“ Are you afraid of him?”
“ Yes. He’s very bad, very evil.”
“ The town,” J.P. said.
“ Let’s go.”
Keeping the backstop between them and the man across the street, Ann and J.P. walked across the baseball diamond, where the Tampico Pirates played, then the football field, where the Tampico Bullets played. Then they went into the Elm’s section of the park, where the high schoolers went to make out. Exiting the Elms, they found themselves at the corner of Kennedy and Second Avenue.
“ Let’s go by Ken and Dub’s Records and see if they got the new Dylan CD in yet,” J.P. said.
“ I don’t think it’s open.”
“ We could look in the window,” he said.
“ Since when did you start liking Dylan?”
“ I don’t, really,” J.P. said, “but I was gonna buy it for Rick. I’ve been saving up.”
Ann smiled and they started out for the used record store that catered to a diminishing group of people who still preferred vinyl, but they didn’t get far, because J.P. turned for a look behind.
“ Look, he’s coming,” he said. “Over there, by the corner. I don’t think he’s seen us.”
Ann grabbed him by the hand and pulled him into Susan Spencer’s Diner. The only other soul in the restaurant was Jesse Hernandez, the morning cook. He was dressed in kitchen whites, long hair in a bun under a cook’s hat and headphones, his back was facing the door and he was singing at the top of his lungs about being dazed and confused.
Like spies in the night, they walked through the diner, past booths with blood red Naugahyde and into the corridor that led to the back exit, past the women’s, past the men’s, past the pay phone, and out through the open door in back as Lola, the morning waitress, exited the woman’s restroom, never knowing that Ann and J.P. had passed by.
Ann looked left, then right. They were in the alley between First and Second Avenues. The east side was dotted with dumpsters and trash cans situated near the rear doors of Second Avenue’s merchants. The west side fronted on the garages and fenced backyards of the modest homes on First.
“ Is he still coming?” J.P. asked.
“ I think so,” Ann said.
Then they heard the front door of the diner crash open.
“ Is there anybody here?” Someone yelled in a raspy voice.
“ Nobody’s been here for the last half hour,” Lola answered.
“ Are you sure?” The raspy voice boomed loud.
“ We’re going over,” Ann whispered. She hoisted J.P. up to the top of a five foot brick fence. He grabbed on, rolled over the top and dropped into the yard on the other side with Ann right behind him.
Ann took J.P. by the hand and led him across the backyard to the back door of a two story house. Checking the door, she found it unlocked and they quietly went inside. Ann locked the door behind them. They heard the sound of a shower and a woman’s voice humming a tune Ann wasn’t familiar with. Putting her index finger to her lips, indicating to J.P. to be quiet, Ann looked through flower print curtains and saw the man coming over the fence.
“ He’s still coming,” she whispered, taking J.P.’s hand again and leading him through a modern kitchen, then a dining room, then a sitting room, then an entrance way and finally out the front door as they heard the man banging on the back.
Once they were out the front they turned left and sprinted down First. Without slowing, they crossed Kennedy, back into the Elms, back across the football field and the baseball diamond, back onto Seaview Avenue, and back up the hill toward home.
Once they were back at Judy’s Ann felt safe, at least for a few minutes, she told herself. She was exhausted, the cancer stealing her strength. She had to lay down, just for a few seconds. She literally fell on the sofa.
“ Are you all right?” J.P. asked.
“ I’m fine, I just need a little rest.”
“ Okay.
J.P. settled back in his mother’s favorite chair, remote in hand, and channel surfed, changing channels at least three times a minute, but he couldn’t get that Ragged Man out of his mind. How could Ann rest at a time like this? She must really be tired. He didn’t want to think about it, so he decided to get something to eat, but before he got to the refrigerator, he heard an animal sound from outside. He pulled a kitchen chair over to the sink, climbed up and looked out the window and saw the black shape of a big dog slide into the bushes that grew between the garage and the house.
J.P. loved to play in there.
Like a flash he was off the chair and through the kitchen to tell Ann. Halfway to the sofa he heard the scratching at the front door and screamed, “Annie, something’s outside!”
“ What?” she said, nerves taught.
“ Listen,” he whispered.
Ann heard the scratching at the door.
“ It’s the Ghost Dog,” she said. “It belongs to the Ragged Man.”
“ What are we gonna do?”
“ Sit tight for a second,” she said.
For the longest minute in her life, Ann sat, J.P. by her side, listening to the scratching and scraping at the door. Then whatever was out there growled a low rattling, rasping whisper, barely heard by the duo inside. “Smell-your-fear.” A hideous phlegm-filled gurgle.
“ That’s the Ragged Man,” Ann whispered.
J.P. shuddered.
Ann’s adrenaline was flowing before her feet hit the carpet, her racing mind taking her back to the night with the dingoes in Australia. She was afraid then and she was now, afraid that fear meant death and she wasn’t ready.
“ Are you okay, Annie?”
She couldn’t answer, because she wasn’t okay, her hands were trembling, her skin was clammy with sweat and a searing pain was ripping through her chest.
She knew the end was near. She wished she could see Rick and his beautiful smile one last time, but instead all she saw was the glint of the summer sun reflected into her eyes from the silver, shiny blade of the Jim Bowie knife the Ragged Man was holding up for her to see, just outside the window.
J.P. picked up the phone. “Annie, the phone doesn’t work,” he whispered and she heard the fear in his voice. “Someone cut the line.” He looked Ann in the eyes and she saw the boy fight the fear away. “I’m going for help.” He dashed to the door, slid the bolt and screamed when he saw the Bowie knife sitting on the front porch. Then he jumped over it and ran.
Jaspinder Singh watched as Sheriff Sturgees cradled the phone, then turned to Rick Gordon and Judy Donovan. The phone call had done something to him. The straight shoulders now sagged. The hard set of his jaw was gone. His glaring eyes were now dim. In thirty seconds the call had transformed him from a steaming battleship to a lumbering barge. He started to say something, then stopped. He turned away from Judy as he fished out some bills from a shirt pocket and faced Jaspinder Singh behind the counter.
“ Can I have a pack of Camels?” he asked, handing over the money.
“ It’s that bad?” Singh knew the sheriff only smoked when he was severely upset.
“ It can’t get any worse, Mr. Singh,” the sheriff said. It was plain for them all to see that the Sheriff was suffering some kind of mental anguish. He was fighting hard to control the tremor running through his hands and it took him a few seconds to get the pack open, and a few more to get a cigarette from the pack to his mouth, and still a few more to get it lit.
“ They’re here,” he said, exhaling a cloud of blue-gray smoke as an ambulance was parking out front.
“ Isn’t it a little late for that?” Rick said.
“ We don’t have an undertaker, don’t even have a morgue. They’ll transport both bodies to old Doc Willets in Palma. Doc will do the autopsies and sign the death certificates.”
They watched as the two attendants rolled Gundry’s body onto a stretcher with no more concern for his earthly remains than they’d have for a dog in the gutter.
After they were gone and it was just the four of them again, the Sheriff again looked like he’d swallowed something bad, then Jaspinder Singh thought he’d cry and he fought the tears as he listened to the Sheriff tell Judy Donovan that her brother-in-law, his wife and daughter had been found dead in the Wetlands.