by SM Reine
“Oh, yeah?” Sleeveless asked. “How’s that?”
“The cop was looking for the farmer,” Hollywood said, pensive, as the car rattled down the road. “He’s a law and order type, trying to figure out how to adapt to the situation at hand. Simple guy. Doing his best, given what he’s got to work with. But the demon hunter, he’s something else. He’s not into any of those things we just went through. He’s doing this for his own reasons.” He’d seen the guy’s face as he’d tipped the hat off and gone for the knife. It wasn’t just scrunched with exertion. “Something personal.” It was laced with anger, and not just a fury at being restrained, either.
“Oh?” Sleeveless asked. “What, did Kellen insult his mother or something?”
Hollywood chuckled. “No, not that. Not him. No, what we’ve got here is a stone demon killer. Cold heart. Black. Not in it for money, ego, or fun, not religion, nor supremacy.” He didn’t let it get to him, but if he was a chickenshit like Sleeveless, he might have felt a little chill thinking about what this guy was, what was behind him. What he might be willing to do, because of his reason for being here. “No … this guy … he’s here for revenge.”
7
Arch had dropped by Hendricks’s motel room, knocked on the door, and gotten no response. He was tempted to ask the manager of the Sinbad for a key. He’d talked to him earlier, could see the recognition in the man’s eyes. He was clearly a fan of Arch’s from back in the day. Arch still got that and mostly didn’t mind. It tended to produce cooperation of a kind not necessarily enjoyed by other members of the department. In some cases, that counted for more than others. He considered himself lucky when all it did was make them think of him as a man asking for help rather than a cop trying to get them to give something up.
He didn’t push it, though, not yet. Odds were that Hendricks was elsewhere, maybe getting a bite, and he was all set to drive by a couple of the restaurants when his phone went off again. He picked it up, saw it was Alison, and answered. “Hey, babe.”
“Hey,” she came back. “You’re off now, right?”
“Just clocked out a few minutes ago,” he said, answering automatically. “Why?”
“Meet me at the apartment?” Her voice was hopeful, honey laced with extra sugar. Not enough to gag him, just enough to recognize it for what it was. “I got a break, figured instead of getting some supper, we’d just … satisfy some other cravings.”
Arch wasn’t far gone enough on working this demon thing that he was unresponsive, but it did produce a little resistance in him. He shut it up pretty quick by remembering that Hendricks was indisposed in some way right now, anyhow. “Sure. I can drop by home for a little bit. You got a half hour off?”
“Yep,” she said, “and I’m leaving now.”
“Okay,” he said, “you’ll beat me home by about five minutes, probably.”
“Hurry, hurry,” she teased. “See you then.”
Once he’d hung up, he took one last look at the door to Hendricks’s room. The demons could wait a half hour or so. Besides, he needed to eat anyway.
+ + +
“So now we know what our players are up to,” Hollywood said as they rounded the corner of road that was semi-paved. “The next question is, who are they?”
“Krauther’s on the cowboy,” Sleeveless said, pulling off the road onto a gravel driveway. “Seems like he’s new in town. But I know the cop. We’ve had dealings before.”
“I figured that out,” Hollywood said. He was sure Sleeveless missed the irony he had laced the statement with. He wasn’t bright enough to understand concepts like that.
“His name’s Archibald Stan,” Sleeveless went on. “Was a local football hero, graduated and went to UT in Knoxville. Married the head cheerleader—”
“They still married?” Hollywood asked with obvious interest. He felt himself leaning forward in his seat and everything.
“Yeah,” Sleeveless said. “She works down at Rogerson’s, the grocery store in town. Her daddy bought it out from the widow Rogerson after her husband died.”
“Good, good,” Hollywood said, putting all his thoughts into a matrix. “So he’s got vulnerabilities. His little cheerleader wife.” He felt his nose twist. “Not that it really matters. If he’s too problematic of a sacrifice, there are plenty of others. Though I do want to make him hurt for what he did to my suit.”
“Your suit?” There was an air of disbelief from Sleeveless, like something he’d said was unfathomable.
“This suit cost more than your whole town,” Hollywood replied, burying his irritation. He gave the feeling a moment to subside. “So … Krauther is on the cowboy now?”
“Says he’s staying at the motel,” Sleeveless said, “right near where we saw them last night.”
“And these guys you know,” Hollywood said, gesturing to the trailer that was peeking out from between the trees ahead, just a little farther up the gravel path, “they’ll be okay with … getting done what needs to get done?”
“Yeah,” Sleeveless said. “They’re pretty hard. They’ve killed people before, I know it. If they know you’re backing us,” Sleeveless turned a little red, “and paying, then they’ll be willing to get out of line to get the job done.”
Hollywood waited just a second. “And they’re not as stupid as the last two?”
Sleeveless hesitated before answering. “Well, they’re not as smart as me.”
Hollywood sighed. It was so hard to find good help in this shithole town.
+ + +
“So where are you from?” Erin asked with that drawl. He was loving the drawl, the southern accent.
“Amery, Wisconsin,” Hendricks replied, taking a sip of his pop. He called it pop, she’d said Coke, even though the Pepsi signs were clearly posted. He just kind of shook his head at that. “You probably never heard of it. It’s small.”
“Oh?” She looked like she was interested. At least more interested in him than she was in what was left of her meal, which wasn’t much. She’d gone through the big burger in no time, and was picking at the last few fries, which looked like they’d gone cold, all mushy and limp. “Like … smaller than Midian?”
He looked out the window. “Maybe a little. We didn’t have a Wal-Mart, that was for sure, you had to go to St. Croix Falls or New Richmond for one of those.” He paused, realizing those names were meaningless to her. “You had to drive a little ways. Twenty minutes, maybe.”
“Sounds familiar,” she said then explained. “The Wal-Mart’s new. Only opened in my junior year of high school.”
“When was that?” he asked, more than a little curious. She looked young. Younger than him.
“Ummm,” she said, a little grin on her face, shy. “Two years ago, I think.” She met his gaze, fed off it. “I’m nineteen.”
On a purely intellectual level, Hendricks didn’t know what to think about that. He was dimly aware that he wasn’t really going on intellect, not around her. “It’s a good age. I remember being that young, vaguely.”
“How old are you now?” She said it all flirty, like there was a giggle just waiting to escape.
“Twenty-five,” he said, matter-of-fact.
“An older man.” She didn’t make it sound like a bad thing. “So how do you know Arch?”
“Oh, we go way back,” Hendricks said. Lying was no great stretch for him, though he didn’t like it. The alternative was trying to explain how he was a demon hunter that had met the man only last night. It was an answer designed to keep Arch from looking like an idiot and him in the running for that first-date fuck she’d alluded to. If he were honest with himself, though, Arch’s reputation didn’t fit very large into that equation. “How’d you know him?”
“Everybody ’round here knows Arch,” she said, nibbling on a soggy fry. “Hard not to. I didn’t really know him very well until we started working together at the Sheriff’s Department, though, on account of he was three years ahead of me in school. I knew his wife some, though, she was cheer
leading captain when I was a freshman.”
“You were a cheerleader?” He watched her blush. “I could see that.”
“Only for a year,” she said, still red in the cheeks. He thought it was damned cute. “It was too much for me.”
“Hey,” he said, a thought occurring to him. “If you’re only nineteen, how were you drinking in the bar last night?”
“Oh, that?” she waved a hand across the table at him, close enough he was tempted to reach out and catch it, hold her hand. “Please. Sheriff’s Department budget is so strained, Reeve doesn’t waste his time with stuff like that. Fast Freddie’s serves minors all the time. But,” she held up a finger to wag at him, “Phil, the barman, won’t let you drive if you’re underage. Makes you give your keys to him before he’ll pour, so you gotta get another ride home if you’re drinking.”
Hendricks smiled at that thought. “So you’re a sheriff’s deputy, blatantly flouting the law, huh?”
“There’s a lot of laws I flout. Did you know under Tennessee law, it’s still technically illegal for me to give you a blow job?” She took a sip of her drink, but kept her eyes on him.
For the second time, Hendricks was flummoxed. This time he just tried not to look dumb while he recovered, trying to keep his mouth shut instead of agape. After a moment, he said, “Well, I’ve always thought if you were gonna break a law, you oughta at least make it one you’ll enjoy breaking.”
+ + +
It wasn’t a traditional job interview. Hollywood had done those, hiring crew, even been involved in casting decisions, table reads, shit like that. This wasn’t like any of those. This was sitting around a trailer that smelled of weed and loserhood, not in equal measure. There was way more loserhood than weed in the air, and that was saying something.
The boys lined up in front of him on the couch looked like they were feral, wild demons of a type he didn’t even really know, not off the top of his head. Little things, really, common as fucking dirt on earth. It would have been too much to ask for a greater to be mixed in with this handful of meth-heads. Greaters didn’t drift around waiting to be henchmen for other greaters. They didn’t lack purpose like these disposable louts, who worked in petty human jobs until something came around for them. Greaters did shit with their lives. Seized moments. Cut a path to success through the brambly bushes of adversity.
Hollywood sniffed the air. Also, almost all of the greaters showered regularly. Which clearly hadn’t happened here.
They mostly wore t-shirts and shorts, and really, they all kind of looked the same to Hollywood. Which probably meant all was right in the world. If one of them wanted to distinguish himself (or herself, he noted with some surprise, because there was a female in there with them, though it was hard to tell given the hairy legs) they’d clean up, start wearing something more presentable. He doubted any of them would do that, though.
“So,” Hollywood said, letting it ooze out and trying to create the right impression from the start. He was seated in a battered old chair that stank like someone had let a dog lay in it every night. There were no dogs in the trailer. None. “I trust …” he struggled to remember Sleeveless’s name, the one he’d given, and gave up after only a moment’s effort, instead gesturing toward the man in the flannel with the cut-off sleeves, “our mutual … friend …” he struggled with that word, “has informed you that I’m looking for some muscle to help me finish the job I’ve got going in this town?” He waited for the nods, which came, some slower than others. He’d hoped the woman would nod first, but she was somewhere in the middle. He looked over the sea of white faces, and then turned to Sleeveless. “Do we not have any … diversity candidates?”
Sleeveless just stared back at him blankly. “They’re all demons …?”
Hollywood smiled faintly, realizing once again he was talking to an idiot. “I mean … do we not have any that might be more representative of other racial backgrounds?” He gave a patronizing smile. “I realize we have a female in our midst, and that’s good, but I just meant some more ethnic diversity. More breadth.”
Sleeveless gave him a cockeyed look. “You know their skin ain’t really real, right? It’s just a shell—”
“I fucking know that, you idiot,” Hollywood said sharply. “I’m just asking if we can add in some muscle that maybe has a little different shade on their shell, so we don’t look so fucking monochromatic. Do you not know any African-Americans or Hispanic-Americans—hell, or Asian-Americans we could add to the pool?”
Sleeveless was rendered speechless by this, sputtering. “You asked for demons, I brought you to the only demons I know …”
Hollywood sighed, feeling a throbbing in his head caused by his essence bulging in his shell. He could feel things through the skin, of course, probably just like a human could, and right now he felt his true self wanting to escape, burst out and rip the head off Sleeveless for being a dumb fuck. He’d given it some thought, wondering how humans felt, back when he was considering being an actor, and after a long time he’d concluded that humans couldn’t possibly feel things the way his kind could. Demon essences reached beyond the shell, could taste, touch, smell and feel things that brushed up against them. Not just the physical, but the metaphysical as well. Which was just another reason humans were a low form of life, just above ferrets.
“Okay, all right, yeah,” Hollywood said at last. It really wasn’t all right, of course. “We’ll just have to make do with a lily-white cast for now and keep our eyes open for other candidates to balance things out as we go.” It probably didn’t matter that much longer anyway, but it burned him; he was in charge of this—production, for lack of a better word, and the way things were just looked … unseemly, to his way of thinking. He divided the couch in half. “You three, go meet up with Krauther,” (what a dumb name) “at the cowboy’s motel.” He thought about it for a second. “Wait, you know what you’re supposed to be doing, right?” He shook his head. “Never mind, that’s too much to ask. You know Krauther?” He waited, and the nods came again. “Go find him at that fleabag motel by the interstate, and he’ll tell you what to do.”
One of them stood up abruptly, and Hollywood smiled. “Good. Someone’s got initiative.” He waved at the other two. “Go on.” He reached in his pocket and pulled out a wad of bills. “Here.” Threw a Franklin at each of them. “For your day’s labor.” They filed out, and he turned to look at the four who were left. “You guys are gonna get marching orders from Sleeveless.” He smiled. “We have something planned for one of your local cops, something special.”
It was the woman who smiled first. He liked that. Predator’s instinct. “You’re gonna run this team,” he said to her then waved at Sleeveless. “He’ll tell you what to do.” He peeled off four hundred-dollar bills and handed one to each of them, careful not to touch their hands, then found his way out the door, pushing the old screen door on the outside of the trailer out of the way as he stepped down. The flies weren’t as thick here as at the dairy farm, but they were still present. Still annoying. But at least out here he could breathe.
+ + +
Alison was already inside when Arch got home, the sound of soft footsteps coming toward him on the thin carpeting of their apartment. He put his keys in their familiar spot on the table next to the door then relieved himself of his cell phones, both of them. By that time he heard her near the end of the hall, coming out of the bedroom. He caught a glimpse out of the corner of his eye, a little splash of red, and he turned his head to see.
She was leaned against the frame of the bedroom door like a pinup model, arching her back, bare feet on the carpet, showing off her long legs, tan from the long hours she spent out on the balcony of the apartment and beside her momma and daddy’s pool. His eyes followed them all the way up to the red piece of lingerie she was wearing, something that reminded him just a little of a one-piece bathing suit but pared back considerably. All the important pieces were covered, bikini-like. A see-through lace panel, which hung loosely
from the bra, delicately covered her trim waistline.
Arch wasn’t quite sure what to make of the whole ensemble nor did he really want to give it too much thought. Any thoughts of demons slipped out of his mind as he looked at her, standing there in the faded afternoon light that seeped into the apartment through the closed curtains. This was hardly the first time she’d done this, dressed up for him in this way. It was one of her favorite things, judging by the bills from Victoria’s Secret, which was one reason why he didn’t complain. She’d done it more since they’d decided to try for a baby, but it was hardly a new occurrence before that. And it wasn’t for nothing, either; there was a very simple reason why she kept doing it.
Because it worked every time.
He crossed toward where she waited, giving him a very forward look, using her index finger to beckon him onward with a slow, sexy, come-hither motion. And a few minutes later, after she had gone first, he did indeed come. Hither and yon.
+ + +
She’d wanted to get a beer, and Hendricks had gone along with it. Who was he to argue with what the lady wanted, after all? They’d debated walking to Fast Freddie’s from the burger joint and ultimately decided against it. Too damned hot, they’d both concluded before hopping into her little subcompact. It wasn’t much cooler in there, Hendricks reflected as they drove the hundred yards or so to the bar’s parking lot before getting out. The car’s air conditioning hadn’t even had a chance to start working before they were done with the drive.