Thief Of Souls

In truth, nothing would happen to them if she told . . . but if word of Dillon’s deeds got out, he didn’t want to think about what would happen to him.

“We’ll pack our things, and leave in the morning,” she told him. “And we won’t tell a soul.”

But it was clear from her tone of voice that she al­ready had.

***

Two hours later, the town of Burton was swarming with police and state troopers, and Dillon knew they were looking for him. He had slipped away from the Jessups’ at dawn, already sensing the world closing in around him. As always, they had decided to drive along the back roads. Carter sat silently in the passenger seat, impassive and unconcerned as Dillon managed to evade one police checkpoint after another, until he finally slammed the brakes on his Land Rover, and slammed his fists on the steering wheel.

“What’sa matter?” asked Carter.

Dillon shook his head to clear his thoughts. There was no way out of town—every road was crawling with troopers. The news of his feats must be more widely known than he had suspected, to mobilize so many troopers to ferret him out. Bringing back the dead must have been an offense as serious as mass murder in the eyes of the law.

A hundred yards ahead, the officers at the Harrison Street checkpoint took notice of Dillon’s car stopped suspiciously a hundred feet away from them.

Carter yawned and brushed some morning crust from the corner of his eye. “We’ll get away from them,” said Carter. “You can get out of anything.”

But it wasn’t that simple. Dillon silently cursed his luck. His talent for seeing patterns in the world around him was as acute as ever, but when it came to his own life, he was blind. He knew someone would eventually give away his secret, but he had thought he would have more time. And it probably wasn’t just the Jessups who had blown the whistle; other families must have come forward, too. He could imagine the most hardened of police investigators turned into blubbering morons when they saw the resurrected dead with their own eyes. No, they couldn’t catch him, or he’d never be able to complete his repair work. He had to get away.

“We’re smarter than them!” said Carter. “They’ll never catch us!”

Dillon took a good look at the boy. Dillon couldn’t remember ever being that innocent. That trusting.

“We’re going to run, aren’t we?” Carter’s eyes were bright and eager. “Aren’t we? You won’t let them break us up—we’re a team, right?”

Dillon knew what he had to do. Carter deserved more than an apprenticeship to a freak—Dillon owed him at least the chance at a normal life. And so, as the troopers approached, Dillon made no move to escape. Instead he quickly whipped up a new plan. A brilliant, brutal plan that would leave everyone better off.

Well, almost everyone.

***

The troopers dragged Carter, kicking and scream­ing into one police car, and took Dillon off in another. Dillon offered no resistance. The two cars drove off, away from Burton, toward a saner part of the world where, presumably, Dillon would be “held for ques­tioning.”

The two state troopers in the front seat smelled of morning breath doused with black coffee. The older one, who drove the car, his graying hair cut in a tightly cropped butch, kept glaring at Dillon in the rearview mirror. His name tag read WELLER, Dillon had noted. The stripes on his sleeve made him a sergeant.

“You’ve got the folks around here in one mighty uproar, son,” he said. “We don’t need any more uproars around here—the virus was enough trouble to last a lifetime.”

“What are you charging me with?”

Weller laughed smugly. “Does it matter? You’re ob­viously a runaway, and we’re well within the law to bring you into ‘protective custody.’ '

Dillon broke eye contact and gazed out the window.

“Are you listening to me, son?” said Sergeant Wel­ler.

Dillon still didn’t answer him, but he did turn to catch Weller’s eyes once more as Weller watched him in the rearview mirror. Dillon studied Weller—the way he moved, the cadence and inflections of his voice. Dil­lon noticed the way the man held his shoulders, and judged the way he aggressively changed lanes. To any­one else, it wouldn’t have meant a thing, but to Dillon, the tale couldn’t have been clearer if it were painted on the man’s forehead. I can see patterns, he had told Carol Jessup. That’s all. And the patterns of Sergeant Weller—each action, every word—betrayed to Dillon who this man had been, who he was, and who he was destined to be. It was not a pretty picture.

“Don’t you talk, son?” Weller asked. “Or are you one of them idiot savants?”

Weller chuckled at his own words. Dillon paid par­ticular attention to the methodical but nervous way Weller rubbed the fingers of his right hand, then clasped the hand into a fist. To Dillon, this man’s life was easier to read than a street sign.

“Your wife wishes you would stop smoking,” Dillon told him. “She wishes you would stop drinking, too.”

Catching Dillon’s intrusive gaze in the rearview mir­ror, Weller’s cold demeanor took a turn toward winter. “Watch yourself, son,” he said. “You make up stories about people, you may find people making up stories about you.”

For the first time, the trooper riding shotgun turned around. His name tag read LARABY. He was younger than Weller and to Dillon didn’t seem nearly as un­pleasant. He did, however, seem troubled. “People are saying you bring back the dead,” Officer Laraby said. “You got anything to say about that?”

“It’s all a bunch of voodoo talk,” Weller sneered. “Mass hysteria—these people all think they got over ‘the virus,’ but I say some of their marbles are still lost in the drain pipe.”

Officer Laraby turned to him. “So how do you ex­plain all those people who turned up alive?”

Weller brushed a weathered hand over his butch and threw a warning glance at his young partner. “It’s all hearsay. That’s how a hoax works—hearsay held to­gether by spit and tissue paper, isn’t that right, son?”

Dillon smiled, all the while thinking how much he hated the way this man called him “son.” “I suppose so.”

The grin made Weller more irritable. “You think you’re pretty smart, don’t you? What did you do—take money from folks who didn’t know any better, then bring back people who weren’t even dead? That’s the way you worked it, wasn’t it, son?”

Dillon let the grin slip from his face. “You hit your wife one more time, and she’s gonna leave you, you know?”

Panic flashed in Weller’s eyes. His jaw twitched un­comfortably. Laraby watched the two of them, his head going back and forth like it was a game of Ping-Pong, to see who would speak next.

Weller hid his uneasiness behind an outburst of laughter. “Oh, you’re good,” he told Dillon. “You put on one heck of a show—but the truth is you don’t know a thing about me.”

Dillon found himself grinning again—the way he did in the days when the wrecking hunger had consumed him. “I know what I know,” he said.

Dillon sensed the younger cop’s growing discomfort, his confusion and uncertainty. Dillon also noticed the particular shade of the rings beneath Laraby’s eyes, the faint smell of mild perfumed soap, and a handful of bitten fingernails. Dillon, his skill at deciphering pat­terns as acute as ever, understood Laraby’s situation completely.

“Sorry your baby’s sick,” Dillon told Officer Laraby.

The man went pale. Dillon noted the exact way his chest seemed to cave in.

“Heart problem?” asked Dillon. “Or is it his lungs?”

“Heart,” Laraby said in a weak sort of wonder.

“Don’t talk to him!” Weller ordered Laraby. “It’s tricks, that’s all.”

“Yeah,” said Laraby, unconvinced. “Yeah, I guess . . . '

In front of them, the car that carried Carter had pulled out far ahead of them. If Dillon’s plan was to work, he knew he would have to strike now, with lethal precision. He leaned forward, and whispered into Ser­geant Weller’s sun-reddened ear, hitting him with a quiet blast of personal devastation in the form of a sim­ple comment.

“Sergeant Weller,” he whispered, “no matter what everyone says . . . it was your fault. Your fault, and no one else’s.”

A subtle hammer to glass. Dillon could feel the man’s mind shatter, even before there were any out­ward