Read Online Johnny Halloween by Norman Partridge - Free Book Online Page A

When they found Bill, they’d try to talk sense to him, convince him that the thing to do would be to pay for Wich’s truck repair and return the chalker. And maybe skip a couple of the county’s field maintenance bills, too, just to show that he was genuinely embarrassed about the whole thing. If Bill did that, and if he was very nice about it, maybe they wouldn’t worry about the 459, the 2002, and the big bad deuce rap. It sure as hell would save all concerned a whole bunch of paperwork, and Dennis Wichita had already told Nardo that the last thing he wanted to do was deal with his insurance company. Again.
    Nardo got behind the wheel of the patrol car and headed for the county line, thinking about Bill’s biggest contracts, the places he was likely to visit first. He’d start with the cemetery, then work his way back toward the heart of the county. Soon he found himself thinking about Häagen-Dazs and foil-wrapped beers and steak dinners—thick filet mignons smothered with mushrooms and garlic and red onions—but he couldn’t work up a good head of jealousy over Bill’s success. His brother-in-law was a real entrepreneur. Two years ago he’d started out with a mail-order book called How to Earn $50 an Hour with a Pickup Truck , and now he was….
    Hell, now he was driving around drunk while his loony buddies flew black leather kites off of his truck-bed.
    Nardo eased the blue-and-white Dodge Diplomat onto Old Howard Road, careful to avoid the many potholes that dotted the blacktop. Up ahead, a blue-and-red pickup was parked on the sloping shoulder. Nardo killed his lights as he pulled in behind it.
    Stepping onto the gravel shoulder, he took his nunchaku from the inside door panel. When he was a teenager, he had seen every Bruce Lee movie that had played at the Visalia Drive-In at least a dozen times, and he’d been sold on the preferred weapon of Okinawan rice farmers ever since, even though his police training with the chucks had disappointed him, concentrating on wrist locks rather than elegant flourishes and passes. Still, he had seen many a perp freeze at the very sight of them, and he thought that the chucks were a hell of a lot more intimidating than the nightsticks most cops carried or the tonfas favored by the California Highway Patrol.
    Nardo checked the truck. Nothing. He tried contacting Sylvia Martin with his extender mic, but he was too far from the station’s repeater and the signal was miserably weak, so he called in his position using the patrol car’s more powerful radio.
    Once again, code 4. Once again, investigating suspicious circumstances.
    The full moon shone a chalky white-blue, the color of an oyster. Nardo hustled quietly across a weed-choked drainage ditch and through a tangle of scrub oak that partially circled the cemetery fence, glad for the moon because it made his flashlight unnecessary. He started to swing open the rusty gate before he saw the men, and the squealing hinges would have given him away for sure if not for the loud chanting that began at the same instant.
     
    “The darkness, the darkness,
    The light, the light,
    At midnight, at midnight,
    On Halloween night.”
     
    Nardo dipped low, taking cover behind a leafy oak. He’d nearly walked right into it.
    There were about ten of them, and just like Dennis Wichita had said, they were flying kites. Nardo saw three bat-shaped silhouettes darting and diving before the bright moon, though it didn’t appear that any of the men were holding kite reels or paying much attention to the aerial acrobatics.
    One of the men came forward, pushing something that looked like an old lawn mower. The chalker. The man bent low and jammed his arm into the machine, first to the wrist, then the forearm, then the elbow, and when he stood up, in the brief moment before the heavy, leathery sleeve of his robe descended, it appeared that he had lost his right arm.
    Nardo inched back toward his patrol car. It was a trick, he told himself. Damn