The Bear

by Dustin Stevens

  As captain of the 8th Precinct, Grimes was Reed’s immediate supervisor. A man that had previously been a sergeant in the neighboring 19th Precinct, one of his first moves after ascending to the captain’s chair was to request Reed switch precincts as well, even suggesting Reed consider becoming a K-9 detective.

  Still reeling from the death of his previous partner and unsure if he even wanted to stay on the force, Reed had accepted the suggestion with great reluctance. At the time, he’d thought the move to be a bit of a demotion, both in station and stature.

  Only in the subsequent year-plus had he come to learn just how prescient Grimes had been.

  “What’s going on?” Reed asked, pushing past the captain’s apology. As he did so, his mind worked to shove aside the fog of slumber as his synapses began to fire anew. Seizing immediately on the very topic he’d been reaching out about for the past weeks, he added, “Has there been a change in status? Are we cleared to return?”

  Out of pure habit, Reed glanced to the nightstand. Expecting to see the glowing red digits of his alarm clock, he saw only bare wood. For an instant, confusion set in, his brows coming together, before his mind was able to push past the immediacy of the unexpected wakeup call.

  His clock wasn’t there because he wasn’t in his own home. He was actually a long way from it. The space he was now staying in was little more than a bed and some basic furnishings. The rest of it, like most everything else in the home, was still packed in boxes.

  Tasks on his to-do list for that afternoon, or perhaps the next day.

  Depending on whatever Grimes was about to say.

  Pulling the phone away from his face, Reed checked the clock in the corner. At just a few minutes after six, it seemed unlikely anything had changed, even with the time difference.

  But there was still a chance.

  “No,” Grimes replied, a hint of a sigh underlying the word, an unspoken message that he was fast growing weary of the subject that now consumed their every interaction. “I’m actually calling you about what happened last night.”

  His mouth opening to respond, Reed pulled up. A crease appeared between his brows as he thought on what the captain had said, no sound escaping his lips.

  As he did so, Billie raised herself from her spot on the floor beside his bed. The combination of hearing his voice and picking up on his shift in demeanor, she raised herself to her front paws, her eyes shining in the half-light.

  Aside from the greenish tint of them, she was nothing more than an outline, her midnight-black hue reducing her to a shadow.

  “I’ve been on the move since I left Columbus yesterday,” Reed said, knowing Grimes was fully aware of his impending travel plans. “I haven’t seen a paper or even turned on a TV. What happened last night?”

  In his mind, no less than a hundred different scenarios sprang to mind, each successively worse than the one before.

  All calling for him to hop a plane and return as soon as possible.

  “That’s what I’m hoping you can tell me,” Grimes said. “I got a call from some chief of police in a Podunk town I’ve never heard of this morning wanting to know what the deal was on one of my detectives.”

  The look of confusion on Reed’s face grew more pronounced as he tried to process what he’d just been told. Propping an elbow beneath him, he pushed himself to a seated position, allowing the covers to bunch around his waist.

  As he did so, Billie nudged forward, resting her chin across his thigh.

  “Chief of police?” Reed said. “Why the hell was he calling you? And why would he be checking me out?”

  “That’s why I’m calling you,” Grimes replied. “I tried asking him a dozen times, but the bastard just kept talking right over me. Barely got a word in.”

  “And what was he saying?” Reed asked.

  For the second time in their brief conversation, Grimes let out a sigh. A bit more pronounced than the first, frustration was apparent. “Some nonsense about not needing a vigilante showing up in his town,” Grimes said. “Kept talking about how Warner had been under the protection of Carver Ecklund for thirty years and had never had an incident, and he didn’t need some outsider showing up and causing trouble now.”

  Reed couldn’t rightly argue with the part about being an outsider, though he couldn’t pretend to understand how anybody could call what he had done causing trouble.

  “Carver Ecklund?” Reed asked. “That was the guy’s name?”

  “Yeah,” Grimes said. “And let me tell you, he loved referring to himself in the third person, too. Must have said it five or six times.

  “Basically, a lot of grandstanding and preening. Whole thing sounded like a damn campaign speech.”

  Reed could feel folds of skin form around his eyes as he lowered the phone for a moment. He glanced to the window, the blinds not yet in place, affording him a clear view across the back pasture.

  Under the faint glow of morning, dew was already starting to glisten. A trio of blackbirds rested on the power line running across the back of the property.

  Otherwise, the world was silent and unmoving, having not yet awoken for the day.

  A state Reed could only wish to still be in himself.

  Pushing the phone back into position, Reed began at the top. Just as he had with Todd Wyatt the night before, he ran through the incident from start to finish. When he was done with that, he outlined his brief discussion with the officer and mentioned that he found their interaction as terse as one might expect, though nowhere near confrontational.

  Definitely nothing that would call for what Grimes was describing.

  When he was done, Grimes took a full minute to process their conversation, just as he always did. As he waited, Reed could almost imagine the man locked into his standard pose, reclined in his desk chair, fingers laced over his stomach.

  Slowly, he would tap the pads of his thumbs together, waiting until he had everything arranged in his head before speaking.

  “So, you never met the man?” Grimes opened, choosing to start there instead of with the incident.

  “Had never heard the name or knew he existed before you said it a minute ago,” Reed confessed.

  “What about the officer? What did you say his name was? Wyatt?”

  “Yeah,” Reed confirmed. Lifting a hand which he then dropped across Billie’s ears, kneading the thick fur between them. “Seemed like an okay guy. Late thirties, probably ex-military.”

  “He seem to have any problem with you being there?” Grimes asked.

  Taking a moment, Reed ran back through his entire interaction with the man, most of it consisting of the initial interview. From there, they had walked back to the Sinclair Station together so Wyatt could talk to the clerk and Reed could be on his way.

  “Not at all,” Reed said. “Took my contact info, told me I’d need to come by the station today and fill out an official statement.”

  Snorting softly, Grimes offered, “And next thing anybody knows, I’m getting a call at the crack ass of dawn from some guy in Oklahoma.”

  Dropping two obscenities in the same conversation was fast approaching the high end of the spectrum for Grimes. A man that prided himself on being in control - even in the hairiest of investigations - the only thing that tended to earn his ire to that degree was condescension.

  Reed knew because it was one of several traits they had in common.

  “I apologize for that, Captain,” Reed said, a tiny bit of anger setting in. “I know you don’t need that on your plate right now.”

  “Didn’t call for an apology,” Grimes said. “I’m calling to let you know that you might have stumbled backward into something a lot bigger than it seems.”

  Six hours earlier, Reed had thought the odds of showing up seconds before an abduction was almost too much to be considered a coincidence. Adding this to it only pushed that supposition into the stratosphere.

  “Yeah, I seem to be doing that a lot lately, huh?” Reed muttered.

 
Not expecting an answer, he wasn’t the least bit surprised when Grimes chose to ignore it, remaining silent.

  “What did you tell him?” Reed asked.

  “The truth. Most of it, anyway,” Grimes replied. “Told him you and Billie were two of the finest in the entire CPD, with a case solve rate that was second-to-none. I didn’t mention that he’d know that if he’d bothered spending five minutes on Google.”

  Feeling a bit of warmth flush his cheeks, Reed glanced down to his partner. Dropping his hand flat, he ran his palm along her neck, watching as her gaze raised to meet his.

  “And about the other?” Reed asked, leaving it deliberately vague.

  “I didn’t tell him,” Grimes replied, “but let’s hope he didn’t spend any time Googling that, either.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Serena Gipson felt like she had been inside the spin cycle of an industrial washing machine for the last ten hours. Cracking open her eyes, it seemed as though bits of gravel were wedged beneath her eyelids, scraping their way upward. Her tongue felt at least two sizes too large for her mouth as it rubbed against the backs of her teeth.

  And it seemed that someone had driven an icepick into her temple, leaving it there for good measure.

  Raising a hand to her head, Serena rolled over onto a shoulder.

  “What the hell happened?” she whispered, her voice thick, just barely audible in her own ears.

  The last thing she could recall with any certainty from the night before was locking up the diner. After Curt had left, she’d finished mopping the floor, fast approaching a contact high from the cheap chemicals she was forced to use.

  From there, it had been one last pass over the damned checklist they were forced to complete before closing the back door and stepping outside.

  Her eyes still nothing more than slits, Serena’s mind continued to work through the previous evening. She recalled exiting into the night air, the warming temperatures a nice reprieve after months of chill. She remembered putting in her headphones and opting for her workout mix, hoping some Ariana Grande and Taylor Swift might be enough to get her adrenaline pumping and help her through a long night of studying.

  After that, things seemed to be reduced to nothing more than snippets. Brief flashes interspersed with harsh cuts, sections of black separating one memory from the next, like seeing the world through a strobe light.

  Cutting across the street.

  Break.

  Going down the alley.

  Break.

  Seeing a sweep of headlights and a van pull up beside her.

  Break.

  The last image she had was of the enormous fist coming straight for her, the scream she had unleashed just barely past her lips before the blow connected, the mental slideshow ending with a bright flash of light.

  And then, nothing.

  Serena gently probed her face with her fingertips. Starting at her jaw line, she could feel the soft puffiness of swelling already setting in. Working a little higher, she drew in a sharp breath of air, wincing at the pain.

  Beneath the pads of her fingers, she could feel the warmth of blood collected in the area. Her touch became softer as she kept moving upward, eventually finding the epicenter, the spot where contact had been made.

  Less than an inch from the corner of her left eye protruded not the handle of an icepick, but a knot the size of a robin’s egg. In the center of it was a small scab where the skin had broken, the rest sloping downward, the entire area feeling like it might force her eye through its socket at any moment.

  Lord only knew what it must look like.

  Cracking her eyes open a bit wider, Serena winced as the light of the room worked its way in like a spotlight aimed directly into her skull. She felt moisture collect in the corners of her eyes, tears leaking across the bridge of her nose and along her cheek, disappearing into the pillow beneath her.

  Sucking in a long breath, she blinked a dozen times in rapid succession, willing herself to keep her eyes open, to get past the initial shock. More tears persisted, blurring her vision for a moment, before the initial sensory onslaught finally passed.

  Bringing with it a brutal realization.

  Not one thing around her looked familiar.

  The first thing to register was the wallpaper directly across from her. Solid yellow with pinstripes of a lighter shade spaced a foot or so apart covering the walls in both directions. It was different from any pattern Serena could ever remember seeing, knowing in an instant that it wasn’t from her own home. Certainly not her room, as those walls were currently covered in notes and diagrams from her anatomy studies.

  The second thing to come to her was the bedding wrapped around her and the sheets she was laying on. Shifting her gaze to each in order, she took in the fabric and the floral motifs, knowing in an instant there was no way her family or friends would have ever chosen such a gaudy design

  And, much like the wallpaper, they wouldn’t possibly be used by a hospital of any kind.

  Feeling a bit of panic rise within her, Serena’s breathing increased. Beads of sweat appeared along her brow, the uptick in blood flow causing the wound on her face to throb.

  Trying to remain calm, to force herself not to descend into hysteria, Serena felt her lungs constrict. She pulled in as much air as she could, listening hard. Her fingers grabbed at the blankets enveloping her as she did so, squeezing them tight, all focus on the world around her, hoping for some telltale sign as to where she might be.

  The background noise of a television. The sound of voices in the hall. A breathing tube or heart rate monitor.

  Anything.

  For more than a minute, Serena waited, hoping in vain for a sign that wasn’t there.

  More sweat came to the surface as she lifted herself to an elbow. Her head spun slightly from the upright position, her vision again blurring for a moment before the excess moisture dripped away.

  Casting her gaze in either direction, she took in her surroundings.

  The space she was in was a single room, no more than fifteen feet square. Void of any windows, all four walls were covered in the yellow wallpaper, not a single thing hanging on any of them.

  The ceiling above was painted white. Extending down from it was a quartet of single-bulb light fixtures housed in red wire cages, all burning bright. The floor was comprised of bare wood, deep gouges and rub marks having stripped away much of the original varnish.

  The bulk of the space in the room was dominated by the bed she now lay on, a metal frame rising in a half-arc from the foot of it. To either side was a pair of small end tables, each completely barren.

  In the corner stood a standard wooden dresser with five drawers, the top row split into two with three full-size options beneath it. Along the top was a set of books standing on edge, all of a uniform size and color.

  Serena took it all in with a single pass over the space, inventorying and dismissing it out of turn, her focus instead going straight to the far corner. There stood the lone entry into the room, a solid metal door painted slate gray. At eye height was a single horizontal slit pushed shut, it being the only mar on the otherwise solid surface.

  “No handle or doorknob,” Serena whispered, her chest tightening slightly. Palpitations rose through her core as she remained propped on one elbow, casting a second glance around the room.

  Seeing nothing but the same basic furnishings as her first pass, she peeled back the covers, intent on making a closer inspection.

  And made it no further, the underside of the blankets revealing something she never would have imagined possible.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The conversation with Captain Grimes was still at the forefront of Reed’s thoughts as he stood at the kitchen sink. Twenty minutes of the hottest water he could stand beating down on him in the shower had managed to wash away the dust and sweat from being in the alley the night before, though it did little to lighten his mood.

  Glass of sweet tea in hand, he stood and stared out
through the window above the sink, his mind in a thousand different places.

  The incident he’d somehow stumbled upon the night before was bad enough. The entire point in coming out was to help his folks with their move and to get away from the constant reminders of the situation that he was currently embroiled in at work back home.

  Thus far, things were already proving to have exactly the opposite effect. What little sleep he did get the night before was riddled with images of sprinting down the alleyway, screaming out for the kidnapper to stop, arriving just in time to see them pull away.

  Adding to that the potential of being dropped into a local political pissing match had him already questioning the wisdom in making the trip.

  Or if it would have even mattered. Such things seemed to follow him with alarming regularity these days.

  “You’re up early,” his father said, stepping into the kitchen behind him.

  Swirling the last inch of sweet tea in his glass, Reed looked back over his shoulder. Already dressed in work jeans and a faded Sooners T-shirt, his dad looked all set to begin taming the beast that was the front yard.

  “Morning, Pop.”

  Grunting softly in response, Rhett went to the coffee pot on the counter between them. Tugging out the top drawer, he checked to ensure that Reed’s mother had already loaded it the previous evening before shoving it shut and pressing the button, calling it to life.

  A moment later, the sound of water being drawn through the percolator could be heard, followed in turn by the smell of fresh dark roast.

  An aroma that did little for the twist in Reed’s stomach, the total number of times he had ever willingly consumed coffee in his life able to be counted on one hand.

  “Damn decaf isn’t anything but brown water,” Rhett muttered, “but we drink it anyway.” Moving in the slow, stilted steps that always punctuated the early morning, he took a place beside Reed. Staring out through the window, they watched as the sun rose to a half-disc above the horizon, shining in a tangerine hue. Catching every stray droplet of water covering the ground, it seemed to set the world ablaze, hinting at the day to come.