Chapter 1
Four Way Crossing
"I ain't gonna be no shit-kickin' sheriff's deputy like my daddy!" snarled Gareth.
He raised his lip to show yellow tarantula-leg teeth as his forehead folded into itself and his head slowly dropped, like a battered wide-tooth shovel on a massive creaking crane.
Reed blinked once and nodded slightly, down in time with Gareth's head. He realized with an electrical jolt that he was suddenly facing an ugly emergency. Gareth glared down at him, face inches away. Reed jerked his chin into his neck, nodding, and managed to keep his features frozen over the rush of alarm. It was always dangerous when Gareth mentioned his father. Reed knew he had to begin speaking immediately and that the last thing he should talk about was Gareth's daddy.
"I know what you mean, Gar," he said in a controlled monotone, eyes fixed on Gareth's.
"The way the world is nowadays, people don't know what they want to do with their life.
It's hard to even, you know, decide what you're going to do ten minutes from now, and there's no way you can figure out your whole life ahead of time. Take me, for example: I took two years of college, and I thought I'd be a veterinarian, an animal doctor; that's what I wanted to be. I musta been about your age then, . . . "
Gareth's left eye was no longer visible, just a crooked gash beneath the pulsing brow, his right eye dilated and oddly sedate, salamander-cold. His heavy breath began to carry a low-throated growl, rising slowly as his huge hands drifted up and the rest of him seemed to descend. Gareth cocked his head to the side like a bird.
"I SAID, I AIN'T gonna be no SHIT-kickin' SHERIFF'S deputy like my DADDY!" he roared, hands held rigidly up, squeezing the life out of the air.
Cold panic sliced through Reed, an image of Gareth as a ten-year old child, already the size of a husky man, standing there with that expressionless, beady-eyed look, a sputtering tremor in his hands, facing the closed coffin. The photograph of Emory Beaumains was perched on the coffin, a tilt to the head and the smart brown hat of a sheriff's deputy cocked the other way, like a glamour shot of some Hollywood leading man, except with poor Emory's stupid, fleshy face in the middle of it. Reed remembered why Emory was in the coffin and why the coffin lid was closed.
Reed nodded his head sagely a couple times, as if he and Gareth were discussing philosophy, and took a lackadaisical step. Gareth rocked in place, his entire hulking body nodding in time. His head pivoted, left hand trembling down and out, as though feeling blindly to confirm that Reed had indeed stepped aside.
"That's exactly what I'm talking about, Gareth," Reed went on, casually taking another oblique step, orbiting Gareth. They were on a landing in front of an entrance to the New City-County Building. The afternoon sun, broken by the dogwood trees planted every twenty-five feet on the sidewalk along John Mason Drive, played on the granite stairs behind Gareth. Nearby, one of the stately curving stone handrails rose to a pedestal, on which a statue of a marble mountain lion reclined. Reed pressed the back of his hand lightly against the cougar's flank, feeling the cold, hard strength, still so close that Gareth, too, could probably reach over and stroke the statue.
"A guy like you has so much in front of him, so much choices to make, so much to think about. You're gonna be around a long time, and you're gonna live every minute of every day of all those years. You got, you know, a lot to look forward to, and you can take things a day at a time. And you don't have to think about anything in a hurry, and you don't have to worry about too much all at once."
Reed glanced at his feet as he stepped down the first granite stair, snapped a quick flash around the broad expanse. He locked his eyes back on Gareth's and played the flashed image on a slide in his mental eye, looking for two things: potential assistance and potential victims.
"Yeah, it's true what they say,"
he continued in rhythm, keeping the words flowing while his thoughts stampeded. He was out of luck as far as assistance was concerned, the only remote possibility a police car a block away waiting on a red light on JM Drive at Second, even though he and Gareth were casting shadows on the door to the County Jail. The only uniforms in sight were being worn by Gareth and Reed.
"You never know what tomorrow's gonna bring."
There were, however, plenty of potential victims. Reed counted nine in his hasty inventory: two suits walking down the steps in front of the main entrance twenty yards away, arguing and waving their hands, probably lawyers; a plump brunette halfway up the stairs, the grim face of a civil servant returning to resume her public duties; a young couple in jeans lounging at the far corner of the stone entryway, probably too far to worry about but you never know with Gareth; three children, two girls and a boy, junior high or so, on the sidewalk at the near side of the building, thankfully walking the other direction; and, worse yet, a woman with straight blonde hair and down turned eyes starting up the stairs directly behind Gareth.
"All you can do is just take things as they come and do your best with what happens, and hope it all works out."
The first priority was to keep Gareth under control long enough for those kids to get out of harm's away. The second priority was to make the blonde woman walking towards them realize that what she really wanted to do was head in the opposite direction.
Reed took another step down, casually keeping Gareth three-quarters in front, eyes steady on the ugly face in front of him. Gareth stood shaking, feet planted, as though ankle-deep in the concrete trying to vibrate out. Two and a half feet above Reed's upturned head, Gareth's was turned on its side, unkempt hair hanging down in clinging strands. With conscious effort, Reed forced himself to keep his eyes up, restraining the instinct to look at the gun on Gareth's hip.
"'Cause you wanna know something? They usually do work out."
As Reed continued in a soothing rational cadence, he could see Gareth's fire turn a corner and a familiar glaze begin to creep back into his expression. Years of control conditioning were straining inside Gareth, whose fury tired easily with depression if he sensed his frustration was just stupid hatred of things he couldn't understand. Reed slid a foot along the concrete, placing himself directly between the woman and Gareth, and waved from his ass, trying to get the blonde's attention.
Letitia Crane was going to visit Mark Hicks. Mark was doing thirty days for drunk and disorderly, and Tish told herself time and again that she wasn't going to get mixed up with Mark and them and she wasn't going to go out with him any more, but it was her fault he was dragged away by the cops and she had been a bitch and it was long overdue but she still felt responsible, so she had to go see him and apologize, but she was going to tell him he shouldn't call her any more, because his way of doing things was just too wild for her and it's fine for him to run around and all like he does but she just couldn't live like that.
She'd parked her car, a decomposing Maverick, in the big public lot behind the Masonville County Auditorium, across First Street from the New City-County Building. There were two rows of spaces with meters on the Second Street side of the City-County Building, but Tish didn't mind the walk and couldn't spare the change anyway.
The small lot on the near side of the building was "City-County Employees Only."
Gareth Beaumains had parked his dirty maroon LTD in the employee lot. There was a barracks at Sheriff's Office Central that mostly the guys on duty at the jail used, but Gareth was already wearing his brown and olive uniform, gun belt strapped in place, when he arrived. He didn't like to undress in front of other men, who always tried to look like they weren't staring while they gaped at his knotted muscles and who always sneaked that little peak at his crotch that really pissed him off. Gareth's brutish face had been frowning and strained as he carefully closed the car door, thinking about telling Reed his decision. His uniform, like all his clothes, had been specially tailored for his size.
The Old County Seat Building still stood eight blocks away, now the crumbling headquarters of the Urban Civic Affairs Coalition and various other community outreach programs. The New Building went up in the early seventies, when local governments were relaxing again and no longer feared that radical college students were going to try to seize immediate power by violent means, and the local war-chest could once again be invested without insecurity.
The team of architects who designed the New City-County Building based their blueprints on a series of "concept" sketches developed by a firm of environmental engineers who won a competitive bid based on specifications drafted by staff members of the quasi-governmental Consulting Services Agency on behalf of a Special Committee convened jointly by the authority of the Masonville City Council and the Masonville County Board of Magistrates. The building was supposed to combine the sleek efficiencies of modern design with the stately dignity of traditional houses of government. The result was a patchwork of corinthian columns, plate glass windows, black stone, fluorescent lights, bas relief, tile, marble and concrete. There were even two gargoyles at the corners of the carved stonework that arched across the building's crown.
The great grand entryway with fifty-seven steps opened widely toward the dogwoods of John Mason Drive, a fluted concrete handrail curving majestically wider as it descended on each side. The original artist's vision had conceived a beauty in the unbroken lines of stairs, but for a landing every nineteen steps, reaching without interruption across the face of the entire building. The Safety Design Review delegates of the Joint Special Committee, however, upon public hearing held on the statutory two weeks' notice, determined that safety rails needed to be installed at twenty-one foot intervals. The additional rails were made of black cast iron rods, positioned in four parallel rows. At sidewalk level on the south end, where Tish had walked around the hedges and made the slowly curved turn starting upwards, the first cast iron rail was thirty feet away. At the top, where Gareth and Reed were having their discussion, the way narrowed so that only about two people, if they were normal-sized, could fit between the black rail and the marble mountain lion.
Now that she was actually walking up the stairs, Tish had half a mind to just turn around and head in the opposite direction. Mark Hicks was bad news, and she'd had enough bad news to last a while. She could just see him, cranked up and shouting, grabbing her arm, twisting, bringing guys like Scully and Modeen to hang out at her place, breaking things and messing things up, asking for money, feeling her up in public, roughing her up at home, pushing her, shaking her, slapping her, looking over to see little Darren in his Garfield pajamas at the bedroom door watching the naked man hit mommy, . . .
Stabbed by the memory, Tish snapped into awareness. She was near the top of the stairs and noticed for the first time the two cops four steps away. Her first reaction was irritation, these assholes on power trips in their stupid brown outfits blocking her way, like they couldn't have their stupid conversation somewhere else. Damned if she was going to squat under the black rail to get around them, damned if she wasn't gonna just walk right up to them and make them move out of her way. It wasn't until she said "Hey" and reached out to touch the shoulder of the one with his back turned that it registered his hand was behind his back, flapping frantically, gesturing for her to stay away.
It was M. Barron LaPlace, Esquire, of Bergen & LaPlace, that Eric was arguing with. They were leaving a status conference for a case scheduled to go to trial the first week in October, less than six weeks away. Barry headed the litigation department of the largest and most expensive law firm in Masonville, occupied primarily with insurance defense matters. Eric Hundt worked for Gerger, Gund & Hoefnecker, which advertised "Personal Injury Is What We Do Best" in the Yellow Pages, on billboards and on park benches. Eric was irritated because LaPlace laid a motion for summary judgment on him five minutes before the hearing began. He'd argued the motion was meritless and motivated by a desire to delay the trial, but Judge O'Michael nevertheless set October 12th for a hearing on the Rule 56 motion, and said he would decide then when and whether to reschedule the trial. Eric was mostly irritated because his own motion for summary judgment, which he'd intended on laying on LaPlace five minutes before the hearing, laid two thirds finished on his desk six blocks away.
Reed Connecky could see Gareth's menacing rage start to sag. In another minute or so he’d be able to talk Gareth down enough to walk him away and then later, someplace safer, gently work around to the subject of Gareth's announcement, in slow, easy shades of peeling through the layers of Gareth's demons. What had Reed said that provoked this violent rage? "I don't think that would be a very good idea, Gareth."
Tish's hand landed on Reed's shoulder in the time it took her to recognize the danger. The other was no ordinary cop. Even with Reed in front of her, blocking the view, Gareth was clearly visible all around, powerful shoulders towering above, framing Reed like a rhinoceros hiding behind a piece of patio furniture. She could see simian arms, rippling with muscle, big enough to reach around a bull and strong enough to carry it away.
The flash of a white hand and a foreign bark amid Reed's controlled tones jerked Gareth out of the spiral staircase descent in his mind. His feet, in steel-toed work boots the size of shoeboxes, were still where they were when he spotted Reed walking out the door three minutes ago, right trailing on the first step. His anger kicked back in and he had the sensation he'd been tricked. Without conscious thought, he pivoted and spun around to face the intruder. His right hand gripped the top rod of the black rail while his left, in a graceful sweep, swung to rest on the marble cougar's head, his thumb in its eye.
Tish screamed. It wasn't an operatic yodel like in the horror movies, with vibrato and scales. It was short and whistle-sharp, the kind of yelp a dog lets out when you step on it. She didn't see Gareth move, he was just suddenly there, scowling down at her. She looked at his face and screamed again, this time more like in the horror movies.
Gareth had a minefield of a face, danger everywhere, broad features, protruding forehead, slab nose. Tangled, rust-colored hair shot out in every direction, coarse rubbled cheeks reached for thick, dark eyebrows that met and arced down between the eyes. Wide, fleshy lips stretched across a truck-bed jaw, open to reveal a mouthful of bent, immense teeth. His eyes were pale green and dull, no windows, no humanity. He was not a pretty sight under the best of circumstances, but now, contorted with fury and violence, he looked utterly primitive.
Reed shot out an arm and swept Tish stumbling behind him. Gareth had caught him by surprise, and Reed blamed himself for the situation, but the next time he would think, think, think before he said anything to Gareth about the Academy Qualification Exam.
"Now take it easy, Gareth."
Gareth kept his eyes on Tish's terrified face, watched her look in panic at the holster around his waist. He snarled and put his hand on his gun. Reed was rapidly losing control.
"You don't want to do anything you'll regret and I'll regret and we'll all regret."