Drummer Boy: A Supernatural Thriller (16 page)

Littlefield peered through the bottom pane on the cab door, shining his light into the dim interior. It featured a seat like that of a tractor, and a series of gear levers protruded from the floor. An instrument panel featured a few dials and buttons, but obviously predated the era of microelectronics. Dirty rags littered the floor, and a length of rusty chain was coiled in the floorboard like a sleeping snake.

Otherwise, the cab was empty.

Littlefield fought an urge to ram the butt of his flashlight into the glass. Before the McFall incident and his latest failure, he would have figured himself for a head case on the verge of a breakdown. The shrinks would say it was only natural, a delayed post-traumatic reaction to the death of his younger brother when they were children.

Just a little guilt trip catching up with him, nothing to worry about, take a few weeks off and it should clear up on its own. With a little intensive therapy, of course, and possibly a little medication to keep the brain wires firing toward a desired result. All in the name of returning to normal.

But there was something shrinks would never acknowledge: once you’ve peered into the black heart of hell, once you’d ridden the nightmare rainbow all the way down, “normal” no longer existed.

And disappearing faces no longer were mere figments of his imagination.

Just like the footprints on Mulatto Mountain that had faded into thin air…

He glanced down into the milling area, where large steel claws arched upward. Years ago, they had sunk their jagged tips into oak and poplar and cherry, pushing their prey into the grinding, chewing jaws of the saw blade. Now they flexed open like the upturned palms of a metal martyr. Chains dangled from the rough-cut rafters, clinking softly as they swayed in the October breeze.

A pile of slabs, covered in ragged gray bark, lay to one side of the sawmill bench. Littlefield ran his light over them. He spotted a pair of eyes and steadied his beam, only to find a couple of knots protruding from a warped hardwood burl.

Then one of the slabs separated from the pile and moved into the orange circle of his beam. It approached him.

“Morton!” Littlefield scrambled down the ladder, feeling a little silly at his relief. He was able to dispel the vision of the face a little more with each rung, and by the time he reached the bottom he had convinced himself the incident had never happened.

As he jogged toward the end of the long steel saw table, he called to his deputy. “Did you see anybody?”

Littlefield stopped short, almost losing his balance and pitching into the raw teeth of the saw blade. It wasn’t Morton after all, not with those black eyes that soaked up the light and the scruffy beard that swayed in the wind like dried corn stalks. It was the man from the cab, probably the one who’d cast the silhouette he’d seen as he’d entered the lumber yard. The man was undeniably solid, though he was gaunt, checks sunken, ragged clothes draped on his body as if someone had hastily dressed a scarecrow.

“Who are you?” Littlefield said.
Thank God for vagrants and trespassers, safe, normal, everyday bums and creeps.

The gaunt-faced man stood at the end of the saw table, looking around as if not recognizing his surroundings. Littlefield had a chance to study him in profile now that he was relatively motionless. He had the drawn cheeks of a meth addict and looked like he’d missed a few turns at the soup kitchen. His dark brown hair ran just past his collar, and when he grimaced, there were black gaps between his yellow teeth.

His clothes appeared to be natural fiber, dusty and stained, the cuffs of his shirt frayed. He wore a vest that was pocked with holes, and his gray cotton trousers had a rip in one knee. The leather boots were dusty and cracked, the heels coming loose and the toe of the right one lolling open like the mouth of an exhausted hound.

On his head was a peculiar cap that seemed two sizes too small and looked as if it had been mashed lopsided.

Since the man had not acknowledged Littlefield’s challenge, the sheriff took three steps toward him and spoke again. “This is private property.”

“Churr,” the man said, and it was almost like a question.

“You been drinking?” The encounter was moving back onto familiar footing and Littlefield gained confidence. His right hand, which had reached to the butt of the pistol holstered on his belt, now relaxed.

The man finally stared into the burning glare of the flashlight, not squinting or blinking. The eyes appeared to swell with darkness, and the light didn’t glint off them, as if they were bone dry and as dusty as his boots.

Where the hell is Morton?

Littlefield was not just concerned about his deputy, he didn’t like the idea of being alone with this weather-beaten scarecrow of a man. If it weren’t for Sherry’s dispatch record of the call, Littlefield would have been tempted to just mosey back through the gash in the fence and drive away.

The lumber yard offered little satisfaction for vandalism, and as a decent sleeping quarters for Titusville’s scattered homeless, it rivaled the Living Waters Mission’s stiff steel cots. And, the sheriff reasoned, if the department made a precedent of rousting one wino, Sherry’s 9-1-1 hotline might be flooded with reports of other emaciated and hollow-eyed wanderers.

Chickenshit rationalization. The same justifications that had led him to past mistakes, some that ended with a shovel, flowers, and a preacher’s solemn eulogy.

“Churr,” the man repeated, turning and walking toward the back of the lot.

“Stop, or I’ll…” Littlefield let the threat trail off because he didn’t know exactly what to say. He certainly wasn’t going to shoot, and he didn’t think the suspect was making what could be called a high-speed attempt at escape. In fact, Littlefield wasn’t even sure the man had heard or seen him. His reaction to the light might have been the instinctive response of a mindless animal.

The man walked with the stiffness of a scarecrow, as if his limbs had been long unused. He moved between two dunes of decaying sawdust, clothes swathed against a skeletal frame.

“Churrrrr,” the man said then rolled the syllable into “rrrrain” as if learning a new language.

The sound was as slow as everything else about the strange man, and Littlefield followed, slogging through the mix of wood chips and mud. That’s when he noticed the man’s boots left no prints.

“Stop!” Littlefield shouted, and now he wasn’t even sure he wanted the man to stop or if he’d simply fallen back on professional protocol when faced with the extraordinary.

The gray scarecrow didn’t heed, if it had heard in the first place, and just kept flopping its broken boots toward the fence.

Littlefield drew his gun and steadied the flashlight beam against the Glock until the circle of light was centered on the man’s back. The vagrant was carrying a haversack, slung low and dangling with old equipment.

“Churr-rain,” the man said, a little faster this time, as if a termite-riddled tongue had learned to speak.

Train?

Littlefield’s finger tickled the trigger, but he knew he wouldn’t shoot. For one thing, his hands were shaking and the light bobbed up and down, and a stray bullet might zing through the chain-link fence and ricochet toward the run-down section of Titusville, where houselights and flickering televisions glowed behind the kudzu-draped trees. The town’s few Mexicans, employed in the Christmas-tree fields because of their willingness to work hard and ignore warning labels on pesticide containers, were clustered in the clapboard shotgun shacks, and a random shooting promised a flood of Charlotte news crews. On the other hand, one more non-arrest on a suspicious-persons call would flush into the ocean of forgotten paperwork.

Thank God Morton was still nowhere to be seen, because Littlefield didn’t want to explain why he holstered his weapon. Unable to totally neglect his duty, he gave half-hearted pursuit, maintaining a distance of 30 feet.

When the man approached the chain-link fence, where the rusty and abandoned railroad track ran parallel to Norman’s Creek, Littlefield was left with a skipped heartbeat at the thought of the man’s turning and staring into the flashlight.

But, as might be expected of something that had probably tromped across Mulatto Mountain and eventually given up the need for footprints, the man didn’t pause when he reached the steel fence. Instead, he passed through it and stopped in the middle of the tracks, looking both ways as if listening for a distant steam whistle.

Then the wind blew and he was gone.

Vernon Ray had to stretch his legs and take unnatural steps to walk the crumbling creosote crossties. Railroads were made for the travel of big steel monsters and not boys, though Dex seemed to be doing fine with his hopping motion. But Dex was a jock, a linebacker who could already bench press 10 reps of his body weight, and owner of enough bowling trophies to melt down and cast as a statue of a general on horseback. So he could hop and get away with it.

If Vernon Ray tried to hop, it would probably look like some prissy little ballet move, so he settled for what felt like a manly stride, even though the motion strained the backs of his knees.

Bobby somehow floated along with an easy grace, but then Bobby made every action look cool. And though Dex could probably beat up both of them with one hand tied behind his back, Bobby was in the lead, moving down the track like a locomotive that was right on schedule. Dex followed, fanning the light along the rails and crossties ahead. Vernon Ray, the caboose, could come uncoupled and the train would keep rolling. Except, probably, Bobby would feel the loss of weight and the new ease of acceleration.

As if everything had to be a metaphor . . . .

“And then that doofus Deputy Dawg shot at me and I heard the bullet whistling through the trees over my head,” Dex said.

“Bet you about crapped your pants,” Bobby said.

“Hell, I was too scared to be scared, if you know what I mean. I was running like I was going in for the winning touchdown and Kitty Hawkins was waiting at the goalpost with her legs spread.”

“How do you know he shot at you?” Vernon Ray asked.

Dex stopped and Vernon Ray had to brace himself and get his balance to keep from pitching forward into Dex’s back. Bobby continued down the track, even though he must have noticed their shoes had stopped flapping behind him in that rollicking train rhythm. Vernon Ray would have to deal with this one alone.

“Because I was the one they were chasing,” Dex said without turning. “I was the only one who had enough balls to go for it. You sissy-boys sat there whining for mercy. You ain’t figured out yet that the system don’t allow no mercy.”

Though Dex had meant it as a challenge for Bobby as well, Bobby kept right on motoring. The lights of Titusville cast a gray gauze against the black ceiling of night sky. The creek clinked and gurgled, sounding merry despite the runoff from the town’s parking lots and gutters. The wind was soft in the trees and Vernon Ray spun a metaphor of gently beating wings until Dex yanked him back to reality.

“So he shot at me because I’m worth shooting,” Dex said. “But the second time, I don’t think he shot at me.”

Bobby, now 50 feet ahead, stopped and yelled back at them. “Come on, guys, we can make it to Planet Zero before it closes.”

Bobby tossed rocks from the gravel rail bed into the tide of encroaching kudzu until the two boys caught up. Dex said, “I was just telling V-Girl here about getting shot at. It was a better rush than sniffing glue, I can tell you that.”

“If he had hit you, you’d probably be singing a different tune,” Bobby said.

“Yeah,” Vernon Ray said, emboldened. “Like ‘Precious Memories’ or whatever else they do at a funeral.”

“Big deal,” Dex said. “I ain’t scared of dying. The preacher saved me so I got a free ride from here on out.”

Vernon Ray was about to dispute Dex’s theological justification, but it was hard to argue with a true believer. And Vernon Ray was jealous, because Dex had a destination after death, a shimmering, pillowy heaven where everyone was happy and nobody was different.

Plus he got to commit all the sins he could pack into a lifetime and not alter the eternal outcome one tiny bit. Vernon Ray had nothing waiting after death, no peaceful rest that he could anticipate, and his soul was a train rolling into a strange, misty tunnel that-

“What was he shooting at, then?” Bobby asked, spinning a rock into the trees that lined the creek. Lights from passing cars on the highway blinked amid the dying foliage. The smell of roadkill skunk drifted over.

“Nearest I can figure, it was that weird wino dude,” Dex said.

“Wino?”

“Yeah. Kinda makes you wonder why cops get to carry guns and normal folks don’t. If they’re that freaking loopy, they ought to join the Army where they can kill all the people they want.”

“As long as they’re brown,” Vernon Ray said.

“You don’t know nothing,” Dex countered. “Them ragheads attacked us on our own soil and-”

“What about the wino?” Bobby said, cutting off Dex’s favorite jingoistic rant, no doubt learned from his father and endlessly recited down at the bowling alley.

“Well, after that first shot, I ducked under a big shelf of rock,” Dex said. “You know how up on the ridge the boulders poke out of the ground. I figured, barring a ricochet, I’d be safe until the cops got tired of looking. I mean, I can outrun any cop in the county, but I haven’t figured out how to outrun a bullet yet.”

“Keep training,” Bobby said. “Maybe you got muscles somewhere besides your head.”

“Hey,” Dex said. “I’d rather run than try to talk my way out of it. Vernon Ray can use them big words and do okay in front of a juvie judge, but I been down that road before. Daddy’s lawyer is smart, but at the end of the day those pig porkers all kneel down at the same trough.”

“What’s that got to do with the wino?” Vernon Ray asked.

Dex gave him a shove, and Vernon Ray’s ankle caught on the rail. He nearly tumbled backwards off the bank and toward the creek, but Bobby grabbed his shirt sleeve.

“Come on, Dex,” Bobby said. “Don’t be a dickhead. Just tell us the story.”