Mad Dog and Englishman: A Mad Dog & Englishman Mystery #1 (Mad Dog & Englishman Series) (26 page)

“Hi,” he said, finally recognizing the girl who’d been brought to the courthouse on a stretcher. “Are you all right? Do you need a ride?”

“Do I,” she agreed fervently as she scrambled in the passenger side door. “You’re a life saver.”

“What on earth are you doing out here?” he asked. The car rocked with another blast of wind and reverberated with the echo of the sand blasting it was receiving. Bowen could see only a few yards ahead of his front bumper. “Does your mother know where you are?”

“She’s such a dweeb!” the girl said. “She’s the one who stuck me out here.”

Neil Bowen had visions of getting involved in a child abuse case. Just what he needed to top off a day in which he’d already spent too much of his time in the company of law enforcement officers. “What, she dropped you off out here in the middle of nowhere?”

“Like practically,” the girl replied as they began easing along the road again, headed west toward that hypothetical strip of macadam. “She’s been acting so weird. I mean like totally flipped out. She took me to this deserted farm and told me to climb up this ladder at the back of an old barn and wait for her in a silo. Of all the crazy things! She said it was a safe place and she’d come back for me. That was before the storm was so near so I went back where she said. The ladder was like all flimsy, you know, but that’s what she’d told me I should do. I climbed up there and got clear to the top and there wasn’t anything inside, just this big empty hole with no way in and no way out and, like what was I supposed to do? Wait up there for the ladder to give out? I came back down and hung around the barn for a while, then I went up and knocked at the door to the house but there wasn’t anybody home and the storm was starting to look pretty bad. I thought maybe I could walk to another farm or find a ride into Buffalo Springs. I have friends at the Sheriff’s Office. Could you take me there?”

If Neil Bowen could, he would. He wondered, though, how Wynn or whoever happened to be at the courthouse would feel about their former black murder suspect bringing in this unescorted teenage White girl. Freedom might have been won, he mused, but some hardships remained.

***

Mad Dog was in his speedos and body paint again. He had given a lot of thought to the metaphysics of the thing and had begun to realize that costume and location were not necessary, other than for helping him achieve the right state of mind to do what he had to do. He was enough of a neophyte, he decided, that the props, though irrelevant, helped him focus his powers on the forces he planned to summon and manipulate. It was kind of like golf. No grown man in his right mind would wear knickers and knee socks out where other folks could see him unless he was walking onto a golf course. The clothes didn’t make him shoot a better game, unless they helped him feel like one of the pros on TV. In the same way that a golfing costume might lead to a near par round, Mad Dog’s war paint helped put him in the mood to impose his will on the evil he’d inadvertently summoned.

He didn’t go for quite the same patterns this time, though. There was a tube of glow-in-the-dark opalescent blue in the pack. It felt right to him. On the basic black that covered his body he streaked lightning bolts down arms and legs and, for a reason he couldn’t explain, drew finger wide, horizontal stripes across his ribs. Black didn’t seem right for his hands and his head, except around his eyes and mouth and over most of his nose. For the rest, he used the florescent blue. As storm-induced, premature darkness settled over Buffalo Springs and the place Mad Dog had chosen to confront the forces of malevolence, his body disappeared and became one with the night. Only a pair of apparently detached hands and a glowing skull linked by lightning streaks of sex-shop body paint remained. He finished by tying the leather thong around his temple and inserting the eagle feather. He was ready. Mad Dog watched the flickering horizon and began to chant, words as unnecessary as the paint, but words that helped his mind concentrate on its task.

“
Maheo
, I ask your blessing. Spirits of the four directions, I ask your blessing. Spirits of the sky world, I ask your blessing. Spirits of the underworld, I ask your blessing. Spirits of the surface world, I ask your blessing. Spirits who bless me, help me put things back in harmony. Spirits of evil, I summon you. Spirits of evil, you must go back where you came from. Hear me, I, and the spirits who bless me, we command you.”

He went on like that for a long time, sitting in the lotus position on the old rug he’d spread, earlier in the day, on the grass of the Veteran’s Memorial Park. Now, he sat as close to the upper world as he could, on a flat white roof not far from a metal tower on which a blinking red light stood to alert air traffic to the existence of a monumental cliff of white concrete. He could feel them coming. He could feel that ancient, terrible evil drawing nearer, just as the storm also drew nearer and the heavens flashed and roared and opened.

The rain soaked him and the wind buffeted him. There was something about the awesome power of the storm that was gratifying, a physical manifestation of all the metaphysical forces on which he called. But there was something troubling about it too. His body might only be painted with lightning bolts, but the sky was filled with them. Jagged flashes of raw energy split the heavens and crashed into trees and roofs and fields below. Below, that was the key here. Lightning sought the easiest path from sky to ground, or vice versa, and the shortest path was where he sat, on the roof of the head house of the Buffalo Springs Co-operative Grain Elevator, more than forty feet above the highest tree or building nearby. Considering that made it harder to concentrate on being a shaman. Surely, though, he could control the lightning just as he could control the evil. Metaphysically speaking, he was convinced of it. But somewhere inside was the little boy who’d marveled at the split and burned tree trunks he’d seen result from such storms, and the scattered bodies of the animals—marked with eerie fern-like, arborescent discolorations—lying where they had gone to seek shelter under the branches. Doubt is the enemy, he told himself, and tried not to think about that. Then the world flamed and a white light engulfed the pole and the flashing beacon and something picked Mad Dog up and flung him backwards until there was no longer a roof under him and he began to fall.

***

“I knew you’d come,” he said. “I thought about meeting you at the belt elevator, but I knew you’d have to come to me, wherever I was.”

Heather could hardly hear him over the roar of the storm, and she couldn’t turn her head far enough to see who he was talking to. At first she thought it was just more gibberish aimed at her, but this time another voice answered. It spoke in a higher register, a feminine voice, but not a soft one.

“You were right,” she said, “but you were wrong, too.”

The voice sounded familiar, but Heather wasn’t certain. He’d moved closer to her just before the woman arrived and there was a long sharp blade in his hand near her throat, something home-made with razor blades bound to a steel shaft. It curbed her curiosity and persuaded her not to ask who was there, but to wait and listen instead.

“I knew you’d come because you had to. I’m a threat to the only thing you love more than yourself…or you think I am.” To Heather it sounded like a variation on the things he’d been telling her since she first started to regain consciousness. It was like he wasn’t listening to what this woman was saying to him any more than he’d listened to her. Like he’d played this scene out in his mind so many times that he knew it by heart. He knew everyone’s lines and it didn’t matter if someone else got theirs wrong. He simply carried on.

“I used to think we were allies against them, that if we just circled our wagons the Indians couldn’t hurt us. They still could, of course, and they did, but we found each other and helped each other heal. Or so I thought until Daddy found Mickey. Even then, I thought you were trying to take Mickey away from him so you could give him back to me, but you threw Mickey and Daddy couldn’t quite reach and then you tripped him and he fell down.

“Still, I was willing to forgive you and love you because that stopped our Indians and we’d both suffered so very much, but then our daughter came along. That’s when I found out I wasn’t your partner. I couldn’t believe it. You thought I was like them, like our Indians. You shut me out, and then you had me locked up like an animal.”

“You are an animal. It was you who tripped your father, not me, and worse, I know what you did to our little girl.” Heather recognized the voice now. It was Ellen Lane, the other Heather’s mother. What was she doing here? Where was Dad? Heather Lane’s disastrous family history had stopped being fascinating. Heather English just wanted to go home.

“I wasn’t an animal, but you may have turned me into one. Look what you’ve made me do to her just to get you here. Just to get you to come to me this one last time.”

“That’s the part you don’t understand, Ben. You screwed up. You haven’t lured me into a trap, I’ve hunted you down. You’re not in control here. I am.”

He moved closer, slipped between Heather and the endless windowed corridor, held the blade to her throat with a gentle intensity that made it all the more terrifying.

“Do you think I’m surprised to see that you’ve brought a gun? What good does that do you? You’re not that good a shot. If you don’t kill me instantly, my knife’s at our daughter’s throat. Even if I don’t try to hurt her intentionally, the way you expect, even if you just wound me, I might jerk and kill her by accident. Put the gun down, my love. Put the gun down and I promise you she’ll be safe. I’ll let her go. I’ll make you a trade, your life for hers. That’s fair, isn’t it. That’s what you want. Put the gun down and give me your hand. I’ll cut her loose and she can run for it. You can tell her where to go, how to get away and I won’t interfere. Take my hand. Then you and I’ll go through those windows over there and it’ll be like it should again, just the two of us, together, going to join Daddy and Mickey, free of Indians forever.”

“No!”

“You don’t have a choice, my love,” he said clasping Heather’s hair with one hand and putting the knife to her carotid artery with the other. “Do it now.”

Heather couldn’t see it, but she could hear the sneer in Ellen Lane’s reply. “I do have a choice, Ben. You blew it. You grabbed the wrong girl. Our daughter’s a long way from here in a safe place and this time that makes me the predator and you the victim.”

Heather heard another noise she recognized. She’d been around her dad and guns long enough to know what it sounded like when a revolver was cocked.

“This is Heather,” he said, but for the first time there was just a hint of doubt, the tiniest indication that he wasn’t sure and the plot of his tragedy might not end the way he’d pictured it.

“Yes, but she’s somebody else’s Heather, not yours and mine.”

“You’re trying to trick me but it won’t work. Even if this isn’t our daughter, you wouldn’t take a chance on hurting some innocent girl just to get at me. Even you aren’t that cruel.”

“I’ll do what I have to in order to protect my child, Ben. You can bet your life on it,” the other Heather’s mother said. Heather could tell the man was still considering it, weighing the implications and making up his mind, but she didn’t have any doubts. Ellen Lane was about to take out her husband and God help Heather English if she was in the way.

***

The sheriff came at them on the far side of the belt that delivered grain the length of the elevator, the belt on which Benjamin Todd had deposited Heather English’s trussed form. He wasn’t worried about Ellen Lane shooting anyone with his pistol. He’d loaded it with blanks before climbing to the top of the Strand. The sheriff always had a pouch of blanks on his belt because firing a couple of shots in the air worked wonders when he was breaking up the occasional drunken brawl at the Bisonte Bar. Using blanks insured nobody got hurt and he didn’t have to squabble with the management over the cost of patching holes in their ceiling. Since they were available, letting Ellen Lane have a harmless pistol and a head start had seemed like a great idea—a way to make sure she would lead him where he wanted to go, then be unable to cause any harm once she got there. Of course that was before the sheriff encountered the grain dust in the Co-op. The dust changed everything. Blanks could ignite dust, blow the top off the elevator, just as surely as normal bullets. It wouldn’t matter that nobody got hit by flying lead.

It wasn’t an easy approach and the sheriff didn’t manage it quietly. He’d had to clamber over and under tubes and machinery he only dimly understood. It was impossible to see clearly in the flickering translucence that penetrated the elevator’s windows and Englishman painfully banged into unseen metal supports and pipes and rails the deceptive lighting had hidden or made him think stood elsewhere. The clamor he was making didn’t give him away though, not over the almost constant roar of wind sucking at windows or the staccato rattle of rain driven just this side of hard enough to shatter glass. And there was the thunder, never quieter than the rumbling of an adjacent megasaurian belly, more often crashing with end-of-the-world violence that shook even this monstrous structure of concrete and steel rebar and made it impossible for him to hear any of the words Heather Lane’s parents were exchanging.

The sheriff, whose relationship with God centered on mutual disbelief, found himself hedging bets and asking favors. If only he could get close enough to jump her and knock the gun away…. Well, then he’d still have the problem of what to do about the man with the knife and his daughter, but at least they all might live long enough for him, and any God who cared to lend a hand, to begin solving the next stage of this endless series of life and death situations.