Devoted(61)





Something else the bad man said was true.

You know how hot your mommy is? Way too hot to waste her life with a dummy like you.

If he never went home, she would be free of him. If he stayed here in Castle Wyvern, his mom could have a better life with someone who could tell her that he loved her. She could travel places she liked to go and not worry anymore about what might happen to her dummy child. He was smart, but he was nevertheless a dummy: dumb, mute, speechless, full of learning and full of so many feelings that mattered not at all because he couldn’t share any of what he knew and felt with anyone.

In the throbbing of the silent storm light, under the soundless flights of dragons, in the unearthly quiet of the high tower room, where he could no longer hear the crackle of the reeds under him or his own heartbeat or his breath drawn and expelled, he suddenly heard a voice.

“I’m coming, boy, I’m almost there.”

He lowered his stare from the windows without glass panes and saw the dog again, not curled on the floor this time, but sitting up, a harness around it as if it was riding in car.



“Don’t cry, boy, don’t be afraid. I’m almost there.”





65



Upon being told of the extraordinary home invasion and violence at the Bookman residence, the sheriff had assumed that this incident and the Spader-Klineman murders might involve the same perpetrator. He at once ordered blockades on Greenbriar Road. They were looking for a red Dodge Demon fleeing the scene, a high-end aftermarket job with the power to outrun any vehicle in law-enforcement’s fleet.

Four men had been assigned to each roadblock, the first one approximately two miles south of the Bookman property, the other a mile and a half to the north. The southern post was fully manned almost at once, and two deputies with one car established a half-adequate barrier at the northern position.

Nathan Palmer, if it was Nathan Palmer, had been harried from the Bookman house by the sound of approaching sirens. It was thought that he had gone west on foot, across the backyard of the property and into the forest rather than risk the highway with patrol cars swarming it. He’d surely arrived in his Dodge Demon, however, and secreted it somewhere in the vicinity; he would attempt to circle through the trees to the vehicle.

For the past half hour, traffic on Greenbriar Road had been halted and subjected to inspection. Now deputies Walter Colt and Freeman Johnson, the first to arrive at the Bookman residence, departed the house and drove north to fortify that roadblock.



Freeman rode shotgun. An ardent woodsman—hiker, fisherman—as well as a deputy, he possessed an acute awareness of the patterns of nature. The forest-service road they passed on the right appeared as dark in its depths as the bowels of a leviathan. The sidewash of the headlights penetrated only a few feet, yet Freeman detected a visual discordance amid an otherwise vertical blackness of night-shrouded trees.

“Hold it, turn around,” he said. “Something back there on that forest-service road.”

Walter Colt slowed, hung a U-turn, cruised south for a short distance, turned left onto the narrow dirt lane, and clicked the headlamps to high beams. With the light boring directly into the woods, what had been concealed to all but Freeman’s intuition now stood revealed approximately sixty or seventy feet from the paved highway: a red sedan.

As the patrol car coasted slowly through the trees and the sedan before them was revealed to be a Dodge, Walter Colt snatched up the police-radio microphone and reported the find. He stopped ten feet short of the perpetrator’s vehicle and shifted into park and put on the emergency brake, but he left the engine running.

Neither Johnson nor Colt had been at the scene of the Spader and Klineman murders the previous afternoon, but they had heard that the woman had apparently been ravaged by animals or carrion-eating birds, perhaps vultures, after her death. They realized that if the attack at the Bookman house involved the same perp, he was both reckless and uncommonly violent, although they were not yet aware that he was something far beyond their combined thirty-six years of law-enforcement experience.



In addition to a shotgun clamped muzzle up to the dashboard, left of the front passenger seat, there was also a four-foot-long cattle prod for use on animals only. Pinehaven County was home to more wild animals than people, and some of the former were powerful predators, most notably mountain lions, but also bears and coyotes. In Freeman Johnson’s experience, there had also been a runaway bull twice, a tiger kept illegally by an idiot who thought it would always be as gentle as a kitten, and a badly abused pit bull that understandably turned savagely against all humankind. Deputies didn’t encounter such dangerous creatures every day or even weekly. But because it had long been the policy of the sheriff’s department not to shoot any animals except in the most extreme circumstances, there were times when the electric prod was essential.

Although the Dodge Demon was dark and silent and seemingly untenanted in the headlight beams that pierced its windows, Colt and Johnson exited the patrol car with guns drawn.

To an extent, the wildwoods raised walls against the power of the wind, although these ramparts weren’t impervious. A lesser but still-insistent tempest shivered across the forest floor, thrashing whatever undergrowth it found, and a stronger gale fiercely shook the higher boughs of the evergreens. Translated by the deep canopy of needled branches, the upper currents of air sounded like rushing water, as though a great river surged overhead, and within that susurration arose thin shrieks, hollow groans, cries of seeming anguish, as if the river were the Styx, sweeping legions of souls from the world of the living to the land of the dead.

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