Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 98, No. 4 & 5. Whole No. 588 & 589, October 1991

Speed Demon by Doug Allyn

It started to snow. Slowly at first, big flakes wafting out of the dark, then more heavily. A blizzard. In August. Bren blinked, rubbed his eyes, but the snow kept coming.

He fought down a surge of panic. The snow wasn’t real. He knew it, he’d seen it before. It was only a speeder dream, a hallucination. But one with a heavy message. Too little sleep, too many amphetamines. Wake up, Brennan, you’re close to the edge.

In reviewing his first novel, The Cheerio Killings (St. Martin’s), Publishers Weekly said of Doug Allyn, “He displays a flair for gritty, colloquial dialogue... and a talent for making even the most incidental characters flesh-and-blood originals...”

“Put this hearse in reverse, I wanna live my life over againnn—”

Brennan roared out the chorus, bellowing along with KCQ, Michigan North Country, over the truck radio in his eighteen-wheeler. He was rolling through the middle of a hot August night, southbound on a secondary road, hammer down, headed for Motown with a load of engine blocks from a factory in Kenosha, Wisc. The radio was cranked to the max, the rig’s windows were wide open, the windblast ripping into the cab, making his eyes stream, but the racket wasn’t working any more. Bren had been twitching the last thirty miles, nodding out, his head jerking up from split-second blankouts. Almost home. Eight days on the road, crisscrossing four states and the Canadian border, more’n seven thousand miles, the last fifteen hundred or so running strung-out on coffee, No-Doz, poppers, Black Beauties, and raw nerve.

Just one more hour, please, Lord. We can fuel up at the Big 76 truck stop in Saginaw by three, crash for some quick Zs there, and still make delivery in Motown by seven. If we’re not dead in a ditch by then, or in jail.

First things first. Bren eased the big rig over on the shoulder and switched off his headlights, rumbling along in the orange halo of the running lights, letting the Peterbilt’s own weight slow it as it climbed the long hill. He touched his air brakes a couple of car lengths from the top, stopping the truck, then switched on his emergency flashers and killed the radio.

He folded his arms across the wheel, lowered his forehead to his wrists, and allowed himself the luxury of closing his eyes. Sweet darkness in the midnight Michigan silence. He rested a few minutes, knowing he was too wired up to doze off, listening to the nightsounds, frogs, the murmur of the idling truck, Griz snoring softly in the lower bunk of the sleeper cab behind him. Time was when stopping the rig would have awakened Griz long enough to ask where they were, how it was going, but it’d been beaucoup years since anything short of a train wreck woke Griz up.

Suck it up, Brennan, you can always roll one more hour. He took a ragged breath, rubbed his stubbled face with his hands, shook his head hard trying to clear it. Then he grabbed the 10 x 50 Bausch binoculars out of the glove box, slung them around his neck, and climbed down out of the cab.

The gravel shoulder of the road felt alive beneath his feet, quivering like a California quake. He forced himself to jog on wobbly knees to the top of the hill, breaking an instant sweat in the humid summer darkness. He knelt at the crest and scanned the road ahead with the binocs.

Damn.

A Department of Transportation patrol car was parked in a cutout a quarter mile ahead at the foot of the hill. No big surprise — the dots often sat there waiting to snare big rigs who ran out-route to avoid the weigh station on I-75 at Birch Run. Bren checked his watch. Nearly one. He zeroed the binoculars in on the car and watched it for what felt like a year. Nothing. No movement, no cigarette glow, zip.

He rose slowly, then strolled back down to his rig. He took his time running a safety check on the cab and trailer — tires, brake and electrical connections, cargo chains, the works. He brought his log book up to date, mileage, hours driven, hours slept, and forged Griz’s signature on it. Then he walked back up the hill to scan the DOT car again. The safety check had taken roughly fifteen minutes and there was still no sign of activity. Asleep? Maybe.

He climbed back up into the cab, fished his hideaway magnetic matchbox from under the dash, and slid it open. Ten pills left. Four Black Beauties, a half dozen Mexican white crosses. Enough speed to fly all night and then some. He swallowed two of the Beauties dry, gave ’em a few minutes to kick in, then shifted the Peterbilt into first gear and crawled the truck toward the top of the hill.

Decision time. He checked the DOT car one last time through the binocs. No action. The next hill was only half as high as this one, sooo— Go for it. He killed the truck’s flashers and running lights, then eased it over the top.

He kept the Peterbilt on the shoulder, running blacked out, letting inertia carry it down the hill. Even with the motor on idle, the whine of the rubber on the road seemed deafening in the dark. He was doing forty plus when he rumbled past the DOT car. No response. The guy must be zonked.

He had a bad moment near the crest of the next hill, afraid the Pete wouldn’t have enough momentum to make the top without risking some engine noise. The big rig slowed to a bare ten miles per when he rolled over the crest, but he made it.

Yes! Yes! Yes! He hammered the wheel with his fist, feeling the rush of winning one over the DOT combine with the ragged surge of energy from the Black Beauties.

“Mmmmmph?” Griz mumbled from the bunk.

“Nothin’, Griz. Go back to sleep.” Wired up now, pumped and enjoying the game, Bren kept the rig on the shoulder, blacked out. Hell, maybe he’d drive all the way to Saginaw like this, floating along like a ghost, invisible, saving fuel.

It started to snow. Slowly at first, big flakes wafting out of the dark, then more heavily. A blizzard. In August. Bren blinked, rubbed his eyes, but the snow kept coming.

He fought down a surge of panic. The snow wasn’t real. He knew it, he’d seen it before. It was only a speeder dream, a hallucination. But one with a heavy message. Too little sleep, too many amphetamines. Wake up, Brennan, you’re close to the edge.

Sweet Jesus, he was already over the edge, rolling through the hills in the dark, blacked out— He switched on the Pete’s headlights and a face leapt at him out of the darkness. God! A guy was standing on the shoulder barely twenty yards ahead— Bren cranked the wheel hard to the left, bucking the truck out onto the road. The man just stood there, frozen as a flash-blind rabbit in the headlights, staring up at the cab as eight hundred tons of steel thundered toward him.

The trailer lurched and started to jackknife, its tires smoking and howling as it swung around, its terrible weight dragging the tractor cab toward the ditch. Bren slammed the shift into sixth gear and matted the pedal, powering up, trying to gain enough speed to straighten the rig and keep the trailer from flipping. White-knuckle time, furiously spinning the wheel, countersteering, fighting to keep the trailer from skidding around the other way, skill and reflexes warring with rubber and steel and the laws of physics. Somehow Bren wrestled the cab back out in front, the trailer jerking and fishtailing behind him, trying to break loose again as he fought to slow the truck and get it under control.

It took well over a mile to bring the rig to a shuddering halt, rocking on its tires on the wrong side of the road.

“What the hell’s goin’ on?” Griz demanded blearily from the tangle of bedding on the floor of the sleeper.

But Bren had already vaulted out of the cab, sprinting across the highway, pounding back up the hill to where he’d seen the man with—

The woman. Bren slowed his pace from a sprint to a jog, then to a wobbly, chest-heaving walk. His throat was burning, dry as sandpaper from adrenaline and amphetamines. But his memory was beginning to clear. The guy he’d seen on the roadside was carrying a woman in his arms. No question about it. He’d seen them both clearly from only a few feet away. But he especially remembered the woman.

Because she was dead.

He stopped, head down, hands on his knees, gagging down a surge of bile in his throat, trying not to cough up his cookies in the ditch. The woman was dead. Her head was lolling unnaturally, eyes sightless, uncaring, as an eight-hundred-ton truck rumbled past within inches of her face.

The man? Bren swallowed, trying to focus on the man’s face, not able to recall it clearly. The man had seemed to glow in the headlights, to glitter. A big man. A monster. Truly. A monster. Frankenstein. Carrying a dead woman. He’d seen them both as clearly as he’d seen—

The snow. If Bren hadn’t felt so nauseous, it would have been hysterical. A dream. He’d been running up the road like a wino with his pants afire chasing after a damn speeder dream. Still, the vision seemed so intense, so realistic, that he continued up the road a ways just to be sure.

Zilch. No Frankenstein, no woman. The horizon brightened momentarily as a car crested the hill. The DOT? He winced as a station wagon roared past him in the dark, the windblast shaking him like a twig.

Enough. Time to go. The next car might be the DOT. He turned and walked unsteadily back to the rig.

Griz was bleeding his lizard in the ditch when Bren walked up. The old man looked like he’d been sleeping under a bridge, white hair awry, three-day stubble, one suspender undone.

“Hey,” Griz said, “next time you wanna wake me up fast, just poke me in the eyeball with an icepick, okay? Be easier on the nerves. What the hell happened, anyway?”

“A speeder dream, I guess,” Bren said, still only half believing it. “You awake?”

“Damn straight I’m awake,” Griz grunted, zipping his fly, “you’re lucky I didn’t crap my drawers in the rack. What kinda speeder dream?”

“You wouldn’t believe it if I told you,” Bren said, “but I think you better take the rig until Saginaw anyway.”

“Yeah,” Griz said. “I think you’re right.”

The yellow-and-black Manistee County school bus was just pulling away as Bren wheeled the Peterbilt down the twin ruts of his driveway and parked it beside the barn. He sat there in the sudden silence for a minute, bone-deep relieved to be home but feeling like he’d been skinned and stretched out on a barbwire fence. Rock bottom.

He climbed painfully down out of the cab and leaned against it, letting the morning sun wash a welcome over him. A couple of Herefords glanced up in his direction, then went back to nosing their empty feed trough, dumber’n coalbuckets. Eighty acres of rolling pastureland, crisscrossed with fences, a small split-level ranch house, chicken coop, three barns, all in need of paint. Mockingbird Hill.

Emmaline stepped out onto the front porch barefoot, wearing his old plaid bathrobe, her hair in curlers. “Hi, babe,” she said, giving him a thin, skin-deep smile. “Welcome back. You hungry?”

“Hungry enough to eat fried cowflop and beg and plead for seconds.”

“Shape you’re in, you probably would,” she said. “Why didn’t you call ahead? I look like a roadkill.”

“Didn’t have time. I just flat ran outa steam in Saginaw, didn’t think I could make Detroit, so I sold the load there and came on home.”

“You sold the load?”

“I was whipped,” Bren said. “Hell, we’ve been out eight days.”

“And how many of those days did Griz actually drive? Two? Three?”

“Don’t you worry about Uncle Griz, that old man’s still got plenty of miles left in him. And don’t worry about how you look, either, Emma darlin’. Compared to Griz Behr and the inside of that Pete, gettin’ home feels like I’ve died, gone to heaven, and you’re queen of the angels.”

“I’ll buy into half of that,” she said. “You definitely look like you died a ways back. Come on in, I’ll fry you up a cowflop. Or something.”

Bren woke suddenly, clawing his way out of the blackness, fighting a dream. He felt godawful, sweat-slick, shaky, stir-fried and left on the griddle too long. The couch. He was on the living-room couch, still wearing the clothes he’d driven the last seven hundred miles in. Hadn’t made it to the bedroom. Hell, he hadn’t even taken off his boots. One-thirty the wagon-wheel clock on the mantel said. He tried to do the math, figure out how long he’d been asleep. Couldn’t quite manage. “Emma?”

No answer. He glanced around the sunlit, knotty-pine room. It felt strange, alien as a motel, unfriendly. He needed another twelve hours sleep, but if he crashed now he’d snap awake at two A.M. and wouldn’t be worth a damn tomorrow. Unless he popped maybe just one more Mexican white cross—

No. No way. The way he felt, one more speeder’d likely put him in a rubber room. Bad enough he was seeing snow again, and—

Frankenstein? There was a new face. Or an old one, depending on how you look at it. But ugly as Frank was, Bren had seen worse things when he’d done speed a few days in a row. Hell, back in his single days he woke up next to a woman who coulda been Frank’s sister.

That was it. That’s what the dream was about. The woman. The dead woman Frank was carrying. Man alive, he was gonna have to find a new source for Black Beauties if he was going to keep seeing things like that woman. He stood up slowly, took a ragged breath, shook off the dream, and stumbled off to the bathroom.

The sweet home aroma of frying bacon was floating in the air like incense when Brennan climbed out of the tub. He gave himself a shaky shave, then slipped into a clean T-shirt, faded jeans, and work boots and followed his nose to the kitchen.

“Hi. Bacon and pancakes in the afternoon?” he said.

“You look like you need the calories,” Em said brusquely. “Sit yourself, have some coffee, catch up on the news. I’ve got to leave for work in a few minutes, but I think we’d better talk before I go.”

“About what?” he said, easing warily down in the dark pine captain’s chair at the kitchen table.

“About you and Griz and speed,” Em said, flipping a pancake onto the serving plate. “You promised me you were gonna quit using that junk.”

“I don’t really use it,” Bren said, avoiding her eyes, riffling through the stack of newspapers beside his plate. “I just pop one once in a while to stay alert.”

“Damn it, Bren,” Em snapped, “don’t lie to me, you’ve got no talent for it. My God, you looked like a zombie when you rolled in this morning. You don’t look much better now.”

“Thank you kindly, ma’am,” Bren said, “it’s always good to be home. Look, darlin’, we were out eight days, gettin’ good loads, musta cleared close to seventeen grand. I can lay low for a week now, catch up on the work around here, pay some bills. Everything’s under control. I’m just doin’ what I have to to get by.”

“And what’s Griz doing while you’re getting by?”

“Babe, I’m not up to hasslin’ with you about this again. Uncle Griz taught me everything I know about goin’ over the road and I’m not gonna cut him loose just because he’s startin’ to show a little snow on his roof. Everybody gets old, you know?”

“You won’t, Bren,” she said, banging the platter of cakes and bacon down on the table, “the way you’re goin’, you won’t live long enough. The question is whether me and the kids will still be around to— What’s wrong?”

“I... don’t know,” he said, blinking, tracing a headline with his finger, SEARCH CONTINUES. “What’s this all about?” he said, pointing at the photo above the article.

“A kidnaping or something over in Traverse City,” she said. “A doctor’s home was broken into last week and he and his wife were beaten up pretty badly. He’s hospitalized, I think, and now she’s disappeared. Why?”

“I saw this woman,” Bren said, “on 131 east of Traverse, about two this morning. A guy was carrying her. I think she may have been dead.”

“Are you serious?”

“Darlin’, I’ll joke about a lotta things, but dead isn’t one of ’em.”

“No,” she said, reading his face as he pored over the paper, “I guess not.”

Bren was mucking out a stall when they came. He was stripped to the waist, forking horse manure into a wheelbarrow, enjoying the work, the solid heft of the pitchfork, the sheltering dusk of the horsebarn out of the August glare. He had the barrow half loaded when the barn suddenly dimmed. A man was silhouetted in the doorway, blocking the light. A portly type, maybe six foot, wearing a rumpled brown uniform, no cap, an oversized gunbelt losing the battle of the bulge with his belly.

“Mr. Brennan?”

“Back here.” Bren piled on another forkful, tamping the load down.

“I’m Gene Lewandowski from the Benzie County Sheriff’s Department. This is Sergeant Shields, Michigan State Police.” Shields was a rangy giant, six-six, two-forty, beefy Irish face, heavily freckled, flushed from the sun, his knife-edge-creased uniform impeccable as a recruiting poster.

“I’d offer to shake hands,” Bren said, “but as you can see I’m hip-deep in horseapples. What can I do for you?”

“Go ahead on with your work,” Lewandowski said affably, easing his bulk down on a hay bale. He had a thin, wheezy voice, like air was leaking out of the innertube around his waist. “I enjoy seein’ a man do honest labor now and again. Makes me grateful I don’t have to work for a livin’ myself.”

“That why you drove over here?” Bren said. “To watch me work?”

“No, sir,” Lewandowski smiled, “actually, we wanted to talk to you about the report you phoned in. How certain are you it was Mrs. Delisle you saw?”

“As sure as I can be, considering I blew past about fifty miles an hour.”

“How about the location?” Shields asked. The trooper’s voice was so chilly Bren glanced up at him a moment before answering.

“I’m dead sure about the location. Did you guys find anything there or not?”

“We stopped at your uncle’s on the way over,” Lewandowski said, still smiling vaguely at nothing in particular. “He didn’t seem so sure of the location. In fact, I’d have to say Mr. Behr wasn’t very cooperative at all.”

“No reason he should be. Cops don’t rate very high on an independent trucker’s Christmas list, and Griz was asleep at the time, anyway. Look, what is all this? I told you what I saw, and that’s really all I can do, so unless you’ve got somethin’ heavy on your mind, I’ve got horseshit to shovel.”

“Fair enough,” Lewandowski said, his smile fading a bit. “Here’s our problem. You called in saying you’d possibly seen Mrs. Delisle being carried by an unidentified man near a cutout on 131. As it happens, we’d already found her body, very near to where you said it might be. The problem is the Department of Transportation had a car sitting on 131 last night, and the officer says you weren’t there. And the log book in your truck says the same thing. So maybe you’d like to explain to me how it is you knew where Mrs. Delisle’s body would be.”

“Now wait just a minute,” Bren said, straightening. “You think maybe I had something to do with it? Hell, I’m the one who called you, remember?”

“Happens all the time,” Shields said. “Perps can’t stand the suspense, so they call and ask about a crime, or offer information. Just like you did. Dr. Delisle says two men broke into his home, mugged him badly enough to put him in the hospital. Then three days later his wife is abducted and murdered. And since we don’t have much crime up here, Mr. Brennan, we assume we’re looking for the same two men. Like maybe you and your uncle, for instance. Neither of you are exactly virgins when it comes to violence.”

“Violence?” Bren said. “If you’re talkin’ about occasional misunderstandings in saloons, or Griz takin’ a tire iron to some guy who was tryin’ to make time with his wife while he was out on the road, maybe we aren’t virgins. But that’s just minor bullshit and you know it. We never stole anything, never really hurt anybody didn’t have it comin’. And we sure as hell never did anything like you’re talkin’ about.”

“We haven’t said you did,” Lewandowski put in smoothly. “On the other hand, you see our problem. So I think I’ll have Sergeant Shields here read you your rights just as a formality. And then I’d like you to tell us your story one more time.” He reached into his uniform pocket and took out a small magnetic box. Bren’s speeder hideaway from the truck. He tapped it idly against his palm. “And this time, Mr. Brennan, maybe you’d better tell us everything, okay?”

So Bren did. Or at least everything he thought they’d believe. He gave them the details of every run, where they’d picked up freight, where they’d delivered it and when. How after six days out, Griz was nodding out, so Bren did most of the driving, poppin’ speed to stay awake. But the bottom line was, it didn’t make any difference. Running Detroit to Windsor to Chicago to Kenosha and around again, they’d passed through the area five times in eight days. Nothing necessarily incriminating in that, but no alibi, either. And when Bren finished, Shields told him to put his shirt on and they took him out to the navy-blue Michigan State police cruiser. Griz was already there, in the back seat behind the wire grille, looking as bleary and raggedy ass and scared as Brennan felt.

Nobody had much to say on the trip over to Traverse. Lewandowski tried some small talk with Griz, but Bren shot his uncle a look that shut him up. The problem was, Lewandowski seemed genuinely friendly, a guy you’d take a stool next to in a strange bar, buy him a beer, listen to him gab. Bren liked him instinctively, which made the pudgy, balding sheriff about five times more dangerous than Shields the hardcase. Lewandowski put up a good Joe Sixpack front, but there was a badge on his rumpled shirt — he was still The Man.

Bren figured they’d haul them straight to jail, do not pass Go, do not collect $200. They didn’t. Shields radioed ahead that they were coming in. And they drove into the Bay Area General Hospital lot, parking the cruiser near the emergency entrance.

“This is how it is, guys,” Lewandowski said, shifting his bulk around in the front seat to face them. “You’re welcome to call an attorney, which you can do from the county lockup. Or you can take part in a little exercise we’ve set up here. With any luck, you’ll be back home again in time for a late supper. What do you say?”

“What kind of an exercise?” Griz asked.

“I don’t think you quite got the picture, old timer,” Shields said curtly. “We ask the questions, you answer. And the question was, do you want to call your lawyer from jail or take a chance on walking away from this right now? Unless, of course, you’ve got something to hide.”

“I got a few things I might not want my mama to hear about, Stretch,” Griz said, “but I got nothin’ to hide from you and your fatbutt buddy here. And quit callin’ me old timer. Your wife calls me Mr. Big.”

“I don’t understand it, Shields,” Lewandowski sighed, “how a nice fella like you always seems to bring out the pit bull in folks. What do you say we run this thing up the flagpole, gents, see if anybody salutes?”

Lewandowski led the way into the hospital, past the emergency room and down a narrow first-floor corridor, with Shields bringing up the rear. A half dozen men in work clothes were clustered at the end of the hall near the fire door, with two state troopers looking on. Bren recognized Tudy LaRouche, a guy he’d known in high school, a loser then and since. He didn’t know the others. Tudy looked away.

“All right, gentlemen, and I use the term loosely,” Shields said, “form up a line and file through the doorway on your left. No talking, please.”

Bren and Griz joined the line and followed Shields into the room — an ordinary private hospital room with one bed, a big guy in it wearing a blue bathrobe over a hospital gown, dark hair slicked back, pasty-faced as a vampire. He was sitting upright braced between two narrow sandbags, his head held rigid by a thick white foam-rubber brace around his throat. One cheek was bruised, a purple welt ringed by a greenish rainbow.

The eight men formed a half circle facing the foot of the bed. The vampire scanned each of them intently, wordlessly, moving only his eyes. Bren met his gaze straight on, but felt nothing in it — no hostility, or even curiosity. Empty. Dead as a roadkilled raccoon. The vampire’s stare seemed to linger a bit longer on Griz, then moved on. When he’d finished looking over the line, he glanced at Shields, passing a silent message.

“That’s all, men. Please file out and wait in the hall.”

Nobody had anything to say, they just waited a few minutes, and then Shields came out and arrested Tudy LaRouche and Griz, suspicion of homicide in the murder of Elaine Delisle.

It happened so quickly, Bren barely had time to react. As Lewandowski and a deputy led the two men off, Bren grabbed Shields’ arm, spinning him around, and found himself immediately pinioned by two state troopers, slammed face first into a wall, and held there, his mouth mashed against the cool white tiles, tasting the bite of antiseptic.

“You got a problem, Mr. Brennan?”

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Bren grated out of the corner of his mouth. “You know damn well Griz didn’t kill anybody! He was with me the whole time!”

“I’m not forgetting that,” Shields said. “With any luck you’ll be back together soon. But for now, the doc’s made his I.D. and we’ll both have to live with it. Unless you’d like us to book you for assault?”

“No,” Bren said, “I’m cool. Tell ’em to let me go.”

“Please?” Shields asked.

Bren swallowed hard. “Yeah, okay, please tell ’em to let me go.” Shields nodded and the two troopers released Bren, backing warily away to stand beside the sergeant.

Bren faced them, barely holding himself in check, only a split second away from going for all three of them, seeing how much damage he could do before—

No. It’d be too stupid. The big red-faced trooper would love to put him away with Griz. And he couldn’t help the old man from the slammer. Still, it was a near thing. He gagged down his anger, and some pride. “If that guy identified Griz as one of the men who roughed him up, he’s dead wrong.”

“I think he’s wrong, too,” Shields said evenly, “but not about your uncle. I think he’s wrong about Tudy. On the other hand, you two look a bit alike, you and Tudy. Maybe the doc’ll change his mind. Now take a hike, Brennan, but don’t go too far. I may want to talk to you again.”

So Bren walked, out to the bank of pay phones beside the hospital entrance. He tried three different attorneys out of the yellow pages, offices and home numbers both, but it was nearly six and all he got was answering machines. He tried his home. No answer there, either — Em would be at work until ten, the kids with the sitter.

Terrific. Now what? His stomach rumbled a partial answer. He hadn’t eaten anything since his late breakfast and it had already been one helluva day.

He walked the half mile into town and stopped at the first bar restaurant he came to that didn’t look touristy. Sealey’s Joint. Dim, smoky, busy, guys in work clothes battin’ the breeze at the bar or kibitzing around the pool tables, drinking beer out of quart bottles, the jukebox moaning softly in the background about how proud he was to be an American.

Bren had never been in the place before, but he knew home when he smelled it. He chose a back booth away from the crush, ordered a Bud, a barbecue sandwich, a side of fries’n’gravy from a peroxide-blonde grandmother in a salmon-pink uniform. The beer was icy, the chow was hot’n’greasy and Bren tore into it like a wolverine. He’d wolfed about half of it down when Sheriff Lewandowski wandered in and backslapped and gladhanded his way through the crowd back to Bren’s booth.

“Mr. Brennan? Mind if I sit?” he said, easing his bulk down without waiting for an answer.

“If you’re gonna arrest me, at least let me finish my feed first. I’ve had a tough day.”

“Me, too,” Lewandowski said, “and we both had long nights as well. But I’m not here to arrest you, at least not yet.”

“Well, if you’re here to ruin my dinner, consider it a job well done and leave me alone, okay?”

“Doesn’t look ruined to me,” Lewandowski said, fishing a fry off Bren’s plate, sopping it with gravy, sucking it down like a noodle. “Good food here. Used to spend quite a lot of time in this place. Nice folks. Friendly. And I’m basically a friendly guy. And a curious one. It’s one of the neat things about my job. When I get curious about something, I can just ask, and people think I’m working.”

“Lucky you.”

“I am lucky. Not as lucky as you, maybe, but close.”

“How do you figure I’m lucky?” Bren said around a mouthful of his barbecue sandwich, washing it down with a long pull of Bud.

“For openers, you’re still in one piece. I checked you out, talked with a few truckers I know. Off the record, they say the way you’ve been driving you’re damn lucky to be alive.”

“Maybe they oughta just mind their own business.”

“Maybe so,” Lewandowski smiled. “That’s the way you strike me, Brennan, as a man who works hard, minds his own business. Which makes me wonder why you called us this afternoon.”

“Just doin’ my duty as a citizen,” Bren said. “Don’t worry, it won’t happen again.”

“No? Why not?”

“Get real, Lewandowski. I tried to help you out and my uncle winds up in the slammer on a bum rap, that’s why not.”

“Your uncle’s okay. As burned out as he is, he could probably sleep on a railroad track. One night on the county won’t hurt him a bit. He’s been there before.”

“One night?” Bren said warily.

“How long he stays may depend entirely on you, Mr. Brennan.”

“Like if I confess you’ll turn Griz loose, that it?”

“Not at all. Your uncle’s in jail because the good doctor identified him as one of the men who broke into his home and mugged him last week. And to be frank, Jack Shields thinks Dr. Delisle made a mistake when he identified Tudy LaRouche as the second man.”

“Yeah, he kinda mentioned that to me.”

“Well, for what it’s worth, I agree with him. I don’t think Tudy was the second man, either. Which troubles me some. Because if the doc’s right about your uncle and you claim you were with him the whole time—”

“I don’t claim anything — we were together, period.”

“Exactly. And you’re quite a bit taller than your uncle, aren’t you? Nearly a head, I’d say.”

“Probably,” Bren said. “So what?”

“That’s what struck me oddly. The good doctor never mentioned that the second man was taller. In fact, his descriptions were pretty vague for a guy as bright as he is. So it surprised me a little when he picked out Tudy and your uncle so positively. It might have made me wonder about the whole situation except for one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“You, Mr. Brennan. You’re the witness. You knew where the body was, so at least that much of what you told us was true.”

“I told you everything I know, damn it!”

“No, sir — I don’t think so and neither does Jack Shields. Jack’s a good cop, an experienced investigator — which is why he and I see things differently sometimes. Jack transferred up to the Traverse City post from Detroit. He’s used to random violence among strangers. I’m not. Wanna know something interesting, Brennan? In all the years I’ve been with the department, we’ve never had a killing like this one. We’ve had a couple of holdups that got out of hand, and we’ve had the occasional mom-and-pop murder. But nothing like this kind of random brutality. And maybe I’m just a hick sheriff, but I’m not so sure we’ve had one yet.”

“What are you saying?”

“It seems pretty straightforward to me. The doc picked two men out of the lineup. The two seediest guys in the room — no offense to your uncle intended. He swears they’re the men. You claim your uncle was with you. So the doc’s either mistaken or he’s lying. Which kind of leaves the ball in your court.”

“How do you figure?”

“Because this lineup could have gone either way. The doc could have identified you. Or maybe you could have identified him.”

“I don’t follow you. I’ve never seen the guy before.”

“You saw the woman being carried. You saw her clearly enough to recognize her face from a newspaper photo. But you claim you didn’t see the man. I gather you and Tudy know each other, right?”

“From high school,” Bren nodded, “but we weren’t friends. I’m not covering for him if that’s what you’re wondering.”

“Didn’t think so,” Lewandowski said. “Which kind of narrows the field. If I take Tudy and you and your uncle out of the picture, the only one left in it is the doc. Which is a picture I kind of like. You see, I’ve had words with the doc once or twice. His wife seemed to be an uncommonly clumsy lady, always sportin’ black eyes and bruises she said she got from failin’ over furniture or runnin’ into doors. Plus we’d had a couple of complaints from their neighbors about noise, him yelling, her screaming. Not exactly Ozzie and Harriet, those two. So when they reported that two guys broke into their house and roughed them up last week, I took it with a grain of salt. The doc had taken a header down a flight of stairs and gotten banged up, fractured a couple of vertebrae. But it wouldn’t take two men to do that. His wife could have pushed him and, to be honest, I thought she had and good for her. We investigated and rousted a few local baddies, but came up empty. End of story, I thought.

“Until a state trooper spotted Mrs. Delisle’s body out on 131 this morning. The house had been broken into again, but the doc’s still in the hospital, which either means he’s telling the truth or there’s somebody else involved. Which brings me back to you, Mr. Brennan. My myopic witness. So maybe you’d better explain to me one more time why you saw the woman so clearly but not the man you say was carrying her.”

Bren eyed the fat man straight on, reading him. Lewandowski met his gaze straight up, not smiling now. “Okay,” Bren said slowly, “if it’ll help my uncle, I’ll tell you, but it won’t do you any good.”

“Maybe not. Why don’t we find out?”

“How much do you know about speed, Sheriff? Poppers, Black Beauties, Mexican white crosses, California turnarounds?”

“Not a whole lot,” Lewandowski said. “I’ve seen it around, but booze was always my drug of choice. Tell me about it.”

“If you can handle it, speed’s handy stuff. Black Beauties, for instance, will fire you up, keep you awake, alert, and mellowed out for about fourteen hours at a pop.”

“Alert?”

“Yeah, maybe more alert than normal. What happens is, your concentration gets sharper, you zero in on whatever you’re doing, totally focus on it. Trouble is, the longer you speed, the tighter that focus gets, till it’s like you’re looking through a telescope — a narrow field of vision, but still very clear.”

“And how long had you been speeding last night? How long since you’d slept?”

“Goin’ on three days. And I was gettin’ ready to crash. The truth is, I was starting to speeder dream, to see things.”

“What kind of things?”

“Yeah, well, that’s the real nasty side of speedin’. What happens is, your head starts to shut down. Physically, you’re still okay, but mentally you start to lose it. You can’t deal with anything complicated, and the longer you’re high the stupider you get, until near the end you start to misinterpret things. If the demon sees something he doesn’t understand, he’ll turn it into something simpler.”

“The demon?”

“The speed demon,” Bren said, smiling wryly, “the little guy who’s half in charge of your head while you’re high. Like once I saw some warning lights on a freeway in Oklahoma, so I stopped my rig and watched a train pass for a good five minutes before it dawned on me that trains don’t cross freeways. And this one wasn’t makin’ any noise. And then it disappeared.”

“But you watched it for five minutes?”

“Something like that,” Brennan shrugged. “What probably happened was I saw a pattern of lights that looked like a railroad-crossing flasher, so the demon showed me the whole train.”

“A hallucination, you mean?”

“More like a dream, but at the time it seems absolutely real. Anybody who does much speed has seen things like that — brick horses, trees walking. You learn to sort it out.”

“Sort it out how?” Lewandowski asked.

“Simple. When I’m gettin’ near the end of my rope, I start to see snow. Like a blizzard. Like the TV screen of my mind is losin’ its signal. It was snowing last night. Just before I saw — what I saw.”

“Okay—” Lewandowski nodded grimly “—so you saw a snowfall in August. Then what?”

“I saw the woman. But the man who was carrying her was — Frankenstein.”

“Frankenstein,” Lewandowski echoed, his tone neutral. “The movie monster?”

“You know any others?”

“I see. Could it have been a man wearing a mask?”

“It could have been anything,” Bren said. “I honestly don’t know what was actually there, but what the demon showed me was Frankenstein from the movies. Boris Karloff, you know? Big shoulders, big shoes, the works. The point is, that’s all I can tell you. It’s all I know.”

“How about the man’s face? Was that Karloff, too?”

“Seemed to be, but I couldn’t really see it clearly. It was glowing or something. But from what I recall, it was Boris Karloff.”

“It might be a little difficult to serve a warrant on Boris,” Lewandowski said, copping another french fry.

“I didn’t figure you’d believe me,” Bren said.

“Believe what?” Lewandowski said. “That you saw Boris Karloff? You’re right, I don’t. But from what I gathered, what happens to you when you’re strung out is kind of like — a mini-dream, right? And sometimes dreams mean something. So what does Frankenstein mean to you?”

“I’ve thought about that,” Bren nodded. “It really doesn’t mean anything to me. Didn’t even scare me when I was a kid. I always figured I could outrun him, you know?”

“So you’re not afraid of him now?”

“Afraid? No, why should I be? He wasn’t real.”

“That in itself would scare the hell out of me,” Lewandowski said, easing out of the booth, standing up. “How bad do you want to get your uncle out of jail?”

“I guess I’d do pretty much whatever it takes.”

“Good. Do you smoke, Mr. Brennan?”

“Smoke? No, why?”

“Neither do I. Not any more. Let’s go.”

“Whole Earth Health Clinic?” Bren said, reading the handcarved sign hanging from wrought-iron chains above the porch of the stately turn-of-the-century fieldstone home. “What is this?”

“A house of miracles,” Lewandowski said. “I was a two-pack-a-day man for more’n twenty years till I came here.”

“What the hell are you talking about? I told you I don’t smoke.”

“No, sir, you’re a man of much nastier habits,” Lewandowski said, cutting him off, “but that’s not why we’re here.” He rang the buzzer again. The porchlight flicked on and the front door opened. “Evening, Mrs. Beck, I appreciate your seein’ us on such short notice.”

“You piqued my curiosity,” the woman said, standing aside, ushering them in. “I don’t believe I’ve ever treated an emergency case before.” She was late thirtyish, trim and attractive, with tousled sandy hair that looked like she’d combed it with her fingertips, wearing a powder-blue jogging suit and tennis shoes. The house looked lived in — scuffed hardwood floors, antique maple furniture recovered in sturdy twill, books and magazines scattered around. An upright Starck Victrola stood glumly in the corner.

Bren and the sheriff trailed Mrs. Beck into a small, sparely furnished office — a plain oaken schoolmarm desk, a couple of leather chairs facing it. A new-age harp plunked softly over the Sony sound system on a middle shelf of the floor-to-ceiling bookcase. “How are you doing, Gene?” the woman said, waving them toward the chairs.

“Fine, Lois, just fine,” Lewandowski said, easing down into one of the chairs, “haven’t felt the urge to smoke in months. But that’s not exactly why we’re here. I remember you saying once you can do — regressions, is that the word? Show people their past lives?”

“I do that occasionally,” Mrs. Beck said. “More as a hobby than anything else. It’s not a regular part of my practice.”

“No, ma’am, I understand that, and it isn’t really a past life Mr. Brennan here wants to visit. It’s yesterday.”

“Yesterday?” The woman glanced at Bren curiously.

“That’s right. He saw something yesterday that neither one of us can make sense of. I’m hoping you can take him back a day, let him take a closer look.”

“Going back a day shouldn’t be overly difficult, if what Mr. Brennan saw isn’t too traumatic, and if he’s a willing subject. Have you ever been hypnotized, Mr. Brennan?”

“No, ma’am, and I’m not so sure I’m gonna be. How do I know you won’t — mess with my head? Maybe make me confess to something, for instance?”

“If you really think I might try to brainwash you, Mr. Brennan, I doubt that any reassurances I can offer would help. Perhaps you’d prefer to have a friend monitor the session?”

“To a guy who lives the way you do, mister, I’d think risking a little hypnotism would be pretty small potatoes,” Lewandowski said. “Maybe it all comes down to a gut check, Brennan. You said you’d do whatever it took to get your uncle out of jail. You willing to try this? Or were you just blowin’ smoke?”

“It wasn’t smoke,” Brennan said grimly. “Okay, fine, what do you want me to do?”

“Very little,” Mrs. Beck said, perching on the edge of her desk, letting her ankles swing. “Just sit down next to Gene there and relax. This may not work, anyway. Look up at the top of the wall, where it meets the ceiling. Now concentrate on your breathing. Breathe slowly, all the way in. And now out—”

It didn’t work. Bren sat there, listened to the woman babble about picturing himself on a staircase and how he would feel more relaxed with each step downward, but nothing happened. He was just too wired up and ragged from the eight-day run and Black Beauties and—

He was sitting at the Beck woman’s desk. A piece of typing paper lay in front of him with some kind of symbol on it. Like a squared-off A with an oval boxed in the upper half. Lewandowski was standing beside him, scowling, tracing the symbol with a blunt fingertip.

“What’s that?” Bren asked.

“You don’t know?” Lewandowski said, folding the paper and putting it in the breast pocket of his rumpled uniform. “Well, maybe it’s nothin’, but I’d better check it out in a hurry. Tell you what, Brennan, go back to Sealey’s Joint, finish your dinner. I’ll meet you there in an hour, one way or the other.” And he was gone, moving very quickly for a big man.

“What’s going on?” Bren asked Mrs. Beck.

“I’m not sure,” she frowned. “I put you under and we worked our way back to early this morning, to something you’d seen from your truck. You couldn’t seem to describe it, so I had you draw it.”

“You mean I drew that thing?” Bren said, incredulous. “What the hell was it?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Mrs. Beck said, eyeing him oddly, “but the sheriff seemed to think it was a picture of Frankenstein.”

Sealey’s was even busier than before, the crowd a bit younger, better dressed. Bren took the same booth in the back. A hell of a situation when the only consistent thing in your life is where you sit in a saloon. He ordered a side of fries and a long-neck Bud. Lewandowski wandered in forty minutes later, cheerily back-slapping through the crush back to Bren’s booth.

“You’re lookin’ fat and happy,” Bren observed.

“Actually, that’s my normal state, most days,” Lewandowski said. “Jack Shields is a good man, and a good friend, which makes it twice as sweet when I can stick it to him, you know?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Bren said, “I try not to stick it to my friends.”

“No, that’s right, you think you stick by ’em, don’t you?”

“I try. You gonna tell me what happened?”

“I’m gonna tell everybody,” Lewandowski said, leaning back in the booth. “I’m gonna be tellin’ people for the next ten years. Shields had you pegged for a stoned psycho, you know, a regular Charlie Manson of the highway.”

“And you didn’t?”

“Oh, you’re a psycho, all right, Brennan. But not that kind. We just don’t have that kind of crime up here. This one turned out to be a mom and pop, just like I figured. The doc’s over there spilling his guts about it to Shields and a stenographer and anybody else who’ll listen. Your little cartoon did the trick.”

“My cartoon?”

“Sure.” Lewandowski fished the piece of paper out of his shirt pocket and unfolded it on the table. A squared-off A with an O enclosed in the upper half.

“What is it?” Bren said. “Something I saw in a former life?”

“You really don’t know, do you?” Lewandowski said, shaking his head. “An amazing thing, the mind — especially when it’s half fried on amphetamines. It’s simple enough. Doctor Delisle is a spouse-abuser, been knockin’ that pretty little wife of his around for years. I talked to her a couple of times, but she always denied it. A few days ago, he slapped her up one time too many and she pushed him down a flight of stairs, banged him up pretty good.

“To avoid a scandal, they cooked up a story about being attacked by a couple of raggedy-ass housebreakers. I never really bought it, but I didn’t see the harm in rousting a few local jerks. And I was dead wrong about that. She might still be alive if I hadn’t pretended to buy their story.”

“What happened?”

“Yesterday the good doctor snowed her into believing everything would be okay now that she’d finally stood up to him. They had a real moving reconciliation. Then he called her from the hospital about midnight, said he wanted to come home, asked her to pick him up, said he’d meet her in the parking lot. His room was at the end of the hall. He just hung a do-not-disturb sign on the door and snuck out. In the car, he hit her one good pop and then, ah—” Lewandowski looked away a moment, his eyes narrowing “—and then he strangled her.” He picked up Bren’s beer, took a long pull, then seemed to realize what he’d done, and replaced it carefully on the table.

“Sorry about that,” he said. “Old habit. I’ll buy you another.”

“It’s okay,” Brennan said, “you look like you needed it.”

“I always do,” Lewandowski said. “Anyway, the doc drove to what he thought was a deserted stretch of highway to dump the body, only you came along and scared the hell out of him.”

“But I didn’t see a car. And there wasn’t anyone there when I went back to check.”

“The car was there, all right. From what the doc said, I gather you barely missed ramming it in the dark. When you hit him with the headlights, he dropped his dearly beloved in the ditch and got the hell out of there.”

“Could have,” Brennan nodded. “It took me a few minutes to get the rig stopped and run back up the road. And I didn’t actually look in the ditch.”

“You might not have seen her, anyway, shape you were in,” Lewandowski said. “Anyway, the doc drove back to the house, trashed the place to make it look like another break-in, then walked back to the hospital and snuck back into his room.”

“I thought you said this guy had a broken neck?”

“He does. Two fractured vertebrae. An interesting point. It seems there are all kinds of fractures — green stick, compound, compression, hairline — hairline being what the good doctor has. It can be dangerous to move around much, which is why I thought he had to have an accomplice — a guy who looked like Frankenstein, for instance. But he didn’t. He didn’t need one.

“This little cartoon you drew? It’s a picture of a special contraption called a halo brace. It’s a steel frame that holds the head rigid in severe neck-injury cases. The doc knew exactly what his condition was and how much movement would be safe, so he filched the brace out of the hospital supplies. It was still in his room, he hadn’t had time to put it back. What you saw on the road was a big man with chromed-steel rods sticking out of his head. Which was apparently too complicated an idea for your — speed demon? Is that what you call it?”

Bren nodded.

“So it showed a guy who normally has steel sticking out of his head. Frankenstein. That sound right to you?”

“Maybe not ‘right,’” Bren said, “but that’s how it works. Can Griz and I go home now?”

“Your uncle’s free to go when he wakes up, which might not be till next Tuesday, tired as he looks. But you?” Lewandowski shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

“We had a deal,” Bren said. “I did what you asked.”

“True enough. You told me the truth, or at least as much as you could. About Frankenstein, and even your speed demon. A scary pair, those two. But you know what really scares me, Brennan? You. Because you’re not scared and you should be. You must be half crazy to live the way you do.”

“I do what I have to,” Bren said.

“Bullshit,” Lewandowski snapped, “you’re doing exactly what you want. You tell yourself it’s for your uncle, or for your family, but it’s not. It’s for you — you and the demon. You’re an addict, Brennan, goin’ over the road stoned, strung out, seeing things that aren’t real, kidding yourself that you can handle it. You’re not hauling that old man around out of loyalty — he’s your enabler, your noble excuse to do speed. It’s a miracle you haven’t killed him and yourself and God knows who else already.”

“Funny, I thought you were a lawman,” Bren said. “You sound more like a social worker.”

“Wrong,” Lewandowski said bluntly, “I sound like a junkie — one who’s been through it. Remember I said once that booze was my drug of choice? It wasn’t just a figure of speech. I’m an alky — dry for now, but I still miss the booze and maybe I always will. And the only difference between you and me is I admit I’m addicted and you don’t.”

“Or maybe you’re wrong about me.”

“I could be,” Lewandowski nodded. “Like you said, I’m a sheriff, not a social worker. Tell you what, the hospital here’s got a great program for substance abusers. I’ve been through it myself. Why don’t we go over there and you tell them about seeing Frankenstein and snowstorms in August, and see what they think about it?”

“And if I don’t?”

Lewandowski met Brennan’s eyes straight on, and for a moment there was something cold and hard as a crowbar between them. “An independent trucker’s got a tough life,” Lewandowski said, his tone neutral. “I could threaten to cite you for chickenshit violations until you lose your license. But I won’t. How do you scare a guy who’s not afraid of Frankenstein? But think about it, will you, Brennan? Maybe I’ll stop by your place tomorrow, we can talk about it some more.”

“No.” Brennan shook his head. “I spend a lot of time on the road. My time at home’s my own. I don’t do a lotta company. No offense, Sheriff.”

“None taken,” Lewandowski said, sliding out of the booth. “I expect I’ll be seeing you around anyway, Brennan, on the road. Count on it.”

“I’ll do that. Tell my uncle I’ll be around to pick him up in the morning, okay? And Lewandowski? You asked before if Frankenstein meant anything to me, and I said no. But I’ve been thinking about it. When I was little, I, ahm, I used to try and warn him.”

“Warn him?”

“Sure. In the movies, when the villagers were after him? I felt sorry for him. I wanted him to get away.”

“He doesn’t, though, does he? He dies in the end. I guess he couldn’t hear you.”

Brennan eyed him a moment, started to say something, then shook his head. Lewandowski turned and stalked off, pushing through the crowd, not bothering to gladhand this time.

Brennan watched him go, then took a last, thoughtful pull on his Bud and closed his eyes, focusing inwardly, trying to remember exactly what the monster had looked like standing there in the road. He still couldn’t see him clearly—

“Are you all right, mister?” The peroxided, grandmotherly waitress had paused beside his table, frowning down at him.

“Yeah,” Brennan said, taking a deep breath, “I’m fine, ma’am, just fine. A little tired is all. Check, please?”