Scream Catcher (2 page)

Back pressed up against the block wall, Jude watches, listening to his heart beat inside his temples. He’s no stranger to the pit. As a boy he used to play
Johnny Quest
inside the big dig during the day, but never at night when the Lake George
dark monster
came out of hiding. Standing in the rain his mind recalls deep craters, jagged shale, abandoned automobiles, empty beer bottles, used condoms and rock piles galore. The images flash back while he works up a smile. Black Bear’s Bar and Grille is located on the opposite north end of the old pit. Black Bear’s is open all night for the commercial salmon and charter fishermen and their pickled livers.

As for the running men?

Pulling himself away from the wall, he sucks in a wet breath, prepares for the two-mile jog back home to pregnant wife and child when the T-shirted man drops to his knees on the pavement, and Longhair raises up a hand exposing a silenced automatic.

What happens next takes forever
and
an instant.

Longhair extends his right arm, presses the automatic to T-shirt’s head.

“Scream,” he orders in a strange, high-pitched voice. “Scream. For. Me.”

The man on his knees hesitates. Peering slowly up at the long-haired man, he doesn’t scream. He produces only silence and a frightened smile. Until Longhair thumbs back the hammer on the automatic.

“Scream. For. Me.” he repeats, bringing a handheld device to the mouth of the T-shirted man.

T-shirted man loses his smile. He lowers his head, swallows a deep breath.

He screams.

Screams so loud the guttural shriek bounces off the side of the gym and rattles Jude’s bones.

He screams directly into the handheld device. A device that by now Jude is certain is an iPhone.

When the scream is finished, and the T-shirted man’s lungs are empty of oxygen, silence returns to the lot. That’s when two muzzle flashes light the dark sky for two brief instances.

Longhair takes a step back.

T-Shirt falls face first. French kisses a rain puddle.

“God almighty,” Jude whispers to himself.

But there’s nothing God Almighty can do now.

Longhair slides the automatic into a shoulder holster, and pockets the iPhone. Sensing another presence, he turns, laser beams a gaze in the ex-cop’s direction.

It’s then that Jude’s body suddenly becomes a pinpricked balloon.

All strength bleeds out of his feet.

He drops down onto the wet lot, rolls his body behind the B.F.I. dumpster, hides himself behind stacks of cardboard and rain-drenched newspapers.

Heart beats a berserk rhythm. Hands tremble. Adrenalin-filled brain becomes an orchestral symphony warming up inside the skull, until the roar of a car engine and burning rubber kills the music.

Longhair is getting away.

What’s the ex-cop gonna do?

Ex-cop is gonna listen to the demon inside his chest, and he’s going to sit still, play dead.

The car approaches, downshifts to a crawl, then brakes to a hard stop some fifteen or twenty feet away. As soon as the passenger window goes down, Jude can’t miss it: gunmetal death staring him in the face.

Longhair’s got an unobstructed shot.

When the hammer comes down the ex-cop never sees the flash. Never feels the pain.

What’s it like to die?

It’s like the lights in a room being turned out. It’s about silence and stillness and darkness. It’s freedom from the demon. It’s like falling …

… falling into a deep and painless sleep.

Sweeney’s Boxing Gym

Tuesday, 6:30 A.M.

But Jude is not dead.

Instead he’s jarred awake to the voices that belong to the handful of boxing students who’ve arrived at the gym for their early morning, pre-work workouts, two of whom promptly assist him off the damp pavement.

Standing awkwardly, out of balance, eyesight blurred to the point of being blinded, he’s become the crippled sum total of his fear. He begins to realize that there is both good and bad news in his situation.

First the good news: the bullet discharged from the killer’s silenced automatic only grazed the right side of his skull. The bullet, while knocking him out cold, did not penetrate the brainpan.

As for the bad news: his skull feels like it’s been rammed into the block wall.

His head rings and throbs with jolts of pain. His swelled brain feels like it’s about to explode out the ears, eyes and nostrils. Something is bothering Jude, too. Something that only a former cop can’t help but contemplate: if the long-haired killer finds out he missed his target, he’ll have no choice but to hunt Jude down, destroy the eyewitness to a murder.

* * *

The Lake George summer tourist paradise is gearing up for another beautiful beach ball-cotton candy day. The newly risen sun has already burned off the predawn rain. Maybe Jude has no way of seeing them clearly, but he can feel the rays warm on his face. Sweatpants and sweatshirt are heavy with the rainwater that’s saturated them; sneakers damp, squishy, his feet itching.

His fellow boxing students do their best to hold him upright and steady, one on each arm. He tries with all his powers to regain his equilibrium while big iron bells relentlessly toll inside a bruised skull. But the imaginary bells are not loud enough to drown out the distressed voices of the boxing students.

Managing to free himself from their grips, Jude stumbles a step forward, gently touches his head wound with the tips of his fingers, comes away with sticky blood. From where he’s standing, he’s able to make out one student who’s crying inconsolably, another student ordering the distraught woman, “Don’t look at it!” referring no doubt to the assassinated T-shirted man. Yet a third student—this one a man—asks him if he’s going to be okay.

“I’m having trouble seeing,” he whispers. “But it’ll pass.”

“Police are on their way,” the same man adds in a shaky voice. “So is Jimmy Mack and an ambulance.”

At the mention of his adoptive father and former L.G.P.D. boss, Jude feels a knot begin to twist itself around his intestines. Not only did he witness a murder, but he froze up, allowed the murderer to get away. That clearly in mind, he isn’t sure if he can bear to look into Mack’s face when the old Captain finds out about it. Maybe he has no idea how Mack will react. But already he can taste the top cop’s disappointment on his tongue, as if he’s just swallowed a mouthful of sour milk.

By the time the first emergency siren can be heard blaring from out of the near distance, the sight is already returning to his eyes.

Wooded knoll behind Sweeney’s Boxing Gym

Tuesday, 6:37 A.M.

Bright blue eyes peer through the narrow tree branch openings.

Eyes focused not on all the people scattered behind the boxing gym, but instead on one man. A man the people sometimes refer to as Jude and at other times as Parish. A former Lake George policeman turned best-selling author. Or so the people whisper to one another.

Blue Eyes sees that Parish stands a bit unsteady, wobbly. The ex-cop is holding his head in his hands. When Parish finally raises his head up, Blue Eyes spots the small but noticeable gash between the temple and the right ear lobe. It’s where the .22 caliber round from the silenced automatic must have grazed him instead of killing him.

Blaring from out of the distance, sirens.

The police are coming …

Black Dragon studies the face of Jude Parish, commits it to memory. Black Dragon wants to hear Jude Parish scream.

In his right hand, he grips the iPhone. He turns on the scream catcher app he created himself. He presses play, puts the phone to his ear. He listens to the scream the T-Shirted man made just before his death. The scream sends ice water up and down his backbone.

When the first cop car turns the corner into Sweeney’s back lot, Hector “the Black Dragon” Lennox is already bushwhacking back through the woods towards his silver sedan.

“Scream. For. Me.” chants the blue-eyed beast. “Scream. For. Me.”

Sweeney’s Boxing Gym

Tuesday, 7:01 A.M.

Shock.

It’s how the demon fucks with him, tainting his blood with a numbing poison.

With his shoulder pressed up against the gym’s rear block wall and the sweat-suited boxing students keeping a strange and careful distance, as if they can smell the demon rotting inside his ribs, he’s come to see what he fully expected: the arrival of a blaze-orange and white EMS van and its two-person crew of blue uniformed emergency technicians—one male, the other female.

Right on their tail, arriving in a Jeep cruiser, is his adoptive father, L.G.P.D. Captain Jimmy Mack, slate gray eyes locking onto his own browns through the windshield.

Mack exits the Jeep, leaving the driver’s side door wide open, radio spitting out a popping mix of static and voices. The stocky, gray-haired man nervously pulls on the ball-knot of his tie and approaches his son.

“You’re hurt.” It’s a question.

“Hurting, Mack. But not
hurt
.”

Mack bites down on his lip, squints his eyes to get a better look at the cut on the right side of Jude’s head.

“Just a graze,” he says. “Butterfly clamp will do the trick.” Clearing his throat, he shifts the subject. “Think you can give me a halfway decent picture of the perp?”

Jude does it. No hesitation. Right from where he’s standing in the back lot.

A killer has gotten away with murder. Maybe his head feels like it’s about to split down the center; spill his brains all over the lot. But the very least he can do now is shove the demon aside and play the role of
old reliable
.

He can provide the old Captain with a decent ID of the killer he let get away.

* * *

When it’s done, Mack returns to his perch behind the wheel of the Jeep.

He leaves the door wide open, short tree trunk legs hanging out, black cop shoes planted flat on the blacktop. Jude sees the old Captain pull the radio transmitter from the console, with which he begins issuing an A.P.B. on a “single male Caucasian, six-feet to six-feet-four, long blond and/or dreadlocked hair, possibly dressed in black pants, matching long-sleeved T-shirt and lace-up boots. Suspect is between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five and was last seen driving a sedan, probably foreign made, color silver or platinum. He is armed and must be approached with extreme caution.”

The EMTs approach Jude, one on either side.

They make him take an awkward seat on the van’s rear fender.

“Please be still,” orders the short dark-haired woman while applying a bandage and butterfly clip to the flesh wound on his head. The dressing completed, she then points a penlight flashlight into his open eyes.

The light makes Jude dizzy, lightheaded, causing him to abruptly pull away from it.

While her partner wraps a thick strap around his arm for a blood pressure reading, she suggests that an immediate E.R. visit to be followed up by a C.A.T. scan precedes any police assistance that might be required of him now.

“My father will take me directly to Glens Falls Medical,” he white lies.

Once more he catches sight of Mack in the near distance. The old Captain has left the Jeep cruiser. Now he’s climbing up the gravel pit embankment, eyes beaming down at the tops of his shoes. From Jude’s perch on the EMS van’s fender, he watches his father disappear over the side of the wooded embankment, down into the pit. He can’t help but wonder if the old Captain might uncover a clue that will lead to the dreadlocked killer.

A set of car keys maybe; a wallet; a calling card!

But when Mack returns from the gravel pit, Jude can’t help but notice the resignation that paints his hard face. Mack doesn’t have to say a word for Jude to know what’s happening. It’s just as he thought: no visible clues left behind inside the pit.

The pouring rain, it will have erased even footprints.

* * *

One of the half dozen uniformed cops assigned to the crime scene escorts Jude directly to the back seat of Mack’s Jeep. Mack makes his way around the front of the vehicle, opens the passenger-side door, sets himself down. Reaching into his jacket pocket he hands over his cell phone.

“Call your wife,” he orders. “She’ll be worried.”

Jude breathes, calmly dials the number for his lakeside home. When Rosie answers, he begins telling her why he didn’t make it back immediately after the morning workout. Using a soft controlled tone, he reveals everything he can under the circumstances—that he is with Mack; that something’s happened that requires his complete attention and “Yes, don’t worry, I’m okay.”

As a husband he’s not ready to reveal the fact that he nearly took a bullet to the brain. But as a former cop he does not spill even a single detail about the morning’s events, other than letting her know that a man was killed outside Sweeney’s Gym and he just happened to be on hand to see the whole thing unfold.

He swallows.

He pictures his newlywed wife. Her long brown hair, deep brown eyes. He sees her standing in the kitchen by the big picture window that looks out over the lake. In his mind she’s still dressed in her white nightgown, a protruding belly four months pregnant, open hand gently pressed against it. He sees the ten-year-old Jack seated at the kitchen table downing a plate of buttermilk pancakes drenched in maple syrup. Through the open screen door the bushy haired, round-faced boy will be able to see the down-sloping back lawn, the calm lake lapping against the docks at the end of it.