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I’m looking into the eyes of a psychopath, he thought.
The man stepped forward, and Will stepped back again. “I mean you no harm. I just …”
“Leave me alone!” the man shouted, and suddenly his face snarled like an enraged animal.
He lifted up his hand, and the light caught the surface of something metal in his grip. Will reached up instinctively as the man lunged forward, bringing his hand down.
Will guarded his face with his forearm. Whatever the man had in his hand, battered against it, and something snapped inside Will’s arm.
“Charlie! Help!” Will cried out on the side of that abandoned hill.
The man pulled his hand back up into the air, bringing down swiftly what Will now saw was an old, rusted hammer. With one arm broken, Will grabbed the man by the throat and brought his knee up into his stomach.
Crying out in anger, the man reeled back having been winded. But it was a momentary lapse. He readied the hammer in his grip again and charged towards Will.
This time, Will used his intellect. He turned and fled into the mist. If he could just put some distance between himself and his attacker, his panicked mind hoped that the mist would cloak him from view.
“Come here!” the man seethed, closing in from behind.
As Will ran through the mist, he knew the man was only seconds behind. In the poor conditions, Will didn’t see a large rock on the ground and caught his foot on it, falling forward, and sliding down a grass embankment.
He scrambled back onto his feet as quickly as he could. It was now that the injury to his arm made itself known. The pain ran up his forearm like electricity.
Will bit down on the collar of his coat to stop from screaming. Ducking down, he found a large bush and hid behind it, peering out from between its branches.
The mist still made it hard to see. Dark shapes stood nearby, some were trees, but others Will felt were more malevolent. Like watchers, figures observing the violence in Kerry County, detached from the humanity of it all.
Then Will saw one of the shapes moving closer. He could see it looking around, and there was something in its hand. He was certain that it was Lance Nielsen, but that certainty lasted only a moment.
Will heard a footfall from behind him. He turned to see his attacker standing over him.
“Leave me alone!” he screamed, lifting the hammer up over his head to strike Will down once and for all.
But something had changed. Will no longer felt alone. Someone else was there. A sure hand moved out of the mist, a gun in its grasp, and the barrel placed coldly against Lance Nielsen’s temple.
“You so much as cough, and I pull the trigger. Put the hammer down. Now.”
Will saw the face of his friend and partner, Charlie. Then he passed out from the pain of his broken arm.
CHAPTER TEN
Valerie sat in pathologist Larry Birkin’s office, a sinking feeling in her chest. She was unimpressed with how things were proceeding at the Kerry County coroner’s office.
Sheriff Glen Carter sat next to her. He was drumming his fingers on his knee over and over again.
“You do that any more and your knees will fall off,” she said.
“Sorry,” the sheriff said, stopping. “I get nervous whenever I’m around Larry.”
“Why is that?” Valerie asked sarcastically, looking at the strange arrangement of stuffed animals on various shelves in the office. Crows, a stag’s head, even what looked like a large bat.
Carter looked at the animals as well. He laughed. “Yeah, Larry is a strange one. People don’t take to him because of it. But it’s just his way.”
“Then why be nervous?” Valerie asked.
“Ugh, it’s a long story. We don’t see eye to eye, exactly.”
The door behind them opened and then closed with some force. Valerie turned to see the figure of an elderly man with a slight hunch and reading glasses at the end of his nose.
