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Coven at World's End
Thirteen
Lieutenant Farrell Gant didn't have the slightest clue as to the
cause of the outbreaks of violence in Oak Grove. He sat in a borrowed
office of a police station hardly adequate to the task of securing one of
the larger high schools of his native Boston and thumbed through local
crime statistics. More crime had been committed during the current twelve
hours than in all the previous year, murder included. Most of the trouble
was taking the form of felony assault and domestic abuse, and it was
damned strange.
Captain Vance Sherrod stuck his head in the door. "Off your ass,
Gant. Let's go out and get our hands dirty."
Gant followed dutifully. The station seemed quiet enough on the way through.
A few too many phones were ringing. Outside, the night seemed peaceful as
well. But Gant could still feel the tension in the air.
Sherrod was already in the car and cranking the engine. He dropped it
in gear before Gant had pulled the door closed. "Damn, Captain, where's
the fire?"
"I wanna have a look at the killings before they move the bodies. And
we got a kid threatening suicide. I told the locals about your magic
charm in soothing the soul of the savage beast."
"You almost got me shot the last time you volunteered my services."
Sherrod looked over at him and grinned. "He missed, didn't he?
Besides, kids in these small towns don't have access to shit-loads of
drugs and guns. She's gonna jump."
"She? A kid?"
"Twelve qualifies as kid, wouldn't you say?"
Gant was startled and more than a bit alarmed by the development.
"You're putting me on. Twelve-year-olds don't jump."
"What the hell. Maybe she knows how to fly."
Gant felt a surge of self-defensive anger. "What's with this town?"
"That's why I brought you with. You tell me."
The call had come in before midnight. Some little burg off the beaten
path had called for help, speaking wildly of an unseen invasion. Captain
Sherrod had been assigned the case, and Sherrod had been given his choice
of a partner. Both he and Gant had worked homicide in the greater Boston
area for a good part of their careers. His own career was ten years
along, Sherrod's double that.
Neither had Oak Grove figured out as yet. Gant could feel a nasty
tension in the air, and Sherrod had grown moody and kept brushing at his
face. He had seen that unconscious gesture committed by more than one
individual in the offices during the course of the evening. He couldn't
quite chalk it down to mass hysteria. He could almost taste something far
more concrete lingering unseen in the area.
"We getting help with this tonight?" Gant asked of his superior.
"We get a forensic investigative team in the morning. If they can't
pin a quick and simple explanation on this, we get a team from the EPA to
check for chemical and the Atlanta Center for Disease Control for
biological contagion. Either way, we'll be taking a back seat by morning,
which is fine by me."
Gant felt some of the burden lift from his shoulders. Sherrod tore
through the night in nervous silence. Too many lights were lit in the
houses they passed, but the streets were strangely empty.
"Jean left me," Sherrod commented after a time.
Jean, Sherrod's wife of fifteen years. Gant had heard.
"You heard I got passed over for promotion again. I don't think I'm
going to get it."
Gant frowned. Neither turn of events had been bothering Sherrod the
day before. His marriage had been headed for the rocks for years, and, at
age forty-five, Sherrod had already resigned himself to having peaked out
in his career. He had voiced his intent to coast the rest of the way to
retirement. Why the concern now?
"Sucks, don't it, the appreciation you get for investing the best part
of your life in something? Where does it get you?"
"Marriage is for getting laid on a regular basis and the job's a meal
ticket," Gant said in an attempt to lift Sherrod's gloomy mood. "We
don't need it on a regular basis at our age and I've seen people eat
damned well on food stamps."
Sherrod brushed the humor aside irritably. "Where does any of it
get you? You get old, fall apart and sit staring at a nineteen-inch
portable after hours until you croak. It's all behind me, Gant,
everything worth doing. Don't you ever get bored with this crap?"
Sherrod gave him no time for an answer. He whipped the car into a
drive leading up to an old brownstone school with one face illuminated by
floodlights and half the emergency vehicles in the county parked at its
base. Sherrod pulled as close to the scene as he could and braked
impatiently. "Get her the fuck off the building. Find out why she's up
there to begin with. Then get back down here pronto. I want your
feedback on the homicides, and we're pressed for time."
Gant grimaced. "Anything else while I'm up there? A ham on rye,
maybe?"
Sherrod glared at him. "Talk to the kid. Find out why a
twelve-year-old wants to kill herself. Christ, Gant, if you can't make
sense of this, who the hell can?"
"I don't think it's going to work this time. Not in this town,
Captain. This place is seriously strange."
"Get off it, Gant. You could sell the pyramids to the Egyptians
and tell them how to build a better one to boot. I
never did figure out what you saw in becoming a cop. A lawyer, maybe. An
insurance salesman. Why a cop?"
Because he had an overblown conscience to go with his talent. It
wasn't a explanation Sherrod had any respect for. Sherrod couldn't see
past the superficial benefits of his talent. It came in handy in the line
of duty, but bending the will of others was a skill that left one
strangely isolated and alone in the world. It wasn't an ability one could
abuse and hope to survive as a human being in any enviable form.
Being a cop suited him just fine.
More than just a curious few townspeople were out and gawking despite
the late hour. Sherrod led the way through the crowd and then flashed his
badge through a gauntlet of city, county and state police. He and Sherrod
followed a local officer down a short leg of a fluorescent lit corridor
inside the school and up three flights of stairs to a stairwell that
opened onto starlight.
There were a handful of distraught civilians here as well. Relatives, Gant guessed. He pegged the loudly sobbing woman as the girl's mother.
The girl herself was a the silhouette against the light, staring down from
the stone ledge of the three-story drop-off.
Gant went ahead to confront the girl, leaving it to Sherrod to hold
back the crowd. She looked around sharply as he approached, as
angered as she was despondent. He squatted to reduce the threat he
posed and
observed for the moment. He thought of initial moments of personal
contact as the opportunity to establish a rapport of simple body language,
communicating in seconds what could not be expressed in words
regardless of the time allowed. Only after he shared that level of
introduction did it ever accomplish anything to talk.
The child radiated raw nervousness, like molten steel against the
cold night. Regardless, a rapport took, deeper and more intense than he
would have expected. He could all but see the tension drain away from
her. She sat gazing at him calmly after a time, brushing at her face as
he had seen Sherrod do. And then even that stopped.
"What's the matter?" he asked of her.
She glanced over his shoulder at the sobbing woman and two younger
children clinging to her leg. Her agitation returned momentarily, and
then diminished when she glanced back at him.
Gant understood that nothing the girl said would explain anything of
what was happening. "I don't think you should be out here so late," he
said. "Tell me what's wrong and I'll fix it."
She hungered for the calmness inside him. Gant sensed that his
ill-understood and mysterious charisma was
going to work yet again, but disengaging from this child was going to be worse
than usual. When he stood and walked to her, she held her arms out to him
and clung trembling. Behind him, and down below, the crowds gasped at the
ease with which he rescued the distraught girl.
"Is someone at home bothering you?" he asked gently, sensing that to be
the case.
"Uncle Dave," she whispered in his ear. "Please don't make me go back
to him."
Gant turned and eyed the hysterical woman waiting anxiously for him to step away from the ledge. "Is that your mother?" he
asked of the child.
She gave a reluctant nod, then put her head back on his shoulder and held tight. Gant gestured
for Sherrod to send the woman forward. The
gaunt faced woman approached fearfully.
"How many uncles are living at home?" he asked of her.
"One, my brother, but..."
Gant caught Sherrod's eye and called out to him. "Get Uncle Dave
the hell out of the house before you
send these two home. Let him know in no uncertain terms he'll go to
jail if he doesn't." Gant fixed the woman
with a stern look and said in a softer tone, "Don't cross me on this.
Family or not, keep him away from her."
"I didn't know!"
He sensed she spoke the truth. When she apprehensively
reached for the child, Gant stepped back. "I'll carry her down. We're not quite done yet."
The girl let Gant hand her to a female emergency medical
technician at the waiting ambulance. Around them in the night, the crowds
thinned sullenly, hungry for morbid excitement and finding none here.
Sherrod escorted him back to their idling car. "How the hell did
you to that? You hardly talked to the girl."
"Uncle Dave was her problem. I was the solution."
"Gant, you scare the shit out of me sometimes. Do you ever
look at yourself in a mirror? You're a gorilla! And she went
to you like you were Mother Teresa!"
Gant had no explanation and he refrained from synthesizing one.
Sherrod spent a quiet moment behind the wheel of the car. "This shit is beginning to get to me.
And you, you bastard. You're on some kind of drugs, right?"
Sherrod started the car and drove off into the night in a squeal of
tires without waiting for an answer. Gant studied the man, alarmed by the
intensity of his emotional agitation and the ease with which he was
falling prey to it. It was an energy being fed to the inhabitants of Oak Grove
from outside and was pushing the entire town toward the ragged
edge of psychosis.
Several winding blocks toward the center of town, Sherrod slowed the
car. Ahead, more emergency vehicles had gathered. "We've got
two dead
parents here, an adolescent son thought responsible for both these
killings and a strangled fifteen-year-old girl a few blocks away.
Hang around and taste the atmosphere for me. Tell me what you think.
When you get back to the office, monitor incoming calls. Ride with the
locals and investigate anything that strikes your fancy. I want whatever
insights and suggestions that may occur to you on how to handle this
situation. Come morning we can dump this bullshit on the guys with the butterfly
nets. I'm going fishing this weekend, and I swear to god I'm gonna pack a
sidearm and shoot any bastard that gets in my way."
Gant watched Sherrod brush invisible cobwebs from his face and hoped
they could get away clean. It didn't seem
likely. It was as if Oak Grove suffered a contagion, one he could
not hope to explain, and it was spreading. If it ever
reached a population center the size of Boston, all of the cops and
emergency medical wards in the state wouldn't be able to control it.
