"What's in this, Fred?"
"It must be a prize in that contest George Rathbun runs every summer — the Brewer Bash. But I don't know how Ty could have won something in the first place. A couple of weeks ago he was pissing and moaning about how he forgot to enter. He even asked if maybe I'd entered the contest for him, and I kind of . . . well, I snapped at him." Fresh tears begin running down Fred's stubbly cheeks at the memory. "That was around the time Judy was getting . . . strange . . . I was worried about her and I just kind of . . . snapped at him. You know?" Fred's chest heaves. He makes a watery hitching sound and his Adam's apple bobs up and down. He wipes an arm across his eyes. "And Ty . . . all he said was, ‘That's all right, Dad.' He didn't get mad at me, didn't sulk or anything. Because that's just the kind of boy he was. That he is."
"How did you know to bring it to me?"
"Your friend called," Fred says. "He told me the postman had brought something and I had to bring it to you here, right away. Before you left. He called you — "
"He called me Travelin' Jack."
Fred Marshall looks at him wonderingly. "That's right."
"All right." Jack speaks gently, almost absently. "We're going to get your boy now."
"I'll come. I've got my deer rifle in the truck — "
"And that's where it's going to stay. Go home. Make a place for him. Make a place for your wife. And let us do what we have to do." Jack looks first at Dale, then at Beezer. "Come on," he says. "Let's roll."
Five minutes later, the FLPD chief's car is speeding west on Highway 35. Directly ahead, like an honor guard, Beezer and Doc are riding side by side, the sun gleaming on the chrome of their bikes. Trees in full summer leaf crowd close to the road on either side.
Jack can feel the buzzing that is Black House's signature starting to ramp up in his head. He has discovered he can wall that noise off if he has to, keep it from spreading and blanketing his entire thought process with static, but it's still damned unpleasant. Dale has given him one of the Ruger .357s that are the police department's service weapons; it's now stuck in the waistband of his blue jeans. He was surprised at how good the weight of it felt in his hand, almost like a homecoming. Guns may not be of much use in the world behind Black House, but they have to get there first, don't they? And according to Beezer and Doc, the approach is not exactly undefended.
"Dale, do you have a pocketknife?"
"Glove compartment," Dale says. He glances at the long package on Jack's lap. "I presume you want to open that."
"You presume right."
"Can you explain a few things while you do it? Like whether or not, once we get inside Black House, we can expect Charles Burnside to jump out of a secret door with an axe and start — "
"Chummy Burnside's days of jumping out at folks are all over," Jack says. "He's dead. Ty Marshall killed him. That's what hit us outside the Sand Bar."
The chief's car swerves so extravagantly — all the way across to the left side of the road — that Beezer looks back for a moment, startled at what he's just seen in his rearview. Jack gives him a hard, quick wave — Go on, don't worry about us — and Beez faces forward again.
"What?" Dale gasps.
"The old bastard was hurt, but I have an idea that Ty still did one hell of a brave thing. Brave and crafty both." Jack is thinking that Henry softened Burnside up and Ty finished him up. What George Rathbun would undoubtedly have called a honey of a double play.
"How — "
"Disemboweled him. With his bare hands. Hand. I'm pretty sure the other one's chained up somehow."
Dale is silent for a moment, watching the motorcyclists ahead of him as they lean into a curve with their hair streaming out from beneath their token gestures at obeying Wisconsin's helmet law. Jack, meanwhile, is slitting open brown wrapping paper and revealing a long white carton beneath. Something rolls back and forth inside.
"You're telling me that a ten-year-old boy disemboweled a serial killer. A serial cannibal. You somehow know this."
"Yes."
"I find that extremely difficult to believe."
"Based on the father, I guess I can understand that. Fred's . . ." A wimp is what comes to mind, but that is both unfair and untrue. "Fred's tenderhearted," Jack says. "Judy, though . . ."
"Backbone," Dale says. "She does have that, I'm told."
Jack gives his friend a humorless grin. He's got the buzzing confined to a small portion of his brain, but in that one small portion it's shrieking like a fire alarm. They're almost there. "She certainly does," he tells Dale. "And so does the boy. He's . . . brave." What Jack has almost said is He's a prince.
"And he's alive."
"Yes."
"Chained in a shed somewhere."
"Right."
"Behind Burnside's house."
"Uh-huh."
"If I've got the geography right, that places him somewhere in the woods near Schubert and Gale."
Jack smiles and says nothing.