He pressed his thumb on the transmit button of his walkie-talkie. “Five minutes,” he said.
Each of the deputies responded with “all clears,” and Ruston began to relax.
Then he caught a glimpse of a ragged-looking guy with a shaggy head of hair on the other side of the Birthday Club float, and felt a shot of adrenaline squirt into his bloodstream. An instant later he was running, trying to keep the man in sight, dodging students, tubas, clowns, and bicycles.
He made an end run around the back of the drugstore’s float, which appeared to be intending to bribe the judges with hot dogs this year, but by the time he got to the Birthday Club, the man was nowhere to be seen.
Slowing his pace close enough to a walk that it wouldn’t unnecessarily alarm anyone, Ruston moved along the only route the man could have taken while keeping the float between himself and the sheriff.
There!
He had him now. He sped his gait just enough to close in on the man without panicking anybody else, but just as he was about to lay his heavily practiced, if rarely used, “law enforcement” hand on the man’s shoulder, followed by a spin that would end with the man pinned against the wall of the bank, the man turned around.
Fred Rawlins.
The manager of the very bank Ruston had been about to slam him up against.
Rawlins was wearing a shaggy wig and rags for some float — probably designed by his over-the-hill hippie wife — the point of which Ruston was certain would be lost on nearly everyone except Mrs. Fred, who had changed her name to Sunbeam Moonrise twenty years earlier, and had steadfastly refused to allow people to shorten it to “Sunny,” thus relegating herself to being known as “Mrs. Fred” ever since.
Fred himself now smiled and held out his hand. “Hell of an event again this year, Rusty,” he said, waving exactly the kind of small American flag his wife hated. “See you at the barbecue?”
Rusty Ruston shook the proffered hand, nodded, then stepped back as Fred climbed aboard his wife’s float, which seemed to be trying to draw attention to the plight of the homeless. Sunbeam Moonrise had struck again, and Ruston wondered what Rawlins’s superiors in Madison would say when they heard their bank had sponsored a float honoring the people they wouldn’t be caught dead loaning money to.
Not my problem, Ruston decided. His problem was to figure out some way to relax a little; he’d nearly spun the bank manager around and slammed him up against a wall, and he couldn’t stay that edgy all day or he’d wind up hurting someone.
He had to calm down.
He had to trust his deputies to be his eyes and his ears.
He checked his watch.
Ten o’clock on the dot.
The band was lined up, and the drum major held his baton high. He gave a short blow on his whistle, and the band began to march out of the parking lot, the drum major strutting smartly. As the band turned the corner onto Main Street, they broke into an enthusiastic rendition of “Strike Up the Band” that was only slightly out of pitch.
The parade was officially under way, and, as always, the crowd began cheering with far more enthusiasm than Ruston thought the parade truly merited.
But that, of course, wasn’t the point.
The point was for everyone to have a good time, and Ruston decided that the best way he, too, could have a good time would be to go back and stand next to Misty Kennedy while she stood at the curb with her clipboard and stopwatch, trying to control the pace of the floats. The drivers were getting themselves under way either when they felt like it or when they got their engines running, whichever came last.
Following the band was Summer Fun’s “Land of the Free” float, with Merrill Brewster’s daughter Marci as the Statue of Liberty, wearing a costume that was far better than any ten-year-old Miss Liberty had worn in years and standing proudly in the center of what was apparently supposed to be some kind of immigrant ship.
With any luck at all, Ruston decided, the rest of the day would turn out just as beautifully as Marci Brewster’s costume.
Finally, as “Land of the Free” cruised slowly by him with only a slight list to starboard, Rusty Ruston began to relax.
Chapter 32
LOGAN MOVED THE brush away from the cave entrance and peered out, his rheumy eyes squinting against the sun that had risen high in the sky while he slept. He listened while he waited for his eyes to adjust to the glare, holding so still that even his breathing was silent. Only when both his eyes and his ears told him there was no danger lurking nearby did he finally wriggle out of the cave’s narrow entrance to stretch his cramped muscles in the great expanse of the morning.
As the aching of the night began to ease, he crouched low, once again listening.
Nothing to be heard but a pair of jays, quarreling over some morsel of food they’d found.
Rising, he began making his way quietly down the slope toward his cabin, moving slowly, constantly casting his eyes and ears in every direction, searching the woods for any sign of men waiting to take him away.
Nearly an hour later he finally reached his goal.
The one-winged crow was perched on a stump outside the cabin door, and the moment it caught sight of him, it began bobbing madly up and down, cawing and flapping its wing.
“Shhh,” Logan hissed, but the bird paid no attention, its scolding far from over. As the man headed for the door, the bird hopped off the stump and scuttled to the cabin, pushing through the door as soon as Logan cracked it open. As it disappeared into the cabin, the bird fell silent, and Logan felt a grim foreboding.
He pushed the door wider, and the sunlight flooded in.
His dog lay dead in a pool of black, sticky blood, his chest blasted open.
For more than a full minute Logan stood silently in the doorway, his eyes fixed on the corpse of what only yesterday had been his best friend.
A trick, he told himself. Has to be some kinda trick. Who’d want to shoot a harmless old dog?
But even as he formed the words in his mind, he knew they weren’t true. “No,” Logan whispered, finally moving into the cabin and dropping to his knees. He lifted the cold, limp corpse and held it to his chest, cradling and rocking the remains of the animal as gently as if it were a baby. “Why’d they do that?” he murmured. “What’d they think you could do to them?” He buried his face in the dog’s fur and breathed in the pungent smell of the only real friend he’d known in years. “I’m so sorry. So sorry.”
Tears began to stream down Logan’s face, and his gentle rocking turned violent. A moment later, still clutching the bloody corpse of the dog to his breast, his balance failed and he was rolling on the floor, his grief for the loss of his one true friend igniting the worries and fears and terrors that had been building up inside him ever since he’d discovered that Dr. Darby’s demons had once more been set loose.
And now they’d killed his dog.
His poor, harmless, deaf and crippled old dog.
For a long time — he had no idea how long — Logan lay on the floor, sobbing. But slowly the emotional storm faded, and at last he sat up and wiped his sleeve across his face.
Everything, he knew, had changed.
Everything was wrong.