Revenant (9 page)

“Stand up,” he said simply.

“Screw you,” Manning replied, but began to rise even as he spit the words out. The corpse pushed itself up to its knees, then ever so slowly shifted its weight so that its feet were beneath its body, eventually rising to a standing position. It stood unsteadily, body swaying slightly as if still as drunk as Earl Manning had been when he took his last reeking breath more than a week ago.

Max turned and closed the lid on the Navajo box, snapping the latch and sealing the beating heart inside it next to the perfectly round stone. Then he faced Manning again and said, “Come over here.” Raven whimpered behind him.

The Manning-thing again said, “Screw you,” louder this time, but again began moving even as it spoke. It lifted its left foot and almost immediately slammed it back down onto the floor, maybe twelve inches in front of where it had begun, as the corpse fought to maintain a sense of balance. It staggered sideways and then fell backward, slamming into the wooden staircase leading from the basement up to the first floor.

The silence was broken by a loud
Crack!
as something snapped inside Earl Manning, perhaps another rib, from the force of its body’s impact against the stairway. The reanimated corpse didn’t seem to notice, however, immediately rolling awkwardly to its feet and trying again.

This time Manning managed to move in the proper direction, gazing steadily at Max as he staggered forward across the basement floor, skirting the tarp upon which he had recently lain dead, lurching to a stop directly in front of him. “What have you done to me?” he whispered.

“We’ve gone over all that,” Acton replied dismissively as Raven cowered behind him. She whimpered again and was ignored. “To clarify, and I’ll try to use as many single-syllable words as I can, I killed you. I cut out your heart. You were—you
are
—dead. Your heart now resides inside this breathtakingly beautiful box, next to a stone containing a mystical power: the power to reanimate the dead.

“The possessor of this box controls the stone. As you may notice, I possess the box, thus you belong to me. As long as your heart resides next to the stone inside this box, you will continue to, for lack of a more accurate word, live. If the heart is removed from the box and taken away from the stone you will, again for lack of a better word, die.

“You may have noticed, even with your limited brain capacity, that you have control over your body to a certain extent but are completely beholden to me. While in possession of this box, I am able to divine your intentions as well as force your compliance with my instructions. As I believe I have already mentioned, I am your God.

“That’s about as simple as I can make it, Mr. Manning, and whether or not you choose to believe what you’ve been told is irrelevant to me and, in point of fact, also to you. It is all completely true, as you have already discovered and will continue to discover.

“Now, we have a limited amount of time to accomplish what needs to be done before your body . . . shall we say . . .
deteriorates
to the point where you will be of no further use to me, so let’s stop wasting it and get started. Would you like to know what you’re going to do for me?”

“No.”

Max told him anyway.

11

“The obvious place to start would be the Ridge Runner,” Mike said, leaning back in his chair and eying Sharon across the desk. The atmosphere inside the office was tense and awkward, each person trying to concentrate on the job at hand, each well aware of the eight hundred pound gorilla of their breakup inside the room. “That was the last place anyone saw Manning, as far as we know, so that’s where we need to go.”

Sharon sat silently and Mike studied her face before speaking gently. “I know you had a history with this guy. Would you rather I took Pete Kendall with me to do the interview?”

“Of course not,” she answered as her face flushed bright crimson. Mike wondered whether it was from anger or embarrassment. “My ‘history,’ as you call it, with Earl Manning consisted of one highly regrettable night spent humping in the guy’s pickup truck, for crying out loud, while trashed out of my mind years ago when I was young and stupid. Believe me, I can handle this job.”

Mike sat, thinking. “What about us?” he said. “Would you rather not be around me, considering . . . you know. No one would blame you, certainly not me, if you chose to sit this one out. Like I said, I can bring—“

Sharon cut him off. “Listen, if we’re going to be able to work together, we might as well start now, don’t you think?”

Mike’s head snapped back as if he had been slapped. “Of course,” he nodded. “That’s fine. Let’s go, then.”

***

The ride across town to the Ridge Runner was conducted mostly in silence. There didn’t seem to be anything to say so no one said anything. Mike piloted the cruiser into the lot and felt the eyes of the patrons and staff on them as he and Sharon walked to the door. It was early, Happy Hour hadn’t even officially begun yet, so only a small phalanx of hard-core drinkers was in attendance, but Mike didn’t mind. They were the ones he wanted to talk to, anyway.

The soft buzz of activity ceased as the two officers entered the rectangular concrete building. The half-dozen or so regulars stopped talking, stopped drinking, stopped everything. They simply sat and stared.

The hostility was evident. Most of the people—all of them men—holding down stools at this time of day had had occasion at various times to make their acquaintance with the Paskagankee Police Department, some for more serious issues than others, but the one thing they all had in common was a mutual dislike and distrust of law enforcement.

Mike didn’t care about that. The guys who thought themselves the toughest and the baddest in this little town were small potatoes compared with some of the truly evil people he had come in contact with while serving on the force in Revere, Massachusetts. Gang members, drug dealers, wife beaters, gun runners, all of whom had little or no regard for human life, had been nearly a day-to-day reality back in Revere. These people in Paskagankee might be tough, but they held no power of intimidation over Mike McMahon.

Bo Pellerin stood behind the bar, as motionless as his customers, waiting for Mike and Sharon to cross the floor. He wore a dirty apron that might at one time have been white but was now a dingy grey, wiping glasses with a rag that looked as though it had last been washed in the same load of laundry as the apron.

“Chief,” Bo said.

Mike nodded a greeting and extended his hand. Pellerin took it reluctantly. “To what do we owe this pleasure? It ain’t even dinnertime yet, so I figure none of my customers have been arrested for DUI.”

“It’s nothing you’ve done, or any of your customers, either, as far as I know,” Mike replied. “We’re here about Earl Manning.”

“Ain’t seen him in over a week. He hasn’t been in here since a week ago Friday.”

“Is that unusual?”

“Hell, yeah, it’s unusual. I don’t think Earl’s missed more than one day at a time on that stool over there,” he nodded to the empty barstool closest to the wall, “since, well, since as long as I can remember, and I took this place over from my daddy almost ten years ago.”

“Last Friday night was when he was last here?”

“That’s what I said.”

“That was eight days ago. How can you be so sure it wasn’t Saturday night, or Thursday, if he comes in here all the time?”

Pellerin chuckled. “Oh, it was Friday, all right. Ask anyone that was here; they all remember, even the ones that can’t remember what they had for dinner five minutes after they put their fork down.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because last Friday night was Earl Manning’s wet dream come true.
Sorry,
ma’am,” Pellerin said, leering at Sharon in a way that made it clear he wasn’t the least bit sorry.

Mike waited for the bar owner to continue and when it became clear he had no intention of doing so, said, “What are you talking about, Bo?”

“I’m talking about this little girl who came in just before midnight, after Earl was well on his way to liquid oblivion. She’s the hottest thing to hit this town since, well, since
her,”
he said, nodding and leering again in Sharon’s direction.

“HEY!” Mike said, getting in Pellerin’s face and refocusing his attention on the question. “Keep your opinions about Officer Dupont to yourself unless you want to see your liquor license disappear like your common sense.”

Pellerin’s lip curled but he said nothing. Mike prompted him. “So, some young lady came into the bar and she was very good looking. What happened then?”

Pellerin smiled. “Okay, we’ll do it your way. Yes, she was
very good looking.
She comes sauntering in like she owns the place, walking through very determinedly like she knows exactly what—or who—she’s looking for. She walks around the entire bar and then stops next to Earl. She sits down and starts chatting him up like he’s freakin’ Matt Damon or something. Next thing you know, they get up and walk out together.

“That was the last I seen of him,” Pellerin said. “I called up his Ma a couple days later to get his piece of shit truck out of my parking lot. She came and got it that same day, and I ain’t seen neither one of ‘em since.”

“Can anyone verify your account?”

“I told ya,” Pellerin said in exasperation.
“Everyone
can ‘verify my account,’ as you call it. This chick could get a rise out of a dead man and she zeroed in on Earl like maggots on spoiled meat. I guarantee everyone can ‘verify my account;’ it’s all anyone could talk about around here for days.”

“What did she look like?”

“Holy shit, she was hot.”

“Could you be a little more specific?”

“Well, let’s see. Maybe five foot four, darkish skin like she spent a lot of time in the sun, jet-black hair halfway down to her butt, and the nicest butt to be jammed into a pair of jeans in this town since . . .” he glanced at Sharon and seemed to feel the chief’s stony glare and finished, “. . . well, since a long time, anyway.”

Mike nodded as Sharon jotted the description down in a small notebook. “I’m sure you won’t object to us asking your regulars a few questions? From the sound of things, they’d probably love the opportunity to relive the big moment.”

Bo Pellerin smiled, revealing a mouth full of stained and yellowed teeth. He wiped his hands on the greasy apron and said, “I don’t mind at all, Chief, knock yourself out. But you haven’t asked the most important question yet.”

“Really. And what might that be?”

“Don’t you want to know her name?”

“You have her name?”

The grin widened. “Sure do.”

“You didn’t tell me you talked to her.”

“I didn’t.”

“Listen, Bo, you’re not doing yourself any favors, here. This young woman is potentially a witness in a missing-persons case. You’d better stop screwing around and tell me what you know, and right now, because I’m just about out of patience with your little boy games.”

Pellerin raised his hands in surrender. He seemed satisfied now that he had gotten under Mike’s skin in front of his customers. “Okay, okay,” he said. “You know my sister Rose operates a little gift shop downtown,
Needful Things,
right?”

“Bo, I’ve lived in this town for almost a year now. Of course I know Rose’s shop. She named it after the Stephen King book.”

“That’s right. Well, anyway, this little chick you’re looking for was in there a few weeks ago with some rough-looking dude old enough to be her father. Hell, maybe he
was
her father, I dunno, but here’s what I
do
know. Rose said the chick was farting around, looking at glass figurines or some such crap, long after the guy had found whatever the hell he had come in to buy. He finally lost patience and said . . .”

Pellerin paused theatrically and Mike waved his right hand in a tight circle—
get on with it.

 “. . . He said ‘It’s time to go, Raven.’ Her name is Raven.”

“Did Rose get her last name? Or the other guy’s name? The older one that could have been Raven’s father?”

“Not that I know of, but you’ll have to ask her to be sure.”

“We will, don’t worry. And thanks for the information, Bo, it will go a long way toward finding Earl.”

“Yeah, well, hurry up about it,” Pellerin said. “Sales are down in this place twenty percent since that gin-soaked bastard disappeared.”

Mike shook his head. “Your concern is touching. We’re going to talk to your regulars for a bit, then we’ll be out of your hair.”

“Like I said, have at it, but they won’t have anything of value to add to what I already told you.”

And he was right. They didn’t.

12

Earl Manning picked his way through the woods, staggering more than walking, tripping over fallen logs, scrub brush littering the forest floor, even occasionally the tiniest of harmless twigs. It seemed that overnight, or rather over the week he lay at the bottom of a freezer, his muscles had somehow forgotten most of the subtle techniques involved in ordinary locomotion. It was like being drunk only without the accompanying fuzzy alcoholic haze.

He had been driven to a point along one of the most desolate stretches of Route 24 by that devil Max Acton and the treacherous beauty Raven. They pulled to the side of the road and as the car crunched to a stop on the gravel, Acton had reviewed his instructions one last time and then sent him on his way.

A medium-sized fallen birch tree, perhaps eight inches in diameter, loomed in front of him and he spent a moment studying it, determining after a fashion that it would be better to climb over it than to try to work through the thick brush on either side. He threw his right leg across the trunk and half-vaulted, half-crawled over the tree, falling to the ground on the far side and rolling to his hands and knees before struggling to his feet and marching on.

Before his transformation, eight days and a lifetime ago, Earl would have spent at least a few seconds brushing the dirt and leaves and detritus of the forest floor off his clothes had he fallen like he just did. He may have spent his entire life, nearly thirty years, in the tiny, remote village of Paskagankee, but no one would ever have accused him of being some kind of Daniel Boone. Earl had never been comfortable in the great outdoors, much preferring to spend his time atop his personal barstool at the Ridge Runner or sprawled on the ratty old couch inside the trailer he shared with his mother, drinking Budweiser and watching the Sox on TV.