The Shepherd (15 page)

The officer nodded in agreement, and then he glanced back at Marcus and said, “You’re right. A policeman’s not supposed to play God. But a wise man once told me that a cop is like a shepherd, and sometimes in order to protect the flock, you have to keep the wolves away.”

Mommy, there’s a bad man in my closet.

The quiet and meek sounding voice was uncharacteristic for the boy who had called to her. He sounded terrified.

Lucas was a typical six and a half year old boy. He possessed an excellent quality for mischief and had two favorite pastimes: playing with his action figures and teasing his little sister. Although his parents didn’t really have enough money to buy them for him, Lucas had an army of action figures drawing from the ranks of Star Wars and G.I. Joe. He was rambunctious, full of energy, and always getting into trouble. He was everything you expected a boy of his age to be, but seldom had his mother ever heard him sound timid. Although she dismissed his claims as being the product of an overactive imagination, there was something in the tone of his voice that disturbed her.

“Honey, there’s no one in your closet. You’re safe here. Daddy and I are here to protect you. Now go back to bed. You’re gonna wake your sister.”

“Mommy, there really is someone in my closet,” he said. “I saw him standing in my doorway, and then I hid under the covers. But I heard him open my closet doors, and when I looked again, he was gone. So he must be hiding in my closet, waiting for me to go to sleep. I was too scared to scream even.” The boy spoke at a machine gun’s pace. Real or imagined, he had been rattled by something.

“Okay,” she said, playing along, “we’ll check the closet.”

She tried to be confident and not let her own imagination run away with her. She considered waking Dwight so that he could check the closet and the rest of the room using the .38 Special revolver that he kept hidden and loaded in their bedroom.

No, you’re being silly. You’re an adult, and you can’t let yourself get scared over nothing.

She walked to the closet doors but hesitated for a second. Her heart raced, and her palms were sweaty.
Don’t be ridiculous
. She was the parent here. She was supposed to be the protector, the one who watched over the children. How could she fortify them against the likes of trolls that live under bridges, monsters that live under beds, or the dreaded boogeyman if she couldn’t even take care of one little closet monster?

No guts, no glory
. She grabbed the closet door’s handle and threw it open.

At the same time, Lucas threw the covers over his head.

She half expected a wild-eyed madman to come bursting out of the closet, but its only inhabitants were clothes. Everything was as it should be, and nothing seemed to be out of place. She went on with the show and poked around on all of the clothes, in order to show Lucas that everything was okay.

She felt relieved but angered at how childish she had been.
Next thing you know, I’ll be sleeping with the lights on
. She had never been given a reason to fear the darkness.

“See, I told you there was nothing to worry about.”

The boy didn’t seem convinced. “There really was a man, Mommy. Could you check under my bed?”

She walked to her son’s bedside and leaned down, causing a pain to rip through her back. It started at the base of the spinal cord and worked its way up between her shoulder blades. She flinched but pressed on. The idea of a good night’s sleep drove her forward. She pulled back the bed skirt with a jerk. Once again, Lucas threw the covers over his head.

She had always wondered what protection a child thought a cover would provide. She never remembered doing it herself, but it seemed that a lot of kids felt that a cover over the head was a monster-proof shield.

“Nothing under the bed, either. Nothing to worry about.”

“What about under Casey’s bed?”

Her patience wore thin, but seeing an end in sight, she checked under Casey’s bed as well. “No monsters. No bad men.”

“But Mommy, he’s here somewhere I know it. He—”

She cut him off with a raised hand.

She sat down beside him on the edge of the bed. “Listen to me. You’re safe here. There are no bad men in this house. Daddy and I are here to protect you, and we would never let anything happen to you. You probably just had a bad dream or thought that you saw something that really wasn’t there. It happens all the time, even to grown-ups, but the key is to not let your imagination get the best of you.”

“But—”

“There’s nothing to worry about.” She wondered if something had jumpstarted her son’s imagination tonight. “What did you and Daddy watch on TV while I was at work?”

“Nothing,” he said a bit too quickly.

“Nothing, huh? Of course, you know that little boys who lie get grounded.”

“Okay, we watched Ghostbusters 2. But I wasn’t scared, and I’m not imagining the man I saw.”

Bingo
. Sometimes, she could kill Dwight. “So did the man you saw look anything like Vigo, the Carpathian?” Vigo was the bad guy in the movie.

Lucas’s face scrunched up, and he gave her a dirty look. “No, Mom, he didn’t look anything like Vigo. I watched Spongebob Squarepants too, but he didn’t look anything like Squidward either. He was real.”

She fought back a chuckle and suppressed the urge to smile. She knew that either gesture would draw more harsh looks from her imaginative, young son. “Okay, well, if there was anyone here, they’re gone now. So let’s try to get some—”

A creaking noise filled the room.

At first, she didn’t realize what it was, but then it came to her. It was the door to the bedroom, moving.
Did I check behind the door?

Her heart stopped dead and then pounded with such volume that she thought her eardrums might shatter. She didn’t want to see what was behind her, but she saw the fear on the face of her son as his eyes widened and his mouth hung open in a silent scream.

She rotated and saw a dark figure standing in the corner of the room.

A cop is like a shepherd.

Those were the exact words that the Sheriff had used.
Now, this officer makes the same analogy.
It could have been a coincidence, but Marcus didn’t believe in coincidences. They didn’t exist, as far as he was concerned. Everything happened for a reason. Everything was connected—even though, most of the time, that connection and the reasoning behind it was far beyond human comprehension.

He glanced around and took in every detail of the cop car. The seats weren’t like regular car seats. They were plastic, in order to allow the officer to easily clean up whatever surprise might have been left for him. At one time or another, puke, piss, and every other manner of bodily secretion had been found in the back seat of a squad car. Plus, a plastic seat lacked the crevices where a suspect could hide incriminating evidence.

A metal grill and a piece of Lexan plastic a quarter inch in thickness formed the barrier between the front and back seats. He checked the barrier’s frame for any possible flaws but found none—at least none that could be exploited. There were sections of the frame where the foam covering had worn down and cracked or was non-existent. Some of the screws showed through, but he neither had the time nor the tools to unscrew any of them.

It took him only a few seconds to realize his options and formulate a plan. Whether he liked it or not, he was in his element. Under different circumstances, he could have been an impeccable criminal.

He had a plan, as well as the determination and ability to carry it out, but that didn’t make him feel any better about what he was about to do.
A plan?
Could what he was about to do even be considered a plan? He felt like a football coach whose entire strategy consisted of the
plan
to score more points than the other team. It seemed to lack the subtle strategic nuances of which an actual
plan
would consist, but it was the only option that seemed feasible. If he would have thought about it much longer, he may have talked himself out of the idea. There was a real risk of getting himself killed if he carried out his
plan
, but there was an even greater possibility of getting killed if he waited.

Don’t think, react. Adapt. Improvise. Overcome.

The officer had cuffed his hands behind his back but hadn’t strapped him down with the vehicle’s seatbelt, which made all the difference now. He pulled his hands under himself while bringing his legs up high enough to allow his cuffed hands to slip to the front of his body. All the while, he kept a sharp eye on the man in the front seat, to ensure that the cop wasn’t aware of the maneuver.

He took in one last determined breath to stiffen his resolve, and then he threw himself down in the seat and kicked his feet against the rear driver’s side window.

He knew that although a quarter inch of reinforced plastic composed the partition between the front and back seats, the side windows in many patrol cars were the same windows you would find in an average civilian vehicle and could be broken out. He continued kicking over the screams of the officer in the front seat, until the window shattered and the glass exploded onto the highway.

He leaned out of the car and smashed his cuffed fists against the driver’s window.

The officer rolled down the window, took out his gun, and screamed at Marcus to get back in the car. He fired a warning shot to emphasize his point.

This, combined with the strong winds cutting deep into his skin and the asphalt rushing by at high speed, made Marcus wonder what he was thinking when he decided to kick out a window and hang out of a moving car.

Another shot sailed off into the night. He lunged forward and grabbed hold of the officer’s wrist as a third shot traveled into the darkness. He threw his weight into a hard yank and pulled the officer partially out of the vehicle. The cop’s gun fell to the pavement.

It was as much of an opportunity as he could have hoped for, and he took advantage of it. He wrestled his left arm around the officer’s neck and squeezed. With his right fist, he pounded the man while trying to maintain enough balance to keep from falling out the window.

The vehicle swerved from one set of ditches to the other. He looked up and saw a slight jog in the road ahead. He knew that they wouldn’t make the curve.

He shoved the officer back into the car and then pulled himself inside. The officer’s foot must have pushed down the accelerator because he could feel the car gaining momentum.

He braced himself for impact.

The patrol car struck the ditch at high speed, smashing the right front wheel upward and compacting the front end as if it were made of aluminum foil. The car ramped the ditch and twisted in midair.

He was thrown around like a garment in a clothes dryer. Despite his earlier attempts to brace himself, he smashed into every hard surface. His head struck the rear passenger window, and a deep gash sliced into his forehead just above the right temple.

When the vehicle touched the earth again, it landed on its roof and skidded another fifty feet, tearing a large groove that resembled the path of a tornado.

As he lay bleeding, a looming sense of dread hovered within his mind like storm clouds rolling over a peaceful valley or an ominous fog blanketing a tranquil sea. To him, the darkness outside seemed to move with a purpose. He felt its weight pressing down against him. He thought for a moment that he was under attack from some dark and ancient entity that had stumbled upon them on its quest to rid the world of all light. Then, he realized that the growing darkness was only in his mind. Although he struggled to keep it from overtaking him, he lost his grip on consciousness and succumbed to the encroaching night.

Alice Richards had staked a small place in the world that she could call her own. It wasn’t much, at least not nearly what she had hoped for when she was a young girl, but the cramped little house was still home. And now, her home would no longer be a source of security and fond memories. All of those happy times had been washed away in the blink of an eye.

The sanctity of their home had been violated and forever desecrated by a madman waiting in the shadows.

She stared in disbelief at the very real man that had invaded their home. She didn’t know what to do.
Should I run? But what about the kids? Where the hell is Dwight? What does this psycho want?
A multitude of questions that she didn’t have time to think flew through her mind.

She had to do something, and she had to do it fast. She knew full well that the man who stood before her had come with far darker intentions than to frighten them.

The man’s eyes burned with an intensity that she had never before seen in her lifetime. She knew that there would be no bargaining or reasoning with the man from the shadows. Evil dwelled behind his eyes.

She clenched her teeth so hard that they began to ache, and her hands trembled with a fear that she could have never imagined before now.

Only one rational thought could penetrate the wall of fear that had been bricked up within her mind:
Dwight’s gun…the pistol that he keeps loaded under our bed.

She and Dwight had argued numerous times over the handgun. She had felt that it would be more of a danger to the family than a means of protection. Guns appalled her, and she felt that nothing good ever came from owning or using one. But now in the grip of fear and face to face with evil, Dwight’s gun was the only thought that consumed her.

If I run for it, I’ll be leaving the kids alone. But if I don’t go, we’re all dead anyway.

She took a deep breath and made a dash for the doorway.

The man reached out and grabbed her by the back of her shirt as she ran past. With a strong push, he sent her flying into the hall.

Her face smashed into a large picture frame across the hall from the doorway. She felt glass razor into her skin. She fell to her knees, and the picture frame and a shelf of knick-knacks below it fell from the wall and onto her back. A few tiny figurines shattered against her neck and shoulders.