Pines

  She’d probably closed last night, which meant there was a good chance she was home now. Hell, she’d offered. He could swing by, borrow a few pills, get this headache under control before heading over to the sheriff’s.

  He crossed the street, stayed on Main until he’d reached Ninth, and then took a turn around the block and headed east.

  Streets intersected Main.

  Avenues ran parallel.

  Figured he had about seven blocks to walk.

  After the third, he could feel his feet rubbing raw, but he didn’t stop. It was pain, but a welcome distraction from the pounding in his head.

  The school occupied an entire city block between Fifth and Fourth Avenues, and he limped alongside a chain-link fence that enclosed a playing field.

  It was recess hour for a class of eight- or nine-year-olds, and they were engaged in an elaborate game of freeze tag, a girl with blonde pigtails chasing everyone in sight as a choir of screams echoed between the brick buildings.

  Ethan watched their game, trying not to think about the blood that had begun to collect in his shoes—cold between his toes.

  Blonde pigtails suddenly stopped in the middle of a group of kids and stared at Ethan.

  For a moment, the other kids continued running and screaming, but gradually, they also stopped, taking notice, first, that their pursuer was no longer chasing them, and then, of what had stolen her attention.

  One by one, each child turned and stared at Ethan—blank expressions that he could have sworn contained some element of thinly veiled hostility.

  He smiled through the pain, gave a little wave.

  “Hey, kids.”

  Not a single one of them waved back or otherwise responded. They just stood frozen in place like a collection of figurines, only their heads turning as they watched him pass out of sight around the corner of the gymnasium.

  “Weird little shits,” Ethan muttered under his breath as their laughter and screams started up again, the game resuming.

  On the other side of Fourth Avenue, he picked up the pace, the pain in his feet getting more intense, but he pushed through it, thinking, Just get there. Grin and bear it and get there.

  Beyond Third Avenue now, and he was jogging, his ribs beginning to ache again. He passed a series of houses that looked more run-down. The seedy side of Wayward Pines? he wondered. Could such a town have a bad side?

  At First Avenue, he stopped.

  The road had gone to dirt—the gravel long since worn away and the lumpy grade of it heavily washboarded. There was no sidewalk and there was no road beyond this one. He’d come to the eastern edge of Wayward Pines and behind the houses that lined this street, civilization came to an abrupt end. A steep hillside, wooded with pines, ran up several hundred feet to the base of that cirque that enclosed the town.

  Ethan limped down the middle of the empty dirt road.

  He could hear birds chirping in the nearby woods, and nothing else. Completely isolated from what little bustle downtown Wayward Pines could muster.

  He was passing mailboxes that were already in the five hundreds, feeling the first glimmer of relief, knowing Beverly’s place would be on the next block.

  The light-headedness was threatening again, waves of it—gentle so far—washing over him.

  The next intersection stood completely empty.

  Not a soul out.

  A warm wind sliding down off the mountain sent little whirlwinds of dust across the street.

  There it was—604, the second house on the right. He could tell this from the tiny steel plate that had been screwed into what was left of the mailbox, which was completely covered in rust except for the gaping, jagged holes. A quiet tweeping emitted from within, and for a moment, he thought it might be another speaker, but then he glimpsed the wing of the bird that was nesting inside.

  He looked up at the house itself.

  It had probably been a lovely two-story Victorian once, with a steeply pitched roof and a porch with a swing and a stone path leading through the front yard to the entrance.

  The paint had long ago chipped away. Even standing in the street, Ethan could see that not even a fleck of it lingered. The boards still attached to the listing frame had been bleached almost white by the sun, most in the final stages of disintegration from rot. Not a jag of window glass remained.

  He pulled the ticket from last night’s dinner out of his pocket and rechecked the address. The handwriting was clear—604 1st Ave—but maybe Beverly had transposed the numbers, or written “Ave” when she meant “St.”

  Ethan pushed his way into the waist-high weeds that had overtaken the front yard, only flashes of the stone pathway visible through the undergrowth.

  The two steps leading to the covered porch looked like they’d been run through a wood chipper. He stepped up and over them onto a floorboard, his weight upon it producing a deafening creak.

  “Beverly?”

  The house seemed to swallow his voice.

  He carefully crossed the porch, stepped through the doorless doorway, and called her name again. He could hear the wind pushing against the house, its timber frame groaning. Three steps into the living room, he stopped. Springs lay rusting on the floor amid the crumbling frame of an ancient sofa. A coffee table stood covered in cobwebs, and underneath them, the pages of some magazine, sodden and rotted beyond recognition.

  Beverly couldn’t have wanted him to come here—not even as a joke. She must have accidentally written down the wrong—

  The smell brought his chin up. He took a tentative step forward, dodging a trio of nails sticking up through a floorboard.

  Sniffed the air again.

  Another blast of it swept by as a gust of wind shook the house, and he instantly buried his nose in the crook of his arm. He moved forward, past half a staircase, into a narrow hallway that ran between the kitchen and the dining room, where a cascade of light streamed down onto the splintered remains of where the ceiling had crushed the dinner table.

  He went on, picking his way through a minefield of bad boards and outright holes that gaped into the crawlspace under the house.

  The refrigerator, the sink, the stove—rust covered every metal surface like a fungus, this place reminding him of the old homesteads he and his friends would stumble across on summer explorations into the woods behind their farms. Abandoned barns and cabins, the roofs perforated with holes that the sun blazed through in tubes of light. He’d once found a fifty-year-old newspaper inside an old desk announcing the election of a new president, had wanted to take it home and show his parents, but the thing was so brittle it had flaked apart in his hands.

  Ethan hadn’t ventured a breath through his nose in over a minute, and still he could tell the stench was getting stronger. Swore he could taste it in the corners of his mouth and the sheer intensity of it—worse than ammonia—was drawing tears from his eyes.

  The far end of the hallway grew dark—still protected under a ceiling that dripped from the last good rain, whenever that had been.

  The door at the end of the hall was closed.

  Ethan blinked the tears out of his eyes and reached down for the doorknob, but there wasn’t one.

  He nudged the door open with his shoe.

  Hinges grinding.

  The door banged into the wall and Ethan took a step forward across the threshold.

  Just like his memory of those old homesteads, bullets of light shot through holes in the far wall, glinting off the labyrinth of cobwebs, before striking the only piece of furniture in the room.

  The metal frame was still standing, and through the soupy ruin of the mattress, he could see the bedsprings like coiled copperheads.

  He hadn’t heard the flies until now, because they had congregated inside the man’s mouth—a metropolis of them, the sound of their collective buzzing like a small outboard motor.

  He’d seen worse—in combat—but he’d never smelled worse.

  White showed through everywhere—the wrist and ankle
bones, which had been handcuffed to the headboard and the iron railing at the base of the bed. Where his right leg was exposed, the flesh looked almost shredded. The internal architecture on the left side of the man’s face was exposed, right down to the roots of his teeth. His stomach had bloated too—Ethan could see the swell of it underneath the tattered suit, which was black and single-breasted.

  Just like his.

  Though the face was a wreck, the hair length and color were right.

  The height was a match too.

  Ethan staggered back and leaned against the doorframe.

  Jesus Fucking Christ.

  This was Agent Evans.

  * * *

  Back outside on the front porch of the abandoned house, Ethan bent over, his hands braced against his knees, and took deep, penetrating breaths through his nose to purge the smell. But it wouldn’t leave. That death-stink had embedded in his sinus cavity, and as a bitter, putrid bite in the back of his throat.

  He took off his jacket and unbuttoned his shirt, fought his way out of the sleeves. The stench was in the fibers of his clothing now.

  Shirtless, he moved through the riot of undergrowth that had once been a front yard and finally reached the dirt road.

  He could feel the coldness of raw skin on the backs of his feet and the bass throb in his skull, but the pain had lost its edge to pure adrenaline.

  He set off at a strong pace down the middle of the street, his mind racing. He’d been tempted to search the pockets of the dead man’s coat and pants, see if he could score a wallet, some ID, but the smart play had been to hold off. To not touch anything. Let people with latex gloves and face masks and every conceivable state-of-the-art forensic tool descend on that room.

  He still couldn’t wrap his head around it.

  A federal agent had been murdered in this little slice of heaven.

  He was no coroner, but he felt certain Evans’s face wasn’t just rotting away. Part of his skull had been caved in. Teeth broken out. One of his eyes MIA.

  He’d been tortured too.

  The six blocks seemed to fly by, and then he was jogging up the sidewalk to the entrance of the sheriff’s office.

  He left his jacket and shirt outside on a bench and pulled open one of the double doors.

  The reception area was a wood-paneled room with brown carpeting and taxidermied animal heads mounted on every available piece of vertical real estate.

  At the front desk, a sixty-something woman with long, silver hair was playing solitaire with a physical deck of cards. The freestanding nameplate on her desk read “Belinda Moran.”

  Ethan arrived at the edge of her desk and watched her lay down four more cards before finally tearing herself away from the game.

  “May I help—” Her eyes went wide. She looked him up and down, wrinkling her nose at what he supposed was the god-awful stench of human decay that must be wafting off him. “You’re not wearing a shirt,” she said.

  “United States Secret Service Special Agent Ethan Burke here to see the sheriff. What’s his name?”

  “Who?”

  “The sheriff.”

  “Oh. Pope. Sheriff Arnold Pope.”

  “Is he in, Belinda?”

  Instead of answering his question, she lifted her rotary phone and dialed a three-digit extension. “Hi, Arnie, there’s a man here to see you. Says he’s a secret agent or something.”

  “Special Agent with the—”

  She held up a finger. “I don’t know, Arnie. He isn’t wearing a shirt, and he...” She turned away from Ethan in her swivel chair, whispered, “...smells bad. Really bad...OK. OK, I’ll tell him.”

  She spun back around and hung up the phone.

  “Sheriff Pope will be with you shortly.”

  “I need to see him right now.”

  “I understand that. You can wait over there.” She pointed to a grouping of chairs in a nearby corner.

  Ethan hesitated for a moment, and then finally turned and headed toward the waiting area. Wise to keep this first encounter civil. In his experience, local law enforcement became defensive and even hostile when feds threw their weight around right out of the gate. In light of what he’d found in that abandoned house, he was going to be working with this guy for the foreseeable future. Better to start off with the glad hand than a middle finger.

  Ethan eased down into one of the four upholstered chairs in the sitting area.

  He’d worked up a sweat on the jog over, but now that his heart rate had returned to baseline, the layer of sweat on his bare skin had begun to chill him as the central air blew down out of a vent overhead.

  There wasn’t much in the way of current reading material on the small table in front of his chair—just a few old issues of National Geographic and Popular Science.

  He leaned back in the chair and shut his eyes.

  The pain in his head was coming back—the cut of each throb escalating on some molecular level perceptible only over a span of minutes. He could actually hear the pounding of his headache in the total silence of the sheriff’s office, where there was no sound other than the flipping of cards.

  He heard Belinda say, “Yes!”

  Opened his eyes in time to see her place the last card, having won her game. She gathered the cards up and shuffled them and began again.

  Another five minutes passed.

  Another ten.

  Belinda finished the game and she was mixing the deck again when Ethan noted the first impulse of irritation—a twitch in his left eye.

  The pain was still growing and he’d now been waiting, at his estimation, for fifteen minutes. In that increment of time, the phone had not rung once, and not another soul had entered the building.

  He shut his eyes and counted down from sixty as he massaged his temples. When he opened them again, he was still sitting there shirtless and cold, and Belinda was still turning cards over, and the sheriff had yet to come.

  Ethan stood, fought a bout of wooziness for ten seconds before finally establishing his balance. He walked back over to the reception desk and waited for Belinda to look up.

  She laid down five cards before acknowledging him.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry to be a bother, but I’ve been waiting about twenty minutes now.”

  “The sheriff’s real busy today.”

  “I’m sure he is, but I need to speak with him right away. Now you can either get him on the phone again and tell him I’m done waiting, or I’m gonna walk back there myself and—”

  Her desk phone rang.

  She answered, “Yes?...OK, I sure will.” She shelved the phone and smiled up at Ethan. “You’re welcome to go on back now. Right down that hallway. His office is through the door at the very end.”

  * * *

  Ethan knocked beneath the nameplate.

  A deep voice hollered from the other side, “Yep!”

  He turned the knob, pushed the door open, stepped inside.

  The floor of the office was a dark and deeply scuffed hardwood. To his left, the enormous head of an elk had been mounted to the wall opposite a large, rustic desk. Behind the desk stood three antique gun cabinets brimming with rifles, shotguns, handguns, and what he calculated were enough boxes of ammo to execute every resident of this little town three times over.

  A man ten years his senior reclined in a leather chair, his cowboy-booted feet propped on the desk. He had wavy blond hair that would probably be white within a decade, and his jaw was frosted with a few days’ worth of grizzle.

  Dark brown canvas pants.

  Long-sleeved button-down—hunter green.

  The sheriff’s star gleamed under the lights. It looked like solid brass, intricately etched, with the letters WP inset in black in the center.

  As he approached the desk, Ethan thought he saw the sheriff let slip a private smirk.

  “Ethan Burke, Secret Service.”

  He extended his hand across the desk, and the sheriff hesitated, as if holding some internal
debate over whether he felt like moving. Finally, he slid his boots off the desktop and leaned forward in his chair.

  “Arnold Pope.” They shook hands. “Have a seat, Ethan.”

  Ethan eased down into one of the straight-backed wooden chairs.

  “How you feeling?” Pope asked.

  “I’ve been better.”

  “I’ll bet. You’ve probably smelled better too.” Pope flashed a quick grin. “Rough accident you had a couple days ago. Tragic.”

  “Yeah, I was hoping to learn a few more details about that. Who hit us?”

  “Eyewitnesses say it was a tow truck.”

  “Driver in custody? Being charged?”

  “Would be if I could find him.”

  “You saying this was a hit-and-run?”

  Pope nodded. “Hauled ass out of town after he T-boned you. Long gone by the time I reached the scene.”

  “And no one got a license plate or anything?”

  Pope shook his head and lifted something off the desk—a snow globe with a gold base. The miniature buildings under the glass dome became caught in a whirlwind of snow as he passed the globe back and forth between his hands.

  “What efforts are being made to locate this truck?” Ethan asked.

  “We got stuff in the works.”

  “You do?”

  “You bet.”

  “I’d like to see Agent Stallings.”

  “His body is being held in the morgue.”

  “And where’s that?”

  “In the basement of the hospital.”

  It suddenly came to Ethan. Out of the blue. Like someone had whispered it into his ear.

  “Could I borrow a piece of paper?” Ethan asked.

  Pope opened a drawer and peeled a Post-it Note off the top of a packet and handed it to Ethan along with a pen. Ethan scooted his chair forward and set the Post-it on the desktop, scribbled down the number.

  “I understand you have my things?” Ethan said as he slipped the Post-it into his pocket.

  “What things?”

  “My cell, gun, wallet, badge, briefcase...”

  “Who told you I had those?”

  “A nurse at the hospital.”

  “No clue where she got that idea.”

  “Wait. So you don’t have my things?”