Douglas Preston - Still Life With Crows

“You’ve got to be kidding,” he said.

“She wants the sheriff out there,” the dispatcher ended lamely.

Tad could hardly believe it. “We’ve got a serial killer loose and a frontful of tornadoes on their way, and you want me to check out a monster? ”

There was a silence. “Hey,” said the dispatcher, “I’m just doing my job. You know I have to report everything. Mrs. Higgs says the monster left a footprint.”

Tad lowered the radio momentarily. Jesus Christ.

He looked at his watch. Eight-thirty. He could be out to the Higgs place and back in twenty minutes.

With a sigh, he raised the radio once again. “All right,” he said. “I’ll check it out.”

Fifty-One

B y the time Tad arrived at the Higgs residence, old man Higgs had returned home and whaled his boy, and the kid was sitting angrily in the corner, eyes dry, little fists clenched. Mrs. Higgs was flitting about in the background, worried, wringing her hands, her mouth compressed. Higgs himself sat at the kitchen table, face set, eating a potato.

“I’m here about the, ah, report,” Tad said as he came in, taking his hat off.

“Forget the report,” said the old man. “I’m sorry you were bothered.”

Tad went over to the boy and knelt down. “You okay?”

The boy nodded, his face flaming red. He had blond hair and very blue eyes.

“Hillis, I don’t want any more talk of monsters, hear?” the farmer said.

Mrs. Higgs sat down, got up. “I’m sorry, Deputy Tad, do you want a cup of coffee?”

“No thanks, ma’am.”

He looked at the kid again and spoke softly. “What’d you see?”

The kid said nothing.

“Don’t be talking about any monsters,” growled the farmer.

Tad leaned closer.

“I saw it,” said the boy defiantly.

“What’d you say?” the farmer roared.

Tad turned to Mrs. Higgs. “Show me the footprint, if you will, ma’am.”

Mrs. Higgs rose nervously.

The farmer said, “He ain’t talking about monsters still, is he? By jingo, I’ll whale him a second time. Calling the police about a monster!”

Mrs. Higgs brought Tad through the small parlor to the back of the house and scuttled into the boy’s room. She pointed at the window. “I know I shut the window before I put Hill to bed, but when he screamed and I came in I saw it was open. And when I went to shut it I saw a footprint in the flowerbed.”

Tad could hear Higgs’s voice raised in the kitchen. “It’s goddamned embarrassing, having the sheriff come calling over a bad dream.”

Tad raised the window. The moment he did so, the wind came shrieking in, grabbing the curtains and tossing them wildly around. Tad put his head out the window and looked down.

In the faint light from the room he could see a bed of carefully tended zinnias. Several of them had been roughly flattened by a large, elongated mark. It might be a footprint, but then again, it might not be.

He went back through the parlor, exited the side door, and walked around the edge of the house, leaning toward the clapboards for cover, until he’d reached the boy’s window. Snapping on his flashlight, he knelt by the flowerbed.

The impression was smudged and had been eroded by the storm, but it did, in fact, strongly resemble a footprint.

He straightened up, angling his flashlight away from the house. There was another mark, then another and another. With his flashlight, he followed their direction. About a quarter mile distant—beyond the frenzied, tossing sea of corn—were the faint lights of the Gro-Bain plant. The storm warnings had shut the plant down early and it now lay empty.

As he watched, the lights abruptly winked out.

He turned. The lights in the Higgs house were out, too. But the glow of light from Medicine Creek was still visible.

Blackout.

He trudged around the side of the farmhouse again and went in the door.

“It appears there may, in fact, have been an intruder,” he said.

The farmer muttered angrily but didn’t say anything. Mrs. Higgs was already lighting candles.

“We’re also under a tornado warning. I’m going to ask you to shut and lock your doors and windows. Head for the basement the moment the wind gets any worse. If you have a battery-powered radio, keep it tuned to the emergency channel.”

The farmer grunted acknowledgment. He didn’t need anybody telling him what to do in case of a twister.

Tad got back in his car and sat for a moment, thinking. The big cruiser rocked back and forth to the gusting of the wind. It was nine o’clock. Hazen and his team would be in town by now. He unhooked the radio and called in.

“That you, Tad?”

“Yeah. You back at the station, Sheriff?”

“Not yet. Storm blew down a tree on the Deeper Road and knocked out a couple of repeater stations.”

Tad quickly explained the situation.

“Monsters, huh?” Hazen chuckled. There was an awful lot of noise in the background.

“You know 911, they have to report everything. I’m sorry if I—”

“Don’t apologize. You did right. What’s the upshot?”

“It appears there may have been an intruder. The kid’s scream might have startled him. He seems to have headed away in the direction of the Gro-Bain plant. Which, by the way, just lost power.”

“Probably that Cahill kid and his friends again. Remember that egging last month? We don’t want those boys out on a night like this. They take advantage of a blackout to go helling around, they could end up getting skulled by a flying tree. As long as you’re out there, why don’t you check out the plant? There’s still time. Keep in touch.”

“Right.”

“And Tad?”

“Yes?”

“You haven’t seen that man Pendergast, have you?”

“No.”

“Good. Looks like he blew town after I served him with that C-and-D.”

“No doubt.”

“We’re going to hit the cave at ten. Get back by then to cover the office.”

“Got it.”

Tad signed off and started up the car. He felt a certain relief. Now he had an even better reason not to go into the cave after the killer. As for Gro-Bain, they hadn’t had a night guard since the last one started working days. He would just check the entrances: as long as they were all locked, and there was no sign of activity, his job would be done.

He pointed the car south, toward the dark, low outline of the plant.

Fifty-Two

T ad eased his squad car into the plant’s parking lot. Heavy gusts blasted across the empty asphalt, carrying with them bits of straw and ruined husks of corn. Ribbons of rain cascaded here and there, coming and going in sudden sheets. A line of fat raindrops passed over the cruiser, from front to back, with a machine-gun cadence. Beyond the parking lot, he could hear waves of wind ripping through the cornfields surrounding the plant. He peered out at the blackness over the corn, half hoping for, half dreading, the sight of a daggerlike funnel cloud. But he could see nothing.

The sheriff had said he suspected Andy Cahill and his friends of terrorizing the Higgs homestead. Privately, Tad thought Hazen’s own son Brad and his gang were the more likely suspects. Scaring little kids, egging buildings, was more their style. The son would never be the man his father was. Tad wondered what he’d do if he ran into the sheriff’s son outside the plant. Now, that could prove to be more than a little awkward.

He eased the car up to the low outline of the plant and stopped, engine idling. Even through the closed windows, the wind screeched and moaned like a beast in pain. The plant was dim against the murk, sunken in the corn, dark and deserted.