If Dr. Lecter was here, if she could get him, maybe she could put him cuffed hand and foot into the trunk and get as far as the county jail. She had four sets of cuffs and enough line to hog-tie him and keep him from kicking. Better not to think about how strong he was.
There was some frost on the gravel when she put her feet out. The old car groaned as her weight came off the springs.
“Got to complain don’t you, you old son of a bitch,” she said to the car beneath her breath. Suddenly she remembered talking to Hannah, the horse she rode away into the night from the slaughter of the lambs. She did not close the car door all the way. The keys went into a tight trouser pocket so they would not tinkle.
The night was clear under a quarter moon and she could walk without her flashlight as long as there was some open night sky. She tried the edge of the gravel and found it loose and uneven. Quieter to walk in a packed wheel track in the gravel, looking ahead to judge how the road lay with her peripheral vision, her head slightly turned to the side. It was like wading in soft darkness, she could hear her feet crunch the gravel but she couldn’t see the ground.
The hard moment came when she was out of sight of the Mustang, but could still feel it loom behind her. She did not want to leave it.
She was suddenly a thirty-three-year-old woman, alone, with a ruined civil service career and no shotgun, standing in a forest at night. She saw herself clearly, saw the crinkles of age beginning in the corners of her eyes. She wanted desperately to go back to her car. Her next step was slower, she stopped and she could hear herself breathing.
The crow called, a breeze rattled the bare branches above her and then the scream split the night. A cry so horrible and hopeless, peaking, falling, ending in a plea for death in a voice so wracked it could have been anyone. “Uccidimi!” And the scream again.
The first one froze Starling, the second one had her moving at a trot, wading fast through the dark, the .45 still holstered, one hand holding the darkened flashlight, the other extended into the night before her. No, you don’t, Mason. No, you don’t. Hurry. Hurry. She found she could stay in the packed track by listening to her footfalls, and feeling the loose gravel on either side. The road turned and ran along a fence. Good fence, pipe fence, six feet high.
Came sobs of apprehension and pleas, the scream building, and ahead of Starling, beyond the fence, she heard movement through brush, the movement breaking into a trot, lighter than the hoofbeats of a horse, quicker in rhythm. She heard grunting she recognized.
Closer the agonized sounds, clearly human, but distorted, with a single squeal over the cries for a second, and Starling knew she was hearing either a recording or a voice amplified with feedback in the microphone. Light through the trees and the barn looming. Starling pressed her head on the cold iron to look through the fence. Dark shapes rushing, long and hip-high. Across forty yards of clear ground the open end of a barn with the great doors open wide, a barrier across the end of the barn with a Dutch gate in it, and an ornate mirror suspended above the gate, the mirror reflecting the light of the barn in a bright patch on the ground. Standing in the clear pasture outside the barn, a stocky man in a hat with a boom box radio/tape player. He covered one ear with his hand as a series of howls and sobs came from the machine.
Out of the brush now they came, the wild swine with their savage faces, wolflike in their speed, long-legged and deep-chested, shaggy, spiky gray bristles.
Carlo dashed back through the Dutch gate and closed it when they were still thirty yards from him. They stopped in a semicircle waiting, their great curved tusks holding their lips in a permanent snarl. Like linemen anticipating the snap of the ball, they surged forward, stopped, jostled, grunting, clicking their teeth.
Starling had seen livestock in her time, but nothing like these hogs. There was a terrible beauty in them, grace and speed. They watched the doorway, jostling and rushing forward, then backing, always facing the barrier across the open end of the barn.
Carlo said something over his shoulder and disappeared back into the barn.
The van backed into view inside the barn. Starling recognized the gray vehicle at once. It stopped at an angle near the barrier. Cordell got out and opened the sliding side door. Before he turned off the dome light, Starling could see Mason inside in his hard-shell respirator, propped on pillows, his hair coiled on his chest. A ringside seat. Floodlights came on over the doorway.
From the ground beside him, Carlo picked up an object Starling did not recognize at first. It looked like someone’s legs, or the lower half of a body. If it was half a body, Carlo was very strong. For a second Starling feared it was the remains of Dr. Lecter, but the legs bent wrong, bent in ways the joints would not permit.
They could only be Lecter’s legs if he had been wheeled and braided, she thought for a bad moment. Carlo called into the barn behind him. Starling heard a motor start.
The forklift came into Starling’s view, Piero driving, Dr. Lecter raised high with the fork, his arms spread on the singletree and the IV bottles swaying above his hands with the movement of the vehicle. Held high so that he could see the ravening swine, could see what was coming.
The forklift came at an awful processional speed, Carlo walking beside it and on the other side Johnny Mogli, armed.
Starling fixed on Mogli’s deputy badge for an instant. A star, not like the locals’ badges. White hair, white shirt, like the driver of the kidnap van.
From the van came Mason’s deep voice. He hummed “Pomp and Circumstance” and giggled.
The pigs, raised with noise, were not afraid of the machine, they seemed to welcome it.
The forklift stopped near the barrier. Mason said something to Dr. Lecter that Starling could not hear. Dr. Lecter did not move his head or give any sign that he had heard. He was higher even than Piero at the co
ntrols. Did he look in Starling’s direction? She never knew because she was moving fast along the fence line, along the side of the barn, finding the double doors where the van had backed in.
Carlo sailed the stuffed trousers into the pigpen. The hogs leaped forward as one, room for two on each leg, shouldering the others aside. Tearing, snarling, pulling and ripping, dead chickens in the trouser legs coming to pieces, pigs shaking their heads from side to side with chicken guts flailing. A field of tossing bristled backs.
Carlo had only provided the lightest of appetizers, just three chickens and a little salad. In moments the trousers were rags and the slavering pigs turned their avid little eyes back to the barrier.
Piero lowered the fork to just the height above ground level. The upper part of the Dutch gate would keep the pigs away from Dr. Lecter’s vitals for the time being. Carlo removed the doctor’s shoes and socks.
“This little piggy went EEE EEE EEE all the way home,” Mason called from the van.
Starling was coming up behind them. All were facing the other way, facing the pigs. She passed the tack room door, moved out into the center of the barn.
“Now, don’t let him bleed out,” Cordell said from the van. “Be ready when I tell you to tighten the tourniquets.” He was clearing Mason’s goggle with a cloth.