Pines(59)

The people below looked nothing like the residents he’d encountered prior to this moment.
Most had outfitted themselves in extravagant costumes.
Fake, gaudy jewelry dripped from the wrists and necks of women. Beaded necklaces and pearls and tiaras. Their faces were a-sparkle with glitter and heavily made-up, eyes popping with eyeliner, and all scantily clad despite the cold and the rain, like a throng of reveling prostitutes.
The men looked equally absurd.
One wore a sports coat and no pants.
Another, dark slacks and red suspenders and no shirt with a Santa Claus hat perched atop his head. He pointed a baseball bat to the sky, the weapon stark white and covered with grotesque drawings of monsters that Ethan could barely see from his vantage point.
Standing on a brick planter, head and shoulders above the crowd, an immense figure caught his notice. The monstrous man was dressed in the fur of a brown bear—still pinned with his brass star—and he wore some sort of metal headpiece mounted with antlers, his face streaked with lurid war paint, a shotgun slung over one shoulder, a sheathed sword hanging off the other.
Pope.
The man surveyed the crowd like it was something he owned, the liquid pools of his eyes reflecting the bonfire like a pair of stars.
All he had to do was look up across the street, and in the wealth of firelight, he couldn’t fail to miss Ethan peeking down from the third-floor apartment.
He knew he should leave, but Ethan couldn’t turn away.
A segment of the crowd beyond Ethan’s line of sight erupted in shouts that caught Pope’s attention, a big smile expanding across the lawman’s face.
From an inner pocket in his bearskin coat, Pope took a clear, unlabeled bottle containing some brown liquid, raised it toward the sky, and said something that ignited the crowd into a frenzy of fist-pumping cheers.
While Pope took a long pull from his bottle, the crowd began to part, a corridor forming down the middle of Main Street, everyone straining to see.
Three figures appeared, moving through the crowd toward the bonfire.
The outer two—men dressed in dark clothes with machetes dangling from shoulder straps—held the person in the middle by her arms.
Beverly.
Ethan felt something dislodge inside him, a molten core of rage metastasizing in the pit of his stomach.
He could see that she didn’t have the strength to stand, her feet sliding across the pavement as her captors dragged her along. One of her eyes was closed from what must have been a savage blow, and what he could see of her face was covered in blood.
But she was conscious.
Conscious and terrified, her gaze fixed on the wet pavement under her feet like she was attempting to shut out everything else.
The two men toted her to within ten yards of the bonfire and then pushed her forward, releasing her.
Pope shouted something as Beverly crumpled to the ground.
The people in her immediate vicinity pressed back, forming a circle of open space around her, twenty feet in diameter.
Through the window, Ethan heard Beverly crying.
She sounded like a wounded animal—something so desperate in her high-pitched keening.
Everywhere, people were elbowing their way through the crowd, trying to reach the outskirts of the circle, the cluster of bodies forming the perimeter becoming tighter and tighter.
Pope tucked the bottle back into his coat and took hold of his shotgun.
He pumped it, aimed it at the sky.
The report echoed between the buildings, rattling the glass in the window frame.
The crowd fell silent.
No one moved.
Ethan could hear the rainfall again.
Beverly struggled to her feet and wiped away a line of blood running down the middle of her face. Even from this third-floor window, Ethan couldn’t miss the quaking that had enveloped her, the all-encompassing fear that consumes a person who knows exactly what horrible thing they’re about to experience.
Beverly stood teetering in the rain, favoring her left foot.
She turned slowly, hobbling, taking in the surrounding faces, and though Ethan couldn’t hear her words, the tone of her voice was unmissable.
Imploring.
Desperation.
Rain and tears and blood streaming down her face.
A full minute elapsed.
Someone shouldered his way through the mass of people and broke out into the circle.
Cheers erupted.
Wild applause.
It was the shirtless man with red suspenders and a Santa hat.
At first, he lingered on the edge as if steeling himself—a boxer in his corner, moments before the bell.
Someone handed him a bottle.
He tilted it back, took a long, reckless swig.
Then he gripped his painted bat and stumbled out into the circle.
Toward Beverly.
He circled her.
She backed away, veering close to the edge of the crowd.
Someone gave her a hard shove out into the middle of the circle, the momentum propelling her straight at the man with the bat.
Ethan didn’t see it coming.