Depths: Southern Watch #2

by Crane, Robert J.

  “All right, now that you’re all here,” Reeve said once Erin was there with them. Arch watched the water drip from her short blond hair. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, which was probably fortunate for her given the wet conditions. Her khaki uniform top was now sported a dark brown, camo-like pattern from all the places it had gotten wet. “I need y’all to start canvassing the area, asking the neighbors what they’ve seen. If anything.” Reeve pointed to the right. “Fries, you go that way, Reines, start across the street on the left, and Arch, go left. Take Erin with you and show her what to do.”

  Arch caught a flash of irritation from Erin, but she didn’t speak up. “Yes, sir,” Arch said.

  “All right, then,” Reeve said, his brow was puckered as if he was concentrating. “I’ll keep watch here until the crime scene unit arrives. See what you can find out in the meantime.” He waved them off, and Arch held up for a minute while Erin put on her raincoat and hat. Reines and Fries went scrambling to their cars to get their gear, the waist-high white gate slamming shut behind them with a rattling noise.

  “Shall we?” Arch asked as Erin pulled her brim down low over her eyes. She didn’t look up at him, just led the way down the porch steps as the rain pitter-pattered on the awning and the sidewalk. Heavy grey clouds hung low overhead. They walked under the shade of old trees that kept a little of the rain from falling on them as they went.

  Arch was getting used to the freeze out, had become real accustomed to it lately at home, and it bothered him less with Erin than it did with Alison. They only had to walk one house down the street, anyway, and she was fit enough to keep ahead of him at a reasonable pace if he didn’t try to run her down. Which he didn’t, though his long legs would easily have allowed him to.

  She did the knocking when they got up to the house next door. It was an old-style Southern house with a porch wrapping all the way around. She let her small knuckles rattle on the screen door, not bothering to open it. He just watched and said nothing; he could play this game as well as her or better.

  When there was no response after a minute or so of standing in the rain-drenched quiet, she pulled open the screen door and laid a firm knock on the front door itself. It gave and creaked open an inch, a black line all that showed of the interior.

  “Who lives here?” Arch asked, already rummaging through his mind for the details.

  “Orin and Kim Hauser,” Erin replied in a half second. “Older couple, in their sixties. He worked as a long-haul trucker until a few years ago when he retired.” She looked back at him. “They’ve got a couple grown kids still in town, Jake and—”

  “Lisa,” Arch said with a nod. He stepped up next to her and pushed the door open slightly. “Mr. and Mrs. Hauser?” A stench hit him in the face as though he’d been punched in the nose, and he recoiled from it, drawing his Glock 22 as he did so. He could feel the weight of the plastic grip in his hand and heard the click as the metal barrel slid loose of the plastic holster. He kept his finger along the slide, off the trigger, and pointed the gun down at a forty-five degree angle. He pulled loose the little flashlight from his belt and threaded his left hand under his right. He pointed the flashlight in the same direction as the gun, and kept his eyes along the same sight line.

  He saw Erin mimic his posture behind him, following along as he entered the house. His light illuminated the living room area ahead of him, shadows of the furniture cast on wallpaper checkered with blue dots or patterns too small for his eye to discern in the dark. A quick scan of the entry showed nothing out of the ordinary in the living room.

  A wide aperture ran the length of half the room and entered a dining area of some sort. Arch could see the edge of a table beyond but little of the surface.

  “Right behind you,” Erin said quietly.

  “We should have radioed Reeve,” Arch said.

  “He hears gunshots, he’ll come a runnin’,” Erin said.

  Arch left his next thought unspoken—what if there was no time for shots?

  Arch kept moving forward, each step throwing up a floorboard creak ominous enough to squeeze its way into any horror movie he’d ever seen at the drive-in theater near Whitsville. Any minute, he expected something awful to come crashing in through the window at him, claws and all.

  He made the edge of the dining room entry and covered behind the wall. He caught his breath and felt Erin stack up behind him. He wanted to close his eyes for the next part, because the smell was truly awful and he suspected he knew what was coming next.

  Arch turned the corner and pointed the gun into the dining room. There was a faint buzzing noise, a few flies that had made their way in somehow. They were sweeping in low circles around the dining room table, and the smell was dead obvious here.

  Mostly dead.

  There was a rib cage stripped of nearly everything, a skull cracked open and empty from what he could see, though the shadows hid the contents pretty well. Other bones were strewn about the floor and table. Lesser ones he suspected. He took another step and his shoe hit another skull; he only knew it because it skittered off and hit a table leg, then rolled back toward him. It came to rest in the glow from an uncovered window.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” Erin whispered from his side.

  Arch didn’t do blasphemy, but he thought about swearing here. Thought about it and swallowed it whole. Instead he reached up to his shoulder and cued his mike, radio formality all thrown out. “Reeve … this is Arch. You’re gonna wanna come next door.” Arch took a look to his right, as though he could see through the wall and into the next house. “We’re gonna have to search the whole neighborhood.”

  Chapter 6

  Gideon didn’t love the smell of the burgers frying on the grill, but it was what the diner served, so he was stuck with it. He actually preferred salad, which was a hell of an irony even for him to digest. The salad prospects on the diner’s menu had seemed poor, so he just sat there, pondering the menu, waiting to see what happened.

  He wondered, just briefly, if his reticence about burgers had anything to do with having “seen” and eaten so many heart attacks. He shrugged mentally and went back to studying his menu. If he was lucky, what he was here to eat would happen before he had to order, thus saving him both money and the prospect of eating something he didn’t want to.

  He glanced behind the counter as a waitress in her mid-fifties placed a little square of paper bearing an order onto a spike in the window that separated the area behind the lunch counter from the kitchen. He watched her, her grey hair tied back in a ponytail, her jeans a little too tight for what she was carrying underneath. She wore a peach blouse, and Gideon kept a close eye on her as she came back around the edge of the lunch counter, heading toward a booth in the corner.

  He could feel it starting and knew she’d never make it. He watched her walk anyhow, caught the first hint of a stumble, and his hand went to his pocket immediately.

  * * *

  Linda Richards was in for a double today. She’d had a faint headache since she woke up that morning, but damned if that wasn’t a consequence of waking up and forgetting to get coffee within the first hour of starting. The headache was in hour six of rearing its ugly head, though, and four cups of coffee hadn’t done a thing to help.

  The diner was buzzing like it always did during weekday lunch rush. She was doing all she could to keep up, but she wasn’t as young as the other waitresses. She’d heard ’em talk about her behind her back, but she was old enough to brush most of it off. She could still nail more orders than any of them could anyway, prissy little bitches. They wouldn’t do half as well as her when their tits were sagging and their asses barely fit in their jeans.

  She bumped an empty table mid-thigh as she passed, like it had just jumped out at her. She looked at it a little perplexed, and it blurred in her right eye. Not the left, just the right. Left was still clear. She tried to reach up to check her glasses, see if she’d gotten something on the lens, but her arms felt weak, like she couldn’t lift th
em.

  Her head was light, and she wondered if she could hear the blood rushing in her ears. She started to take another step, try to turn around to get back to the counter, but her legs faltered. The ground came rushing to her face, and she barely felt it when her cheek hit. The table she’d run into overturned, but she watched the whole thing like it was happening real far off.

  She saw faint figures over her head, but they were out of focus, blurry. She couldn’t move anymore. Not arms, not legs. Everything seemed to be drawing away.

  The ceiling above was all white, lit by the grey day, and it blurred, bit by bit, until that color was all that was left of her world.

  Everything else just faded away.

  * * *

  Gideon was out of his seat within seconds of her hitting the floor. It was so overwhelming, having her right there. It flooded his consciousness with the low buzz of what she was hearing, echoing as he heard it too. Her pain was sweet delight to him, all the better for his proximity. He got hard without prompting and jerked on the doorknob of the men’s room with enough force to fling it open.

  He could hear the cacophony of screams and cries behind him, the desperation of people unsure what to do next. Gideon knew there was no doctor that could save Linda Richards now, even if there had been one right there in the diner. She was past the point of saving, heading into death not twenty feet from where he was in the bathroom.

  He shouldered into a stall, almost too overcome to bother shoving the lock into position. He whipped his fly down and started beating off, short strokes as the woman’s last, dying senses came through to him in the bathroom.

  He could feel her breaths coming slowly, her body fighting for the last ones, rasping for them …

  His breaths came in short gasps, hand working up and down in regular rhythm …

  He smelled the aroma of burning meat on the griddle as she smelled it …

  He tried not to breathe, the pungency of the old building’s unclean toilet wafting up at him as he stroked his cock harder …

  The faint hum of people talking around her was like distant voices, whispering just out of sight …

  His breaths were heavy, in triumph, his essence threatening to explode out of his body the way he heard the heart pounding on some of those close to death …

  The bitter taste in her mouth was like acid working its way up from her last meal …

  He could taste the desire for it to finish, to come, to cum, to explode. It built inside, throbbing in his body. He looked down and could see through her eyes for one last second, the light fading into black. He stopped the movement of his hand and the shell of a penis ejaculated. It shot black fluid that spattered the white tiles, simmering as it hit. Drops fell on the toilet seat and sizzled, fell into the water and smoke wafted out.

  He tried to control his breath, the steady, hard intakes of air that were just pumped into his essence and came back out again. It was pointless; he didn’t need oxygen, but his shell made him breathe like a human, make the noise, take in the breaths, and his excitement caused it to speed up.

  Gideon tilted his head back. He was still hard, still dripping. The sound of a drop spattering on the floor hissed and he shook his cock, trying to get the remainder in the toilet. He’d give it a few minutes, make sure it was all out before he put it back in his shorts.

  In the distance, somewhere beyond the stall, he could hear the sirens coming. The sound made him hard again, and he took himself in hand and started to stroke up and down once more to the memory of what had just happened.

  * * *

  Erin was soaked in spite of her raincoat, drenched to the skin and surprisingly chilly for a summer’s day. The summer had turned cold. Or maybe it was just what they’d found that morning.

  Reeve called them all together inside the entry hallway of the Hughes house once they’d finished searching the street. They’d found one more house in the line that was filled with remains. This one was a house of bones, too, not a slaughterhouse like Corey Hughes’s place. It still reeked, and she could smell it on herself through the plastic coat.

  Or maybe it was just the smell of the Hughes house.

  “This is fucking unbelievable,” Reeve said as a member of the crime scene unit from Chattanooga went past them in a suit that was designed to keep the contamination of the crime scene to a minimum. Reeve seemed not to notice the stink eye that the guy gave them. “We’ve had more murders in this town in the last week and half than we’ve had in the entire time I’ve been alive.” His voice quivered, his eyes were turned down in hard lines. “I’d give you all the ‘not on my watch’ speech, but the goddamned horse has already left the barn on this motherfucker, so instead I’m going to give you the ‘find this cocksucker and let’s pin their asscheeks to the wall’ speech.”

  Erin looked over at Arch; he seemed desperately uncomfortable, like someone had put itching powder in his uniform. He shifted left and right, unable to keep himself still while Reeve was talking. She, on the other hand, felt no desire to do anything other than stand there frozen.

  More dead than she could count. No clues. No sign of who could have even done such a monstrous thing.

  “I want suspects,” Reeve said.

  “No one saw anything,” Fries said with a shrug of his massive frame, jowls shaking as he turned his head.

  “Don’t give me that shit. Someone saw something,” Reeve said, and put a finger up, pointing it Fries. “Something. A car. A person walking down the sidewalk. You can’t tell me there’s not some busybody in this neighborhood that didn’t hear something.” He turned and pointed toward the back of the house, where Corey Hughes was laid out. “You can’t tell me he died without screaming while whoever did that to him … did it.”

  Erin had seen a bloody rag in Corey Hughes’s empty, gaping cavity, and suspected he’d been gagged to keep him from making any noise while he was eaten alive or vivisected or whatever had happened happened. She’d seen similar rags in the other houses

  It wasn’t something she felt compelled to mention right now, though.

  “I want suspects,” Reeve said, a fury lighting his eyes. “We got a lot of new people in town lately.” He turned to Arch. “What about that cowboy?”

  Arch looked a little stunned. “He was with me last night until about nine.”

  Reeve leaned forward, eyes alight, jaw stuck out. “And after that?”

  Shit. Erin coughed, and four sets of eyes came to her. “He was with me,” she muttered.

  “He’s just an example,” Reeve said. “Anyone else notice we got a shit ton of tourists in the last couple weeks?”

  “Diner’s been fuller than usual,” Reines said, running a finger over his soul patch. “Thought maybe it was tourists.”

  “Tourists don’t come to Calhoun County during summer,” Erin said. It was true. They came during hunting season, hoping to get one of the wide-bodied bucks with a big rack that lurked up in the national forest around Mt. Horeb. “Not a damned thing to do here except hike, and most tourists go to the Appalachian trail for that.”

  “Well, there’s sure as shit a lot of strangers here,” Reeve said and pointed out the door, where the rain was still coming down. Erin could hear it on the roof. “And they ain’t here for the weather right now.”

  “Maybe they’re from England,” Fries said with a low chuckle. His smile disappeared when everyone looked at him. “Sorry.”

  “Start shaking the trees,” Reeve said. “Question everybody. Stop any cars that look suspicious.”

  “What if it’s a local doing this?” Arch asked, and every head swiveled toward him. Erin had to blink a couple times.

  “That’s crazy,” Reeve said. “We know everyone around here, and you’d think if someone was going to go around and completely eviscerate random people, we’d have had a hint of it before now—”

  “Maybe not,” Arch said, and Erin could tell he was holding his ground. His back was straight, his whole body was stiff. “Think of how many
farmers we have around here. Serial killers often start with animals. Someone could have been practicing for years.”

  “What the hell are you saying, Arch?” Reeve was looking at him with narrowed eyes.

  “I’m saying it could be anyone, so singling out strangers is kind of a futile strategy.” Arch folded his arms, and Erin could tell by his posture he was done.

  Reeve seemed to chew on this for a moment, looking at Arch in disbelief, like he wanted to say something but was holding back for some reason. Erin suspected it was because of race. If Arch had been a white deputy of the same age, Reeve would have taken his head off right then and there, called him stupid—to put it mildly. The problem was, the more Erin thought about it, Arch was right. She said as much.

  “Corey Hughes looked like he’d been slaughtered, right?” she asked, and Reeve’s red face turned to look at her, his eyes smoldering with rage. “Arch is right. We could have had a farmer ripping up his animals for years to practice up for this. It could be someone from here in Midian, or just the county. Or it could be someone from a neighboring county. Could be a total stranger from Colorado for all we know.”

  “Why Colorado?” Fries asked, his jowled face scrunched up.

  “Just picking somewhere at random,” she said. “Point is, we don’t even know what we’re looking for. This fucker, whoever he is, slaughtered three houses full of people. If he’s some kind of cannibalistic sonofabitch and came for the meat—and the bones being picked clean mean he probably did—he’s got a whole freezerful of it now, and we may not see him again for a while.”

  “Y’all been watching too many serial killer movies,” Reeve pronounced, running a hand over his bald head. His face was lessening in its redness, expression softening. “I just can’t believe anyone in Calhoun County would do something like this … this … atrocity.” He said the word atrocity like it was worse than any curse he could have breathed. And since Erin had heard him casually throw out the c-word, he knew some pretty bad curses.