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  “Why not? Look, it would take a closed mind not to admit that there is a lot of weird shit going on in this world that nobody can explain away. I used to date an airline pilot. He told me that he’s seen stuff up in the sky that he didn’t know what the hell it was or where it came from. A lot of pilots have seen weird stuff. The airlines made them all shut up about it. They don’t even enter it in the logs anymore. And I know that for a cold fact. Back here on the ground, I’ve personally witnessed psychics work, leading us to dead bodies. It caused goose bumps to rise up on my flesh. Things that go bump in the night are real, Ted. They’ve been documented, photographed, and filmed in action too many times to shrug off.”

  “Nonsense!” Ted huffed.

  “Screw you!” Brenda muttered.

  “I looked up two words last night,” Lani said. “Pure, and evil. Pure: absolute. Evil: the force in nature that governs and gives rise to wickedness and sin. And do any of you know what the very last definition of evil is?” She looked around as they all shook their heads. “Satan.”

  Leo did his best, but he could not suppress a shudder. Brenda rubbed at a sudden coldness on the back of her neck; her palms were clammy. Ted looked down at his bare forearms. They were covered with chill bumps.

  “You remember the name of that psychic, Brenda?” Lani asked.

  “I won’t ever forget it. Anna Kokalis.”

  “What are we looking for?” Leo asked.

  “I don’t know,” Lani admitted. “Let’s talk to her and see if she will help us. What have we got to lose?”

  “Credibility, for one thing,” Ted said, but he knew he was outvoted in this matter.

  * * *

  Agnes Peters parked her BMW in her garage and walked back to close the garage door. Just as her foot slipped on a small spot of oil, throwing her off balance, a shotgun roared from the darkness beside the house. Had she not slipped, the buckshot that tore a hole in the garage wall would have blown her head off. Agnes screamed and made a dash for the door. The shotgun roared again, the buckshot blowing out the back window of her car. Agnes fumbled for the key to unlock the side door. The shotgun boomed again. The buckshot missed her, but it did tear the side mirror off of her car and send tiny bits of glass and metal in her direction. Several pieces of glass and metal came to a stop, when they impacted and penetrated about an inch into Agnes’s butt.

  “Yowee!” Agnes shrieked, just as she unlocked the door and fell tumbling into the kitchen.

  The shotgun boomed again, and blew the glass panels out of the side door. The glass and bits of wood sprayed Agnes just as she was crawling to her feet, putting several small cuts on one cheek. Agnes thought she was mortally wounded, she let out a squall that sounded very much like an angry grizzly and took off at a run for her bedroom.

  Naturally, since Agnes believed in the confiscation of all privately owned firearms—except those in the hands of certain selected, highly intelligent, morally responsible, and very elitist people, such as herself—she owned a pistol. A big pistol. A Dirty Harry special. Which she had never fired. She ran to her bedroom, snatched up the .44 mag from her nightstand, assumed a two-handed shooting position, just like in the movies, pointed the muzzle in the general direction of the garage, and pulled the trigger.

  The recoil numbed Agnes’s arms from hands to elbows and knocked her flat on her butt on the carpet. The slug, traveling at about the same speed as an F–16 with afterburners roaring, rocketed down the hall, through the open side door, through a garage window, right through the house next door, and came to rest in the tiled shower stall of the home at the end of the block. Agnes got to her feet and fired four more times. She ruined a mixer in her kitchen, a microwave in the house next door, an outboard motor in another garage across the street, and blew out the side window, tore off the rear-view mirror, and punched a hole in the windshield of the car that was passing by, which happened to belong to a local Baptist minister.

  “Jesus fucking Mary!” the minister hollered, momentarily reverting to his teenage years in St. Louis. He floored the pedal and ran up into the lawn of another homeowner, who had stepped out onto his porch to see what all the shooting was about. The homeowner had just enough time to leap for his life as the now out of control Toyota climbed the porch and entered his living room, coming to rest in his dining room.

  “Son of a bitch!” the minister said.

  Agnes, knocked against the wall of her bedroom by the recoil of the powerful handgun, was deaf as a post for several minutes, and her arms were numb clear up to her neck.

  “Call the goddamn cops!” she squalled, putting such volume behind the words that the homeowner across the street, who was crawling out of the bushes by the side of the house, could plainly hear the plea.

  But a patrolling unit from the La Barca PD had heard the shots and was pulling up just about the time Agnes, still clutching the .44 mag, staggered out onto her front porch.

  “Drop the gun!” the officer yelled at her.

  Agnes dropped the .44 mag. On her foot. Breaking two toes. “Don’t shoot me, you pig son of a bitch!” she screamed at the confused officer. “I’m the one being shot at!” Agnes sat down on the steps, both hands holding her injured foot. “You goddamn ignorant ape!” she yelled at the cop, just as two more city units came screaming up.

  Sgt. Gene Clark, who was working the second shift that week, jumped out and took a look at Agnes. “Oh, shit!” he muttered. He pointed to an officer. “You see what’s wrong with her,” he ordered.

  “Thanks a lot,” the cop said.

  Agnes shifted position on the porch, putting weight on the shot-up cheek. She hollered and jumped to her feet. “I’m wounded, goddamn it! Call an ambulance!”

  “Where?” Gene yelled.

  “In my ass, you pig bastard!”

  “Shot her right in the brains,” Gene muttered.

  “I heard that, you Gestapo son of a bitch!” Agnes shrieked. “I’ll sue you!”

  “Will somebody get this goddamn car out of my house!” the homeowner yelled.

  By the time the police got everything sorted out, Dick Hale was long gone.

  * * *

  “I wish I could have seen it,” Lani said to Leo the next morning. “I’d have given a hundred dollars to see Agnes Peters get shot in the ass.”

  “That’s not the half of it,” Brenda said, sitting down. “Sergeant Clark arrested her for possession of an unregistered handgun. Seems she didn’t have a permit for it. Now she’s screaming about living in a police state.”

  “She just can’t seem to get her priorities in order,” Leo said, unable to hide his glee at Agnes Peters getting shot in the ass.

  “You think it was Dick Hale?” Ted asked the group.

  “Oh, sure,” Lani said. “He’s hated Agnes for years. They’ve despised each other since high school.”

  “Too bad Dick can’t stumble up on the Longwood boys with his trusty shotgun,” Leo said wistfully.

  “Don’t let the press hear you say that,” Brenda warned.

  “Heaven forbid!” Leo looked upward. “Not those purveyors of truth and justice. As they see it,” he added very drily.

  “Don’t let them hear you say that, either,” Ted said.

  The phone rang and Lani picked up. A second later she muttered, “Jesus!” and hit the record button on the cassette recorder attached to the phone. She listened without saying a word. She slowly replaced the phone in the cradle and rewound the tape. “Listen to this,” she said.

  The voice was electronically altered, and they could not tell if it was male or female. But the message pushing through the tiny speaker was very clear.

  “The time has come to end this game.

  To reach the summit of my fame.

  The blood must flow and the screams be heard.

  Now try to stop me, you pig-snout turds!”

  A second voice was added. It said in a singsong voice: You’ll hear from me again!”

  They could all clearly hear the p
iano music playing in the background. It was “Mary Had A Little Lamb.”

  * * *

  “So what do you propose we do?” Brownie asked, leaning back in his chair. “Declare martial law, call out the national guard, and order a dusk-to-dawn curfew?”

  “That’d be the last thing I’d want,” Lani said. “Even if it were possible. The Ripper would just pull back and wait us out.”

  “Stacy Ryan?” the sheriff asked.

  “Calm and cool and making no bobbles. She gets up, goes to work, has lunch at her desk, and goes home and stays,” Brenda said. “Her phones are tapped at home and work. We’ve got people on her twenty-four hours a day. We know everything she does and much of what she says. She has made no calls from any pay phones. She has had no visitors at her home since surveillance began.”

  “The judge was very unhappy signing that phone-tap order,” Brownie reminded the four cops. “We don’t have one shred of court-admissible evidence against Stacy Ryan. If we don’t have something concrete in a few days, he’ll rescind that order.” He held up his hand in advance of the vocal objections he knew were coming. “I’m just telling you all the way it is. I think Stacy Ryan is guilty as hell. I think she’s involved in this mess up to her neck. Now go out and prove it.”

  Walking down the hall after leaving Brownie’s office, Lani muttered, “Go out and prove it. What the hell’s he think we’ve been trying to do all summer?”

  “He’s taking all the heat on this,” Leo said. “The press is on his ass, the public is on his ass, the DA is on his ass, the governor is on his ass. I’m surprised Brownie hasn’t lost his cool and punched someone.”

  “The attorney general is on our asses, too,” Brenda said glumly.

  “Hard!” Ted added. “After the chewing I got this morning from Sacramento, I’m just very thankful I still have the seat in my pants.”

  Brenda looked to see and Ted sighed.

  “We can’t sweat those kids any harder,” Lani said. “Juvenile is pissed off now. Mommy and daddy’s little darlings have been complaining about the interrogations. Their attorneys said we’ve got all we’re going to get from them.”

  “Yeah,” Leo said. “Because of their tender age, the DA is cutting deals left and right. Some of those little monsters will be back on the street in two to three years. What am I saying? Hell, some of them are back on the streets now!”

  But if Dick Hale had his way, they wouldn’t be for long.

  Chapter 24

  “Monstrous!” Dick said, reading the day-old newspaper he’d found in the street. He wadded it up and tossed it aside. “There is no justice in this world.” He slobbered for a moment, then picked his nose, and farted.

  Dick picked up the ragged, old, discarded topcoat he’d found, and took out his knife, cutting away a few threads that lingered after his tailoring job. The back of the coat would be perfect for what he had in mind. Part of one sleeve would do nicely, too. He’d already fashioned that. He’d found a pair of long-handled underwear amid the trash at a newer landfill, and carefully washed and dried them. He’d found a pair of boots and repaired them with some strips of leather shoelaces. Dick was going to bring justice back into society. He’d by God show everybody what he was made of! He’d become a legend that people would be talking about for years to come.

  Yeah, but not quite like Dick imagined in his sick mind.

  * * *

  “We know you didn’t have anything to do with those terrible crimes,” the mother said to her son at the dinner table.

  “Of course, I didn’t,” the lying, little, beady-eyed zit-head replied smoothly. “I just wanted to be with my friends.”

  “That’s only natural,” the father said.

  “The cops beat me every day I was in jail,” the prick said. “And they tried to make me have oral sex with them, too. They’re really terrible people.”

  “We know,” mommy cooed. “And we’re going to sue them for that. Our attorney says you’ll be rich.” Translation: we’ll be rich, and the attorney will be richer.

  Tommy Williams had taken an active part in a dozen of the torture/murders/rapes. He’d been a leader of one of the youth cells. He had planned and taken part in the kidnapping of many of the victims. Tommy Williams had begun his career of perversion and evil as a very young child, torturing dogs and cats and birds. That had been called to the attention of his parents, but, of course, they didn’t believe a word of it. Naturally. Mommy and daddy’s precious, little, perfect darling would never, ever, do anything like that.

  How could they be so sure? Why, they asked him.

  Mr. and Mrs. Williams did not see the dark shape slipping silently into their backyard. A rather peculiarly dressed shape, wearing an eye mask and a cape over long-handled underwear and flat-heeled boots.

  Mommy and daddy left to go to the club for drinks and dancing, and Tommy was alone in the house. He was under court order not to leave the premises, and he had enough sense to obey that order. He wandered aimlessly from room to room. He put heavy metal on his stereo and turned the volume up to an ear-splitting level. “Stupid goddamn cops,” Dick Hale heard him mutter, just before the sounds of shrieking and howling and banging and thumping filled the night air and caused neighbors to wince in annoyance and dogs to howl.

  “Turn down that damn racket!” a neighbor hollered over the fence.

  “Fuck you!” Tommy shouted. Such a polite, young man. Very respectful to his elders and so considerate of the rights of others.

  “I’ll call the cops!” the neighbor shouted.

  “You do and I’ll poison your dogs!” Tommy yelled.

  The neighbor knew the punk would do just that. He’d poisoned other dogs in the neighborhood, when people had complained about the music. The man closed up his house, flipped on the air-conditioning, and turned up the volume on the TV. For the thousandth time, he wished Tommy Williams would fall off the edge of the world and burn forever in the pits of hell. He would get at least part of his wish that evening.

  Tommy Williams walked back to his bedroom and opened all the windows and turned up the volume just as loud as his speakers could take. He smiled an evil upturning of the lips, as he walked back to the den. Tommy opened the sliding glass doors and looked out. He blinked and stared.

  “What the fuck?” he said, and stepped out into the lawn. “Hey, you!” he shouted. “You with the cape! What the hell do you want?”

  “Justice,” the caped figure said.

  “Justice?”

  “That’s what I said. Are you deaf from listening to that crap you call music?”

  “Hey man, go screw yourself, you goofy-lookin’ bastard. And get off this property.”

  “No.”

  “I ain’t believin’ this shit,” Tommy muttered. “How come all the nuts move into this neighborhood.”

  The area would soon be minus one.

  “You’re a murdering piece of trash,” the caped and masked figure said.

  “Yeah? Well, the cops couldn’t prove it, and neither can you. So haul your ass on out of here.”

  That was the last thing Tommy Williams ever said on the face of this earth. Tommy would murder and torture no more humans, no more animals, and he would never again annoy his neighbors with loud music. The caped figure lifted a shotgun and blew Tommy’s head all over the sliding-glass doors. The music was so loud, the shotgun blasts could not be heard over the grunting and groaning of the singers and crashing of cymbals and the roar of guitars.

  The caped man stepped into the house and walked toward the source of the music. He stood in the doorway and blew the offending stereo into a jumble of pieces.

  “Thank you, thank you, thank you!” a neighbor hollered.

  “You’re welcome,” the caped and masked man muttered, then walked out the back door, stepping over the headless body of Tommy Williams. He paused for a moment, looking down at the body, unaware that several neighbors were staring out their windows, wondering what had happened to bless them with su
ch quiet. “Punk,” the man said, then walked on.

  * * *

  “The woman over there said it was Batman,” Gene Clark told Leo, pointing.

  “The neighbor across the street said it looked like Zorro to her,” another uniform said.

  “The kid on the other side of the house swears it was Flash Gordon,” a deputy said.

  “Oh, hell, it was Dick Hale,” Leo said. “The fool has gone completely around the bend.”

  Lani looked down at the blanket-covered body of the headless Tommy Williams. “There is justice in the world after all,” she whispered, careful that the sobbing mother and father holding on to each other in the den would not hear her words.

  “Yeah,” Gene Clark said. “This was one sorry punk.”

  “Easy,” Brenda said. “Agnes Peters just drove up.”

  “Somebody be sure to ask her if her ass is healing nicely,” Leo said with a smile.

  None of the cops present could work up even a modicum of sorrow for the kid sprawled in death at their feet. Tommy Williams had been giving the La Barca PD and the Hancock County Sheriff’s Department headaches for years. But being a semiprecious juvenile, he had to be handled with kid gloves. Up until now.

  “Oh, my baby!” Mrs. Williams squalled. “Why? He was such a good boy.”

  “Excuse me while I look for a place to puke,” Sergeant Clark said, upon hearing those words.

  Mr. Williams stepped to the glass doors and pointed a trembling finger at the knot of cops on the patio. “You goddamn cops better find out who did this,” he threatened.

  A neighbor, who was standing on his own property, peering over the five-foot-high security fence, said, “Goddamn punk finally got what was coming to him.”

  “What a terrible thing to say at a time like this!” Agnes Peters hollered from the side of the house, standing behind the yellow and black CRIME SCENE—DO NOT CROSS tape.

  “Why?” the neighbor questioned. “It’s the truth. You should try the truth sometime, Ms. Peters. It would be a refreshing change.”

  “I’ll whip your ass, Beeson!” Mr. Williams shouted.