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“Ah, good stuff, Aggie. Still make it from the apples out back?”
“Of course I do. I won’t have store-bought cider in my house.”
“Deer still stealing your apples?”
She waved a wrinkled hand at him. “Oh, of course, especially now winter’s on its way, but I don’t mind. There’s enough for all of us.”
The chief got up from the kitchen table and Jay joined him. “Don’t you worry now, Aggie, we’ll be out there tonight.”
And Jay thought, Great, a date with great potential stopped in its tracks by a UFO-believing old lady.
The lights were a chain of bright dots against the sky, arching about in a semicircle and settling down against the bulk of the hill on the other side of the ravine. The lights flared up for a moment and then they started moving, like a lazy snake, down the side of the hill, a chain of ten or eleven. Jay watched them, his hand on his pistol, and he realized he had been holding his breath.
“Chief?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I see ‘em.”
There was a rustle of leaves and branches, and he saw the form of the chief standing up. Jay stood up as well and joined him. When he got to him, he could smell his pipe. It was a comforting feeling.
“Looks like flashlights,” Jay whispered.
“Could be. But they sure move awfully fast. Let’s go at them, Jay.”
The chief started making his way down the side of the ravine, to the stream and the slope of the other hill. Jay followed, keeping an arm out to fend off low branches and brambles, but even then he felt an occasional sting on his face as a branch whipped at him. It was slow going and his back felt tingly, as if something was drawing a target on him. God, he thought, as he struggled to keep his balance, if this had been happening at his old job he’d have at least two or three cruisers for backup, but this was it, the entire on-duty Crawford police force, heading towards God-knows-what. He supposed the chief could have called the county dispatch for a deputy sheriff or a state trooper to swing by, but he was sure the nearest unit was at least a half-hour away.
They reached the stream, and Jay’s boots sank into a stretch of mud, making a squishing noise as they forded the shallow stream. The lights were now above them, up near the peak of the slope. They were white and wavering, and occasionally one would dart out, like a thin searchlight beam. He tried hard to swallow, to clear his throat, but his mouth was very dry and his tongue seemed to stick to the roof of his mouth. All he could hear was his own harsh breathing and the snap and crunch of branches being broken and leaves being stepped on as he and the chief made their way up the hill. He reached down to his weapon more than once, but each time his hand touched the cool metal of his pistol he would draw back. This was no time to draw out his weapon, not here, where a trip or a fall could fire off an accidental shot.
The chief stopped, an arm out at his side. Jay came up to him, smelling the stench of sweat. He wondered what was going on in the chief’s mind.
“Jay, what do you think?” the chief whispered.
“Not sure, it might be-”
The world seemed to explode.
A line of three or four lights suddenly blazed forth in an orange flare above the other lights, and the ravine echoed and reechoed with hollow booms. The chief grabbed at him and Jay fell to the ground with him, scratching his face and hands in the process, and he thought, We’re being shot at, first time ever in our job, we’re being shot at. Someone is trying to kill us both, and a rational part of him listened to a whiz-scrape-scrape as a bullet flew over them, passing through the tree branches.
Everything seemed to move too fast. He got up on his hands and knees, trying to decipher what in hell was going on, and there was another barrage of gunfire. The chief tugged at his holster belt.
“Down, you idiot!” the chief whispered. “We’re way outgu
He went back on his stomach, the cold ground seeming to suck away the warmth from his body. He held his right arm out straight, the pistol grasped tight in his fist, and his heart was pounding so hard it was like a muted hum in his chest. He was breathing so fast he was scared he couldn’t hear anything coming closer to him, so he tried to hold his breath every few moments, but that didn’t work. All he could see were the lights, way up on the slope of the hill, and a twisted tangle of shadows and shapes on all sides. He was trying hard to make out what was in front of him when the chief slid over.
“Look,” he said. “The lights are gone.”
So they were. Jay stood up with the chief and they resumed their fast walk up the hill, and after a while, the chief switched on a small flashlight. He cupped the end of the flashlight with his fist, so only a little light leaked out. Jay was clambering over a large branch that had cracked off an evergreen when part of it snagged on his holster and he fell, scratching his hands yet again. It was wet where he had fallen, as if he had tripped into a muddy spot. The chief flashed his light at him.
“All right?”
“Yeah,” he said, sitting up. “But it’s wet over here. Looks like I fell in some mud.”
The chief knelt down and pointed the flashlight to the ground, his hand still blocking most of the beam, and Jay felt his stomach tense up. His hands were smeared with rust-brown stains.
“Blood,” was all the chief said.
Jay got up, rubbing his hands furiously on his pants. Blood. The chief moved his flashlight and Jay saw a pool of blood as wide as a bathtub on the ground.
He said, “Chief, the old lady’s right.”
“Yeah, looks that way, don’t it. I’ve seen enough. Come on, we’ve got some ground to cover.”
“Where? The top of the hill?”
“Nope.” The chief took his free hand away from the flashlight, and Jay blinked hard against the bright glare. “Back to the cruiser.”
As the chief sped the cruiser down the dirt road, the flashing from the light bar on the cruiser’s roof lit up the surrounding woods with a bright blue glare. The chief said, “Look at it this way, Jay. If whoever was up there wants to get out, the only place they can use is Mast Road. We’re go
The cruiser roared by Agatha Tate’s house and Jay nodded a greeting as they went by. Well, lady, he thought, we found your lights and we found your blood, but we didn’t find your aliens. But what in hell did we find?
“Execution,” he said aloud.
“What?” the chief asked.
“You know, she was almost right, people were being killed up there. Not aliens. Hell, not that. But I bet there’s pot being grown up there, Chief, and I bet you a breakfast at Dino’s that if we look hard enough, maybe get the DEA involved, you find some serious crops up there. And you know what they do out in California if you trespass on those pot fields? Bang. Taken care of.”
The chief just nodded. Jay spoke up again, reaching down to the radio microphone. “Should I put a call in to county for backup?”
The cruiser made a sharp corner and he could hear gravel being kicked up by the tires.
“No,” the chief finally said. “It’ll take them too long to get here, and I think we can take care of it by ourselves. Honest.”
Jay drew his hand back and bit his lip in frustration. A few minutes ago he had been playing George the Groundhog, burrowing in the dirt, trying to get his head blown off while World War III nearly broke out, and now the chief wanted to play small-town hero. He looked down at his hands. From the dashboard lights he saw the brown flecks of dried blood still sticking to his skin, and he rubbed his hands again on his pants legs.