Jack bolted upright, dazed for a moment before realizing what he had done. Cursing himself, he was amazed that he could doze off in the middle of a something like this. It was so nauseatingly quaint, being chased though the backwoods by packs of dogs and armed deputies, and here he was, lying on the wet ground, waiting for them to come and find him. Or maybe he was waiting for some unseen director hiding behind one of these dark trees to step out and yell “CUT!”
He jumped to his feet, grabbed his green duffel bag and raced out of the clearing, heading east towards the highway.
But the dogs were not close yet, not nearly as close at he’d initially thought, and making a lot of noise, almost too much noise. But why would they be making that much noise? You would think that their handlers would be as quiet as possible, to try and sneak up on him and catch him. If they hadn’t been making so much noise, they probably would have caught him, back there in that clearing. Jack wondered why they were being so loud…
He wasn’t being chased; he was being driven. Up ahead somewhere, probably where the Interstate and Highway 132 met up, Sheriff Beaumont was waiting for him, probably with a really big gun, waiting to blow Jack’s head off.
Jack smiled, knowing now that he could get out of this one. He just had to keep his cool, keep his head about him, keep on thinking straight and not get stupid. He knew there was the big interstate highway out east of town, running north and south. He also knew that he was traveling parallel to Highway 132. If he could make it to the Interstate and get past Beaumont and his men, he could catch a ride with a trucker or somebody and be on his way out of this godforsaken place.
Liberty. The name of this stupid little town was embedded in his memory, feeling like it had been somehow branded onto the convoluted surface of his brain. He wondered if he would ever forget this place. Or this Sheriff.
Jack rounded another thick group of trees and saw that the ground sloped roughly up to a roadside, water running slowly down it in a hundred little rivulets. It looked wide and flat, at least six or eight lanes – it had to be the Interstate.
As he cautiously approached, a car passed, the sound loud and hollow and dead in the rainy night. He could hear the sounds of water being splashed up by the passing tires. He dared not stop a car – it was far too easy to mistake a police car for a regular one. Besides, he was looking for a truck to stop. Truckers were less likely to be concerned about the local authorities and their problems, especially truckers that made their money by taking the long hauls in the shortest amount of time. Like Jack, they were just passing through, moving on. Never looking back.
After the car passed, he slowly climbed up the embankment. It had to be the Interstate – here, the road was a six-lane, three lanes in each direction stretching off both ways into the gloomy darkness, separated only by an uneven patch of grass and gravel. Up further north, about a half mile by his best guess, the Interstate would cross Highway 132, and even further north, nearer to D.C., the highway stretched out to four and even, at times, five lanes wide, but that much pavement would have been useless here.
He crested the top of the hill and began crossing the highway. Jack was about ten steps out onto the road when red and blue lights splashed the trees around him. Looking to his left, he saw a police car round the curve about a mile to the north, speeding toward him.
And it was coming very fast.
Jack hesitated for a moment, but it felt like an eternity. Jump back over the embankment he had climbed up, or try to make it to the other side before the cop car got here? The embankment was so steep; he could be really hurt jumping off of there. Funny if he rolled all the way to the bottom and broke a leg or something.
Instead he ran, sprinting across the wet road, his boots slapping at the rainy surface as the car sped closer. They sounded so loud, the chains now jingling crazily. He felt twenty feet tall in the approaching headlights.
Jack Terrington had just reached the grassy median and started across it when his foot caught on some uneven asphalt in the median, sending him sprawling. His bag went flying and he landed with a hard ‘thump’ on the muddy grass of the median. The wind was knocked from his body, and he lay gasping for air, the rain spattering to the ground around him.
He started to get up, but instead he lifted his head up and saw the police car racing toward him and he stayed down, staying glued to the ground, willing the cops to ignore the dark shape he made on the median. The car came closer and he buried his face in the mud, ignoring the disgusting squishing sound, and laid as flat as he could.
The police car, its lights flashing and spinning lazily, raced past him, and did not stop, or even slow. He couldn’t see it but he heard its passage, and when it was gone, he looked up, seeing the twin red taillights as they disappeared into the distance.
Luck, again. He would’ve never made it across the road without being spotted, even as heavy as this rain was coming down. A lucky fall, sending him into this shallow depression, had shielded him from discovery. Just like his luck at realizing that he was being driven instead of chased – tonight he was getting very lucky.
He stood slowly and wiped mud and water from his face and clothes. He retrieved his duffel bag and headed across the northbound lanes of traffic, reaching the far side of the road without any more problems and, scrambling down the opposite embankment and back into the woods, he turned south. His mind was made up now – he could head north and get away from all of this trouble, but he had to end it all, here, tonight. The Sheriff needed to pay or he would hound him forever, sending out APB’s and manhunts and announcing Jack’s presence to the entire world. And Jack wanted to stay unknown for a long, long time.
Jack skirted the tree line that edged the highway, working his way south, following the patrol car. Chances were pretty good it was headed for a roadblock of some sort, and hopefully, the Sheriff would be there, waiting for him. The dogs had been making a lot of noise, driving him east, and if Jack hadn’t taken that slight northern detour, he would’ve come out on the Interstate a little ways south of here. That’s where Beaumont had to be – Jack knew it – but it surprised him that Beaumont hadn’t planned his trap better. Jack had thought Beaumont was smarter than that.
Beaumont sat in the back seat of his police cruiser, thinking. He was also playing his flashlight over the map of Liberty and the surrounding area that was spread out across his lap, but his mind was a million miles away. Actually, his mind was only about twenty miles away. He was thinking about his young wife and the little child slowly growing inside her.
She was so beautiful, basking in that glow that some pregnant women seem to enjoy, and his joy at the baby’s impending arrival was rivaled only by his pride in his wife – the pregnancy had been an unexpected, and long overdue, surprise. Grace Beaumont was not supposed to be able to have children.
The doctors had not been so overjoyed, though, saying that she was not as strong as they wanted and that the delivery, sometime in September, would probably be difficult for her. Very difficult. They said that she needed to be careful over the next few months.
Beaumont had been a lucky man, meeting her and convincing her to marry him, despite the fact that she had hated his job and hated the idea of being a policeman’s wife. But she had gotten past all of that in the five years since they had been wed, and now it looked like their life had taken a definite turn for the better. It was amazing how a baby can change one’s opinions about life.
But Beaumont still found it difficult to think about having a happy, healthy life with this madman out here, running around loose. How could they be thinking about bringing a baby into this world when there were so many sickos out there, so many people who would kill for no reason? Over the past few weeks, he had begun to seriously doubt the intelligence of bringing a new baby into the world. What kind of a world was this, anyway?
Of course, he hadn’t told Grace that. She was happy about the baby, very happy. They had gone to get the appropriate tests done, of course, and when the doctors had informed them only a couple of days ago that they would be having a boy, he and Grace had decided on the name of David Jonathan, somewhat of an homage to ancestors on both sides of their families. He had seen the nervousness in her eyes, though, when they had settled on a name; she knew of the dangers of her pregnancy, the doctors with their cautionary words about how her anatomy would make a natural birth extremely painful and dangerous, and somehow giving the baby a name had made the fear more clear, more defined.
But even knowing that he would be a father soon, even knowing that he would have a boy to throw around the pigskin with, even that knowledge couldn’t help him shake the notion that it was a bad idea, a very bad idea, to be having a baby, especially now. What if he couldn’t stop the Killer? What if Beaumont’s boy had to be born into a world that was populated with such sick people? Could his boy David ever adjust to such a topsy-turvy world?
When Grace had first told him that she was pregnant, he had been overjoyed. He had had visions of them as a happy little family, happy to be living in a small town, a town that up until a few weeks ago had been a safe, secure place to raise a family. But ever since Jasper Fines had come into their lives, Beaumont had been thinking more and more about his family, about their safety.
Sometimes he wondered (although only to himself – never in front of his men) if they would ever catch this guy. This guy was crafty, resourceful, smart; three dangerous attributes in any criminal. Beaumont hoped they would catch him, and soon. He had to catch this guy, if only to protect his wife and their son. He could never let anything like that happen to one of them.
Not like what had happened to that little boy.
Beaumont had been there. He had seen the dead little boy, his arms sprawled out like he was trying to hug the ground, trying to find something or someone in that dark field to help him. Beaumont he seen what this “Jasper Fines” character had done to that little boy, things that were beyond words, beyond understanding. And last night, Beaumont had had a horrible, gut-wrenching dream – a dream where Beaumont was wandering though that same dark field and he had been the one that found the body of the little boy, tossed behind a rickety tool shed, and one of the boy’s toes…
But this time, in the dream, Beaumont had reached down and turned the body over, and it had been the face of his son. The eyes were glazed over and dead, but as Beaumont had watched with growing horror, his dead son’s hand had drifted up from the soggy ground and pointed a dirty finger up at him. It didn’t matter that Beaumont hadn’t seen his own sons’ face yet; he knew that it was his son. And his unborn son was blaming him for everything that had gone wrong in Liberty.
Beaumont had been pushing himself hard for weeks, too hard, and he was running out of energy. He was tired, very tired, from too much work and too little sleep, and last nights dream hadn’t helped. His leg hurt like hell, but Beaumont knew that this whole thing had to end, tonight. One way or another. He knew that he could chase this monster out of his town, if luck and careful planning was on Beaumont’s side.
Beaumont looked back down at his map, tearing his thoughts away from his family. Highway 95 ran north to D.C. and south to Richmond, and he had roadblocks set up ten miles apart, five miles north and south of the junction with Highway 132. If Beaumont knew anything about criminals, he knew that he would probably try to hitch a ride, and then they could catch the guy.
The guy. They didn’t even know this joker’s name, for Christ’s sake! He, The Killer, had given his name as “Jasper Fines”, but that obviously been an alias. A quick call to the state police had confirmed that. Most sheriffs’ offices didn’t rely on the state cops for much help, but Beaumont had found them indispensable on many occasions, including this one.
Two of his citizens butchered like cattle. A city councilman, found naked and bloody, thrown into a ditch like garbage. Two of his deputies in the hospital, one with a fractured skull and a broken nose, the other one shot twice. The doctors had told Beaumont that both of his deputies were very lucky to be alive.
Himself, he was laid up in the back seat of his cruiser with a bum leg, encased in a pale gray leg cast that felt very heavy and looked incredibly big. It felt like a tree trunk. And not even a real name to hang it all on! Norma Jenkins, the female decoy at the supermarket, had given a fairly accurate description of the guy to their sketch artist, but that was all they had to go on. Copies of the sketch now adorned every signpost and telephone pole in Liberty, but so far it had turned up no new leads. “Jasper Fines” had been written at the top of each poster, but if this guy had doubled back to the west or kept heading east when he reached the road instead of hitching north or south, they’d never catch him, and then…
No, that wasn’t the way to think. Even if Beaumont lost him, at least the monster would be gone, and his little town could go back to being normal. Bake sales, teenage pregnancies, and the occasional theft. This plan, to drive him out of the woods and into the roadblocks, it had to work. And then they would catch him and arrest him, and Beaumont could drive home and take his wife into his arms and gingerly rest his hand on her growing stomach.
Deputy Jenkins leaned her head in, the white bandage across her broken nose looking large in the pale moonlight. The rain had slowed and it looked like the clouds had started to break up, the rain was slowly being replaced by a thin glow of moonlight reflecting off the puddles on the pavement. “Brown’s calling in again, sir.” Her voice was odd, clipped, and the tone reminded Beaumont of the sound of someone with a really bad head cold or a sinus infection.
“Good.” He awkwardly folded the map and painfully adjusted his leg to reach over the front seat and grab the radio handset.
“Brown? What have you got for me, son?” His voice sounded hopeful and almost upbeat. Almost.
A voice crackled back over the receiver, tinny and distant but still very familiar. “Nothing here yet, sir. We crossed the creek and picked up another trail, but it turned out to be nothing. We’re back at the creek, trying again.”
Beaumont thought about it for a few seconds. “Forget the creek. Fan your men out in a north-south line and head in this direction. That’ll drive him to us, if he’s in front of you at all.”
“Roger that, sir.” Brown replied. “Whatever you say. Are you all set up?”
Beaumont smiled. He knew that Deputy Brown didn’t like this plan very much, but Brown would just have to deal with it. “Yeah, half the cars are here, and half are on the highway ten miles north of here up past 132, blocking the three north-bound lanes. We’re checking all the cars and trucks, so if he thumbs a ride, we’ll get him.” He didn’t like feeling like he was justifying himself or his plan to anybody, but Jes Brown was a pretty good deputy, even if he was headstrong and cocky. A few more years of supervision and the big man might turn out to be a pretty decent cop.
He signed off and painfully climbed out of the back of his cruiser, trying to not bang the gray cast into anything. The cast was supposed to help the healing process, but he was having a lot of trouble imagining five more weeks of hobbling around like a toddler. It had only proved to him that being injured on the job was much less glamorous than he had previously imagined. It felt like he was dragging a telephone pole around all the time.
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