Scream Catcher (28 page)

Encouraged, Jude feels suddenly lighter.

He begins to move with increased speed along the trail while the sound of rushing water becomes louder, more forceful. A sudden burst of energy and strength fill his veins. But when he feels the violent slap against the center of his lower spine, all strength in legs and arms gives way. He drops down chest-first onto the path like a sack of rags and bones, face buried in the mud as though having taken a bullet to the back. In his panicked mind, Jude knows that it’s quite possible he’s been shot.

* * *

The ground zero of pain is located in the lower spine, where it ripples throughout his entire body. That much he is sure of. The pain shoots up and down the backbone with surprising efficiency. He might roll over, maybe bleed to death. But then he knows a little something about pain besides the way it makes him feel. He knows for instance that pain can be a good thing.

He attempts to move his feet, then his legs. Until he pulls himself up from off the ground. He leans up straight, feels the welt swelling against his lower spine. From that blind position he has no way of knowing if a bullet has lodged there or not.

Then through the tree leaves comes the quick whoosh and another stinging slap. This one against the right arm. The sting is powerful enough to suck his breath away like cigarette smoke through rotating fan blades.

Another powerful slap to the side of the head causes him to drop down hard onto his left side. His body roars with ache while multiple rounds come at him fast. Some missing altogether, some falling short, some slamming against the ground only inches from his face, water and mud splashing into eyes, ears, nose and mouth. Rapid-fire rounds that whoosh and burst through the trees, but not a hint of gunfire. Not a single muzzle flash.

From down on the ground Jude reaches across his chest, touches the spot of impact along his right arm. A thick bruise or welt is already forming on the bicep. He brings fingertips back to his face, raises them up to lips and nose. The thick pasty substance that covers the finger pads is not water. He can only assume that the liquid is blood. But then the smell is not blood either; nor is the taste.

The smell and taste are acidic, toxic.

The fumes they give off make his eyes sting and tear.

The realization sinks in: Lennox has decided to complicate the kill game by adding a pepper-ball obstacle. Just like his first two Lake George victims. Jude has never been shot with a pepper-ball before. He’s never even seen a pepper-ball or its launcher until his most recent visit to the L.G.P.D. village precinct. He’s known some people who through the years have taken real bullets and survived to tell their stories. Each one of them, without fail, attested to the fact that when a bullet enters your flesh it does not hurt. At least, not right away. Instead it disables you, sucks the breath from your lungs, knocks you unconscious or on occasion, makes you bleed out, sometimes to death. But it almost never causes immediate pain due to the onset of shock.

Jude can’t say the same thing for the pepper-ball.

Its sting is violent enough to steal his breath away; enough to mute his screams. The only saving grace is the rain. Rain turns most of the pepper dust into mush. It prevents him from going into a disabling fit of coughing, tearing, choking.

Multiple rounds strike all around him, fast and furious.

The rounds keep him pinned down in the wet mud. He knows he has to do something. He can either lie there and waste precious time, worry over the pain. Or he can make a move, get himself downhill and out of range.

A scream pierces the darkness. A yelp coming from behind him along the high ground. The yelp cuts through flesh and bone.

Jude makes a silent three count.

Breathing deep, he pushes himself up onto his feet, bolts off through the brush.

Tongue Mountain

Friday, 1:38 A.M.

Jude runs.

It doesn’t seem to matter where to.

For him, the entire black mountain forest has become an unrelenting obstacle. Branches and twigs whip and flail at his face, little devils stinging arms and chest. He sprints full speed, off trail, in a directionless panic, desperate to get himself out of range of the pepper-balls.

His escape should be a good thing. But it turns out to be a grave mistake when a head-on collision with a tree truck knocks him cold.

* * *

Unconscious darkness.

Just how long it’s lasted, Jude has no idea. Lying on his side on the wet ground he has no real memory of the violent collision either. All he knows is that one moment he’s running like hell, the pepper-balls whizzing by his head. And the next, he’s opening his eyes onto the pain and the tighter than tight pressure that begins and ends in the center of his face. Like two separate sticks that have lodged themselves up inside his nasal passages, the tightness throbs and stings. It shoots up through the sinuses, into the eyeballs making eyes tear, making head ring.

Raising his right hand, Jude extends his index finger, gently touches the crest of his nose. He feels the surface sting where the cartilage has fractured, the skin split down the middle. He can breathe, but only through his mouth.

Blood combines with the rain, runs thick onto lips and tongue. It tastes of salt and water. There is this sick inside-out sensation in his belly. He hears another shriek coming from not far behind him. He hears the rustling of leaves and branches. It sounds like a bear crashing through the woods.

That’s when he feels the snakes on his legs.

Maybe he can’t see them, but he can feel their thick, linear bodies slithering over his lower legs, one after the other, as if he’s gone down the middle of the very path in which the rattlesnakes are migrating from Lake George up the Tongue mountainside. It’s one thing to feel the snakes, but it’s another to be blinded to their presence; to know that at any minute they might sink their fangs into his legs.

He has to move.

Inhaling a breath, he bounds himself up onto two feet.

A pair of snakes fall to the ground. He can hear the sound of their rubbery bodies coiling against the leaves and the pine needles. He hears their rattling tails. With the powerless Maglite still gripped in his right hand, he shuffles through the thick woods. Not in any specific direction, but away from the snakes; away from the beast that crashes through the trees.

Then without warning, Jude falls.

Tongue Mountain

Friday, 1:43 A.M.

Through the green-tinted vision of the DVND, Black Dragon observes the Player do a sudden, jerky come-to only three or four minutes after colliding head-on with the tree-trunk. With a kind of amused amazement he watches the long, green-tinted snakes that slither and crawl over the Player’s legs. He recalls a passage in the Player’s memoir that details its specific fears, phobias and demons, one of them being spiders, another closed spaces, and yet another snakes. What a perfect setting the Black Dragon chose for this all important kill game’s second level.

A dark, eerie snake-filled stage.

When the Player manages somehow to get its head together, it pulls itself up off the muddy floor only to resume a panic-run through the brush in the direction of the cliff.

Black Dragon cradles the pepper-ball launcher inside his right arm. He bulls and bushwhacks his way through the heavy foliage, never taking his eyes off the Player even for a second. He feels certain that it is about to take a flying leap off the cliff edge, the carefully planned kill game now about to come to a disappointing, premature end without the Player’s recorded screams.

But then he sees the Player make a kind of blind, quick left turn before dropping out of sight. Not off the cliff. But into the whirlpool situated at the far end of the stream.

* * *

Glens Falls Medical Center

Friday, 1:43 A.M.

Following the emergency surgery to suture his bullet wound, Mack is wheeled from recovery to a private room. The room offers a blacked-out view of the Glens Falls downtown and beyond it, the southernmost point of Lake George. As if the wounded Captain cares about the scenery at this point.

Looking up from his hospital bed, he groggily views the mustached face of Lt. Lino.

“What day is it, Daniel?”

“Friday morning. Technically speaking.”

“Time?”

Lino glances at his wristwatch.

“Going on two.”

“Have they found my son yet?”

“That’s a negative, Captain,” the Lieutenant offers before filling in his department superior on Lennox’s now abandoned apartment and the fire retardant frost job he did on the place.

After a time, Mack swallows.

“Blackout or no blackout, we still have a preliminary hearing later this morning. Which means we must locate Lennox tonight … now.” But considering Lennox has taken the Parish family hostage, the mumbled words come off sounding like a gross understatement.

“I understand that Captain. Which leads me to a question.”

“What is it Daniel?”

“Over the course of the past two days, have you overheard anyone—cop, lawyer, maybe Agent MacSweeny, or even P.J. Blanchfield—ever mention uncovering and/or gathering evidence regarding Lennox’s future kill games? Where they might take place? Anything regarding locations?”

Mack in all his pain and confusion tries his best to think. But his brain is soaked in anesthetic and worry for his son. In the end he can’t recall a goddamned thing.

He says, “I’ve been working this thing for four years. If I knew something about future kill game locations, you would know something about future kill game locations.”

Lino nods, purses his lips, lets the question slide.

Shifting the subject: “CSI is wading through the apartment now. But that shit Lennox sprayed is making the going too slow. We’re hoping to get something off his computer. Something that might give us just a hint about what Lennox could be up to.”

“You’re playing right into his hands by wasting your time,” the old Captain grimaces. “The computer will be shot with viruses and the apartment was iced over. What’s that tell you?”

Sensing Mack’s drift, Lino nods.

“Tells me he expected company; our kind of police company.”

“And what else?”

“That Lennox planned on returning nevermore to his apartment. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t leave something for us to chew on. It’s like MacSweeny said. Before he leaves us, Lennox will want to tell us everything. CSI should be looking for a full confession, probably on the computer hard drive once we get through any virus or block.”

“But as for the location of the new kill game,” Mack says, “You won’t find a clue.”

“We have to keep looking.”

“One more thing,” Mack says, lips pressed together during sudden wave of discomfort. “That surveillance bracelet. I’m not sure even a hacker like Lennox could have removed it himself. I think there had to be somebody else.”

“Somebody inside,” Lino offers like a question. “Any ideas?”

In his mind, Mack is screaming “Blanchfield!” But then as this point, he doesn’t want to start pointing fingers. Not even in front of someone he can presumably trust.

“No ideas,” he grunts. “Yet.”

Lino swallows a cold lump of disappointment. He pictures the ankle surveillance bracelet that’s been removed and discarded without a single alarm being sounded.

Mack squeezes his fists.

The old, now injured Captain is fighting sleep. But then just when he thinks it might be possible to wake up from the nightmare, the exhaustion and anesthetic begin to overtake him.

Lino, however, is still at a loss.

He’s no closer to figuring out where Lennox might have taken the Parish family now than when he walked into the hospital room earlier. About the only thing going for him is that he can confidently cross off the abandoned factory, the Hudson River and the Molloy gravel pit as possible kill game sites. But maybe he’s reaching for something that doesn’t belong to him. Lennox isn’t his direct responsibility. No more than the lives of the Captain’s family are. Lino has become a member of the L.G.P.D. for other reasons—reasons unknown even to Captain Mack. But then over the past two weeks, he’s become convinced of a direct connection between his final objective and Lennox. In his mind, he knows that if he were able to apprehend Lennox, the beast would sing like a wing-clipped bird. Of course, what all this means is that a search for the Parish family is actually a search for Lennox. And an apprehended Lennox would provide him with direct access to his ultimate goal.

He’s already been to Lennox’s village apartment. So now he needs to continue the investigation at a new location, look for some kind of lead there.

Making his way out the open door past a snoring Mack, he believes he knows precisely where to carry on.

Tongue Mountain

Friday, 1:43 A.M.

The whirling current takes hold of Jude’s body, draws him into its center.

He feels himself being pulled under, body spiraling, going down. No other alternative but to let go, be drawn under the surface of the drowning pool, be dragged along the serrated edge of a metal culvert that drains out over the cliffside.

But something happens then. Jude doesn’t freefall to the solid earth below. He finds himself reaching out, clawing for something to grab on to, until he finds a handhold.