I thought of the few things I knew about black rats, how they’d originally come from the deserts of southern Asia but then stowed away on the ships of the returning Crusaders, to help bring bubonic plague to Europe, which ultimately killed millions. And how rabid rats had been known to rip apart animals as big and formidable as horses.
Next to Mindy lay the remains of Betty Roberts, the reverend’s wife. Her face had been torn away, as had most of her torso, but I recognized the short, frosted hairdo. At the moment, a rat sat on her shoulder bone and picked the last of the flesh from her nose.
And as I trained my light back and forth across the floor, I saw the picked white bones of young girls, no doubt the runaways who’d done the porno movies. Done with, they’d been thrown down here as feast for the rats.
I fired two shots straight into the dozens of rats still massing around Mindy. They scattered briefly, the report ear-numbing as it echoed below, but it was too late. They had gotten the top of her head open enough to begin eating her brain.
I leaned to the side and vomited again. I would never be able to forget what I’d just seen. Never.
And then I sensed somebody standing at the back of the barn, a silhouette in the gloom, and I raised my flashlight and saw Kenny Deihl standing there in his Western getup, smiling at me.
“Pretty impressive, isn’t it?” he said. “How fast they can totally rip somebody apart?”
I didn’t need to ask who he really was, the monster who was Tolliver’s son, who had sent photos of his victims to his mother and father.
“But then, you’re going to find out all about my friends for yourself, Mr. Hokanson. I’m going to put you down there with them.”
I had made the mistake of dropping my Ruger while I was vomiting.
Kenny Deihl had made no such mistake at all. He kept a Magnum trained on me all the time he talked.
13
He had killed them all, he told me, Mike Peary, Nora and Vic, Lodge and McNally, Mindy and Betty Roberts. They had all uncovered his secret — or he thought they had, at any rate — and so he was forced to kill them. Eve McNally he’d beaten up when she couldn’t tell him where the tape was that her husband had.
As he would now be forced to kill me. He’d tried it once already, on that first day. God, it seemed so long ago. After Mike, he’d gotten nervous about how much Nora knew, and followed her for a while.
“How about Melissa? You took her so McNally and Lodge would give you back something they were blackmailing you with, right?”
He nodded.
“Very creative, those two. They hid out here and watched the taping in the barn over there. I always told Mindy and Betty that I’d drive the girls back to Cedar Rapids and drop them off. But I never did. I brought them over here and fed them to the rats.” He smiled his improbably boyish smile. “You know the funny thing? Those’re the only animals I’ve ever liked, those rats. Hated everything else.” He shrugged and moved in closer to me. My flashlight was on the floor. He bent over, picked it up, shone the beam in my face. “So good old Lodge and good old McNally videotaped me killing one of the runaways and stuffing her down with the rats. They made me pay them $6,000 a month. I have some money I diverted from Eleanor before I left her — but I just didn’t like the principle of paying somebody blackmail money.”
He was silent for a time. Rain plopped from the roof to the ground in front of me. The old hay smelled sour-sweet in the darkness. I avoided looking at my vomit.
Suddenly, he turned off the flashlight. “Don’t say anything or I’ll kill you on the spot.”
I said nothing, just eased myself quietly to my feet. He could see me with no problem. And could kill me with no difficulty.
At first, I didn’t know what he was so agitated about. There was just the hissing rain and wind and the far-distant midnight trains.
And then I heard it, an almost inaudible squishing sound.
What was it?
I had to hear it for a time before I recognized it. Then — footsteps. Yes. Somebody was outside the barn, sneaking up.
In the doorway I saw nothing but the fainter darkness of the night. And then somebody was there, peering inward.
Rain hammered the roof; wind rattled the back door.
Inward came the person; one, two, three cautious steps.
Whoever it was carried a shotgun.
Four, five steps now.
“Watch out!” I called, pitching myself to the right and the hard earthen floor.
As I did so, I saw a yellow eruption of flame and smoke as Kenny’s gun fired in the darkness.
He caught the person; there was a thrash of old hay as, wounded, groaning, he fell to the floor.
“You sonofabitch,” Kenny said in the gloom. “You’re going to regret coming in here, believe-you-me.”
As I scrambled back to my feet, he turned the flashlight on again and found the person he’d wounded.
The blood from her shoulder wound ruined the nice starchy look of her blue uniform shirt. She lay on her back, holding a bloody hand to the wound. The injury looked serious.
“Stay right where you are!” Kenny shouted at me above the din of rain and wind.
But I didn’t pay any attention to him.
I went over to Jane and knelt down beside her.
“Thanks for warning me,” she said.
“Least I could do,” I said, touching my fingers to her wound, trying to see how bad it was. Awful bad.
“You shouldn’t have followed me,” I said.
She grinned her girly grin. “Least I could do,” she said.
Kenny came over. “Help her over to the trapdoor there.”
My reaction was to spring to my feet and start to swing on him but all he did was raise his Magnum and push it into my face.
“Don’t worry about being noble, Hokanson. You’re both going to die. I’m too much of a gentleman to let her die alone.”
Just before he hit me hard on the side of the head with his Magnum, I heard a kind of faint bleating sound from the storage box near the back. I wondered if an animal had been trapped in there. But then I didn’t wonder about much at all because when the gun cracked against my skull, I felt my knees start to buckle.
He brought his knee up between my legs and caught me hard and straight in the groin.
Pain blinded me momentarily; he pushed me to the floor, next to Jane, and said “Help her up.”
“Do what he says, Robert. C’mon.”
But I must have moved too slowly — because he took two more steps toward me. This time he hit me so hard my knees buckled entirely and I dropped to the floor. I was dizzy, and everything was getting faint and fuzzy.
I pitched forward into the deeper darkness of my mind where pain and fear lay like shameful secrets.
Could I get up? Drag myself over to Jane in time to help her? Somehow get my hands on Kenny?
I wasn’t out long, just long enough for him to carry Jane over to the trapdoor.
She fought him constantly, even using the arm of her wounded shoulder to drive the heel of her hand into his jaw.
But I had recognized the look in his eyes; he was as eager for death as his friends, the rats.
He dropped her hard on the floor, so that her shoulder lay directly over the hole.
The response was instant. A kind of chant, a keening cry unlike anything I’d ever heard before in my life, went up in the old barn, louder even than wind and rain combined, the cry and chant of rats as they are teased with just a few drops of blood falling from above, the same cry and chant of the rats that overran medieval European villages, and that ate infants in the dark impoverished streets of eighteenth-century London.