Wellspring (Paskagankee, Book 3) (29 page)

She
wheeled the cruiser into the diner’s parking lot, barely slowing. Loose gravel
scattered from under her tires as she spun the steering wheel sharply and accelerated
back onto Main Street in the direction of the Paskagankee Police Station.

Mike
was probably right. If she stepped between the FBI and the murder suspect now by
accusing the two agents of conspiring to execute the man, she would effectively
end any chance of promotion.

Ever.

Hell,
it was entirely possible she would lose her job. She didn’t doubt the federal
government’s ability to get people sacked at the local level if doing so was
important enough to them.

But she
was one hundred percent certain about what she had seen this morning. Something
was off about those two agents, and she knew in her heart if she had been just two
minutes later arriving at the Ridge Runner, the prime suspect in the murder of
Chief Kendall and Bronson Choate would have been summarily executed, his body
buried in a shallow grave somewhere in the vast expanse of wilderness
surrounding Paskagankee.

There
was no doubt in her mind.

She recalled
something her mother used to tell her. It was one of her mom’s favorite
sayings, and when the twelve-year-old Sharon asked her what it meant, she smiled
and said, “You’ll understand when you need to understand.” Then her mother had
succumbed to cancer, and her father had started drinking, and the words had
vanished from her mind, forced out by many other more pressing life events.

But now
she remembered, and she understood with a clarity that brought tears to her
eyes that her mother had been right all those years ago. The expression was, “It’s
more important to do the right thing than the prudent thing.” She said a quick
prayer of thanks, hoping more than knowing that her mother would be there to
hear it.

For the
second time today, she entered the police station lot at a rate of speed she
would have ticketed a citizen for. She screeched to a stop directly in front of
the entrance – another no-no – and leaped out of the car. Now that
she had made up her mind, she felt driven, like every second mattered, like she
might already be too late.

Leaving
the cruiser’s front door hanging open, Sharon rushed up the steps, banging
through the front door and into the lobby. Gordie Rheaume looked up from the
dispatcher’s console with a smile and said, “Whoa, where’s the fire, young
lady?”

She
ignored him, trotting as fast as she was able through the maze of chairs and
desks to the rear stairway. She registered Gordie saying something else to her as
she ran but ignored that as well.

She hit
the stairway and took the steps three at a time. She knew it was a bad idea,
that she was risking injury, but by now she was no more able to slow herself
down than she would have been to lift the building off its foundation. She was
being driven by an almost pathological need to stop whatever was happening in
that interrogation room. And she
knew
something
was happening in the interrogation room.

She
leaped off the last four steps, landing in the hallway with a bone-jarring
thud.
Then she straightened out and
sprinted the length of the hallway to the closed door.

31

Mike did his best to keep any hint
of ridicule or skepticism out of his voice. “A hundred and fifty-seven years,
huh? That would make you fellas close to two hundred years old. You’re holding
up amazingly well, under the circumstances.”

Cooper
glanced at him scornfully, but Ferriss looked almost introspective at his words.
Then the FBI man seemed to come to a decision and he said, “What do you know
about the Fountain of Youth?”

Mike
tried to cover his surprise. This was an unexpected turn, but since his goal
was to keep the two armed men talking until he could figure out his next move,
he considered any subject they decided to explore to be a productive one. “What
do I know about the Fountain of Youth? I know the legend says that if you drink
from its water, you receive the gift of eternal youth. I know that people have
been searching for this fountain for thousands of years. I know that it’s
nothing more than a myth.”

Ferriss
smiled. “Yeah? What if I told you you’re wrong about that last part? What if I
told you—”

A
suddenly agitated Jackson Healy blurted out,
“I
took that liquid out of Peru after I shot you.
I
took it, and then drank it after you
tried to burn me to death in the Paskagankee Tavern!
I
took it,” he repeated, “so how could you be standing here?”

As if a
switch had been flipped, the introspective look vanished from Ferriss’s face.
He turned to Healy with a snarl. “You shot us, but you never finished the job,”
he spat. “You never checked to see that we were dead. But you didn’t care about
that, anyway, did you? We were miles out in the wilderness, with nowhere to go for
help and no one to save us, even if we
were
still alive.”

Mike
watched, open-mouthed, as Healy nodded a mute confirmation of Ferriss’s impossible
words.

“Well,
here’s what you didn’t take into consideration,” the FBI man continued, his
words dripping with venom. “I’m sure you remember the sacred ceremony we
crashed that night, right? When we killed everyone and stole the disk and the
Fountain water? Remember? And then you gut-shot Amos and me? You remember all
that, right?”

Healy
nodded wordlessly, his eyes haunted.

“Well,
here’s the thing, Mr. Genius Outlaw: The ceremony wasn’t over at that point. It
was at some kind of halftime or something, like at a fucking football game.”

Mike
watched the exchange closely. Healy gaped at the FBI man as if not fully understanding
his words. Then comprehension started to dawn as Ferriss continued speaking.
“After you rode off into the sunset, leaving Amos and me to bleed to death and
end up as a meal for some small animal, more of those goddamn shaman priests
started to show up.

“They discovered
all of their compadres slaughtered and then they found us, cursing and bleeding
in the scrub brush. They carried us across the wilderness on the backs of
goddamn donkeys to a village who the fuck knows how far away. It felt like
forever, thanks to your lead injections in our bellies. And then they interrogated
us. They asked us just how badly we wanted to live. Understanding them wasn’t
easy, either,” Ferriss said, “and not just because Amos and I was just about
delirious by then from pain and infection. None of them jungle-living bastards
spoke a word of English, and of course our Spanish wasn’t exactly up to snuff,
neither.

“But
eventually, them shaman guys managed to make their intentions clear. We agree
to their terms, and they save our dying asses. We don’t agree to their terms,
and we can just crawl off into the jungle and finish dying all alone in the
middle of nowhere, with not a single goddamn soul to ever know what happened to
us or how we were double-crossed by one traitorous, cheating bastard!” The
volume of Ferriss’s words had gradually been increasing as he talked, until now
he was just shy of a full-out scream.

He took
a moment to regain control of himself before continuing. When he did, his tone
was once again icy, his words hard as diamonds. “Well, as you might imagine,
ol’ Amos and I felt we had quite a bit to live for, what with the way things
ended between you and us that night back in Bumfuck, South America. The thought
of dying in the jungles of Peru was bad enough, but we had a score to settle.”
He gazed at Healy, flat-eyed and cold, and Mike saw that Agent Cooper was doing
the same.

Jackson
Healy looked from Ferriss to Cooper and back again. Nobody spoke. Finally Healy
said, “A-an understanding?”

Ferriss
grinned. “I thought you might focus on that part of our little story. Yep. We
reached an understanding with them godless shaman guys. As I mentioned, it was
an easy decision for us.”

He
stood across the table, keeping his flat-eyed stare trained on Healy, making
the man squirm. “Wondering what the understanding was, ain’t ya?”

Healy
nodded, the rigid set to his body indicating to Mike he already had a pretty
good idea what the answer might be.

Ferriss
said, “The agreement was a simple one, really. In exchange for them shamans nursing
us back to health, we would agree to spend the rest of our lives hunting down
the murderous scum who slaughtered their fellow heathens at that cursed rock.
It was a no-brainer, really. Shamans or no shamans, that would have been our
intention, ain’t that right, brother?”

“Goddamn
right,” Cooper agreed with a growl, his weapon still held rock-steady and
trained on Mike. For his part, Mike had nearly forgotten all about the Glock,
so intensely was he trying to follow Ferriss’s bizarre narrative. He noticed
the two FBI men slipping into more rural speech patterns. The transition was
jarring, but somehow made perfect sense at the same time.

“But that
ain’t to say them Peruvian medicine men didn’t sweeten the pot a little,”
Ferriss/Wesley Krupp continued. “Once they learned you had made off with the
Youth Juice that unearthly demon gave them during the ceremony, they realized
the hunt for you would likely be a long and difficult one. They had to assume
you would eventually drink it – which you obviously did – and they
knew it would take decades, maybe centuries, to even the score with you.”

Ferriss
paused, either for dramatic effect or to take a deep breath, Mike wasn’t sure
which. Maybe it was both. With his flat gaze still directed at Healy,
Ferriss/Wesley said, “I’m thinking you might be able to guess how they
sweetened the pot for us.”

Healy’s
eyes widened and he said, with almost no hesitation, “They had more liquid,
didn’t they?”

“Give
the man a cigar,” Ferriss/Wesley Krupp crowed. “They had more Youth Juice. And
they were so pissed off at the slaughter of their buddies back at the magical
rock that they were more than happy to forgive us our little role in the
confrontation, if only we were willing to follow you to the ends of the earth
to extract revenge, on their behalf as well as ours.”

He
looked around, as if taking in the massive forest of Paskagankee, rather than
the dingy off-white walls of the windowless interrogation room. “It looks like
we’ve done exactly that.”

Healy
sat shaking his head. “I don’t understand,” he said not just with fear but also
with genuine curiosity. “How did you know I was inside that damned tavern when
you burned it down a century-and-a-half ago?”

“We
didn’t know,” Ferriss/Wesley Krupp replied. “Not for sure. But we was only
minutes behind you when we tracked you down that night. Where else would you
have gone? Once the tavern burned and you never showed up, we thought maybe we
had killed you after all.”

“But
how could you have killed me if I had drunk the ‘Youth Juice,’ as you call it?”

“Drinking
that stuff don’t make you invincible,” Ferriss/Wesley said. “It simply stops
the aging process. If you hadn’t been nice and cozy in that goddamned secret underground
room, you
would
have died. You could
have drank a gallon of magic juice and it wouldn’t have mad a damned bit of
difference. But when the body of the tavern owner was the only one found in
there after the fire burned itself out, we suspected you might somehow have escaped.”

Healy
shook his head in wonder. “So you’ve been waiting more than a century and a
half for me to show up?”

“That’s
the curse,” Ferriss/Wesley said, nodding. His eyes were still flat and hard but
Mike thought his face looked rueful. “Until we
knew
you were gone, until we
knew
you had paid for what you did, we had to continue slogging along, watching
and waiting for you to show your traitorous face.”

“But…”
Jackson Healy hesitated, working it out in his head. “The FBI? How did you
manage that?”

Ferriss/Wesley
shrugged. “Wasn’t that hard,” he said with a thin smile. “After we was back at
full strength in Peru, we snuck across the border and started searching. I’m
sure you recall we almost caught up to you a few times before we finally ran
you down in Paskagankee.”

“I
remember,” Healy nodded.

“Thought
you might,” Ferriss/Wesley said. “But after we burned down the tavern and you
never showed up, we feared you might have somehow given us the slip again. So,
within a year, we had transformed ourselves from Wesley and Amos Krupp into James
and Hardy Frey. We hired on as law enforcement in the surrounding states,
always keeping an eye on news and arrest reports, just waiting for you to poke
your head out of your hidey-hole.”

Healy
looked stunned. “You’ve been working in law enforcement for the past one hundred
and fifty years?”

“A
hundred and fifty-three, to be exact,” Ferriss/Wesley said drily. “I think it’s
fair to say we now have seniority over just about every cop and FBI agent who’s
ever worked in the country. Ironic, when you think about it.”

Ferriss’s
sardonic remark went right over Healy’s head. He was otherwise occupied,
clearly thinking things through. “But if you never aged…”