They waited in the circle until Reeve spoke again. “All right, fine. Maybe it is someone local. We need to keep an eye out for anything suspicious. We should troll through town on patrol at night, make our presence known. I want a light shined on every house. People are gonna go ape shit when they find out about this.” He breathed out, almost sounded like he wanted to spit. “They may even send the news trucks from Chattanooga to cover this mess. This shit just doesn’t happen around here.”
“You know people are gonna be asking questions,” Erin said.
“Yeah,” Reeve said and ran his hand over his slick head again. “You’re gonna be our department’s official communications coordinator.”
Bullshit, is what she thought, but caught herself before she said it. “That’s not in my job description, and I’d be terrible at it.” She saw him start to argue at the first part of it then deflated at the second half. Reeve knew she was a shitty liar. Couldn’t keep a straight face during a poker hand for anything, they’d discovered that at the last department Christmas party. And that was without even any booze running through her.
“Yeah, you’re right, dodging press questions ain’t your forte,” Reeve seemed to give it some thought. “Well, I’ll have the wife handle it, maybe funnel the really important ones to me.” He looked up at her. “I’ll need you on patrol, then, helping pick up some of the slack.”
She felt the rise of excitement. “I’ll need a car.”
Reeve scowled. “You can use mine. For now,” he hastened to add.
“You need me to leave my keys behind so you’ve got something to drive?” Erin felt the rush of near-giddiness. Finally. One of the team, doing something other than answering phones, filing bullshit paperwork, managing time cards and fetching coffee.
“Uh …” Reeve looked a little red in the face now, but for a different reason. “Nah, that’s okay. I’ll borrow my wife’s car if I need to get around.”
And he was calling her car a piece of shit. She sighed. At least she was moving up.
* * *
Arch hit the street as soon as Reeve was done with his inspirational talk. The direction he got out of it was basically to catch the guy responsible and keep an eye—and a lid—on things. There wasn’t much more they could do, really, other than pull over anyone acting suspicious and look out for broken windows and such. It wasn’t like they could go house to house, even in Midian. There were something like ten thousand people in the burg and surrounding area, after all, and that was a lot of doors to knock on. Even if they called in the cavalry and left the outlying areas of the county unpatrolled.
Which was a bad idea. Too much meth moving out there to leave it unobserved for long.
What he’d seen was still rattling in Arch’s head, and the new car smell didn’t come close to erasing the stink of what he’d gotten on him in those houses. He put the Explorer in gear and felt the pressure of the accelerator pedal as he pushed down. He took a breath and could almost taste the fetid, rotting smell in the back of his mouth. What he’d seen this morning was truly the sickest thing he’d ever seen.
He wanted to curse, but he didn’t allow himself to say any of the ones that would have counted. To him they’d have been as rotten and unwelcome on his tongue as the smell of that house was.
Demons.
It all came back to demons.
He steered the Explorer along the rain-drenched streets of Midian. When he hit Old Jackson Highway, he took a right toward the Interstate. He needed to talk to somebody. It was pressing on him, Alison not really saying anything lately. Not that she would have been the one to talk to about this, anyhow. Demons were something so fantastical it was probably beyond his wife’s comprehension.
There was no way in Arch’s mind that what he’d just seen had been caused by a human being. Sure, people had done things like that in the real world, that and worse, he would acknowledge. But to come to Midian now? When it had just become a mystical hotspot and demonic tourist attraction? Surely not a coincidence.
He blazed past the Sheriff’s Department office without even slowing down. He didn’t habitually speed, but he suspected he would today. He’d need to hurry if he was going to squeeze this conversation in before he got back on patrol. Reeve probably wouldn’t care where he was, so long as he was moving. Now wasn’t the time to get caught taking a long lunch, that much was certain.
But there was a serial killing demon wandering the streets of Midian, eating its way through the populace, and that meant Arch needed to take action of a different sort than his standard patrols would allow. He needed help. An expert.
As he pulled into the parking lot of the Sinbad motel, part of him wondered why an expert on demon hunting would be staying here, but dismissed the thought without putting much into it. The sandy brown exterior of the motel wasn’t much to look at and the inside was even worse, but it was almost all they had in this town. Almost.
* * *
Hendricks was lying on the bed, just savoring the pain that was racking him, when the knock came. He grunted and sighed, feeling his injuries come to him in an inventory as he rolled his way off the side of the bed into a crouching pose. He thought about answering with sword in hand, but it was daylight and unlikely that a demon was going to be attacking him now. He was more or less anonymous here, after all, having killed every demon he’d run across since coming to town.
Still, he pulled the chair his coat was resting on to within arm’s length of the door before he even looked out the peephole.
It was Arch. He opened the door a moment later, not bothering to throw on a shirt. The sheriff’s deputy made a low whistle that caused Hendricks to tilt an eyebrow at him. “You’re all bruised up,” the deputy explained.
“Though maybe you were admiring my physique,” Hendricks said with a half-hearted smile as he headed back to the bed. “What’s up?”
Arch’s joviality disappeared like it was written in marker erased off a whiteboard. “We got dead bodies.”
Hendricks cringed and not just from the pain. “Damn. Hazard of a hot spot, but I don’t imagine it’s ever easy to see people start turning up dead.”
“We’re not just talking normal dead,” Arch said, and he crossed over to stand by the table. “We’re talking eaten alive, nothing left but bones.”
Hendricks nodded. No wonder the cop was a little touchy. That’d do it, all right. “There’s a few strains of demons that like to eat human meat. How many dead?”
“Eight we know of,” Arch said. “They got a whole family in one house.”
Hendricks closed his functioning eye, racked his brain for what he knew. “They went from house to house?”
“Yep.”
“Hmmm, eating their prey, hitting all in a line,” Hendricks lay back on the bed and put his feet up. “Probably a pack of Tul’rore or a couple Spiegoth working in tandem.” He opened his eye and tilted his head to look at Arch. “They weren’t in the house when you got there?” Arch shook his head. “Probably the Spiegoth, then. They move around a lot, kinda strike a few targets of convenience, then they get lethargic for a while after that. Likely as not they’re gorged, and they’ll be under the radar for a few days.”
“So … what we do?” Arch asked. He was hanging on every word, Hendricks could see that.
Hendricks sniffed. His body smelled like the glue from adhesive bandages. He’d taped gauze over his eye, and the Plasticine smell of the adhesive hung heavy in his nose. “Well, we need to go hunting for their den. They’re likely to choose something warm and damp.” He looked toward the curtains, which were drawn, but he could still hear the rain outside and Arch was decked out in rain gear. “So, pretty much the whole area right now.”
“Storm drains are starting to overflow,” Arch said. “The Upper Caledonia River Valley is getting pretty wet. The reservoir up above Tallakeet Dam is probably pretty full at this point. That means the caves are probably beyond wet right now, probably getting to flooded. The water level is rising aroun
d here.”
Hendricks stared at him blankly. “So?” he asked.
“It means that typical underground hiding locations, if you’re talking about warm and damp, are out.” The big policeman seemed overly stiff while pointing that out, like he was annoyed at being called on his explanation.
“Warm and damp doesn’t mean underground,” Hendricks said with a smile. “Caves are too cool. They’d hang out in a swamp, more like. Or a greenhouse, if they could find one to their liking.” He glanced toward the closed curtains again, as though he expected them to be open or he could magically see through them. “The rain dropping the temperature?”
“Some,” Arch conceded. “Probably low eighties.”
“Yeah,” Hendricks said, “they’ll want somewhere hotter than the woods right now, then.” He paused. “If it is Spiegoth.”
“What do we do?” Arch asked.
“Come back when you’re off work,” Hendricks said, stretching on the bed. “Hopefully I’ll be a little more mobile by then, because right now I’m having a time convincing myself to even go to the bathroom. Almost led to a tragic bed-wetting incident earlier.”
“I probably won’t be done until late tonight,” Arch said, and Hendricks watched the deputy’s face sag. “Reeve will keep us on until late. Probably even institute some overtime because of this, which …” he flattened his lips and blew air between them, “… I always wondered what it would take.”
“Okay, well,” Hendricks said, trying to think it through, “I’m not gonna make it far without a car, not in this condition. Maybe we can go on your patrol together?”
Arch’s face got rocky. “Probably not. If Reeve catches you riding along with me on a patrol right now, he’ll throw a fit.” Hendricks waited for the explanation and it came along shortly. “He thinks it’s an out-of-towner that did this.”
“Probably was,” Hendricks said, trying not to take umbrage at the thought of a small-town sheriff taking aim on him or someone like him with an accusation like that. “But not a human out-of-towner.”
“I tried to get him to look at everybody,” Arch said. “Not get so myopic. Figured maybe if he’d broaden his search a little bit it might give him more opportunity to run up some blind alleys while we try and track down the real culprits, reduce ’em to a sulfur stink.”
“Which leaves your cannibal serial killer murders unsolved. Might not be a bad thing,” Hendricks said, focusing on the mauve/taupe wallpaper as he pondered it, “having people extra vigilant for a while. After all, depending on how long this hotspot lasts, they could be in for a lot nastier things than demons that want to eat them alive.”
Arch’s face twitched. “Worse? Worse than this? How?”
Hendricks told him. The big black lawman looked kinda pale when he was done.
* * *
Gideon walked through the rain, his skin still feeling like it was on fire, flush with heat of what he’d just seen. What he’d just done. It had been so close, so delicious. The cold rain battering him, soaking his t-shirt and cargo pants and chilling his skin, was easily ignored.
The taste of her death was just lingering on his tongue, like he’d gone out there and just licked her right in the middle of it. He could feel himself get hard as he walked, and he didn’t care. That made it even hotter somehow. Being that close to the death drove the sensuality factor through the roof. He imagined himself walking out in the middle of the diner while it was happening. Fulfilling himself right there, his jizz spattering the checkered tablecloths and burning through them, smoke wafting in the air.
It was a pleasant fantasy, but that was all it was. The damp, humid air filled his nose as he walked over the highway bridge. Cars rushed past in the rain below, the noise of tires on a slick road reaching him far above. He looked over the side and wondered what it would be like to—
He’d forgotten his car at the diner. He looked back and could see it over there, the rental waiting in the parking lot. It was such a simple thing to drive a car, but he’d been so distracted he’d forgotten about it.
Gideon stopped and looked down to the interstate again. The traffic flow was steady. Semis raced past, minivans and cars in their wake. It was afternoon, and he’d seen the traffic level rise in the mornings with rush hour and in the evening as well. They were right there, traveling along at seventy miles per hour, a hundred lives a minute. So close he could reach out and touch them.
Almost.
A smile creased his face and he stared off the bridge then looked around. Cars were coming by only occasionally on the overpass. He had an idea. A solid idea, a good one. It maybe pushed the boundaries of what his kind normally did, but there weren’t any real rules, right?
It wasn’t like he was the first to cross this particular boundary, after all. He’d just never needed to in places like Chicago, or before that, Detroit. There were plenty of dead coming all the time in those places. Like New York in the seventies and eighties, before it got cleaned up. That had been like heaven. A handful of murders every day, plus all the deaths of natural causes. Now it was dried up and he was lucky to get one good kill per day. Chicago had been a boon for his kind the last few years. And it wasn’t played out, but he’d fell the draw of the hotspot. Got sick of the snow, the summer, the streets.
The call of the hotspot promised something more. The Tul’rore that had blown into town after him seemed like they were going to deliver, too. It was entirely possible that other demons would come in, step things up, and turn it into a paradise like Chicago for a while, now that the Tul’rore were gone.
But until then, he was high and dry.
Watching Linda Richards die from a room away was a joy, and it had awakened in him a desire to experience it again. It was getting compulsive, and he wanted to reach down and take himself in hand, relive it—his most intense climax yet.
The rain kept coming down, though, and even though there was no traffic on the overpass, he knew better than to do it here. He didn’t want trouble. Not the obvious kind, anyway.
It’d interfere with the plan he’d just crafted.
Gideon walked on, heading back to the Sinbad, back to his room. He’d go back to the diner and get the rental later. He’d need it around five o’clock.
A loud crack of thunder startled him, and he looked up. The rain was coming down in sheets, and the sky looked almost black to the east. Good. That’d be in his favor if it kept up like this.
He was so gleeful about his plan, about what was on his mind, that he almost didn’t notice the Crown Vic with the sheriff’s markings sitting just outside the Sinbad’s parking lot. He tried not to be too obvious as he walked by, but he caught a glimpse of a blond woman watching the front of the motel. There was a sheriff’s department Explorer parked in a space just outside his room, and Gideon started to get very, very nervous.
* * *
Erin was watching Hendricks’s door. She hadn’t followed Arch here because she’d made it away from the crime scene about ten minutes after he did, but she’d ended up in the same place as him, sure enough. She was just sitting outside the Sinbad’s parking lot, waiting to see if he came out.
She asked herself again what the hell was going on, but no answer really came beyond the obvious. They were probably just talking about something or other. But what? It wasn’t like Arch had run out here to tell Hendricks about her big promotion. Hell, she didn’t even know exactly why she’d run out here to do it.
Okay, that was a lie. She’d driven out here because her BFF had left town before the curtain had even fallen on their graduation, and she’d done the slow draw away in the year since. Frequent texts became less frequent until they never really came at all anymore, and Erin had been left palling around with the other townies or her coworkers. None of them were really close. More like drinking buddies. Occasional fuck buddies, maybe. Very occasionally, lately.
Hendricks was the first thing to show up in a long time that had interrupted her monotony. This temporary field promotion
or whatever was the second. Two breaths of fresh air in a stale town she had gotten a little bored of. So she was pissed at him for being all mysterious.
He was still the only person she could think of that she was actually excited to share this with.
What the hell was Arch doing in there? Why did he leave the scene of the most heinous murder in Calhoun County history and head immediately for a seedy motel to talk to a guy he had just professed not to know all that well?
Erin ran a hand over her face as the rain-streaked window of the Crown Vic blurred in front of her. What the hell was she doing here, anyway? Hendricks was just a guy she’d met less than two weeks ago. A guy she’d made some exceedingly stupid decisions with.
Still, she didn’t put the car in drive and leave. She just sat there in the rain, watching the door to the motel, waiting to see if it would open.
* * *
Gideon circled around to the other side of the street where a gas station was damned near abandoned. He pushed in through the door and took a quick look around. Bored clerk behind the counter, not a patron in sight, no one filling up out at the pumps. The place smelled a little of mildew and the carpet squished faintly as he walked in. He went over to the candy, picked up something at random and went to pay for it. All the while he was watching the motel to see what the cop was up to.
She was just sitting there. He couldn’t be sure from this distance, but it looked like she was watching the place. Maybe she was just watching the other cop car. Or maybe she was watching for him.
His mind reeled. What could they possibly be after him for? He hadn’t committed any crimes, at least none anyone knew about. It seemed unlikely they’d already be on him for masturbating in the diner bathroom, even if someone had seen him. Besides, the cops hadn’t even showed up to the diner, just the paramedics.
Depths: Southern Watch #2 Page 8