He pulled his hand back to rest on the back of the sofa. She didn’t turn to face him, just kept staring ahead. This was how it had been since the attack, since the demons had smashed into their apartment. She still had the barest discoloration on her neck where one of them had held her by the throat. He wanted to touch it, to touch her, but she always seemed to shift away.
“Going to bed?” Arch asked. He could feel the pull of the bed, the barely conscious realization that he had an early shift tomorrow. It was probably not going to be a very busy day, if tradition held. He hadn’t really had a busy day yet, save for the ones where he was fighting demons after work.
And he and Hendricks had just killed the ones they’d gotten a lead on. It was all listening to rumors about strange out-of-towners so far, but it’d paid off a couple times. Arch enjoyed the scrapes, really, though he didn’t necessarily want to admit it to anyone, least of all himself. He could feel it, though, the glow that came from knowing he’d punched the ticket of something really bad earlier in the night.
He stared down at his wife’s exposed neck, wanting to let his fingers drift lower. The terrycloth robe was closed tight, though. He shrugged, though she didn’t see him, and turned away to undress in the bathroom so he could hang his uniform up to dry.
Alison remained behind and made not a sound as he left. He felt the chill as he undressed and wondered if it was just the air conditioning unit fighting against the humid Tennessee summer, or if it was the wife who hadn’t said more than a few words to him in a week that was causing him to shiver.
Chapter 4
If it was possible, Hendricks awoke feeling even shittier than he had when he went to sleep. His right eye was swollen shut, his ribs hurt like someone had kicked him while he was down, and his lips felt like they’d been transformed into Polish sausages filled with flaming, screaming nerve endings. He moaned and rolled over, forgetting that someone was in the bed with him.
His one good eye caught sight of Erin lying there next to him, her short-cropped blond hair more than a little tousled from the night of sleep. She was looking at him kind of pityingly, like she was uncomfortable with him being there or with the way he looked, or maybe even both.
“Good morning,” he mumbled through his swollen lips. It came out more than a little twisted, and he wondered for a beat if it was even comprehensible.
“You look like holy hell, Hendricks,” she said. She reached a tentative hand across the white sheets, and Hendricks caught a whiff of the flowery scent she wore on her wrist as she touched his forehead. Her thumb traced a delicate path around his eye, causing the pain to flare even so. “What were you thinking?”
“I’m asking myself that very same question this morning,” Hendricks said and rolled to the side of the bed. His hip cried out in pain as he did, and he wondered what he’d done to offend it so. The bedroom was flooded with light, the carpeted floors and grey walls dimly illuminated in the light of the early morning sun. He placed a hand gently upon his eye and felt the pain radiate outward in waves.
“So you just walked into the bar and the fight started?” Erin asked over his shoulder as she got up, bed creaking beneath her. Hendricks ran a hand over his chest, feeling the curly hairs that sprang out of his skin and the bruises beneath.
“Kinda,” Hendricks said. “Well, not really. I was there for a while, and this guy started some shit with McInness, the owner—”
“Oh, God!” Erin cut him off. “You were at the Charnel House? Why?”
“I dunno,” Hendricks said. “I just was. It’s where the road took me.”
She closed her eyes tightly at this. She was standing at an angle, leaning heavily on one leg, face in her palm like she was trying to think of a way to ask what was on her mind but couldn’t find a way to do it. She was wearing a thin wife beater shirt over her tiny frame, pink panties underneath it. If Hendricks hadn’t been feeling like shit scraped onto toast, he knew he’d be trying to get her hair even more tousled than it already was.
As it was, she probably wouldn’t have any of it. He was aching too much, anyway, and not in any of the right places.
“People do not just wander into random establishments in the backwoods and get into bar fights,” Erin said finally, opening her eyes. “It’s not normal.”
Hendricks just stood there. “I wear a black cowboy hat and a drover coat everywhere I go. Where would you get the idea I’m normal in any way?”
She opened her mouth to respond but probably couldn’t figure out what to say to that, so she shut it a moment later.
“Look,” he said, “I didn’t go looking for a fight.” A blatant lie, but hopefully he carried it off well. “Some out-of-towners jumped McInness and the regulars, and I stepped in to help them when it went wrong. McInness got the shit kicked out of him, too, had to go to the hospital and everything—”
“Jesus,” Erin said.
“Yeah, he didn’t look too good,” Hendricks said. “But Arch helped, and we ran the guys off. You can’t expect me to just sit back while people are getting the holy hell hammered out of them. It’s not who I am.”
Erin had positioned her hands over her mouth while waiting for him to finish. She watched him through skeptical eyes, or at least that was how he would describe them. “And who are you, exactly?”
Hendricks stood there for a second. Wasn’t it obvious? “I’m Lafayette Hendricks—”
“I know your fucking name, jackass.” Erin wasn’t too harsh with it, Hendricks reflected, but she also could have been gentler. “I’m asking who you are. Some cowboy drifter that blows into town, doesn’t seem to work at all—at least not that I can see—just kind of hangs out, apparently jumps into bar fights from time to time.” She ran a hand through her tangled hair. “I don’t really know anything about you.”
“Well … I mean, you know a little bit about me,” Hendricks said, and he felt heat on his cheeks. “We’ve been sleeping together for a couple weeks.”
“We’ve been fucking for a couple weeks,” Erin replied matter-of-factly. “We haven’t exactly had deep and epic conversations.” She changed posture, and he thought she looked a little more standoffish now. “Look, I slept with you because—I’ll be honest—you really own that whole cowboy thing. It’s a good look, and you wear it well, even with the coat, which is weird, by the way. Arch knew you, and he’s about the nicest and most stand-up guy around, so I figured you couldn’t be too bad. I mean,” she said with a mirthless laugh, “I didn’t even make you wear a condom.” She blushed a little at this. “But I don’t know you, not really. I know your name, I know you were in the Marines, but that’s about it.” She shrugged. “I know you get into fights, based on the bruises I’ve seen. So I guess I know you’re not that good at fighting.”
Hendricks frowned and felt his hackles rise. “You don’t tell a Marine he’s not any good at fighting unless you want an argument.”
“Maybe I want an argument,” Erin said, and he could tell by the testy way she said it that she probably did.
“Well, let me oblige—” Hendricks said, but the trilling of a cell phone cut him short.
She held up a hand palm out, like he was a kid on a trike and she was telling him to stop. She pulled the cell phone off her nightstand and answered it. “Hello?”
He stood there, kind of slack-jawed, wondering what the hell kind of argument this was. Wondering what kind of man he was, just able to be put on hold like this in the middle of what was kinda, sorta their first fight. He wondered if there would be another. He could feel his temper flaring, that sense of stubborn irritation and embarrassment, and he realized he was standing there in his boxer shorts while Erin was just listening to the phone.
“Fuck this,” he muttered and started to pull his jeans on.
She walked out of the bedroom and pulled the door nearly shut behind her. He could hear her mutter, “Are you fucking kidding me?” into the phone as she went.
Hendricks pulled his shirt on, the cold chill of a
nger washing down into his guts. He tugged his shirt on, grimacing the entire time from the pain. He pulled on his socks as he heard a faint voice saying something indecipherable in the next room. He put on his cowboy boots one by one then pulled his coat out of the pile he’d made of it and put it on, careful to keep the sword hidden in its depths.
He grabbed his hat off the bottom post of her bed and put it on, checking himself once in the mirror. Yep, still looked like shit. There wasn’t much he could do about it, though.
He walked through the apartment without bothering to glance at her. He saw her still on the phone, her mouth slightly open, out of the corner of his eye, but he didn’t stop to say anything. She didn’t get off the phone anyway, so he just walked over to the door, unlocked it, and left without saying a word.
She didn’t say anything either.
* * *
Arch was on the scene less than ten minutes after Sheriff Reeve called him. He’d heard the basics from the sheriff, and it sounded like nothing he’d dealt with in his time with the department. Reeve was calling in everyone, Arch knew that for a fact, because that was what you did in a situation like this; you called for all hands on deck and got to work solving the crime.
Arch had gotten the thumbnail sketch from Reeve, but he still wasn’t quite sure what to expect when he got there. It left him with a kind of nervous tension in his stomach, belly rumbling at him for leaving home without anything to eat or drink. He hadn’t even bothered to shower, just tossed on his uniform and sprinted out the door without saying a word to Alison. He knew she was faking sleep, but he didn’t have time to deal with it at the moment.
The Explorer’s engine rumbled as he took it down a side street. He was only a few blocks from home, here in the heart of Midian. If there was such a thing. The town square was only a few blocks away also. He pulled onto Crosser Street and saw the squad cars. They were the older models, the Crown Victorias driven by Sheriff Reeve and the other deputies, three of them lining the road in front of a big white house. Arch flipped on his lights but not his siren. He hadn’t even needed them to get here. Midian didn’t exactly have a roaring rush hour.
The red and blue lights flickered in the dim early morning. Clouds covered the sky and cast a grey pall over the day. It was the kind of day that would be perfect for a funeral, Arch thought. The clouds were sapping all the joy and light, leaving nothing but a lifeless feeling over the usually vibrant town.
And as Arch stepped up to the white picket fence and opened the gate, he reflected that it would probably be an appropriate feeling.
He took the steps to the front porch in one bound, heard the squeak of the floorboard he landed on as he did so. The front door was open, and he could hear talk from inside. He recognized the voice of Ernesto Reines, the second-most junior patrolman in the department, one rung up the ladder from him. Reines was speaking in a low voice with Ed Fries, a portly officer in his early forties. Arch stepped in and saw them both, just off to the side of the dim entry hall.
Reines nodded to Arch as he entered, and Fries turned to him to do the same. Reines had a soul patch, a little growth of black hair just under his lower lip that was probably not department regulation, at least not the way Arch read the regs. Sheriff Reeve never said a word, though, probably figuring that in Midian, Tennessee, there were better uses of one’s time than enforcing regulations about the length and location of facial hair.
“Man, Arch,” Fries said in his low, drawling voice, “you better bring a damned plastic bag in there with you.” Fries was looking unusually pale today, Arch thought, his chubby jowls bereft of their usual ruddy color. “I ain’t never even seen anything like that.”
“Reeve said on the phone it was Corey Hughes?” Arch had heard Hughes’ name before but didn’t really know the man. Worked at the paper mill, according to Reeve, just a single man living in a city house by himself.
“Yeah,” Reines spoke up, his voice a little gruffer than usual. “But you wouldn’t know it by looking at him.”
“Right,” Arch said. “The scene’s a real mess?”
Reines and Fries exchanged a look. “You could say that.” Fries shook his head, jowls flapping as he did so.
Arch walked on past them, taking his time, steeling himself. He’d seen photos of crime scenes at the academy, some videos where they’d gone in and catalogued evidence in some truly heinous murder cases. He came into a family room, the lights left off so as to avoid touching the switches and possibly disturbing whatever fingerprints might be resting on them. No, they’d leave the lights off and tread as carefully as possible until the crime scene unit from Chattanooga came and took apart the whole place, cataloguing all the evidence.
“Arch?” Sheriff Nicholas Reeve stepped into an open door to Arch’s left. There was a light behind him, shining off his balding head. Reeve had short grey hair growing up from his sideburns that stretched around the back of his head in a strip, but the top of his skull was completely bare. The man had an open, earnest face that was creased with frown lines today. He was a little overweight but not too much. Certainly not as much as Fries. “Arch, you might want to bring a bucket with you in here. Ed already contaminated the scene by throwing up in the sink.”
“Nice going, Ed,” Reines said from down the hall behind him.
“Shit, man, you only just made it outside yourself,” Fries shot back at him.
Arch felt the stale air in the house, warm and rank and humid. It smelled like when he’d visited the morgue during his time at the academy but fresher and more pungent. He could hear the faint hum of civilization somewhere in the distance, under the hushed voices of Fries and Reines. “I’ll be all right,” he told Reeve, and the sheriff stepped aside to let him pass into the kitchen.
The first thing he noticed was red where it shouldn’t have been. The room was done in yellow tones, old wallpaper in amber and white that was faded with time, but there was red everywhere. It was on the ceiling, the oak floor, and it drenched the table. It pooled underneath on the floorboards, looking like black oil in the shadows.
The body was on top of the table, and Arch couldn’t rightly recall seeing anything quite like it before, not even a post-autopsy corpse. He swallowed hard and then turned around, leaving the room before he could feel any more ill. He stood just outside, letting the smell of the scene permeate his nose. He didn’t feel any sicker, but he didn’t feel any better, either. He just stood there for a few minutes, trying to get his breath and realizing that what he’d just seen probably couldn’t ever be unseen.
* * *
Erin drove along above the speed limit. She didn’t have a police vehicle, just her old Honda, but all the cops in town were already at her destination, so who was going to stop her?
She hammered the accelerator as she went down a city street at forty, about ten miles over. Reeve had called, telling her to get her ass down to the crime scene immediately. She was a little excited and a little horrified, since she hadn’t really been to any real crime scenes before. Most of her horror came from the fact that he’d told her to stop and get coffee for everyone. That stung. She tried to decide if he’d asked her because she was the most junior member of the department or because she was the only woman. With Reeve, it could have been either.
She took the corners with care, four Styrofoam cups on the seat next to her in one of those fancy holders they gave out nowadays. She was surprised that Pat at the Surrey Diner on the square had them, but she did. It was a little surprise, like Midian was slowly entering the modern world.
The prospect of what she was about to see, about to be involved in, was so overwhelming that it nearly eclipsed the thoughts still hanging around her head about Hendricks. She was still kicking herself over everything related to him. Sure, he was cute, and she’d thought because of his association with Arch it was like he came stamped with a personal recommendation. But that was kind of dumb, on reflection. She’d known all the other guys she’d slept with for pretty much her whole life
. They were all local, and she knew through rumor and admission the people they’d slept with. The seedier ones she was careful with.
With Hendricks, though, it was like any good sense she might have had fled at the sight of his cowboy hat and lovely abs. And they were lovely. She liked to run a hand over them just to feel the firm ripples. She shook that thought out of her head.
He was a mystery, and who didn’t love a mystery? Still, just because someone was mysterious, it didn’t mean you had to sleep with them without a condom. Quite the opposite, in fact, because one of the secrets he could have been hiding under that coat and hat might just have been syphilis. At least she was on the pill; wondering what a baby cowboy would look like was one mystery she didn’t want solved at present.
He’d showed up last night, beaten all to hell, then left this morning in the middle of a burgeoning argument. Didn’t even say goodbye, and Erin had to admit that stuck in her craw more than a little. The next time she saw him, she wanted to give him a little hell of her own. The other part of her, the non-confrontational part, which was small but present, just hoped he’d pick up and leave town. Problem solved.
But most of her kind of hoped he wouldn’t.
She pulled up behind Arch’s Explorer on Crosser Street and killed the engine. She had to admit, she was more than a little envious of Arch. He’d gotten the last squad spot, the new car the department had bought last year, and he spent his days on patrol. Meanwhile she got stuck behind the desk working dispatch and filing and computer shit, had to drive her own personal vehicle, even on department business, and got stuck doing coffee and lunch runs (though she had to admit Reeve did split the lunch runs with her fairly often).
She didn’t begrudge Arch any of what he’d gotten, but she did wish, as the sole owner of a vagina in the Sheriff’s Department, that some affirmative action would kick in on her behalf. Maybe next year.
Depths: Southern Watch #2 Page 5