Forests of the Night (35 page)

Charlotte jabbed her fingertip with the needle point of the scissors and had to suck away the blood before going on.

“And your father, Standingdog? He took the fall, why?”

“My goddamn fault,” Lucy said. “I got pregnant and he found out.”

“I don't follow.”

“Standingdog went barging in to see Chief and Parker's mom at the summer camp, ready to kill them for what their son did. And Diana had no choice but to tell him who she was. The whole Tsali thing. Her being an ancestor. Which meant my baby was going to be one, too.”

“So if the truth ever came out about who Jacob's daddy was, Jacob would become a target.”

Lucy nodded.

“So your daddy went to prison to protect his grandson.”

“Far as I know,” said Lucy, “that was the one good thing he ever did.”

“It kind of outweighs a lot of bad.”

While she worked with the scissors, she ran through the snarl of secrets and motives and sacrifice and deceit and got stuck on one simple question.

“Why couldn't Diana and Charles go to the police? A couple of upstanding people like them, they'd be taken seriously.”

“What're they going to say? A boogeyman's after me? I don't care how upstanding they were, no cop I ever met is going to waste a second on that kind of superstition. Up here, where everybody's married to their second cousin, isn't any way to know who to trust. So Parker's mom did the one thing she could after the fire, she ran off and hid herself and Parker. It's what I would've done myself.”

Charlotte's head swirled. Trying to imagine Diana's daily dread as her son rose in his profession, became a subject of headlines and news stories.

“You said you had two things to tell us,” said Gracey.

Her left ankle was free, and Charlotte had the left wrist almost done.

Lucy started to speak, then grimaced and shook her head as if the words had thickened in her throat and lodged there.

“Go on, Lucy. It's okay.”

Lucy puckered her lips and whistled down a long breath.

“A bunch of the Cherokees they killed over the years, Tsali's people, the goddamn Tribues heaved their carcasses into that gorge out there. That's where my own body was headed soon as Farris had enough of it. That ravine goes straight down a half-mile and ends in scrub pine. It would take a mountain climber with ropes and pulleys to get down there. Bones from a hundred years ago mingled with last week's kitchen trash.”

Lucy Panther was free, struggling to rise. Charlotte gave her a boost, and Lucy sat up and began to rub at her hands and feet, getting the blood back.

“Someone's coming up the stairs, Mom.”

Charlotte took a glimpse out the window and saw Sheffield and Parker still standing on the lawn. A single white poodle was pointing its snout up toward the window where she stood, barking and barking.

When he saw the Monroe child in the front window, Farris knew it was finished. Not that he'd ever doubted it would end badly. His father's autopsy would be impossible to explain. Gasoline in his veins. His fate was sealed.

Farris knew his mother would approve of that part at least. The IV, the torturous agony her husband had to endure. Although it fell well short of her own months of misery. As he walked toward the house, he looked through the trees toward the barn. When had he last emptied the rattraps? Their bodies rot, you know, and the smell, oh my God the smell, once it permeates those old pine planks, it will be there forever. And your teeth. The plaque, the floss, and the toilets. Don't forget to clean below the rim. That's where it accumulates, the scum. You've got to stay on top of it, or the porcelain will be ruined. How many times had she told him? The toilets, his teeth, the rattraps. How many times?

Farris marched toward the house, knowing it was almost over. A relief of sorts. A quiet serenity suffused him. If all was lost and Farris was never again to see his boy and breathe his breath, then, at the very least, he would accomplish some last portion of what he'd been charged to do. One of the Monroes would die. Which one, it hardly mattered anymore.

If she'd had more than thirty seconds to plan it out, Charlotte would have devised something more creative. But as it was, she worked with what she had in the fleeting seconds available.

She stashed Gracey in one closet and Lucy in another.

Then she flattened her back against the wall, just beyond the range of the door's inward swing.

All she wanted was a second of distraction, maybe two.

Lucy had barely shut herself inside her closet when Farris kicked the broken door open, his SIG Sauer coming through at shoulder height. There was a pause as he absorbed the scene before him. An empty bed, an empty room.

Charlotte chose her spot and hacked the pistol's steel casing across his knobby wrist. His handgun went skittering across the floor, and she hopped away from the wall with a two-handed grip, sighting on his sternum. Giving him orders to put up his hands, turn around.

Farris obeyed without comment. She saw twin flickers pass across his face, the grim sag of defeat morphing into desperate fury and then back again.

Lucy came out of her closet wearing a green robe. Standing at a distance, Gracey looked on in a soundless rapture.

“Get his gun, Lucy. Cover him while I pat him down. And if he flinches, you empty that thing, okay? Don't worry about hitting me.”

“I won't be hitting you.”

With her Beretta jammed against his spine, Charlotte frisked him one-handed, feeling through the black funeral clothes the tense, wiry body beneath, but finding no more weapons, nothing, not even a wallet or keys.

But still her right first finger was curled with four pounds of pressure against a five-pound trigger. Twitch and he was gone.

“This isn't over,” Farris said. “As long as there are Tribues on this planet, there will be one to hunt you down.”

“He's lying,” Lucy said. “The Tribues have played out their string. Now with Otis gone and Martin and Uncle Mike, there's just this last one left.”

“What about this boy, Shelley?” As she spoke the name, Charlotte felt Farris's back grow rigid against her gun barrel.

“Oh, him,” Lucy said. “You got nothing to fear from that one. Way I hear it, that boy can't wipe the snot off his own nose.”

Charlotte prodded Farris forward with the pistol.

He took two steps into the hallway and said, “This isn't finished. This will never be finished.”

“You may be right about that,” she said. “But
you're
finished. That's for damn sure.”

Charlotte walked him down the stairway and outside onto the porch and told him to go on down into the yard. Sheffield and Parker spotted them and came running, followed by a swarm of deputies and agents. Guns were drawn all about her, questions shouted, but Charlotte didn't respond. Lost in the moment, watching Farris's shoulders for any sign of that twitch.

She prodded him out into the center of the lawn. His men stepping forward to block her further progress. The two white poodles wriggled through for a view of the proceedings.

“Now halt right there,” she said. “Keep the hands up, don't move.”

“They're growing heavy,” Farris said.

“Lower them and you die.”

“What happened?” Sheffield said. “Are you out of your mind?”

“I'll explain later. Somebody cuff this guy.”

“I gotta have a reason here, Charlotte. Talk to me.”

“It's what Parker told you.”

“Not credible, Monroe. Now put the gun down.”

One of the deputies made a threatening feint in her direction, and Charlotte waggled the pistol at him. He halted, and she resumed her aim at the center of Farris's back.

“Farris killed Parker's mother. That morning when he learned his brother had been murdered, he ducked into the museum, stole Tsali's hatchet, then flew down to Miami and killed Diana on Tuesday night and he was coming for Parker and Gracey, too, but it all got a little too messy, so he turned around and flew back home and slid behind his sheriff's desk and decided he'd just bide his time. But, lo and behold, the next day he hits the jackpot, because the whole Monroe clan suddenly shows up right in his own backyard.

“Isn't that how it went, Farris? Tell Agent Sheffield. Unburden yourself, Farris. Go on, let it out.”

“She's insane,” Farris said. “Someone disarm her.”

“If that's how it was,” Sheffield said, “then we can check the airline passenger lists. Fine. We'll do that, Charlotte. But right now, you're going to have to put that weapon down. Do you hear me, Officer Monroe? Now.”

A few feet to her right, the dogs watched, alert to the unfolding events but showing no inclination to protect their master.

“Keep your hands up, Farris, and turn around so I can see you.”

Farris revolved slowly, his hands sagging to his ears.

“Hands higher!” she said. “Above your head.”

“Won't anyone stop this outrage?” Farris said.

“Somebody give me some goddamn cuffs,” Charlotte shouted at the officers.

But no one moved to help. Roth and his team had drawn their pistols as well and were in a standoff with the deputies. Everyone, it seemed, was trying to decide who threatened them most.

Farris got honey in his voice and said, “Gracey, your granny is over there in the trees. I see her.”

“Shut up,” Charlotte told him.

“Granny?” Gracey said.

“Parker, come get Gracey.”

But one of the deputies blocked his way, gripping him by the arm.

“Put your weapon down, missus,” the deputy said. “Or we'll be forced to fire.”

“Nobody's going to shoot,” Sheffield said.

“Your granny. She's over in the trees. Don't you see her? Diana.”

“Another word, Farris, and you're dead. It's that simple.”

He smiled at her, and Charlotte saw again the boy in the videotape, the redheaded punk, his flattened lips, the fixed, lightless eyes.
Here, kitty kitty
.

The circle of police officers was tightening around her. Ten feet and inching closer.

Gracey took several wandering steps toward the grove of poplars.

“No, Gracey, you stay here, right here. Go to your dad.”

“She's calling for you, Gracey. Don't you hear her, your granny?”

Her daughter turned her back on Charlotte and headed at a trot across the field toward the trees. The dogs stared at Farris, and Charlotte felt a clock begin to tick in her chest, twenty seconds, nineteen.
Here, kitty kitty
.

Farris held her eyes and dared her. An unarmed man standing five feet away, threatening no one, doing nothing.

Then she saw it. His right hand drifting downward to his ear, curving forward toward his forehead.

An unarmed man. A man endangering no one. Ten seconds, nine, eight, seven.

“Where?” Gracey called out. “Where is she?”

Farris touched his right hand to his forehead, the beginnings of a salute, and Charlotte put two rounds in his gut that knocked him sideways and spun him to the ground.

The dogs shied back a step but continued to observe the fallen man.

The deputies were in a frozen panic. She panned the pistol across the group and behind the men saw Lucy Panther trot away toward Gracey.

One of the deputies in the back of the pack broke into a sprint for his patrol car. But Charlotte could tell from Farris's wounds that he was beyond the help of paramedics.

“Mom!” her daughter screamed. “Mom, what's going on?”

“Drop your weapon, Officer Monroe,” Sheffield called out. “That's a goddamned order. Drop it now.”

“He was going to kill my daughter,” Charlotte said.

“The man's unarmed, Monroe. You shot a defenseless man.”

Farris groaned and heaved up a stringy mix of blood and slime.

“He was going to kill Gracey. I read it in his face.”

“His goddamn face? Are you nuts? She's over there, fifty yards away.”

Sheffield was coming toward her, one hand extended for her pistol, the other aiming his .357 at her chest.

Struggling onto his left elbow, Farris groaned and brought his hand up and completed the salute and the two white poodles loped away toward Gracey.

Charlotte fired twice more into Farris and settled her aim on the dogs, but before she could squeeze off a round, Lucy Panther stepped into their
path and opened her arms wide. The dogs leaped onto her, knocked her to the ground, and tore at her head and neck and shoulders.

It lasted only seconds, then they fell away from Lucy's broken body and ambled into the shade of the poplars and lay down to lick each other's muzzles.

Lowering their pistols, the deputies parted for her and Charlotte sprinted across the field and dropped to her knees beside her weeping daughter. Parker and Sheffield were there seconds later.

“What?” Gracey sputtered through her sobs. “What did I do?”

“You were fine,” Charlotte said. “Just wonderful, Gracey. You did exactly right. It's over now. It's over.”

“Lucy Panther saved my life. She saved my life, didn't she, Mother?”

“Yes, she did. Lucy was very brave. Very, very brave.”