The Totem 1979 (31 page)

Chapter Four.

Marge had stayed on duty at the police station until everything was finished at the mansion. There was nothing she could do up there to help, but she could free a man from night shift on the radio while he went up to lend a hand, and Slaughter needed every officer in town. So she had gotten the news in bits and pieces from the radio, and when she’d found out what at last had happened, she had done her best to keep from crying. Slaughter didn’t need the people he depended on to break down when he most required them. Marge couldn’t help it, though, and she had sat there, wiping at her tears, relaying messages. She knew the mother and the father. She had gone to school with older sisters in the mother’s family. She had known this woman since the woman was a baby. Why, the woman lived just two blocks down from Marge’s house, and Marge had often gone to visit, to see the boy, to bring him presents. Now the boy was dead, and partly out of sympathy for what the parents must be feeling, partly out of sorrow for the boy, she wept. But she did her job, and when the man she had relieved came back to resume his shift, she tried to hide that she’d been crying. All the same, the man had noticed, and he sat with her a while until he felt that she could drive. “You need a little sleep is all,” he told her, but they both knew that it wouldn’t be that easy. There were many people now who wouldn’t get much sleep tonight, and she had thanked him, walking to her car. He’d asked if he should walk outside with her, but she had thought about the radio, with no one to attend to it, and she had told him that he really didn’t have to. Anyhow, from five years of work with Slaughter, she had learned the value of control, and she was certain she’d be fine.

So she had gone out to her car and driven from the parking lot. Almost midnight on a Saturday. She normally would have expected lots of movement in the streets, especially outside the bars, young trail hands come in for a weekend’s fun, but she was not surprised when she saw little action. A few cars and pickup trucks, a couple of men who stood outside a bar and sipped from beer cans. But in contrast with a normal weekend, this was more like a quiet Tuesday, and she wondered if the word had spread, or if ranchers, losing stock, had stayed home watching for some trouble with the cattle. But no matter what the reason, things were quiet, and that bothered her. As she drove through the outskirts, she saw lots of houselights on, and that was hardly normal either. She wished that she’d had the chance to talk to Slaughter, but he’d been so busy, and she didn’t want to stay at home alone, so she drove past her house, went two more blocks, and if there were lights on, she meant to go in and console the mother and the father There were lights on for sure, the whole house both in front and back. She saw the plumber’s truck, the car before it. Both the mother and the father must be home then, and she parked her car, wondering if she would be intruding. Well, she’d come this far, and after all it was her duty, so she got out, locked her car, and started up the sidewalk. She could hear the crickets screeching. She was peering toward the lights in all the windows, wondering if anybody else had come to visit, when she heard the voices. Loud: two men it seemed, and they were shouting. Then they were screaming. Marge was paralyzed. The cool night air was still, the crickets silent now, as someone ran out onto the porch as if for help, a man she once had met from two doors down, and he was staring at her. “Jesus, she’s gone crazy.”

“What?”

Abruptly Marge heard the snarling. Instinct almost made her run away, but she moved slowly forward as the window in the dining room came bursting toward the porch, two figures struggling through the broken edges, falling, writhing on the porch. The mother and the father, the mother snarling, the father screaming, and the mother was on top where she was scratching, biting.

Marge ran up the steps. “You’ve got to help me! Get her off him!”

“But she’s crazy!” the neighbor said.

Marge would later recollect how she had thought of Slaughter at that moment, wondering how the chief would try to handle this. She wanted him to say that she had done the right thing when an instant could make all the difference. She pushed at the man behind her, shouting “Go get help!” as she looked all around for something to subdue the mother. She wasn’t about to grab the mother and get bitten like the father screaming there, but when she saw the thing she needed in one corner of the porch, she couldn’t bring herself to grab it. Warren evidently had been playing with it the day before he died. She didn’t want to touch it, but the father’s screaming was too much. She reached for it. Slipping on the broken glass, she lurched toward the mother, raised the baseball bat high above her head, and thinking about Slaughter, started swinging.

Chapter Five.

Slaughter waited in his locked house until Rettig and Hammel arrived. He shouted out the window that they’d better look around before they left the cruiser. So they flashed their searchlights, but there wasn’t anything. He went outside to meet them, staring past them, scanning all around them and then pointing. “This way.”

“Well, what is it?”

“Don’t you think I wish I knew?”

They stiffened. They were dressed in jeans and sport shirts, a gunbelt strapped around each waist. They saw that Slaughter had his own gun out, and they were drawing theirs as they walked toward the fence where he was pointing.

“Shine your flashlights.”

The beams arced out across the field.

“But I don’t understand this,” Rettig said.

‘Just keep your back protected. Keep looking all around you,” Slaughter told him. “There was something out here. Hell, it came up on my porch.”

Slaughter climbed over the fence and flashed his light while they jumped down beside him. Then he started walking with them through the field.

“Your porch?”

“That’s right.” Slaughter was embarrassed, determined not to admit that he’d run in panic. He felt safer with his men to help him, but he couldn’t subdue the burning in his stomach, and he wished they wouldn’t ask too many questions.

But they kept on. “Well, what is it?” Rettig asked again.

“I told you, I don’t know. I never got a look at them.”

“Your porch, though.”

“I was talking to you on the phone when I heard it. When I looked, it wasn’t there.”

Then Slaughter saw what he was searching for and wished that he’d been wrong. With his flashlight aimed, he glimpsed the fallen objects in the field, and he was hurrying through the grass toward them. He stopped and stared. The horses were mangled like the steer that he had seen by old Doc Markle, like the other steer that he had seen by Bodine’s pickup truck, except that these were worse, so mutilated that he almost didn’t recognize them. He heard his men gasp.

“Some damned thing was out here all right. God, I’m sorry, Chief.”

“These horses … They were all I …”

Slaughter stalked toward the gully. “I heard three of them up in those bushes, two more by the barn. I’d like to-“

“Wait a second, Chief.” Rettig grabbed his shoulder.

Slaughter pulled his hand away. “These goddamned-“

“Wait a minute.

We don’t even know what we’ll be up against. You say that there were five of them?”

“That’s right. Like a bobcat.”

“Five of

them?”

“I know it doesn’t make much sense, but-“

“I don’t care about that. Sure, bobcats don’t hunt in packs, but anything can happen. What I mean is, we need help to do this. We need better light.”

“You want the sun to come up? Damn it, they’ll be long gone when that happens.”

“You can find a tracker.”

“Who, for Christ sake? I already thought of that. These cowboys maybe think they’re expert trackers, but I never saw one yet that knew enough to be able to trail a sick man to the outhouse. If we don’t go now, we’ll never find whatever did this.”

“I’m sorry, Chief, but I’m not going.”

Slaughter scowled at Rettig, then turned to Hammel. “What about you?”

Hammel shrugged.

“You don’t have a lot to say since we saw Clifford’s body.”

“Well, I figure I’ll just watch and learn,” Hammel said.

“Yeah, I bet you will.”

Slaughter spun to face the gully. Even with his flashlight and the moon, he couldn’t see much in the bushes, and his anger became fear again.

“Okay, you’re right. It’s stupid to go in there. Looking at these horses, I just-“

“Don’t you worry. We’ll be sure to get whatever did this,” Rettig said. “But not right now.”

Slaughter’s anger changed to grief. He had to get away from here.

“But what about your horses?” Rettig asked.

“Leave them. Hell, what difference does it make?”

Slaughter heard his men walking behind him as he climbed the fence, and when he stepped down, from the house he heard the phone again. Whoever kept on calling, he was thinking, livid. He would make sure that they stopped it. He was running, cursing, toward the house, but when he burst in, grabbing for the phone, he heard a voice this time, and as he listened, he mentally started running again. It seemed as if the last few days he’d never stopped.

Chapter Six.

He charged along the corridor, the nurses staring at him. Rettig and Hammel were on guard back at his house, and he was thinking of his mangled horses, hoping that the two men would be safe as he pushed through the door marked morgue and rushed across the anteroom to push against the second door. The morgue looked like a shambles. There was blood and broken glass and scattered instruments. The medical examiner was leaning against a table. He had blood across his gown, his face mask hanging around his neck. His face was pale in contrast with the blood. He looked as if he’d been sick, although he might have seemed that way because the neon lights reflecting off the green tiles tinted everything a sickly pallor. The medical examiner was shaking, and the man beside him, wearing street clothes, didn’t look much better. Owens. Slaughter recognized him as a veterinary whom he had come across from time to time and had last seen on Friday morning when they’d looked at old Doc Markle on the floor beside the mangled steer.

The two men turned to him, and Slaughter kept glancing all around. The smell of chemicals, of sick-sweet clotting blood. He didn’t understand it. He inhaled, drawing breath to ask them, but the medical examiner interrupted. “I just killed him.”

Slaughter stared at him and then at Owens. He was puzzled, walking toward them. “Look, you’d better take it easy. When you called, you sounded like you’d had a breakdown.”

“But I killed him.”

“Yes, I know. You told me on the phone. You said that at the mansion. But you had no way of knowing that the sedative would kill him. What’s this blood here? I don’t understand what’s happened.”

“Christ Almighty, listen while I tell you. I just killed him.”

Slaughter spun toward Owens. “What’s the matter with him?”

“Over there. You’d better take a look.”

Owens had trouble speaking. He pointed toward the far end of the room, beyond the final table where a smear of blood was trickling down the wall, and Slaughter felt apprehensive again. He started forward, although a part of him was holding back. He peered down past the corner of the table, and he saw the tiny feet on the floor. Then he leaned a little closer, and he saw the boy, his belly sliced wide open. “Christ, you mutilated him!”

“No! I told you, I killed him!”

Slaughter swung and glared. “You said that he was dead back at the mansion!”

“I was certain that he was. I would have bet my reputation.”

“Bet your reputation?”

“Never mind that. I did every standard test, and he was dead.”

“Well, then he-“

“Seemed to come back from the dead and tried to grab me.”

Slaughter felt as if he’d heard some unknown language. The words made no sense. They didn’t have a meaning. Then he understood what he’d been told, and he stepped back from the medical examiner. “My God, you’ve really had a breakdown. You’ve gone crazy.”

“No, just listen. I don’t mean that the way it sounds.”

“I hope to God you don’t.”

“I mean the paralytic stage of the disease must have been aggravated by the sedative.”

Slaughter shook his head in confusion.

“He was so unconscious that his life signs couldn’t be detected.”

“What the hell is this now?” Slaughter asked him. “Edgar Allan Poe?”

“No, please. I listened for his heartbeat. I checked his breathing. I even took his temperature when I got back here. Everything was negative.”

‘You did a brain scan?”

“I did everything, I told you. He was dead as far as I could tell. I started working with him on the table, and he looked up, and he grabbed for my throat. I-“

“Take this slowly. One thing at a time. You’re saying he was catatonic. That’s it? That’s your story?”

“On occasion, it can happen. Rarely. There are cases where a patient has been certified as dead, and he wakes up on a slab at the morgue.”

Slaughter looked at Owens. “This is true?”

“I’m not a doctor, but I’ve heard of things like that. It’s rare, just as he said, but it can happen.”

“But Jesus, a brain scan.”

“Look,” the medical examiner said. “Once we thought that no sign of a heartbeat proved that someone had died. Then we found out that a person’s heart could beat so weakly that our instruments couldn’t detect it. So we made up other tests. For body heat. For electrical impulses in the brain. The fact is, we don’t know exactly when a person dies. A patient goes to surgery. He’s doing fine when suddenly his heart and brain fail.

We try everything we can to resuscitate him. No success. He’s dead. Then all of a sudden, on its own, his heart starts beating again. So tell me how that happened. You explain it. I can’t.”

Slaughter looked at them, more disturbed. “All right, let’s assume your argument’s correct. The sedative wore off along with the paralysis.”

“He grabbed for me. We fought. I knew I couldn’t let him bite me, scratch me. Never mind how small he was. I couldn’t let him touch me. He kept coming at me. I was kicking, yelling for help, but those two doors muffled the sound. We dodged around the table. I got cornered. I was scared and lashed out with the scalpel I was holding, and I killed him.”