“You don’t want an injured bear standing between you and the exit,” her father used to say.
“It’s my phone, not an alarm,” Rainey said.
Before Buddy had a chance to react, she pulled the phone from her pocket and looked at the screen. She silenced the ringtone and in the same motion touched the personal alarm program icon, alerting everyone in her close circle to her location and that she needed help. The only complication would be the locator wasn’t exactly precise. Whoever came looking would have to search within one hundred yards and they would start with Wendy’s house. Unless they thought to call Sheila, whom Rainey decided at that moment was going on her emergency contact list.
Thinking the authority of the Bureau and the truth might be to her advantage, she said, “It’s the FBI. They know I’m here. They want to keep younger Wendy safe too. Can you take me to her?”
Buddy glanced out the window toward the house and then glared at Rainey. “He’s here. That was the alarm. You lied.”
Rainey stood from her crouch. Calmly, she said, “Look at me. Look in my eyes. Tell me you don’t see Wendy King.”
Buddy stared at her, focusing on the green eyes Billy Bell gave both his daughters.
“You see her, don’t you?” Rainey prodded.
“Yes, the eyes are the same, but you’re taller.”
“It’s my shoes,” Rainey said, dismissing the difference and hoping he would too. “I need to see the younger me. The prophecy depends on this meeting.”
Buddy wasn’t convinced but he slid the knife back up into his sleeve. “Phaleg told me none of this.”
Rainey gave his delusions validity, but also assumed the power role a time traveling “Protector” would have in Shaman Gelaph’s world.
She chastised him, “Phaleg did not warn me of the injuries you inflicted on young Wendy. Where is she? She needs my help.”
Buddy explained, “The demon had marked her for destruction.”
Paranoid, but lucid in his logic, Buddy listened to an unseen voice and then said to Rainey, “But you should know this. You survived to be you now, I mean then, I mean, you know, in the future, right?”
Rainey’s mind flew through appropriate replies and settled on, “I was hit in the head. My blood is on your coat. If I remembered what happened, I wouldn’t be here asking you where my body is, would I?”
“Okay, we believe you,” he said, and then looked out the window again. “The demon is coming. You need to go. If he finds you here, my work will have been for nothing.”
From her vantage point, Rainey could not see if someone other than a figment of Buddy Cashion’s imagination approached. What she could see did not matter. His facial expression confirmed his sincere belief someone was out there.
“We’ll go together,” she suggested. “Take me to Wendy.”
“He knows I moved her. I saw him preparing to take her as he took the first Protector. I acted too fast for him. I’m better trained this time. The demon will not have Wendy King.”
“Great, you saved her. Now, where is she?” Rainey asked again. She held the Glock up for him to see. “I can protect all of us.”
Buddy offered another excuse for not taking Rainey to Wendy, “If she sees you, it will cause a paradox.”
“You watch too many movies,” Rainey said while attempting to contain her excitement. Buddy had indicated Wendy was still alive. “The paradox, if there were such a thing, would already exist. The moment I appeared here we started rewriting history for Wendy King.”
Rainey thought her reasoning sound. Buddy either accepted her explanation or his worry about the approaching demon took his focus. He slid the curtain back over the window, plunging them into darkness except for the glow from Rainey’s phone. He dropped to his knees and signaled to her to do the same.
“Shh. He’s here. Cover the light,” Buddy said.
Rainey had played along, but her patience was waning. She stuck the phone back into her pocket, knowing it was pinging her location to five people who would search for her and never stop. She contemplated taking Buddy Cashion into some form of custody, but lacking handcuffs and seeing how he’d beaten the crap out of her much younger and stronger little sister, she focused on finding Wendy. She could simply sit tight and wait for the cops to deal with him. Surely by now, at least one of the alert receivers—Katie, Ernie, Mackie, Danny, and Brooks—had notified the appropriate authorities.
As Rainey opened her mouth to once again ask Buddy where Wendy was, the door began to rattle with someone’s efforts to enter.
“I know you’re in there, Buddy. Open the fucking door,” a male voice demanded.
The door rattled a few times more.
The man outside changed tactics and softened his tone. “Buddy, what did you do with the girl?”
Buddy stood so abruptly, Rainey stumbled backward with his movement. She tripped over something and landed in the blanket and newspaper nest. Buddy, fixated on the “demon” outside, yanked the curtain open again. With the sudden burst of light came the realization she had fallen into skeletal remains. While Buddy bobbed up and down in front of the window, Rainey concentrated on the skull that rolled out of the nest and came to rest next to her foot.
The morning began so promisingly, with a plan to breakfast with family and be thankful for her blessings. That plan had rapidly gone to hell from the moment Wendy did not answer her cellphone. Rainey thought her current situation, trapped inside a small building with a paranoid schizophrenic, had deteriorated rather rapidly with the addition of the skull at her feet, not to mention the “demon” outside the door and the delusional shaman on the inside with her.
Rainey stood and moved away from the nest of remains. She looked down at the skull. “Joanne Bonner, I presume?”
Buddy didn’t answer her, but yelled at the “demon” through the window. “Fuck you. I’m not going to let you take this one. The prophecy will be fulfilled.” He ducked below the window and began frantically giving hushed orders to Rainey, “Listen to me. Leave through the back. I’ll hold him here.”
“Who is this?” Rainey asked, pointing at the skull.
Buddy’s reaction to the skull was that of reverence due holy relics. He gently lifted the skull from the floor and placed it back on the nest of bones.
“She was the Protector called Joanne sent to keep me from the demon’s touch, but she wasn’t strong enough.”
The man outside grew more insistent. The door shook violently. Rainey watched the pin bounce and jiggle, but it held—for now.
Rainey pointed at the door. “Did that demon kill the Protector Joanne?”
“Yes,” Buddy said, as he lovingly covered Joanne Bonner’s remains with a threadbare, dirt-stained blanket. “When they let me come home again, I found her right where I knew he left her. I brought her here.”
“Who is the demon? Who is out there?”
“Malphas, the Prince of Hell. He killed the King. He killed the Protector. He will kill the queen if I betray him. You must leave.”
The man outside pounded on and kicked at the door. “Who are you talking to? Is she in there with you? Open the damn door, Buddy.”
Rainey thought someone should be coming to find her soon. Even with an ice storm in progress and the weather-challenged drivers of the Triangle, surely at least one patrol car was in the area. Buddy thought the second in command to Satan was banging on the door, so she’d prefer law enforcement arrive sooner than later.
Buddy continued tucking the dirty blanket around his sacred pile of bones. The man at the door continued his ranting and banging.
In contrast to the chaos around him, Rainey spoke in a calm but direct voice to Buddy, “I’m not leaving without Wendy King and if that is the Prince of Hell out there, a lock isn’t going to stop him. Tell me where Wendy is so I can help save her.”
Buddy, as paranoid schizophrenics tend to do, added a new element to continue his fantasy. “It’s in the hands of the fates now. As long as I held the Protector’s bones in secret, I had the power to keep him away. He’ll destroy me now.”
Oh my god, you’re killing me here,
Rainey thought, but remained quiet, listening to the sudden stillness.
The knocking and banging stopped. The voice on the other side of the door went silent. Rainey moved over to the window and peeked out. There were too many blind spots to know for sure he was gone, but she could see no one. A smile crept onto her lips when she heard the siren growing closer.
Rainey chuckled and said to Buddy, “It seems Satan’s second is afraid of the police. I think he’s gone.”
Buddy jumped up. “The police can’t see him. He tricks them. He wears a smiling face. I’ll be blamed like before. I won’t go back to the hospital.”
Now Rainey had an agitated, paranoid schizophrenic on her hands.
“Hang on. Don’t panic,” she said too late.
Buddy was already in full panic mode. He leaped into the chair in the center of the room and had the noose around his neck so fast she was sure he had practiced the move routinely. This was his exit strategy; the sins of the father were to repeat.
“Whoa, hey, that’s not cool,” Rainey said.
Buddy was no longer paying any attention to her. He mumbled prayers to the Olympians. At least that is what it sounded like to Rainey.
“Hey, Shaman Gelaph,” she’d try anything at this point, “who is going to save the Protector if you’re gone?”
“I have seen the prophecy. I am to martyr myself, in hopes that you will lead the others to safety.”
Rainey had a hard time keeping up with Buddy’s delusions. “What others? Where is Wendy? I can’t lead them anywhere if I don’t know where to find them.”
Buddy looked down at Rainey. “Let me lie beneath the sacred bones with the Protector. Do not let the demon have my soul.”
The disturbed man kicked the chair out of the way.
“Oh shit,” Rainey said, as she jumped into action.
She grabbed his flailing legs and lifted, still holding the Glock in her hand. She could hear him gagging, feel his body spasm and jerk. The sirens grew nearer, but she doubted they would make it in time. If the noose had been tied correctly, it locked around Buddy’s throat the instant it took his weight. At least the knot had not broken his neck as it was designed to do.
“Don’t you fucking die on me,” Rainey yelled.
She heard the sirens roll up and go silent. She had no time to waste. She pointed the Glock as best she could without dropping Buddy and fired a round toward the base of the door.
“Hang on, Buddy,” she said, immediately regretting her choice of words.
Rainey heard shouting outside, “Come out, with your hands up.”
She yelled back, “I can’t. I’m holding up a hanging man. Break the door. I need help.”
Rainey saw a patrolman peek in the window.
“Help me. I can’t hold him much longer,” she shouted.
Seconds felt like hours before the door frame splintered and the patrol officers entered, assessed the situation, and began the rescue.
Rainey was glad to step aside once Buddy had been lowered to the floor and the noose cut from his neck. He wasn’t moving and Rainey feared, even with the faint heartbeat the patrol officer found, Buddy’s brain had been deprived of oxygen for too long. Calls went out for emergency medical personnel for Buddy and detectives to deal with the skeletal remains. Rainey holstered her weapon and stood in the corner processing, remembering, and begging her brain to figure it out.
Where did Buddy put Wendy?
Think it through, Rainey. She should call Katie and tell her the crisis had passed, but her brain wanted to process what it knew. The strong urge to pause and reflect was one she recognized from years of crime scene analysis. Something here in this space caught the attention of her subconscious and she needed to determine what it was.
One officer stabilized Buddy’s neck while the other ran to direct the medical personnel to the patient’s location. Rainey ran through her recent interaction with the Shaman.
“Let me lie beneath the sacred bones with the Protector. Do not let the demon have my soul.”
The officer looked up at her. “What?”
Rainey did not look at him when she answered, “Buddy said that, ‘Let me lie beneath the sacre—’ ”
The message clicked into place. Rainey crossed the workshop in two steps. She reached down and removed the nest of blankets, papers, and bones as carefully as she could, revealing a locked wooden storage bench below. She saw a shovel in the corner, lifted it high above the lock and crashed the blade against it. It took three hard blows to pop the lock open.
Throwing the shovel out of the way, Rainey leaned down to remove the dangling lock. One deep breath later, she lifted the bench lid and found what she’d been looking for—Wendy King, supine and unmoving, dried blood on her face, and her hands folded over her chest. It appeared her own underwear were scattered over her body. Rainey lowered herself to her knees.
“Wendy,” she whispered as her heart began to break.
Rainey placed two fingers on her sister’s neck, pressing in on the carotid artery, praying she would find a pulse. Wendy was warm to the touch, which was a good. Rainey pressed harder, searching for any sign of life—and then there it was. A shallow, almost undetectable breath and the faint, slow beat of Wendy’s heart against her fingertips.
“Oh, thank God,” Rainey said.
As she removed her coat and covered Wendy’s body, she turned to the officer. “You get on that radio let them know we found Officer King. We need medical right now. I don’t give a rat’s ass about an ice storm. Get me some paramedics, ASAP.”
Rainey pulled the phone from her pocket and hit redial.
Sheila answered on the first ring, “Robertson.”
A nearly breathless from adrenalin Rainey said, “I found her. We’ve called for medical. You need to step in here and make things happen. She’s barely breathing and I think she’s probably been drugged with her schizophrenic neighbor’s anti-psychotic meds, maybe Haldol. She needs help fast.”
Sheila said, “I’m on it,” and hung up with nothing further spoken between them.
Rainey pressed Katie’s contact icon.
She too answered on the first ring, “Are you okay?”
“Yes. I’ve found Wendy. She’s in bad shape. I can’t talk. Just didn’t want you to worry. I love you. I have to go.”