The Siege (42 page)

“You get paid good money to do one thing,” Rodgers said, holding up his index finger and taking a step closer to Steve. “You ‘arrange’ for certain individuals to die of complications in the hospital. That’s
all
!” He made a quick, chopping motion with the edge of his hand. “The people I do this work for don’t want you getting involved with any experiments on your own. Do you understand? When I gave you that sample of the drug, I wanted you to run a few experiments with it using the hospital lab equipment and that was all! I certainly didn’t intend for you to try anything on your own.”

“Look, I’m sorry, Mr. Rodgers, honest,” Steve said. He looked longingly across the lot to where his own car, a beat-to-shit Mustang, sat in the thick shadow cast by the hospital. “I’ll admit I might have screwed it up a little, but, hey!” He stretched out his arm and looked at the glowing face of his wrist watch. “I’m due at work now.” He started to turn to leave, but Rodgers’ voice froze him.

“You’ll leave when I say you can leave!” Rodgers bellowed.

Steve turned and faced him, feeling his heart thump like a cold knot in his throat.

“Look, it’s not going to be any problem to finish the job,” he said. He was holding tightly onto the envelope Rodgers had given him, slapping it repeatedly into the palm of his hand. From what I saw, she has a fairly serious bruise on her forehead. It’s not going to be any problem to slip into her room sometime during the early morning and pop an air bubble into her. No sweat.”

“And you honestly think you can do it right this time?” Rodgers said, his voice steely and commanding.

“ ’Course I can,” Steve said. He wanted to laugh out loud but his throat still felt constricted, as though Rodgers physically had his fingers gently laced around his neck and was squeezing, ever so slowly.

“I don’t think you can,” Rodgers said. He put one hand to his mouth, seeming to consider for a moment, but as soon as Steve shifted on his feet, letting his guard down, Rodgers’ fist shot out of the darkness and connected solidly with Steve’s jaw. There was an explosion of bright light behind Steve’s eyes, and he was only vaguely aware that his legs had finally given in to that rubbery feeling; he dropped to his knees on the asphalt. He would have fallen face-first onto the parking lot if Rodgers hadn’t caught him.

With a quick glance around to see if they had been noticed, Rodgers grabbed Steve under the armpits and turned him around so his back was leaning against the side of his car. It took considerable effort to prop him there, but once he had him set so he wouldn’t keel over, Rodgers withdrew a small leather case from the glove compartment and leaned over Steve.

“You said you experimented on the Grant girl because you were curious, huh?” Rodgers said, addressing the unconscious man. He snapped open the leather case and withdrew a hypodermic needle. Holding the needle up to the street light, he pressed on the plunger until the dark liquid in the barrel filled the needle tip.

He rolled back the right sleeve of Steve’s coat and then jabbed the needle into Steve’s exposed forearm.

“I’ll show you how to do it
right
!” Rodgers hissed. “You said you were curious to see what effect the drug would have on someone who was still living.” He laughed softly as he pressed the plunger and the needle drained into Steve’s veins. “I’ve taken small doses of this stuff for years, but I often wondered what a generous dosage would do. Would it simply kill you so you’d end up like all the others? Or would the drug have a different effect when it went to work on
living
tissue?” He snorted with laughter as he withdrew the needle and put it back into the leather case.

“Well, Stephen old boy, maybe
if
you regain consciousness, you can tell me all about it! Satisfy my curiosity as well as your own!”

Rodgers leaned Steve’s inert form forward, opened the back door of his car and, with effort, dragged him around and pushed him onto the floor in the back seat. He took the blanket and casually draped it over the silent form. Then he got into the car and drove out of the parking lot, waving cheerfully to the elderly man in the guard booth.

“Good night,” he said, brightly, all the while thinking
I’ll probably be seeing you soon, too!

He drove slowly down back to Dyer, not wanting to chance being stopped and asked questions by any more cops tonight. The one who had stopped him earlier that night, while he was pursuing Dale Harmon, had let him off quite easy. Rodgers’ first thought had been that he would have to kill the man and dispose of him. But as it turned out, he worked for the Haynesville Police Department. As soon as Rodgers had flashed his identification, the kid had let him go with a verbal warning to “
watch your speed on these back roads, ’specially at night!
”

Rodgers wanted to get Steve’s body back to the funeral home quickly because there were still so many things he had to take care of before dawn. Now that he knew how much Dale Harmon and that woman knew (which was too much; otherwise they wouldn’t have gone straight to the cops after what they had seen happen to Larry Cole) and where they were now, the most pressing problem was exactly what he was going to do to silence them. He smiled to himself, glancing in the rear view mirror every now and then to catch the merry gleam in his eyes.

Oh, he wasn’t worried; he’d think of something very special for both of them, of that he was sure. It was just a matter of time.

“Under Attack”

I

T
he thin light of dawn was no more than a diffuse gray wash in the cellar and it brought little cheer to Dale, Donna, or Winfield. After a night spent bound and unable to move, each of them suffered sore joints and aching muscles that, no matter how much they shifted their positions, wouldn’t get better until they could stand up and move.

Throughout the night, Hocker or Tasha came down to the cellar to check on them and make sure they hadn’t worked free of their bonds. The first time Tasha had shown up, Winfield had whispered, “The left shoe,” but she had checked the ropes and left without a word. The biggest surprise and most encouraging sign to Winfield was that she didn’t tell Hocker about the hidden key, or take it away herself; maybe she didn’t believe him, or thought he was just trying to get her close enough so he could catch her. In the time between checks by their captors, Dale and Donna filled Winfield in on what they had found out and what they suspected.

The gray light had grown bright enough to see by the time they finished telling everything. “I know it’s pretty difficult to believe,” Dale said.

“Difficult?” Winfield said, snorting with laughter. “It’s damned near impossible!”

“If I could just have had a chance to play that tape for you,” he said, dipping his head downward to indicate the pile of shattered plastic strewn on the floor. Light brown audio tape was unspooled into a tangled mess. Hocker had patted him down before binding him up—removing the bills and credit cards in his wallet. When he found the cassette, he had laughed as he ground it into the dirt floor of the cellar with his boot heel.

“I didn’t really conceive anything like this could happen until I heard it in Larry’s own voice—” He choked with memory of his dead friend, sitting up in his coffin and
looking
at him with eyes as glazed and flat as marble slabs. “Even
then
, it took me a while to believe it. Hell, I probably can’t really accept it even now. But if you had seen what we saw out at Rodgers’ house last night...” He shivered, and not just from the damp cold of the cellar.

Winfield looked over at Donna, whose face looked pale and much thinner than he ever remembered it. Was this the face of someone who had seen things she couldn’t accept? he wondered. Or had she, somehow, been drawn into the insane delusions of this man?

“You said you could hear what Rodgers was doing out there last night, trying to run us down,” Dale said. “This man is very afraid his time’s run out and that he’s going to take the fall on this soon. He’s desperate, and he knows we’re here. If he can silence us, well, things might continue the way they have been for quite a while up here. It’s going to take a lot of persistence on the part of someone to find an answer to where we’ve disappeared.”

Winfield sighed and sagged back against the wall. Chill be damned! If he couldn’t get Tasha to help them, they were screwed!

“I know it sounds crazy,” Donna said. “I keep trying to put myself in your shoes and seeing if I would believe what we’re saying. lTo be honest, I don’t think I would. It’s too weird to be true.”

“But if you put together some of the pieces yourself, keeping in mind what I’ve said, it does start to make a kind of sense. How about Larry Cole? You were there at the accident. Was his body so bad off it required a closed casket to keep from upsetting the family?”

Winfield shrugged as best as he could with his hands shackled behind his back.

“He was a mess, I already told you that,” he said softly, trying to remember precisely what he had seen last Friday night, not colored by the details Dale had just given him. “I agree with you that Rodgers’ insistence on a closed casket struck me as a bit unusual, but I wasn’t about to go make an issue of it. His decision was his decision, and he did maintain that, in spite of what Larry’s mother said, she had requested a closed casket.”

“How con-
venient
,” Dale said, mimicking the nasal drawl of the
Saturday Night Live
character “Church Lady.”

“And you must have heard about Reggie Perry,” Donna said. “From what his brother said in the bar, there was no reason for him to die like that. He’d been doing just fine until
pop!
He’s dead.”

“Things like that happen,” Winfield said.

“Often enough for anyone to get suspicious?” Dale asked, arching his eyebrows.

“Possibly,” Winfield said, scowling. “Look, “I suppose I can tell you this, now that, apparently, we’re…” He snorted and spit over his shoulder onto the wall. “Christ, I’m starting to act like our host.”

“I suppose I can tell you now that if there was one mistake made in all of this, it was that your friend Larry Cole got a little too close to this.”

“What do you mean?” Dale asked, looking over at Donna and trying to read her reaction.

“He was right. And you’re right, to a degree,” Winfield said. “Lots of ‘unusual,’ shall we say, things have been going for a long time around here, and I was conducting an investigation, trying to pin certain ‘untimely deaths’ on one or possibly two people who work in the hospital in Houlton.”

“Like what happened yesterday to Reggie Perry?” Dale asked.

Winfield nodded his head. “Exactly.”

“Do you want to mention any names?” Dale asked, feeling a sudden flush. Until now, he hadn’t really considered how extensive something like this might be. If there was enough money involved it might be very big indeed.

“No,” Winfield said. “I don’t care to mention any names. I’d say, odds are we’re going to have a bitch of a time getting out of this. I’m not really worried about compromising anyone. I can say that there is—should I say
was
?—an investigation in progress.”

Dale chuckled aloud and shook his head. He glanced up, at the cellar ceiling, when he heard Hocker’s heavy footsteps track from the living room into the kitchen overhead. Hocker said something to Tasha, but no one in the cellar could make out the words. Tasha shouted, “How the hell should I know who it is?”

“You know what’s funny as hell?” Dale said, still shaking with laughter. “Now that I think about it, on the tape, Larry said something about his ‘contact.’ Were you his contact?”

Winfield nodded solemnly. “I had spoken with him off the record because I knew him from when he grew up here. Second, he worked for the state, and I wanted to sound him out on the possibility of getting the State Police involved in the investigation.”

“What the hell would Larry have known about the State Police?” Dale said, shaking his head in wonder.

“I said I asked him off the record,” Winfield replied. “I’d been working on my own and wanted to bring someone else in on it, but frankly I thought the whole thing—and I’m not talking zombies here, like you two; I’m just talking about some suspicious deaths locally—I thought the whole thing was strange enough to warrant my attention. I mentioned it to Larry one night, while we were drinking down at Kellerman’s.”

Sudden laughter burst out of Dale like a gunshot. His shoulders shook as he looked back and forth between Donna and Winfield.

“And all along,” he sputtered, “I was thinking maybe you were in on it with Rodgers, working for him! Jesus, I guess that shows what kind of cop I would have made!”

Winfield tilted his head back and looked up at the cellar ceiling when they heard Hocker’s hefty footsteps go across the floor again.

“And what do you think we can do about him?” he asked. “Because if I’m right, and Rodgers is responsible for several local murders, or you’re right, and he’s ‘experimenting’ with the corpses, if we don’t get out of this goddamned coal bin, it isn’t going to matter what we think.”

“I’ve been trying to work these knots loose all night,” Dale said, glancing at Donna. “This guy may be crazy, but he sure as shit knows how to tie your hands up nice and snug. I’ve been working on the girl all night, trying to scare her into helping me get loose. Thanks to her, I was almost sporting my left nut on my right shoulder.” He briefly described his first encounter with Tasha in the church parking lot. “I think she’s our best hope. It’s obvious she doesn’t really like this guy Hocker, but she feels some kind of security from him, too. I think if she realizes just how much trouble she’s gotten herself into, she’ll come around.”

Donna sighed and leaned her head back against the cold stone wall. “You think she hasn’t realized that already? God, I mean, what’s it going to take for her to wake up?”

From upstairs, footsteps sounded in the kitchen again, running this time. The three prisoners heard Hocker call out, “You just make sure that back door is locked this time! I’ll take care of this!”

“Could be one of my co-workers, looking for me because I didn’t show up for my morning shift,” Winfield said, his eyes brightening with hope that quickly faded when he remembered how easily Hocker had blindsided him. It irritated him because it made him realize he was getting older and slower.

Dale was shaking his head, his eyes closed as he tried to slow down his thoughts. After what he had seen last night at the funeral home, his imagination had gone into overdrive, and he didn’t like what he thought might be outside the house.

“I’ll bet it’s someone looking for us, all right,” he said softly. “I’ll bet you ten to one it’s Rodgers, coming back with a little help.”

II

B
y the time dawn came, Hocker agreed with Tasha that it was time to head out of town. He had never really wanted to get involved here; things had balled up, and as much as he wanted to clear out, he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. Maybe, he thought, it was because he hadn’t had a chance to torch anything yet. He couldn’t very well leave without leaving his mark on the town. Hell, those three dead guys buried back in the woods didn’t count. Who was going to miss them?

Hocker hadn’t slept well, because he didn’t trust Tasha to guard the guests down in the coal bin. He figured she’d get cold feet and, when he was sound asleep, let them go. Then she’d betray him. Naw! It would be best to keep an eye on her and the hostages until they could slip out of there into Canada.

Sunlight slipped in through the living room window and, like a spear, lanced through a hole in the drawn window shade and hit him squarely in the eye. He jumped awake with a start and looked around, afraid that he had fallen asleep and, that while asleep, Tasha might have fucked him up.

But no, she was still sleeping, a quiet hump in her sleeping bag over by the fireplace. Hocker got out of his sleeping bag and hurriedly pulled on his jeans and socks. Damned, it was cold! But he didn’t want to chance even the tiniest fire in the fireplace. Not after everything that had happened. Combining what he had taken from that old man, the cop, and the other guy tied up in the cellar, he had enough money to afford a motel room once they were in Canada. Hocker felt long overdue for a hot shower and a night’s sleep on a real mattress.

Grumbling softly to himself, he hiked on his boots, buttoned his flannel shirt, and sauntered into the kitchen. None of the appliances worked, he knew, but he didn’t want to bother with setting up the small camping stove, even though it was the only way he could get a cup of coffee. What he should do, he thought, was go in there and wake up Tasha. Let her do the woman’s work!

He decided against doing that, though, because he was enjoying the early morning quiet in the house. For a moment, he let himself wonder what it would have been like if he had grown up in this house instead of…

“Fuck it,” he whispered as he slammed open the lid of the cook stove and started working the valves to get the flame glowing. He cracked a wooden match with his thumbnail and lit the burner. The flame hissed loudly as it burned with a warm, blue glow, but it did nothing to cut the chill in the house. Hocker was still sputtering under his breath as he filled a small saucepan with water from his canteen and put it on the stove to boil.

“ ’Morning,” Tasha said sleepily. She was standing in the doorway, her eyes half-closed as she raked her fingers through her hair. Hocker, not wanting to let her know she had caught him by surprise, merely nodded her a greeting without turning around.

Before long, they were standing together in the frigid kitchen, sipping coffee from a steaming mug. The daylight outside was getting stronger, driving away the tangles of mist that clung to the hollows. The sloping hill was sharply lit by the slanting sunlight, and everything glowed with a gold light against the darkened sky to the west.

Hocker’s eyes, though, as often as he tracked up the hill to the horizon, always kept coming back to the barn:
the goddamned barn where I hid the goddamned cop’s goddamned cruiser!

Something is going to have to burn in this town
, he thought, feeling the hand holding his coffee mug tighten involuntarily. It was almost like a part of his brain began to
itch
, and he knew of only one way to scratch it.
Burn! Burn something!

“What was that?” Tasha said, suddenly tensing.

Hocker tore his eyes away from his contemplation of the barn and looked at her. “I didn’t say nothin’.”

“No, that noise…”