Mad Dog and Englishman: A Mad Dog & Englishman Mystery #1 (Mad Dog & Englishman Series) (22 page)

“Listen, Sheriff. I saw that Lane woman, maybe fifteen, twenty minutes ago. Your crazy brother was over wandering around in the park and howling like he thought he was some kind of werewolf and he caught my attention. Anyway, as he was leaving the park Mrs. Lane was driving by the courthouse in that fancy bronze Volvo of hers. She drove off after Mad Dog and they both turned south down by Bertha’s, though I don’t think Mad Dog knew she was there. Far as I could tell, she was alone in the car.”

“You hear that,” the sheriff told Wynn. “Be on the lookout for a bronze Volvo.”

“Yes sir,” Wynn said, trying to remember what a Volvo looked like and whether that might have been one he’d glimpsed through an alley over on Walnut a few minutes before.

“There’s more,” Mrs. Kraus said. “She ain’t Todd’s daughter like she told you. Doc and Judy found her picture and some records over at the school. Back when she lived here, her name was Sarah Ann Simms. It’s her brothers that have been murdered and her father that was scalped.”

“What!” the sheriff exclaimed.

“Doc says to tell you he’s still making calls, still following up on our Mrs. Lane, but she’s misrepresented herself and there may be reasons to consider her a suspect. He says she could be somebody’s target, too. If we don’t find her, she might be our next deceased Simms.”

“How does this all fit in with the nut who’s got Heather?”

It was beyond Mrs. Kraus. “Look,” she finally said, “I better hang up the phone and see if we don’t maybe get some more information coming in. You want me to call Billy and have him high tail it back to town to help you search?”

“Yeah, Mrs. Kraus. Get him on the road and keep me posted.”

“Roger, Sheriff, will do.” Mrs. Kraus said, neglecting her numerical sign off.

“Sheriff,” Wynn said.

“Yeah?” The sheriff didn’t want to talk to Wynn, or anybody else right now. He just wanted to find his daughter.

“I think I saw something bronze parked down that alley back there.”

Englishman did a u-turn that had the Chevy climbing the sidewalk in front of the old Rexall.

“Which alley?” the sheriff demanded.

The force of the turn and the brief proximity of the Rexall stole Wynn’s breath away. He pointed and the sheriff and 350 cubic inches of American iron wasted no time going to investigate.

***

Heather English fought to come back from wherever it was she had been, an awful nightmare place. Something unnatural had taken possession of her. She was frozen, unable to move, the way you sometimes are in a bad dream, paralyzed while the demon did with you as it wished. This demon had a face and a voice and, as she gradually slipped back into consciousness, was as potentially terrible as the creature that stalked her nightmares. Worse, maybe. Dream demons couldn’t really rape and kill you. Heather Lane’s father could and might.

She forced her eyes open, let herself check to see if the monster was really there or if she was maybe just home, safe in her bed, and it had only been a dream.

What she saw left the question of nightmare or reality unresolved. It looked solid enough. It just wasn’t like anything she’d ever seen. There was a surreal quality to it, like the work of some artist whose head wasn’t on quite straight. It reminded her a little of the
Alien
movies because there were beams and pillars and braces and mechanical devices she couldn’t immediately fathom surrounding her. The curious purpose of the place was made more difficult to discern because it was dimly lit. She was in a long corridor, and though it was lined with windows, not much light came through them. And the nature of that light was equally strange. It was a kind of foggy green, like the color the sky took on sometimes when a bad storm was about to hit. Behind the windows along one side of the corridor, light flashed in a random fashion, sometimes almost bright, sometimes almost invisible, a kind of strobe like effect that increased her sense of dread.

The paralysis seemed to be real. She couldn’t move, at least not enough to look over her shoulder to see what was behind her. Before her was the corridor. It stretched forever. She couldn’t see an end to it. It seemed to just taper off into hazy infinity. That was a scary thought. In a way, it reminded her of when she was a little girl attempting to imagine what it meant to go to heaven and have eternal life. She’d tried to picture it and what she’d come up with was similar to the corridor in the way it stretched beyond her ability to see an end. This was an uglier place, though, more brutally functional, more like hell than heaven.

She couldn’t see anything through the windows. They were thickly covered with dust and grime and looked as if no one had ever cleaned them. She found no hints to help orient her there.

The floor of the corridor appeared to be concrete, as dirty as the windows and with occasional small piles of dirt or rubble or something she couldn’t quite make out in the gloom. The floor was regularly interrupted by circular holes, big enough that she could easily crawl through one if she was foolish enough to want to find out what was down there, assuming she could move.

She had thought she was lying on a table, but on closer observation, she determined that it, like the corridor, was of infinite length. It was softer than a table should be, more like cloth or canvas that was fraying a little along the edges. There was a waviness to it too, where it swayed a little between regular supports.

The light seemed to be getting dimmer, the flashes brighter. Somewhere, far away, she heard a kind of rumbling, like some distant machinery, or like thunder. She didn’t hear Heather Lane’s father. She thought she remembered coming half-awake earlier somewhere very different, somewhere just as confusing, and hearing him talking to her, going on and on about the awful things that had been done to him. She wasn’t sure whether the memory was real or just part of the dream. Whatever, she could neither see nor hear him now. If he was there, with her, he was behind her and he was being still.

She could move a little, she discovered, and in doing so, found why her movements were limited. Her hands and feet were bound with plastic restraints, similar things to the devices that locked around the mouths of garbage bags or held price tags on items in the mall. They would be easy to cut off, she knew, but impossible to break and they only pulled one way—tighter. Not that she was feeling strong enough to test them yet anyway. Her wrists were bound together, and her ankles, and there was another strip of plastic that attached wrists and ankles to each other. She was as effectively trussed as a calf that had been roped and thrown at the rodeo.

She tried swiveling her head again. This time it moved, though not far before the movement induced an awful sense of vertigo that made her moan and, for a moment, think she was going to upchuck all over herself and the table or belt or whatever it was.

The vertigo began to subside and then the belt moved and dizziness swept over her again, not quite so bad this time, but bad enough.

“It’s about time you woke from your nap,” a soft voice said from just behind her. It was real. This was a living hell and her demon was right here. She squeezed her eyes back down tight and wished she could go hide in unconsciousness again. Wishing didn’t make it so.

***

Mary Ellen Chandler sat in the dark and watched as mindless strangers entered her home and brightened it a little with cheerful noises, companionable sounds in a room that rarely received guests other than those televised figures sharing their shallow plots and hollow humor. She watched, but she seldom really saw or heard them anymore.

This was a Sunday so she was wearing her robe and slippers, the same robe and slippers, if she thought about it, that she’d been wearing since Friday. On Mondays she rose and dressed. She wore stockings, jewelry, even makeup. She was always ready when the people from Hospice came, precisely at 9:00 a.m., to troop through the house to the back bedroom where her sister, Linda Lois Chandler de la Jolla, lay perpetually dying—terminally ill, but clinging by gossamer-like threads with the tensile strength of titanium to a life that would not take her back.

Linda was always the same now. No better, no worse. She was little more than a human vegetable, fed and watered intravenously and in need of regular diaper changes. Linda hadn’t talked in weeks, so it was impossible to determine whether she knew what she was doing when she soiled herself. Mary Ellen thought she did, but that she was no longer willing to waste the strength she needed to cling to life on pleasantries like speech or going to a bathroom.

Linda’s consciousness responded to only one thing, now. Her eyes opened and watched when Mary Ellen brought her the morphine. The Hospice people monitored and renewed its gradually increasing dosage on their weekly Monday visits.

The visitors from Hospice were always gone by ten. Within minutes the house was dark and silent again, the TV flickering its false cheer at Mary Ellen—all dressed up and no place to go. On Tuesdays and Wednesdays she never got out of her robe either, but on Thursdays there was a brief reprieve.

There were two Hospice workers who came, a nurse and a volunteer. The nurse was the one who dispensed the morphine on Mondays. The volunteer was the one who dispensed the comfort on Thursdays. Linda appeared to be beyond the volunteer’s aid, but Mary Ellen wasn’t. On Thursday afternoons, the volunteer came and sat with Linda and freed Mary Ellen for a few hours away from a house where the grim reaper had already won, even if the victim had yet to concede. They were glorious hours, but too few, too far between.

Linda might not know she was dead, but Mary Ellen did. Their father’s old shotgun still stood in the hall closet. Mary Ellen had taken it out several times now, checked the barrels and hammers, cleaned it, removed the shells with bird shot and replaced them with the double-ought deer loads. Linda would go easily. She was so very near her destination already. Mary Ellen knew it would be harder for herself, though if she shot her sister she knew she must shoot herself as well. She thought she could do it. Turning the weapon on herself would be awkward, but she was still limber enough to reach the trigger with her foot.

She was the middle of three daughters. The other two had both developed breast cancer. One had been dead for years. The second remained only technically alive. It ran in the family. Their female ancestors had been dying too young for generations. Mary Ellen was equally doomed. She was sure of it. She had a lump in her breast, but having witnessed the torment of surgery and treatment, as well as the futility, she had stopped seeing a doctor herself at the moment of discovery. It was another reason that, more and more, the shotgun seemed a rational alternative.

A weather bulletin was traveling across the bottom of her television screen when the phone rang. Mary Ellen hadn’t been paying attention. Weather was no longer a threat to her. She always answered the phone, though it was never anything other than a salesman or someone soliciting donations for a superfluity of charities. Mary Ellen listened, politely, attentively, encouragingly, though she never bought or gave. Those brief moments when she visited with strangers nearly constituted the extent of her social contacts these days.

“Hello,” Doc Jones said over a line that defied modern technology by sounding terribly remote, even more long distance than it was. “I’m sorry if this is an intrusion, but it’s vitally important that I reach a Ms. Mary Ellen Chandler. This is the last number at which I have her listed and I wonder if you can tell me whether, by some chance, she still lives there, or if not, how I may be able to reach her?”

Not exactly the standard, “Our team of professional carpet cleaners will be in your neighborhood this week and can offer a twenty-percent discount on our deluxe deep-steam and shampoo treatment,” or the smooth pitch of the people who wanted you to believe they were actually police or firemen and that most of your donation wouldn’t go to the profit-making organization behind the request.

“This is Mary Ellen Chandler,” she said. “How may I help you?”

***

For a man who’d been trained to defend himself, even to kill in hand-to-hand combat, the sheriff hadn’t done very well against this 120 pound woman. Apparently, more than twenty years without North Vietnamese and Vietcong soldiers coming out of the jungle trying to kill you was enough to take the edge off. The kick should have been clue enough. He shouldn’t have required a punch to the sternum to remind him that he was supposed to use an arm block he’d once thought his combat instructor had drilled into him as an automatic response he would never lose.

The sheriff collapsed onto the roof looking stunned. Ellen Lane didn’t rip out any razor blades and rush to begin his dissection. She didn’t swoop in for a
coup de grâce
. She just walked by him toward the broken windows and the trapdoor that led back into the Strand. The sheriff rolled and swept her legs out from under her and she went down and this time she was the one who looked stunned.

The sheriff was still having some trouble breathing, but he managed to complete the roll and regain his feet just as she regained hers. He’d put himself between the woman and the exit. She was watching him, gauging him, trying to decide which of them had been lucky so far and whether to try for the trapdoor or try to talk her way out of it. The sheriff must have looked more dangerous than he felt. She tried talking.

“I’m sorry, Sheriff. He was here and you let him get away. Now you’re in my way and I’m in a hurry.”