Dark Specter

“It’s me,” said Joe Quinlan.

“Jesus, almost blew you away!”

“Two of us should go. That way one of us might make it.”

“I don’t believe this,” muttered the sheriff.

“It don’t need you to believe it,” Quinlan replied.

They had almost reached the woods when Griffiths stumbled on something. Another body, a guy in his forties this time, short but solidly built. He had a blond mustache and a ponytail and that was about all you could tell, because the whole back of his head wasn’t there.

“Ah, fuck it,” said Quinlan.

He stood up.

“Get down!” yelled Griffiths.

Joe Quinlan kept on walking. The sheriff wasn’t his boss. When he reached the trees, he started to run, dodging and weaving, feeling a thrill he hadn’t experienced for years, not since he was a boy playing war games up at English Camp with the Whitney kids and Lorne Fowler. It was fun! He tore through the woods, emerging on the trail about twenty yards from the pier. Only then did it occur to him that this wasn’t a game.

He backed into the trees again and worked his way down beside the path. He could see the pier now, the two boats riding at their moorings and the dead man. If this had been a trap, these were the jaws. He stayed there for a full five minutes by his watch. There had been no further firing back in the clearing. Then he stepped out on to the trail and strolled down to the pier. There was no point in hurrying. If there was anyone up there in the trees, they’d get him anyway.

He climbed over the police boat into the fire launch moored alongside. Sheriff had some kind of smart radio he wouldn’t know how to operate. Quinlan switched on the set and sent out an “Officer Down” call, adding that they’d found two bodies and were under fire. No one had actually been hit, but he wanted armed backup, and he wanted it now. If these guys were going to play hardball, let them play the pros.

Thirty minutes later, Sleight Island was thick with cops. State troopers, a SWAT team from Seattle, units from Skagit County and Bellingham, even a squad of MPs from the Navy airbase at Oak Harbor. A helicopter hovered overhead, pouring a cone of brilliant light down on to the clearing.

In the meantime, Pete and Lorne, the two deputies, had split up and circled around the remains of the hall to see what they could find. Joe Quinlan was about to offer to join them when he realized that would be uncool. He’d already upstaged the cops by volunteering to go to the boat and call HQ. He hadn’t even been thinking, but they had. He was in Vietnam, they thought. He figures he’s the hot-shit jungle warrior and we’re just a couple of farm boys.

Actually, nothing had been further from Quinlan’s mind. He hadn’t been trying to make anyone look bad, he’d just done what felt good. But he could see it from their point of view, and sat tight while they loped off through the bush with their.38s drawn, wagging their tails around like they were playing flag football. Quinlan prayed to God some guy out there wouldn’t blow their well-meaning asses over Orcas before they even figured out what they were doing wrong.

Ten minutes later, Pete Green was back, white-faced as a kid whose Halloween has turned bad on him.

“Another guy dead up there!” he exclaimed, pointing to the hillside. “Stripped down to his underwear. Jesus, made me sick to look at him!”

The five men crouched down, scanning the darkness for signs of movement, alert to every rustle in the surrounding undergrowth, trying to shut out the sporadic unnerving moans which emerged from the burned-out structure of the hall.

“I better go take a look,” said Darrell Griffiths.

Pete Green went with him. Joe Quinlan kind of tagged along. They found the corpse right behind one of the outbuildings. He was a big guy, over six feet tall, with a long beard divided into miniature pigtails looped together with some kind of silver threads. A ring in one nostril dangled suggestively over the bloody ruin of his skull, which had been dismantled with a brute force that even Quinlan found sickening. Mostly because it reminded him of other times, other deaths.

“Looks like someone shot him from behind,” Griffiths remarked, as though this wasn’t obvious.

“From about a foot away,” Quinlan added.

Then they heard the siren of the first backup team to arrive, and returned to the others. Lorne Fowler was back. He’d found a body too, on the far side of the clearing. This one had been shot in the chest, just like the guy down by the pier.

An hour later, with overwhelming force on their side and all the equipment and backup they needed, they still hadn’t found the shooter. The cleared area around the burned-out hall had been searched meticulously, as well as all the smaller buildings that had survived the blaze. They had located the source of the unnerving moans, a girl in her teens with a broken leg and severe burns lying in the dirt to one side of the charred hall. She was airlifted to the hospital in Bellingham by medevac helicopter along with another woman and a man, both of them suffering from third-degree burns.

Other than that, the search yielded only corpses. Some had been hauled from the wreckage of the hall, burned beyond recognition. Others were scattered outside the doorway, apparently shot down as they had tried to flee.

None of the survivors was in a condition to fire a gun, and no weapons were found anywhere near them. The conclusion was obvious. The person who had loosed off those shots after Griffiths’s warning had slipped away into the woods and was still at large. It was impossible to search the whole island until daybreak, but the sheriff wasn’t worried about the delay. Members of the SWAT team had secured the perimeter of the clearing, preventing any further threat to the safety of the law enforcement personnel on the ground, and there was no place the guy could go. Let him shiver alone in the dark. They’d pick him up the next day at their leisure.

There might well be more bodies in the burned wreckage of the hall, but that too could wait. Helicopters cost money, and the taxpayers of the county were going to get a stiff enough bill for the night’s operation as it was. Griffiths had the site sealed off with tape, and arranged for the loan of a set of mounted floodlights and a generator from the state. The Coast Guard agreed to provide a vessel with sleeping accommodation and communications facilities. Everyone was pulling together, the way they always did when things got tough. Griffiths was just beginning to think he might get to bed that night after all when one of the SWAT personnel called in to report intruders.

“Is he armed?” asked Griffiths.

“One of them is.”

“How many are there?”

“Two. No, wait…”

Joe Quinlan stood beside the sheriff, staring starkly up at the helicopter spraying light like some deadly defoliant.

“Use your discretion,” Griffiths told the SWAT man curtly.

Quinlan was peering toward the edge of the clearing, beyond the water tank on its metal trestle, his eyes narrowed. The helicopter blades whopped monotonously overhead. Then he started to run.

“Hold your fire!” shouted Griffiths into the radio. “One of our guys is …”

He broke off. What the fuck was Quinlan doing? Sprinting up the trail as if his life depended on it, toward the figures who had emerged from the woods. He reached them, turned and walked with them down the trail.

“Joe’s with them,” Griffiths told the men scattered around the clearing. “Hold your fire.”

The policemen waited, looking toward the three figures moving toward them. No, four. A child had detached itself from the grasp of one of the adults and was walking between them, holding their hands. Joe Quinlan walked to the right of the group, a little apart. They came steadily forward down the trail into the scorching circle of light, staring at the semicircle of armed men, who stared back.

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