Chapter 36 - The Sins of Arthur Vance
The steel chair leg collided with Hayes’s right forearm with a sickening *CRACK*.
The deputy’s shot went wild, blasting into the ceiling tiles, raining down fiberglass and dust. Hayes screamed, dropping his weapon, but he was a trained tactical officer. Even with a shattered forearm, he pivoted on his back foot, driving his left elbow straight into Daniel’s jaw.
Pain exploded behind Daniel’s eyes in a blinding flash of white. Daniel hit the floor, tasting copper and dirt, his vision swimming. Hayes dropped his weight onto Daniel’s ribs, his left hand lunging for the combat knife strapped to his tactical vest.
*BANG.*
A second shot echoed through the enclosed cinderblock room, deafening in the confined space.
Hayes stiffened. His eyes widened in shock. A dark, bubbling circle bloomed on the left breast of his uniform shirt. Slowly, like a felled timber, he rolled off Daniel and collapsed onto the concrete, his fingers clawing uselessly at the floor.
Sheriff Miller lowered his smoking service revolver, his hands trembling violently.
"God forgive me," Miller whispered into the choking cloud of gunpowder smoke. He rushed over to Daniel, grabbing his jacket collar and hauling him to his feet. "Are you hit? Daniel, are you hit?"
"No," Daniel coughed, clutching his bruised ribs. "I'm okay. Where's Deputy Vance?"
"He was outside on perimeter," Miller said, his breathing ragged. "If Hayes was on Arthur’s payroll, the perimeter team might already be dead. We have to move. Now. Before the strike team reaches the compound."
Daniel pounded three times on the heavy oak door of the holding cell. "Claire! Open up! It’s me!"
The deadbolt snapped back. Claire opened the door, her eyes wild, holding an iron fire poker she had ripped from the wall. Seeing Hayes’s body on the floor, she sucked in a sharp, horrified breath and shielded Lily behind her legs.
"The back exit," Miller urged, reholstering his weapon and grabbing an AR-15 rifle from the gun rack. "There’s an old maintenance trail that leads down to the creek bed. If we cross the water, their thermal drones won't pick up our body heat as easily. But we have to move on foot."
They stepped out through the rear metal fire door into the violent fury of the midnight storm. The Appalachian mountains were a living wall of roaring wind and driving, icy rain.
As they slipped into the black timberline, Daniel glanced back at the ridge above the forestry compound.
Through the swaying hemlocks, high on the logging road overlooking the valley, two massive halogen floodlights suddenly flared to life atop a modified, heavy-duty black mobile intensive care unit.
Standing on the hydraulic lift of the vehicle, wrapped in a heavy fur coat and hooked to a twin-cylinder oxygen rig, stood an old man. His skin was gray, stretched paper-thin over a skull of sharp, aristocratic bones. Even from fifty yards away, Daniel recognized the hawk-like nose, the ruthless, deep-set eyes that had haunted his nightmares since childhood.
Arthur Vance was holding a loudspeaker to his cracked lips.
His voice drifted down through the roar of the gale, amplified, distorted, sounding like a demon speaking through an iron pipe.
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"You can't hide her in the woods, Danny!" Arthur’s voice boomed across the valley. "She’s my flesh! Her marrow is my marrow! Margaret kept you weak, Danny... but you’ll bring me that girl, or I will burn this entire mountain to the ground with everyone you love on it!"
***
