Oath of Office (21 page)

Both men went down, Lou on top, still hammering downward with as much power as he had in him. It was as if he were punching stone. The man, with at least a four-inch and fifty-pound advantage, reached up and grasped Lou by the throat. He was a beast, and his ham-hock hands were pure power. Lou tucked in his chin to protect himself, but too late. His trachea and larynx were seconds from collapsing.

Still on top, he slammed his forehead down onto the man’s nose. Blood burst from both nostrils, but incredibly, the killer’s grip hardly lessened. His teeth were bared in a snarling rictus, and Lou’s vision began to dim. Grinning obscenely, he rolled Lou onto his back. Thick dollops of blood splashed down into Lou’s eyes.

He landed two more wild blows, but the behemoth simply squeezed harder. Lou’s flailing weakened. It was over. Images of Emily and Renee, his father and brother took over his thoughts. At the instant his vision went completely dark, he heard a loud gunshot followed by a muffled cry of pain from on top of him. The flow of blood from the man exploded into a fountain, and he toppled limply to the ground.

Gasping, Lou could only lie where he was.

Finally, he managed to turn.

The huge killer lay motionless beside him, blood soaking through the groin of his trousers. Then Lou realized that the top of his head had burst open as well.

George knelt nearby, smiling proudly. “I couldn’t find my thirty-eight,” George said, “but this damn water buffalo had a cannon. Just look at this thing. This is some serious firepower.”

Groaning, Lou forced himself to his knees. George’s bullet had gone straight up between the man’s legs and had blown off the top of his head.

Serious firepower, indeed.

“Nice shot,” Lou understated.

“You all right, Welcome?” George asked. “You look like something Jason got ahold of in
Friday the Thirteenth
.”

Lou pawed at the gore on his face with the sleeve of his jacket. It took some work, but gradually his vision cleared. “I’m okay, thanks to you,” he whispered. “I’m sorry about your cousin.”

“I can’t believe this has happened. We gotta find him. He’s not dead. I know my cousin, Welcome. He’s not dead!”

“We’ll look for him as soon as we can,” Lou said, knowing in his heart what they would find. “We’ve got to get back to the car. We can call for help, provided there’s any reception.”

“How many you estimate are out there, not countin’ him?”

“I’m guessing four. Could be five. Stay low, George, and try not to fire that thing anymore unless someone’s about to kill me again.”

Crouching low, Lou moved ahead, pushing the densely packed rows of corn aside. George followed closely. They found the road again, and after a careful walk along the edge, saw George’s car. The overhead spotlights had been shut off. There was no sign of Cap or Notso.

“Cap!” George cried out anxiously. “Where you at, man? Notso! Cap!”

“George, keep it quiet!” Lou whispered harshly, but his warning came too late.

Gunfire erupted from across the road, forcing them back into the corn. Bullets streaked past them from several directions, but their cover held. Sticking close together, they pressed deeper into the corn. At that instant, the silence was pierced by a low rumbling, coming from the direction in which they were headed. Shoulder to shoulder, they ducked down in a furrow. The noise built steadily until it seemed like a jet engine had fired up and was heading toward them.

“What the hell is that?” George asked.

Lou stood up on his tiptoes and peered over the corn.

Instantly, his blood turned cold.

CHAPTER 29

Advancing rapidly toward them through the darkness, looking like an attacking spaceship, its bank of headlights blazing, engine roaring, was a massive combine harvester. Attached to the front end of the harvester, whirling at a blurring speed, was a cylindrical threshing reel, at least twenty feet wide. The machine, with tires taller than Lou, was shearing stalks off at ground level.

Wind generated by the rotating blades sprayed dirt toward Lou and rushed ahead with enough force to throw him off balance. In the brightly lit cab, he could see the silhouette of the driver and wondered what George and he must have looked like to the man.

Helpless
was the only word that came to mind.

Most frightening to him about the thresher was its speed. For several precious seconds, he was frozen—almost literally, a deer in the headlights of the powerful beast. The gap between him and the machine seemed to be closing rapidly. Finally, with no specific plan in mind, he whirled to his right. Nimbly, the combine responded. Moments later, Lou tripped and fell, pitching facefirst onto the rugged ground.

“George! Run! Get out of here!” he shouted, stumbling to his feet.

He could barely hear himself over the roaring engine, and knew there was no way George could hear him.

The screech of the razorlike blades was deafening, and the skill of the driver had him persistently locked between the headlights. Slivered stalks flew out from the base of the apparatus like daggers. A shot rang out from the right, then another. Bullets sparked off the metal framework of the cab. A third shot seemed to spiderweb the windshield.

Lou saw the muzzle flashes and located George, thrashing ahead through the corn, firing over his shoulder like a sharpshooter in a Wild West show. For the moment, at least, he seemed to be well beyond the far end of the screeching rotors.

Lou was dead center.

George got off three more rapid shots. Then, it seemed, he was out of ammunition. It didn’t matter. The bullets had done nothing to stop, or even slow the combine. Still, Lou was concerned that there was space for the thresher to swing from him to George.

Still fixed between the headlights, he began jumping up and down, hollering and frantically waving his arms above his head. The move sealed his fate. The thresher made an adjustment, and he quickly became the chosen one.

Fifteen feet.

Ten.

The noise was deafening now.

In seconds, it would be over.

Five.

Lou spun to his left and tripped on a root, rolling his left ankle. He pitched forward like a baseball player diving headfirst into a base. Unlike the rest of the cornfield, the soil he landed on was muddy and dense. He flattened himself out, hands stretched over his head, jaws clenched, waiting for the blades to tear him apart.

But there was no impact.

He had fallen into a trough, he realized—not a furrow between rows, but something deeper, an irrigation ditch. The roar and wind as the harvester passed over him were like a tornado. The ground shook violently, and the blades actually swept across his back. A millimeter or two more, and he would have been shredded.

As soon as the harvester had passed over him, Lou scrambled from the ditch and hobbled toward where he reckoned the road was, feeling every step in his ankle. Just as he was losing confidence in his sense of direction, the densely packed stalks fell away. He stumbled out into the roadway, torn and completely covered in blood and dirt. Some distance away, he could hear the combine, swinging about for another run at him. Headlights appeared up ahead, flashed twice and went out. A car came skidding toward him through the darkness. Lou tensed, ready to dive back into the corn. The headlights urgently flashed again and the approaching car slowed.

Cap leaned out the driver’s-side window. “Quick, get in the car, Lou!” he cried.

Lou clambered into the backseat, relieved to see George sitting up front, and immediately grasping the significance that there were only three of them. Cap spun the car 180 degrees, sending a pillar of dust swirling into the night sky. The car fishtailed several times on the dirt road before finally catching traction. Lou looked behind him and saw the bank of lights from the harvester fading in the distance.

Unable to stop shaking now, he kept on looking until the machine had vanished from view.

CHAPTER 30

At one o’clock in the morning, beneath a densely overcast sky, the vast cornfields all looked the same.

Each turn Lou directed Chief Gilbert Stone to take led them to another narrow dirt road that cut through another field. With a gentle breeze fanning the tall stalks, it all seemed so peaceful—so far removed from the guns … and the combine harvester … and the blood … and the death. But the nightmare had been real, and Notso Brite had apparently paid for someone’s paranoia with his life.

It had taken most of an hour before the 911 call from Cap’s cell phone had directed a cruiser from the Kings Ridge police station to where the three of them were waiting in George’s car. The officer, on orders from Stone, had led Lou and the others to the station, and after photographing Lou, fixed him up with a shower and a set of clothes. Even after washing off the blood and caked soil, he looked beaten and totally spent. His face had half a dozen gouges, and his knuckles throbbed. Nasty crimson bruises encircled his neck like a cleric’s collar. Worst of all, his ankle was quite swollen and was monitoring every heartbeat.

The small motorcade consisted of two cruisers. Stone drove lead with Lou riding shotgun and Cap and George seated quietly in back behind a wire mesh screen. Two officers occupied the second car. Even staying under fifteen, nothing Lou or the others described was of any help in leading Stone to the spot where they were ambushed. Thirty minutes passed. Then another thirty. Several times, Lou thought they were on the right track. His pulse spiked, only to quickly settle down at the sight of a road sign or a house or outbuilding that told him they were still in the wrong place.

Stone was patient and understanding, but several times suggested that they might do better to suspend their search until daylight. Lou was adamant they continue.

“Look at my neck!” he insisted. “I didn’t do this to myself. There are at least two bodies out there—one of the men who was trying to kill us, and our friend Anthony Brite. Cap saw him get shot.”

He glanced back at his stoical friend and wondered what Gilbert Stone was thinking about him and George.

“Turn here,” Cap said suddenly.

“Turn here?”

Lou nodded and Stone made the right. The other police car followed them onto yet another narrow dirt road. Both drivers cut to their fog lights and slowed to five. There were no distinctive tire tracks on the dirt road, but there was something about the interface between the road and the stalks that seemed familiar.

“Cap, you sensing something?” Lou asked.

“Maybe.”

“Duncan, do you really think you killed somebody, too?” Stone asked.

“Well, first of all, while one of them was shootin’ at me like Wild Bill Hickok, another one charged me. I hit him with a right cross to the throat that would have stopped an elephant. I didn’t have time to stick around and check the guy’s pulse, but he didn’t seem to be doin’ much moving.”

“Three dead and no bodies,” Stone murmured thoughtfully. “Not your everyday case.”

“They’re out there,” Lou said, gazing out the window and trying not to feel hopeless.

“We should have left a breadcrumb trail,” George added.

“We’ll find him, George,” Lou said, somewhat buoyed that they hadn’t seen anything that meant this could not be the road. “We’ll find him.… Wait! Stone, up there! Up ahead!”

Stone slammed on the brakes. Twenty feet ahead on the right was a gnarl of tread marks.

Lou clambered out of the cruiser, cringing when his ankle bore weight.

“What do you have?” Stone asked as he and the others approached.

Lou pointed at the disrupted ground ahead. “This is it. We were here.”

“You sure? Could just be farm machinery,” Stone said, climbing out with the others and panning the area with his flashlight.

“Mighty small machine,” George said. “I wish we had brought my car out here with us so we could compare, but these tracks are bald in the same places my tires are bald.” He got low to the ground and felt around the depressions in the road, then nodded authoritatively, as if he actually could tell.

With renewed tension, the group climbed back into the cruisers. The fog lights were turned off, and they slowly rolled ahead. They had gone a quarter mile or so when Lou exclaimed, “Look! Look at the corn over there.”

The fields on both sides of the road, for as far ahead as they could see, were mown flat. The six of them stepped out into the cool early morning and listened. Nothing but the heavy white noise of humming insects and swishing stalks of corn, where such stalks remained.

“This has been threshed,” Lou said.

“What does that mean?” Stone asked.

“It means someone flattened these fields.”

Stone scanned the area with his flashlight. It looked like the model of a nuclear winter.

“This is where these gunmen attacked you?” he said.

“I’d bet on it,” Lou said, excited at last. “We didn’t pass any other fields that had been cut down like this. It’s a huge cover-up.”

“I agree,” Cap said.

Lou limped into the field.

Was it possible this wasn’t the place?

He inhaled deeply, tasting the air, and then inspected a handful of chopped-up stalks and leaves. “This field looks like it was very recently cut,” he said. “These plants haven’t decayed any, and you can still smell diesel in the air.”

Stone shook his head. “I want to believe you, Welcome,” he said. “I really do. But I still have trouble wrapping my brain around the extent these killers went to in order cover up what you say happened here.”

He took his powerful flashlight out again and shone it at one of the overhead spotlights—then at another. None of them was lit, but all the bulbs appeared intact.

“I thought you said you shot out the lights,” Stone said. For the first time, there was a note of cynicism in his voice.

“They could have been replaced,” George said.

“And we could be in the wrong place. You guys haven’t spent much time out here in corn country, if you’ve spent any at all. It’s sort of like another planet to you. You could be feeding off one another. We see that sort of group dynamic from time to time. It’s like a form of hysteria or mass hypnosis. You start following some suspicious thugs out of the city, and get yourselves double-crossed and ambushed. No one’s attention to details is all that sharp. The stories get twisted on one another.”