Evil Harvest (41 page)

Authors: Anthony Izzo

The red-haired cop stood in the garage, a revolver clutched in his hand. He grinned at Matt. “Did you really think you’d win?” he said, and collapsed on the ground.

The automatic slipped from Matt’s hand. He looked at Jill’s body and screamed. And screamed.

He went to Jill and rolled her over, hoping for some sign of life. She flopped over on to the concrete. The bullets had shredded the front of her shirt. The blood had spread in a star-like pattern. It was futile, but he touched the side of her neck. She had no pulse.

With the back of his hand, he stroked her cheek. He looked at the police station, at the red-haired cop lying spread eagled in the garage. They had done it to him again. Taken it away. Right in front of his face.

He slid his arms under Jill and carefully picked her up. He walked to the unmarked car and opened the rear driver’s side door. Then he laid her on the backseat. After shutting the door, he looked down at his shirt and hands. They were smeared with her blood. He didn’t wipe it off.

He had left the automatic on the pavement. Scooping it up, he strode toward the open garage. He could smell the stink of Rafferty’s burning corpse. As he passed the red-haired cop he spotted a gas can. Gas can. That was what he needed.

He picked up the can and flipped the top open. Then he spattered the dead cop’s body with gasoline. He went through the cell block and squad room, dumping gas on anything he thought would burn.

After grabbing a road flare from the supply room, he walked back out and looked at the garage. The dead cop’s fingers twitched. There would be no resurrection this time.

He lit the flare and it hissed. Matt tossed it in to the the pooled gasoline in the garage. The flames crept across the floor, up and over the cop’s legs.

He’d never thought it would end like this—he’d hoped to ride out of Lincoln with Jill.

He got in the car, pulled out of the lot. The flames had caught, and now they shot out of the garage door as if from a dragon’s mouth. In the distance, sirens sounded. He glanced in his rearview mirror and watched the smoke rise and curl into the sky.

As he reached the edge of town, he passed Folsom Furniture. He tried not to think about Jill’s body in the backseat. He tried instead to remember sitting on her porch sipping lemonade, dinner at Morotto’s, the night of sweat and passion in her apartment. And what could have been.

He drove ten miles, into the village of York. As he rolled past the rows of drugstores, plazas, and bars that lined York’s main drag, he thought:
They have no idea
. All these people, scampering in and out, buying hair dye and condoms, picking up dry cleaning, drinking a cold one in a dank bar. They had no idea what was happening down the road in Lincoln.

He spotted the municipal building, a brick structure with tall white columns in front. He pulled up to the driveway for the lot and saw the red-and-white police cars in the lot. This was the right place.

He swung the car into a spot and killed the engine.

Entering the front door, he walked down a long hallway to a window cut out of the wall. A heavyset man in a police uniform stood with his elbows on a counter. Through the glass he said, “Help you, sir?”

“I need to talk to a cop.”

The guy glanced at Matt’s shirt, and Matt looked down. He was covered with Jill’s blood.

“You hurt?”

Matt shook his head.

“I’ll get the lieutenant.”

Matt took a seat in one of the wooden chairs that lined the wall. A few moments later, a trim-looking cop in a crisp white shirt walked out of an office door. He approached Matt as if Matt were a ticking bomb that might detonate.

“How can we help you?”

“There’s a dead woman in the back of my car. It’s a brown sedan, you’ll see it. And you need to send someone into Lincoln. All hell’s breaking loose.”

He spent the next few hours in a haze, as if things around him were part of a play or television program and he was just observing. After the York police checked out the car and found Jill’s body in the back, the lieutenant, whose name was Campbell, sent a patrol car.

They kept Matt in a seat next to one of the desks, unsure of what to do with him yet. He’d told them he hadn’t killed Jill, that one of the cops in Lincoln did it. Soon cops were scurrying around the squad room. He caught a glimpse of one bolting out the door with a shotgun in hand.

Apparently someone had gotten on the horn with the Feds, because a tall, thin man with a gray brush-cut entered the room. He wore a dark blue suit and a red tie. “Matthew Crowe?”

“That’s me,” Matt replied woodenly.

“Agent Adam Haynes.”

“Who are you with?”

“Not important, but I’ll need you to come with me.” He brushed aside his suit coat to reveal a sidearm in a holster.

“Not till you tell me who the hell you are.”

One of the cops in the squad room, a balding guy with a goatee, said, “You’d better go with him, Mr. Crowe.”

“Not until I know where he’s from.”

Agent Haynes gripped him by the arm. He lowered his voice. “Let’s just say we know all about what happened in Lincoln. Our people are taking care of it. Now come with me—this involves national security and even though you are a valuable witness, I will not hesitate to hurt you. Got it?”

Matt pulled his arm away. “Fine.”

Haynes latched back onto Matt’s arm and led him past the dispatcher’s window and outside. As he stepped outside Matt looked up and saw a dull green helicopter zip over the municipal building.

Haynes led him to the curb, where a dark blue van waited. It was windowless on the sides except for the passenger. He half expected to be driven to a wooded area, where the last thing he would feel would be the cold steel of a gun barrel against his skull.

As they approached the van, a second man in a gray suit jogged around and opened the sliding door on the side. Haynes moved in closer and nudged him and Matt got a whiff of the man’s cologne and the garlic on his breath.

Matt slid onto a bench seat. He was vaguely aware of someone behind him and he turned around to see a third agent, this one in mirrored sunglasses, sitting as still as the Thinker.

“Turn around,” the agent said.

Matt did, and he felt fabric draped over his eyes and then heard the
thwipp
of it being tied into a knot around the back of his head. Great. Blindfolded.

He heard the van doors slam and the engine start, and soon the van rolled forward.

“I don’t suppose I get to know where we’re going,” he said.

“Sorry, chief,” Haynes said.

They drove for a few hours, Matt lurching back and forth with the bumps in the road. From behind him, he heard the low rhythmic breathing of the agent in the rear. The van slowed, then stopped. Someone killed the engine. From the front seat, he heard fabric against fabric. Haynes turning around?

“Were you up at that cabin? The one Pierce owned?”

“How’d you find out about that? Drug and torture someone?”

Haynes snorted out a laugh. “Big evil government agents, right? No, the fire department in Pottsville called the cops when they found one of those things’ bodies. The cops didn’t know what to make of it, so they called the Bureau boys in, who called us.”

“And who is ‘us’?” Matt said. This guy was starting to piss him off.

“Classified, my friend. We just missed Pierce, tracked him down to a hotel and then lost the scent. We were more concerned with the baddies we found up at the cabin. I’m hoping you can shed some more light on what happened in that little town of yours, Mr. Crowe. The media’s dying to get in there, but we scared the socks off of them, told them there’d be jail time if this thing went public.”

“How about taking this blindfold off?”

“In a minute.”

The accommodations were comfortable, if a little Spartan. The walls were painted government gray, but they had provided him with a bed, a table and television, and all the books and magazines he wanted. Over the next week, he talked to one dark-suited agent after another; a psychiatrist; a doctor, who performed a complete physical; and two brass with stars on their fatigues. He had shared everything, from the story of Rafferty killing his family to all the events in Lincoln through the Harvest. Most of them listened and nodded, and Matt guessed they had seen the evidence firsthand because no one came in and gave him a happy shot in the arm.

Now, he sat on the bed. The door opened and Agent Haynes strolled in, pulled up a chair and sat down. Matt still didn’t know which agency the guy was from, and he doubted Haynes would ever tell him.

“They’re doing an autopsy on one of them, you know.”

“Let me guess—classified, right?”

“Yeah,” Haynes said. “But the medical guys are having a field day with it from what I hear.”

“When am I getting out of here?”

Haynes shrugged. “We’ll see. Can we get you anything else?”

Matt shook his head.

“You should at least feel safe in here after what you went through.”

“I don’t know if I ever will.”

“Matt,” Haynes said. “This place is locked up tight. There’s enough firepower on the base to level a city.”

So it
is
a base
, he thought.

“You should rest easy,” Haynes said. “We’re going to hunt them down.”

“Agent Haynes?”

“Yeah?”

“You going on this hunting trip?”

“We’ve got troops for that.”

“Don’t be surprised when they end up in body bags.”

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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ISBN: 978-0-7860-3086-6

ISBN-10: 0-7860-1875-5

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