Jeffery Deaver - Praying for Sleep

Emil took off down the shoulder of the road, Heck paying out the dark-red rope until he felt the twenty-foot knot. Then he followed. Fennel and the retrievers too. But they hadn’t gone fifty feet before Emil turned and nosed slowly toward an unlit, dilapidated house squatting in an overgrown yard. A spooky-looking place, with a sagging roof and shingles like old snake scales. In the window was a sign. Hunting Goods. ETC. Deer dressed and mounted. Pelts bought and sold. Trout too.

“Think he’s in there?” The Boy uncomfortably eyed the black windows.

“Hard to say. All that animal work’d confuse even Emil.”

Heck and Fennel led the dogs to a cockeyed fence post and tied them up. The men drew their sidearms and simultaneously chambered bullets and put the safeties on. Heck thought, Don’t let me get shot again. Oh, please. I got no insurance this time. Though what was behind this prayer wasn’t hospital bills of course but the horror of a scalding bullet.

“ Trent, you don’t have to do this.”

“From the sound of this guy, you need everybody you’ve got.”

Conceding, Fennel nodded then motioned the Boy around back. He and Heck walked onto the front porch quietly. Heck looked at Fennel, who shrugged and knocked on the door. There was no answer. Heck leaned forward and looked through a grimy window. He leapt back suddenly. “Jesus! Oh!” His voice clicked into a high register.

Fennel drew down on the window with his Glock. He squinted. Then laughed. Six inches away, through the muddy glass, was the rearing form of a black bear staring out at them, taxidermied into ferocity.

“Goddamn,” Heck said reverently. “Son of a bitch, I nearly dampened my pants there.”

Fennel pointed to a sign propped in another window. Closed First Two Weeks of November. Happy huntin’.

“He’s telling everybody he’s going away? Don’t this fellow know about burglaries?”

“He’s got himself a watch-bear.”

Heck studied the creature with admiration. “That’d be the first thing I’d steal.”

Then they found the door that Hrubek had kicked in. The men entered cautiously, covering each other. They found the traces of the madman’s shopping spree but it was clear he was no longer here. They reholstered their guns and returned outside. Fennel told the Boy to call Haversham and tell him where they were and that Hrubek did in fact seem to be making for Boston.

They were about to continue up the highway when the Boy called, “Hold up a minute, Charlie. There’s something here you ought to see.”

Heck and Fennel ordered the dogs to sit and then walked around to the back of the building to where the young man was standing, hand on his own pistol. “Look there.” He was pointing inside a work shed. There was blood on the ground just inside the doorway.

“Jesus.” Out came the Walther again. The safety clicked off.

Heck eased into the shed. The place was chockablock with a thousand odds and ends: hoses, boxes, animal skulls, bones, broken furniture, rusted tools, auto parts.

“Check it out. Over there. We got a ’coon bit the big one.”

Fennel shone his light on the limp corpse of a raccoon.

“Think he’d do that? Why?”

“Goddamn,” Heck whispered in dismay. He was looking not at the body of the animal, however, but at a narrow beam in the ceiling from which dangled some spring animal traps, toothless but big-the sort that would easily snap the neck of a fox or badger or raccoon.

Or the leg of a dog.

The reason for Heck’s dismay wasn’t the traps themselves but rather the three empty pegs where, presumably, three other traps had hung until not long ago. Several large bloody bootprints were directly below the pegs.

Heck asked, “Your girls heel?”

“Not when they’re on track. Emil?”

“He’s slow to, if the scent’s fresh. We’ll have to tie the lines back and keep ’em next to us. Hell, if he takes to the grass we’ll just about have to crawl on our bellies. Hrubek’ll be in Boston by the time we get to the county line.”

They walked back to the highway and shortened the lines as Heck instructed. He left his pickup at the truck stop with the third deputy, who remained there in case Hrubek wandered back this way. The Boy accompanied Heck and Fennel in his squad car, the headlights dark, just the amber flashers on. The dogs caught a whiff of the scent and started east once more.

“Down the middle of the friggin’ road.” Fennel laughed nervously. “This boy is nuts, that’s for damn sure.”

But Heck didn’t respond. The giddy excitement of earlier in the evening was gone. The night had turned coarse. Their quarry was no longer a big silly fellow, and Trenton Heck felt the same chill he remembered when, four years ago, outside of a neon-lit 7-Eleven, he’d glanced at what he thought was a branch moving in the breeze and saw instead a sphere of muzzle flash and felt a ripping jolt in his leg, as the asphalt leapt up to meet his forehead.

“You think he’d set traps for dogs ?” Fennel muttered. “Nobody’d do that. Nobody’d hurt a dog.”

Heck reached down and held up his hound’s right ear, in which was a smooth hole the exact size of a.30-’06 slug. Fennel whistled out his disgust at humankind, and Trenton Heck called, “Find, Emil, find!”

Lis stood in the greenhouse, taping bold X’s over the glass that she could remember being glazed into place twenty-five years ago, her mother standing in the construction site, arms crossed, her austere eye on the contractors. Often she frowned because she believed that people wouldn’t cheat you if it was obvious that you suspected they were capable of it.

Taping windows as she went, Lis moved slowly around the large room, which was filled with hybrid tea roses in all shades, and grandiflora blushes dotted with the blood-red John Armstrongs, and High Noon yellow climbers twining around an antique trellis. She had large-cluster floribunda Iceberg whites and Fashion corals. A thousand flowers, ten thousand petals.

She preferred the striking shades, the stark colors, especially in the most fragile of flowers.

Recalling the thousands of hours she’d spent here-as a girl, helping her mother, then more recently by herself-she pictured the many times she’d cut back shoots, pruned flowered laterals and snipped away unvigorous stems. Her hands, thorn-pricked and red, would scoop a dormant eye from the budding and peel the bark to make a shield then slide it into the t-cut rootstock, binding the incision with raffia.

Glancing at several recent grafts, she heard a sound behind her and turned to see Portia rummaging through a box on the floor. She was no longer wearing her Manhattan outfit but had finally acknowledged that she was in L. L. Bean country and accepted Lis’s offer of jeans, sweater and Topsiders. Lis was overcome with an urge to thank her again for staying. But the girl wasn’t interested in gratitude. She seized several rolls of masking tape and disappeared, saying, “Too fucking many windows in this house.”

Her footsteps pounded up the stairs, a teenager sprinting to take a phone call.

Lis was suddenly aware of the greenhouse’s overhead lights, one bank of which Owen had turned on when he was looking for burlap bags. She now doused them. Lis respected the daily cycle of plants-in the same way that she herself never woke to an alarm if she could avoid it. The rhythm of our bodies, she believed, is linked to our souls’ pulse. Plants are no different and in deference to them Lis had installed, in addition to five-hundred-nanometer artificial-sunlight lamps for overcast days, a series of dim blue and green bulbs for nighttime hours. These lights let her flowers sleep-for she believed plants did sleep-while illuminating the greenhouse.