Off Season - Jack Ketchum [69]
I have to try, he thought. No way to stop now. He had seen what they could do to a woman, and to leave Marjie to that would mean he would despise himself the rest of his life. Like it or not, he was not capable of abandoning her. What if it had only been Laura? he thought. Would I still be here? He didn’t know. He doubted it. It was Marjie. He felt responsible for her. If his sense of responsibility had always been hard on him, it had never been so hard on him as now. He felt alternately terrorized and oddly elated; he was going into combat again. He had won the first time—or at least not lost—and he would win again.
He had totaled an automobile a few years ago, he remembered. It had been a hot sunny day and the roads were slick from a recent shower. A Volkswagen tried to pass him and went into a skid, its rear end fishtailing into his left front bumper and forcing him over an embankment. There was a moment that had remained clear in his mind ever since, when he was falling through the air while the car did its own flip and slammed down hard, roof first. He did not think about the steel-reinforced doors then, though it was the doors that saved his ass and kept him from being crushed inside. He only kept thinking that somehow he was going to get through this and in good shape at that. He’d known he would be all right.
And that was exactly what had happened. He’d walked away without a scratch. People he’d told about it kept saying it was a miracle but he didn’t think so. It seemed to him it was the precognition itself that had saved him, which had allowed him to relax and fall in time with the heartbeat of the incident, and which had precluded the panic that might have killed him. He had a similar feeling now, a mix of fear and excitement with optimism as its base, a feeling that whatever the odds, things would be all right. Something told him he wasn’t going to die tonight. He only hoped that it wasn’t something that came to everybody on the edge of disaster, that it really meant what it appeared to mean. He hoped, for instance, that John Kennedy hadn’t felt similarly on his way to the hospital, with half his brains shot the hell away.
He watched the man walk ahead of him by the shoreline. He shook the driftwood a few times, getting a feel for its weight. He thought, This is for you, you big drooling eight-fingered bastard. You go first if I can help it at all. This is for wanting to eat me, you sick fuck. This one’s for Carla.
Strong but careful, he stayed low and moved along the rocks.
4:20 A.M.
No wonder they bitch about the police, Peters thought. How long had it taken them? A half-hour to assemble. A hell of a long time, considering how fast things were going tonight. He’d been so nervy by the end of it that he’d half considered sending Willis and Shearing on ahead the way he’d promised he would do. But he was too good a cop for that. It wasn’t their fault. They were good boys, and he needed cops, not heroes and dead men tonight. I got enough of those right here, he thought.
The ambulance had arrived and the photographers were already working. Peters and Shearing stood by the embers of the fire and watched a much smaller man—in clean white shirt and tie at this hour of the morning, for God’s sake—photograph the coal-black remains of what had once been a human being. Behind them a dozen men stood ready, armed with shotguns. Peters carried his own sawed-off pump, the one he kept in the car for special occasions. He guessed this was as special as it got. He spotted Willis amid a second group of men down by the house.
“Willis!” he yelled. “Come on, son, haul it up here!” His voice was a little hoarse. Willis motioned to the other men and they arrived on the double. Another dozen or so. Peters counted them. Yeah, another dozen.
“Sorry, George,” said Willis. “Mott wanted the info on their automobiles.