The Dead Have A Thousand Dreams (22 page)

>>>>>>

Solstice Day 4:00
p.m.

GET THE FUCK
DOWN

It was a long, slow walk
back to the house. Wooly, for good reason, was showing some
reluctance to return. He was still buzzed from the rock and still
carrying on about solstice traditions. In some places, he was
saying, they celebrated midsummer by crowning the Oak King, the god
of the waxing year. But the festivities were short-lived, because
as soon as he as crowned, let me get you told on this, his reign
was over, and his rival—the Holly King, god of the waning
year—began to take over.

That’s what he was talking
about when it all went down.

We were winding around the
swamps of the hidden lake—I could smell them, I could see patches
of reeds through the trees—and the whole forest started to vibrate.
Some sonic boom shattered the silence and nothing else existed but
noise, but I didn’t know what it was until I heard a ricochet
splinter off a tree trunk behind me.

Then I knew.

I ran and rolled into the
swamp-side trees as bullets tore the woods apart. Flat to the
ground, I could see pinpoints of rifle fire flaring from a jagged
wall of pines on the other side of the trail. Whoever was shooting
was shooting full on. The bullets kept kicking dirt in my face;
leaves and bits of bark were raining on my head.

I got the Glock out and
went to return fire, but at that point I realized something large
and fleshy was taking up a lot of my sightline. Wooly was still
standing on the path. He hadn’t moved. He was just standing there
in the middle of the bullet hail.

“What’re you
doing
?”

“I’m ready,” he yelled
back. “I’m ready for it.”

“Get
down!”

He shook his head. “I’m
ready to go.”

Fucking idiot and his
fucking acceptance. Never do anything halfway.

I fired into the pines.
Moments later I saw something moving—the shooter going for better
position. For a second the sun caught a glint of something. Light
hair. Tufts of light hair.

Now he was firing back,
scattering shots all over the place. Who was he aiming for? Me or
the numbnuts standing out there?

“Get the fuck
down
!”

“It’s all right,” said
Wooly.

“Fucking
move
!”

“I can’t get hurt out
here. I can only die in the house.”

What the hell was this,
tragedy or comedy?

I let a round loose and
jumped out of the trees, running at Wooly with my shoulder down. I
hit him low—center of gravity, etc.—but it was still like trying to
tackle a bus. We stumbled across the trail like dancers in the
world’s worst ballet, and the whole sloppy effort finally ended
when we crashed into the trees and bushes on the other side and
collapsed on the ground.

“Am I dead?” he
said.

“Shut up. Lay still.” I
looked up the woods, waiting to take more fire.

Wooly was feeling his
face. “I’m not dead.”

“Not quite.”

“I knew it. It can’t
happen out here, only in the house.”

“You could get shot out
here and
then
die
in the house.”

Now he looked worried. “I
hadn’t thought a that.”

“Just shut up.”

Silence instantly took
over. Five seconds later it was feeling weird. Why wasn’t the guy
shooting? Then I realized—he couldn’t see us anymore. We’d landed
on his side of the woods. We were blocked out by the walls of
pines.

Ten more seconds of
nothing went by. Then I heard a little
crunch
, somebody stepping on a twig.
The shooter was coming this way. There was another crunch, followed
by branches snapping back, the sound of somebody moving fast. But
the sounds were getting smaller, further away. He was taking
off.

“Stay here. Don’t
move.”

Wooly didn’t answer, but
he looked like he wouldn’t dare to breathe.

I plunged deeper into the
woods, sidestepping whatever roots and loose twigs I could while I
trailed after the noises. I couldn’t tell where the shooter was
going—from the sounds he seemed to be running some crazy zigzag.
The ground at one point rose to a hill that was ringed at the top
with rhododendrons. Once I got past the flowers and started sloping
down, I could see the outlines of houses, a street. The guy was
heading for civilization.

I’d just gotten off the
hill when I heard metal slam. Three seconds later an engine
started. The last line of trees let me out on a paved road. A dark
Grand Cherokee—maybe black, maybe blue—was sitting maybe 200 feet
away. The driver gunned the motor, spun into a 180 and sped off
away from me.

I Glocked him. I aimed for
the tires and just kept squeezing until one of them blew and the
car whipped into the trees on the right side of the road. The
impact was solid and sick. One massive crunch of metal and smashing
of glass and it was over.

By the time I got to the
car the driver’s head was bent over the back of the seat and his
eyes were closed. I didn’t recognize him at first. The first thing
I saw was the gash that had opened up between his eyebrows,
irrigating his tan-dry face with flows of blood. Then I keyed in on
the rest of his head. Spiked blond hair. Strangely sexless bronzed
skin.

I remembered him on the
fifth floor of the Executive Center, coming out of the Trident
office with his partner Monte Slater. I remembered him
saying
Wooly’s got lots of enemies. He’s
going for like the world’s enemy record
.

Bogash. Gary Bogash, The
blank, shiny hustler whose face was now a blood map of rivers and
tributaries.

I wasn’t gonna let him die
on me.

I opened the door. No seat
belt—guy was a real shit for brains to be driving like that. His
rifle, a Marlin XL7, was in plain sight—it had fallen to the floor
on the passenger’s side. I reached for his throat, going to feel
for a pulse in the carotid with my left hand, keeping the Glock in
my right.

I’m going to assume he had
a pulse. I’m going to assume he had a
fast
pulse, cause a second later he
had his fingers locked around my gun hand and his right arm was
swinging a knife at my neck. I just had time to block the blade
with my left shoulder.

It didn’t hurt right away.
In fact, the first thing I felt as the metal broke through to
muscle was how stunningly cold the blade was against the heat of
the day. It wasn’t until I staggered out of the car and felt the
blood releasing and saw the Glock drop out of my other hand that
the pain really started.

Bogash came out of the
driver’s seat like a spring. Bastard had the balls to be smiling at
me. But it wasn’t a smirk. It was more like a huckster’s
all-knowing smile. Maybe the lines of his own blood created the
effect, but the smile seemed to say I know what’s going on and you
don’t.

He saw the Glock on the
ground. As he bent over to get it I lunged at him. He stood up and
waved me off with the knife. Again he went for the Glock and the
same thing happened again. It was like he’d decided to stretch his
legs by doing knee bends.

He forgot about the Glock.
The knife was good enough. He started stalking after me, taking
slashes at me, making me jump back every time he swung the blade
and each time I jumped it hurt like fucking hell. Each jump was
like a punch that sent pain right into my windpipe.

Thing about pain is, it’s
such a great motivator. I couldn’t keep going on like this.
Something had to change. When he got ready to charge again I
charged into him instead. Only I stopped short as he went to defend
himself, and just before he hammered the knife in my chest I kicked
him in the kneecap. The pain froze him, held him long enough for
another kick, this time in the balls. He doubled over as the air
whooshed out of him. I reached behind him, grabbed his belt and
started swinging him, just kept spinning him in circles until we
worked our way back to the Grand Cherokee and I slammed him into
the side of the car.

Then I clamped onto that
spiked hair and smashed his skull into the roof. Did it once, then
again, then again and again and again. I was paying back. I was
thinking about the shit we’d all been through over the past long
days, about his smile, about Jen and Ralphie Freeny, about Roy
Freeny’s tattooed head, about what Roy had done to Nickie all those
years ago, and I just kept driving his head into the roof until the
dark paint was splattered with new blood and I made myself so sick
I threw up.

>>>>>>

Solstice Day 6:45
p.m.

HE TOOK EVERYTHING
AWAY

I was trying to keep myself
awake in the Hidden Lake Hospital waiting room with some putridly
awful coffee I’d bought from the vending machine. At least I
thought it was putridly awful. Some people might prefer coffee
that’s both weak
and
bitter. If so, this was their cup of tea.

So far I’d called the
house about 80 times. Wooly was fine. He’d been fine since one of
the Hidden Lake cops had managed to find him wandering in the woods
and had brought him back, and he was still fine. Disoriented, but
fine. Nickie said she and Genevieve were fine too. Well fine, I
said, then I’d keep hanging around until I heard what Gary Bogash
had to say.

I called Jen. The house
was also fine, though she’d seen a cop bringing Wooly home. What
happened? I told her about the ambush but assured her everything
was, yes, fine. How about you? she said.

I wasn’t bad. They’d
cleaned out my shoulder and stitched me up—which took about the
amount of time usually reserved for open-heart surgery—and they
wanted to send me off somewhere for at least a day of observation.
I refused. Not on this day.

Bogash, of course, didn’t
have that choice. They were treating him under police guard for a
concussion and multiple facial fractures. Once they got him set,
he’d be taken to the police station and get booked on multiple
charges of attempted murder. From there, they’d haul his ass to a
hospital with a prison wing.

They’d put Bogash in the
first unit off the waiting room. At one point I drifted back there,
just to see. He was propped in a bed, head heavily bandaged, though
dried streaks of blood were still tracking around his eyes and ears
and down his neck. Alex Tarkashian was questioning him, the two
cops dutifully patrolling the side of the bed. Bogash was looking
at Alex like he was forcing his eyes to stay open as wide as
possible.

Back to the waiting room.
Half dozen people restless in plastic chairs, whispered
conversations, scuff marks on the floor, fingerprints on the window
glass, a twisted-up latex glove left on a pile of diabetes
brochures.

An old man with pitted
cheeks was standing near me, sipping on something in a paper bag.
Trying to be slick about it, but holding the bag to his face like
he was talking into it. He’d brought his wife in, he said, when she
started having convulsions.

“My wife,” he confided,
“is an al-cay-holic.”

Alex came out, tucking his
pad back into his shirt pocket, his face reflecting orange from the
sun outside. He walked over.

“How is he?”

“Not a friend of Wooly’s,”
he said. “But talkative. I said to him, just give us some small
help here. He did.”

Alex dropped money in the
vending machine, waited for the coffee to drip in the
cup.

“It’s all about
Trident?”

He nodded. “Says Wooly
destroyed the business, decimated it. There was some test he did
for them?”

“Yeah. For their
textiles.”

“He says Wooly took
everything away from them, just grabbed it out of their hands. Says
he pressed them until it hurt and just kept pressing.”

He took a sip of the
coffee and immediately tossed it in the trash.

“He’s even blaming Wooly
for Monte’s death. Says he drove him to suicide. He calls it
murder.”

“I get the feeling there’s
not much remorse.”

“Not a trickle. He said,
and I quote, I’ll blow his fucking head off his body. I’ll blow his
fucking head off his fat fucking neck.”

We paced around the
waiting room, Alex saying that with things looking squared away
here, he was getting ready to go back to the stationhouse. He had
to get prepped for Bogash’s processing and transfer and formal
arraignment.

“So much shit going on in
this town,” he said, “I can’t keep track of it all.”

We were back at the first
unit. I took another look inside. The two cops by the bed, Bogash
staring off into lifeless space, totally tuned out and whispering
something to himself.

Alex was giving me a head
to toe glance. “Don’t you look like shit.”

“I just wanna sleep, all I
wanna do.”