of him, and his grip on me eased enough that I was able to break free of his hold.
The strobe was still going, and there was still a bright blob in my vision as I jumped away from him. I attempted to draw my pistol left-handed, but I tripped and landed on a paint can, breaking one of my ribs.
I heard Oates shouting at me over the roar of the wind outside, and I knew he was coming. I started scrambling away on all fours, thinking, Get some space. Get the gun. Shoot him.
Then I felt something slam into my calf and cut right through the meat of it.
The gaping wound was agony. I grabbed at it as I rolled over. I could see him standing above me in the pulsing light of the strobe, which revealed the bloody meat cleaver he held.
Oates was grunting and wheezing so hard it sounded like a pig with asthma. He seemed ecstatic as he raised the cleaver high over his head and started to swing it down at the center of mine.
A shot went off.
Oates jerked, screamed, and let go of the cleaver in midswing.
I heard it slam into something six inches behind my skull.
Another shot rang out.
The Meat Man jerked, stumbled, crashed against the freezer that held the severed heads of his victims, and then sprawled lifeless in the trash.
Peaks ran to me, grabbed my hand, and pressed it hard against my gaping calf wound, which was spurting blood. Then he tore off his starched white shirt, ripped it in two, and wrapped one piece tight around my calf and the other around my wrist. When he was done, he said, “Let’s get you help.”
“What about him?”
The wind outside had gone beyond the roar of crashing surf. It sounded like a freight train blazing at us down a tunnel.
“Jesus,” Peaks said.
“What the hell is that?”
“Twister! It’s coming right at us!”
CHAPTER 48
THREE DAYS AFTER THE RUN-IN with Dwight Rivers, as I entered George Washington University Hospital, I thought about the Meat Man and the tornado. Even all these years later, I was still awestruck at the way it had passed within two hundred yards of me and Randall Peaks, tearing apart outbuildings but leaving the slaughterhouse untouched.
I spotted John Sampson coming down the hall toward me and waited for him.
“Mahoney tell you anything?” I said.
“Just to be here. Sixth floor.”
Since the night we found the head in Rivers’s bunker, we’d been kept completely in the dark about the case. All we knew was what we heard from the media reports, which were sketchy because Mahoney’s team was keeping a tight lid on the details.
The night before, I’d been watching a piece on the local news that featured the Shenandoah County sheriff and a Virginia State Police captain, both of whom were angry about being excluded from the Rivers investigation, when I got a text from Ned telling me to be at the hospital at nine the next morning.
Mahoney was waiting outside a hospital room for us. “His attorney’s in there.”
“Seeing things clearer?”
“Clear enough that you’re here, but do me a favor?”
“Anything.”
“Next time you get a self-destructing message from M, simultaneously squeeze the sleep button and the home button on your phone. It will take a screenshot and put it in your photos folder.”
“Really?”
“That’s what Rawlins says to do.”
Before I could tell Mahoney that I was grateful for his show of confidence, Sheila Cowles, Dwight Rivers’s attorney, came out of his room. A tall, skinny woman in her forties, Cowles adjusted her blazer and said, “I advised him not to speak to you until he’s feeling better. But he wants to talk to you so he can give you his version of events sooner rather than later.”
“What we wanted to hear,” Mahoney said, and the three of us followed her inside.
Rivers was in a hospital bed with the back raised slightly. Monitors chirped around him. An IV ran into his left arm. His right ankle and lower leg had been broken badly in the crash and that leg was in a cast. His face was swollen, but not enough to obscure the deep blue, intelligent eyes that scanned us as we entered.
Mahoney and Sampson held up their badges. Ned identified me as an FBI consultant.
Rivers studied me, then said, “You the one who saved my life?”
He’d bitten his tongue in the crash, so it was a little hard to understand him, but I nodded.
“Thank you,” he said.
“You’re welcome.”
Mahoney turned on the video app on