Dead Run (2 page)

The truck was going forty miles per hour when it hit the place the tar had buckled in yesterday's afternoon heat, right at the end of the long driveway leading back to the Wittig farm. The cab's right front tire bounced violently over the worst of the break, then veered into the soft pea gravel of the shoulder. There was a long, high-pitched squeal as the driver slammed on the brakes, and then, its forward momentum diverted, the truck began a sickening lurch to one side. It balanced on its left wheels for an endless moment, as if giving the driver time to think about what was to come, then jackknifed and crashed to its side and slid across the asphalt with a deafening metallic screech.

Wide-eyed and terrified, the driver lay pressed against his door, the metal handle poking into his ribs, his hands still frozen in a white-knuckled grip around the steering wheel. The cab was pointed toward a distant cluster of farm buildings, and through the stone-pocked windshield, he saw two boys running toward him down the dusty drive. In an adjacent pasture, a tight cluster of panicked Holsteins was running the other way.

"Shit," he finally managed in a shuddered exhale that broke the word into half a dozen syllables. He flexed his fingers on the wheel, wiggled his toes, then released a shaky, breathy laugh, giddy to find all his body parts intact. His smile froze when he heard the compressor behind the cab kick in, and vanished altogether when he glanced at the dashboard and saw the needle on the bulk tank gauge dropping slowly.

"Sweet Jesus," he whispered, groping frantically for the small computer unit built into the console. He depressed the large red button in the middle, then hit the send key. A message appeared on the tiny screen, blinking innocently in large, baby blue letters.

SPILLED MILK

SPILLED MILK

SPILLED MILK

Mark and Matthew were almost to the truck, running flat out, legs and arms and hearts pumping hard. They dropped like stones a few yards shy of the truck, and for one terrifying instant, saw horror in each other's eyes.

On the other side of the pasture, the cows in Harold Wittig's prime herd of Holsteins began to sink to their knees.

Haifa mile downwind in Four Corners, the screeching noise had split the quiet morning like a thousand fingernails scraping down a blackboard. The puppy wailed and batted at his ears; Grandpa Dale and Tommy both covered theirs with their hands. For a second, Dale wondered if those Swenson boys had taken out Harold's old John Deere and tipped it over in the road again, but he dismissed the possibility almost as soon as he thought of it. The horrible noise was going on much too long for that, spearing into his brain, making his eyes hurt.

The curious and the worried had already started to come out of Hazel's by the time the awful noise had stopped, all of them looking up the road toward the Wittig farm, shading their eyes in the bright light of morning. The pastor and his wife were the worried ones, thinking of their sons working up there. The sudden silence was almost more upsetting than the sounds of the crash had been, and they both moved quickly toward where they had parked the big Chevy in front of the cafe. The others were wandering right into the middle of the road, as if that would help them figure out what had happened over a hill and out of sight.

Inside the cafe, Hazel was waiting impatiently for the donuts she'd just put in the fryer to finish so she could follow her customers outside and investigate for herself. Excitement of any kind was a rare thing in Four Corners, and not to be missed. When she finally lifted the basket and hooked it on the edge of the fryer-another perfect batch- she had only enough time to glance out the window and marvel at the sight of her customers prayerfully sinking to their knees, some of

them right in the middle of the road, before her candy-red mouth sagged open and her throat started to close.

When Dale saw the first person go down just a few yards away, he scooped up Tommy in one arm and the pup in the other and tried to race away, but already his heart was pounding too slow for that. He never felt the pup slip from his grasp and tumble to the asphalt, but he never let go of Tommy, not even when he finally fell.

R ICKY SCHWANN was freezing his ass off. Damned water in this quarry never warmed up, no matter how hot the summer. It was great when you needed to quick-chill a case of brews, but it really sucked when you were two hundred pounds of muscle in a pair of swimming trunks and had to dive in after it. Ricky had worked hard his senior year at Paper Valley High to get down to five percent body fat, but now he was wishing he'd porked down a few more Big Macs, just for the insulation.

Ten feet down into the black water, his lungs were already starting to burn and his eyes hurt from the cold. He squeezed them shut. The water was so black that you couldn't see more than a few inches anyway. He yanked hard again on the rope that tethered the case of beer he was after, but it wouldn't budge. He was going to have to go all the way down. Five, ten more feet, he figured.

He went hand over hand down the rope until he felt it veer sideways, snagged on whatever it was that was holding it down. He jerked on the rope and felt it loosen, then opened his eyes in time to see another pair of eyes floating toward him. They were blue, just like his, but wide and empty.

"WHAT'D I TELL YOU?" Deputy Bonar Carlson was leaning forward in the passenger seat of the patrol car, jabbing a chubby finger at the windshield. "Look at the top of those Norways. Yellowing already, and August is still a youngster."

Sheriff Michael Halloran kept his eyes on the twisting strip of tar so he wouldn't run into one of the Norway pines that Bonar wanted him to look at. The forest moved in on everything man-made when you got this far north in Wisconsin, and roads were no exception. He felt like he was driving through a tunnel. "We are not having a drought," he said. "You're doing that Chicken Little thing again."

"It's going to be a bad one. Maybe as bad as 'eighty-seven."

"That's such a load of crap. We nearly drowned in June. Broke every record in the book for rainfall."

Bonar snorted and flopped back, sticking a thumb under the seat belt to ease the pressure on his considerable, cherished stomach. "That was then, this is now. Just wait until we get to the lime quarry. I'll bet the water is at least a foot low, maybe two."

"No way." Halloran eased the car around an unbanked turn, watching sunlight dapple the road ahead like a strobe. He'd known since the fifth grade that only a fool questioned anything Bonar stated as fact, but he just couldn't help himself. One of these days, he was going to prove him wrong about something. The law of averages was on his side. "Did I miss the turn? Feels like we've been driving for hours."

"Fifty-seven minutes from the office to the lime quarry, and that's if you don't run into a deer or a bear. How long since you've been up there?"

Halloran thought about it for a minute, and then got sad. "Senior-class party."

Bonar sighed. "Yeah. Gives me the creeps every time I pass the place. Haven't dipped a toe in that water since."

The old lime quarry they were heading for hugged the northern county line, about as far from human habitation as you could get in this part of the state, making it an ideal party site for every teenage bash since the quarry and kiln had closed in the '40s. Fifty feet down from ground level, the lime had petered out and buried springs had bubbled up, filling the ugly machine-made hole with icy water. Halloran had always liked thinking about that-man working decades to make a piece of earth ugly, nature covering the scars in a blink, if you just left her alone to do her job.

But the water and the isolation made the place a magnet for kids and kegs, and every now and then something bad would happen. Like at the senior-class party nearly twenty years ago, when Howie Dexheimer dove into that cold black water and disappeared, as if the quarry had swallowed him whole. Every diver in the county had worked the deep water for weeks but never found the body. As far as anyone knew, Howie Dexheimer was still down there.

"You think it's him?" Bonar interrupted Halloran's thoughts as if he'd been following them.

"Lord, I hope not. I sure don't want to see Howie after twenty years in the water."

When Bonar was thinking hard, his whole face screwed up. "Might not be so bad. Water's too damn cold for anything to live in, including most bacteria. The body could be almost perfectly preserved if the alkaline content isn't too high."

Halloran winced. The idea of a perfectly preserved Howie was almost worse.

Fifteen minutes later, he found the two-lane dirt track that made a hole in the woods. Deputy Walter Simons was blocking the access with his legs spread and his arms crossed over his chest, a banty rooster with an Elvis haircut trying to look like Colossus.

Halloran pulled up alongside him and opened his window. "Tell me something I don't know, Simons."

Simons swatted ineffectually at a congregation of deerflies buzzing around his head. "Goddamn deerflies bite like a son of a bitch, did you know that?"

"I did."

"Well, it isn't poor old Howie Dexheimer, anyway. I caught a glimpse just when they were pulling him out, and Howie never had hair that long."

"Hair grows after death," Bonar told him.

"Go on."

"So some people say."

"Does it tie itself up in a pony tail with a rubber band?"

"Hardly ever."

"Well, there you go. Besides, Doc Hanson says this was an older guy, mid-twenties at least, and not in the water that long. No ID, no nothin'. Naked as a jaybird. You want to send Cleaton back out here with the squad? Another ten minutes out in these bugs and I'm going to be a pint low."

About a tenth of a mile in, the two-lane track broadened onto an open grassy area clogged by cars-Doc Hanson's old blue station wagon, three patrol cars that had responded to the call, and a brand-new Ford pickup that would have eaten up a year of Halloran's salary. Had to belong to the kid who had called it in, he decided. These days half the kids in the district got new trucks just for graduating.

Just beyond the makeshift parking lot, an earthen ramp that had once been access for heavy machinery led down to the water. They'd called it "the girlie road" in the old days, and no self-respecting, testosterone-crazed teenage boy would ever set foot on it. There was only one acceptable entrance into the water for them.

Halloran's eyes shifted to either side of the ramp, where the quarry walls rose a good fifteen feet from the black water. Mature trees leaned over the rim as if peering downward, and frayed ropes hung from many of the bigger branches. He and Bonar had hung ropes just like them when they were young and immortal, swung on them like foolish apes until they arced over the water and let go. Timing had been everything. You let go too soon, and you landed on the jagged rocks that climbed the ridge wall. That had been the thrill of it, and with the sharp and fearful eye of maturity, Halloran thought it was pretty much a miracle that they had survived their own stupidity.

He glanced over at five teenagers tangled together in a distressed knot near one of the county cars. Their expressions cycled through the spectrum of human emotion-shock, horror, fear, fascination, and back again-as they tried to make sense of their gruesome discovery. He recognized Ricky Schwann, a full head taller and a few shades grayer than the rest of them.

Halloran and Bonar ignored the kids for the moment, got out of the car, and headed down the rock-strewn slope to the little beach below, where Doc Hanson's crouched form was partially blocking the view of what Halloran dearly hoped was an intact body. Initially, all he could see of it was a head and a pair of legs so white they looked like they belonged on a plaster statue. As they drew closer, the doc got up and took a step back, giving them their first look at the torso.

"Oh, man." Halloran's cheeks went up and his mouth turned down when he saw the band of neat, pencil-sized black holes that stitched a perforated line across the white flesh of the dead man's chest. "We just figured it for a drowning."

Doc Hanson was holding his gloved hands away from his sides so he wouldn't forget and shove them in his pockets. "So did I, until they pulled him out." He stooped and moved a tangled clump of wet hair away from the open filmy eyes. "You know him?"

Halloran and Bonar both took a long look at the frozen face, then shook their heads.

"Me either. And I figure I know just about everybody in this county. Hell, I delivered half of them. But I've never laid eyes on this boy."

"Identifying marks?" Halloran asked.

Doc Hanson shook his head."No freckles, no moles, no scars, no tattoos.He might have had something on his back, but there isn't much left of it anymore. You want me to roll him?"

"Lord, no," Bonar said, already picturing what that many exit wounds might have done to the body. "It looks like somebody tried to cut the poor guy in half."

Doc nodded. "Eight full penetrations, head-on, another one that scraped his left side, see?" He pointed to a raw strip where tissue had been burned instead of blown away. "Mowed him down, is what they did. Looks like NATO rounds some fool fired on full automatic, which is flat-out overkill. That stuff fragments like crazy. One good chest hit like any one of these"-he gestured at the body-"and the job's done."

Halloran looked curiously at the kindly, time-worn face of the doctor who'd delivered him, who'd given him lollipops with every childhood vaccination and mixed india ink with the plaster so he could have a "manly-colored" cast when he'd broken his wrist in second grade-not the kind of man you'd think would know a whole lot about the end results of automatic rifle fire. "NATO rounds, Doc?" he asked softly. "You learn about those in med school?"

The softening jowls under the old doctor's jaw tightened a little. '"Nam," he said in a way that made the single syllable sound heavy and dark and final.

Halloran and Bonar shot each other a look. You could know a man for all of your life, it seemed, and still know so little.