The Night Monster (24 page)

“How can you be sure they went this way?”

I stared down at the highway. “I’m not,” I yelled.

“But what if—”

“Shut up, and watch the road.”

Long didn’t like that. People hired me to do a job, and that didn’t include explaining my actions. I grabbed him by the shoulders and spun him around.

“Look at the road!”

“You’re a real prick!” Long said angrily.

“Who cares?” I replied.

The chopper suddenly slowed. Morris waved to me, then pointed straight down. He had spotted something and wanted to take a closer look. I gave him the thumbs-up, and he took us down. It felt like the floor had dropped out from beneath our feet, and Buster buried his head in my lap and shut his eyes.

I continued looking down at the highway. A crew of tree cutters were trimming back the overhang on 27, and had traffic stopped in both directions. If Mouse had run into this during his escape, it would have slowed him down considerably. I hadn’t had much to cheer about lately, but this turn of events lifted my spirits. Maybe I’d finally caught a lucky break.

We flew another five minutes, each of us focused on the backed-up line of vehicles below. Long had stopped speaking to me. I supposed I could have apologized, but I didn’t look very good on my knees.

Another minute passed. Off to my left, I spotted something strange. A compound of white, deserted buildings sat in an overgrown field, the buildings surrounded by a chain-link fence topped by razor wire. It looked like an abandoned prison, yet I knew of no prison in this part of the county.

“I want to take a look at that,” I yelled to Morris.

The chopper dipped, making me feel weightless. Morris brought us down directly over the compound’s entrance. I stared at the shell
of a guard house. At one time, the abandoned place had been some type of institution.

A single road made of crushed seashells led into the compound. I spotted a fresh pair of tire tracks in the shells, their indentations several inches deep. Someone had recently been here, and I told Morris to see where the tracks led.

Morris followed the road into the compound. It was an enormous facility, and I counted six towering buildings, each painted an institutional white. The buildings’ windows had been knocked out, as had the doors, giving them a ghostly feel. On one building, rusted bars covered the windows on every floor. Not a prison, I thought, but a mental institution.

The tracks stopped in a courtyard, then made a complete circle, and went back out. It could have been teenagers, or some curious tourists looking for a photo opportunity. Or it could have been Mouse and the giant, looking for a place to hide.

Long turned around in his seat. “Why are we stopping?”

“I think they came here,” I said.

“You’re nuts. This is a ghost town.”

It
was
a ghost town, its memories long since displaced. But sometimes people returned to places that filled their souls with darkness. Mouse and his partner had been in Broward eighteen years ago, and something told me that this was where they’d lived.

“Let’s go!” Long told the pilot.

The chopper left the compound. Flying over the entrance, I spotted a rotting wood sign lying on the ground beside the front gate. The name of the institution was painted on the sign in bold letters, and it screamed up at me like a horrible voice from my past.

Daybreak
.

he air escaped from my lungs, and I felt light-headed. An old joke came to mind. A Buddhist walks up to a hot-dog stand and says, “Make me one with everything.”

I had become one with everything about this case. I knew exactly what was going on and who these guys were. All from staring at a rotting wooden sign lying in an overgrown field.

The infamous Daybreak Mental Health Center had once stood in this field. Up until the 1980s, this was where the county’s mentally disturbed citizens had been put, usually against their will. It had been a state-funded snake pit of abuse, neglect, and wasted lives, with more people dying here each year than in all of the state’s jails combined. It had gotten so bad that the governor had shut the place down.

I had focused on Daybreak when I’d first starting looking for Naomi Dunn. Because it was closed, I had relied on phone interviews and had spoken to different people associated with the facility, including the center’s director, the doctor who ran the ward for the criminally insane, and two Broward County cops who worked there.

I closed my eyes and plumbed my memory. My conversations with the director, the doctor, and the two cops quickly came back to me. Each had sworn to me that they had no knowledge of a disturbed
giant as a Daybreak patient. Their denials had almost been identical, like they were reading off a script. I should have seen through the ruse, but hadn’t. They had lied. And men lied when they had something to hide.

I opened my eyes. We had stopped and were hovering in the air, the pilot waiting for instructions. I glanced at Long. He was still livid with me, his face bright red.

“This is it,” I shouted.

“How can you know that?” Long asked.

“It’s an old mental institution. Sara’s abductors were inmates here.”

Long acted stunned. The idea seemed to upset him more than if I’d said his daughter’s abductors were convicted murderers.

“We need to look around down there, and see if the Cherokee is stashed somewhere,” I said.

The pilot looked to Long for approval.

“Do what he says,” Long told him.

We circled the grounds. Daybreak was surrounded by a chain-link fence with several gaping holes in it. Each time we passed over one of these holes, I looked for tire tracks leading out. I had hunted for mentally disturbed people before. They were difficult to track down, their behavior unpredictable at best. But they shared one thing in common. When they were being chased, they would often hide instead of running. In the past two days, Mouse and his partner had hidden all over Broward County, and I sensed they were doing the same thing right now.

“Look! Down there!” the pilot said.

I strained my eyes to see what Morris was pointing at. Just north of Daybreak was an orange grove with a brown dirt road running through its center. There were fresh tire tracks in the road, and I felt my heart start to race.

“Follow that road,” I said.

Morris brought the chopper directly over the road, then headed down it. It was hard to judge distances from the air. After what felt like two or three miles, we came to a clearing with a cracker house
that had a corrugated metal roof covered with mold. The structure appeared to be part of a farm, the surrounding yard filled with rusting tractors and farm equipment. The brown dirt road ran past the cracker house and all the way down to 27, it’s length over a mile long. The tire tracks appeared to stop at the house.

“We need to go down,” I shouted.

Morris landed the chopper in a pasture two hundred yards from the cracker house. The grass was knee-high, and my foot sank in a pile of ancient cow dung as I jumped from the cockpit. Buster strained at his leash, the enticing smells too much to bear.

Long climbed out and headed straight for the ramshackle structure. The strap on his holster was unbuckled, his fingers gripping the handle of his gun. If he wasn’t careful, he was going to shoot himself in the leg.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I’m going to storm the house and rescue my daughter,” Long said.

“That’s a good way to get Sara hurt.”

“Do you have another plan in mind?”

“We need to find their vehicle, and make sure those tire tracks are theirs,” I said. “For all we know, they might belong to someone else.”

Long backed down. “All right. We’ll do it your way.”

I made Long get behind me, and approached the house. The windows were covered in plywood, and a yellow “No Trespassing” sign was stuck on the front door. I tested the knob, and found it locked.

I circled the house while checking the boards on the windows. They were nailed down tight. The house had not been lived in for years, and I turned my attention to the grounds. There was farm equipment scattered around, including rusted combines and ground busters. The age of the equipment confirmed that the place had been abandoned. Buster continued to strain his leash. A part of me wanted to let him go to see what he could find. But I knew the woods were filled with gators, wild boars, and panthers. If Buster ran across one of these animals, he’d be ripped apart, and my company would lose half of its employees.

“This is a goddamn waste of time,” Long said a few minutes later.

“You can leave if you want to,” I said.

We were standing by the dirt road next to the house. I spent a moment studying the tire tracks I’d seen from the air. They were fresh, and about a half inch deep in the soft earth. The tracks left the road, and I followed them around the house with my eyes peeled to the ground.

Behind the house was a shaded backyard. There was no grass, the ground as hard as a rock. The tracks disappeared, and I got on my knees, and placed my cheek next to the ground. My grandfather had taught me how to track, and my eyes picked up the faint disruption in the earth. It was the outline of a car’s tires going straight into the forest. I stood up and dusted myself off.

“What did you find?”Long asked.

I brought my fingers to my lips and shushed him. Long grew infuriated.

“Are they in there?” he asked.

I pulled out my cell phone. Long was my client, and I had an obligation to tell him what I knew. But my greater obligation was to making sure no harm came to Sara. I needed backup, and I called Burrell’s number.

“Who are you calling?” Long asked.

“The police.”

“But they might get away! We have to save Sara!”

Long had watched too many TV cop shows. In those shows, the heroes saved the day during the last few minutes of the program, and shot the bad guys while rescuing the victim. In real life, the police showed up and displayed a massive show of force that convinced the bad guys to throw down their weapons and give up. That was the script I was going to follow.

Long drew his gun from its holster. It was a Glock 19, and it looked like it had come right out of the box.

“Put that away before you hurt yourself,” I said.

“Like hell I will.”

Long ran into the forest brandishing his gun. He was going to get us killed if I didn’t do something. Dropping my phone into my pocket, I started to run after him. I had not taken five steps when I heard a gunshot, followed by Long’s ghastly scream.

arl, you all right?” I called out. “Help me!” Long screamed.

I instinctively drew my Colt. Someone had taken Karl’s gun away from him. That was usually what happened when people who didn’t know how to handle firearms decided to play John Wayne.

I cautiously entered the forest. Buster was glued to my side, his hackles sticking straight up. The forest was thick with oak and punk trees, the ground peppered with tiny flecks of light. Dozens of birds chattered overhead, and I heard the unmistakable rustle of a squirrel running across a pile of leaves.