Scare Tactics (14 page)

“Good morning, Sheriff,” Hero said, before he even opened his eyes. “I hope you had pleasant dreams.”

Stone told him to stand up. Stone’s right eye was a monster. He looked as if he hadn’t slept, let alone dreamed.

As soon as Hero was on his feet, Stone dropped him with a billy to the side of the neck.

“I don’t know,” he said softly to the writhing Hero, “how it is you did what you did last night. But it don’t matter. You better believe I’ll personally take real good care of you now.” Stone looked at the deputy and pointed to Hero on the cell floor. “Cuff him, Horace, and let’s get a move on.” The black deputy came in with shambling lopsided gait and reached down to lock Hero’s hands behind his back. Hero was puking. When he finished, Horace lifted him easily, inserted a long ebony club between his back and his elbows, and maneuvered him toward the door with it. Stone stood by pensively, fingering his swollen eye.

“Where ... taking me?” Hero gasped.

“Son, you need medical attention. You’re about to get it.”

“No! I demand ... speak to a barrister! My right. You must allow—”

Horace chuckled softly, trotting Hero along in front of him with little adroit manipulations of the club.

“Deputy! Listen to me! The Sheriff ... murdered ... Taryn Melwood! He knows ... I know, that’s why he—”

“Save your breath,” Stone said. “Horace has his hearing aid turned off. But it wouldn’t make no nevermind to him anyway. I own him, body and soul.”

Beauregard the jailhouse dog stood shivering outside the alley door. He sniffed at Hero as Hero was loaded into a cruiser. Thick wire mesh separated him from the front seat.

“I demand to know—where we’re going,” Hero said. He could barely speak above a whisper, his voice affected by fear and the blow to the neck, which had raised a throbbing goose egg.

Stone shut his dog up in the jail and got in beside Horace, who drove through empty streets.

“You can’t do this! You’re trying to shut me up, but it won’t work!” Hero began to throw himself against one of the doors, from which the handle had been removed. He tried to scream, but even if he’d had the voice for it, no one was around this early to pay attention to him. Stone stoked his pipe and lit up.

West of Carverstown they took narrow country roads through sparsely populated hill country. The white belfry of a ramshackle church glowed in sunlight. At a touch on the shoulder from Stone, Horace roared off the blacktop and drove toward the rising sun past a nearly dry pond that revealed the metallic hulks of discards half-buried around the shore. They were even more isolated here. Parched fields that simmered even in the early morning were bisected by the dirt road, now not much more than a wagon track. Horace pulled off into a straggly clump of loblolly and the Sheriff looked back at Hero in a thin cloud of smoke, his abused eye smarting. Hero was rigid with disbelief and horror.

“Why ... are we here?”

“Pee break,” Stone said. He tapped Horace on the shoulder again.

Horace got out and opened the back door. When Hero dug in his heels and wouldn’t be moved, Horace exerted a minimum amount of force and removed him from the seat as easily as if Hero were a week-old kitten. Horace was smiling peaceably. Stone looked at Hero with the stem of his pipe clenched between his teeth. Sunlight kicked off the nickeled steel of the service revolver in his shoulder holster.

“I don’t ... have to pee,” Hero said, shaking.

Horace slapped him lightly and smiled again. His ebony club was swinging gently from his other hand.

“You will never ... be able to explain this to the satisfaction of my family,” Hero said to Stone. “They will come. And they will not be ... without influence, even in this ... godforsaken place. You are making a fatal mistake, I assure you.” Hero dropped to his knees. “You will have to drag me. Then you will have to shoot me in the back, because I refuse ... to run. Any worthwhile forensic scientist will know ... that it was nothing but murder, plain murder!”

Hero remained on his knees with his head bowed, listening to warblers in the nearby trees, feeling the heat of the sun. He heard Stone walking slowly around the car, and began to tremble. He smelled the sweetly obnoxious pipe tobacco, and gamier odor of the deputy’s old boots. He looked up without flinching, though his cheeks were wet from tears.

“What is it going to be, Sheriff?”

Stone sighed.

“I thought I’d do both of us a favor. Just get it over with. But, no, hell, you don’t want to cooperate. So I reckon it’s time for you to meet Dr. Dove. Son, I’ll guarantee before it’s all over for you you’ll wish you’d opted for a bullet through the heart.”

Stone moved so swiftly then he was a blur to Hero, but he sensed a kick was coming. He couldn’t throw himself to one side fast enough to avoid it. Stone’s boot caught him in the groin and Hero felt nearly impaled; the agony lasted barely two seconds before he passed out.

The jouncing of the Sheriff's car down another bad road brought Hero back to consciousness. He was lying on the back seat with his knees drawn up; the effort to straighten his legs, just a little, was like dragging a white-hot anchor through his groin. Light through trees and the back window of the sedan struck him glancing blows; it was better with his eyes closed. The lower half of his face felt artificially stiff. He couldn’t open his mouth.
Taped,
he thought groggily. But he was more attentive to each bolt of agony as the squad car jolted along.

Presently they stopped. Stone and his deputy got out and walked away, leaving him alone. Perhaps they’d thought he was still out. It represented a chance, albeit a very small chance, to get away ... but he couldn’t do it. There was too much pain no matter how carefully he tried to move.

He was weeping again, from frustration, when he heard footsteps in gravel again. A back door was opened.

“That him?” a new voice said.

Hero opened his eyes and lifted his head, but he could make out only an indistinct face nearly shrouded in a mustache and beard longer and thicker than his own. The man’s beard was nearly to his waist. His eyes were small as fish eggs, black and with a vaguely oily sheen.

“Why’s he gagged?”

“He bites,” Stone said.

“Take him inside,” the other man said, and abruptly disappeared from the door space.

Horace took the bearded man’s place. Hero bucked in pain as soon as he was touched.

“Reckon his balls still hurtin’,” Horace said, looming over Hero and smiling. “Come on, now, I’ll treat you gentle.”

It surprised Hero that he was true to his word, but still Hero had to walk. Each step redefined his suffering. Horace allowed him to take his time, and Sheriff John Stone was nowhere in sight.

They were parked beside a low concrete-block building with a shingled roof. The walls had once been painted white, but the paint job had faded and peeled in places. It looked like a down-at-heels motel. There were several doors, regularly spaced, some with numbers on them. And all the windows were barred. Hero saw an old rusting ambulance in a field, a clothesline drooping with torn bedsheets. There was a pale face behind a partially lifted shade, staring eyes with no boldness in them. He smelled a sourness in the air, garbage smouldering in a pit, and heard chickens. The gravel drive he crossed with small dragging steps was littered with chickenshit and bottlecaps and discarded cigarette butts.

He was led by the patient Horace into a dank room with bright lights grouped in one corner, over a padded examination table and a rollaway table the top of which was crammed with instrumentation: an EKG machine and a console that resembled a VCR. The smell of garbage was behind him, but now his sensitive nose was treated to the slightly rotten odor of antiseptics. Hero tried to hold back on the threshold, but Horace put pressure on a nerve inside the right elbow.

“Have him lie down,” the bearded man said. He was somewhere out of Hero’s line of vision. “And keep a good grip on him until I’ve prepared the sedative.”

Apparently Horace had turned his hearing aid back on. Hero looked up at the albino, his eyes wide with apprehension, trying to communicate with him. The pink eyes seemed incapable of reflecting emotion. Hero tried to make coherent sounds behind the plaster of tape over his mouth, then began frantically to shake his head. Horace applied a little more pain, and pushed him inexorably toward the padded table.

“I’m Dr. Dove. That doesn’t mean anything to you, I’m sure. But there it is.”

Hero stared at the man with the mountaineer’s beard and long hair done into a ponytail. He had put on a white jacket. Under the jacket he was wearing only a T-shirt, with the notation
I dropped out at Club Med.
He had a syringe in one hand. Horace unsnapped the stained jail jumper Hero had on, exposing a bare flank. He held Hero down.

“I understand,” said Dr. Dove, “that you’re acquainted with ECT. Then you know there’s very little to fear. Most of my patients benefit remarkably from the course of treatment.” He showed Hero the syringe. “This is a fast-acting barbiturate; you’ll soon be asleep. Once you’ve gone to sleep I’ll administer another drug that temporarily paralyzes the major muscle groups, including your diaphragm. Then we can take that tape off your mouth, and a machine will do your breathing for you. That’s the electroconvulsive machine you’re looking at now. It will send a current through your brain for less than one second. When you wake up you’ll probably have a headache, some muscle soreness, and, most likely, you’ll experience a period of confusion. Not at all unpleasant, though. EC therapy also tends to eradicate memory—but nothing we can’t do without, I’m sure.”

Hero felt the prick of the needle even before the doctor had finished speaking. A sensation of ice-cold horror ripped through him like a storm wave.
They were going to steal his mind!
—And all the memories he could do without, including, no doubt, everything he’d seen and heard at Sheriff John Stone’s house the night before.
No, you can’t!
But it was already happening, the wave of horror dwindling into a kind of warm mist he found too comfortable to resist ... but he must, somehow he had to tell them both about Stone: a deaf albino deputy, and someone else Stone apparently owned body and soul, the bearded dropout Dr. Dove. It almost made him laugh as his vision grew a little cloudy, and the pressure of Horace’s hands felt like a good-night caress.

He saw Taryn then, floating out there in the thickening mist, composed and piquant in death, smiling regretfully. Hero had failed her, failed blond Edie, failed all the young girls he now saw laid out in neat burial rows, prepubescent victims of Stone’s ruthless mania.

I won’t close my eyes,
he thought.
All I have to do is stay

awake,

and

The Mt. Pisgah Cemetery

W
ith no apparent transition no desultory period of restless dreaming, he went from images of the dead to vivid apprehension of the mundane: a dog’s hoarse barking, a distant radio playing a country song. He was indoors, not outdoors, and there wasn’t much light in his dark corner of the world. But he saw streaks of pale sun, in barred patterns, along a corridor. He smelled acrid, over-brewed coffee. Water splashed from a metal pail. Mop-sounds. His stomach was empty.

His head hurt.

He was looking at the bars of a cell, but he had no idea of where he was.

The dog continued to bark.

Hero had random impressions of home, mother, university, a tawny-haired German girl who inspired a wistful pang for a long-extinguished romance—then, abruptly, a startling face, clear in the tiniest detail, filled his mind: scared him. It was a bleak, sunbaked Indian face. Obsidian eyes, only a few teeth to enliven the steady grin. Hero shifted his attention to a high Bolivian village. The air was so thin and sharp it was like breathing ground glass.

But I cant be there; I’m somewhere else.

Oh God where?

He couldn’t remember. The dog was quiet now. He listened patiently to the sounds of mopping until he saw someone backing into view, sliding a galvanized bucket behind him on the concrete floor.

“Hello,” Hero said. He moved then, shifting his weight, trying to raise a hand, but it was stuck fast in something; his entire upper body was immobile. He looked down curiously and saw that he was wearing a dirty buckled sort of—
Straitjacket!

“Good mornin’,” said the man with the mop. He paused to wipe his forehead. He was black, with a raised wrinkled scar darker than the rest of his skin diagonally down his forehead . He wore a wrinkled jail jumper and unlaced docksiders. “Man, it’s too hot already, ain’t it? How you be this mornin’?”

“I don’t know,” Hero said. “I can’t—I wonder if you’d be good enough to tell me—where I am?”

“Whoo-whee! Don’t recollect where you is? That be some toot you was on.”

“Toot? I don’t understand—”

“They got you restrained that a’ way on account of the d.t.’s, I reckon.”

“But I—I don’t drink.” Hero was sweating; he felt queasy. “Am I in jail?”

“It ain’t the Ramada Inn, Jack.”

“Well, I—I need to get out of here.”

“Shittt, don’t we all.”

“What time do you have?”