag above me, and I flinch. It’s such an archaic word, saddlebag. When did I even learn that word? The world has become so strange.

“You mustn’t, mustn’t say those words,” he says, and then he pulls the bag down over my head and cinches it tight.


*

The big, thick-necked Amish man doesn’t kill me. I suffer a long terrible moment lying on the ground, my head encased in darkness inside the bag, waiting for him to kill me. Over the rush of the rain I hear him moving around, back and forth to his horse, boots on the road, muted clanks—he’s putting down his gun and pitchfork, he’s gathering things from the bags.

My arms are bound loosely behind me, wrist to wrist. His hands shove in under my armpits and lift me like a broken doll and set me on my feet. He pushes me in a direction, and we begin to walk. Through the rows, crunching over small slippery mounds of rotting husks, the brush of dead stalks against my legs and hands.

“Please,” says my captor, each time I slip or stumble, his strong hands shoving urgently at my back. “You will continue.”

I am trapped inside the thick stale odor of the briquettes, the canvas of the bag scratching at my face and scalp. The woven fabric is not enough to blind me completely. I get fleeting glimpses of the cornfield, flickers of moonlight peeking in through the material.

It might be the same man, the man that Sandy described, or it might not be. How many burly sixtysomething Amish men must there be, black beards flecked with gray, out here “down county,” guarding their farmsteads from strangers on the road? What are the odds that this is the right place—the right man—that he can answer my questions? What are the odds that he is about to shoot me and leave my body in an unsown field?

“Sir?” I begin, turning my head slightly, still walking. How even to ask? Where to begin?

But he makes a harsh Germanic shushing noise, like ech, repeats what he said before: “You will continue.”