Revenant (25 page)

“A lot. The gist of it is that if we plan to stop Manning by waiting for his body to decompose, we’re going to have a lot more corpses on our hands. Apparently one of the capacities of the stone is that it slows the decomposition process of the revenant.”

“That’s not good.”

“It gets worse.”

“What could be worse than that?”

“There’s no way to stop him. Mrs. Running Bear told me the only way to control a revenant is to control its master. There’s never been a case to her knowledge of a revenant gaining possession of the stone and thus controlling its own actions. To top it off, Manning’s brain function is deteriorating rapidly, making him more aggressive and unmanageable, and he is basically unstoppable because you can’t kill him since he’s already dead.”

An icy feeling of dread washed over Sharon. This was far worse than the situation last fall. At least when the renegade spirit was terrorizing Paskagankee, Professor Dye had had a plan to stop the madness. This time there was no plan. Only madness. “What’s the good news?” she said weakly.

“Be sure to tell me if you think of any.”

“What do you suppose the odds are Earl hasn’t killed Brett Parker yet?”

“After talking to Mrs. Running Bear, I’d have to say slim. Maybe if Manning thinks Parker can help him he’ll keep him alive, but it sounded to me like any ability for rational thought Manning still has will be gone soon. He’s going to turn into a mindless killing machine if he hasn’t already. Those were Mrs. Running Bear’s words, by the way, not mine.”

“And we don’t know where he is.”

“Nope. He could be anywhere within a fifty mile radius of this town by now, and it’s widening rapidly. I’m going to have to alert law enforcement agencies all over the state, and I don’t have a clue what I’m going to say to them. Who’s going to believe a reanimated corpse is running around Maine killing people? Someone’ll send a psych team up here and take me away to a rubber room, which may not be such a bad idea along about now.”

Sharon’s heart went out to him. Despite the fact she had ended their relationship, she loved Mike McMahon and always would, and the situation he found himself in right now could not help but end badly. He had beaten himself up endlessly over the death of a little girl during a hostage standoff a couple of years ago in Revere, Massachusetts, and then his career had nearly ended last fall during the Wally Court mess. He clearly recognized this situation was spiraling out of control, and if dozens of lives—or more—were lost in this situation, she felt he might never recover. “What are you going to do?”

She pictured him sighing and shaking his head. “Stick to the plan, I guess. I’ll have Gordie send a BOLO out to all law enforcement agencies in Maine—maybe all of New England just to be safe—and then finish securing the murder scene and hand the scene over to Pete for a while when he gets here. Then I’ll drive up to the hospital to interrogate Raven Tahoma. Maybe something will shake loose that will help us get this thing under control, or at least narrow down where Manning may have gone.”

The plan sounded pretty thin to Sharon, and she knew if she recognized that fact, Mike must as well, but she didn’t mention it. What would be the point? “Good luck,” she said glumly.

“Thanks. There is one small thing to be thankful for,” Mike added.

“I can’t imagine what it might be.”

“At least you’re not in danger. It seems pretty unlikely a lunatic Earl Manning would show up at Mercy Hospital in Orono. I know you’re not happy being stuck there, but it’s a load off my mind knowing you’re safe.”

Sharon gazed out the windshield as the trees whipped by on the narrow road. She hadn’t been paying much attention to the deserted thoroughfare as she talked and realized she was once again driving dangerously fast. She eased her foot off the gas and the cruiser began to slow.

“Uh, yeah,” she said, feeling guilt and shame for misleading him. She was lying not just to the man she claimed to love, but to her direct superior as well. “Right. Safe.”

Mike didn’t seem to notice. “I’d better go,” he said. “It’s time to begin making a fool of myself and my department around the state.”

“Okay. I know I said it before, but good luck.” She wanted desperately to end the conversation with, “I love you,” but she had thrown away the right to do so, hadn’t she? “Talk to you later,” she said instead, and disconnected the call.

Sharon tossed the phone back down on the seat. She was miserable. The Earl Manning she had known in the past may not have been capable of cold-blooded murder, but that individual was disappearing if he wasn’t gone already. He was devolving into a killer. An unstoppable killer.

She rounded a corner, anxious to arrive at the crime scene in Paskagankee, anxious to offer an in-person apology to Mike for ignoring his orders, and slowed instinctively, stepping on the brake harder than she intended, stunned at the sight directly in front of the car in this deeply forested, remote location still miles from Paskagankee, miles from
anywhere.

Walking along the side of the road—stumbling, really, staggering even—with his back to the cruiser, was a man dressed in rags, skinny to the point of emaciation, clothes tattered and filthy, fluttering in the light breeze. The man seemed to be struggling to match the pace set by another man, who, while dressed in much nicer clothing, was also filthy and covered in blood.

Sharon slowed further, now moving forward at barely more than a crawl. The rumble of the cruiser’s engine finally alerted the trailing man to her presence and he turned and grinned, and Sharon gasped in shock.

It was Earl Manning.

39

Earl had guessed he wouldn’t have to wait long for a car to pass by, and he was right. He had lived his entire life—and death, now that he thought about it—in Paskagankee, haunting these out-of-the-way back roads and fire lanes as a drunken teen and impaired adult, and one thing he knew for sure was that even way out here in the middle of nowhere, in the mole on God’s butt-cheek, as he liked to think of his home town, people with nothing better to do would be out driving in the afternoon. Nighttime was a different story, but as long as the sun was out, townspeople would want to go to the store or to the movies or to any damned place.

He turned at the sound of the engine noise and instinctively took a couple of steps back when he saw the blue and white Paskagankee Police cruiser moving slowly along the crumbling pavement behind him. A lifetime of run-ins with the law, drunk-driving busts and petty scrapes with authority, had burrowed into his consciousness, and his first reaction upon seeing the Pigmobile was to look for an escape route.

Then he remembered. He was untouchable. He couldn’t be killed—Max the Fucking Devil Acton had taken care of that problem quite effectively—and he couldn’t be hurt. Hell, even if they shot his skinny ass, all that would happen would be he’d get knocked for a loop and another ventilation hole would open up in his body. Not ideal as far as aesthetics were concerned, but Earl had never been too concerned about appearance even in the best of times, and his current situation certainly didn’t qualify as the best of anything.

So he smiled, baring his teeth at the pig driving up behind him, glancing at his traveling companion to make sure the software geek didn’t get any bright ideas about using the distraction to take off running. No worries there. Brett Parker stood rooted to the spot, staring at the police cruiser like a starving man eying a turkey dinner. For a genius, the guy sure didn’t have much common sense. Parker should have known a fucking cop wasn’t going to be able to help him.

Oh, well. It was too bad for the geek, but good for Earl because the genius’s stupidity would make him easier to control. He swiveled his head to look back at the cruiser and lost his balance, stumbling to his knees before scrambling quickly back to his feet. His body was definitely becoming less coordinated, and it was getting
much
harder to think straight.

His brain felt fuzzy and confused, like it did when he was in the middle of a long bender, only instead of feeling mellow and happy like he did when he drank, he felt an undefined sense of anger and aggression building.
That’s not surprising,
he thought.
I’ve been killed, had my heart torn out of my fucking body. Who wouldn’t be a little twitchy?

Earl stared hard at the cruiser, which had now come to a complete stop about fifteen feet away. His blossoming anger vanished—for now—and his smile returned when he managed to peer through the glare of the sun on the windshield and identify its lone occupant. Seated behind the wheel, staring out at him with wide blue eyes and her perfect angelic face, was his old drinking pal and one-time fuck buddy Sharon Dupont.

Earl heard himself cackle like a goddamned loon as he considered the possibility of expanding his little group to include the Paskagankee PD officer. He had only slept with her the once, back when she was a seventeen year old high school junior trashed on cheap beer, so desperate to get high or drunk that she would screw anyone or do anything.

He knew she had straightened her life out—Paskagankee was a small town; everyone was in everyone else’s business—and was now living with the police chief. Of course, “living with” might be a bit of an exaggeration now that Earl had pitched the loser head-first into freezer and then slammed the lid.

So the chief was dead, or would be soon, which meant Little Miss Officer Goody Two-Shoes sitting there in the cruiser would be back on the market. Earl wondered if his pecker would still work since he was technically dead and decided there was only one way to find out.

He fixed Parker with a stare—easy enough to do, since the damn fool was still gazing longingly at the police car—then began strutting toward the cruiser, wondering if Dupont carried as many pleasant memories of their night together as he did. He smiled. He would grab her around the neck, force her into the back seat along with Parker, then drive the cruiser somewhere nice and private where he could renew acquaintances with—

—The cruiser’s door ripped open, rocking the vehicle on its springs. The little police chick leaped out of the car and took cover behind the door, which she had opened with such force it bounced back and hit her in the side. A hand appeared in the V-shaped space between the door and the car’s body, and the voice he remembered so fondly from so many years ago commanded, “Stop right there, Earl!”

And Earl stopped right there.

Not because he was worried about getting shot—apparently Miss Law and Order was unaware of his new reality and thought threatening him with a gun was a strategy that might be effective—but rather, because he knew there was no way he could control the software geek at the same time he was locked in a battle with a cop who was busy filling him full of holes.

There was no possible way Parker would be stupid enough to stay standing on the side of the road when the gunfire started, and as much as Earl wanted to find out if dead people could have sex, he couldn’t afford to take the risk of forfeiting Parker’s money and technical savvy just for a little corpse nookie.

So stopped in his tracks and then began backing toward Parker, knowing there was no way in hell the young woman who had once screwed him in the front seat of his truck would now shoot him in cold blood. He took three shambling steps before she shouted, “I told you to stop. Now you freeze right where you are!”

He grinned at her for the third time, then turned and strode quickly toward Parker, who finally seemed to realize the cavalry wasn’t going to be doing a whole lot of saving of the day today.

The software geek turned to run, but before he could take two steps Earl was on him. Earl wrapped his right arm around Parker’s throat, careful to cradle the all-important box containing his beating heart in the crook of his left. He pulled his gun hand back toward his chest, squeezing Parker’s throat closed, while at the same time twisting his body to the right, turning his prisoner into a human shield.

He straightened and faced the chick cop, who was still screaming something at him. He had tuned her out just like he tuned out his Ma when she told him to wash the dishes or pick up his dirty socks or stop farting in the middle of the living room. “Looks like we got us a standoff,” he rumbled, cutting her off in mid-harangue, loosening his grip on Parker’s throat just enough to allow the man a bit of air.

“Just calm down, Earl, nobody needs to get hurt today,” Dupont called out, and Earl laughed.

“A little late for that, don’t you think? I’m a walking corpse, I gave that fucking devil Max Acton what he had coming to him, and I suffocated your boyfriend in a freezer, you think for one goddamned second I’m worried about
anyone getting hurt?”
Earl’s voice rose steadily in pitch as his fury returned, rushing back like a hurricane.

“Chief McMahon is fine,” claimed Dupont. “He’s unharmed. And maybe Acton
did
get what he deserved, maybe it
was
a case of self-defense. But there will be no possible defense for harming an innocent hostage, no justification at all. Why don’t you just drop your gun and let Mr. Parker go and we can sit down and talk about it?”

“Just like that? Really? I drop my gun and we all come together in a search for truth and justice? Maybe sing
Kumbayah
while we’re at it? Because ain’t you forgetting something, Sugar-britches?”

‘What’s that?”

“I’m fucking dead! Where’s the truth and justice for me?”

“Earl, listen to me. Come with me and we’ll figure something out, I promise, but nothing’s going to come from us standing here in the middle of nowhere pointing guns at each other.”

“Pointing guns at each other? But that’s not really the situation, is it, sweetheart? Because you’re pointing a gun at me, but I’m pointing a gun at
him.”
Earl released his chokehold on Parker and raised Mike McMahon’s Glock until the barrel was pressed against his hostage’s temple. The man whimpered and Earl laughed savagely.

“So if you think about it,” he continued, “I hold all the cards and you hold none.”