by Steve Vera
She shook her head. “No way.”
Don’t ask me to leave you.
“Amanda,” he pressed.
“Gavin, no. That’s just stupid.” She shook her head again, softly. “You’ll ask something bad.”
The overwhelming simplicity of her ability to read him left him speechless. He recovered, though. He always did. “Then I can’t tell you anything.”
“Gavin, that’s not fair.”
“No, it is not.” His voice was regretful but unapologetic. “That’s the deal and it isn’t negotiable.”
Her jaw unhinged. He was serious. “Don’t do this to me,” she whispered.
He closed his eyes, shoulders slumped, face deflated. “I don’t have a choice. Do you accept?”
She chomped down on her bottom lip. “Fine,” she snapped.
“Word?” he asked. It was a common enough request between them; there was no lying or fibbing on “word.” If she was dumb enough to ask if a dress made her look like a stuffed sausage and asked “word,” then she got her answer. Even if it doomed him. But it went both ways.
“Yes, word,” she answered through her teeth. “Just spit out whatever it is you have to say so I can deal with it.”
He nodded, satisfied. She watched him switch gears and begin to arrange sentences in his head like Scrabble letters in a tray, his mouth twitching to speak.
“For the love of God, Gavin, tell me.”
Deep breath. “All right. I’ve been in the Witness Protection Program for the past seventeen years.”
Amanda blinked. “Huh?”
He cleared his throat. “I said, I’ve been in the Witness Protection Program for the past seventeen years. And, um, my cover’s been blown. I have to leave.”
Amanda finally laughed. “That’s really funny because for a second—” she gave another chuckle, “—it sounded as if you said that you were in the Witness Protection Program and you had to leave.”
Rain pattered against the Audi’s roof.
“That’s what I said.”
“I’ll punch you in the throat,” she said, wiping the smile off her face by making a fist.
This time it was Gavin who laughed, a quick one, and for just a flicker everything was fine.
“You think I’m kidding?” she asked.
The smile faded. His eyes went flat. “Seventeen years ago, Tarsidion, Cirena, Jack, Noah and I saw something terrible, something we weren’t supposed to see.” He looked at her. “We were just teenagers.”
“God’s truth?” she asked him, knowing full well it was. He wouldn’t be able to meet her eyes otherwise—she knew him too well. But then again, all that history…and he’d never said this?
“We sent someone to prison. He was supposed to be there for life but…somebody sprung him and he knows where we are. He’s left…messages.” His lips were drawn so tight that they seemed to disappear into his mouth. “Babe, he’ll be coming for me specifically.”
A rumble of thunder was all that was needed. None came, just the incessant drone of raindrops against glass and metal.
Amanda opened her door. The Audi chimed its protest as the overhead light came on and before he could stop her she stepped out into the rain, slammed the door as hard as she could and stalked up to the water’s edge, crossing her arms across her chest. She was as pissed as she was freaked out. A second later she heard his door shut and felt him come up beside her.
“Amanda, please.”
“Please what?” she demanded softly, refusing to meet his eyes. “What is the appropriate response to something like this, Gavin?” Her eyes narrowed as she did turn to him. “Is Gavin even your real name?”
“It’s one of them,” he said, eyes brimming over.
Crack! Her hand catapulted from her side and caught him clean across his face. She’d expected him to move out of the way or duck, since he was quicker than anyone she’d ever known, but the strike of her hand caught him solid.
He let me.
“Oh my God, I’m so sorry,” she gasped, touching his cheek, teardrops spilling down her face like hot wax down a candle. It was the first time she’d ever hit a person. “You were supposed to duck, you idiot.”
He just stared at her, shoulders slumped, eyes dull and bleary by his own tears, and for just an instant she could imagine him as a child—young and vulnerable.
“I deserved it,” he finally said.
“You’re damn right you deserved it,” she said, shaking out her hand. Then quietly, “How much of us is a lie?”
“None of it,” he said instantly. “What we have is truth. Everything that’s happened, everything you’ve felt, what I’ve felt—us, is real.”
He reached out for her then, wrapped her pale, shaking hand in his own scar-flecked one. His skin was cold. In all the time she’d known him, his hands had never once been cold; she used to tease him about having a nuclear reactor inside of him.
He cupped her chin with his fingers and tenderly forced her to look at him. “You know I’m right.” He gave a small smile. “Remember when we talked thirteen hours straight on the phone?”
Her misery deepened. “Of course I do.” He’d been in Berlin that time, stuck on the other side of the world, but they’d talked all night and until noon the next day. He’d never told her how much it had cost him no matter how many times she’d asked. Not once had they ever run out of things to say.
“There’s more.” His breath was warm against her skin.
Raindrops dribbled down her forehead, lodged in her eyelashes then plunked onto her cheeks.
“I don’t know if I can take any more,” she whispered.
His eyes hardened and his fingers tightened around hers. She didn’t like that look at all. It scared her.
“Anyone I know is in danger, anyone I love a target.” He pulled her closer. “That’s why you have to leave, too, Amanda. He’s a monster.”
Chapter Thirteen
The only snow from the freak blizzard that remained on the streets was browning and scraped to the sides. Once back behind the wheel of his beloved Super Chief (Stan and Jared had driven it back to his house for him), Skip felt substantially better, more in control. It could have something to do with the effectiveness of the Percocet, or the fact that he’d gotten seven good hours of power-sleep; either way, he was prepared to do what needed doing.
He was going back to the graveyard.
Instead of his usual rock station, Stan’s “alternative” station was on. Normally he would have changed it, as he was more of a blues and classic rock kind of guy, but the unfamiliar music seeping out of his speakers fit his mood perfectly. Dark, heavy bands of electric bass pulsed into sullen, angry rifts of guitar, promising a reckoning. He turned it up. Slowly at first, the energy began to build, reinforced by other instruments—the ring of a cymbal, the deep booming of a bass drum. Skip found himself leaning back in his seat and bobbing his head. Like everything else he’d ever come across in his illustrious life, Skip would fix this mess, make things right. That’s what he did.
And it all started at that cemetery.
Seven minutes later he turned down the narrow winding road that had started everything.
A well-salted black Dodge Charger was parked at the dead end of the street. Next to it was a wide swath of yellow police tape, warding trespassers away. The Charger’s headlights flipped on at the approach of his Ford F-250 Super Chief.
Skip pulled alongside to peer in. He was met by the serious stare of a government man, though to which alphabet soup agency Skip could only guess. Probably FBI.
“You can’t be here,” the man said, validating
Skip’s hunch with a flash of his FBI badge.
“Sure I can,” Skip said, flashing his own badge.
The agent’s brows dipped and he motioned for Skip to show him closer. “You sure got a lot of balls coming here,” he said as recognition spread into his eyes.
“Yes, I do. Big brass ones. Excuse me.” Skip rolled up his window and parked his truck on the side of the road. He didn’t particularly care for the way the agent’s hand strayed toward where the butt of his pistol would be on the inside of his coat.
Skip turned off the ignition, threw it in park and stepped out of his truck gingerly. Immediately he was confronted.
“You can’t be here,” the man repeated, grabbing Skip’s shoulder.
A dozen separate ways of breaking that arm flashed within Skip’s mind. “I have an investigation to conduct,” he said instead, walking past the man toward the truck bed.
“Nice try, Walkins, but this is a federal investigation now.” The agent was right on Skip’s heels.
Without warning, Skip turned around and abruptly they were face-to-face. The cloy of onions and coffee wafted out of the man’s mouth. “You should invest in a pack of gum,” he said. “What agency did you say you worked for?”
“FBI.” The agent matched Skip’s six feet, though Skip outweighed him by at least thirty pounds. “And this is our investigation.”
Skip leaned closer to him. “I disagree.” They were almost nose to nose.
“I don’t care what you agree to. This is a federal investigation. That means you can’t be here, and if you don’t leave…” The agent shrugged. His features were plain and unremarkable, except maybe for his jaw. He looked like he could take a hit.
“Just what investigation are we talking about here, anyway?”
He gave Skip a patronizing smile. “There is only one investigation, and if you don’t know that, perhaps you should get back to that hospital.”
Skip flashed the smile he’d used a hundred times to suspects when he had hard, irrefutable, incriminating evidence against them. So sweet. “You see, I’m investigating the homicide of Rufus Jenkins and the aggravated assaults of Marcus and Todd Jenkins. In fact, it was this very investigation I was conducting two nights ago before I took a small detour to a hospital. I thought you might appreciate the details, so I had Judge Daniels sign off on it. Here ya go,” he said helpfully as he handed the agent the document. Probably wouldn’t hold up in court, but numbnuts over here didn’t know that. The agent’s sudden itchy head and slack mouth was more than worth the suppression of Skip’s violent desires.
“I’ll have to call this in,” he said with a squint at the small print.
“You do that,” Skip said. Good luck with a phone call in these mountains, pal. He swung open the back door of his truck, ignoring his protesting chest, then took out his handy-dandy CSI kit, slammed it shut and bleeped the alarm with his key. The exertion angered the pain in his chest but Skip showed nothing. He wouldn’t give this prick the satisfaction.
“Take it easy,” he said with a casual wave, amused by the uncertainty in Agent Onionbreath’s face before walking toward the small opening without a backward glance.
Where was the love?
Two days of investigation and a warm sun had exposed the gray, inlaid stones that had been covered by snow. He took his time. Falling would mean a blast of molten agony, and Skip wasn’t a big fan of those types of things. At least he didn’t have snowflakes the size of small elephants driving into his face this time. As long as he didn’t move his upper carriage too much, the pain was manageable. Sort of.
Ten minutes later he was standing at the doorless entrance of Blackburn Memorial Cemetery, listening to Montana’s autumn night. No longer did the graveyard loom like a brooding entity. Now, it just sat, abandoned, like a cage with nothing in it. Skip walked under the archway of stone that framed the wrought iron double gate and crunched through muddy snow that had formed a crust from the daytime thaw.
Even from fifty feet away he could see that the black grave no longer existed. All that remained was a giant crater, as if an air-to-ground missile had found its mark. He walked right up to the spot he’d been standing when he’d confronted Mr. Shades and looked around, first at the former grave and then at the spot where he’d glimpsed amber eyes in the chill of the dark. Only pine needles and sparsely leafed branches stared back. Satisfied that he’d properly faced his demons, he shined his flashlight into the gaping hole, feeling a bit of vertigo as the powerful beam refracted within its depths, as if the darkness were a fog. That wasn’t supposed to happen. A steady current of warm air breathed out like rotting meat stuck between teeth. Heavy and humid.
Skip narrowed his eyes, suspicious. He took a clump of mud and tossed it in, waiting for the plunk at the bottom. It didn’t come. He did it again. Still no plunk. Letting out a baffled sigh, Skip groaned as he stuck his head deeper in the hole, hoping he didn’t pop a stitch.
Not only did he smell rotting meat but also wet mushrooms, a hint of rotten eggs and a scent he had no archive for. It was faint but highly offensive, like a fat salamander baking on rotting lettuce. And still he saw no bottom.
Skip rolled his head on his shoulders. Nothing about this case was normal.
Okay. So, there was a bottomless pit in the middle of a formerly haunted graveyard guarded by an FBI agent. I got this. Slowly and methodically he scanned the ground, analyzed the tombstones, allowed his mind to unravel. Some of the markers were more than two hundred years old and ranged from blank slats in the ground with faded etchings to artistic memorials adorned with thoughtful and brooding angels. Each of them bore witness to what had transpired here, but none of them were talking.
“What about you, cherub-face—you got anything to tell me?” he asked an eighteenth-century marble angel, poking his finger at it.
And then he saw something. A section near the rim of the hole looked too neat and crisp to be natural. He lowered to one knee, grunting at the pain, and inspected more closely. It seemed to him as if a section of earth had been cut away with a knife. There were traces of yellow, synthetic material around the rim. After rubbing the pliable material between his thumb and forefinger, Skip realized it was molding foam, used to preserve impressions, most often handprints and footprints. He shined his light around and realized that there were chunks of earth missing all over the place, camouflaged among the stampede of investigation. Hmmm. Judging by the size, Skip figured they had to be at least…geez, twenty-six, twenty-seven inches by twelve. Those were some big frickin’ feet.
Every depression, every exposed blade of grass and clump of mud became suspect.
What Skip really wanted to find was a piece of that grave. How many times had he come back to this place to poke at it? He’d taken pictures, attempted to chisel samples, even considered bringing a scientist down to take a look at it before being stopped by the mayor. Nobody in town was interested in becoming a circus again. Out of respect, he’d acquiesced. Mayor Robinson was the whole reason he got the Rolling Creek gig in the first place, but now he was kicking himself. He should have listened to his gut; he should have had a platoon of scientists trying to figure out just what the hell had invaded Rolling Creek, Montana.
He scanned every decimeter but came up empty. Skip found zippo. The feds had picked this place clean.
Tired, grumpy and in pain, Skip decided to call it a night. He looked around one last time, more in habit than expectation, and saw something that hadn’t been there two minutes ago. A footprint. It was slight, hardly m
ore than a partial, but Skip knew for certain it hadn’t been there before. Up a little farther, next to a stalk of brittle wild grass, Skip saw another. It was a hiking boot of some sort, small, a child’s or woman’s, perhaps. They led into the forest. Skip looked around. He couldn’t quite place his suspicion, but he got the distinct feeling that somebody was toying with him, leading him into the forest.
Oh, yeah? He followed the tracks deeper into the trees, foraging for clues and miscreants. Adrenaline dampened his pain.
As if to vindicate his suspicions, the footsteps disappeared all together. Somebody was definitely toying with him. He looked hard at the tracks, to deciphering whether or not the maker had doubled back. Not so in this case. Which left up. Skip shifted his attention from the ground to the branches above him and suppressed a gasp.
There, like grizzly bear graffiti, were deep furrows carved deep into the flesh of a cottonwood, and a blue atlas cedar next to it. The bark had been gouged away, and Skip didn’t need to be a forest ranger to know that these were no ordinary markings. They were writings. Glyphs. Just like he’d seen when he’d tracked Mr. Shades two nights ago.
With a nod and a “hmm,” Skip opened up his kit and took out a set of tweezers and a UV flashlight. What kind of DNA does a gargoyle have, anyway?
While he probed the tree’s wounds, he caught a whiff of shampoo. He sniffed deeper and caught it again. Somebody was definitely out here with him. Appearing to be absorbed, Skip nonchalantly scanned the trees around him. Nothing. No phantom figures at the corner of his vision, no whisper of movement, nada.
His humming changed to the theme song of The Twilight Zone.
When he was done with the tree, he dropped several fragments into a glass vial, click-closed his kit and made his way back to the bottomless hole, toward the gray-stone path. After about fifty yards Skip stopped. With a ginger shimmy of his shoulders he shed his bulky jacket—it wasn’t that cold out tonight, forty degrees only—placed his CSI kit underneath it and then, like a hunter, broke off the path to flank whoever was following him.