The red church (31 page)

"Don't we need to tell Dad?" Tim asked.

"He'll only get mad, honey. He'll yell at me. You don't want him to yell at me, do you?" Tim rushed to the window and hugged her. Ron-nie locked the door and the boys put on their sneak-ers. Then Ronnie helped Tim slip through the window. Ronnie followed, taking a last look into the lighted room before heading into the night.

The siren was louder now, closer. Frank shut his eyes and leaned against the bed. His shoulder throbbed, but he could still flex the fingers of his left hand. No major nerve damage, at least from the bullet wound. But Archer McFall had damaged his nerves plenty.

Sheila's fingers explored the area around the wound. "Does it hurt?" she asked, her voice as spaced-out as it had been when he'd first entered the motel room. He thought about trying to make a wise-crack, like Bruce Willis in
Die Hard,
but he gave up. Bruce Willis had a writer to feed him lines. All Frank had was a jangled-up nest of thoughts and red wires of hurt in his brain.

He grunted and opened his eyes. Sheila's face was corpse white, as white as Samuel's had been.
Samuel.

Anger and hate pushed Frank's pain away. That bastard Archer had killed Samuel. Whoever or what-ever Archer was, ghost or demon or the best damned magician this side of Houdini, the "preacher" was to blame for Samuel's death. And for Frank's long years of guilt.

"You know what's funny?" Frank said.

"Nothing's funny," Sheila said. "I just shot you."

"No, really, it
is
funny," he said. "Once you throw away all the old rules, all the things you thought you knew and that you counted on, then you can believe just about anything."

"What in the hell are you talking about?"

"Ghosts. Archer McFall. Whatever he is, he's real. Not some trick of the mind, or a vision to fit in with your criminal-psychology theories."

"He's real, all right," she said, though she sounded unsure. She folded back the bedspread and yanked the sheet free. She tore a long strip from the sheet and wrapped it around Frank's shoulder and upper arm. He winced at the fresh pain.

"Damn, it's only a flesh wound," she said.

"That's good."

"No, it's not. I was aiming for your heart."

"I'll take that under advisement, for the next time you threaten to shoot me." She tied off the bandage as the wailing patrol car pulled up to the door. It skidded to a stop, tires squealing, and Wade Wellborn shouted from the parking lot.

"Sheriff? Detective Storie?" He had seen their ve-hicles.

"It's all clear, Wade," Frank yelled back.

Wade rushed through the open door, gun pointed to the ceiling. "What in the holy heck happened?" he said, eyes wide.

"We had us what you call an 'incident,' " Frank said. His blood stained the makeshift bandage, but the spreading seemed to have slowed. He stood, Sheila taking his good arm and helping him up. As he struggled to keep his balance, he said, "Maybe it was more of an 'encounter' than an inci-dent."

"Sir?" Wade said.

"Call in backup. Then stay and secure the scene."

"Who done it?" Wade gaped at the bandage, then at the broken window and the holes in the motel's Sheetrock wall.

"You'll have to wait for the incident report like everybody else," said Frank. "I won't even know what happened until I make it up."

Wade hesitated, a confused expression on his face. Then he obeyed Frank's command. When Wade left the room, Frank said to Sheila, "You up for a church service?"

"I don't know. I always thought I'd believe in ghosts when I saw them. Only now I've seen one, and I still don't believe it."

"You ought to have a little faith, Sergeant."

"Faith?"

"Yeah. I
told
you the church was haunted. I just didn't know what was doing the haunting."

"Like I was supposed to believe you when you bab-bled on about the Hung Preacher?" Sheila seemed to be coming around, emerging from her daze and regaining her sarcastic edge. Frank was glad she was her old self again. He kind of liked her old self. Maybe the old Sheila wouldn't shoot him next time. They went out the door, Frank taking a last look at the bloodstain on the carpet, the mussed bed, the Bible on the floor. "You drive," he said to Sheila.

"Yes, sir."

"Stop calling me 'sir.' If we're going to try to kill a ghost together, we might as well be on a first-name basis."

The few motel tenants had left their rooms and stood in clumps of two or three, whispering to one another in the parking lot. Blue lights strobed off the windows, adding to the disorienting power of the experience. The Holiday Inn's night manager stood at the far end of the parking lot, half-hidden behind a concrete planter.

"Everything's under control," Frank shouted to him.

"Don't look so damned under control to me," said the manager in a squeaky voice. "Where's Mr. McFall?"

"Checked out early," Sheila replied. She got in the driver's side of her patrol car and opened the passenger door for Frank. As he settled onto the seat, Wade ran over to their car.

"Where are you going?" he asked, his face red from exertion.

"Following up on a lead," Frank said. "We'll radio in the details." Sheila gunned the engine to life, backed up, then fishtailed out of the parking lot. When they were on the highway and accelerating smoothly, Sheila pulled her revolver from her shoulder holster.

"You're not going to finish the job, are you? Shoot me for real?" he asked. She handed the gun to him. "Need to reload."

"Why? We already know that bullets can't stop him. Or
it.
Whatever the hell it is."

"There's still such a thing called 'proper proce-dure.' It might be the last thing I can do by the book." She hit eighty and held steady, running with-out siren or blue lights. He watched her face as she drove. He liked her.

Crazy as it was, he liked her. Hell, the world was touched-in-the-head crazy anyway, with its haunted churches, shape-shifters, Hung Preachers, and Looney Toons sheriffs. Why couldn't he like a woman he had worked with for years? So what if she'd shot him? He knew men who'd been treated worse. Sheila glanced at him for a moment, and must have seen his strange expression. She glanced again.

"What are you looking at?"

"You."

She gave a tired smile. "Just reload the gun."

"Yes, sir," he said, struggling to open the box of shells she'd flipped onto the seat. She turned off the highway onto a narrow road that was paved but un-marked. Frank looked up at the dim stars. A high haze belted the sky, and the three-quarters wedge of moon was wreathed with electric-blue clouds just above the mountains.

"Sheila?" he said, the first time he'd said her name aloud. At least to her. He'd tried it on his tongue a few times, back in his small apartment in the wee hours between nightmares.

"What?" she said.

"What are we going to do when we get to the red church?"

"You're the sheriff," she said.

"I mean, how do you kill a ghost?"

"Good question," she said.

They rode in silence as Frank clumsily dumped the spent shell casings and reloaded the revolver us-ing his one good hand. He passed it back to Sheila.

"Feel better?" he asked after she'd returned it to its holster.

"No," she said. "What about you?"

His shoulder still throbbed with every beat of his heart, but the pain was just a background distraction now, mental white noise. "I'll live. More or less."

The dispatcher's voice fuzzed from the radio. "Base to Unit Two, come in, Unit Two." Frank turned the radio off.

Sheila glanced at him, her hands still tight on the steering wheel. "Guess we do this without backup?"

"Seems like those are the rules."

Her next question made his breath catch. "Do you believe in God?"

"Sure," he said without thinking. "Jesus is our Lord and Savior."

"No," she said. "I mean
really
believe."

"Look, if you think Archer is the devil and this is the ultimate battle of good and evil—"

"Don't be a jerk, Frank."

"I don't think it's ever that simple," he said. "I mean, God is good and the devil is evil. One's right and one's wrong. You ever known anything that clear-cut?"

"Well, we're only human," she said with some sar-casm. "What the hell do we know?"

"Archer says it's the flesh itself that leads to sin," Frank said, wondering where he'd picked up that lit-tle nugget of wisdom. "The heart is pure, but the flesh gets us in trouble."

"Archer says a lot of things." Sheila slowed the cruiser and turned onto the gravel road leading to Whispering Pines. The river glinted below them, the silver of the moon dappled across its surface. They rounded a bend and the dark shape of the church stood out on the hill above them.

"Here goes nothing," Frank said, his voice barely audible over the gravel crackling beneath the wheels.

"What's the plan?"

Frank looked at the long dark fingers of the dog-wood, at the black belfry, at the white bones of the tombstones. Figures moved around the church, and cars were clustered in the driveway. Archer's fold was gathering.

"If I come up with one, you'll be the first to know," he said.

It happened so fast that it seemed like slow motion.

He yelled, Sheila braked, and the cruiser slid side-ways. Her elbows flailed as she fought the steering wheel, trying to avoid the boy standing in the road. The momentum slammed Frank against Sheila's side and she lost control. The car skated across the loose gravel onto the soft dirt shoulder
,
then slipped down the embankment to the black river below.

Frank's head bounced off the dashboard, then rammed into the roof, and he reached for Sheila as metal twisted and glass shattered and the world turned cartwheels. As his thoughts turned black and blue, he held on to the image of Samuel in the road, arms spread in welcome, worms dripping from his smile. Then, wet darkness.

TWENTY

"Where's your car?" Mama Bet asked in the dim-ness of the vestry. Not that a car mattered much to her, but few around these parts had raised a son who made good in the world. Maybe she suffered from sinful pride, but a flashy luxury car just flat-out said,
I done proud.
Soon cars and pride and such wouldn't matter, but you clung to life's little joys while you had them.

"I won't need a car where I'm going," Archer said. "Where
we're
going." Archer lit a candle. Waxy smoke mingled with the smell of the communion. The reverent murmurs of the congregation filled the wooden shell of the church, anticipation in the air as thick as flies on roadkill. Archer's suit was a little rumpled. Mama Bet frowned and straightened his tie. A messiah had to look the part. People didn't fall in for just any old body.

"You going to make me walk into the kingdom on these tired old feet?" she said, trying to get Archer to smile. He was so blamed serious all the time.

"We each must make the sacrifice," he said.

Mama Bet worked her shoulders so that the lace of her dress collar stopped tickling her neck. "Guess we'd best get on with it."

"Yes . . . you go ahead. Give me a moment to com-mune with God the Father," Archer said without a hint of irony.

That was one part of this deal that worried Mama Bet. She was finally going to come face-to-face with that low-down, sneaky thing. The one who'd planted the seed and left her with all the pain and trials of raising a messiah. Well, He couldn't properly claim any of the benefits. S
he
was the one who had made the hard decisions, the sacrifices, endured the whis-pers. Even though the reward of heaven was great, she felt she deserved a little something more.

Like maybe God ought to get down on His knees and beg her forgiveness.

She smiled at the image, though she had no clear picture of what God should look like. She remem-bered that night of sweaty pleasure, but His flesh had been moist and cool as clay. She hadn't glimpsed His face, but had felt his mouth slick on her neck, her shoulders, her chest. She shuddered in a mixture of remembered pleasure and revulsion.

Everybody knew that saying, "An eye for an eye," from the Old Testament. But not many knew the part right after, Mama Bet's favorite verse: "A stripe for a stripe, a burning for a burning." You got what was coming to you, what was due, the very thing you deserved. That was the best thing about God. He was fair. What you dished out to the world, He fed back to you, over and over, for an eternity.

And her heart swelled at the thought of her part in it, of Archer's part. They were doing holy work. Nothing so dirt-common as fulfilling a prophecy, but rather they were guiding people onto the True Path. Every nutcase who ever took a knife to little girls and boys claimed they had a hotline to God. But Archer was the real thing, the Second Son, God in the flesh.

She paused at the threshold of the vestry. Archer stood with his head bowed, eyes closed, the candles throwing golden light on his peaceful face, the deep brown of the wooden walls busy with shadows. Tears came to her eyes at the beauty of the scene. She could give him up.

See, God, how strong I am? I know You need to take him, that's the Way and the Word. But I hope You got
some idea just how much it pains me. If I didn't know the stone would soon be rolled away forever,
I'd throw myself down at Archer's feet and not let him go through with it.
Then Mama Bet realized she hadn't been totally truthful to God. She was actually looking forward to the cleansing. Sure, most of the old biddies who had whispered about her unexpected pregnancy were long dead, were under the cold dirt and damp grass of the cemetery. But she had a feeling that those long-dead weren't out of the woods yet. They still had a part in Archer's plan. Archer would sink his claws into them, one way or another.