Velvet Rain - A Dark Thriller (52 page)

The Coming.

The farmer cracked his beer, and as Kain had seen, raised it in toast. Kain cracked his and followed the man’s lead. It was as if he were powerless to stop this madness, as if God had laid out their future, with no turning back. It was all happening … and the worst was yet to come.

“To Jimmy,” Big Al said, and with a brave face that only Allan Jefferson Hembruff could muster, he winked.

~ 32

He wanted to tell the man what he knew. But he couldn’t.

He could only pray he was wrong.

He finished his Schlitz, then held a lingering gaze along the horizon. He tried to see his way to whatever it was he was looking for, but the way north would have to wait just a little bit longer.
Life
would have to wait … just a little bit longer.

“You want a ride?” Big Al said.

Kain shook his head. “I need to get my thoughts together,” he said. “I’m not sure what I’ll say to her.”

The drifter stood, and the farmer joined him. There was a nervous silence between them, and then they simply shook hands as men. As friends.

“Canada,” Big Al said, a trace of choke in his voice. “Send a postcard.”

Kain offered a slim nod; it was all he could muster. He stepped down from the veranda and into the grass. He looked up wistfully. The sky teased with the first stars; he could follow any one of them. He started to say something, but then he turned to the man, his heart heavy, and simply thanked him for the last time.

Kain Richards walked away.

~

A half hour later, Big Al was dead.

~ 33

Just as Georgia Hembruff was planting a soft kiss on Kain Richards’ forehead, a crimson Ford pickup pulled up quietly beside some trees, on a dirt road about a half mile from Lynn Bishop’s farm. It sported a shiny black bumper lifted from scrap and a new headlight from stock. Small patches of dull jade paint along its slightly crumpled hood had been scraped off, touched up with a deep rusty red that didn’t quite match. The back had been scrubbed clean, and now held nothing but a siphon hose and a large metal gas can that had been filled with regular not an hour before.

Ray Bishop killed the lights and the engine and eased up on the wheel. He peered into the deepening twilight. No moon. The road was a long black snake. He finished the bottle and set it beside him, and tried to settle himself with his last cigarette. He hadn’t slept in days. Bags hung from his dark, bloodshot eyes, and his black stubble had grown thick. He stank of sweat, grease, and whiskey. He wiped the spit from his lips.

He sat brooding. He opened the glove box and eyed the small tin box he’d stuffed inside. He wasn’t quite sure why he was keeping it. Holding on to it scared him a little, just like the dark had always scared him a little. Still, it gave him a strange kind of pleasure. But if the cops found it … shit … didn’t matter now. In all likelihood—as if he were powerless to change his destination—this ticket was a one-way. Finding the kid’s tongue meant squat. Ha. They’d never find his body anyhow, and that sat just about right with him, right as rain.

Once old Frankie had gotten through it, once he’d finally stuffed a cork in it—Christ, you could still smell the puke in here, you never got that shit out, not completely—they’d righted the Mercury. He’d had Jake run it up to the shop, but it had died halfway and they’d had to tow it the rest of the way. Despite the wound in his foot—thank fuck it had looked a lot worse than it was, just yesterday it had finally healed up—they’d worked like bastards all night. The Merc was in about a hundred pieces now, rotting at the bottom of the river.

At the bottom … where the stinking half-breed was rotting. Hog-tied with two blocks of concrete round his ankles.

Oh, Frankie had put up a stink out on the water, but not much of one. Not when it was pointed out that there was another pair of cement shoes with his name on them if he didn’t shut the fuck up. The look on his sorry face … you couldn’t buy that for all the tea in goddamn China. All that yellow bastard could do was hack up a lung like he always did—and just stand there and bleed. Old fat ass hadn’t said shit either, but Jake’d damn near pissed himself again. And really, when he figured it, what could they say? Shit, that’s what. They were as fucked as he was if it all came down.

Still—he had wanted to kill them, right then and there. Just to be safe. Lucky for them the sun had been coming up.

He closed the compartment door with a soft click.

He stared blankly into the growing darkness. Things were fuzzy; had been for days. He blinked a few times. Rubbed his eyes.

No.
NO.

But there she was, his woman, standing there in the road beside the drifter. Hanging on his arm like the fucking whore she was. He felt that rage rising, burning within him. It made him crazy … made him sick. He closed his eyes, waiting for this madness to flee. Finally, he opened them.

Only darkness. Always the darkness.

His mind reeled as he raced through his plan. Steps had to be taken: scores needed settling. Ryan might give him some trouble, but that was nothing he couldn’t handle. Little fucker was just like Frankie, a goddamn coward … good for nothing.

But what about the drifter?

His chest tightened as he nearly succumbed to that rising rush—as he often did when things got out of hand, got a little crazy—as he drew out his switchblade and flicked it to life. It scared him sometimes, like the dark scared him, how things got all wired up … how he lost control. Sometimes he heard voices,
a
voice, really, swimming inside his head. It was as if he were someone else, as if he had stepped outside of his body. As if his mind and his will were not his own. Like when—

He took a deep breath and held it. He fought the Voice.

No. NO.
Not now. Not yet.

He shut his eyes and held them tight, but he could still see those drifter eyes mocking him. He sat silently rocking, his arms wrapped round his chest. He prayed for his heart to settle, his blood to stop boiling … prayed for the Voice to flee.

At long last, he opened his eyes. He could breathe again. Could think again. It was always the same.

He stared at the blade. If only he’d had those ten seconds back in the diner. If only.

He knew what he had to do. Steps had to be taken.

He’d take care of the drifter first. Carve him up like a roast. Like he’d carved up the kid.

After all, the sonofabitch had it coming … they
all
did.

He felt better. He did.

He palmed the blade closed.

Ray Bishop slid the knife into his back pocket. And then, as quietly as a lamb, stepped out for the slaughter.

~ 34

Brikker’s private military aircraft touched down at Sioux City Air Base at precisely 4:30 p.m. local time. Strong and Christensen, attired in civilian clothes, joined him in the waiting four-door Plymouth Valiant. The good Doctor—he too dressed in simple casuals, save the holstered service pistol tucked inside his jacket—had specifically requested something nondescript, and he had not been disappointed … it had even come in black. Strong had been instructed to drive, while Christensen would ask the questions. The locals would take kindly to his girlish face, Brikker had told him, and should they ask why he was looking for the man in the photograph, he would simply tell them they were old friends. Upon their arrival in the tranquil town of Spencer, they wasted little time, visiting perhaps twenty establishments, yet twilight was nearly upon them when Strong pulled up in front of a rather ordinary hardware store that held no more promise than any of the others.

“Maybe I’ll pick up a fan,” Christensen joked. “This place is hotter than the desert.”

“Perhaps you should do your job,” Brikker said. “Or should I send Strong in your stead?”

The private’s face fell as he swallowed something unpleasant. Strong cast him a deceptively sexy, disapproving glare, that in his bunk would have given him cause to masturbate. He fumbled for the door release, found it, and stepped out. He went inside, stayed far longer than he had at their previous stops, and when he got back in the car, regarded his superiors anxiously.

“What’s up
your
ass?” Strong barked. “You were in there for ten fucking minutes.”

“Guy had one hand,” Christensen said. “A vet. Lost it in the Ardennes during the war. Talked my bloody ear off.”

“How touching,” Brikker said. “You’ve found a friend.”

Christensen turned slightly, clearly not wanting to face the one-eyed man in the back. He held up a folded piece of paper.

“He sold Richards some paint,” he said, his eyes flittering nervously between Brikker and Strong. “Enough to paint a house. Enough to—”

“And this?” Brikker snapped.

The soldier risked a small smile. “Directions.”

~ 35

The Voice followed. It spoke not with a whisper, as it often did, but with a cold hard edge he had always feared. As he walked along that dark and lonely road, it told him—as it
had
been telling him, over and over, like some crazy song in his head—that what he was doing was right. Steps must be taken, it said, and somehow, he knew it was right. It was always right.

It had first come to him as a boy of ten, a time of trouble. His mother had died of tuberculosis in January, and later, at the height of midsummer, his father, a laborer at the old rail yards, had died in an accident … an accident young Raymond had caused. There they were, the men having lunch on the noon, Raymond Senior sitting with them and eating his sandwich and drinking his coffee, while Raymond Junior, hiding behind a container car when he should have been at home doing his chores, waited and watched. His father looked happy, cracking jokes, making small talk. As if nothing in the world bothered him. Not the heat, not the work, not the fact that his son had no mother anymore, not the fact that he had practically abandoned his frightened little boy since her death. The Voice had come the night before, right there in their kitchen, just as his father was filling his lunchbox. It had told him that steps had to be taken, had told him to put the rat poison in the coffee. The other workers had thought it a joke, laughing the way they were when his father had thrown his hands up to his throat, and only when his father had tripped over his stumbling feet and crushed his skull on a rail did the laughing stop.

During his troubled teenage years he was sent to live with his aunt in Spencer, and when she had had enough, to his other aunt, just outside of Mason City. The Voice would come, and the Voice would go. For the most part it stayed away; for the most part. But then the times would come as he struggled into adulthood, with all its bullshit and burden, when the Voice would return. Louder and stronger. More certain in its want. It lived inside of him; it lived and it lusted. It envied. It wanted. And it would have what it wanted. Come hell or high water.

It had told him to kill the boy. He had tried to fight it, even right up to the instant he ran the blade under the half-breed’s tongue. But it would have what it wanted. It had nearly had him on the boat with Jake and Frank.
Very
nearly.

It
wanted
—

It had wanted his daughter. His little girl. It had made him crazy. It had been her fault, of course. Looking like her mother, looking
just
like her, talking just like her … and rejecting him, just like her. But it had wanted her. And it had had her.

It made him crazy, yes, but it made him strong. From where it came, who knew, but it would come almost harmlessly, some half-baked thought, some random urge. Often it would pass. But at times it would not pass. At times it would grow, slowly and surely, and when the instant—the
moment
—came, it would scream in its want, its anger venomous. Dear God, it would make him crazy. Make him dangerous.

It had made him dangerous that night with the Sioux; had made him dangerous with the half-breed. And—

No,
he whispered.
NO.

Yet he could only submit to it.

He saw the light from the farmhouse ahead.

They walked.

~

He hid in the gully behind the oak and set the gas can beside him. Upstairs, lights shone in his children’s bedrooms. The Chevy wagon sat parked outside. The guesthouse was dark.

He left the can behind as he skulked across the yard and rounded the back of the small outbuilding. A cat cut across his path, and he just missed it as he kicked at it. The thing vanished behind the barn. He kept low as he drew out his knife. He moved round the front, and then, when he heard not a sound from within, chanced a view through the window.

The window—

He ran his fingers along the cracks in the glass.

He trembled. He remembered that night. How the Voice had come like a bullet. How it had turned him, twisted him, against his own flesh and blood. How it had driven him to the edge of madness.

Only the grace of God had stopped him from stepping over.

He slipped back to the gully and turned to the house.

The drifter was inside. He knew that as surely as he knew he would kill him.

All of them.

~

Crouched behind the tool shed that he and Jake had built not three summers back—not twenty feet from the doghouse they’d slapped together for that piece-a-shit mutt about a hundred years back—he could see that worthless whore through the kitchen window. She stood at the sink doing the dishes.

But where was the drifter?

Still at Hembruff’s place? Either that, or the sonofabitch was on his way.

He had to act now.

He grabbed the gas, and just as he was about to make his way to the house, the back door opened. He slipped down out of sight.

Ryan told the dog to go, and the old shepherd hobbled down the steps and into the yard. He closed the screen door behind him and disappeared into the house.

Beakers walked about, sniffing the ground. He raised a leg and relieved himself, then squatted in that rude and awkward way that dogs do. He finished his business, sniffed at it, then simply roamed aimlessly about the yard.