Josh knew that this was beyond Streng’s capabilities. He was a nice old guy, probably competent in his day, but whatever was happening was too big for him.
“You wait here for the sheriff, I’ll head over to Sal and Maggie’s place and use their phone.”
“Josh … that deer … it was almost cut it in half. Whatever killed it …”
Josh finished the sentence in his mind:
Just before the electricity went out, the phones throughout Safe Haven began to ring. First one. Then five. Then twenty. Then several hundred, all within a five-minute period. Late-night phone calls usually didn’t mean good news, but every resident who received this one immediately shrugged off any sleepiness and began dialing other residents, per instructions.
Land lines and cells, from old-fashioned rotary ding-a-lings to the modern rock ringtones programmed in by teenagers, echoed out through the night, through the woods, carrying across Big Lake and Little Lake McDonald, fading out and finally mingling with the crickets and owls.
An exodus soon followed, whoops and hollers and horns accompanying vehicles as they headed into town. At long last, prosperity had found its way to Safe Haven, filling the heads of every man, woman, and child with dollar signs.
The celebration would be short-lived.
• • •
Sheriff Ace Streng pulled onto Gold Star Road, the Jeep’s four-wheel drive biting into the sand and gravel surface and leaving tire marks in its wake. His brights were on. So were his undercarriage beams and the hunting spots on the overhead roll bar. All of that wattage, and the light still couldn’t penetrate more than two feet into the forest. These trees were ancient, thick, and they lined the sides of the road, their tops bending over and obscuring the night sky. It was like traveling down a winding, high-arched tunnel.
Streng drove by a house almost entirely hidden by foliage, tried to recall the name of the owners. His mind gave up the answer a mile after he passed. The Kinsels. Snowbirds, gone someplace that didn’t have minus-thirty- degree winters and four feet of snow by January.
“Where are you hiding?” Streng asked himself, scanning ahead for the swirling red lights of Josh’s fire truck. Streng could imagine a whole fleet of helicopters lost in these woods. If daylight never came, they’d never be found. The forest liked to hide things. A plane went missing ten years back—one of those experimental one-seaters flown by some rich moron who hadn’t bothered filing a flight plan—and it had taken a week of continuous searching before they found the wreck, less than two hundred yards from Big Lake McDonald’s east shore. By that time, a family of raccoons had already moved into the cockpit, and an egret had built its nest on the tail section. The coyotes took care of the pilot.
He reached down and rubbed his right calf, then his left one. Shin splints. The pain sometimes acted up when he drove. Every so often he toyed with the notion of seeing a doctor about it but always dismissed that as weakness. As his late father liked to say, “It’s better to have two bad legs than a single healthy one.” And Dad knew that from experience.
His cell rang, and Streng peered down his nose at the number. Mayor Durlock, from Safe Haven. In a town of less than a thousand, a helicopter crash was headline news, and the mayor never missed an opportunity to speak to the press.
“Sheriff? Something wonderful has happened.”
“Not for the people in the helicopter.”
“Helicopter? What? Oh.” Durlock sounded sleepy. Or maybe he’d been drinking. “This is about the lottery.”
“Lottery?” Streng asked. But he was talking to a dead line. No signal. He tried redial, it didn’t work, and he tucked the phone away and concentrated on driving.
Still no sign of Josh, and the road dead-ended in maybe a thousand feet. Streng passed Sal’s property and was reaching for his cell to call the firefighter when he heard the sound.
Having grown up in the Northwoods, Streng knew animal calls. The warning hoot of owls. The howl of timber wolves. The crazy piccolo chorus of the loons. This didn’t sound like anything Streng had ever heard before. It was loud and shrill, but with a gurgling quality to it. Like a woman screaming underwater.
Streng brought the Jeep to a stop and rolled down the windows, his ear facing the forest.
This time it sounded less animalistic, more human. But what could cause a person to make a sound like that? Was it Josh and Erwin, screwing around? And where was it even coming from?
He pulled onto the grass alongside Sal’s house, put the Jeep in park, dug the flashlight out of the glove compartment, and stepped onto the scrub grass. The night was unusually quiet, as if the woods were collectively holding their breath. Streng adjusted the beam for maximum distance, unbuttoned the strap on his Kimber Compact Stainless .45, and walked in the direction of the sound.
That was someone in agony, and you couldn’t fake agony like that. The fire truck was still nowhere to be found. All that lay ahead was Sal’s place.
Reflexively, Streng pulled his sidearm from his holster and thumbed off the safety. He’d been carrying it cocked and locked. Now it was ready to fire.
He moved at a brisk pace, minding his footing but intent on helping the screamer. Streng was old-school, military trained. He kept the flashlight at his hip in a sword grip and his gun before him at chest level. He’d been shown, years ago, a method of locking wrists so both flashlight and pistol were aiming at the same thing, a move favored by cops in the movies. What the movies didn’t show you was the sympathetic limb contractions and hand confusion that occurred while under fire, where combatants would often shine their gun and try to shoot their flashlight. The new moves weren’t always the best moves.
Another scream. Definitely coming from the house. Every light was off, making Sal’s two-story cabin look like the silhouette of a mountain among the trees. Streng directed his beam at the front door, and from a dozen yards away he saw the pry marks on the jamb, the splinters sticking out like witch’s fingers.
Streng tucked the flashlight under his armpit and touched the knob cautiously, as if it were hot. The door opened with a faint creak, and Streng again gripped the flashlight and moved in a crouch as low as his shin splints would allow. The air in the house radiated warmth, and it tingled against his cool skin. The acrid smell of burned popcorn filled his nostrils. The silence seemed total, complete. Not even the click of the furnace or the hum of the refrigerator.
The scream brought Streng back in time, twenty years earlier, to a traffic accident scene. A pedestrian pinned under a trailer truck, his face pressed against the burning hot muffler. They couldn’t move the semi, couldn’t lift the semi, couldn’t do a damn thing until the tow truck came, and as the victim’s face cooked away the screaming became so intense that Streng had actually pulled his gun and considered shooting the poor bastard.
This scream conveyed the same thing; unimaginable pain.
He took the stairs two at a time, calves crying out, jaw set hard, gun steady and leading the charge. The top ended at a hallway. Streng went left, toward the scream, knowing he should announce himself as a police officer, but some instinct, some voice in his subconscious, told him it would be better to use the element of surprise.
Streng stuck his head though the bedroom door, shining his light, gripping his weapon, and he turned out to be the surprised one.
“Hello, Sheriff Streng.”
The intruder’s voice was high, breathy, with a foreign lisp. Streng’s beam spotlighted him, standing next to the bed with a gun to Sal’s head. Sal sat on the edge with his legs over the side, his chin and chest bobbing up and down as if he had an accelerated case of the hiccups. Streng glimpsed something on the mattress next to Sal, something bloody and naked and sprawled out—
