Chapter 30
Paul Winchester
It was always the same dream.
Since he was eight years old.
He was sitting cross-legged on the rug that lay in the center of the floor in his old living room.
Barefoot, wearing his Captain Caveman pajamas and watching Sesame Street.
It was the summer, but there was nowhere to go.
Both his parents were at work, and they didn’t want him wandering.
Mom would be back anytime. He just had to wait.
He was feeling hungry. She should have been home by now.
When she got home, she would fix him a PBJ and serve it on a little flowery china plate with a cold glass of milk. He was worried now. She was really late.
He thought about going into the kitchen and making his own PBJ, but he’d tried that a few weeks ago and it didn’t work out.
He had torn the slice of Wonderbread to shreds trying to spread the hard peanut butter, just out of the fridge.
The strawberry jelly wasn’t a problem, but putting it all together was impossible for him.
He thought about just getting a spoon and eating from the jars, but he liked the combination of sweet red jam and salty peanut butter on sugary thick white bread.
He missed his mom.
The credits started to play on Sesame Street as Big Bird and the kids on the street waved goodbye.
That’s when he saw the flashing red and blue lights on top of the police car as it pulled up outside his house.
He saw the big cop, the tallest man he’d ever seen, get out.
He had a white uniform and black aviator sunglasses with gold rims. And a hat.
A hat kinda like those that cowboys wear except it had a golden-colored cord wrapped around the base of the crown like a band.
That hat came off as the cop knocked on Paul’s front door.
He could smell the chewing tobacco on the big cop’s breath as he knelt down and told him both his parents had been killed.
And they were never coming home.
That was the point, usually, when Paul would awaken, startled and upset and disturbed, and strangely with the same odor of that chewing tobacco in his nose.
But not lately.
Not for a while.
In the last few years, there had been another part of the dream.
The part he was seeing now.
The part where he lay down on the living room floor and rolled around, crying hysterically. And as he rolled, he suddenly felt something cold against his eight-year-old cheek. When he opened his eyes, he saw the headless, naked corpse of a woman beside him.
She was crying too. Even though she didn’t have a mouth, or eyes, or a head. He could still hear her wailing.
That’s the new part. That’s the part where Paul wakes up.
Like he did tonight.
He was sweating and panting. Sitting upright in bed.
This time, it was different.
He could still hear the headless woman wailing.
A terrible fear filled his chest, and chilled every inch of his flesh until he felt as if it was being pulled off his bones.
Then he realized it wasn’t the headless Teresa Chase haunting his dreams. The security alarm on his phone was shrieking.
He grabbed the handset.
The alert told him someone had breached the motion detectors in his backyard, and out front.
He’d heard this siren before. Raccoons, mostly. Especially out back.
But never had they triggered alarms at the front and back of his home.
Raccoons don’t attack in a pincer movement, covering all exits.
Only people do that.
Paul drew the Colt from the quick-release holster bolted on the side of his nightstand. He stood in his vest and boxers, barefoot, still panting, but a different kind of panic now washing his system.
This was real. This was actually happening.
He shouldn’t have spoken to those private investigators. He knew it then, and he knew it now.
But he did the right thing. He had told them everything that he had known, everything that he had believed, and everything that he couldn’t prove.
They were professionals, Bloch and Lake.
Both had fearsome reputations. They wouldn’t stop until the truth finally came out, and then, maybe then, he would stop hearing Teresa Chase’s corpse crying in his dreams.
He opened his bedroom door quietly, held the pistol out in front as he padded to the top of the stairs. The floor below sat in a heavy, pregnant darkness. He held his breath, listened to his heart thumping, the blood coursing through his veins and resounding in his ears, the sound almost deafening.
What were his options?
He could wait until they tried to get upstairs.
Bad choice.
He would be cornered up here. No way out.
He had to go down.
Cautiously, the pistol shaking in his hands, he stepped lightly and slowly down the stairs, his bare feet feeling the ribbed pattern of the carpet, his eyes wide, his every sense on high alert.
He froze.
The second to last step. The board was loose. It would groan as soon as he put weight on it.
In this dense quiet, it would be as good as sending up a flare to mark his exact position.
Fear took hold of Paul. He had known terrible fear before, when that tall policeman came to his front door all those years ago.
He knew it was because something awful had happened to his parents.
And still now, years later, that fear visited him often.
It was a paralyzing cold, as if he had fallen into a freezing black lake.
That’s what downstairs looked like to him. Pitch black. Cold.
And filled with fear.
His teeth began to rattle, and he clamped his jaw shut.
He took the pistol in his right hand, reached out and took the rail with his left.
He would need to step over that loose board.
Stretching out his right foot, he put it carefully onto the last step and was able to see a little way into the hall.
As he picked up his left foot to bring it down, he overbalanced and pulled on the rail to stop himself falling.
The rail creaked.
His right hand shook so violently that he almost dropped the gun. And he couldn’t suppress a whimper escaping his lips. It wasn’t the fifty-five-year-old Paul on those stairs – he was now that frightened boy again.
That’s when he saw the flashlight. At first, it pointed straight at the floor.
He could just make out the man who had stepped into view.
Dressed in black, with a black ski mask covering his face.
The flashlight was attached beneath the barrel of a pistol and part of it shone on the silencer that elongated the barrel.
Everything happened in slow motion. The light swept up toward him.
Paul couldn’t move.
Couldn’t extend his arm. Couldn’t even point his weapon at the light.
He wasn’t that kind of cop. He had never even had to draw his gun before, not in all his years of service, and now it showed.
‘No,’ he said quietly.
Just as the flashlight beam swept up and over his body, he collapsed on the stairs, dropping his gun.
And a huge sonic BOOM rent the air.
Paul closed his eyes. But even before then he was conscious that the light from the flashlight had disappeared.
He didn’t feel any pain. And he wondered if he was dead. If this is what death feels like.
Then he opened his eyes and saw the flashlight on the floor, pointed toward the window.
He blinked as another figure appeared from the darkness, and grabbed his hand.
‘You’re alright,’ said Bloch.
His vision cleared as he stood, and felt Bloch’s grip on his wrist. She helped him down the last steps.
He glanced down and saw that the man in black lay still, some distance away from the stairs. His balaclava was now oddly shaped, as if half his head had collapsed. The stain on the wall behind the man and the glint of Bloch’s magnum in her other hand told him everything he needed to know.
‘You saved me,’ he said.
‘We came in through the fields at the back. But don’t thank us yet. This isn’t over,’ said another voice.
He squinted, saw Gabriel Lake, who was on his knees, peering out of the front window of the living room.
His senses began to return, the shock lessening.
It was then he heard the engine, and followed Lake’s gaze through the window to see a large black SUV, with no headlights, pull up outside his house.
Three men, all in black, got out of the vehicle. They wore black ski hoods, and they held stocky assault rifles in their hands.
‘Everybody down,’ cried Lake.