Widow Town (7 page)

“Seen Lynn lately?”

Gray blinked and nodded once
, the question blindsiding him. “Yesterday. Came by to pick up a jewelry box. She was headed out on a date.”

“Yeah, I was going to mention I saw her with someone in town
last week when I stopped in for supplies.”

“Who?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes.”

Danzig rubbed his forehead, pushing the goggles off completely. “Mark Sheldon.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah, hate to say it but they looked pretty cozy at the café having lunch.”

Gray shook his head,
looking at the floor. “The fucking DA.”

“Yeah.”

“That just fits, doesn’t it?”

“Why, because you hate the guy
already?”

“Pretty much.”

Danzig stood to his full height and grabbed a piece of cable off of the wall, turning it over in his big hands. “You know, it’s surprising, but with the new technology springing up every year, people still rely on things like this for all different kinds of reasons. This steel is an alloy, it’s made from a high content of iron and a low percentage of carbon. Now if there’s too much carbon, or not enough, the alloy becomes too soft or too brittle. Put stress on it and it’ll break, either way. The art of metallurgy is a continual exercise in balance. Without balance, things don’t work.”

Danzig pulled hard on the cable. I
t creaked, growing taut between his fists, but held.

“You’re terrible at metaphors,” Gray said. Danzig hung the wire back on the wall, shrugged. “But than
k you.” Gray looked at a clock above the workbench. “I need to get going.”

“Before you do, I have a couple things to show you,” Danzig
said, motioning to follow him.

The two men walked the length of the building to a doorway leading to a smaller room tucked into one corner. The room held sets of steel drums, their gleaming hides reflecting light from overhead. Some of the barrels were misshapen, bulged out and pocked with internal distortions as if someone had taken a hammer to their insides.
On the wall hung what looked like a shiny, black sweater, its sleeves and back catching the light. As Gray leaned closer to it Danzig pulled the odd garment off the wall and stuffed it into a nearby cabinet. The sweater made an odd clanging as he put it away.

“What was that?”

“Top secret. Not ready yet.”

Gray didn’t press him further and followed as the huge man proceeded deeper into the room.

Danzig stopped before a table holding a hardness tester. On the machine’s small platform was a large ball bearing, compressed by a pointed indentor. The machine’s gauge read all zeros.

“This is something new I’ve been working on for over a year. It’s an alloy
of stainless steel and M-Core.”

Gray squinted at the sphere. “You
alloyed the stuff from Mars?”

Danzig’s smile creased his entire face. “Yep. Took me a bit to get the mixture and temperature right,
but I think I’ve perfected it.”

“Looks delicate,” Gray said, motioning to the zeros on the hardness tester.

Danzig raised his dark eyebrows. “It’s zeroed out because it maxed the machine.”

“You’re joking.”

“Nope, and watch this, this is the real treat.” Danzig decompressed the ball bearing and held it out to Gray. It felt like a polished egg in his hands. There were no markings visible on its surface to indicate the extreme pressure it had been under moments ago. “Now step over here and put it in that funnel system.”

Gray walked to where Danzig indicated and tr
aced a steel tube that ran in a descending arc, then shot straight down into one of the sealed barrels. Gray placed the bearing into the tube and watched it roll out of sight. The sound of the sphere traveling was like a fly buzzing inside a light fixture. Then there was a gap of silence before a quiet ting.

The barrel’s sides expanded with a bang so loud Gray put his hands to his ears and flinched halfway across the room. Numerous bulges appeared in the drum’s sides and the ticking of st
eel re-settling filled the air.

“What in God’s name was that?” Gray asked, glancing wide-eyed at his friend.

Danzig’s deep laughter overtook the clicking metal. “I call that a Tin-Snipper. It’s completely stable under constant applied pressure, but if dropped above a distance of five feet onto a hard surface—” Danzig cupped his fists together and then sprung his fingers apart. “Boom.”

“That’s unbelievable.”

“Like I said, it took me a year to perfect. It’s got the same explosive power of a standard grenade but three times the shrapnel.”

“You’re a mad scientist and you’re going to blow
off a hand someday.”

“Yes mother.” Danzig laughed and guided Gray over to the far corner of the room
. “Almost forgot, I have something for you.” The huge man picked up a smooth-handled knife from a shelf and handed it to Gray. The weapon looked almost exactly like the one he carried, the blade hidden inside the handle itself. Gray made to push the release button on the back and felt Danzig grip his wrist.

“Hold on, let me tell you about that. First off, it’s made mostly from meteor nickel with a dash of tu
ngsten carbide.”

Gray glanced up from the knife. “How the hell did you get your hands on
a meteorite?”

“Got a contact in Texas,
a star hunter. Found one last spring a few hundred feet off the coast of Corpus Christi. Now what makes this unique is the cooling factor the nickel underwent upon impact. It hardened the molecules perfectly, so perfectly it took me three months to figure out a way to superheat it and bind it with the carbide. I wore out sixteen diamond files shaping the blade too.”

Gray looked down at the knife
and triggered the button.

A
seven-inch bit of slender steel shot from the handle so hard it nearly recoiled out of his hand.

“Holy shit,” Gray said, studying the blade. Its color reminded him of oil poole
d on water in the right light.

“Gas deployed, good for a hundred and fifty openings, then you have to have it recharged, which I can do for you. That alloy is hard enough to cut through a quarter inch of stainless steel and
you could still shave with it on the other side.”

“What if the dam
n thing goes off in my pocket?”

“It won’t, the button can only depress if the grip is pinched on either side, almost impossible to deploy otherwise.”

Gray pushed the button again and the blade retracted soundlessly into the handle.

“
Thanks Frankenstein.”

“On
ly the best for your birthday.”

Gray paused before sliding the knife into his pocket.

“You forgot, didn’t you?” Danzig said.

Gray nodded. “I thought about it last we
ek, but with everything in the past couple days…” He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter, but thank you for remembering.”

Danzig put a hand on his shoulder and stared down at him from his towering height. “
One other thing before you go—if you need me on this in any way, I’m more than willing to help. Those people didn’t deserve to die that way and I’d have no qualms doing what needs to be done to whoever’s responsible.”

Gray squeezed his friend’s hand once. “
One thing’s for sure, either I’ll find them, or they’ll find me.”

When Gray pulled up to the station his stomach sank as he saw the car parked in his spot.

He shook his head, sighed once
, and got out of the cruiser.

The air conditioning inside the building wasn’t working properly. The temperature se
emed the same, if not higher than outside. Sweat sealed Gray’s dark shirt to his body and he pulled off his baseball cap as he entered, smoothing his hair back. Mary Jo sat behind the station’s main desk, an array of monitors surrounding her. A headset rested in her auburn and graying hair, her skinny fingers danced over a multifunction screen on the desk. She looked up at him as he entered.

“He’s in your office.”

“You let him wait in my office?”

“No, I did no such thing, he went in himself, blew past me befor
e I had words out of my mouth.”

Gray rapped his knuckles once on the desk
top.

“I hope that wasn’t directed at me,” Mary Jo sa
id, her fading eyebrows rising.

“No ma’am,
just like the sound it makes.”

Gray stepped away from the desk and walked down the narrow hall, hot air pushing at his head from an overhead vent. The bathroom door on the left stood open, a smell of old urine and disinfectant leaking out. On the right a window looked into a small office, a large desk standing in its middle, top covered in stacked papers.
A man in a dark suit sat in the chair facing the opposite wall, greased hair plastered down to his head in a style resembling lawyers Gray had seen in the cities years ago. When he walked through the door, the man glanced at him.

Mark Sheldon had an overly handsome face with eyes light blue and a nose that you could cut a straight line with. His even teeth flashed white, once as h
e stood, more sneer than smile.

“Sheriff, how are you this morning?” The district attorney extended a hand that Gray shook quickly, not wanting to think about if it had touched Lynn, o
r where.

“Busy, what can I do for you?” Gray settled in behind the desk as Sheldo
n did the same across from him.

“Just stopped by to see how things we
re going with the Jacobs case.”

“It’s going. W
e’re exploring a few different aspects at this point.”

“
Which are?”

“Gathering
leads in the form of suspects.”

“And those are?”

Gray blinked once at the other man. “We’re compiling them this morning.”

S
heldon nodded, his eyes closed, fingers steepled. “Gotcha, and the coroner’s report?”

“Should be on my computer before noon un
less Tilly ran into something.”

“Tilly?”

“Dr. Swenson.”

“Ah.”

The seconds ticked by and Sheldon smiled, nodding to the silence.

“Is there something I can d
o for you?” Gray finally asked.

“Yes, there most certainly is,” Sheldon said, sitting forward. “You can remember who the one person is that can remove you from your elected job,
Sheriff. And that’s me.”

“Well, I very much appreciate you stopping in to refresh my memory,
though I think you’re speaking out of turn since the county board has that right, but I have a case to work on.”

“Oh yes, you do,” Sheldon said, still smiling. “You have this case to work on, this very normal, very average breaking and entering gone wrong. Mitchel explained to me
some of the hints you’ve made in the past and let me tell you, Sheriff, fairy tales like the ones you’ve got in your head will do nothing but hurt this town and its people.”

Gray unclenched his jaw before a tooth cracked. “With all due respect, Mark, get the fuck out of my office unless you’re prepared
to handle this case yourself.”

Sheldon’s smile flickered and then died under Gray’s stare. He stood from his chair, brushing his suit pants of nonexistent wrinkles. “I know why you came back to your hometown, I know your theories weren’t popular in Minneapolis either. But if you think you can shove your deranged fantasies onto a smaller town like Shillings, you’re dead wrong. This place will eat you up and spit you out if you try peddling that shit to the public. You’d be out of this
office with hell on your heels before you could say ‘boo’.”

“The door is what you walk through to leave.” Gray pointed before turning to
wake his monitor. He heard Sheldon’s dress shoes snap across the floor and pause at the entry.

“Enjoy your last term in office, Gray, and
I’ll enjoy Lynn later tonight.”

Gray looked down at his feet below the desk and counted to one hundred, listened to Sheldon’s car start outside before he
glanced up. The first thing he saw was the digital temp control mounted on the wall. It read 86 degrees.

Gray stood and p
ut his fist through the screen.

The plastic smashed into spider-webbed lines and plaster cracked
around the control’s base. Mary Jo’s voice came through the small speaker on the side of his monitor. “Are you all right? Did you fall down?”

Gray sat in the chair, gave his knuckles a look and leaned back. “Peachy. Send Joseph in when he
gets back, we have work to do.”

“Are you feeling okay, son?”

Ryan
jerked out of his trance, the plate holding his bagel before him coming into focus. He looked up at his father who held his coffee cup below his chin, blowing away the steam, his eyes soft and beseeching.

“I’m fine,” Ryan said, reaching for his breakfast. His stomach flipped at the thought of eating anything.

“You look a little pale. Did you sleep okay?”

“Yeah, great.” Ryan summoned a smile.

His father nodded, sipped his coffee, his sandy hair catching the morning light. “You know, I was thinking it would be nice to go to the lake over in Semingford when I have a stretch off. Maybe rent a cabin there and spend a weekend like we used to. What do you think?”

“Yeah, we should, definitely.”

His father set his coffee down. “What’s wrong, son, you can tell me.”

Ryan almost laughed. “Nothing,
Dad, I’m fine. Maybe I am a little under the weather.”

“Want to come into work with me, I can fit y
ou in right away this morning.”

“No
, that’s fine. I’ll just rest.”

“Okay.” His father glanced at his watch and stood, pouring
the remainder of his coffee down the kitchen sink’s drain. “Gotta go, I should be done sometime early tonight unless the ER is shorthanded today, then it might be later.”

“Sounds good.”

“And tell your brothers that it’s their turn to clean the house today, you’ve been doing it more than your fair share.”

“Sure, thanks
, Dad.”

“Love you,” his father called over his shoulder as he left the kitchen and disappeared through the entryway.

Ryan listened to his father’s BMW start in a muffled hum inside the garage and then pull out, the rattle and clank of the garage door shutting again.

“Love you too,” Ryan whispered.

“Talking to yourself again?”

Darrin’s voice startled him so much he spilled the half-full glass of orange juice
across the table. The liquid pattered on the floor, the dripping reminding him of something else.

“Jumpy,” Darrin said, moving to the fridge. Ryan stood and began to mop the juice up with a towel.
Darrin pulled out a premade protein shake and leaned against the counter drinking straight from the bottle, his eyes on Ryan the entire time.

“What’s going on tonight?” R
yan asked, his head still down.

Darrin finished drinking. “A little jaunt that he wants Adam and
me to do while Dad’s at work.”

“What is it?”

“That’s our business, little brother.” Darrin gave him a long stare. “How long’s it been since you did your chores?”

Ryan swallowed and finished wiping
up the juice. “A couple days.”

“You know he won’t let you in on everything until you’re f
inished, you know that, right?”

Ryan stood and paced to the sink where he deposited the stic
ky towel. “Yeah, I know.”

Darrin stepped closer to him, the fetid stink of morning breath mixed with sweet protein drink washing over him. “Do it tonight, while we’re gone and
Dad’s at work. You don’t have it done when we get back, I can’t guarantee what he’ll tell me to do with you.”

Ryan nodded, his eyes averted, staring out at the morning light, a
mockery of hope. “I’ll do it.”

Darrin put the drink back in the fridge and slapped Ryan on the bicep, hard. “Good. You’ll enjoy it, little brother, you’ll see.” Ryan nodded and waited until Darrin turned away and climbed the stairs out of sight before
sinking down into a chair, his eyes locked on the window and the world beyond. A bird flew past, a streak of yellow. There and gone.

The morning ached with heat when he stepped outside. Small puffs of dust kicked up beneath his feet as he transitioned from the paved drive running
before their three-story house, to the packed dirt turnaround that wound to the open fields. The corn stretched toward the sun, the unnatural green of the plants enhanced by the meager rain the night before. Ryan walked past an immense storage shed where their Churner sat, the machine scheduled for a bit of maintenance before it would be rented out again to another farmer needing to expose the rich phosphate sixty or more feet down in the ground. The shadow of the towering silo spilled onto the heated dirt and Ryan walked into its embrace, the air changing only a little in temperature. He readjusted his grip on the peanut butter sandwich wrapped in plastic as well as the glass bottle of cool water, already beginning to sweat beneath his fingers.

The dirt track led around the side of the silo and turned right before petering out in the cornfield’s emerald mass. Ryan left the path and threaded his way between several maple trees, their leaves’ dry clicking filling up the morning air. A high stand of reed grass, trampled in places
, stood past the trees and Ryan pushed his way through it until he felt his feet land on smooth concrete.

A row o
f stairs cut into the earth.

Their short steps numbering half a dozen, led down to a steel door set within
a poured concrete enclosure, its top even with the rest of the ground. Grass grew in matted clumps from a layer of earth upon it, a hard fall for anyone who didn’t know it was there.

Ryan climbed down the steps, not looking at the dirty, five-gallon pail filled with rusted instruments, their bladed smiles gleaming beneath clumps of matter gone dark with age. The
memory of the pail’s handle in his palm nearly overwhelmed him and he rubbed his hand on his jeans to assure himself he wasn’t actually holding it.

A sliding block of iron graced the front of the door, a shining padlock securing its end. Ryan set the food down and dug a single key from his pocket. The key shook and jittered against the lock’s cylin
der face before sliding inside.

He
pulled the lock free and set it on the ground. He slid the shaft to the left, the rasping scrape of steel on steel grating against his eardrums. Picking up the food, he pulled on the door, letting the bright light of the day spill inside.

The root cellar was only seven feet wide but over twenty feet long. Its smooth walls were dry and powder-white, helping the light from outside stretch
farther in. The smell hit him as soon as he stepped inside and even though he braced himself, he couldn’t help the gag that spasmed in the back of his throat. The scent was a mixture of human waste along with body odor laced with fear. The latter was sharp in the close air.

A
tinkle of chains came from the far end of the cellar and Ryan waited for his eyes to adjust before he took several steps inside.

A man lay on his side near the furthest wall, one arm tucked beneath his head, the other ran down to his hip where it ended in an ugly stump that oozed blood and pus through a soiled wrapping of gauze. He wore only a brown pair of underwear, once white, that barely hung on his
emaciated frame. Scars, old and new, covered his legs and torso in archaic etchings of pain, their puckered mouths speaking silent agonies. Chains ran down from deep-set anchors sunk in the wall to a dozen oversized fishhooks that were embedded in the flesh of the man’s back and buttocks, their tips catching the light in evil glints.

The man’s eyes were twin reflections of terror, their shine that of a beaten animal past the point of breaking. He shifted and tried to scramble back against the wall, but the hooks twisted in their
fleshy moorings and he made a choked sound before lying once again on the floor, urine flooding the front of his underwear. The formerly vivid shock of red hair on his head was a matted maroon, looking like strands of old blood.

Ryan cleared his throat and moved closer, trying not to vomit from the smell of fresh feces that lingered in the a
ir.

“I brough
t you a sandwich, Mr. Baron.”