where are you?
Garrett pushed Not Ike forward another few steps toward Joe. The pistol was jammed into Not Ike’s ear, tilting his head slightly to the side. Joe could see that the hammer was cocked. Not Ike looked strangely serene, Joe thought. Somehow, it made the situation seem worse.
“We’re going to walk right up to you,” Garrett said, his voice gaining confidence. “And we’re going to take your truck out of here. You are going to lower that shotgun and step aside.”
Yes, I was, Joe thought. He had no other choice. Unless . . . Nate?
Then the door to the trailer filled with someone else, something else, something unspeakably horrible.
It was Cam Logue, with most of his face peeled aside. The front of his shirt was soaked with blood, and his head slumped forward, his arms limp. He was being held up from behind by a big, dark man with a beard, wearing a bloody camouflage jacket.
“Oh, my God,” Joe heard himself whisper. Why is Cam here and what have they done to him?
The man behind Cam Logue moved out of the trailer. He appeared to be carrying Cam, keeping him vertical with one arm wrapped tightly around Logue’s chest. In the other hand was a scalpel, which was pressed against Logue’s throat.
“You din’t fo’get about me, did you, Doc?” the man asked Garrett. His speech was garbled and slurred. The man’s poor speech and the camo jacket clicked in Joe’s mind. It was Nurse Bob, Joe realized.
“Of course not,” Garrett said to Nurse Bob, not looking around. To Joe: “It’s a messy business, this.”
Joe was stunned, unable to process the horrific scene in front of him. Nothing made sense.
BOOM.
The left half of Nurse Bob’s head disappeared, blood and pieces of flesh splattering the side of the trailer with a sickening, wet sound, while his body toppled over backward like a felled tree. Cam Logue fell forward, released from the man’s grip, landing facedown on the ground.
Instinctively, Joe straightened up and moved to his left behind the truck to get an angle on Garrett. Garrett had wheeled Not Ike around toward the sound of the shot, and Joe could see Garrett clearly now. But Garrett still had the pistol jammed into Not Ike’s head.
“Who did that?” Garrett screamed, stealing a glance toward Cam’s prone body.
“DROP THE WEAPON!” Joe shouted.
But Garrett didn’t. Instead, he began backpedaling, pulling Not Ike along with him. Garrett backed up until he was nearly at the trailer again, but veered toward the rear of it. Not Ike was starting to panic now, because he didn’t know what was happening.
“Joseph!”
Garrett backed into the reedy brush behind the trailer, and before he was gone the last thing Joe saw were Not Ike’s arms flailing.
Then he heard a splash.
Joe and Nate followed.
“You didn’t tell me there would be two of them,” Nate said. “Nobody told me there would be two of them either,” Joe muttered.
“Or that Cam would be with them.”
Nate said nothing.
They found Not Ike in the river, sputtering but unharmed. Cleve Garrett was gone.
“I’ve got him,” Nate said, leaving Joe and Not Ike in the river and wading toward the opposite bank.
35
For the next three hours , as night came and the campground filled with vehicles and men and the crime scene lights went up, Joe Pickett was in a kind of fog. He was lucid enough to recognize that he was in mild shock. He dully recounted the details of what they had found in the campsite to Portenson, Hersig, and Sheriff Barnum. As activity whirled around him, he stayed out of the way, observing things as if he had no connection to any of it.
Hersig came over to Joe at one point and told Joe that they’d found a duffel bag with some personal items in the trailer that confirmed that the man Nate shot was Robert Eckhardt, the army nurse accused of mutilations who had gone AWOL. The phone number of the cell phone in the man’s bag matched the phone number Deputy Cook and Sheriff Harvey had pulled off their Caller ID. Hersig said they were going to run the man’s prints through the computer to prove his identification. The extent of his injuries would make a visual ID impossible.
Joe watched as Cam Logue’s body was hustled onto a gurney and loaded into an ambulance, followed by Nurse Bob’s, and as Barnum put together a team of deputies to cross the river and track down Cleve Garrett.
Remarkably, Deena was still alive. The EMTs brought her out from the back bedroom of the Airstream. She was naked except for the bandages wrapped around her belly and legs and a thin white sheet the EMTs had tucked around her. She was conscious, sleepy-looking, probably drugged, Joe assumed. As they carried her on a stretcher toward ambulance number three, she rolled her head to the side and smiled faintly at Joe.
One of the EMTs, whom Joe recognized from the Tuff Montegue crime scene, told a deputy that Deena had spoken to him when they found her inside.
“She said Garrett was experimenting on her, taking off strips of skin. She said she didn’t mind all that much, but she was angry when he screwed up her tattoo. Can you imagine that?”
Deputy Reed came out of the trailer holding a bundle in dark cloth, and someone shined a flashlight on it as the bundle was opened. Steel surgical instruments glinted in the light. Joe recalled Lucy and Sheridan saying something about seeing “silverware” on a cloth in the shack behind the Logues and that the man who chased them away had “Bob” stenciled above the pocket on his jacket. So did the man with half a head who had been zipped up in a body
