White River Burning полностью

“For a while I thought they did. That was my stupidity. Those toilet handles had me fooled. It never occurred to me that you might have been the one who switched them. It was the proof that someone had tried to frame you. Which made you appear to be an innocent victim of the real killer. And it instantly threw into doubt all the other evidence against you. It may be the cleverest criminal trick I’ve ever run into.”

As Gurney was speaking, he was watching Payne’s eyes. He’d learned long ago that any sudden physical movement is telegraphed first by the eyes. He saw no evidence of anything physical about to happen, but what he did see was more disturbing. Payne’s relatively normal range of expressions had deadened into something not quite human. The word “monster” tended to be overused in descriptions of murderers, but it seemed a conservative description of the unblinking creature returning Gurney’s gaze.

As he tightened his grip on the Beretta in his jacket pocket, an unnerving guttural shriek came from somewhere behind him, and a body hurtled past him, smashing Payne against the side of the car. It took Gurney a moment to realize that Haley Beauville Beckert was wildly punching and kicking Payne in an animal fury, screaming, “You filthy little bastard!”

Gurney drew his weapon, made a fast assessment of the situation, and decided that holding back for the right moment would be a safer option than trying to subdue Payne immediately.

That decision turned out to be a mistake.

After letting Haley exhaust her burst of furious energy, Payne turned her around, threw his arm around her neck, and dragged her backward with startling speed away from the car toward the edge of the clearing—a nine-millimeter Glock appearing simultaneously in his free hand.

Gurney remained where he was, steadying his Beretta on the roof of the Camry, waiting for a clear shot at Payne’s head. “It’s over, Cory. Don’t make it worse.”

Payne said nothing. He seemed well aware of Gurney’s goal. He was doing a good job of keeping his body safely behind Haley’s and repeatedly yanking her head from side to side in jerky movements that made taking a shot at him unacceptably risky.

Gurney called out to him again. “Let her go, Cory, and drop the nine. The longer you wait, the worse it’ll be.”

Astoundingly—or perhaps predictably, given the nature of RAM-TV—the roving camera operator took up a position forming a triangle with Gurney and Payne as the other two points. After a quick shot of Gurney, he panned in slowly on Payne and his hostage.

Gurney tried once more. “The longer you hold on to her, the nastier things will get.”

Payne burst out laughing. “It’s all for the best. All for the best.” He wasn’t talking to Gurney. He was talking to the camera. Which meant he was talking to Beckert via the TV in the house.

The ugly truth that Gurney had assembled from a number of observations, including the brand-new satellite dish on the corner of the house, was that while Payne was holding Beckert captive on Rapture Hill, he was forcing him to watch RAM-TV and witness the spectacle of his own ruination.

“All for the best!” Payne repeated, his mouth in a rictus of a grin aimed at the camera, his gaze as dead and cold as a shark’s. “All for the best. That’s what you said after you killed my mother. You called her a worthless addict. You said that her death from the drugs you gave her was all for the best. Then you replaced her with this vile, stinking bitch. You dared to replace her with this—this rotten, cancerous whore. All for the best!”

He gave Haley’s head a vicious jerk before going on with his speech to the camera. “You framed weak, frightened people to get them off the streets. Your streets. You sent helpless people to die in prison. All for the best. You put the girlfriend I loved in a hellhole where she was raped and killed. All for the best. You had nickel-and-dime drug dealers shot on the street for ‘resisting arrest.’ All for the best.”

He looked into the camera with those inhuman eyes. “So I’m thinking that I’ll do the same. Like father, like son. I’ll put a bullet in this whore’s head. All for the best. Happy Mother’s Day, bitch!”

Gurney jumped out from behind the Camry, firing his Beretta in the air and shouting, “Over here, scumbag!”

As the Glock swung away from Haley’s temple toward Gurney, a hard metallic impact rang out almost simultaneously with the sharp report of a rifle shot from the woods across the clearing, and the Glock flew out of Payne’s hand. After an instant of surprise, he shoved Haley toward Gurney and with a sprinter’s speed disappeared among the dark hemlocks. Less than a minute later that sector of the forest was filled with an eerie howling that increased steadily in volume and ferocity, then devolved suddenly into deep savage growls—until a high-pitched whistle produced an absolute silence.