Depths: Southern Watch #2

by Crane, Robert J.

  But probably not.

  She made it through the gate and up the walk before she saw Reines and Fries just inside the door. It was dark and she nodded to both of them as she came in. Her khaki uniform was a little wrinkled because she’d run out the door without a chance to iron it, but she doubted that would matter here. She had the steaming cups of coffee in her hand, carrying the little Styrofoam tray. She wordlessly held it out and Reines and Fries each grabbed one, thanking her profusely.

  She went on, listening to the squeak of the floor as she made her way down the hall. The crime scene unit from Chattanooga was probably still an hour out, which meant they’d all sort of stand around and try not to fuck things up until the pros got here. For her money, the best way to do that would be to get Fries and Reines outside, but she wasn’t exactly in charge. Or anywhere approaching a mile of in charge.

  She came around the corner into a family room complete with sofa and TV. The TV was half the size of the room, which screamed bachelor to her. Part of her wondered if that was because she knew Corey Hughes was a lifelong bachelor or if it genuinely was just because of the TV and the sofa.

  The room was dark, the curtains pulled to. The day was gloomy anyway; it was doubtful that opening them would do much to brighten the place.

  It took her a second to realize that Arch was standing against the wall to her left, just next to an open door leading into a lit room. Light was spilling out and she could hear someone moving in there. She surmised it was probably Reeve, since she knew he was on scene and she’d yet to run across him.

  “You already go in?” she asked Arch, and he looked up at her. He looked like he’d been lost in his own little world before she’d said something, and she stepped over to him and wordlessly offered him a coffee.

  “No, thanks,” he said, shaking his head. “And yeah, I went in. It’s …” Arch’s voice got kind of choked. “It’s bad.”

  She wondered at how bad it could be. Took a couple steps toward the door, but Reeve was there, holding out a hand and taking a coffee from the tray. “You don’t want to go in there,” he said. “It’s just nasty. Ain’t a fit way for anyone to die, and there’s no reason for you to see it—”

  “Sir,” she said, and all the irritation she’d felt and bottled up at being asked to get coffee sort popped out, “please move aside.”

  Reeve cocked an eyebrow at her, and she could tell he was trying to decide whether or not to argue. He must have decided against it, because he shuffled left, leaving the door open for her to walk through.

  She took a tentative step toward it, then another, wishing her pace was a match for the voice she’d just used to order the sheriff around. She stepped into the lit kitchen and the smell hit her.

  It was like a memory she had of childhood, when her three brothers, all older than her, had conspired to drag her six year-old self out to the barn when her daddy was killing a hog. They told her it was something else, she couldn’t remember what, that she had to see it and she went, dutifully, as though the three of them hadn’t steered her wrong a thousand times before. She was naive like that as a kid. Thinking back to Hendricks, she wondered if maybe she still was.

  She’d watched through a crack in the barn door as her daddy slit the hog’s throat. She’d known the name of the creature at the time, though it escaped her now. Her brothers had stood behind her and snickered as she peered in. Their hushed whispers came back to her now, their excitement in the anticipation of seeing her reaction.

  They were dreadfully disappointed when they actually saw it.

  She remembered watching her dad raise the hog in the air once he’d gutted it, once he’d pulled out the innards and put them in a wheelbarrow. She could recall the smell of it, of the shit and piss and gawdawful rancid nastiness of the hog’s carcass opened to the air. She just watched, though, not a word, not a sound, her brothers getting restless behind her. She watched her daddy crank the body into the air and she looked at that empty stomach cavity, saw the ribs from the inside.

  And she never made a sound. Just watched while he cut it to pieces, reducing that hog to individual cuts of meat over the course of the next hours.

  Erin looked into the kitchen of Corey Hughes’s house. There was a carcass on the table, something that had been opened up. The ribs were cracked at the sternum and pulled back, and she could see that the heart and damned near all else had been removed. She took a step forward and peered in. The chest cavity was empty all the way to the spine. She took a sniff, and it was damned rancid, but it didn’t bother her stomach. She heard Reeve catch his breath from the stench, a few paces behind her.

  Just like slaughtering a hog all over again.

  “I ain’t never seen anything like this shit,” Reeve said from behind her.

  Erin didn’t answer him. She looked into the open cavity, that empty space where life had mysteriously once existed. The thighs of the corpse were laid open, large chunks of meat removed by something. It was uneven, whatever had done this, not smooth like a knife. It was like teeth had come in and ground their way through one of the legs, even breaking the femur, which she knew wasn’t a picnic. Which the rest of the corpse looked like, come to think of it.

  A picnic for something.

  Or someone.

  “This place is a goddamned slaughterhouse,” Reeve said behind her.

  “Yeah,” she breathed and tried to tear her eyes away. She couldn’t, though.

  * * *

  Hendricks’s long-ass walk was just about nearing its end. He was crossing the interstate bridge, the sky above was making noise like it might start dropping water on him again, and he was hustling to make sure he missed that. His stomach was rumbling but he had some snacks back at the motel. He wasn’t in the mood for a greasy breakfast anyway, not even after walking for the last hour and a half, and that was just about all the diner across the interstate offered. Grease fried in grease, with some eggs possibly somewhere under the oil.

  He wasn’t really pissed at Erin anymore, not now. He’d walked it out of himself. Now he was just sullen and irritated. It’s not like he knew her all that well, either. He’d never even asked if she was on the pill, just assumed it. Probably been too carried away with having sex for the first time in five damned years to even care. Like he forgot it could have consequences.

  He’d got a little drunk on her, if he was being honest with himself. She was damned pretty, had a youthful cuteness about her that hadn’t been part of his life over the last few years. She was cheery, that was it. Hendricks hadn’t been cheery in a long damned time. Rueful, more often than not. Sarcastic, all the time.

  Also, she had a body that didn’t look like it had gotten any mileage on it since high school, and he liked that. She was a thin slip of a girl, and there wasn’t any problem at all with that in his mind. She was proportioned just right for it, too, not comically exaggerated like she’d had surgery on her busts, as some did. No, her chest was pretty close to flat and for some reason it worked just fine for him.

  He crossed into the parking lot of the Sinbad motel, bearing toward his room at little more than a saunter. It was about all he could manage, and it had taken him a while to get from Midian to out here. His hip was aching, and he figured he’d go in and sit in that ugly ass chair in the corner of his room, put his feet up for a spell. He might even need some more sleep, and he knew for a fact he needed a hot shower after the walk. Things were sticking together on him from the faint sweat generated by his activity.

  He looked up in time to see a guy coming out of the room next to his. Kind of a middle-aged fellow, medium height, medium build, long hair around the sides but way bald on top. The guy was wearing—no shit—a t-shirt that said nothing but Nike, and a pair of khaki cargo pants. He had on a pair of white tennis shoes, and his legs were pale enough that Hendricks knew he was a northerner in a heartbeat. The legs looked just like Hendricks’s when he didn’t have his jeans on.

  “Morning,” Hendricks said, tipping his hat
to the guy as he passed. He’d learned that this was the way things were done in the South, greeting everybody you passed. That shit didn’t fly in the North.

  The guy said nothing, just sort of nodded as he went by.

  Hendricks didn’t think much of it. Lots of people were unfriendly like that, and he ached too much to dwell on it or give a shit. He pulled his key and opened his door, disappearing inside to where slightly cooler air waited. And possibly a shower.

  * * *

  Gideon just nodded at the cowboy as he passed him. He looked back when he was sure the guy wasn’t watching him, and saw him go into the room next door. Shit.

  He knew the cowboy, had felt it when the cowboy had cut loose a couple of demons in a bar last night. That black hat and black coat. There was a sword in there somewhere; he remembered the vision of those Y’freiti demons getting stabbed right through. He’d filed it away at the time, indifferent, because demon deaths didn’t do anything for him. He stared at the cowboy’s back as the man retreated into his room and closed the door.

  Still, a demon hunter in the next room? That was some nerve-racking shit for him to deal with. Gideon had no plans to do anything that would cross the cowboy, but it was still unnerving. Demon hunters and demons weren’t exactly good neighbors, though apparently the cowboy hadn’t seen his real face. Which was fortunate, because Gideon wasn’t much of a killer. He was more of a voyeur.

  Still, if the cowboy figured things out …

  Nah. Gideon turned and kept on walking. He needed something to eat, needed to get out for a while and stretch his legs. Besides, if his nose didn’t deceive him, he smelled death coming nearby. Really close, in fact. It was too tantalizing to pass up. And why not be deathly close when it came? He’d never really tried that before.

  Gideon put thoughts of the cowboy out of his mind for now and turned to walk over to his rental car. He’d just head toward the death he felt coming for now and leave everything else to be dealt with later.

  Chapter 5

  Lerner stared out the window of the hotel and watched rain start. Again. Last night had been a downpour, the little Holiday Inn-style thirty-unit building buffeted by high winds and a hard rain all night long. He’d gone to sleep listening to it tap on the roof, the sound of Duncan’s slow breathing in the bed next to his as familiar as eating. Not as enjoyable, though.

  He put his hand on the glass and felt the slight chill from it across the tips of his fingers. He’d often given a lot of thought to the fact that the shell over his essence breathed the way a human did, could feel sensation and even had a sense of smell the way a human’s did, but contained none of the organs of a human. No liver, kidneys, heart or lungs. On the occasions where they stumbled across dead humans and he had a few minutes, he liked poke around inside, see what was going on in there. Lerner thought being a doctor would have been a magnificent career, if only for the opportunity to poke around inside real, living human beings.

  Of course, he didn’t really care whether they lived or died, so that probably disqualified him.

  Still, the knowledge was interesting. He remembered the smell of the kitchen in the house they’d raided last night. The corpse was so different from a living person. It wasn’t better or worse, just different. The sight of a gutted human didn’t offend him, really, it just bothered him from a job perspective. It meant paperwork. It meant headaches. When there were as many bodies as the Tul’rore had left behind, it meant an interdiction, possibly some expulsions from the plane. Which was what they’d done last night.

  “You finish your Form S0-8T?” Duncan’s tone was clipped, all business. He was sitting at the table behind Lerner, already trying to get his shit done for the day. Lerner was putting it off, and Duncan probably knew it. His gentle reminder was the same thing he always did, trying to push Lerner to get done, too, and Lerner didn’t care for it. Still, he didn’t feel the need to turn around and gnash Duncan’s head off over it. Literally or figuratively. No, Lerner just kept staring out the window. Duncan would get the message in time.

  The paperwork was probably the worst part of the job. Expelling pact violators wasn’t a bad job. It didn’t make him go sour in the stomach to crack open a shell and send someone’s essence screaming back to the underworld. He didn’t have a stomach, anyway.

  Everyone knew the rules, and if they wanted to keep earth as a nice playground where everyone could feed reasonably, enjoy their desires in an orderly manner, and keep the humans from freaking out and staging a full-on anti-demon war the way they had in the past, the rules needed to be followed.

  Lerner liked rules. Almost as much as he like pontificating.

  Duncan cleared his throat, and Lerner felt his expression turn to an eyeroll. “No, I haven’t finished my fucking Form S0-8T, and you damned well know it. Don’t be a Mother Hubbard. I’ll get to it eventually.” The damned bureaucracy of the Office of Occultic Concordance was worse than the fires and freeze of damnation, honestly. “After all,” he went on, “it’s not like we’ve got anything else to do today.”

  Duncan made a sound like he was clearing the throat he didn’t even have. “You know something could come in at any time.”

  “Yeah, well, let’s hope it does.” Lerner reached down and felt the truncheon on his belt. He kind of liked cracking open a demon, letting the essence pour out. It made him feel alive. He wondered if that made him like a serial killer among the humans, then realized he didn’t much care.

  After all, among his own people, it wasn’t like murder was even a crime.

  * * *

  “What the hell is up with Hendricks?”

  Arch got the question he’d been dreading the minute they were outside, out of earshot of Reeve, Fries and Reines. She asked as Arch was heading back to grab his raincoat, the big yellow reflective-striped one that he kept in the back of the Explorer as part of his standard gear. He fished it out and pulled it on as the first little droplets continued to fall here and there. He pretended to not hear her as he fished around in the back for the accompanying hat.

  “Arch, don’t even pretend you can’t hear me,” Erin’s voice came at him again. “That crap might work on your wife but it doesn’t work on me.”

  “Sorry, what did you want to know?” Arch said, forcing a smile as he came up with his hat. He put it on, adjusting the brim.

  “What’s up with him?” Erin didn’t have rain gear on, and Arch cast a look skyward. He suspected it was about to open up, but she didn’t seem concerned. Her khaki uniform was just starting to show the first signs of spotting from the raindrops.

  “Well, he wears a cowboy hat …” Arch started, a little tentative.

  “I fucking know that,” she said, not seeing the humor in it, plainly. Arch’s stomach was a little unsettled yet from what he’d seen. He was glad he’d skipped breakfast. “What’s his deal? Where’s he from? Why’s he here?”

  “You could try asking him this, you know,” Arch said, looking up and down the street. There were a few people out watching the cavalcade of police cars, but they were all safely under their porch awnings now.

  “I’m asking you,” Erin said with a seriousness he didn’t usually see in her. “And I would hope, as my friend, you’ll tell me.”

  Arch was caught a little off guard by that one. They were coworkers, sure, but he wasn’t certain he’d have gone all out and called her a friend. Still, it made him feel a little bad about the whole thing. “He’s from Wisconsin.”

  “If you’re gonna be a kneejerk ass—”

  “Whoa,” Arch said, and could feel his eyebrow crank down. “Whatever problems you’ve got are between you and him, okay? Don’t go dragging me into it.” He slammed the hatchback of the Explorer down. “And clearly you’ve got a problem with him.”

  “I need to know some things about him,” she said, unfolding her arms and seeming to spit fire at the same time. “He’s like a damned cipher that got dropped out of the heavens onto my doorstep by you.”

  “I only
dropped him on your doorstep last night because he needed someone to keep an eye on him,” Arch said. He was still stinging from her swearing at him like that. “I figured that might be something you could do since the two of you were getting close—”

  “We’re not,” Erin said, and a hand worked its way up to cover her eyes as she said it. “I mean … we’re … you know … but we don’t really talk or know anything about each other like …”

  “Yeah, okay,” Arch said, having heard more than enough.

  “Look, I jumped all over him because he was a friend of yours,” she said, peeking from behind her fingers, and for some reason that made Arch’s stomach rumble again. “I figured it was as close as I’d get to my mom endorsing one of the bad boys I’ve liked. But without the creepy side effect of having her try and date him.”

  Arch started to say something to that, but gave up after a moment of trying to figure out what and coming up dry. “Um—”

  “Do you even really know him?” she asked, and this time he felt the impact of her words like thunder on a clear day. “I need to know, Arch.”

  Arch tried to figure out what to say to that. “Not as well as you apparently think I do,” he finally said.

  Erin covered her face again, and he could barely hear her say, “Goddamn.”

  “Hey, y’all!” Sheriff Reeve’s voice boomed out over the street, and Arch turned his head to see what was going on. Reeve was standing on the porch of the Hughes house next to Reines and Fries, gesturing to Erin and Arch with a hand to get on over there. Arch headed that way, listening to the tapping of the rain on the brim of his hat. It was getting worse, starting to open up on them.

  Arch hit the front porch a few seconds later and looked back for Erin, who was not behind him. He caught sight of her rummaging in the back seat of her car and wondered if she might be heading out because of their conversation about Hendricks. She emerged from the back of the car a moment later with her rain gear. She slammed her door and it echoed down the street. The four of them watched while she ran through the increasing downpour to join them on the porch.