From a Dead Sleep (19 page)

He could feel his heart pounding as he lumbered toward the side of the building. He looked back to see the intruder step out onto the porch and hurriedly scan the scene outside. His head pivoted toward Toby and their eyes met. The man’s arm swung up, parallel to the ground with his hand firmly latched onto his firearm.

Toby’s shins collided with a foot-high, rotted wooden planter. He cried in pain as he toppled over it, landing chin and chest first in an aggregation of wet, wild flowers and weeds stemming out from the other side of the planter.

“Hold it, fucker!” a sharp command echoed out from the opposite side of the building.

The voice didn’t belong to the intruder, but Toby wasn’t going to stick around to find out who issued it. He crawled to his feet and glanced back as he scurried down the short hill that led around toward the basement entrance of the building.

Toby noticed blood soaked along both of his pant legs in front of his shins. He was missing a shoe now, but he kept his legs moving.

The man who’d held the boy captive inside looked frozen except for his neck, which slowly rotated in the direction of the commanding voice.

“Drop that piece! Now, asshole!” Hank Bailey threatened thunderously with his twelve gauge shotgun pointed directly at the intruder from about fifteen feet away.

The moist sack of dead rabbits lay in a clump beside his boots as the out-of-breath landlord kept one eye closed and the other aimed through his sights. The night-visions were still suctioned to the top of his head with the lenses pointed up to the trees.

The intruder glared emotionlessly at the bald and stout old man dressed in camo holding him at gunpoint.

“I said drop it!” Bailey shouted again.

The intruder lowered his head and opened his hand. The pistol dropped over the porch railing and down to the dirt ground with a thud. An almost sadistic grin formed on Bailey’s mouth under his flared nostrils as he ordered the stranger to raise both hands, turn around, and face him. The stranger complied as Toby’s footsteps could still be heard in motion around the corner of the building, though they were becoming fainter.

“Where’d you get those goggles?” the stranger brazenly asked.

“
I’m
asking the questions, dickhead! What the fuck’s going on here?” Bailey shouted. “Where’s Zed?”

“Who?” said the intruder with dismissive, almost bored eyes.

“The man whose truck’s parked right here beside me!” Bailey answered, his face beginning to turn red. “The Big Boy wants answers, and he wants ’em now!”

The intruder responded, “Oh, that guy. I killed him.”

The man’s words were laced with such callous apathy that Bailey wasn’t sure he’d heard him right.

“Down off the porch and get down on your chest!” the anxious Bailey wailed. The former Marine’s tongue slid across his upper lip as he kept a sober aim on the man. He wasn’t sure he believed the man’s previous statement but he wasn’t taking any chances. “Zed?” he yelled toward the house.

The intruder smirked as he steadily walked down off the porch with his hands raised.

Once the man’s feet were on the ground, Bailey noticed how truly large in size he was. He carefully dropped to his knees, his eyes and smirk still stuck to Bailey.

There was no answer from inside the house.

Small rocks and gravel lined the ground in front of the porch and they crackled under the man’s knees as he lowered himself down to his chest. He left his neck arched and rested his chin on the ground so he could face the landlord. His arms were spread out to his sides, posing his body in the shape of a crucifix.

Keeping aim, Bailey carefully edged his way over to Zed’s truck.

The stranger’s eyes followed him.

Bailey knew Zed kept a CB on the dashboard.

When Bailey momentarily lowered his left hand off the gun stock to grab the door handle, the intruder discreetly shifted the torso of his body at a slight angle.

Toby scurried across some of the large protruding rocks that rested at the bottom of the shallow creek. With no traction under his right foot, he lost his footing and fell knee-deep into the water. The water was ice-cold, but he quickly maintained his balance and sloshed over to the other side. The forest was thick with pine beyond the creek. Small bubbles squished their way out through the boy’s saturated, frigid shoe with each step he took up the hillside before him. His other foot felt practically numb. In seconds he had tree cover, but he climbed higher, brushing away needled branches and avoiding stepping on dead wood so as not to generate any loud sounds.

A sudden, piercing array of sirens and horns honking in succession erupted through the valley. The sound was immediately recognizable to Toby as that of a car alarm. The boy’s gaze shot up from the sight of his bloodstained legs to a sliver of space between two large pine branches. He winced at the clamor of gunshots that immediately accompanied the racket. They sounded more like popping firecrackers from the distance. His face shriveled and the tears returned while he bit down on his lower lip. The sirens and honks continued for nearly twenty seconds before they halted.

A sharp chirp emitted somewhere from under the hood of the Buick, and its driving lights flickered on and off one last time. The stranger’s distraction had worked. He returned his remote car key to his side pocket and looked down in annoyance at the mud now caked on the front of his jacket. Just a few yards in front of him lay Bailey, motionless. Three shots through his chest, which looked like a roadmap of blood that drained off along different side streets. The intruder’s hand gripped what looked like a small toy gun, similar to a fancy, pistol-shaped, metallic cigarette lighter from a scene in a retro movie. He rolled up his jacket sleeve, revealing a leather cast wrapped around his thick forearm. It was bound together at the ends by two buckle straps. At its center, a metal sliding rail was attached to it. Out from it extended a metal rod that was attached to the small pistol. The man tried to push the gun back toward the opposite end of the sliding rail, but it only slid back an inch before the sound of a spring popping preceded a complete loss of pressure along the rail. With an agitated sneer, he quickly unbuckled the cast and yanked it off his arm, tossing it to the ground. He briskly walked across the front of the house, retrieved his pistol, and hustled over to where he’d seen the boy scamper down the hill.

Before him, about fifty yards away, stood hundreds of pine trees blanketing the side of the hill, beginning at the foot of a narrow creek that meandered its way slowly down a decline that ran parallel with the dirt road. Starting at about thirty or forty feet above the ground line, a layer of fog or mist began, concealing the top portion of the hill. His eyes slowly panned the landscape, searching for the child.

The man continued his scan for another minute while listening for sounds along the hill. He heard nothing other than wind, flowing water, and a couple of birds. He then walked back toward Bailey, picking his sleeve-gun up off the ground on the way.

Toby had been able to see the man, not well, but clearly enough from his momentary hiding spot behind a group of large rocks that jetted up skyward like a natural defense barrier. Thick trees that spawned out from under the formation lay crisscrossed in front of him, concealing him well. He watched the dangerous man as his gaze methodically swept from side to side. Toby sat completely still and silent.

Once he saw the man disappear back behind the house, he breathed again. He was sure Zed had been killed and feared that he would surely be next if he gave the strange man time to catch up with him. After taking one last glance back down the mountainside, he turned toward the face of the mountain and began climbing again. He’d been told not to stop by the man that saved his life, a man that was probably dead, and he was going to honor that command.

The man paused when he got to the dead Marine. Shaking his head in revulsion, he leaned forward and grabbed the goggle netting wrapped around Bailey’s head, pulling the head up with it. He yanked the night-visions off of him. The landlord’s head dropped back to the ground with a dank thud. With the goggles and sleeve-gun contraption dangling from his fist, the man re-entered the house to snag the briefcase. Moments later, he was back outside and walking up the road toward the Buick. Within seconds, the car was cruising down the dirt road, back the way Toby had ridden in from that morning.

Toby never heard the crank of a car starting up or the roar of an engine; all sound was blocked by the wind and his own labored breathing as he dashed up the hillside.

Chapter 20

S
omething was wrong. She was certain of it.

It was the heightened sense of a chronically tired, single mother whose entire life was invested in her son. With the challenges she faced on a daily basis, it was the strict adherence to rules and routine that kept her grounded and sane. Her son had learned to be compliant. It had taken years of trying patience to get there through sometimes unconventional practices, but the two now had a clear, mutually respectful understanding that he’d have his freedom within the limits of Winston as long as she knew his whereabouts at all times. It had been suggested in a book she’d read by one of the many experts in the field. At his age, it was time to “pull back, give him more independence,” but keep a tight hold on the itinerary. That schedule always included him being home each evening by six o’clock for dinner, even during the summer. By 6:15, she was already in her car, looking for him.

Joan Parker slowed to a stop and studied each side street with an intense scrutiny. Her worried eyes from behind thick-framed glasses traced the shoulder of each road until it disappeared around a bend or up over a hill. The sun set early for those living between tall mountain ranges, and dusk had already arrived.

She’d worked her way backwards from where he was supposed to be last—Crowley’s Books in town. Toby enjoyed spending time there. He rarely purchased anything, but the owner, Pat Crowley, never seemed to care. Though the boy would usually talk his ear off when he first got there, the boy would soon end up at a small, round table hidden near the back of the shop. There, under a bright brass lamp, his face would be buried in a picture book or atlas for roughly thirty minutes alongside a caffeine-free fountain drink from Perdey’s, the local convenience store. Neither Crowley nor Perdey had seen him that day.

Before that, he was supposed to have let Sean Coleman’s dog out and feed him dinner. But with the Arapahoe Café being right in town, Joan stopped in to make sure Toby had eaten lunch there earlier in the day. He hadn’t. In fact, his favorite waitress had even prepped a French dip sandwich with fries for him, but it had gone cold and was tossed in a waste can at his absence. Something was indeed very wrong.

Despite the chill outside, Joan kept both side windows on her pale blue Ford Maverick rolled down, praying to hear the high-pitched sound of Toby’s bike bell as she made her way to Meyers Bridge. At one point, she thought she’d heard it, prompting her to slam on the brakes and skid about ten feet. After stepping outside her car and calling his name several times, however, she was convinced she was wrong. That didn’t stop her from staring intently through her rearview mirror as she left the area. Leaning forward in her seat, she couldn’t help but notice how old and sunken her eyes looked. She was too young to have eyes like that. They told a story of hardship that she had never burdened others with the details of.

Once she reached the abutment, she parked and flung open the driver’s side door, and before she knew it, she was down alongside the fast flowing river, navigating stones and saturated tree limbs. Her short, delicate frame would have made her look like a child to someone watching from a distance. The spray wetted her neck as she twisted her head under the bridge, looking for any signs of her son. The dampness in the air flattened her short, graying hair to her head. She knew her son wouldn’t have gotten himself close enough to the rapids to be swept away. He’d grown up in the area. He knew better. But she also knew not to underestimate his misguided commitment to earn the unobtainable respect of the town idiot, Sean Coleman.

Her son was convinced that the obnoxious and self-centered security man was a friend despite all evidence to the contrary. She’d read in the paper of what she perceived to be the drunken delusions of an attention-starved worm who thought he’d seen a man kill himself. Ironically, her son seemed more motivated to clear Sean Coleman’s name than Sean himself was. Otherwise, why would he have left town after making such a ridiculous assertion? Still, Toby believed he was telling the truth when everyone else didn’t. And if there was anything that was going to knock her son off his schedule, it would be his determination to vindicate his hero by finding that body. But Toby wasn’t at the bridge either, nor was his bike.

With Sean out of town, she simply hadn’t seen the harm in letting her son take care of the aged wiener-dog that he often talked about and whose breed he had even researched. She believed now that it had been a mistake. Anything to do with Sean Coleman was poison, and a storm of regret punished her soul as she sped up the soggy dirt road that sprayed her car fenders brown.

When she reached the darkened house, her headlights first exposed Zed Hansen’s truck parked out front, and soon after, her son’s bicycle leaning along the railing beside the front door. A wave of relief warmed her chest. Despite the piece of rotted fruit on his family tree, Zed was a good, responsible man who would insulate her son from any half-cocked influence that Sean might apply to him. Her relief instantly turned to anger, however, once it became clear to her that her son had completely deviated from his schedule and let her worry so terribly. She was certain the explanation would somehow lead to Sean, and she prepared herself to lay out a verbal assault on him once her son was sitting safely out of earshot in the passenger seat of her car.

She got out and slammed the car door behind her, leaving the engine running and headlights on. She marched loudly up the handful of planked steps to the front door, intending for the angry stomps of her feet to be heard by all inside. She found it curious that the front door was partially open and there was no light coming from inside.