Page 130

“Can we pull the plug on these things?” Harry asked. “Your electric bill must be through the roof.”

It was then he remembered something Janice had told him. How, in her work for the town’s electric company, there’d been a power drain they’d not been able to account for. Harry figured he was standing in the middle of it.

Enough, Harry thought.

Time to take out his gun, put the handcuffs on this sick fuck, and take him in, whoever andwhateverhe was. Linking him to recent bizarre deaths like Darryl Pidgeon’s or Nadine Comstock’s would never be possible, but there was plenty of physical evidence in this room to convict Nabler on charges of being a serial killer. There’d been huge advances in DNA technology in the last few years. Forensic experts would be able to match these ghastly remains to the deceased, or their relatives.

Harry pulled his weapon. “I’m taking you in,” he said.

“Oh my,” Nabler said. “What do they say? The jig is up?”

All but one of the trains maintained their frenzied loops around Harry and Nabler. One train slowed to a stop not far from where they stood facing one another. A steam engine with several cars attached, including one very special gray boxcar.

“Turn around and put your hands behind your back.”

“Perhaps we might discuss this further first.”

“Shut up and turn around.”

Slowly, Nabler started to turn his back to Harry, who had pulled a set of handcuffs from his jacket and reholstered his weapon so that he might grab first one arm and then the other to link Nabler’s wrists together.

The roof of the gray boxcar split along a center line, then the two pieces slowly retracted down the side of the car. From inside, a small red projectile rose up on an angle. Ready to fire.

A missile car.

And suddenly it launched with the swiftness of a dart thrown at a wall-mounted board, but it was not aiming for the wall, it was aiming for Harry.

He never saw it coming, not even when it struck him in the left eye.

“Jesus fuck!” he shouted, dropping the cuffs before he’d had a chance to attach one to Nabler’s first wrist and throwing both hands over his injured eye. “Goddamn it!”

Nabler moved very quickly.

He went into his pocket for the scalpel-like instrument that had served him so well, but this was not the time for a precise incision. Gripping the knife as firmly as he could, he drove it into Harry’s stomach.

Harry screamed. And continued to scream as Nabler thrust the knife into him a second time, and then a third.

Harry moved his hands to his gut, blood already seeping through his clothes and between his fingers. He looked down with his one good eye and saw what was happening to him. In a moment of clarity, realizing he had very little time to get out of this alive, he reached for the gun that seconds ago—had it even been half a minute?—he had tucked back into the holster at his side.

But when he reached for it, he discovered it was gone.

“Looking for this?” Nabler asked, waving the gun in front of Harry’s face, taunting him.

“You son of a...”

“You have a mighty fine bone structure, Chief. A true model train enthusiast will tell you the layout is never finished. You think you’re done, but then you go back to a completed section and think,I want to take another run at that. I think I can make it better. Kind of like highway projects. You think that stretch of the interstate is done, and then they rip it up and do it all over again. The layout is always evolving, always hungry, if you will, for new material.”

The train to which the missile car was coupled began to move once more. Soon it was keeping pace with all the other ones that continued to race around the room.

Harry was slowly sliding toward the floor, clutching his stomach. Nabler knelt, synchronizing his descent so his mouth stayed close to Harry’s ear.

“They will never find you. The parts I don’t use I will burn. I was careless with Tanner, but I won’t be with you.”

Harry was almost to the floor.

And then, with his last dying breath, he shot himself forward, throwing his arms around Nabler in a half-assed tackle that, while hardly worthy of a linebacker, was enough to throw Nabler off balance. Nabler managed to shove Harry off him, and when the chief hit the floor he did not try to get back up.

Nabler staggered as he regained his balance and threw an arm out instinctively to steady himself. His hand came down hard on one of the ribbons of track five feet above the floor, suspended by wires that went to the ceiling. Nabler hit it hard enough that the track and the thin strip of wood to which it was nailed down buckled sharply. A second before one of Nabler’s many trains was approaching. The engine hit the gap, jumped the rails, and plummeted to the floor, hitting it with a splintering thud, bits and pieces of its plastic-and-metal shell scattering everywhere.