Spy by Ted Bell Page A

Homer looked and a wide grin broke out on his face.
    “The posse! Sheriff, if it ain’t about time!”
    “They look funny to you, Homer?”
    “What do you mean, Sheriff?”
    “I don’t rightly know. They’re riding all bunched up.”
    “I see that. Something else is wrong.”
    “Something sure is strange, isn’t it? No, I got it. They ain’t got their hats on, Sheriff.”
    “I reckon that’s it, all right. No hats. I knew something was wrong.”
    The posse had galloped to within a thousand yards.
    “Sheriff, you know—something really ain’t right here. I’m gonna tell you that right now. It just ain’t natural the way they’re riding those horses—”
    Homer raced down the hill, fast as he could, and his words were lost in the wind along with his hat. He was running hard on an angle that might bring him a little closer to the oncoming posse. Suddenly, the horses veered left, once again, now directly toward the sheriff up on the hill. Twelve horses galloped right by Homer flying flat out. The deputy turned his head, mouth wide open, watching ’em pass him by.
    Franklin’s brain processed it before his eyes did. Why it was that his posse looked so strange in the moonlight. He stared after them until he couldn’t stand to look at them anymore. He turned away and gazed up at the moon, thinking about what he’d done, sending those boys down there like that.
    The boys on those horses were all dead.
    Ever last one of them he’d sworn in, all riding straight up in the saddle, deader than doornails.
    How’d they stay up in the saddles? Their hands must have been tied to the pommels. Their boots lashed together tight under the girths to keep them all sitting bolt upright like that.
    Homer was right. Not one of them was wearing his hat.
    Because not one of them were wearing his head.
    Homer was coming slowly back up the hill, his eyes on the ground in front of him. When he got to the top he stopped and looked up at Franklin. Tears he couldn’t hold back were streaming down his cheeks. Couldn’t blame him. Homer had gone to Prairie High with half the kids in that posse. Played football with most of them. Hell, he knew these boys and—
    “Sweet Jesus, Sheriff.”
    “Let’s go call this in, son. You come with me. We’ll do what we can for them. I don’t want anybody else to see ’em like this.”
    “This is real bad, Sheriff.”
    “Yes it is.”
    But they couldn’t leave. They stood and watched the headless horse-men disappear. Twelve horses thundered across the highway, the gruesomely dead boys suddenly flashing bright in the brassy yellow beams of the semi.
    They started down the hill toward their cruiser.
    Both looked up, startled. The big Peterbilt roared again and then the whole rig lurched forward and just took off down the highway. Franklin figured it was doing about a hundred thirty miles an hour when it disappeared down over the ridge.
    The sheriff didn’t see anybody behind the wheel when it went roaring by, upshifting gears, loud and fast. Like Homer had sworn, there was nobody driving the truck.

11
    D RY T ORTUGAS
    T he seaplane flared up and splashed down on the clear blue water, her silvery pontoons throwing out foaming white water on either side. She was an ungainly thing, a Grumman G-21 Goose, painted an unusual shade of light blue, not quite turquoise and not quite any other shade Stoke had ever seen.
    Mick Hocking called her the Blue Goose.
    On the Goose ’s final approach, Stoke had been able to get a closer look at Fort Jefferson. The place hadn’t changed much in forty years. A huge octagonal fortress built out of brick and taking up most of a tiny little island out in the middle of nowhere.
    The U.S. Army had built it to guard the southern approach to the Gulf of Mexico. The year it was built, it was declared obsolete. Somebody’d invented an artillery round that could go through six feet of solid brick. The Army had abandoned the place and later turned it into a prison. Dr.