Depths: Southern Watch #2

by Crane, Robert J.

  “What about you?” Hendricks asked, steeling his voice, trying to keep it even. “What do you do with humans for fun?”

  Boston took a step closer and peered down at him. His expression was almost totally cold, blank. “I don’t have fun with humans. I tolerate humans. I go around humans. Avoid them. Try to ignore them when they inconvenience me.” He knelt, and Hendricks noticed for the first time he was wearing some cheap looking loafers that were caked with mud. “Right now, you’re inconveniencing me.”

  “I’ve told you what I know,” Hendricks said, and held his hands up, still cuffed. “You can believe me or not, but I don’t know that much about the redhead.”

  Boston narrowed his eyes at him. They became slits then glowed red with a dark fire. “Do you know her name?”

  Hendricks felt himself tense. Unless his handcuffs were blessed by a holy man of some kind, they wouldn’t do any damage to a demon. What was in a name, anyway? “She calls herself Starling. That’s all she ever told me.”

  Boston settled back, then stood, looking down at him, his face bunched up pensively. The fire in his eyes was gone. “Starling? Like the bird?”

  Hendricks shrugged. “That’s what she said.”

  “Duncan?” Boston asked, turning to face his partner. Hendricks watched Duncan, who was still staring off into the forest.

  “He’s telling the truth,” Duncan said.

  “Well, okay then,” Boston said and reached out for Hendricks in a flash, pulling him to his feet. “I guess we’re almost done here.”

  Hendricks heard that and took note. “Oh, yeah?” Boston was way too casual about this. He braced himself to run for the woods.

  “Yeah,” Boston said and promptly hit Hendricks in the kidney, doubling him over. “Almost done.”

  Hendricks hit the ground and looked up. Boston stood over him and now so did Duncan. They were flanking him, and his back hurt like Boston had used a battering ram to bust him open. Hendricks just lay there, looking up at the two of them, as they both reached down for him, blotting out his view of the tree branches above.

  Chapter 12

  Gideon had tried to put it all together, tried damned hard. Well, he’d done the research anyway. Ammonia-based fertilizer bombs had sounded easy when he’d looked them up, but then things got complicated fast. Some of the materials would require serious effort to get hold of. And they assumed he’d be able to make a functional bomb out of everything once he was done, which was a big if.

  It took him until nearly two a.m. to settle on what he was doing wrong. He was thinking like a human.

  And he was not a human. He was better.

  The rental car bumped along down a dirt road. He’d had to do a little searching to find what he was looking for, but he’d found it. The web was really a boon for their kind, if you knew what to look for. Need a live human delivered to your apartment in New York for fresh meat? There was a service for that. Funerary rites for a Du’clen’tau demon? All on a webpage, indexed somewhere on a server in the Ukraine for viewing anywhere that Wifi or 4G could reach.

  And if you needed the services of a few of demonkind’s more … elusive and mysterious purveyors, they were there, too. Fortunately for Gideon, some of them liked to follow the hotspots. And updated their web pages accordingly. Or blog, in this case.

  The car smelled new, clean, like a rental should. The last one he’d ditched it wasn’t smelling so good by the end. This one was blowing mildly warm air, which worked for Gideon because he was still in cargo pants and a t-shirt. He was starting to stink, he knew it. A few days of fevered pleasuring without a shower would do that, and he certainly hadn’t had time for a shower.

  No, he had plotting and scheming to do. Research. Shit to think up. Plans to execute.

  He pulled off the road when he saw the mailbox. It was painted red, blending in with the flag that was on its side. It felt wrong somehow, like it was some sort of violation of USPS code, but Gideon just shrugged and turned because that’s what the website said to do.

  He felt the rutted road pitch the car, felt the heat blowing out of the vents on his face, smelled his own stink and the rental car’s cleanliness mix in some perverse blend. He touched himself quickly, just a goose to remind him of what this was all about. Oh, yeah. He was hard again already.

  He stopped behind a green pickup truck that looked almost black in the dark night. A porch light was the only thing illuminating the scene. Gideon pulled the keys out of the ignition and took another breath of himself before he got out. He kind of liked it.

  His shoes squished in the mud and gravel of the road. This looked like it was on higher ground than most of the roads he’d seen. Lots of standing water after the rains. That was good. Lots of ground saturation.

  He headed for the door to the house. It was painted red, too, and when he knocked—four times—he heard a voice within.

  “Enter.”

  It was almost a whisper, but it resonated inside, touched his essence. He paused and let that feeling linger. It was like someone had run fingers over his deepest insides. It was not something that was done to strangers casually; it was awfully forward.

  Gideon liked it. He took hold of the old copper handle and opened the door. What he saw inside made his head spin.

  * * *

  “What are you gonna do?” Alison’s soft voice wafted over Arch with a seriousness that he still wasn’t used to. She could pout with the best of them when she wanted, but she was a mostly chipper person. He tried not to let her change in personality get to him, even as he sat back on the couch next to her, sinking into the corduroy monstrosity. Her parents had gotten it for them when they’d moved into the apartment.

  “I don’t know,” Arch said, leaning his head back and feeling the faint lines of the fabric against the back of his neck. He ran a hand over his short hair, then down the bristly stubble on his cheek.

  “Are you coming to bed?” She asked this with as little interest as she asked anything else, but his ears perked up and listened for hints of something—anything—from her. Interest. Anything to hint she might be the same person who was so anxious to have a baby with him only two weeks ago.

  “Not yet,” he said. There was some pull in him to keep him from answering the way he knew he should, the way he wanted to deep inside. Some stubborn refusal to acknowledge that he maybe needed to bend toward her, even a little. His breath caught in his throat before he spoke. “I just … I think I’ll stay up a little longer.”

  “All right,” she said in a rough whisper. She stood and walked past him, pausing only to reach down and kiss him on the forehead. It was quick, perfunctory, and nothing but silence followed after it.

  * * *

  Hendricks was in the back seat again, now with his hands uncuffed. The last few minutes had been strange. He was sitting upright now, in the middle of the seat, his coat on the floorboard.

  “What do they call these handles?” This from Boston, whose actual name, he had found out after he’d introduced himself and helped Hendricks out of the mud, was Lerner. Lerner pointed at the handle hanging next to Duncan’s head. “You know, the ones on the roof of a car by the door. Lunkhead here doesn’t know.” Lerner waved at Duncan.

  “I don’t know their technical name,” Hendricks said carefully. He was still walking on eggshells with these two, in spite of the sudden shift in their demeanor toward affable. “But I’ve always heard them called ‘Oh shit’ bars.”

  “‘Oh shit bar’?” Lerner frowned and glanced back at him. They were heading back toward town, Hendricks thought, but he wasn’t sure.

  “Yeah,” Hendricks said, staring back at Lerner. “Cuz when you need them it’s usually at a moment when you’re saying, ‘Oh shit.’”

  “Ha!” Lerner’s laugh was a bark. Hendricks looked at Duncan, but he was silent, staring into the windshield. Hendricks was ready to write him off as fucking weird, but he had said something about Hendricks telling the truth about Starling. That was interesting.
If he was a mind reader—

  “Yes,” Duncan said. “Not really mind, though. Essence reading.”

  “Bullshit,” Hendricks blurted. Couldn’t help himself. He had to think back, try and figure out if he’d been talking out loud.

  “No,” Duncan said. “You weren’t speaking aloud. But everything you were thinking was written all over your soul.”

  Hendricks tried not to roll his eyes, but he didn’t try very hard. “Whatever, man. I could accept you could read minds somehow. Souls are kind of a different story.”

  “Oh, now this is an interesting discussion we could have,” Lerner chimed in. “About the immortal soul—”

  “He’s an atheist,” Duncan said nonchalantly, like he’d just mentioned what he was having for dinner.

  “Really?” Lerner said, and his face got flat around the mouth, like he was impressed or something. “Don’t meet a lot of demon hunters that aren’t of the faithful.” He looked over his shoulder into the back seat. “What was it that brought you into the field?”

  Hendricks glanced at Duncan, who looked back at him. The man’s face was blank, but his eyes were peering right into Hendricks. “Personal tragedy,” Hendricks said, knowing he sounded tense. He waited to see if Duncan would elaborate, but the demon said nothing.

  “Met a few people in it for that reason,” Lerner said, but he was back to the wheel now. “But usually they go toe-to-toe with a few demons and get religious real quick.”

  Hendricks shrugged his shoulders. “Don’t know what to tell you. I’ve never believed in anything I can’t see some scientific proof of.”

  Lerner laughed and exchanged a look with Duncan. “That’s kind of funny, champ. How do you explain what you fight every day?”

  Hendricks smiled. “Just another species of animal. Different basis of life, obviously, since carbon-based lifeforms don’t go PFFFFFT when you stab them with a sword, but still a species of some kind. You can feel ’em, see ’em—”

  “Not all,” Duncan said.

  “—smell ’em, hear ’em—” Hendricks went on, wondering a little what Duncan meant by that one.

  “You can taste ’em, too,” Lerner said with a smile and looked back at him again. “Though I don’t imagine you’ve probably done that. A little too up close and personal, especially for a guy who’s made this a vendetta.”

  “So, you’re demons,” Hendricks said. “And you’re here to …?”

  “Keep things quiet,” Lerner said, and now he was looking at the road again. Dark pastures and fences were passing them by outside the window. “Keep a lid on our peoples’ activities. Keep humanity from getting all uppity and rising against us.”

  Hendricks thought about that one for a minute. “You kill demons?”

  “I’ve let the brimstone out of more of ’em than you, sonny,” Lerner said, like he was some kind of snappy used car salesman getting pissy with Hendricks over his territory.

  “Humans?” Hendricks asked.

  “No,” Lerner said with a smile after a pause. “Most demons don’t kill humans, by the way. They keep their heads down, blend with your people, live their lives. Eat food, work jobs, have babies—”

  Hendricks blinked at that one. “Demons have babies?”

  “You’re a cute kid,” Lerner said, laughing. “Yeah, demons have babies. Some of them are cute, too. Some of them …” Lerner paused, “… not so much.”

  “So, what are you doing with me?” Hendricks asked, trying to bring things back around. He wasn’t sure he entirely believed Lerner when the man—demon—had said he didn’t kill humans, but he’d sounded convincing.

  “Asking questions,” Lerner said and then he sent a scalding look back at Hendricks, which was mirrored by Duncan. “And hitting you for probably banishing some of our kind without good cause.”

  Hendricks flinched. “Banishing?”

  “Yeah,” Lerner said. “You don’t think you’re actually killing them with that little pointy thing you swing around, do you?”

  * * *

  Erin was driving the patrol car around in circles. She’d been awake for close to twenty-four hours, and her vision was a little blurry at times. She pulled off and got a coffee at the all-night convenience station next to the interstate. Sat there for a while, drinking it in the parking lot with the car idling, watching the Sinbad motel.

  She told herself it was because she needed to drink the coffee before she could safely drive around some more, but even she knew that was a lie.

  * * *

  Lerner took a left onto the main road. The cowboy demon hunter was in the back seat, Duncan was silent next to him now, and he was happy as he could be. The cowboy didn’t seem bothered by his desire to talk, which was kind of like heaven—or some form of paradise, at least—after being stuck with Duncan’s annoyingly reticent ass for so long.

  “So if they’re not dead …” the cowboy said from the back seat.

  “Back to the underworld,” Lerner said. He wasn’t a stupid one, fortunately. “Suffering down there together with their own kind. Probably trying to find a way back, which is … problematic.”

  “Why is that?” The cowboy asked.

  “You don’t need to know,” Duncan said, breaking his silence. Lerner looked over at Duncan, who was giving him the side-eye. It was annoyance combined with a dose of shut-the-fuck-up.

  “So what are you doing here?” the cowboy asked after a moment’s silence. Persistent, too.

  “Keeping things on the level,” Lerner said, letting the sedan glide smoothly along the highway. Much better than the bumpy dirt back roads. He cracked a window and listened to the rush, the cool night air catching him in the face. It had that damp, post-rain smell to it. Lovely. “Keeping our kind from crossing too many lines. I don’t know how many hotspots you’ve seen—”

  “I’ve been doing this for a while,” the cowboy said. What was his name again? Hendricks, yeah.

  “About five years,” Duncan added helpfully.

  “So you’ve seen a few,” Lerner said. “But you’ve missed the really bad ones. The ones that vanish off the map. To say nothing of the places that aren’t hotspots that just get hit with a wave of demon activity. Someone hangs out a shingle, says, ‘Hey, we’re open for demon business!’ And it’s a mad rush. Lost a town in Serbia like that last year. Ugly mess. Entrails everywhere.” Lerner shook his head. It had been gruesome; he and Duncan got to bat cleanup on that one. And cleaning up had been all that was left when a family of M’r’kirresh had been done.

  “So, you’re demon hunters, too,” Hendricks said. Lerner felt himself crack a smile. Yeah, talking to this human was all right.

  “We’re lawmen,” Lerner said.

  “Law-demons?” Hendricks asked.

  “Whatever,” Lerner said, shrugging. He didn’t get caught up in semantics like that. He had the male pieces, after all, even if they didn’t really get used. “We enforce the Pact, which set forth Occultic law on earth to govern everything non-human. Keep things from getting too heavy, make sure that when stuff gets out of control and loud somewhere, it gets stopped as quick as we can make it happen.”

  There was a silence in the back seat. “So you’re … I hate to use this term … kind of like … ‘good guys.’”

  Lerner sighed. “I hate that phrase, too. It shows such a lack of subtlety. Of complex thinking. So I’m ‘good’ just because I don’t murder humans?”

  “I don’t …” Hendricks was quiet for a moment. “It doesn’t make you bad, I don’t think.”

  Lerner shrugged. “I turn my back on the killings of humans every day, did you know that? If they happen in small batches, I remain unconcerned. My job is to stop the big ones, the ones that get attention.” He grinned and turned back to the cowboy, who wore a little bit of a sick look now. “Am I still a ‘good guy’?”

  “Probably not,” Hendricks said, and Lerner could hear the distaste.

  “But you do the same thing every day,” Lerner said, and his grin was
just getting bigger. It was a such a joy to hammer home a rhetorical point. “Where was that place a few years ago where they had that ethnic cleansing?” He clicked his tongue. “South Sudan.” He snapped his fingers a couple times, like it could help him remember. “Darfur! Yeah, that was it.” He turned to the back seat. “Did you go to Darfur to help stop the slaughter?”

  The cowboy’s voice got quiet. “… No.”

  “Well, then welcome to the ‘bad guys’ team,” Lerner said with a grin, steering the car along. They were almost there, he knew as they passed a diner on the left.

  “I do what I can,” Hendricks said, and Lerner could hear the fire starting in his voice. “Going in, me—one man—against an army? Suicide. I go to hotspots and try and stop demons there—”

  “And kill some of them who have never hurt a human in their lives,” Lerner said. He was enjoying this. “Yep, you are a hell of a ‘good guy.’”

  There was a sigh from the cowboy. “Where are we going?”

  “Right here,” Duncan said, speaking up, as Lerner turned the car into the Sinbad Motel’s parking lot.

  “You drove me home?” Hendricks asked from the back seat, and Lerner could hear that the boy was more than a little perplexed.

  “As a good date should,” Lerner said with the same grin. “But actually, we’re not here for you. If we’d been heading the opposite direction, I would have left your ass on the side of the road.” He wondered if the cowboy thought he was kidding. He wasn’t.

  “Why are you here?” Hendricks asked, remaining still in the back seat even though they were now parked.

  “Now that is an interesting question,” Lerner said as he pulled the keys out of the ignition.

  * * *

  Erin had seen Hendricks’s cowboy hat in the back seat in profile as the sedan pulled into the Sinbad’s parking lot. She thought about driving over right then but held back. There were two guys in the car with him. She felt her hand tighten on the hot coffee cup, heard the Styrofoam crack a little before she slackened her grip.