The Nightmare Man


 Contents
 
 Title Page
 Dedication
 Epigraph
 Chapter 1
 Chapter 2
 Chapter 3
 Chapter 4
 Chapter 5
 Chapter 6
 Chapter 7
 Chapter 8
 Chapter 9
 Chapter 10
 Chapter 11
 Chapter 12
 Chapter 13
 Chapter 14
 Chapter 15
 Chapter 16
 Chapter 17
 Chapter 18
 Chapter 19
 Chapter 20
 Chapter 21
 Chapter 22
 Chapter 23
 Chapter 24
 Chapter 25
 Chapter 26
 Chapter 27
 Chapter 28
 Chapter 29
 Chapter 30
 Chapter 31
 Chapter 32
 Chapter 33
 Chapter 34
 Chapter 35
 Chapter 36
 Chapter 37
 Chapter 38
 Chapter 39
 Chapter 40
 Chapter 41
 Chapter 42
 Chapter 43
 Chapter 44
 Chapter 45
 Chapter 46
 Chapter 47
 Chapter 48
 Chapter 49
 Chapter 50
 Acknowledgments
 Also available by J. H. Markert, as James Markert
 Author Biography
 Copyright
 
 
 
 Guide
 
 Cover
 Start of Content
 Title Page
 Dedication
 Chapter 1
 Acknowledgments
 Copyright
 
 
 
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 THE NIGHTMARE MAN
 A NOVEL
 J. H. MARKERT
 
 
 
 For
 The Fist,
 All five fingers,
 It’s been a fun ride, so let’s keep it going.
 To Tracy,
 My wife
 You might not want to read this one.
 Charlie Shircliff,
 You always said I should write something scary.
 Well, I hope this gives you nightmares.
 
 
 Here I am lying down to sleep;
 No nightmare shall plague me until they have swum through all the waters that flow upon the earth, and counted all stars that appear in the skies.
 Thus help me God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
 Amen
 —A prayer from Westphalia, Germany, used to ward off mares
 “I am the corn. I am the fall. I am the harvest, little girl.
 And you are my Little Baby Jane.”
 —From The Scarecrow
 “We collect books in the belief that we are preserving them
 when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector.”
 —Philosopher Walter Benjamin
 
 
 Novels by Benjamin Bookman
 (Detective Mulky Series)
 Summer Reign
 Some Fall Down
 Winter Bones
 Spring Showers, Dead Flowers
 The Pulse
 The Scarecrow
 
 
 
 CHAPTER
 
 1
 DETECTIVE WINCHESTER MILLS smelled the Petersons’ barn before he saw it.
 The mailman had warned him on the phone. The stench is bad, Winny. Bad enough for Ernie Palponie—who’d seen, smelled, and heard it all during his thirty-three years of delivering Crooked Tree’s mail—to stop at the edge of the Petersons’ cornfield and lose his lunch. The mailbox is overflowing, Ernie had told Mills on the phone. It isn’t like them to leave town and not stop their mail. And both their trucks are in the driveway.
 Detective Mills had asked Ernie to slow down and take a couple of deep ones. Then requested he go knock on their doors, and to stay on the line. After a few minutes of listening to Ernie’s heavy breathing as he reconnoitered the Petersons’ house, the mailman reported back that he’d knocked—Good and hard too, Winny—but to no avail.
 Mills told Ernie to continue on his mail route, and not to mention this to anyone. He’d take care of it. But Ernie was still there when Mills arrived, sitting on a back porch rocking chair, smoking a cigar he usually saved for the end of the day, staring out at the cornfield with an undelivered bag of mail on the boards between his old, dusty boots.
 When Mills approached the house, Ernie exhaled cigar smoke, nodded toward the cornstalks. “They should have harvested that field by now. Something’s not right.”
 “Sit there as long as you need, Ernie.” Mills glimpsed the barn’s slated roof down the hillside. It was only noon but he needed a nap. His hips hurt, which meant rain was coming. Breeze ushered in the smell of ozone and fall leaves, the hint of something foul.
 The stench of crime.
 A nuance Mills once admitted to Father Frank in confession he not only recognized, but secretly coveted.
 A conundrum of sorts, Father. You can’t have the catch without the crime, right?
 Is this why you won’t