“I wouldn’t open them,” Amy said as he headed for the door.
He turned. “And why’s that, lady?”
“It’s dangerous stuff.”
“What is?”
“It’s… a new type of explosive.”
He walked back to his desk. “From where?”
“Paradise,” Gerd said.
“Shut up, Clyde.” He looked at them both, then ground out his cigarette in the brass ashtray and picked up the telephone. “C’mon, c’mon,” he muttered. “Mary Beth,” he said at last, “yeah I know what time it is. Business. Get me the state police in Huntsville.”
He waited, staring at Amy. She stared back.
The operator was talking. “It’s dead? Then try Birmingham,” he said. Cradling the receiver in his shoulder, he lit another cigarette. “It’s ringing,” he told Jake. “What the… there’s no lines out? Hey, Mary Beth, what’s going on?”
He put the phone down, walked across to Amy. “There’s someone out there messin’ with us, Bonnie. Ain’t there?”
She looked at the floor.
He grabbed the front of her blouse and yanked her to her feet in one violent jerk. She felt a moment of nerve-tearing pain, then the warm wetness of blood flowing out of the reopened wound.
“How many?” he was asking.
Gerd leaped to his feet, but Jake prodded him hard in the stomach with a rifle barrel and sent him sprawling back across the bench.
“Two,” she said.
“You lying bitch,” he said, shoving her back onto the bench. “Jake, take him into the cells and stay with him. Jesse, take her upstairs.”
“She’s bleeding, Jake.”
“So what?”
“Shall I clean her up?”
“You behave yourself. Just make sure she doesn’t go anywhere.”
“Where’ll you be, Duane?” Jake asked.
“Right here, with a rifle pointed at the door. It’ll be light in a couple of hours, and then we’ll go out and get whoever it is.”
Paul dropped from the telephone pole the last few feet to the grass, then sat on his haunches for a few moments, a shadow among shadows, trying to ignore the splitting pain in the back of his head. On the other side of the road the breeze rustled the pines, but the night was empty of any other sound.
He’d had two pieces of luck: return to consciousness and the wirecutters still being in his pocket. And perhaps the location too. Locust Forks — population 896, according to the town sign — was only about half a mile from end to end and considerably less wide than it was long. He’d found no road entering the town from the east, and the hill he was now skirting seemed to rule out access from the west. But he had to make sure.
He clambered down a bank, waded across a stagnant ditch and up the other side, walking into a barbed-wire fence at the top. He cut himself a hole to get through and removed a four-foot length just in case.
The moon had almost set now, turning orange and bathing the buildings to his right in a ghostly luminescence. He trotted across the field, slipped, and fell headlong, catching the barbed wire against his thigh and burying his face in something that smelled like rotting cabbage. He lay there for a moment, silently laughing at himself. “Two eagles” Schellenberg had called them, and here was one of them tripping over vegetables in the dark.
He moved on, crossing two more fields and cutting his way through two more fences before he reached his starting point at the town’s northern end. Just the one road, then. And they’d be doing no talking on the telephone. But there wasn’t that much of the night left, there were at least three of them, and they had the guns.
He squatted down and cut the barbs off the last foot of each end of the wire, then twisted those ends into loops. It wasn’t very flexible, but it would have to do. He began edging his way down the street, keeping to the darker shadows of the western sidewalk.
Jesse laid Amy out on the sheriff’s bed and disappeared. She heard running water through the adjoining door; presumably it was the sheriff’s kitchen. It was extremely hot, or had the wound made her feverish? She could feel the sweat pouring down her face.
He came back with a bowl of hot water and what looked like a piece of bed sheeting, gently opened up her blouse, and carefully wiped away the blood from around the bullet gash. Then he just sat there, the bloodied sheet in his hand, staring at the space of bare flesh between her belt and her brassiere.
“Thank you,” she said, trying to lift herself up, trying not to let fear creep into her voice.
He helped her forward, and for a second she thought she’d misjudged him, but his hands wrestled with the hook on her brassiere. Successful, he pushed her back down, and like a little boy peeking under a stone, he eased the cups off her breasts with the palms of his hands. Looking into his eyes, she found an innocent evil that terrified her far more than any sign of lust.
He didn’t touch her for a long time, just stared as if transfixed by her naked breasts, the droplets of sweat rolling down between them. Then he reached out a hand and stroked a nipple with the edge of a thumb. Not once did he look at her face. Leaning forward, he put his mouth around the other nipple, sucking gently, his eyes closed.
She squirmed violently, felt the blood flow again.
He let go, looking horrified, and held the sheeting to staunch the renewed flow and made a clucking sound in his throat.
Paul stood on the side of the street opposite the jail, examining the lighted sheriff’s office. The lights seemed to be on in every room, up and down, but in ten minutes he’d seen only one hint of movement, someone upstairs carrying a bowl. It didn’t look very inviting. Someone must have picked up the phone and put two and two together. They were waiting for him.
He crossed the street in a wide semicircle, avoiding the patch of light thrown from the windows and open door, and worked his way around to the back of the building. The lights were on there, too, throwing the shadows of the window bars across the remains of an old tractor. The back door was locked.
He made his way back down the side, but stopped when he heard Gerd whistling the first notes of “Lili Marlene,” which seemed to come from a point only feet away through the clapboard wall. The whistling was swiftly followed by a grunted “Shut up” and the sound of footsteps.
“Keep the bastard quiet, Jake,” another voice said, this time from the right, toward the street.
Which meant the third guy was probably upstairs, and probably with Amy. Stupid, Paul thought. They shouldn’t have separated themselves. He looked up, then remembered the rain barrel and pipe at the rear.
Amy had never felt so much like screaming. If he’d said anything, just one word, it might have been bearable, but the silence, the look of schoolboy curiosity on the middle-aged face, even his concern over her wound…
He unbuckled her belt, breathing with little gasps, a small trace of spittle forming at the corner of his mouth.
“If you take off the handcuffs, I could help,” she said, fighting to keep her voice steady.
He didn’t even seem to hear. She felt him tugging at her skirt, pulling it below her knees, felt a drop of moisture fall on her bare thigh. He was dribbling uncontrollably, a glistening of tears in his eyes.
She closed hers, heard an inhuman gurgle, and almost fainted. But suddenly the hands disappeared, his head jerked back violently, blood spurting as Paul wrenched the barbed wire tight across his throat. It seemed to go on silently forever, then he let the body down onto the bed and lifted her up, and she sobbed into his shoulder. “Paul, Paul…”
“Ssshhh,” he murmured in her ear, and they sat for a moment in silence, her body quivering as the tension dissolved. Then he stood her up, pulled up her skirt and fastened the belt, replaced her brassiere and buttoned her blouse with a doctor’s detachment. He went through the dead man’s pockets, but there were no keys for her handcuffs.