“There,” Wade said. “Is that crime enough?”
Peerce, snarling, jammed the butt of a nineteen ounce blackjack into Wade’s solar plexus. Wade folded up, bug eyed. He was then thrown into the cell. For good measure, Peerce rapped Wade another one—between the legs, this time—and locked the cell door.
“Thank you, Sarge. And my future children thank you too.”
Peerce’s eyes blazed through the bars. “This is the end for you, St. John. We’re gonna check out this harebrained story of yours, and then we’re gonna come back here and kick your ass so bad you’ll shit shoe polish for a week. Assaultin’ a police officer will get you kicked off this here campus forever.”
“I hear you, Sarge. Just go to the dean’s. Check it out.”
Peerce called White and told him to meet them at the dean’s mansion. Then he left, followed by Porker, who limped along cradling his elephantine belly.
In spite of his pain, Wade smiled.
Go ahead, super cops. Check it out.
««—»»
A half hour later keys rattled in the station door. Peerce, Porker, and Chief White tottered in, their faces drained.
Wade leapt up. “Well?”
“The dean is dead,” Peerce iterated.
“I told you so.”
Sweat glazed Porker’s pasty white face. “The closet,” he mumbled. “The dean—” Then he staggered to the john, to vomit. “Poor bastard never could stand the sight of blood,” Peerce said.
The memory blared back. Blood, Wade thought. So much blood.
Chief White’s beshocked eyes looked like big flat coins. “It was pulled off,” he said.
“What?” Wade asked.
“The dean’s head. It was pulled off.” White steadied himself, flinching. “Not cut off or chopped off. Not sawed or blowed off. I mean somebody grabbed onto that man’s head and pulled on it till it came off.”
“They’re a rough bunch, Chief.” But that was only the tip of the iceberg; there was much more to tell, but Wade dared not. These hayseeds would only swallow so much at a time.
Peerce stared cross eyed straight ahead. “Took his wagger off too.”
“His what?”
“His wagger. You know, his meat, his homeboy.”
Wade frowned. “You mean his dick?”
“Pulled it clean off, just like his head. Who the hell would wanna run off with a man’s head an’ homeboy?”
“Psychopaths, that’s who,” Wade said, to put it mildly. “Now that you’ve seen the goods, let’s get out of here.”
“Think again,” Chief White said. He sat down and looked at him. “You ain’t goin’ nowhere till we have some answers.”
Panic rose in Wade’s guts like bubbles. “We’ve got to get off this campus right now, Chief! They’re coming for me! They’ll come here and pull our homeboys off!”
Peerce popped a chaw of Red Man. “He knows plenty more than he’s tellin’, Chief. That’s for damn sure.”
I’m a had daddy, Wade realized. The safety of the cell now condemned him. Porker was still vomiting in the john, cutting loose deep, tubalike eeerps. Peerce edgily spat brown juice into a paper cup. Chief White just stared, arms crossed.
“What were you doin’ at the dean’s at this hour, boy?”
“I—” Shit, Wade thought. “I saw the murderer leaving the scene.”
“Oh, you saw the murderer? You mind enlightenin’ us?”
Wade swallowed, thinking of the blood. “It was Jervis Phillips.”
White and Peerce joined in low laughter. “Jervis Phillips ain’t nothin’ but an egg suck drunk. You spect us to believe he pulled the dean’s head off and painted the fuckin’ closet with his blood? Jervis Phillips?”
“I don’t care what you believe. I saw him driving out of that area,” Wade unconvincingly explained.
White was rubbing his hands together. He was losing control of his town, and he was desperate. He needed a candidate for scapegoat, and Wade could guess the nominee.
“I can’t tell you everything, Chief,” Wade admitted. “If I told you everything, you’d think I was crazy.”
“We already think you’re crazy.” Peerce said.
“A crazy murderer,” White added.
But if they saw the grove, the mutated woods, and the women… Wade could think of no other way to convince them. “Take me to the grove,” he said, “and I’ll show you the rest.”
“What grove?” Porker asked, finally emerging from the john. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Trust me. I’ll take you there right now.”
White was still glaring at him. “Bring him out.”
Now we’re getting somewhere, Wade thought, but only until Peerce released him from the cell and hand-cuffed him to White’s chair.
“This is what we call interrogation,” Chief White said.
“I’ve got a better name for it,” Wade told them. “Deprivation of constitutional rights.”
From a locker, White retrieved an eighteen inch Nova shock baton. It could deliver several one second 50,000 volt bursts, which disrupted the victim’s muscle impulses and caused temporary paralysis. It also caused great temporary pain. Shock batons were illegal now, but Wade could see that this judicial fact would do him little good. They were going to torture him.
“Would it be too much trouble to ask for a lawyer?”
White, Peerce, and Porker all laughed out loud.
The baton hummed when White turned it on. “Now, this thing will shock you right through your clothes. A couple of hits and you’ll think you stepped on the third rail of the subway. Are you gonna talk, or do I go to work on ya?”
“This is America!” Wade shouted. “You can’t torture people!”
White, Peerce, and Porker laughed out loud again, harder.
“I don’t want to hear no shit about Jervis Phillips, and I don’t want to hear about no groves. Tell me the truth, St. John. Why did you murder Dean Saltenstall?”
“I didn’t murder the fucking dean!” Wade bellowed. “It was Jervis Phillips and those women in black!”
White pushed the baton into the soft of Wade’s crotch. The discharge head fit nice and snug. White’s finger wavered over the button, then began to lower.
“Excuse me,” a frail voice rose behind them.
White, Peerce, and Porker jerked upright and turned. White hid the baton behind his back.
A sheepish, long haired girl in a nightgown stood wanly in the doorway. “My name is Nina McCulloch,” she said in a voice almost too soft to be heard.
“So what!” White snapped.
“I just saw my roommate and her friends get murdered.”
Silence unfurled. The three cops stared. Wade sighed.
“Murdered?” White blabbed.
“Yes,” Nina McCulloch whispered. “And I recognized the killer.”
“Who was it?”
“It was Jervis Phillips, and he was with a woman in black.”
—
CHAPTER 29
“It’s a cult of some kind, I think,” Wade speculated from the backseat of White’s cruiser. Porker sat heavily beside him. White drove, and Peerce rode shotgun. They sped down Route 13, toward the agro site.
“A cult?” White questioned.
“Yeah. It must be like one of those satanic gangs. Ritual murder, black mass, cannibalism, that sort of shit. All the members wear upside down crosses. And whoever their leader is, they call him the Supremate. I figure there’re seven of them, not including this Supremate guy. Four of them are girls, and I mean the freakiest looking girls you’ve ever seen. They wear black capes, and they all have” —Should I really say this?— “fangs.”