The Devil's Laughter Read online

  Ray smiled. “Then I would have to think that if someone – or a lot of someones – are on his property thinking about doing him harm, those people are in a world of shit, Cliff. Pardon my language, gentlemen.”

  The young priest frowned along with Cliff.

  The old priest smiled along with Ray and Gerard.

  Chapter 13

  Link had been expecting this. He had stocked his Bronco accordingly. He ran without lights down to about the middle of his property line and parked the vehicle off the road. Reaching into the back seat, he grabbed a clip pouch and his Ruger Mini-14, fitted with a folding stock for easier carrying. He belted on his. 45, made certain he had plenty of full clips for it, and then climbed the fence and began carefully circling his property, working his way through the timber and thick underbrush.

  Link knew every inch of his acreage. He had played in it as a boy and had walked many, many miles through it since his return home. And Link did not like his perimeter violated.

  “. . . burn his goddamn house down,” the words drifted to him. “That’ll teach the son of a bitch not to fuck around with our kin.”

  Link waited for the coldness to fill him. It was very quick in coming. His mind pushed everything but survival out of his consciousness.

  He saw the dark, narrow shape of a rifle barrel. Link smiled. Now it became self-defense.

  “Let’s set all them damn animals of his on fire,” another suggested. “Listen to ’em squall.”

  “Fine idea,” a third voice said. “You do come up with some good ones, Teddy Eugene.”

  The coldness within Link turned to ice. T.E. Barlow, Link thought. Pure, low-down, mean, worthless white trash. Then he said that aloud.

  “Who said that?” Teddy hollered. “Call me white trash, will you? Step out here and face me.”

  “Eat shit,” Link told him, then shifted positions.

  “Link Donovan,” a fourth voice said. “We got him now, boys. Fan out and we’ll take him. Horsewhip the hide clear off him and then geld him like a horse.”

  “Yeah. We’ll see how much pain he can stand,” another voice was added to the group.

  Link didn’t think much of that idea.

  “The Exalted One might not like this much,” another voice whispered.

  Six of them so far. Link smiled. They were really afraid of him. Exalted One? That sounded like something out of the Ku Klux Klan. But he didn’t think it was. He thought it was probably much more sinister than that.

  Link slung his mini-14 and felt around on the ground for a club. He found a piece of wood about three feet long and as big around as his wrist. Just right. He waited motionless by a tree, breathing through his mouth.

  He smelled one of the men just about the time he heard him. Fellow smelled really bad. The man stepped up even with the tree and Link hit him in the face with the club. It sounded like dropping an overripe melon off a building onto a concrete sidewalk. Link looked down. He could see the black wetness of blood and the shiny white of teeth. He had caught the man right in his mouth.

  “What the hell-far’s ’at?” one of the group hollered. “Sounded lak somebody fell down.”

  “No,” Link called. “He didn’t fall down. I knocked him down, asshole.”

  The man cussed and came blundering through the woods. He ran right into Link and his club. Link gave the man one end of the club just as hard as he could ram it into his belly. He hit the ground, puking and gasping and moaning. Link kicked him in the head to shut him up.

  “Billy Joe?” a hoarse whisper reached Link. “Where you at, boy?”

  “To your lef’,” came the whisper. “I cain’t see nothin’ out here. I think Donovan’s usin’ a club. That means he ain’t armed.”

  “I think he’s put two down,” another voice said. “That means they’s plenty of us left.”

  Another one added to the group, Link thought. If this keeps up, it’ll be like taking two steps forward and one step back.

  And he knew it was time to stop playing games in the woods. He’d been lucky, very lucky, with the first two. But luck is fickle, and the next man on the ground might well be him.

  “He’s good,” yet another voice came out of the darkness. “I can’t hear him or see him.”

  Damn! Link thought. The woods are full of trash this night. I wonder how many more are going to pop up out of the sewer?

  “Denny,” another new voice came to him. “You and Jimmy Bob and Albert Clay circle slow. Me and Pete and Harold will hold what we got. Move out.”

  Link did some mental arithmetic. Two on the ground and at least six or seven still functioning. Maybe more. He was not in a real good position.

  “We might not be able to take him alive, Teddy Eugene.”

  “Then kill the bastard.”

  Link slipped his mini-14 off his shoulder and stood up. He triggered off half a clip, just as fast as he could. The sound rocked the night. A wild screaming followed the gunfire. The screaming was accompanied by the sound of someone thrashing around in the brush.

  “Oh, hep me, hep me!” the man screamed. “I’m gut-shot. It’s burnin’ my innards.”

  Link had shifted position and was now flat on his belly on the cold ground. He saw the muzzle flash as someone took a shot at him. He returned the fire and heard the satisfying sounds of a body as it slammed against the ground.

  “He’s done kilt Dennis!” the call went out. “Shot ’im right through the head.”

  Link saw one of the men he had whomped with the club stagger to his feet and lurch toward the voices. He held his fire. Not out of any pity or mercy; he just didn’t want to have to explain a lot of bodies.

  “I never could find Albert Clay.”

  “He’s over yonder with his head caved in,” the man Link had busted in the gut said.

  “Get him. It’s gone wrong for us,” the voice said. “We got to go.”

  “How about Dennis?”

  “We’ll take him with us. Do it, Billy Joe. We’ll be back, Donovan. That’s a promise.”

  Link lay on the ground and said nothing.

  “You’re a dead man, Donovan,” the voice goaded him. “You and all the others with you. Dead.”

  Link lay on the ground and listened to them leave, carrying and dragging their dead and wounded. The gut-shot man was crying in his pain. He figured there had been ten of them at the start. Link rose to his feet and began following them cautiously, staying well back and moving silently. They were heading for that old road that ran on the north side of his property.

  He heard the sound of vehicles cranking up and roaring away and knew there was no point in any further pursuit. He headed back to the blacktop. As he was climbing over the fence, he heard the sound of fast-moving vehicles. Ray and the others pulled in behind his Bronco and jumped out.

  “We heard shots, Link,” Cliff said. “What’s going on?”

  “Local trash tried to burn down my house and kill my animals. I killed one and gut-shot the other.”

  “You . . . killed one?” Cliff asked, incredulous.

  “Yeah,” Link said, laying his mini-14 on the back seat and slipping out of his clip pouch. “You have some objection to people defending themselves?”

  “No. Of course not. But if you had told us the gist of the phone call you received, the killing might have been prevented.”

  “Oh, fuck you, Sweeney!” Link lost his carefully controlled temper as the ice inside him turned to fire. “I don’t want to hear any of your goddamned law and order moralizing.”

  “Easy, Link,” Ray said.

  “Easy’s ass!” Link popped back. “What this parish needs is some good old-fashioned vigilante action to clean out the scum and trash up around the old Romaire complex.”

  “You don’t mean that, Link,” Gerard said softly.

  “The hell I don’t. How many death threats have I received from people in this parish over the last four or five years, Gerard? Huh? Tell me. Sixty, seventy, a hundred? The sons of bitches a
re still walking around, aren’t they? ...”

  Father Lattier was leaning up against a vehicle, listening carefully, a thoughtful expression on his face.

  “There is a little thing called proof, Link,” Ray said, some heat in his voice. “Yeah, Link, we know a lot of the people who have threatened you and your animals over the years. But knowing and proving are two different things. Now just cool down, boy. You got the killing fever running high in you. By God, just cool it down.”

  “Where is the body?” Cliff asked.

  “The scum dragged off the dead and wounded scum,” Link told him. “They’ll probably feed it to the hogs.”

  “Good Lord, Mr. Donovan,” Mark Palombo said. “We’re talking about human beings here.”

  The look Link gave him was filled with cold contempt. “That’s right, Father. Wonderful, compassionate, caring, giving people, right? They are so wonderful, compassionate, caring, and giving, they were going to set fire to my animals to hear them scream in pain. They were going to kill me and Paul and Anne and the kids. They were going to burn down my house. People like those that attacked me this night deserve one thing: a bullet in the back of the head. One of these days, Father, I hope you pull that head of yours out of your ass!”

  Link got into his Bronco and drove away, leaving the men standing by the side of the road.

  “That is a very dangerous man,” Cliff said.

  “I concur,” Father Palombo said.

  “I wish this nation had several million more just like him,” Father Lattier said. “God could use a few more warriors on earth.”

  “You can’t mean that, Father!” the young priest said.

  “Michael was a perfect example of God’s mercenaries,” the old priest replied, looking at the much younger man. “The hell I don’t mean it.”

  * * *

  At Link’s house, Anne fixed him a strong drink while he told them what had happened in the woods. The kids had been awake when the mini-battle occurred, and Link spared them few details. They were old enough to understand the danger they were in. Link did not want them scared half to death, but he did want them to be on guard and cautious.

  “Don’t ever leave the fenced-in area,” Link told the kids. “If either of you see anything out of the ordinary, start yelling just as loud as you can. From now on, Anne, go armed. If the law won’t – or can’t, as the case may be – do anything about the crud and trash and crap that walks around on two legs, those of us who pay the taxes and try to live right certainly can do something about it.”

  Anne was looking at Link, watching his eyes very closely. She had seen the same look in her dad’s eyes a couple of times. Once, when she was a very young girl and her father had been working out of the Company’s New York City offices, a street gang had started bothering her. Bother soon turned to physical threats. Then several of the gang members threatened her with gang rape if she didn’t start giving them her money. She told her parents about it.

  Her father had stood in front of the apartment window for a long time. Finally, he nodded his head and turned to gaze at his daughter. Link had that same look in his eyes now.

  “You will not be bothered again by that gang of thugs,” her father had told her.

  Two nights later, the police theorized that the gang got into a fight with a rival gang . . . although the other street gangs loudly claimed their innocence and no one was ever charged. Every single member of the gang who had threatened Anne was killed in a vicious spray of machine-gun fire. One old wino said he thought he saw several men in suits holding machine guns in their hands just before the alley erupted in gunfire. But he wasn’t sure. Police gave no credibility to the old drunk’s statement.

  But the word reached the ears of the street punks very quickly. Anne was never again bothered on her way to school.

  There is a saying among case officers: It is not wise to bother the woodcutter while the woodcutter is busy cutting wood.

  The woodcutter just might turn his axe on you.

  And right now, Link Donovan had a very dangerous look in his eyes.

  Billy and Betsy went to bed. Paul turned to Link. “I ask you a question, Link?”

  “Sure.”

  “I thought paramilitary groups were against the law in this state?”

  “They are, if they’re formed for the purpose of violent overthrow of the government or to do harm to another human being, I think. Why do you ask?”

  “Well, we’ve sure got one in this parish. And my girl, who lives up in the next parish, said they’ve got one, too. Her brother belongs to it. He’s a ... weird sort of guy. I can’t warm up to him. He’s got eyes like a fanatic.”

  “Who belongs to the local group?” Link asked.

  “Most of the people who are on that list I gave you, including my father, my mother, and my brother, and a lot of others who aren’t on that list.”

  “A four-hundred-strong paramilitary group in this parish, Paul?”

  “Yeah. And that’s what’s so weird about it, Link. It was hush-hush for a long time; I heard whispers about it, is all. Now, all of a sudden, it’s like they don’t care who knows about it.”

  Link shook his head. Just getting stranger and stranger.

  * * *

  Ray sat in his office with Gerard and the Bureau man. He sighed and said, “I got unsolved murders in the parish, a haunted house with a basement full of human skulls and bones, a devil’s coven, all kinds of folks acting weird as hell, and if that wasn’t enough, now I got a good friend who’s boiled enough to start killing in the next heartbeat.” He looked at Sweeney. “And I damn sure couldn’t blame him if he did.”

  The FBI man said, “The law is inadequate in many instances, Ray. I won’t argue that with you. But if Donovan goes off half-cocked and starts shooting people, I’ll arrest him.”

  “No, you won’t,” Gerard said softly. “He’d put a bullet in your head and drop you down some old well out in the parish, cave the walls in on you, and it would be just another unsolved mystery. You don’t know Link like we do. You don’t know how his mind works. We do. He’s a good man, Cliff. One of the best men I know. He’s a compassionate man and a giving man. He won’t bother a soul if he’s left alone. Now, he’ll aggravate the stew out of a lot of folks with his articles and opinions, but that’s a right we all have. Just don’t ever crowd Link Donovan. Don’t threaten him, don’t threaten his critters. He doesn’t do that and he expects the same from other people.”

  “Gerard, we’ve got big problems in this parish,” Cliff stated the obvious.

  Ray rolled his eyes and looked heavenward.

  Cliff continued, “Donovan killed a man this evening. You saw him shortly afterward. There was no emotion there. Nothing. Human life means nothing to the man.”

  “Certain types of human life mean nothing to him. But he contains his baser urges quite well, I think.”

  Sweeney looked at the man. “Contains his baser urges quite well,” he said in nearly a whisper. He rose slowly from the chair and slipped into his topcoat. The night had turned cold. He put his hat on his head and walked to the open door of Ray’s office. Sweeney looked back at the two men. “I’ll be out at the motel if you need me. If not, I’ll see you both out at the Garrison place at first light in the morning.” He chuckled without humor. “Contains his baser urges quite well. I’ve got to remember that one.”

  Gerard cut his eyes to Ray. “Link’s gonna blow.”

  Ray nodded his head. “Yeah. I know it. I think this whole parish is about to blow.”

  Ray’s private line rang and he picked up the receiver. “Yeah, Link. We were just talking about you. Oh, yeah? Go head on, boy.” Ray listened for a moment, jotting down notes. Gerard noticed his expression got very grim. “Thanks, Link. And thank Paul for me. Right. See you at the Garrison place.” He hung up the phone and turned to Gerard.

  “We got us a paramilitary group working in the parish. Same bunch of folks that’s on that list of suspected coven members. And on
e in the parish above us. That’s Tony’s parish. Son of a bitch!” he cussed. “Boy, those folks slipped that one right by me, Gerard.”

  “By me, too,” he admitted. “We both knew there was some ol’ boys liked to dress up in army clothes and go bang off weapons . . . but I never put that and any coven together.”

  “It’s all done on land owned by Jack Matisse and Dave Bradley. Their land butts up against each other.” Ray shook his head. “A lot sure went by me.”

  “Ray, I just thought of something: A lot of those people on that list have commissions to carry concealed weapons. Did you think of that?”

  “Oh, hell, no. So much has been happening. Well, they won’t by this time tomorrow. No, by God, we’ll do it now and to hell with what time it is.” He found the list and Gerard took half the names, moving to his office. In a few hours, there were going to be a lot of pissed-off people in the parish.

  And one more horribly mutilated body.

  Chapter 14

  Trooper Miller answered his call. “Just checking on you,” the dispatcher said. “Haven’t heard from you in a couple of hours.”

  “Dead out here,” the young trooper said. “Nothing is moving. I bet I haven’t seen ten cars in three hours. It’s really sort of weird.”

  “Don’t go to sleep.”

  “That’s ten-four,” he said with a laugh. He hooked his mike and then jammed on the brakes as a man ran right in front of him. Miller’s unit slammed into the man and knocked him clean over the car top. The man bounded onto the trunk, then hit the blacktop. Jeff Miller brought his unit to a sliding stop and jumped out, flashlight in hand.

  But there was no body to be found.

  He called into the sheriffs department and requested a unit. “And have an ambulance stand by,” he added. “I know I hit someone.” Or something, he thought, and wondered why he thought that.

  Jeff checked his unit. He could find no dents; but he knew he’d hit that guy. He checked for blood; no blood was on his unit. “I damn sure hit him,” he muttered. He walked the shoulders of the road, checking the ditches up and down on both sides for a hundred yards. Nothing. And he could find no blood.