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Authors: Dean Koontz

Tags: #Suspense, #Fiction, #Thrillers

Phantoms (11 page)

BOOK: Phantoms
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In the mountains, a mile from the turnoff to Snowfield, the night landscape was rendered solely in black and moon-silver. The looming trees were not green at all; they were somber shapes, mostly shadows, with albescent fringes of vaguely defined needles and leaves.
In contrast, the shoulders of the highway were blood-colored by the light that splashed from the revolving beacons atop the three Ford sedans which all bore the insignia of the Santa Mira County Sheriff’s Department on the front doors.
Deputy Frank Autry was driving the second car, and Deputy Stu Wargle was slouched down on the passenger’s seat.
Frank Autry was lean, sinewy, with neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper hair. His features were sharp and economical, as if God hadn’t been in the mood to waste anything the day that He had edited Frank’s genetic file: hazel eyes under a finely chiseled brow; a narrow, patrician nose; a mouth that was neither too parsimonious nor too generous; small, nearly lobeless ears tucked flat against the head. His mustache was most carefully groomed.
He wore his uniform precisely the way the service manual said he should: black boots polished to a mirrored shine, brown slacks with a knife-edge crease, leather belt and holster kept bright and supple with lanolin, brown shirt crisp and fresh.
“It isn’t fucking fair,” Stu Wargle said.
“Commanding officers don’t always have to be fair—just right,” Frank said.
“What commanding officer?” Wargle asked querulously.
“Sheriff Hammond. Isn’t that who you mean?”
“I don’t think of him as no commanding officer.”
“Well, that’s what he is,” Frank said.
“He’d like to break my ass,” Wargle said. “The bastard.”
Frank said nothing.
Before signing up with the county constabulary, Frank Autry had been a career military officer. He had retired from the United States Army at the age of forty-six, after twenty-eight years of distinguished service, and had moved back to Santa Mira, the town in which he’d been born and raised. He had intended to open a small business of some kind in order to supplement his pension and to keep himself occupied, but he hadn’t been able to find anything that looked interesting. Gradually, he had come to realize that, for him at least, a job without a uniform and without a chain of command and without an element of physical risk and without a sense of public service was just not a job worth having. Five years ago, at the age of forty-eight, he had signed up with the sheriff’s department, and in spite of the demotion from major, which was the rank he’d held in the service, he had been happy ever since.
That is, he had been happy except for those occasions, usually one week a month, when he’d been partnered with Stu Wargle. Wargle was insufferable. Frank tolerated the man only as a test of his own self-discipline.
Wargle was a slob. His hair often needed washing. He always missed a patch of bristles when he shaved. His uniform was wrinkled, and his boots were never shined. He was too big in the gut, too big in the hips, too big in the butt.
Wargle was a bore. He had absolutely no sense of humor. He read nothing, knew nothing—yet he had strong opinions about every current social and political issue.
Wargle was a creep. He was forty-five years old, and he still picked his nose in public. He belched and farted with aplomb.
Still slumped against the passenger-side door, Wargle said, “I’m supposed to go off duty at ten o’clock. Ten goddamned
o’clock!
It’s not fair for Hammond to pull me for this Snowfield crap. And me with a hot number all lined up.”
Frank didn’t take the bait. He didn’t ask who Wargle had a date with. He just drove the car and kept his eyes on the road and hoped that Wargle wouldn’t tell him who this “hot number” was.
“She’s a waitress over at Spanky’s Diner,” Wargle said. “Maybe you seen her. Blond broad. Name’s Beatrice; they call her Bea.”
“I seldom stop at Spanky’s,” Frank said.
“Oh. Well, she don’t have a half-bad face, see. One hell of a set of knockers. She’s got a few extra pounds on her, not much, but she thinks she looks worse than she does. Insecurity, see? So if you play her right, if you kind of work on her doubts about herself, see, and then if you say you want her, anyway, in spite of the fact that she’s let herself get a little pudgy—why, hell, she’ll do any damned thing you want.
Anything.”
The slob laughed as if he had said something unbearably funny.
Frank wanted to punch him in the face. Didn’t.
Wargle was a woman-hater. He spoke of women as if they were members of another, lesser species. The idea of a man happily sharing his life and innermost thoughts with a woman, the idea that a woman could be loved, cherished, admired, respected, valued for her wisdom and insight and humor—that was an utterly alien concept to Stu Wargle.
Frank Autry, on the other hand, had been married to his lovely Ruth for twenty-six years. He adored her. Although he knew it was a selfish thought, he sometimes prayed that he would be the first to die, so that he wouldn’t have to handle life without Ruth.
“That fuckin’ Hammond wants my ass nailed to a wall. He’s always needling me.”
“About what?”
“Everything. He don’t like the way I keep my uniform. He don’t like the way I write up my reports. He told me I should try to improve my attitude. Christ, my
attitude!
He wants my ass, but he won’t get it. I’ll hang in five more years, see, so I can get my thirty-year pension. That bastard won’t squeeze me out of my pension.”
Almost two years ago, voters in the city of Santa Mira approved a ballot initiative that dissolved the metropolitan police, putting law enforcement for the city into the hands of the county sheriff’s department. It was a vote of confidence in Bryce Hammond, who had built the county department, but one provision of the initiative required that no city officers lose their jobs or pensions because of the transfer of power. Thus, Bryce Hammond was stuck with Stewart Wargle.
They reached the Snowfield turnoff.
Frank glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the third patrol car pull out of the three-car train. As planned, it swung across the entrance to Snowfield road, setting up a blockade.
Sheriff Hammond’s car continued on toward Snowfield, and Frank followed it.
“Why the hell did we have to bring water?” Wargle asked.
Three five-gallon bottles of water stood on the floor in the back of the car.
Frank said, “The water in Snowfield might be contaminated.”
“And all that food we loaded into the trunk?”
“We can’t trust the food up there, either.”
“I don’t believe they’re all dead.”
“The sheriff couldn’t raise Paul Henderson at the substation.”
“So what? Henderson’s a jerk-off.”
“The doctor up there said Henderson’s dead, along with—”
“Christ, the doctor’s off her nut or drunk. Who the hell would go to a woman doctor, anyway? She probably screwed her way through medical school.”
“What?”
“No broad has what it takes to
earn
a degree like that!”
“Wargle, you never cease to amaze me.”
“What’s eating you?” Wargle asked.
“Nothing. Forget it.”
Wargle belched. “Well, I don’t believe they’re all dead.”
Another problem with Stu Wargle was that he didn’t have any imagination.
“What a lot of crap. And me lined up with a hot number.”
Frank Autry, on the other hand, had a very good imagination. Perhaps too good. As he drove higher into the mountains, as he passed a sign that read SNOWFIELD—3 MILES, his imagination was humming like a well-lubricated machine. He had the disturbing feeling—Premonition? Hunch?—that they were driving straight into Hell.
 
 
The firehouse siren screamed.
The church bell tolled faster, faster.
A deafening cacophony clattered through the town.
“Jenny!” Lisa shouted.
“Keep your eyes open! Look for movement!”
The street was a patchwork of ten thousand shadows; there were too many dark places to watch.
The siren wailed, and the bell rang, and now the lights began to flash again—house lights, shop lights, streetlights—on and off, on and off so rapidly that they created a strobelike effect. Skyline Road flickered; the buildings seemed to jump toward the street, then fall back, then jump forward; the shadows danced jerkily.
Jenny turned in a complete circle, the revolver thrust out in front of her.
If something was approaching under cover of the stroboscopic light show, she couldn’t see it.
She thought: What if, when the sheriff arrives, he finds two severed heads in the middle of the street? Mine and Lisa’s.
The church bell was louder than ever, and it banged away continuously, madly.
The siren swelled into a teeth-jarring, bone-piercing screech. It seemed a miracle that windows didn’t shatter.
Lisa clamped her hands over her ears.
Jenny’s gun hand was shaking. She couldn’t keep it steady.
Then, as abruptly as the pandemonium had begun, it ceased. The siren died. The church bell stopped. The lights stayed on.
Jenny scanned the street, waiting for something more to happen, something worse.
But nothing happened.
Again, the town was as tranquil as a graveyard.
A wind sprang out of nowhere and caused the trees to sway, as if responding to ethereal music beyond the range of human hearing.
Lisa shook herself out of a daze and said, “It was almost as if . . . as if they were
trying
to scare us . . . teasing us.”
“Teasing,” Jenny said. “Yes, that’s exactly what it was like.”
“Playing with us.”
“Like a cat with mice,” Jenny said softly.
They stood in the middle of the silent street, afraid to go back to the bench in front of the town jail, lest their movement should start the siren and the bell again.
Suddenly, they heard a low grumbling. For an instant, Jenny’s stomach tightened. She raised the gun once more, although she could see nothing at which to shoot. Then she recognized the sound: automobile engines laboring up the steep mountain road.
She turned and looked down the street. The grumble of engines grew louder. A car appeared around the curve, at the bottom of town.
Flashing red roof lights. A police car. Two police cars.
“Thank God,” Lisa said.
Jenny quickly led her sister to the cobblestone sidewalk in front of the substation.
The two white and green patrol cars came slowly up the deserted street and angled to the curb in front of the wooden bench. The two engines were cut off simultaneously. Snowfield’s deathlike hush took possession of the night once more.
A rather handsome black man in a deputy’s uniform got out of the first car, letting his door stand open. He looked at Jenny and Lisa but didn’t immediately speak. His attention was captured by the preternaturally silent, unpeopled street.
A second man got out of the front seat of the same vehicle. He had unruly, sandy hair. His eyelids were so heavy that he looked as if he were about to fall asleep. He was dressed in civilian clothing—gray slacks, a pale blue shirt, a dark blue nylon jacket—but there was a badge pinned to the jacket.
Four other men got out of the cruisers. All six newcomers stood there for a long moment without speaking, eyes moving over the quiet stores and houses.
In that strange, suspended bubble of time, Jenny had an icy premonition that she didn’t want to believe. She was certain—she sensed; she
knew
—that not all of them would leave this place alive.
11
Exploring
Bryce knelt on one knee beside the body of Paul Henderson.
The other seven—his own men, Dr. Paige, and Lisa—crowded into the reception area, outside the wooden railing, in the Snowfield substation. They were quiet in the presence of Death.
Paul Henderson had been a good man with decent instincts. His death was a terrible waste.
Bryce said, “Dr. Paige?”
She crouched down at the other side of the corpse. “Yes?”
“You didn’t move the body?”
“I didn’t even touch it, Sheriff.”
“There was no blood?”
“Just as you see it now. No blood.”
“The wound might be in his back,” Bryce said.
“Even if it was, there’d still be some blood on the floor.”
“Maybe.” He stared into her striking eyes—green flecked with gold. “Ordinarily, I wouldn’t disturb a body until the coroner had seen it. But this is an extraordinary situation. I’ll have to turn this man over.”
“I don’t know if it’s safe to touch him.”
“Someone has to do it,” Bryce said.
Dr. Paige stood up, and everyone moved back a couple of steps.
Bryce put a hand to Henderson’s purple-black, distorted face. “The skin is still slightly warm,” he said in surprise.
Dr. Paige said, “I don’t think they’ve been dead very long.”
“But a body doesn’t discolor and bloat in just a couple of hours,” Tal Whitman said.
“These
bodies did,” the doctor said.
Bryce rolled the corpse over, exposing the back. No wound.
Hoping to find an unnatural depression in the skull, Bryce thrust his fingers into the dead man’s thick hair, testing the bone. If the deputy had been struck hard on the back of the head . . . But that wasn’t the case, either. The skull was intact.
Bryce got to his feet. “Doctor, these two decapitations you mentioned . . . I guess we’d better have a look at those.”
“Do you think one of your men could stay here with my sister?”
“I understand your feelings,” Bryce said. “But I don’t really think it would be wise for me to split up my men. Maybe there isn’t any safety in numbers; then on the other hand, maybe there
is
.”
BOOK: Phantoms
8.95Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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