Hannibal (45 page)

There it was in her headlights, a heavy gate welded of metal pipe and topped with barbed wire. The
SERVICE ENTRANCE
sign she had seen on her first visit was gone now. Weeds had grown up in front of the gate and over the ditch-crossing with its culvert.

She could see in her headlights that the weeds had recently been pressed down. Where the fine grit and sand had washed off the pavement and made a little sandbar, she could see the tracks of mud-and-snow tires. Were they the same as the van tracks she saw in the parking median at Safeway? She didn’t know if they were exactly the same, but they could have been.

A chrome padlock and chain secured the gate. No sweat there. Starling looked up and down the road. Nobody coming.
A little illegal entry here
. It felt like a crime. She checked the gateposts for sensor wires. None. Working with two picks and holding her little flashlight in her teeth, it took her less than fifteen seconds to open the padlock. She drove through the entrance and continued well into the trees before she walked back to close the gate. She draped the chain back on the gate with the padlock on the outside. From a little distance it looked normal. She left the loose ends inside so she could butt it open more easily with the car if she had to.

Measuring on the map with her thumb, it was about two miles through the forest to the farm. She drove through the dark tunnel of the fire road, the night sky sometimes visible overhead, sometimes not, as the branches closed overhead. She eased along in second gear at little over an idle, with just the parking lights, trying to
keep the Mustang as quiet as possible, dead weeds brushing the undercarriage. When the odometer said a mile and eight-tenths, she stopped. With the engine off, she could hear a crow calling in the dark.
The crow was pissed at something
. She hoped to God it was a crow.

C
ORDELL CAME
into the tack room brisk as a hangman, intravenous bottles under his arms, tubes dangling from them.
“The
Dr. Hannibal Lecter!” he said. “I wanted that mask of yours so badly for our club in Baltimore. My girlfriend and I have a
dungeony
sort of thing, sort of Jay-O and leather.”

He put his things down on the anvil stand and put a poker in the fire to heat.

“Good news and bad news,” Cordell said in his cheerful nursey voice and faint Swiss accent. “Did Mason tell you the drill? The drill is, in a little while I’ll bring Mason down here and the pigs will get to eat your feet. Then you’ll wait overnight and tomorrow Carlo and his brothers will feed you through the bars head first, so the pigs can eat your face, just like the dogs ate Mason’s. I’ll keep you going with IVs and tourniquets until the last. You really
are
done, you know. That’s the bad news.”

Cordell glanced at the TV camera to be sure it was off. “The
good
news is, it doesn’t
have
to be much worse than
a trip to the dentist. Check this out,
Doctor.”
Cordell held a hypodermic syringe with a long needle in front of Dr. Lecter’s face. “Let’s talk like two medical people. I could get behind you and give you a spinal that would keep you from feeling
anything
down there. You could just close your eyes and try not to listen. You’d just feel some jerking and pulling. And once Mason’s got his jollies for the evening and gone to the house I could give you something that would just stop your heart. Want to see it?” Cordell palmed a vial of Pavulon and held it close enough to Dr. Lecter’s open eye, but not close enough to get bitten.

The firelight played on the side of Cordell’s avid face, his eyes were hot and happy. “You’ve got lots of money, Dr. Lecter. Everybody says so.
I
know how this stuff works—I put money around in places too. Take it out, move
it, fuss
with it. I can move mine on the phone and I bet you can too.”

Cordell took a cell phone from his pocket. “We’ll call your banker, you tell him a code, he’ll confirm to me and I’ll fix you right up.” He held up the spinal syringe. “Squirt, squirt. Talk to me.”

Dr. Lecter mumbled, his head down. “Suitcase” and “locker” were all Cordell could hear.

“Come on, Doctor, and then you can just sleep. Come on.”

“Unmarked hundreds,” Dr. Lecter said, and his voice trailed away.

Cordell leaned closer and Dr. Lecter struck to the length of his neck, caught Cordell’s eyebrow in his small sharp teeth and ripped a sizeable piece of it out as Cordell leaped backward. Dr. Lecter spit the eyebrow like a grape skin into Cordell’s face.

Cordell mopped the wound and put a tape butterfly on it that gave him a quizzical expression.

He packed up his syringe. “All that relief, wasted,” he said. “You’ll look at it differently before daylight. You know I have stimulants to take you quite the other way. And I’ll make you wait.”

He took the poker from the fire.

“I’m going to hook you up now,” Cordell said. “Whenever you resist me I’ll burn you. This is what it feels like.”

He touched the glowing end of the poker to Dr. Lecter’s chest and crisped his nipple through his shirt. He had to smother the widening circle of fire on the doctor’s shirtfront.

Dr. Lecter did not make a sound.

Carlo backed the forklift into the tack room. With Piero and Carlo lifting together, Tommaso ever ready with the tranquilizer rifle, they moved Dr. Lecter to the fork and shackled his singletree to the front of the machine. He was seated on the fork, his arms bound to the singletree, with his legs extended, each leg fastened to one tine of the fork.

Cordell inserted an IV needle with a butterfly into the back of each of Dr. Lecter’s hands. He had to stand on a bale of hay to hang the plasma bottles on the machine on each side of him. Cordell stood back and admired his work. Odd to see the doctor splayed there with an IV in each hand, like a parody of something Cordell couldn’t quite remember. Cordell rigged slip-knot tourniquets just above each knee with cords that could be pulled behind the fence to keep the doctor from bleeding to death. They could not be tightened now. Mason would be furious if Lecter’s feet were numb.

Time to get Mason downstairs and put him into the van. The vehicle, parked behind the barn, was cold. The Sards had left their lunch in it. Cordell cursed and threw their cooler out on the ground. He’d have to vacuum the fucking thing at the house. He’d have to air it out too. The fucking Sards had been smoking in here too, after he forbade it. They’d replaced the cigarette lighter and left the power cord of the car beacon monitor still swinging from the dash.

S
TARLING SWITCHED
off the Mustang’s interior light and pulled the trunk release before she opened the door.

If Dr. Lecter was here, if she could get him, maybe she could put him cuffed hand and foot into the trunk and get as far as the county jail. She had four sets of cuffs and enough line to hog-tie him and keep him from kicking. Better not to think about how strong he was.

There was some frost on the gravel when she put her feet out. The old car groaned as her weight came off the springs.

“Got to complain don’t you, you old son of a bitch,” she said to the car beneath her breath. Suddenly she remembered talking to Hannah, the horse she rode away into the night from the slaughter of the lambs. She did not close the car door all the way. The keys went into a tight trouser pocket so they would not tinkle.

The night was clear under a quarter moon and she could walk without her flashlight as long as there was some open night sky. She tried the edge of the gravel and
found it loose and uneven. Quieter to walk in a packed wheel track in the gravel, looking ahead to judge how the road lay with her peripheral vision, her head slightly turned to the side. It was like wading in soft darkness, she could hear her feet crunch the gravel but she couldn’t see the ground.

The hard moment came when she was out of sight of the Mustang, but could still feel it loom behind her. She did not want to leave it.

She was suddenly a thirty-three-year-old woman, alone, with a ruined civil service career and no shotgun, standing in a forest at night. She saw herself clearly, saw the crinkles of age beginning in the corners of her eyes. She wanted desperately to go back to her car. Her next step was slower, she stopped and she could hear herself breathing.

The crow called, a breeze rattled the bare branches above her and then the scream split the night. A cry so horrible and hopeless, peaking, falling, ending in a plea for death in a voice so wracked it could have been anyone. “
Uccidimi!”
And the scream again.

The first one froze Starling, the second one had her moving at a trot, wading fast through the dark, the .45 still holstered, one hand holding the darkened flashlight, the other extended into the night before her.
No, you don’t, Mason. No, you don’t. Hurry. Hurry
. She found she could stay in the packed track by listening to her footfalls, and feeling the loose gravel on either side. The road turned and ran along a fence. Good fence, pipe fence, six feet high.

Came sobs of apprehension and pleas, the scream building, and ahead of Starling, beyond the fence, she heard movement through brush, the movement breaking
into a trot, lighter than the hoofbeats of a horse, quicker in rhythm. She heard grunting she recognized.

Closer the agonized sounds, clearly human, but distorted, with a single squeal over the cries for a second, and Starling knew she was hearing either a recording or a voice amplified with feedback in the microphone. Light through the trees and the barn looming. Starling pressed her head on the cold iron to look through the fence. Dark shapes rushing, long and hip-high. Across forty yards of clear ground the open end of a barn with the great doors open wide, a barrier across the end of the barn with a Dutch gate in it, and an ornate mirror suspended above the gate, the mirror reflecting the light of the barn in a bright patch on the ground. Standing in the clear pasture outside the barn, a stocky man in a hat with a boom box radio/tape player. He covered one ear with his hand as a series of howls and sobs came from the machine.

Out of the brush now they came, the wild swine with their savage faces, wolflike in their speed, long-legged and deep-chested, shaggy, spiky gray bristles.

Carlo dashed back through the Dutch gate and closed it when they were still thirty yards from him. They stopped in a semicircle waiting, their great curved tusks holding their lips in a permanent snarl. Like linemen anticipating the snap of the ball, they surged forward, stopped, jostled, grunting, clicking their teeth.

Starling had seen livestock in her time, but nothing like these hogs. There was a terrible beauty in them, grace and speed. They watched the doorway, jostling and rushing forward, then backing, always facing the barrier across the open end of the barn.

Carlo said something over his shoulder and disappeared back into the barn.

The van backed into view inside the barn. Starling recognized the gray vehicle at once. It stopped at an angle near the barrier. Cordell got out and opened the sliding side door. Before he turned off the dome light, Starling could see Mason inside in his hard-shell respirator, propped on pillows, his hair coiled on his chest. A ringside seat. Floodlights came on over the doorway.

From the ground beside him, Carlo picked up an object Starling did not recognize at first. It looked like someone’s legs, or the lower half of a body. If it was half a body, Carlo was very strong. For a second Starling feared it was the remains of Dr. Lecter, but the legs bent wrong, bent in ways the joints would not permit.

They could only be Lecter’s legs if he had been wheeled and braided, she thought for a bad moment. Carlo called into the barn behind him. Starling heard a motor start.

The forklift came into Starling’s view, Piero driving, Dr. Lecter raised high with the fork, his arms spread on the singletree and the IV bottles swaying above his hands with the movement of the vehicle. Held high so that he could see the ravening swine, could see what was coming.

The forklift came at an awful processional speed, Carlo walking beside it and on the other side Johnny Mogli, armed.

Starling fixed on Mogli’s deputy badge for an instant. A star, not like the locals’ badges. White hair, white shirt, like the driver of the kidnap van.

From the van came Mason’s deep voice. He hummed “Pomp and Circumstance” and giggled.

The pigs, raised with noise, were not afraid of the machine, they seemed to welcome it.

The forklift stopped near the barrier. Mason said something to Dr. Lecter that Starling could not hear. Dr. Lecter did not move his head or give any sign that he had heard. He was higher even than Piero at the controls. Did he look in Starling’s direction? She never knew because she was moving fast along the fence line, along the side of the barn, finding the double doors where the van had backed in.

Carlo sailed the stuffed trousers into the pigpen. The hogs leaped forward as one, room for two on each leg, shouldering the others aside. Tearing, snarling, pulling and ripping, dead chickens in the trouser legs coming to pieces, pigs shaking their heads from side to side with chicken guts flailing. A field of tossing bristled backs.

Carlo had only provided the lightest of appetizers, just three chickens and a little salad. In moments the trousers were rags and the slavering pigs turned their avid little eyes back to the barrier.

Piero lowered the fork to just the height above ground level. The upper part of the Dutch gate would keep the pigs away from Dr. Lecter’s vitals for the time being. Carlo removed the doctor’s shoes and socks.

“This little piggy went EEE EEE EEE all the way home,” Mason called from the van.

Starling was coming up behind them. All were facing the other way, facing the pigs. She passed the tack room door, moved out into the center of the barn.

“Now, don’t let him bleed out,” Cordell said from the van. “Be ready when I tell you to tighten the tourniquets.” He was clearing Mason’s goggle with a cloth.