Текст книги "Howlers"
Автор книги: Kent Harrington
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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 25 страниц)
“All right.” Quentin’s secretary hung up.
Miles punched the blinking button on the other line. “Is everything all right there in San Francisco?” Miles said.
“Yes, Miles. Everything is fine here. What’s wrong? You sound strange,” she said.
Miles sat back in his chair, relieved. “Well, if I told you what we’ve been hearing, you wouldn’t believe me,” he said. “Anyway, it’s probably some kind of hoax.”
“Miles, I’ve got to go. I love you. Don’t forget to call my mom.”
“Okay. Love you too, babe.”
CHAPTER 13
Dr. Poole drove out of the Timberland High’s parking lot on the south end of Main Street in a quiet panic. A long line of yellow school buses were parked in the whirling snow. His Volvo dipped roughly off the school’s parking lot and onto the street. Everything that had gone on that morning, until that moment, had been bizarre, even horrible, but still dream like. Now it all seemed very real. His son had disappeared and he was on the verge of panic. He heard his cell phone buzz and he grabbed for it.
Find him?
He pulled the car over and texted his wife back.
No. Not yet.
The high school had called his wife and asked if their eldest son had been kept home. His wife, frantic, had begged Marvin to find their son Richard when Marvin had called her from the Sheriff’s office. So far he’d failed. Now he would have to go home and explain to her that hundreds of students were missing from Timberline’s schools, and that he had no explanation.
He drove down Main Street toward his practice, hoping to see his son on the street—his tall body bobbing the way it did when he walked, his hair riddled with snow. Marvin turned a corner by the town’s one pool hall where he knew the kids sometimes hung out. He slowed the Volvo. He saw the CLOSED sign in the pool hall’s window and went on toward the center of town, glancing down side streets. His cell rang and he snatched it off the passenger seat without looking to see who was calling.
“Poole.”
“Marvin, did you find Richard?” his wife asked.
“No, baby. But I’m sure he’ll call one of us.”
“I don’t understand, Marvin. Richard would never do this. Not call me. He would not cut school.” Marvin listened to his wife’s anxious voice. It was the first time he thought of lying to his wife since they’d met. He didn’t want to tell her what he’d heard. He didn’t want to tell her that something truly dreadful might be happening.
“He’s all right, some kind of prank. You know teenagers, just when you think you know them, they do something like this. It’s part of growing—”
“Marvin, don’t talk to me like that! I’m not a patient. Don’t. I want to know where my son is!” his wife said.
“Grace, how’s Vivian? Is her temperature any better?”
“No, it’s worse. She has horrible diarrhea, you better come see her. I don’t know what to do.”
“What about Richard? I was going to go up to the ski school and see if he—” he said.
“No, come home. See about your daughter first.” His wife hung up without saying goodbye.
Marvin turned the Volvo back onto Main Street with the thought of other mothers and fathers he’d seen, searching for their children at the high school. The doctor tried to put the conversation he’d overheard with the state police into some kind of context, trying to work it into his own son’s disappearance, but he couldn’t. How could anyone make sense of what he’d heard? The report was too bizarre to believe. There was some kind of reasonable explanation. Something was indeed terribly wrong, yes; he was sure of that. He’d sensed it for days, after seeing his patients’ strange symptoms. But there had to be a good reason.
At a stop sign he rubbed his eyes. One of his medical school professors had once said that just because someone was a Catholic, didn’t mean they couldn’t ride a motorcycle too: two diseases could exist together, living side by side.
One of his patients, a young mother with her baby boy, crossed the street in front of him. Bundled up, she lifted her hand to wave at the doctor, and smiled. Marvin watched the baby carriage, one of those new high-tech ones with the bicycle wheels, roll by. How could what he’d heard be true? Marvin tried to smile, but he couldn’t. He glanced up instead and noticed the Christmas lights strung over the street.
“God damn it,” he said aloud.
The streetlight went out. He slammed his hand on the steering wheel.
Marvin pulled onto the old stone bridge over the Truckee River. It was a covered bridge, and once under the bridge’s shed-style roof, he was grateful for the partial darkness and a sense of quiet and protection. He glanced through the slats in the walls and saw the dark molten river running around huge snow-capped boulders, the rocks standing in dumb silent formations against the moving river. It all seemed so normal. He’d passed over this bridge a thousand times, a thousand times he’d felt the bump of his tires over the timbers, and felt the way it shook the car slightly. It reminded him of the first time he had driven over the bridge years before with his wife and son. And then he remembered Willis’ warning as he stood with the scalpel to his throat: “They’ll be here soon!”
Trucks and cars with snow on their roofs and hoods came at him in the opposite lane as soon as he’d crossed the bridge. He went down a mile and turned onto Ridgewood Avenue. He glanced at his watch. He would be home in twenty minutes, or less. He waited at the stop sign. A white VW bug crossed in front of him. He saw Lacy Collier. She wore dark glasses and a bright red wool ski cap. Lacy raised her hand and waved at him as she went on toward the center of town.
The Ponderosa Estates was a new development of expensive homes seven miles from Timberline. The doctor’s Volvo passed the garish sign advertising the development’s newest homes. “Fifteen Ranchettes Still Available!” a sign said. A car coming the other way through the snow was flashing its headlights, alternating between the high-beam and low-beam. The driver slowed down as he approached the doctor’s car. Marvin slowed, thinking there must be an accident ahead. The two cars stopped alongside one another. An older man rolled down his window.
“Mister, don’t go up that road, whatever you do!”
“What are you talking about?” Marvin said.
The man, in his seventies, was talking but keeping both hands on the wheel of his car. He was driving an old yellow Dodge; the car’s back window had been smashed.
“They’re attacking—up by Pollock Pines. I drove through them. I’m looking for a policeman. Do you have a cell phone? Mine is dead.”
“Yes,” Marvin said. “Attacking? Who’s attacking?”
“They tore a guy out of his van and killed him. There’s twenty or thirty kids in the middle of the road, pulling people out of their cars and murdering them.” The old man was obviously in shock, his mouth quivering slightly. Marvin had seen men’s lips quiver that way in Africa, during the worst Ebola outbreaks.
The man drove off without warning, seeming to have forgotten about asking to use Marvin’s cell phone.
Marvin pulled over and got out of the car. It was snowing hard. He went to the back and searched the trunk of the Volvo for a weapon. Not sure why, other than the horribly frightened look on the old man’s face. Marvin took a tire iron out of the back. He got back in the car and put the tire iron on the passenger seat next to him. He had to drive through the intersection at Pollock Pines to get home. There was no way around it, no other route to take.
He pulled back onto the empty road. It was snowing harder. The sky had turned a flat death-gray, everything obscured except the road’s new asphalt.
He turned on the radio automatically and got the classical station from Sacramento. Marvin recognized the piece: “Swan Lake.” As he drove, he realized he’d broken out in a sweat. He glanced at the tire iron on the passenger seat next to him. He thought of his father, who had been a professional prizefighter in his youth; he wished his father were riding with him now.
Marvin saw the van first. Blue, all its doors were thrown open. It was parked in the middle of the road, blocking traffic. More abandoned cars were scattered beyond the van, one of them turned over on its side. He saw people milling about, a group of them wandering down the center of the road, mostly teenagers. Some he recognized from his practice. They seemed different: their faces were blanks, and their arms seemed somehow deformed, a little longer than normal, hanging out from their coats. One of the kids was dragging something behind him.
Marvin slowed the Volvo. The news came on and he switched the radio off and faced the oncoming phalanx of kids. He honked his horn. The faces remained blank. He laid on the horn.
Something about the way they were walking down the center of the road, oblivious, told him not to get out of the car. Marvin reached for the tire iron on the seat next to him. He put the car in a lower gear and started toward the line of kids, slowly, still not sure what to do.
Have to get through. The man said “attacked.” Attacked.
He stopped the car. Marvin heard a sound on his right. Two men were standing on the side of the road. He turned to look at them. A tall white man looked at him with a blank expression. He was wearing a sheriff deputy’s uniform. The front of the uniform was covered in blood. Marvin felt an overwhelming sense of relief, and hit the button that lowered the window.
The deputy’s gun belt was askew. The other man, standing next to the officer, picked something up and rammed it through the doctor’s back windshield before Marvin could speak. A woman’s body, used like a battering ram, crashed through the back windshield, shattering it. The woman landed half in, half out, of Marvin’s back seat.
Marvin sat unable to move, the whole thing a horrible dream—impossible. The woman looked up at him, her face cut horribly by the glass. It was Eileen, the sheriff’s secretary.
“Help me—doctor!”
Marvin heard himself scream. He had never screamed like that before in his life. It was an involuntary scream of fear and panic. He saw the deputy, still with that horrible blank face, drag the begging-bleeding woman back out of the smashed rear window by her shoeless feet.
“HELP ME, DOCTOR!”
Marvin punched the Volvo’s accelerator. The deputy picked the woman up and flung her over the roof of the car so that she landed face down on the hood with a slam. Marvin hit the brakes. Eileen rolled off the car’s hood and fell onto the road in front of him. The deputy dove, jumping into Marvin’s smashed-out back window. Marvin felt the Volvo run over something as it took off again. It was as if someone else were driving.
The gauntlet of Howlers converged on the car. Marvin laid on the horn; it was obvious they weren’t going to move. He drove directly into the mob of kids, knocking bodies into the air. The loud thudding was horrible.
Inside the car, the deputy was crawling toward Marvin. Glancing into the rearview mirror, Marvin saw its lips dripping ugly white ribbons of saliva. The deputy’s hand reached out for the passenger’s seat headrest and caught it; the thing pulled himself up towards the front of the car.
Marvin, turning away from the road, and toward the deputy, picked up the tire iron. The thing looked at him like a shark; its eyes were flat, dead. Marvin brought the tire iron down savagely on the deputy’s wrist until he saw it break, and become useless.
Marvin turned back and faced the road, flooring the gas pedal again. The deputy’s body slid back toward the rear of the car. The Volvo, off the road and traveling at a high rate of speed, scraped the frozen snow bank that ran along the side of the road and on Marvin’s right, showering the windshield with frozen snow and making it hard to see out.
Frantic, he managed to steer the car back onto the roadway. Then Marvin saw the unbelievable: two of the things he thought he’d run over climbed up from the Volvo’s front bumper, where they’d somehow held themselves onto the car’s front grill after being struck. Marvin swung the wheel violently, right, then left, hoping to shake them off the car; but the two hunkered down and clung onto the Volvo’s bumper and grill, howling demonically.
Marvin glanced into the rearview mirror and saw the deputy had grabbed hold of his headrest with his one good hand. The deputy made a horrible grunting-screeching sound and began pulling at the driver’s seat furiously like a trapped ape. Marvin could hear the seat being torn loose from its bolts while he fought to hold himself, and the bucking seat, in place. He clung to the steering wheel in an attempt to keep himself righted and in control of the car; his seat slid wildly, and ripped loose from the floor.
He watched the two things climb up and onto the Volvo’s hood. One of them scrambled forward and punched its fist through the Volvo’s windshield, shattering the safety glass and turning the windshield green. Marvin’s seat tilted violently backwards; he was pitched ass-up, his feet suddenly off the floor. The screaming-howling sound became unbearable. Marvin saw the deputy’s face loom, its dead eyes and drooling mouth inches from his own.
The Volvo, out of control, spun onto the icy median. Marvin could feel the car spinning, and then pitch over. Marvin heard the loud sounds of metal on asphalt. The Volvo rolled over completely, twice, finally righting itself. Marvin, his seat loose, bounced around the car. He saw the deputy’s legs pinned by the collapsing back end of the Volvo’s roof.
The car had miraculously come to a stop upright, but kept rolling forward, the engine still in gear. The Volvo struck the snow bank on the far side of the two-lane road and smashed into it, burying itself into the bank.
It was quiet, or seemed that way to Marvin. The things’ howling had stopped. He could hear the sound of the engine stuck at a high RPM. It was completely dark inside the car, which, Marvin realized, was buried in the snow bank. He unbuckled his seatbelt and turned, looking for a way out of the car. He ran his fingers over the car’s console, felt the map-light button and switched it on.
He saw the deputy. The creature’s back had been crushed by the roof, but it was still trying to move. Marvin found the tire iron, picked it up and brought it down on the deputy’s skull again and again until it was just bloody red and grey pulp, the skull smashed to bits.
Marvin’s face and hand was covered in brains and a wet blood-filth, making the tire iron slippery. He stopped finally and realized he’d been screaming the whole time he was striking the thing’s head. He looked out the side window and saw only snow pushed against the glass and the sound of the car’s engine whining loudly. He wiped his face. It was slick with gray matter. He felt it on his fingers and face. He rolled over and kicked the driver’s seat upright, landing it in front of the steering wheel, but cocked to the right. He took a few breaths. He managed to shift the Volvo into reverse. He began to pray. His lips dirty, he prayed the car would respond.
He felt the tires slip and started to laugh, which shocked him. The salesman had talked him into buying a four-wheel drive, and he’d bitched about it for weeks afterwards. Now the Volvo pulled out slowly, in reverse, through ten feet of snow bank and back out onto the empty road.
* * *
“Who’s that?” Quentin asked. He’d seen the Military Police outside his office when he got back from Eileen’s. He was about to go out again and look for Sharon.
“It’s someone called Bell,” one of the deputies said. “Hey Sheriff, we’re trying to get Calvin on the radio, and nothing. He was supposed to be back from Reno this afternoon.”
“I talked to him first thing this morning,” Quentin said. “Keep trying. Why are they bringing him here—the Lieutenant? That’s an Army problem.”
“I don’t know,” the deputy said.
Miles Hunt walked up to the main counter of the Sheriff’s office. Quentin saw him and raised his hand in a hello. Miles walked through the doorway and up to the counter that separated the offices from the public anteroom. Miles looked at the young man sitting against the wall in chains and leg irons, and then at Quentin standing in his office doorway.
“Quentin, what’s going on?”
The sheriff looked at the young reporter and hesitated. “Buzz Miles through,” Quentin said.
Miles stepped to the gate in the counter and waited for the buzzer to sound. Bell glanced at him. His leg chains made a noise on the floor as he moved his feet. The buzzer sounded and Miles stepped though. He followed Quentin into his old-school, all-metal-furniture office. Quentin closed the door.
“What have you heard?” Quentin said, leaning against the door.
“I heard a lot of people in town are missing, and that’s not all. The paper sent me over for a list of missing people. Eileen was supposed to email it, but she must have forgotten. So I came over to get it myself. And I came to ask you what you’d heard about the rumors.”
“I can’t give it to you. The list, I mean,” Quentin said. He looked at his friend. “Not right now. This is all off the record. Do I have your word on that?”
Miles nodded.
“I got a call from the State Police in Sacramento about an hour ago,” Quentin said. “There’s some kind of … outbreak.”
“You mean like in the movies?” Miles smiled.
“No, there are people gone missing all over the state.”
“And that’s not all,” Miles said. “There are gangs of people roaming the streets of Los Angeles. Killing people.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“Price called the Los Angeles Times,” Miles said. “He still knows a lot of people on the staff there.”
“Gangs of people?” Quentin sat on the corner of his desk, taking the news in.
“That’s what Price’s friend said. And something else. I went up to Genesoft’s news conference this morning. A woman stopped me in the hall and told me that there’s a serious problem with one of the company’s new products.”
Quentin’s cell phone rang and he picked it up.
“Daddy, it’s me,” Lacy said.
“Where are you?”
“I’m in town, at the Copper Penny. I changed my mind, I’m going back to school,” she said. “I stopped here—I wanted to look for Sharon and tell her. And I just bought a new cell phone.”
“Don’t. I want you to come here, to my office right now. Right now,” Quentin said.
“Why? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I just want you to come to the office.” Quentin looked up at Miles.
“Daddy, is something’s wrong? Did you find Sharon? Is she okay?”
“No, I didn’t find her yet,” Quentin said.
“I think I know where she is. I’m going over there,” Lacy said.
“Lacy. Please, for Christ’s sake, not now!”
“Daddy, I can’t go back to school without getting her to go home. Mom wouldn’t like it. I know I can get Sharon to come home. I know I can.”
“Lacy ... Goddamn it!” The line went dead. Quentin held his phone, then put it down. “I’ve got to go out. I’ll be back.” Quentin rushed out the door, past the military police in the lobby of the building. Lieutenant Bell, handcuffed and waiting in one of the wooden chairs, watched Quentin move past him.
They’re here, Bell thought. They’re here and he knows it.
Bell turned in his chair. He held up his manacled wrist and tried to move his chained feet. He twisted in the chair, watching the sheriff pass, out on the street now, from the window behind him. The sheriff moved quickly down the sidewalk, and people moved out of his way.
Miles couldn’t wait for Quentin. He had a deadline at the paper and was already late with his end of the story. He stopped at the counter to look for Quentin’s secretary, but didn’t see her; he would have to write the story without a list of missing persons.
He tapped his fingers on the transom, frustrated because he couldn’t get any hard news to substantiate all the rumors he’d heard. Two deputies were talking to the Military Policemen at the far end of the counter. Miles turned and looked at the young redheaded lieutenant in leg irons and waist chain sitting against the wall. The lieutenant’s head was craned around so that he could see out the window behind him. Miles tried to overhear the conversation the deputies were having with the military policeman.
“From what I heard, he’s not all there,” one of the young MPs was saying. “He told the Colonel some kind of monsters killed his sergeant.”
“We’re out of rubber rooms, but we got concrete ones.” one of the deputies said. That got a laugh from the young cops all around.
“What did he do?” Miles moved down the counter. The men looked at him. “Press. Reporter for the Nevada City Herald,” Miles said to the two MPs.
“Murdered his sergeant,” one of the MPs said, nodding toward Bell.
“At the base?” Miles asked.
“No, out in the woods. They were on a search and rescue mission,” one of the MPs said.
“Why is he here?” Miles asked. His reporter instincts were firing.
“There’s some kind of closure on Highway 50. No one can get through,” the MP said. “We were ordered to leave him here. He’ll be picked up tomorrow. There’s no place to keep him up at the base. We were supposed to take him to the Army’s stockade in Sacramento, but were ordered to bring him here at the last minute.”
“Hey, are you a cop?”
Miles turned around; the young man in chains was looking at him.
“Are you a cop?” Bell asked. “Or a lawyer? Or what?”
“Reporter,” Miles said.
“Well, I got a story for you,” Bell said from across the room. “And it starts with I didn’t kill anybody.”
“They’re here, aren’t they?” Bell asked. He’d turned from the window and put his handcuffed wrists on his lap.
The handcuffs looked heavy duty. The MPs had left, ordered back to their base. Miles and Bell were alone in the anteroom.
“Who’s here?” Miles asked. Miles glanced at Bell’s filthy and ripped flight suit and the military insignia on his shoulder. They were about the same age, he realized.
“The Howlers,” Bell said. “That’s why the MPs couldn’t take me down to Sacramento. See, I’ve figured things out now. I think the Army knows what’s going on too. They just can’t say. But I bet they know about the Howlers by now. I turned on the Apache’s gun camera. So there’s video, and they will have seen it by now and sent it on to Washington. I flew over several hundred people attacking cars on Highway 50.” The lieutenant’s blue eyes were very clear. He seemed completely sane.
“What are you talking about?” Miles said. All morning he’d been hearing things that didn’t make any sense. He was tired of it. It had started to make him angry. If people had been lying to him, he’d had enough of it.
“I’m talking about the things that attacked me and my sergeant this morning—out there,” Bell said. Bell hadn’t been allowed to change his bandage. It was dirty, a bright red stain showing through the gauze that had been taped to his wound. For some reason the bandage reminded Miles of a book he’d read as a boy: The Red Badge of Courage.
“You’re bleeding,” Miles said.
Bell looked down at his side. “Yeah. I’m not crazy, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
A deputy came up to them and started to unlock Bell’s manacles and leg irons.
“I’d like to interview the prisoner,” Miles said.
The deputy scratched his head, picked the chains up and put them on the counter behind him. “What for, Miles?” he asked.
Miles didn’t answer. He was afraid to say why.
* * *
Rebecca stared at the people picketing the front of her father’s store. “Guns Kill!” one of the picket signs said. No shit! What do you think they’re for, she thought. There were more picketers than usual. “Question Authority,” another sign said. The picketers were city types, mostly young, in their twenties. Rebecca watched a girl her own age; their eyes met as the girl passed by the shop window. The girl was on her cell phone. Rebecca held up her middle finger in a universal gesture. The girl saw it and turned away, shocked.
“Don’t get mad, get even,” her father said from the behind the counter. “I put an ad in the paper. We’re having a 50% off sale tomorrow, on all ammo.” He laughed.
“I don’t see why they care so much about guns,” Rebecca said, turning toward her father. She searched her pockets for a cigarette.
“I’m not sure. But I’ve given it a lot of thought this morning, watching them walk up and down in the cold. They’re scared, I think,” her father said. “I asked them to come in and talk about it with me. But they were afraid of me. Like I was evil.”
“Scared of what? Guns? You?” Rebecca came back along the long glass counter that was filled with handguns of all kinds. She reached over and kissed her father on his receding hairline. She couldn’t imagine anyone in the world being afraid of her dad. She went to one of the clothes racks and slipped an orange Day-Glo hunting cap over her blond hair. She had a habit of wearing something from the huge assortment of hunting gear when she was in the store. It was something she’d done since she was a little girl. Her father looked at her and remembered the little girl he’d been left with when her mother had run off. He loved his daughter so much that he didn’t know how her mother could have walked out on her.
“If people don’t understand something, they get frightened of it,” her father said.
“Why don’t they want people to have guns?” Rebecca came around the counter.
Her father was getting a new Swarovski rifle sight out of its box. He laid it out on the counter and began to take out the parts putting them in a line on a green piece of felt he used for resting pistols on.
“Maybe they’re right about some of the assault rifles, I don’t know,” her father said. “I’ve thought about getting rid of the assault rifles myself. But now the hunting rifles?”
Rebecca was shocked. She looked at her father in amazement. It was the first time she’d ever heard him question himself.
“Since that kid fired on the school in Newtown, I haven’t been sleeping too well,” he said. “I mean, it could happen here in Timberline. I couldn’t take that. If it was one of my guns that killed those kids.”
“You said they were just a fad anyway. We could get rid of them. We don’t even sell that many,” Rebecca said. “People here don’t buy many assault rifles. They buy handguns, mostly. But I draw the line with hunting rifles and shotguns.”
“Yeah, I did say that. These military style guns are mostly Chinese made. Not even American.” He took a semi-automatic AK-47-style assault rifle off the long rack behind him. Forty-odd assault rifles were chained to the gun rack, but they were still the minority of long guns he had for sale.
“You’ve just been listening to these tree huggers,” Rebecca said, lighting her cigarette.
“Well, I been reading their signs all morning. They get you to thinking. Some of the ideas aren’t bad. Like that one that says ‘Question Authority I like that,” her father said.
“You’ll start smoking dope pretty soon, if you don’t watch out,” Rebecca said. “Then I’ll have to throw your bail.”
The shop’s doorbell rang and Sharon Collier walked in. A huge dirty-looking biker walked in behind her. It was impossible to tell how old he was; he could have been twenty, or forty. Rebecca had seen the man around town since the summer. People knew the gang sold crank; more and more of the drug was being used now, especially by the unemployed.
“Hi, Mr. Stewart,” Sharon said. Her eyes were furtive, the young girl’s skin pale as paper.
“Hi, Sharon,” Rebecca’s father said.
“Hi, Sharon,” Rebecca said.
The biker with her didn’t say a word. He put his hand on the Sharon’s shoulder and prodded her forward. She walked toward the counter. Quentin’s daughter had on a pair of black yoga pants and her midriff was bare and red from the cold. The bearded and tattooed hulk followed her; his eyes darted around the store, appraising it. Finally he looked at the two people behind the counter. The biker stopped Sharon, grabbed her by the arm and whispered something in her ear. Then he pushed-moved her forward to the counter again.
Rebecca shot a look at her father.
* * *
It had started snowing again. A dozen Harley Davidsons, some with old-school butterfly style handlebars, were parked under a kind of low-slung, bleak-looking carport. The back end of the carport had collapsed under the weight of several feet of snow.
Lacy let her VW idle on the street in front of the house and its adjoining carport. She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. The front door of the house was open. She reached over and turned off the car’s radio. She’d driven to the high school, found Sharon’s best friend at her locker and demanded to know where her sister was. The girl had given her this address. It was what she’d expected; she’d heard her sister talking about the place.
She saw a man in leather pants and black leather vest walk by the open door. A grey pit bull came flying out of the open door as if it might have been kicked out. The dog landed against one of the parked motorcycles, knocking it over. The pit bull scampered away up the road yapping, obviously hurt.
A young girl with long black hair stood in the doorway holding a can of beer. She was laughing; someone grabbed her and yanked her back inside the house by her arm.
“Great,” Lacy said to herself. She pulled the car around and parked directly in front of the house. This is my sister we’re talking about here. If it was Mom she’d walk right in there and yank Sharon out.
She looked up the street. The dog was coming back toward the house, its nose close to the snow-covered road. Lacy turned off the WV’s engine and got out of the car. She waited for the dog to come to her. The animal growled at first, but Lacy bent down and made soft mothering sounds. The dog came forward and let her pat its wide ugly head. Eventually the dog licked her hand.
“What’s wrong, boy, huh?” She looked up at the house behind her. She heard laughter. Someone kicked the door shut. The dog pulled away from her and ran out into the middle of the street, spooked by the loud sound of the door being slammed. The animal was almost hit by a passing car.
“I’m looking for my sister,” Lacy said. The girl who answered the door was only sixteen or seventeen, she thought, in Lycra shorts and a t-shirt. A TV was on in the living room; Lacy could see someone playing a video game on it. Several men were sitting around the dismal room. One of them got up off a black Naugahyde couch and came toward the door. He was very blond and had a large Celtic-style cross tattooed on his neck. Lacy didn’t recognize any of the men; none was from Timberline.
