CHAPTER ELEVEN.

I have no idea where I drove for the next hour and a half.

Sometimes I was in town, sometimes I was on county roads.

A couple of times, I even drove by the police station.

a"I want to report a murder. I can even tell you who the murderer is.

a"Oh, you can, can you?

a"Yes, sir, it's one of your own officers. Garrett.

a"One of our own officers, eh? Well, now, isn't that interesting? You're accusing one of my own men of murder?

That's how the cops would react about Garrett.

They wouldn't believe me, they wouldn't want to believe me.

But Garrett wasn't my concern. Cindy was.

Even if she'd done nothing more than watch, she would also be charged with murder.

There was no way I could go to the police.

I stopped at an all-night gas station, its white tiles and bright lights making it look like a huge alien s.p.a.ce craft that had just landed in the middle of the rolling dark prairie.

I went in the john and tried to puke.

I couldn't.

I went back to my car and drove away.

And then I made a U-turn on the empty highway and drove right back.

This time, I didn't have any trouble puking at all.

I ate.

That was the funny thing.

After all the terror, and all the puking, I was suddenly, almost giddily hungry.

I pulled into a truck stop and sat at a counter with several grizzled drivers popping Benzedrine and eyeing the two hookers who were working this particular stop tonight. These were hookers who specialized in truck stops and truck drivers.

They were both pudgy, both barely out of their teen years, and both badly bleached blondes. One of them had a right eye that strayed and almost no b.r.e.a.s.t.s at all. I couldn't help it, I felt sorry for her. Being a hooker was a tough life, made even worse with a queer eye and a flat chest.

I ate six pancakes, two orders of hash browns, and a cheese omelet.

I also managed to listen to around twenty-five country western songs, which is no easy task, let me tell you.

I decided to top off my meal with a slice of apple pie and a fourth cup of coffee.

That was a mistake.

Two bites into the pie, I clamped my hand over my mouth and raced to the bathroom.

A couple of hairy truck drivers standing at the urinal watched me dive for a stall.

When I came out, and went to the sink to wash my face and hands, they were still at the urinal, pa.s.sing a joint back and forth.

"You better learn to hold your liquor a little better," one of them said solemnly. "You ain't gonna get no p.u.s.s.y with puke all over your shirt."

"Thanks for the advice," I said.

When I got home, around two, Josh sat at the kitchen table nursing a Pepsi and eating a donut. The kitchen smelled of coffee and spices.

"How you doing?"

"Pretty good," I said. "Tired, I guess. I went to the late show out at the Cineplex and then I just drove around."

"What'd you see?'

"Oh, that new Kevin Costner movie."

"Any good?"

I shrugged. "Nothing special."

I yawned, exhausted.

"Well, I'm going to head up to bed."

"I'll be up in a little bit," Josh said.

Then I made my mistake.

I stood up from the table and took my jacket off.

I didn't think anything of it until I saw Josh's face harden, and a kind of panic come into his eyes. You didn't see Josh panic very often.

"Wow. Are you all right?"

I wore a yellow long-sleeved b.u.t.ton-down shirt.

Blood was splotched and splattered not only all over the chest and stomach of the shirt, but also on the sleeves.

I remembered slipping in blood, and falling into the dead woman.

I had picked up a lot of blood.

"I'm fine," I said.

"Where the h.e.l.l'd you get all that blood?"

"There was an accident on the highway. I stopped to help somebody."

He knew I was lying.

But what else could I do?

"She bled a lot but she didn't get hurt too bad. The woman in the accident, I mean."

He just kept staring at the blood on my chest and arms.

"I'll see you in the morning," I said.

"Yeah," he said, and then he looked at me long and hard and said, "You want to talk about it, brother?"

"There's nothing to talk about, Josh. There was an accident on the highway and this woman was hurt and bleeding and I helped her and I got some of her blood on me. No big deal."

"Right," he said. "No big deal."

I went up to bed.

Richard Mitch.e.l.l, KNAX-TV: "The prisoner has been under a suicide watch for the last month. Round the clock surveillance, including video cameras in his cell. Some of our viewers may remember that a few years ago, a prisoner in Nebraska tried to hang himself in his cell the day before the execution. He was almost dead but the warden insisted that doctors revive him. The next day, the prisoner was executed as scheduled."

Tape 34-D, October 31. Interview between Attorney Risa Wiggins and her client in the Clark County Jail A: You say the alien made you do it. I guess you'll have to explain that to me.

C: The chant.

A: The chant?

C: In my head. Over and over. Telling me what to do. I tried everything I could to get rid of it but nothing worked. Finally, I realized the only thing I could do was do what the alien told mea"and then the chanting would stop.

From a Police Report-September 24,1903 The thing was, he didn't put up any resistance at all. I found him in a deserted barn on the edge of town. Somebody had come running to the station house to tell me that something terrible was going on there.

His name is Abner. He works as a clerk over at First Bank. Very mild-mannered.

When I got there, I found him sitting there in the middle of the barn. He had a lantern nearby and a completely naked dead woman stretched across his lap. This one, it was her face he mostly mutilated. The eyes were dug out, of course.

He was skinning her.

I drew my service revolver and walked over to him and told him to put down the mule knife he was using to skin her.

He put the knife down, the naked woman with most of her skin stripped off still on his lap, and he said, "I didn't want to kill any of them, officer. I really didn't."

Then he started telling me about this well up by one of the line shacks the electric company uses. He said there was some kind of Martian or something in the well and that it was the Martian who was making him kill all these women.

All I could think of was when that meteor crashed out there several years back. Bunch of town kids started the story that there were Martians inside the meteora"like in some story by H. G. Wells, they saida"and that the Martians were going to take over the entire planet.

There was a lot of fuss when that rumor started, and even some adults, who should've known better, started to believe it.

This Abner Fenton was apparently one of the adults who believed it.

When I told him it was time to put the handcuffs on him, he just nodded to the dead woman's right arm and said, "I'm almost finished with her arm. Couldn't I just have a few more minutes?"

I picked up the knife and put my gun on him and told him to set the woman on the floor and stand up.

He never gave me any more trouble the rest of the night.

CHAPTER TWELVE.

By morning, Mrs. Swenson's body had been discovered, and I quickly got the feeling that our little town was never going to be the same again.

In big cities, even the most heinous of murders are quickly forgotten, unless one of the killers or victims is famous.

But a small town is like a family, and when one of your own is murdered, the death becomes very personal.

Especially given the way that Mae Swenson was butchered.

Downtown talk was of nothing else. The women looked scared, the men looked angry.

A small group of hunters over at Al's Diner talked about getting a posse together and hunting down the killer in the woods, where they were sure he was hiding.

They just couldn't believe that anybody from our town could murder somebody this way.

All kinds of rumors and theories were floated.

Because we live within fifty miles of a prison, there was talk that a multiple-murderer had escaped and killed Mrs. Swenson. According to this story, the killer was black. Of course.

Another rumor had it that a biker gang did it. The town had always hated this gang, and pretty much forced it to keep to a single tavern down by the railroad spur. I guess the Chief actually did ride out to the old quonset huts where the bikers liveda"and mysteriously collected unemployment checksa"and ask them a lot of hard questions.

Finally, and inevitably, there was the rumor about Mr. Proctor. He was pushing fifty now, and quieter than ever, and unmarried as ever. He wrote how-to books for a living and lived alone in a two-story frame house that he'd fixed up by himself. Everybody had long a.s.sumed he was gay, and as we all know gay people just can't wait to take a knife to straights like us, and so whenever anything notably terrible happened in town, a lot of people looked to Mr. Proctor.