stepped on by someone wearing cleats. Slowly, he got to his knees, fighting off a wave of dizziness. Kneeling there, he groped around in the snow until his numb fingers found the SIG. Weapon in hand, he climbed back up onto his feet, handkerchief pressed to his nose. Then Mitch resumed the chase.
He was an old hand at this now. All he had to do was follow Jase’s trail down those tracks. Around a bend. Into a straightaway. Mitch pursued him, step for step, stumbling repeatedly, falling to his knees, but refusing to stay down. As he came around another big bend, Mitch heard a gunshot up ahead in the snowy silence. Now Mitch was streaking his way around that bend, wondering what he would find.
It was Choo-Choo Cholly’s House, the bright red railroad barn where the little train was stored for the winter. A spur of track led off the main line straight for it. So did Jase’s footprints. One of the sliding barn doors was opened wide. Mitch found the shattered remains of a lock in the barn’s doorway. Jase had shot the lock off.
Once inside the doorway, the narrow-gauge railroad tracks emerged from under their snowy blanket and continued their way deep inside the cavernous barn, which smelled moldy and damp. After the bright white glare of the snow, Mitch could barely make out anything inside the unlit barn. Not until his eyes had a chance to adjust to the dim light coming through the open door. Only then could he make out the brave little train, all shiny and clean, waiting there for spring to arrive. In point of fact, Choo-Choo Cholly was a bizarre thing to stumble upon right now. There was something surreal about Cholly’s locomotive “face,” with its bulbous red nose, electric-blue eyes and cheerful crooked smile. To Mitch, the little engine looked eerily like W. C. Fields after Fields had just done something especially stinky to Baby LeRoy. Maybe it was just Mitch’s head trauma, but he suddenly felt as if he’d wandered into a ride at Disney World while under the influence of a major hallucinogen.
Until, that is, another gunshot rang out, splintering the barn door next to his head. Mitch hit the ground immediately.
“Don’t make me do this!” Jase called to him from deep inside the barn.
“You can’t get away, Jase!” Mitch called back, edging his way on hands and knees toward Cholly, keeping low to the tracks. “Give yourself up!”
“No way! I won’t ever give up! Not ever!”
And yet, as Mitch inched his way deeper inside the barn, it occurred to him that Jase had purposely trapped himself in here. Why had he chosen to do this? Why hadn’t he kept on going down the tracks?
As he crept near enough to get a decent look at him, Mitch knew why-Jase was cowering in the corner behind Cholly like a lost, frightened little boy. Melted snow ran from his hair down into his face. He trembled so badly his teeth were chattering.
“She made me do it,” he cried to him mournfully. “I didn’t want to. Honest, I didn’t. Jory made me.”
“How did she make you, Jase?” Mitch asked, kneeling there with Des’s gun in his hand. “You and I both know you’re no fool. You’re a smart guy. How did you let this happen?”
Jase watched him in scared silence for a moment. “You’re the smart guy. You don’t get it?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Because I loved her!” Jase said this as if it were a special secret.
“Well, of course you did,” Mitch responded patiently. “She was your sister.”
“No, I mean I loved her! Jory and me were together”
Mitch experienced an involuntary physical reaction to this revelation. He could actually feel his innards shudder, as if someone had just reached in and given his guts a good hard shake. “Since… when, Jase?”
“Since we were kids. She was older. She showed me how. She showed me everything.”
“She was your sister,” he pointed out gently.
“I couldn’t help that,” Jase moaned, breathing heavily. “She’s the only girl I’ve ever… I’ll ever love. She was so pretty. The prettiest. And now I haven’t got anybody. I know what we… that you’re not supposed to. That they… people… think it’s wrong. But you can’t help how you feel. You can’t. You just can’t. God, you of all people should get that.”
“Me?” Mitch frowned at him. “Why me?”
“You and Des,” Jase said, nodding his wet head convulsively. “Lots of people think that’s unnatural and wrong, too, don’t they?”
“Jase, I think we’re getting off the subject here. You said Jory made you do this. How?”
“Killing Norma was all her idea,” Jase explained. “She planned the whole thing. It wasn’t Les. It was her, all her. One day she told me, ‘I think Les is into me.’ She figured once Norma was gone she could talk him into marrying her and we could take over the whole castle.”
“So she seduced Les.”
“He was easy. That’s what she told me after she… after they… H-He wanted her bad. God, everyone did. She was so beautiful.” Jase let out a sob. “Wasn’t she beautiful?”
“Very beautiful,” Mitch said, although he was having trouble picturing Jory right now without the bullet hole Jase had just put in her left eye. “If you felt about Jory the way you say you did, then you must have hated the whole idea-Jory and Les sleeping together, Jory marrying him. Didn’t that bother you?”
“She swore he meant nothing to her. That she was doing it all for us. So I went along. I didn’t want to, but I did. She made me.”
“Jase, you keep saying that. How did she make you? Why didn’t you just tell her it was a really sick, bad idea?”
Jase ducked his head miserably. “If I didn’t go along, she said she’d find someone else to marry. Move to a new town and leave me behind. Never let me be with her again. It was the only way I could hold on to her. That’s how come I did it-killed the old woman, killed Les. Because I… loved Jory. And now I haven’t got anybody. Nobody at all.”
“That’s not true, Jase. You have me. I’m on your side.” Mitch moved in a bit closer, Des’s gun lowered out of sight. “You can trust me. But you need to turn yourself in. It’s the smart move. You can explain this to them. They’ll understand. People can be surprisingly understanding.”
“No way.” Jase retreated deeper into the corner, shaking his head. “I won’t be locked up. Can’t handle it.”
“Hey, I don’t blame you. And I won’t lie to you, Jase. You’ve got some serious legal problems ahead of you. But I’m your friend, and I promise I’ll speak up for you. I’ll tell them that you could have killed me just now out there, which makes twice you could have killed me and didn’t. That means you’re not a dangerous person. It means that a lot of this is on Jory, and they’ll understand that. You might not even have to go to jail. You’ve got… mitigating factors in your favor.”
“I’m not going to no loony bin!” Jase cried out. “You can forget that. Just let me go, okay? I’ll live in the bush by myself. I won’t bother anyone. Won’t hurt anyone. I’ll just disappear.”
“I can’t let you do that, Jase,” Mitch said, moving in closer. He was no more than four feet away from him now, close enough to smell Jase’s goaty scent even through his bloodied nose. “You have a couple of options, but running isn’t one of them. You can’t get away.”
“I can so,” Jase insisted. “There’s twenty thousand acres of woods here. Caves no one else knows about. They’ll never find me. Soon as I can make it out, I’ll catch me a river barge or freight train. Head south to Mexico, find work, keep my head down. I’ll be okay, I swear it.” Jase ran a hand through his stringy hair, sniffling. “Just let me go. If you’re my friend, let me go. I’m begging you.”
Truly, Mitch felt bad for Jase Hearn. Or as bad as he could feel for someone who had just murdered three human beings. This was an emotionally fragile, vulnerable guy, a trusting guy who had been ill-used by his older, wiser and infinitely more devious sister. Jory had fully understood the sexual power she held over Jase, and she had cruelly exploited him. It was a twisted and very sad situation. And now justice had to be dispensed. Back there in the kitchen, Jory had already paid the price for her own reprehensible behavior. But what price should Jase pay?
As Mitch crouched there in the damp, cold rail barn, thinking it over, he swore he could hear a faint mechanical hum somewhere off in the distance. Had the electrical power come back on? No, that wasn’t it. The sound came from overhead. It was the state police helicopter, SP-One, whirring its way toward them. Des’s old sergeant, Soave, and his partner Yolie. They were still a couple of miles off, but growing steadily closer.
Jase raised his eyes slowly to the roof, hearing it. Then he let out a low moan of panic, his eyes darting wildly around the barn for a way out. It was almost as if he hadn’t realized until this very moment that he’d let Mitch corner him. Now Jase’s eyes fell on the. 38 he was clutching in his right hand, half forgotten in the telling of his
