Scare Tactics by John Farris

shaking, a powerful internal vibration, as if Stone had jarred to life some potent but seldom-used machinery. Hero slumped in the chair with a little blood leaking from his nose. It looked to Stone like he was in a fit, all the more reason to sedate him pronto. Stone wiped the dribble of blood away with his pocket handkerchief, then stepped back in shock and consternation. Hero had spoken, in a language the Sheriff had never heard before, and he’d been with the Air Police in six different countries when he was a younger man.
    “Gargle as much of that shit as you please,” Stone muttered. “But you’re headed for the dumpster.”
    He sat down behind his desk again to wait, thumbing through a pocket New Testament. When Hero ceased his incantation in the strange tongue and his head sagged, Stone reached for the intercom button on the telephone console. Maybe, he thought, they should just get out a straitjacket and run the prisoner on over to the County Medical Center tonight. But the hospital had no facilities for the potentially dangerous, and Stone didn’t care to risk losing his prime suspect. Also they wouldn’t have a specialist around this time of night who could diagnose and prescribe for Hero’s ailment. He looked harmless enough for now, slumped in the chair, his expression dazed. No trouble he could get into in a holding cell.
    Boodleaux came in with the two jail deputies.
    “Had him a temporary breakdown, nothing serious. Take him on downstairs.”
    “Did he have anything else to say?” Boodleaux asked. “Yeah. He confessed to me that Mork from Ork told him the Queen of England killed Taryn with a Boy Scout hatchet.”
    Except for Sheriff John Stone, they roared with laughter. Hero raised his head slightly but it lolled like an infant’s as he was lifted out of the chair and led, shuffling, from the Sheriff’s office.
    “Good night, Mr. Flynn,” Stone said. “Pleasant dreams, you hear?”

•    8    •
    The Bus to Georgia Avenue
    O ne of the drunks in the cellblock was awake and throwing up violently in the toilet when the jailers put the nearly insensible Hero back in his cell. In a sitting position he teetered on the edge of the lower bunk. One of the jailers said, “Looks like he’s fixing to fall.”
    The other said, “Let him fall and crack his skull for all I care.” Then he yelled at the drunk with the heaves, “Jesus Christ, Bucky, try to get some of that in the hole, will you?”
    The steel door slammed and Hero continued to waver unsteadily before folding up on his side on the thin mattress. His eyes fluttered open, closed, opened again with a look of dismay.
    They were going to medicate him, and soon.
    He must do something before he was chemically lobotomized, or he would surely be confined to an earthly prison for the rest of his life; and the karmic sentence he was already serving would be extended, through how many more, futile lifetimes?
    As a slavemaster in Babylonia during the reign of the Kassite king Olur-Eshnu, Hero had garroted hundreds of slaves. He repeatedly cut off the flow of blood to the brain for short periods of time until, no matter how physically strong the slave was, he became, like so many latter-day punch-drunk boxers, docile and zombielike, no more than a dray animal incapable of coherent speech or intelligent thought, easily handled without chains, needing just the touch of a lash from time to time.
    Perhaps one of the slaves on whom he had perfected this submission technique—a slave so thoroughly forgotten that Hero could not hope, even with the aid of hypnosis, to recall a face or name—was here, now, reincarnated in the person of Sheriff John Stone—
    But it was unproductive to dwell on the possibility, although Hero well knew there were no coincidences in life—or death. He was not concerned with the karmic debt the Sheriff had incurred by murdering his niece. An ordeal had been arranged for Hero, perhaps long before his most recent birth. He