“It’s not my fault! I told you to move! You stupid ass, I told you to move!”
“Ahhhhhh,” Harmon groaned as the first real pain tore at his tattered guts. Blood was pooling in the dust below him.
Hannah turned toward the woods, her face made even uglier by its rubber-lipped contortion. “You ain’t gettin’ away!” she yelled into the dark. She popped the shotgun open and reloaded both barrels. “You think I’m lettin’ fifteen thousand dollars get away in my woods, you’re crazy! You hear me, Mr. Killer?”
Dan heard her. He was lying on his stomach in the underbrush and stubbly palmettos forty feet from where the woman was standing. He’d seen Harmon fall to his knees, had seen the woman reloading her shotgun. Now he watched as Hannah walked to her husband’s side.
She looked down at Harmon’s damp, agonized face. “You mess up every damn thing,” she said coldly, and then she lifted the shotgun and fired a shell into the pickup’s left front tire. The tire exploded with a whoosh of air and the pickup lurched like a poleaxed horse. Dan almost cried out, but he clasped a hand over his mouth to prevent it.
“You ain’t goin’ nowhere in your truck!” Hannah shouted toward the woods. “You might as well come on out!”
Dan still wore his baseball cap, beads of sweat clinging to his face. All his other clothes were blown to rags, his metallic-mist Chevrolet pickup crippled, his hopes of getting to Basile Park blasted to pieces, too. The red-haired witch held the shotgun at hip level, its barrels aimed in his direction. “Come on out, Mr. Killer!” she yelled. Beside her, Harmon was still on his knees, his hands pressed to the wet mess of his midsection and his head drooping. “All right then!” she said. “I can play hide-and-seek if you want to, and first chance I get I’ll blow your damn brains out!” She suddenly began stalking into the woods almost directly toward where Dan was stretched out. Panic skittered through him; there was no way he could fight a loaded shotgun. He bolted up and ran again, deeper into the thicket. His spine crawled in expectation of the blast. “I hear you!” Hannah squalled. He heard the noise of her stocky body smashing through the foliage. “Don’t you run, you bastard!”
She was coming like a hell-bound freight train. Low pine branches whipped into Dan’s face as he ran, thorns grabbing at his trousers. Under his feet, frogs grumped and jumped. His right shoe caught a root and he staggered, coming perilously close to falling. The underbrush was dense, and the noise he was making would’ve brought his Vietnam platoon leader down on his head like a fifty-pound anvil. He had neither the quick legs nor the balance of his youth. All he cared about at the moment was putting distance between himself and a shotgun shell.
And then he smelled oily stagnance and his shoes splashed into water. Mud bogged him down. It was the frog pond.
“You wanna go swimmin’?” Hannah shouted from behind him.
Dan couldn’t see how large the pond was, but he knew he didn’t dare try to get across it. The woman would shoot him while he was knee-deep in muck. He backed out of the water to firmer earth and set off again through weeds and brush that edged the pond. No longer could he hear the woman following him, and it leapt through his mind that she knew these woods and might be hunkered down somewhere ahead. He pushed through a tangle of vines. Up beyond the canopy of pines and willow trees he caught sight of a few stars, as distant as Basile Park seemed to be. And then he entered a stand of waist-high weeds and he walked right into the arms of the figure that stood in front of him.
In that instant he probably gained a dozen or so new gray hairs. He came close to wetting his pants. But he swung at the figure’s head and pain shot through his knuckles when he connected with its jaw. The figure toppled over, and it was then that Dan realized it was a plaster mannequin.
He stood over it, wringing his bruised hand. He could make out two more mannequins nearby as if frozen in hushed conversation, their clothes weatherbeaten rags. Dark shapes lay before him, but he was able to discern what seemed to be a carousel half covered with kudzu. He had stumbled into Harmon DeCayne’s fairyland.
He went on, past the rotting facade of a miniature castle. There was a broken-down Conestoga wagon and a couple of rusted car hulks. Bricks were underfoot, and Dan figured this was supposed to have been the main street of an enchanted village. Other mannequins dressed as cowboys and Indians stood about, the citizens of DeCayne’s imagination. Dan moved past a huge tattered fabric shape with rotting wooden ribs that he thought might have been Jonah’s whale, and suddenly he was looking at a high mesh fence topped with barbed wire that marked the edge of DeCayne’s property.
I can climb the fence, he decided. The barbs’ll be tough, but they’ll be kinder than that damn shotgun. Once I get over, I can —
Can what? he asked himself. Without my truck I’m not gettin’ very far.
But there was another set of wheels close by, wasn’t there?
The station wagon parked next to the DeCaynes’ house.
He remembered the key ring on Harmon’s belt loop. Would the station wagon’s key be on it? Would the car even run? It had to; how else did they get their froglegs to market? But to get the key ring he would have to double back through the woods and avoid the woman, and that was a tall and dangerous order.
He stood there for a moment, his hands grasping the fence’s mesh. Beyond the fence was just more dark woods.
If he had any hope of getting to Basile Park, he would have to go back for the key ring.
Dan let go of the fence. He drew a deep breath and released it. His head was hurting again, but the ringing in his ears had ceased. He turned away from the fence and started back the way he’d come, creeping slowly and carefully, his senses questing for sound or motion.
A one-armed mannequin wearing a crown or tiara of some kind — a deformed fairy princess — stood on his right in the high weeds as he neared Jonah’s whale. And suddenly Dan caught a sinuous movement from the corner of his eye, over beside a crumbling structure festooned with kudzu. He was already diving into the weeds as the shotgun boomed, and a split second later the princess’s head and neck exploded in a shower of plaster. He lay on his side, breathing hard. “Got you, didn’t I?” Hannah shouted. “I know I winged you that time!”
He heard the shotgun snap open and then shut again. The woman was striding toward him, her flipflops making a smacking noise on the bricks. Dan felt what seemed to be a length of pipe next to his shoulder. He reached out and touched cold fingers. It was the princess’s missing arm.
He picked it up and rose to his feet. There was Hannah DeCayne, ten feet in front of him, the shotgun aimed just to his left. He flung the plaster arm at her, saw it pinwheel around and slam into her collarbone, and she bellowed with pain and fell on her rump, the shotgun going off into the air. Then Dan tore away through the weeds with the speed of desperation, leaving the woman cursing at his back.
He found the pond again, and ran along its boggy edge. In another few minutes he pushed out of the underbrush twenty yards away from his lamed pickup truck. Harmon DeCayne was still in the same position, kneeling with his head bowed and his hands clasping his bloody middle.
Dan leaned over the man and grasped the key ring. DeCayne’s eyes were closed, his breathing ghastly. Dan pulled the keys loose, and suddenly DeCayne’s eyes opened and he lifted his head, blood leaking from the corner of his mouth.
“Hannah?” DeCayne gasped.
“Be still,” Dan told him. “Which key starts the station wagon?”
“Don’t … don’t hurt me.”
“I’m not gonna hurt you. Which key starts the —”
DeCayne’s mouth stretched open. He shrieked in a voice that sliced the night: “Hannah! He’s got the keys!”
Dan would’ve slugged him if the man hadn’t been gutshot. He stood up as DeCayne continued to sound the alarm. In a couple of minutes the woman would be all over him. Dan ran along the road toward the DeCaynes’ house. Harmon’s shouting faded, but the damage was done. Reaching the station wagon, Dan op
ened the door on its groaning hinges and slid behind the wheel. The inside of the car smelled like the frog pond. He tried to jam a key into the ignition, but it refused. The next key balked as well. He saw a blurred movement, and by the house lights made out Hannah DeCayne running toward him on the road, her hair streaming behind her, her sweating face a rictus of rage. She was holding the shotgun like a club, and Dan realized she must be out of shells but she still could knock his brains out of his ears.
The third key would not fit.
“You ain’t gettin’ away!” she roared. “You ain’t gettin’ away!”
Dan’s fingers were slippery with sweat. He chose not the fourth key, but the fifth.
It slid in.
He turned it and pressed his foot down on the gas pedal.
The station wagon went ehehehehBOOM and a gout of black smoke flew from the exhaust. Dan jammed the gearshift into reverse and the car obeyed like a glacier, and then Hannah DeCayne was right there beside him and she jerked his door open and swung at his skull with the shotgun’s stock. Dan had seen the blow coming, and he ducked down in the seat as the shotgun slammed against the door frame. Then Hannah was lunging into the car after him even as Dan picked up speed in reverse, and she tried to claw at his eyes with one hand while the other beat at him with the gun. He kicked out at her, caught her right hip, and she staggered back. Then he swerved the car around in a bone-jarring half circle and dust bloomed up between him and the woman. Dan shoved the gearshift into drive, floored the accelerator, and the car rattled forward. One of the side windows suddenly shattered inward from another blow of the shotgun’s stock, bits of glass stinging Dan’s neck. He looked back, saw Hannah DeCayne running after him as the station wagon picked up speed, and she cursed his mother and tried to grab hold of the open door again. Then he was leaving her behind and he found the headlight switch an instant before he would’ve smashed into a weeping willow tree. As it was, he jerked the wheel and scraped a dent along the passenger side. He got the door closed, looked in the rearview mirror but could see nothing through the swirling dust. It wouldn’t have surprised him, though, if Hannah DeCayne had been hanging on to the exhaust pipe with her teeth.
Then he reached Highway 28 and steered toward Alexandria and Basile Park. The woman had given him a blow on the left shoulder with the shotgun’s stock, and though it hurt like hell, it wasn’t broken. Better that than a cracked skull. He debated stopping at the Amoco station to call an ambulance, but he figured Hannah would run into the house first thing and do it. The station wagon’s tank was a little less than three-quarters full, which was a real blessing. He had his wallet, the clothes on his back, and his baseball cap. He still had his skin on, too. He counted himself lucky.
Hannah had stopped running. There was no use in it, and her lungs were on fire. She watched the station wagon’s lights move away. For a long time she stood in the dark, her hands clenching and loosening again on the empty shotgun. She heard his voice — a weak voice now — calling her: “Hannah? Hannah?”
At last she turned her back on the highway and limped — painfully, a bruise blackening on her right hip — to where Harmon was crouched on his knees.
“Hannah,” he groaned, “I’m hurt bad.”
She’d lost her flipflops. She looked at the bottom of her left foot, which had been cut by a shard of glass. The sight of that wound, with its angry edges, made something start ticking like a bomb in her brain.
“Call somebody,” Harmon said. His eyelids were at half mast, his hands clasped together in the gory swamp of his stomach. “You … gotta …”
“Lost us fifteen thousand dollars.” Hannah’s voice was hollow and weary. “You mess up every damn thing.”
“No … I didn’t. It was you … messed up.”
She shook her head. “He read you, Harmon. He knew. I told you to get out of the way, didn’t I? And there went fifteen thousand dollars down the road. Oh my God, what I could’ve done with that mo—” She stopped speaking and stared blankly at the dust, a pulse beating at her temple.
“I’m hurtin’,” Harmon said.
“Uh-huh. The thing is, they could prob’ly sew you up at the hospital.”
He reached up a bloody hand for her. “Hannah … I need help.”
“Yes, you do,” she answered. “But from now on I think I’m gonna help myself.” Her eyes had taken on the glitter of small, hard stones. “Too bad that killer stopped here. Too bad we found out who he was. Too bad he fought the shotgun away from you.”
“What?” Harmon whispered.
“I tried to help you, but I couldn’t. I ran into the woods and hid, and then I seen what he done to you.”
“Have you … lost your mind?”
“My mama always told me the Lord moves in mysterious ways,” Hannah said. “I never believed her till this very minute.”
Harmon watched his wife lift the shotgun over her head like a club.
He made a soft, mewling noise.
The shotgun’s stock swung down with all the woman’s bitter fury behind it. There was a noise like an overripe melon being crushed. The shotgun rose up again. Sometime during the next half-dozen blows, the stock splintered and broke away. When it was done, Hannah DeCayne was bathed in sweat and gasping, and she had bitten into her lower lip. She looked down at the ruins and wondered what she had ever seen there. She wiped the shotgun’s barrel off with the hem of her shift, dropped it on the ground beside the crumpled form, and then she limped into the house to make the call.
9
Time the Thief
THE RUST-SPOTCHED STATION WAGON CREPT through the streets of Alexandria, past the dark and quiet houses, past the teardrop-shaped streetlamps, past sprinklers hissing on the parched brown lawns.
Dan drove slowly, alert for the police. His shoulder was stiffening, his body felt as if he’d been tumbled a few times inside a cement mixer, but he was alive and free and Basile Park was less than a mile away.
He’d seen no police cars and only a few other vehicles out at this late hour. He turned onto a street that led into the manicured park, following it past an area of picnic tables and tennis courts. A sign pointed the way to the amphitheater, beyond the public parking lot. His heart sank; the lot was empty. But maybe she hadn’t been able to shake the police. Maybe a lot of things. Or maybe she’d just decided not to show up.
He decided to wait. He stopped the station wagon, cut the lights and the engine, and sat there in the dark, the song of cicadas reaching him from a nearby stand of pines.
What had happened to his pickup truck still speared him. This whole nightmare was accountable to the truck, and it had taken that red-haired witch two seconds to destroy its usefulness. Damn, but he was going to miss it. A real workingman’s truck, he recalled the salesman saying. Easy payments, good warranty, made in America.
Dan wondered what Blanchard’s wife and children were feeling like about now, and he let the thoughts of his pickup truck go.
Time ticked past. After thirty minutes Dan decided to give her fifteen more. When the fifteen was gone, he stopped looking at his watch.
She wasn’t coming.
Five more minutes. Five more, and then he’d accept it and leave.
He leaned back and closed his eyes, listening to the night sounds.
It took only a few heartbeats, only a few breaths, and he was back in the village again.
The name of the village was Cho Yat. It was in the lowlands, where rice paddies steamed under the August sun and the jungle hid sniper nests and snake holes. The platoon had stopped at Cho Yat while Captain Aubrey and the South Vietnamese translator hunkered down in the shade to ask the village elders about Cong activity in the sector. The elders answered reluctantly, and in riddles. It was not their war. As the other Snake Handlers waited, eight or nine children gathered around for a closer look at the foreign giants. A new man — green as grass, just in a few days before — sitting next to Dan opened his knapsack and gave one little boy a chocolate bar. “Hersh
ey,” the man said. He was from Boston, and he had a clipped Yankee accent. “Can you say that? Her-shey.”
“Hishee,” the child answered.
“Good enough. Why don’t you give some of that to your —” But the little boy was already running away, peeling the tinfoil back and jamming the chocolate into his mouth, with other children yelling in pursuit. The Bostonian — his eyes cornflower blue in a young, unlined face, his hair as yellow as the sun — had looked at Dan and shrugged. “I guess they don’t go in for sharing around here.”
“Nope,” Dan had replied. “If I were you, I’d leave it to the captain to do the tradin’. You’ll be wanting that in a few hours.”
“I’ll survive.”
“Uh-huh. Well, if I were you, I’d do what I was told and no more. Don’t offer, don’t volunteer, and don’t be givin’ away your food.”
“It was just a chocolate bar. So what?”
“You’ll find out in a minute.”
It was actually less than a minute before the green Bostonian was surrounded by shouting children with their hands thrust out. Some of the other villagers came over to see what they might scrounge from the bountiful knapsacks of the foreign giants. The commotion interrupted Captain Aubrey’s questioning of the elders, and he came storming at the Bostonian like a monsoon cloud. It was explained to the soldier that he was not to be giving away his food or any other item in his possession, that the elders didn’t want gifts because the Cong had been known to slaughter whole villages when they found canned goods, mirrors, or other trinkets. All this had been said with Captain Aubrey’s face about two inches from the Bostonian’s, and by the time the captain was finished speaking in his voice that could curl a chopper’s rotors, the Bostonian’s face had gone chalky under his fresh sunburn.
“It was just a piece of candy,” the young man had said when Captain Aubrey returned to his business and the children had been scattered away. “It’s no big deal.”