Sudden Death
by
Donald Hanley
Copyright © Donald Hanley 2019
All rights reserved
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events or locations is entirely coincidental.
Cover art by Donald Hanley
The Random Encounters Series
Personal Demons
Soul Mates
Necessary Evil
Sudden Death
Other Books by Donald Hanley
The Simulated Crime Series
Simulated Murder
Simulated Assault
Simulated Conspiracy
Simulated Assassination
Simulated Blackmail
Simulated Abduction
Simulated Sabotage
The Order of the Shamrock Series
Lucky
Faithful
Hopeful
Beloved
The Knights of Excalibur Series
Gawain
1
Despite Metraxion’s dire warning, not one demon has shown up on my doorstep to kill me and claim my Philosopher’s Stone. Either they’re all biding their time, waiting for me to let my guard down, or Metraxion was just messing with me. Since demon lords aren’t known for their sense of humor, I have to believe it’s just a matter of time before we’re fighting for our lives once again.
Meanwhile, life is astonishingly good. Melissa and I are still together, Daraxandriel and Olivia are still together, Mrs. Kendricks and Agent Prescott are still together, even Susie and Cameron are still together. The only blight on my existence is Amy, the Spawn of Darkness. She’s acting like a spoiled teenager who’s been grounded indefinitely but refuses to believe she did anything wrong, as if trying to coerce Melissa into slaughtering all of us was just an innocent prank that got out of hand.
That’s the problem, everything is going too well. I keep waiting for the sky to turn black or a hoard of hellhounds to rampage through the streets or Metraxion to open a portal to Hell in my living room. My personal doomsday clock is ticking louder and louder with each passing day and sooner or later, all hell is going to break loose again. I just hope we’re ready for it when it does.
The sun was still somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean as I stole another glance at the dashboard clock. My resigned sigh must have been louder than I thought, since Cruz favored me with a sidelong look and a smirk.
“I used to do that a lot,” she said.
“Do what?” I asked carefully. Neither of us had spoken in the last hour. It was like we were on the world’s longest blind date, each of us hoping the other would come up with a new topic of conversation to fill the awkward silences.
“Wondering if the clock was broken.” She came to a full stop at the intersection and signaled before turning right, even though there wasn’t another living soul in sight. I still hadn’t decided whether she was like that normally or just being a stickler for the rules because I was with her. “Night patrol can drag on forever.”
“That’s an understatement.” I wasn’t sleepy, thanks to the Philosopher’s Stone, but I was bored spitless. Hellburn was dull enough during the day. In the middle of the night, it was a ghost town without any ghosts. “What did you do to get stuck with the midnight shift?”
She glanced at me in surprise. “I volunteered for it.”
“Really?” I couldn’t keep my disbelief out of my voice. “Why?”
She shrugged. “Nobody else wants to do it and I’m used to it. It’s very peaceful at night. Sometimes it’s like I’m the only person living here.”
“That’s why you’re still doing it,” I observed. “Why did you volunteer in the first place?”
She pursed her lips, gazing straight ahead through the windshield. “To impress your father,” she admitted finally.
“Huh?” I didn’t expect that answer at all.
“He took a chance on me and I wanted to prove to him he wasn’t making a mistake. I wanted to show him I was willing to do anything to help the department.”
I eyed her profile doubtfully. Gabriela de la Cruz was the newest and youngest member of the Hellburn Police Department – I was just an intern so I didn’t count – and its only female officer but she seemed perfectly qualified to me. I couldn’t imagine why hiring her would be considered risky.
My silence must have made her think I wasn’t buying her story. She cleared her throat and rubbed the tip of her nose. “And I figured there’d be a lot more crime at night,” she confessed.
“In Hellburn?” We had our fair share of traffic violations and drunk drivers, I supposed, but Cruz sounded like she meant something bigger.
“Small towns aren’t as innocent as they seem,” she insisted. “There was that courthouse scandal last year, right?”
“You mean Judge Harper?” Harper’s son and partner-in-crime Darren was the original owner of the Ford Mustang I received from Mom and Dad for my eighteenth birthday, although I did my best to forget that fact. The world was a better place with both of them behind bars.
“Yeah, that was it. And of course there was that cult thing last month.”
“Oh, was that last month?” I asked with feigned carelessness. That was one subject I wanted to stay well away from. As far as the general public was concerned, witches and demons and whatever Amy was were just make-believe. My life was complicated enough without Cruz and the other officers wondering what was going on in the shadows. “I’d almost forgotten about it.”
Cruz eyed me skeptically. “Seriously? Seven people were kidnapped and tortured by Satanists. It was the biggest crime in Hellburn in the last century!”
“Well, I was in the middle of moving out of the house,” I hedged. “I was a bit distracted.”
“Weren’t you in that hush-hush meeting with those FBI agents?” she pressed.
“Um –” I was no good at coming up with plausible excuses on the fly. “They just wanted to ask me a few questions,” I said vaguely, hoping she would just drop it.
No such luck. “What about? Were you a witness?” Cruz actually sounded envious.
“Well, sort of, technically.” Lilixandriel and her parade of demons had been hell-bent on claiming my Philosopher’s Stone from my dismembered corpse and she almost succeeded, until she invited the wrong demon lord to join in the fun.
“What happened? What did you see?”
How did I get stuck with this conversation? I asked myself bleakly. More importantly, how do I get out of it? “They, uh, asked us not to talk about it.”
“What difference does it make now?” Now she sounded frustrated. “The suspect’s dead, isn’t she?”
I cleared my throat. “Well, yes, but Agent Morgan was pretty clear about not saying anything. The light’s green,” I added helpfully, pointing through the windshield.
“Agent Morgan.” Cruz put a lot of scorn and disgust into those four syllables as she accelerated through the intersection. “I busted my butt looking for that Cantrell woman and the FBI just waltzed in and conjured up the suspect out of nowhere. Then they lost her the very same day.”
“Lilix – I mean, Lily tried to escape when they were transporting her to Dallas,” I reminded her, parroting the official story. “She was killed in the shootout.”
“She wouldn’t have escaped if she’d been in my custody,” she grumbled. “It still sounds pretty fishy to me. There’s more to this than the Chief is letting on. I smell a cover-up.” It took her about half a block to remember that the Chief of Police was my father. “Not that he’s in on it,” she amended hastily. “I just think the FBI is hiding something.” I saw her checking me out of the corner of her eye to see if I bought that.
“There’s no cover-up,” I
insisted. There absolutely was. There was no way Agent Morgan was going to admit that her division was made up of witches and warlocks dedicated to dealing with demon incursions. Even her own boss didn’t know that. “It was their case to start with.” They’d been chasing Lilixandriel for years.
“There’s always a cover-up,” she argued, “especially if somebody important screwed up. I just hope I’m there when it all comes crashing down. Heads will roll,” she predicted.
“Um, okay,” I said uneasily. Since my head would be one of them, my enthusiasm for her opinion was muted.
She eyed me oddly and then apparently realized that claiming her superiors were involved in a criminal conspiracy was probably not conducive to a long career in the department. Her reassuring smile appeared just a beat too late to be convincing. “But I’m probably just imagining things. So how do you like being a cop?” she asked casually. “This is your third week, right?”
I didn’t buy her excuse for a second but I was glad for the reprieve. “It’s okay, I guess,” I admitted. “It’s not what I expected.”
“You thought there’s be more car chases and less paperwork?”
“Well, sort of.”
“We all do when we start out,” she assured me. “This is your first patrol assignment, right? What else have you done?”
“I spent the first week helping Sergeant Finney with the jail and then I did filing and whatnot for Mrs. Burns. I mean Rachel,” I corrected myself. The department’s receptionist slash dispatcher slash mother hen insisted everyone call her by her first name but it just felt weird. She was at least ten years older than my mother.
“Two weeks of fetch and carry, hmm? Sounds like standard rookie assignments.” Cruz turned onto Truman Avenue. Her patrol route seemed pretty random to me but we’d criss-crossed most of the east side of town already. “I did pretty much the same thing when I started.”
“I guess Sergeant Finney wants me to get experience in all the different jobs in the department.” Bill Finney was Dad’s second-in-command and the man in charge of the newly-minted intern program.
Cruz snorted softly. “I think he just wanted someone to sweep out the cells for him.”
“Yeah, that too.” Sergeant Finney was a good cop but he was just a few months away from retirement and it was clear he was looking forward to handing in his shield. “Patrol should be more exciting, right?” I asked hopefully.
Cruz gave me a look. “Has anything at all happened tonight?”
“No.”
“Expect three more nights of the same.”
I counted on my fingers. “Tuesday night, Wednesday night, Thursday night. What happens on Friday night?”
She rolled her eyes. “The weekend.”
“Oh, right.” I was too young to drink so the weekend wasn’t much different from any other day for me, especially during the summer. “Something to look forward to, then.”
Cruz’s unenthusiastic shrug and grunt didn’t fill me with confidence. “You never know,” she said, “maybe we’ll get lucky and catch a speeder on the highway. And then maybe you’ll get lucky,” she added with a smirk.
“What do you mean?”
“A lot of drivers think they can get out of a ticket if they flash the officer.”
“What? Are you serious?” I’d seen things like that in the movies but I didn’t think it happened in real life.
Cruz nodded. “It happens all the time, especially late at night. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been propositioned during a traffic stop.”
“Guys try to seduce you to get out of tickets?” I asked doubtfully.
“Actually, it’s mostly the women,” she admitted ruefully.
“But – you’re a woman,” I pointed out.
“I know, it’s weird. It’s like they figure a female police officer must be a lesbian or something.” My thoughtful hmm must not have been reassuring enough, because she looked over at me with a frown. “I’m not, you know. A lesbian, I mean.”
“I never thought you were,” I assured her, although now that she mentioned it, I could see why someone might think so. Cruz was an attractive woman in her mid-twenties, but her black hair was cut short and she wore almost no makeup, not that she really needed it. Her unpainted nails were no longer than mine, she didn’t wear any jewelry, and of course her uniform disguised her figure.
Unfortunately, she noticed my fleeting scrutiny. “I like men,” she insisted. “It just doesn’t make any sense to doll myself up when I’m on duty. I want people to treat me with respect, not wonder how good I am in bed.”
“I wasn’t wondering that at all,” I assured her, although of course now I was. She’s a B-cup, Little Peter informed me confidently. I tried very hard to resist conforming that but my eyes flicked downwards for a fraction of a second. Maybe a small C, he amended gleefully.
“I’m not,” she repeated firmly.
“It doesn’t matter to me one way or the other,” I insisted.
She looked at me in dismay. “So you do think I’m a lesbian!”
“No! I’m just saying that I can see how people can get the wrong impression ... even if you don’t mean to give them ... that impression.” I cleared my throat. “Can we talk about something else for a while?” I pleaded.
She eyed me askance. “I’m not,” she grumbled as she finally turned away to glare out the windshield. “It’s check-in time,” she reminded me tersely, tapping the dashboard clock with her finger.
“Roger that,” I acknowledged, grateful for the excuse to drop the subject. I didn’t bother with the walkie-talkie attached to my shoulder. At this time of night, there was no one back at the station to listen in. Instead, I extracted my phone from my shirt pocket and opened the HPD app. The only messages there were the ones I’d been sending out every hour on the hour.
I glanced up at the street signs as we passed another intersection and then tapped out 105 EB Truman @ Henderson NTR. I was still learning all the codes and acronyms but this one was straight-forward: Patrol Unit 105 is proceeding eastbound on Truman Avenue past Henderson Road with nothing to report. Other than the location, it was identical to all of the other messages.
Cruz’s phone pinged a few seconds later and she picked it up from the console to glance at it, nodding to herself before setting it down again. Then it pinged again. “I think once is enough, Peter,” she noted sourly.
“That wasn’t me.” I checked the app and found a new message right below mine. 105 poss. Code 44 I&R 551 Milton. Someone must have called 911 and woken up Mrs. Burns. I hoped she wouldn’t be cranky when she got into the office later. “What’s Code 44?” I&R meant Investigate and Report, that much I knew.
“Breaking and entering. Where is it?”
“551 Milton.”
“I’m on it.” Cruz made tire-squealing U-turn, forcing me to brace myself to avoid hitting the door, and sped west. She reached for the switch for the light bar mounted on the roof and then withdrew her hand.
“Shouldn’t we use the siren?” I asked as an entire colony of butterflies took shelter in my stomach. After two weeks of grunt work, I was finally involved in a real police action. I wasn’t sure I was ready for it.
“Do you see anyone in our way?” Cruz retorted tersely. She was laser-focused on the road ahead.
“What about the lights, then?” It didn’t feel right to be speeding through town without any warning whatsoever.
“That’ll just scare them off. The idea is to catch them in the act.”
“It’s just a possible 44,” I reminded her.
“Better safe than sorry.”
The word safe didn’t actually seem to be in Cruz’s vocabulary as we flew down Truman at a speed that would have gotten me grounded for the rest of my life. Up ahead, the traffic signal turned yellow and then red but Cruz didn’t ease up in the slightest. My hair tried to stand on end as my foot searched desperately for a nonexistent brake.
“The light’s red, Cruz,” I warned her nervous
ly, just in case she was color-blind. She didn’t respond. “It’s red. It’s really red!”
“I know that, Peter,” she snapped. “Shut up and let me drive.” Her eyes flicked left and right and she actually sped up, as if she intended to avoid a traffic fatality by getting through the intersection in less than two seconds. I grabbed hold of whatever I could and squeezed my eyes shut, waiting for the screech of brakes and the crumpling of metal that would presage my untimely death.
Nothing happened, though, and I carefully peeled open one eyelid. The next light was red as well and I swallowed with difficulty, but Cruz thankfully slowed down this time. My relief was short-lived, though, as she yanked the steering wheel to the right and took the turn onto Milton on two wheels.
“Don’t just sit there like a lump,” she ordered as we swerved into the center lane. “What’s at 551?”
“Huh?” It took my bobbled brain cells a few moments to sort out her meaning. The wireless laptop mounted on the center console was angled towards her so I couldn’t use it without getting in her way. Instead, I pulled up the map app on my phone, trying to type on the little keyboard while simultaneously scanning the area for any stray cars, pedestrians, or animals. “It’s, um, ah, oh.” I blinked at the screen, wondering if I was reading it right. “It’s the library.”
“The library?” She looked at me like she thought I was just making that up. “Who the hell would break into a library?”
“Someone with a lot of overdue books?” My attempt at humor fell flat and Cruz just shook her head, thankfully returning her attention to the road ahead. She was like a gung-ho bloodhound hot on someone’s trail and I wondered if this was the real reason why she was stuck with night patrol. I couldn’t imagine Dad allowing her to barrel through town in the middle of the day every time a crime was reported, even with the lights and siren.
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