Sheriff William Beaumont hobbled awkwardly up behind Jenkins and the other deputies. She was studying another map laid out on the hood of a patrol car, and the others were just finishing up checking a south-bound van. Here, the six lanes, three northbound and three southbound, were separated only by a flat grassy median. On the median, rutting around in the short grass, were a couple of dark birds of a species he couldn’t identify in the darkness – they looked like crows or maybe ravens. Or sparrows. Funny how you almost never see birds at night- he guessed black birds against a night sky were almost invisible.
Other than their winged visitors it had been a relatively quiet night, and so far they hadn’t caused a traffic jam, at least not yet. Roadblocks on major highways often caused lots of trouble, and were precautions that were saved until the very last resort in most manhunts. He cleared his throat. “Are we set up?”
The others turned around and assumed a more respectful stance. “Yes, sir,” Deputy Jenkins answered in her nasally voice. “Hollins, Jordan, and four cars are set up here, about ten miles north of here, blocking the three northbound lanes to Washington.” She indicated their position on the map. “We’re here,” she said, pointing again to a location about an inch or two south of the original. “We’re a little spread out to cover all the bases, but we don’t have as many men as I would like.” She seemed lost in her own thoughts for a moment as she looked around at the other deputies, but when she glanced up and saw the look on Beaumont’s face, she added a clipped, “Sir”.
Beaumont chuckled softly and rubbed his face with one hand. “It’s okay, Jenkins. I know how much you want this guy, and believe me, so do the rest of us.” He thought for a moment. “How many do we have here?”
She turned to do a quick head-count, and he noticed again how awkward the bandaged nose looked, bobbing slightly in the moonlight as she counted. “Eleven, sir.”
Beaumont nodded. “Good.” He looked around for a moment and then continued. “He should be here within the next hour if he shows at all tonight. Except for the five of you checking vehicles, I want everyone else in their vehicles, in case he hijacks a car and we have to pursue.”
Jenkins nodded and began directing the others. She and the four officers who had just finished inspecting the van stayed by the lead car, but the others headed off towards their own patrol cars.
Jack was working his way through the trees at the side of the road when he spotted the group of police lights. They spun lazily atop six or seven cruisers, splashing the night, the trees, the shiny black pavement eerily with their bright lights. The red and blue lights seemed thoroughly out of place among the black trees and the darkness of the night sky. The rain had all but stopped, and the scattered moonlight trying to break its way through the thick clouds made the white paint of the police cars glow with an unearthly pale yellow.
As he crept closer, he saw that the cars were positioned in to form a roadblock on the southbound side of the interstate. The three northbound lanes were marked with roadside flares, hissing and spitting their sparks onto the asphalt south of the roadblock. Evidently, they were also stopping the northbound traffic, too – probably to warn those drivers about picking up hitchhikers. As he watched, he saw a southbound van stopped and searched by several of Beaumont’s serious-looking deputies, and they allowed it to pass only after a very thorough going-over.
Oh well, now he was glad he hadn’t tried to steal a car or kidnap someone – the cops were being too careful to let something stupid like that slip through.
As he watched the little knot of patrol cars from the relative safety of a stand of pines just northeast of the roadblock, he saw Sheriff Beaumont climb out of the back of one of the patrol cars, the last one in the line. As Jack watched, he saw Beaumont hobble over to the group of deputies, one leg encased in a large grayish cast. He knew that he had hit him!! Jack thought he had gotten him when Beaumont had fallen, but now he was sure.
Beaumont was obviously having a lot of trouble maneuvering around in his cast, which meant he was at a distinct disadvantage. Good, Jack thought. This was as good a time as any to finish this. He smiled as he worked his way closer, carefully concealing himself behind the stands of trees and bushes until he was directly opposite the police cars.
Sheriff Beaumont turned and started to make his way slowly back to his cruiser.
Deputy Norma Jenkins called after him, and after a few seconds, came up behind him just before he reached his car. “Brown is on the horn again, sir.”
“Thanks, Norma.” He saw that the other deputies were almost to their cars, and then he turned and grimaced as he bent from the hips and reached inside his squad car, pulling out the handset. He held it up to his mouth and thumbed the talk button. “Beaumont here.”
Jack was almost even with Beaumont’s car, well back from the front of the roadblock. He was about forty or fifty feet from the Sheriff, screened by the group of trees he was hiding in and separated by the shoulder, three lanes of blacktop, and the grass median. Beaumont’s squad car was the last in the line of cars.
Jack slowly crouched, one of his knees popping loudly, and set his green duffel bag to the ground, rummaging around in it blindly, feeling. He pulled both revolvers out, one in each hand, and then he flipped then both open to make sure they were both fully loaded, trying to be quiet as he went. Even in the darkness he could easily see the horrible scar on his left palm, and for a moment he wondered why he was doing what he was doing. He remembered the day he’d gotten that scar, and for a moment wondered why his life had taken the direction it had, starting with that bike ride. The scar had started everything…
Jack shrugged and pushed those thoughts from his mind, shouldered his green duffel bag, and stood, waiting for the right moment to begin.
“Brown here, sir. We’ve found his trail. He’s heading a little to the north, but still straight for the highway. Unless I miss my guess, and unless Hanson and the dogs are completely off base on this one, he should be coming out onto the road about a half mile or so north of your location.” Beaumont could hear it in his voice – Jes Brown wasn’t exactly pleased that the plan had worked, but there was a hint of pride in his voice that the Killer was all but captured. Hanson, another deputy under Beaumont, was their best tracker, and in combination with the bloodhounds, “Jasper Fines” had no chance of getting away.
Beaumont smiled. “Good work, son. When he hits the road, he’ll have to go one way or the other, and then we’ll get him.” His mind was already planning what to do next: he should probably call the men at the other roadblock and tell them what was happening, and then he should probably call his wife to let her know that he was okay and check on the baby, and then…
There was a long silence, and Beaumont was beginning to think that Brown had shut off his radio without signing off, maybe not hearing the Sheriff’s last comment. Then: “Well, I certainly hope so, sir.” Jes Brown’s chuckle came over the radio, as clear and ominous as if the big deputy were standing right there on the wet pavement next to Beaumont, the sound so real and so close that it made the little hairs on the back of Beaumont’s neck stand up. “I’m getting real tired of tellin’ all the boys and their dogs to make so much noise. It was starting to give me a headache.”
Beaumont’s stomach tightened, as if he were expecting a punch to the gut. “What?”
“Well”, Brown continued, “we’ve been making a whole lot of noise here, more than we needed to. The guys have really been whooping it up. We’re supposed to be driving him to you, right?”
Beaumont froze in his tracks, the handset suddenly feeling very heavy in his hand. He grimaced as the realization struck him like a bolt of lightning from a cloudless blue sky. “You can’t do that, man, or he’ll know what you’re doing! He’ll figure out you’re driving him and he’ll…”
The first shot caught Beaumont square in the chest, jerking him around rudely and knocking him down behind the open door of his squad car. The other officers spun around at the sudden sound and futility reached for their sidearms, but Jack quickly dropped three of them as he strode up the hill to the roadway. Surprise, utter surprise, was his ally. He marched up the hill, guns firing, and crossed the northbound lanes full of authority, his green duffel slung over his shoulder and forgotten. He looked just like the hero from one of those old westerns, except this hero was dressed in a dusty brown jacket, his boots clinking in the night. This hero had the look of a demon in his eyes.
Other officers dove behind their cars or down the opposite embankment, and those were the ones that survived uninjured. Some of the other deputies tried to return fire, but Jack, buoyed by his good luck, seemed unstoppable, as if the bullets fired at him went wide simply because of his will. After a few short seconds of gunfire, a deep silence descended and seemed to cloak the dark road, broken only by Jack’s solid, echoing footsteps. The dark birds were long gone, scared into the night. Several wounded officers lay on the ground, groaning weakly, barely audible.
Jack slowly walked over to them each in turn and kicked their guns away, squatting to pop the bullets from them, reloading his own guns and pocketing the rest of the bullets.
One of them was a dark-haired woman with a large white bandage covering her nose. She was curled up, grasping one bleeding leg. Jack walked over to her and pointed the gun in her face. Her eyes were wide, her voice trapped in her throat. He smiled, recognizing her from the supermarket alley, and he held the gun in her face for a long, agonizing moment before he suddenly shouted, “BANG!”
She jumped, but he only smiled and turned around, seeming to forget her immediately.
Jack walked slowly, the chains on his boots jingling merrily, over to Beaumont, and stood over him.
He doesn’t look so tough now, Jack thought. Where was his bulletproof vest? Any fool sheriff should know to wear one of those new-fangled things.
Beaumont groaned weakly and moved one arm, tentatively, towards the gaping red hole in his chest. Jack, surprised, stepped back quickly and raised his gun, but he soon saw that the good sheriff was not going to be a threat to anybody any time soon.
Something shiny on the front of Beaumont’s bloodied uniform caught Jack’s eye and he walked back up to the fallen sheriff and stooped casually over him, picking it off. He stood straight and held it up to the sparse moonlight to regard it more carefully. The sheriff’s once-shiny badge was now smeared with blood, and Jack bent again and carefully wiped it clean on Beaumont’s single pant leg before standing and pinning the gold Sheriff’s badge to his own dusty leather jacket.
Jack smiled. The badge, with its five-pointed star, looked good there, like it had always belonged there. LIBERTY POLICE DEPARTMENT, it read in dull gold letters.
He looked back down at Beaumont, just laying there, bleeding.
“Having a bad day, Beaumont?” Jack smiled, the expression reflected in the tone in his voice. “You look like crap.”
One eye eased open and locked onto the fuzzy image. There was a man standing there in front of him, the man from the picture. It was the man, come to kill him. And he wouldn’t be able to do anything about it, except die. Couldn’t help his family, couldn’t help his little boy – everything hurt so much, but still he could think of nothing but his family. The thoughts raced through his mind, the regret and the anger and the silent screams for help. Couldn’t anyone help him, or change this crazy course of events? His focus changed for a moment, and Beaumont saw that just behind the man, crazily, there was a sparrow sitting on the roof of Beaumont’s’ squad car. Beaumont’s clouded, fading mind was racing, thinking about his family and trying to answer distress calls screaming from seemingly everywhere in his ruined body, and at the same time trying to react to this man before him. But through the deafening static of pain and emotion, he saw one more thing before he died that chilled him right down to his soul.
The man standing over him was smiling.
Jack raised the gun once more and pointed its shiny barrel at Beaumont’s eyes. “Say goodnight, Sheriff.” The gunshot echoed loudly, coldly in the still night.
Deputy Jenkins laid absolutely motionless until she heard the Killer climb into the Sheriff’s patrol cruiser, start the car up, and drive slowly away. Jenkins was hit in the leg and had gone down in the first volley of shots. She had been looking in the right direction and had seen Beaumont fall first, toppling over like a clothing store mannequin, except this mannequin was dressed in a police uniform and sporting a full leg cast.
And she had just lain there. She had done nothing as that man had walked over and pretended to shoot her, and she had just lain there as he had walked up and shot Sheriff Beaumont point blank in the face.
Something moved in her stomach, an angry roiling of acids. A coiled serpent, a restless entity made up of guilt and pain and anger, began to writhe in her stomach.
Norma crawled painfully over to Beaumont, lying by himself in the middle of the road, his car now gone. He lay motionless, face up, his eye wide and blank and pointless. She saw that a quickly spreading pool of what looked like rainwater surrounded his head, but as she got closer, she saw that the pool was too dark to be water. She tried to lift his head with her hands, praying for some sign of life in his vacant eyes, but she suddenly realized that not all of his head was there and then she knew he was dead, as surely as she knew that her name was Norma Jenkins and that she lived at 433 Kraven Road and that she had been one of Beaumont’s deputies for over three years.
It was at that moment that she realized how much she had loved him, admired him, respected him, almost like a father. The newly born snake twisted in her gut and painfully moved again, as it would for many years to come.
She glanced up at the road heading south and could just barely make out the retreating twin taillights of the patrol car, piercing through the night and gloom like a pair of red eyes, eyes of a demon reflected in the damp surface of the road, gleaming at her, mocking her and her pitiful, useless anguish.
Off to one side of the road, the small clutch of dark birds watched the car drive into the darkness. They turned and flapped into the night sky, following the twin red lights into the dark.
Deputy Norma Jenkins, sitting in the middle of that dark highway and cradling the head of her fallen hero, quietly began to cry.
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