The memories of the past four weeks washed over him like a comfortable wave, warm and enveloping, rocking him into a gentle slumber. Yet even as he slept lightly, some small part of his mind was still awake, listening for the dogs.
Jack had chosen the little town of Liberty, Virginia at random, as he did each town in turn, getting the approximate location from a map bought at an Exxon station while hitching through northern Pennsylvania three weeks earlier. When he had first arrived in Liberty, it had looked like a harmless, simple town, something like a modern day Mayberry; he had half-expected to see Andy and Barney come strolling down the street on their way to that Diner they always went to. The town consisted of three dozen thin, crisscrossing streets with rustic, small-town names like ‘Oak’ and ‘Maple’ and ‘Dale’. There was a smallish downtown section with a cluster of quaint businesses and offices around a grassy town square, three or four stoplights, and one McDonalds, the lone sign of ‘modern’ encroachment. Didn’t these people know that it was 1978? This place looked like it was still trapped somewhere back in the early sixties, as if the town had somehow ignored the past 20 years.
Jack had drifted quietly into town, and then, after a few days, he began looking, watching, waiting. But he grew less patient with each passing hour.
Most of the time, it took the local authorities a while to figure out something was going on, and by the time they did, he had already satisfied his urges and left, moving on to some other small town. A body or two, or even a couple of mysterious disappearances, usually announced pretty loudly even to the hick police of these towns that something was wrong. But the police in these little towns were so used to dealing with the simple, petty crimes, like theft and wife beating and such, that when a real case came along, it usually took them a couple of weeks to even realize it was happening. Longer still to grasp its importance or to start piecing together the clues. It wasn’t too hard to understand, when most of the ‘authorities’ in these towns that were charged with public ‘safety’ were far too stupid to grasp much of anything.
And Jack, of course, never made it too easy or too obvious for them. He liked what he did. He did it because he needed to do it, wanted to do it, and he planned to continue doing it for as long as he could.
But this Beaumont had thrown one serious wrench into Jack’s plans. After the first disappearance, the sheriff had immediately dropped everything else and began doggedly working to find some explanation behind the disappearance. When the missing boy, thirteen, was found dumped behind a tool shed on the south end of town, his throat cut, Beaumont had evidently mobilized his deputies, directing them to question any new people in town. Jack had heard the cops were asking around for new faces, and he had given the name “Jasper Fines” to anyone in town that had gotten curious enough to ask him; that lie, like so many others, had come naturally to his lips.
When the second person disappeared a few days later, a thirty-eight year old city council member, a family man and respected member of the local business community, the citizens of Liberty had grown very vocal and demanded that Beaumont spare no time or expense in hunting for “The Killer,” as he was now called. When the councilman’s body was found several days later, dumped in a shallow drainage ditch near the town’s water treatment station, the town had practically gone crazy.
Jack knew he should have left then, but he wanted to take one more before he left. Maybe it was pride, or something else, but he wanted to prove to himself and the Sheriff the he could kill when and where he wanted, and not get caught.
He packed up his few things and left the little hotel he’d stayed in, drifting around town, searching, but no one was out. Jack should have left then. He should’ve buried the bodies, or thrown them in a lake or a river to delay their discovery. But he had only been at this for a couple years and his ego got the better of his experience.
After the man’s body had been found, things starting happening very quickly. Beaumont had ordered a dusk to dawn curfew. People were instructed to come out at night only when it was absolutely necessary. Sheriff Beaumont wrote columns in the paper, promising to bring a speedy end to the worst violence that his town had ever known. He wrote with conviction, convincing the people in his town that if they followed his instructions to the letter, he would be successful in catching whoever was killing in their once-peaceful town.
Two nights later, a very tired and hungry Jack Terrington had staked out the parking lot of a supermarket, looking. The town was shut down tight, but he reasoned that people would need food. Of course, he had no idea it was a setup. He watched for an hour or so before making his move, choosing a short female as she came out of the supermarket. He had concealed himself on one side of the building, in the shadows, but as she walked by, he had moved out of the shadows towards her. Looking around and seeing no one watching, he’d grabbed her roughly and pulled her down behind a metallic trash dumpster. One of the trashcan lids had slid off and clanged loudly to the pavement, and the sudden stink of old food and grease had erupted around him.
But from the moment he had grabbed her, he had known something was wrong. The woman’s clothes felt strangely layered, too thick for what a normal person would wear, even if it was April and rain was in the air. He had thrown her down behind the dumpster and straddled her, starting to unbuckle his pants, but she was much stronger than she had first appeared, and she pushed him off.
As she did, she groped into her ratty jacket and pulled out a gun. Amused, he’d struck out savagely and slapped it from her hand, but by then he could hear the metallic clatter of approaching footsteps, running.
He pulled back and punched her hard, dead in the face. He felt her nose shatter under the blow, blood starting to stream down her face. Jack leapt up from the deep shadows behind the dumpster, glanced out of the entrance to the alley and saw several men running towards him, including the now too-familiar face of Sheriff William T. Beaumont. They were coming from every direction, managing to cut off all of his escape routes.
Except one.
Jack ducked around the corner of the building to the brightly lit front of the Food Town supermarket and dashed through the automatic doors, upsetting a woman’s cart of groceries as he went by. Diving around the checkout counters and surprising several other plain-clothes police officers, employees, and shoppers, he ducked around a display of canned peas and headed for the back of the supermarket. Jack knew that almost all supermarkets had loading doors of some sort in the back for deliveries, but he just prayed that Beaumont wasn’t so smart this time. A few moments later, Jack found the doors marked EMPLOYEES ONLY in the frozen food section and dove through them.
Beaumont and the others burst into the store, ordering all of the civilians outside. As the frightened decoys and employees streamed out, the deputies fanned out and each of them took a row, slowly searching, guns drawn. Most of the young cops were very scared and angry; one of their own had been hurt outside, and now she was with them, refusing Beaumont’s’ orders to go to the hospital and have her nose and face looked at. They each searched their rows carefully, but each came up empty. In a few short, silent minutes they met at the back of the store and Beaumont saw the two heavy metal doors, still swinging slightly. He stopped his deputies with his outstretched arms.
He glanced around and motioned to three of the deputies. “You, you, and you. Go outside and around back. Secure any outside doors, and DON’T let him past you.”
The three deputies scurried off.
Beaumont and the rest of his deputies, including the female deputy that Jack had punched in the face, slowly made their way into the storage area of the supermarket, guns drawn. It was a vast, dark area, much darker than the public part of the market, and it seemed the entire space was crammed to capacity with hundreds of ominous stacks of large cardboard boxes. A thousand places to hide, a thousand shadows to watch out for. The deputies fanned out again and searched the storeroom, this time even more warily, moving slowly towards the large loading doors in the rear. The doors were standing wide open, and the other three deputies waited on the raised concrete platform outside, their breath steaming in the cold night air.
Nothing.
Beaumont was not pleased, not at all. He stepped out through the back doors onto the raised concrete platform, striped with yellow and black paint to help the drivers back their huge trucks up to the rear of the supermarket.
“Are you sure nobody went out past you?” he turned, asking one of the three deputies. The other two deputies just looked down at the pavement, suddenly finding the concrete and weeds around their boots very interesting. Neither of them had ever seen Beaumont this angry before, and it scared them a little.
The deputy Beaumont had addressed swallowed hard. “Very sure, sir. Nobody came out of there.”
Beaumont looked around for a moment and then looked past the nervous deputies, seemingly almost through them, and then stepped quickly towards them. One of the deputies flinched as he stepped out of the Sheriff’s way.
Beaumont pointed off of the concrete platform in the direction behind the deputies. “Maybe he got out before you guys got around here. If he did…” His voice trailed off as he looked out at a small group of cookie-cutter houses behind the supermarket, separated from the loading area at the back of the supermarket by a wide stretch of grass and scrub, rain-soaked and muddy. The sheriff was completely unaware that he was standing ankle-deep in a good-sized puddle of rain water that had pooled on the concrete.
He turned to his deputies. “Two of you, stay here. The rest, come on!” He leapt down from the raised concrete platform and took off at a dead run, and the deputies hurried to catch up, chasing their Sheriff across the soggy field.
Jack waited another two or three long, tense minutes after he had heard the sheriff order his men away from the loading doors, and then he slowly crawled out of the large cardboard box he had been hiding in. His legs had cramped up pretty badly from the odd position he had been in, and as he climbed out, he fell, catching himself but at the same time accidentally jostling a carton of canned pineapples. The carton tipped over and fell loudly to the concrete, spilling its contents, and cans of fruit rolled off down the aisle and hit boxes and cartons. He froze in his tracks for several seconds, but when he didn’t hear any noises or the sounds of someone coming to investigate, he carefully stepped over the scattered cans and moved a few steps to a place where he could see outside.
The two deputies stood just outside the loading doors on the raised platform, guns drawn, one on either side of the doors. They were looking out across the field, in what had to be the direction of the other deputies. He knew that the loading doors were his only way out, just as sure of that as he could be of anything. If he stepped one foot out into the civilian part of the supermarket, he’d be seen. If he was stupid enough to try and walk right out the front doors, he’d probably be mobbed by civilians and beaten to death.
The sheriff and his other deputies had headed off across the field – he had heard at least that much. Maybe, just maybe, he could…
He went back and picked up one of the cans of pineapples and, trying to judge distances in the darkness of the storage area, carefully heaved it across the room, listening to it make a loud sound as it clattered against a stack of cases of sodas stacked on the far side of the room near the loading doors.
One of the deputies turned his head and peeked inside the doors, listening intently for a few seconds. After he heard nothing more, he turned back to his partner. “What do you think that was?”
The other blinked. “I dunno. Probably nothing.”
Jack gritted his teeth, felt around for another can, and heaved it in the same direction.
The second cop heard it this time and looked at the first, nodding his head. “Go check it out.”
The first deputy, his face suddenly serious, cocked his revolver and headed in. He slowly, carefully checked each of the aisles of the storeroom, but saw nothing. As he was turning to leave, something odd caught his eye.
Cans. Lots of cans of something, some kind of fruit by the way the label looked. Had those been there before?
Jack crept slowly up behind the deputy, another can held high over his head. He brought the can down hard and struck the deputy in the back of the head with one of the can’s metal edges. The deputy crumpled to the ground, his gun clattering loudly to the concrete.
“Winslade?” The other deputy glanced inside, trying to see his partner. “Winslade, what was that?”
Jack grabbed for the gun and crouched behind a case of root beer, watching the deputy enter, approaching. He glanced over at the other fallen deputy, and even in the relative darkness he could see a spreading stain of red already beginning to paint the concrete floor around his head. Had the light been any brighter, an observer might have seen a distinct glint in Jack’s eyes, or detected the faint smile on his face.
Beaumont turned sharply as he heard the second ‘POP’, echoing loudly across the wide, soggy field.
Deputy Norma Jenkins, her face still bloodied and her nose rudely plugged with odd bits of tissue, had also heard it. “What was that?” she asked Beaumont, her heart pounding in her chest like an animal wanting to get out. She knew exactly what the sound had been, but she couldn’t force her mind to think about it. Jasper Fines had hit her, and she had gotten a very good look at him. Maybe too good of a look – now, it seemed, she just couldn’t get his face out of her mind.
Beaumont’s face seemed to flicker, like a TV changing channels. His expression shifted quickly from one of hopefulness through surprise to one of anger. And fear.
“Those were gunshots. Back at the Food Town. Round up the men.” Before he even got the last words out, he took off sprinting across the field, but a voice in his head told him that it wouldn’t really matter. No matter how fast he ran, it wouldn’t be fast enough.
Deputy Norma Jenkins watched him go, and then yelled for the others.
Jack grabbed the second revolver from the hand of the other fallen deputy and dove out of the loading doors, jumping off the concrete ramp and running at full speed across the field, away from the sheriff and his deputies. He knew he had only seconds to get to cover. An eighth of a mile, maybe, and he would be in another residential neighborhood next to the supermarket. He could even see lights in several of the windows. Jack had a hunch, or maybe it was some kind of dark instinct, that told him that all or most of the Liberty Police Department was in this field right now with him, and if he could make it away, he would be home free. He just hoped that the gunshots hadn’t been heard.
As he ran back towards the supermarket, Beaumont saw a darkened figure bolt out of the loading doors and race off towards a different subdivision of cookie-cutter houses, dashing for freedom.
It had to be him. Even at this distance, he knew it had to be him.
“Stop where you are!” Beaumont shouted, but the figure ignored him.
Beaumont leveled his gun and fired once, twice. Even though he was running at top speed, he saw the shots bring up sprays of water and mud on either side of the fleeing figure.
Jack stopped in his tracks and turned in Beaumont’s direction and Beaumont clearly saw the glints of moonlight off of the twin barrels of the revolvers in the Killer’s hands. Beaumont suddenly knew that his deputies were dead.
The Killer raised the guns and pointed, firing four quick shots, twice from each gun, alternating. The first three went wide and useless, but the fourth struck Beaumont squarely in one uniformed leg just above the knee, taking him down.
Jack smiled for a moment as he saw the sheriff crumple and fall to the muddy ground, and then he turned and ran.
But that had been a week ago, a long week of desperate hiding, of sweat-soaked shivering nights, holed up in drafty barns and sheds. Chased by Beaumont and his deputies and their mangy, stupid dogs…
Dogs. Braying, howling.
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