Deep Down (Hallie Michaels)

by Deborah Coates

  Finally, she got back in the truck. Even if he was a reaper. Even if he could kill with a touch, there was a way to protect herself from Travis Hollowell. There had to be. Otherwise, she might as well give up right now.

  She drove from Uku-Weber to West Prairie City, ticking off on her fingers what she did and didn’t know. It didn’t take long. She was pretty sure she didn’t know more things than she did. She knew who Travis Hollowell was. She knew what he was—a reaper. She knew that he wanted something he thought Boyd could give him and he wanted to use her as leverage to get it from him. But why? What? What the hell did he actually want?

  He’d stalked and ultimately killed Boyd’s wife—been responsible for her death anyway. And he hadn’t been a reaper then. He’d been human. He’d died. And now he was back. A reaper. Who could kill anyone just by touching them.

  Besides that, he could create solid objects out of—what? All that death he left behind—grass and trees and birds. But, according to the dog, he didn’t have as much power as he thought he had? As he expected to have? How much more power could he draw? How would she stop him then?

  She thought she’d learned a lot back in September—ghosts and blood sacrifice and big magic that could control the weather. But this was all new, like starting over, except this time she was prepared, right? Or … if not prepared, at least willing to dive in and figure out what it all meant.

  When Hallie hit the outskirts of West Prairie City, the black dog reappeared. It didn’t say anything, like where it had gone, just curled up into a ball that seemed too small for its bulk, with one paw covering its nose and went to sleep—or at least appeared to.

  Hallie pulled into the parking lot of the hardware store on the west end of Main. Small broadleaf weeds grew in cracks in the concrete, and the storefront, once a bright red, had faded to something that might, perhaps, be described as pink. The glass door was propped open with a shiny black anvil and when Hallie crossed the threshold, she could smell seed corn, though it was the wrong time of year, and linseed oil.

  If the hex ring kept things out, then iron, she figured, could be a weapon. At least she hoped it could be. Hoped she’d have the chance to find out.

  “Like cabinet hardware?” the clerk said.

  “Is it made of iron?” Hallie asked.

  He scratched his head as if he wanted her to ask different questions, questions he had answers to. “Iron cabinet hardware? Nothing we have in the store right now,” he said. “But I can order something for you.”

  “What else do you have?” she asked.

  “Maybe if you tell me what you’re planning to do, I can suggest something suitable,” he said.

  “I just need iron,” she said. “Or maybe steel.” Because hadn’t her father said that the rails were high-iron steel? Not pure iron. But if that were the case, if anything with a little iron in it worked … “Excuse me,” she said to the bewildered clerk, left the store, and went back outside.

  “How are you here?” she asked the dog, who was still curled up on the seat as if it hadn’t moved so much as an ear while she was in the store.

  It raised its head. “Told you,” it said. “You’re interesting.” It drew out the “in” in “interesting” and hissed slightly on the s, like a long sigh.

  “I don’t mean why,” Hallie said. “I mean, how. How are you in this truck? How did you jump through that window? This truck is made of steel, right? Iron. Or from iron. Like the hex ring out at Pabby’s ranch.”

  “Not the same,” the dog said.

  “How is it not the same?” Hallie asked. “You can’t cross iron, right? You can’t cross the hex ring.”

  The dog stretched its neck so that its nose touched the steering wheel. Standing out here in the open made the back of Hallie’s neck itch. Because Hollowell could appear anywhere. At any time. As far as she knew. Which wasn’t very goddamned far. “Wrong question,” the dog finally said.

  “Wrong question?” This was maddening. “What the hell does that mean?”

  The dog rose, turned around three times, and lay back down.

  Hallie waited.

  Finally, it said, “Can’t cross pure iron. Yeah. Impure. Call it steel? This truck. Can cross.”

  “Then why can’t you cross Pabby’s hex ring?”

  “Sacrament,” it said, hissing the s. “And dead man’s blood.”

  “Really? Dead man’s blood?” Where the hell was she going to get that?

  “Ha,” the dog said, like a quick puff of breath.

  Hallie took a deep breath and thought about hitting something.

  Then, as if afternoon sun had pierced a dark cloud, she realized she’d been overthinking the whole thing, went back into the hardware store, and bought two iron fireplace pokers. Solid iron fireplace pokers. When she opened the driver’s door on the pickup with the fireplace pokers in her hand, the dog disappeared in a rush of cold wind.

  Hallie laughed. She put one of the pokers in the saddle box in the truck bed and set the other on the seat beside her.

  Before she could turn the key in the ignition, her phone rang.

  “Yeah?” she said.

  “Alice Michaels?” A woman’s voice, brisk and business-like.

  “Hallie,” Hallie said.

  “Are you acquainted with a Forest Buehl?”

  “Who are you?”

  “This is Jenna Jamison with the Templeton police. Forest Buehl appears to be missing.”

  “Missing?” She’d just seen him yesterday afternoon when she picked up the bearing kit.

  “Yes, ma’am. Ordinarily we wouldn’t be concerned, as it’s been less than twenty-four hours, but the ag supply was unlocked all night; the lights were left on. He never closed up and no one’s seen him.” She said all this in a quick rush, as if this was the biggest thing that had happened since she was hired in Templeton, which it probably was. She cleared her throat, and her voice dropped back to a brisk professional monotone. “We understand that you were one of the last people to see him.”

  “I was?”

  “That’s what we understand.”

  “I don’t know what I can tell you,” Hallie said. It seemed so removed from everything else in her life, from black dogs and reapers, from iron and blood.

  “Can you account for your movements yesterday afternoon?” Jenna Jamison asked.

  Hallie almost laughed. Because she’d been with Boyd out at the accident. “Yeah,” she said. “I’m pretty sure I can.”

  “We may ask you to come in and make a statement.”

  “Sure,” Hallie said. “If you think that will help. I hope you find him,” she added.

  “Me too,” Jenna Jamison said.

  12

  It was midafternoon when she got back to the ranch. Neither Lily, the black dog, nor Hollowell had reappeared. Hallie wished she knew whether the black had gotten rid of Hollowell permanently, hoped like hell it had. She went inside and changed and spent a couple of hours outside checking water troughs and taking hay to the horses. She’d found some old iron nails in the back room and stuffed them in her pocket before she went out, not sure they would help, but at least it was something. As far as she knew, Hollowell could pretty much appear anywhere, and she had no intention of huddling inside until he did.

  It was nearly four when she got back to the house, her face red from the dropping temperature and the steady wind. The air felt dry, but she wondered if they might get snow tonight. Seemed about time. She parked the ATV behind the horse barn, covered the seat with a plastic garbage bag in case there was snow, and was walking up to the house when she heard a big truck coming slowly up the drive, heard it pause, drop down into a lower gear, and continue.

  Hallie stood at the edge of the yard and waited. Lily’s ghost reappeared and drifted cold off Hallie’s left shoulder. Too late—the truck was already pulling into the yard—Hallie realized she should have grabbed the iron poker. It couldn’t be Hollowell, though. Because why would he need a truck?

  In
the flat light of a late fall afternoon, Laddie Kennedy climbed down from the cab. A red and white border collie bounded after him. It ran over to Hallie, barked once at her, then ran back and circled Laddie’s legs three times before settling with an eager expression under the bare pin oaks at the corner of the yard. The truck was an old medium-sized cattle truck with wooden sides. Hallie could hear thumps, the soft clatter of hooves, breath huffed out. She could smell the cattle too—manure and grain and damp straw.

  “You didn’t waste any time,” Hallie said.

  Laddie shrugged and gave her a thin smile. “I ran them over to the Packer place this summer.” He walked to the back of the truck and began loosening the pins holding the door in place.

  “The Packers don’t actually own that ranch anymore,” Hallie felt compelled to point out.

  “Yeah.” Laddie dropped one pin and crossed to the other side to drop the other one. “That’s what that deputy told me. Not that I didn’t know. Everyone knew. Just didn’t figure anyone cared. Promised I’d get them out this week. Thought I was going to have to sell them off. Take what I could get.” He started walking back the door, which would serve as a ramp for the cattle once it had been dropped. “It’s only ten head. Not much. They’ve all been bred, though.” He looked pleased. “Should calve in the spring. Everything goes good, I can sell the calves in the fall. Buy a few more. Work back up.”

  Laddie stepped up into the truck. Hallie heard the storm door’s muffled slap, and before Laddie had the cattle turned and headed down the ramp, her father was there. No one said anything. The little red and white border collie harried the cattle up the lane, past the horse barn and pasture to the big grazing area just beyond. Hallie jogged ahead to unhook the single-strand electric gate. Laddie, her father, and the border collie moved them through. Fencing didn’t enclose the entire grazing area, but it kept the cattle out of the lane, the yard, and the area around the house.

  “We’ll keep them down here for the winter,” Hallie’s father said when they were finished. He lifted his cap off his head and settled it back on.

  “I’ll haul hay tomorrow,” Laddie said. “I appreciate you letting them run here.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Hallie’s father told him.

  They stayed for a while as dusk settled over them and watched the cattle spread out and begin to graze. Ten head of cattle looked like nothing against the flat grassy land stretching to the horizon. Halfway back up the lane, Hallie’s father turned off to the horse barn. A few minutes later, she saw light seeping through the cracks in the wall.

  “I have a couple more things,” she said to Laddie as they approached his truck. “Questions. Can you ask?”

  Laddie swiped a hand across his forehead. When they reached the truck, he leaned sideways against the front bumper and crossed his arms. “You know it’s not simple, right? Sometimes there’s no one to talk to. Sometimes they don’t tell me anything.”

  Hallie took a couple of steps away, turned back, jammed her hands in her jacket pocket, and said, “Have you always been able to do it? Talk to the dead, tell the future?”

  It was a minute before Laddie answered. “I don’t even really know if I can tell the future,” he said. “It doesn’t really feel like I can. It’s just … sometimes I’m right, you know? As for the other—” He turned so his back was against the hood of the truck and looked across the concrete slab that would be the new equipment shed. “All’s I ever wanted to do,” he said, “was run cattle. Maybe grow a little sorghum on the side. But I figured I’d see the world first, set aside a little money. Ended up in the Gulf War—you know, the first one.”

  Hallie sucked in a breath, but before she could say anything, Laddie continued. “I didn’t die or anything. I didn’t even really see much action. I drove the big trucks. Hot and dirty and I never got enough sleep, but I only ever got shot at once. Naw, it was when I was on leave. In Belgium, which you wouldn’t think anything strange would happen there. You ever hear of anything strange happening in Belgium?” He didn’t wait for her to answer. “No, me neither. But I was out with my buddies. We were at some carnival thing. They told me I should get my fortune told. I didn’t believe in it, you understand. No one believes in that stuff.”

  He adjusted the faded blue baseball cap on his head. The sun sat on the horizon, big and faintly red. “I’d asked Kari to marry me in email a couple of days before and I wanted someone to tell me yes—that she’d say yes, even if they didn’t know, even if it wasn’t true. So I go in this little booth and the rest of the guys are outside, laughing. We’d had a lot of beer and the whole night seemed kind of super real and fuzzed around the edges at the same time. The fortune-teller … she was young or, she looked young—blond hair and dark eyes, thin like she never ate anything. She asked me a bunch of questions. I figured it was so she could ‘tell’ my fortune, you know.

  “‘You’ve got a little,’ she said. And I had no idea what she meant, but I think it was about the cards, because I could always do the thing with the cards—lay them out and make up something that might or might not be true. She took a drawstring bag out of a drawer, said, ‘I’m sorry,’ and handed it to me.” He reached into his shirt pocket and took out something that looked like a large marble. Hallie couldn’t see it very clearly in the fading light, but it looked like the colors inside moved on their own, like thin clouds in a darker sky. “It was like grabbing lightning,” he said, “or a bad wire. It knocked me flat. When I woke up, she was gone and I could hear ’em.”

  “The dead.”

  “I didn’t know that then, but, yeah. I tried to get rid of it. I’d toss it in the trash and it would be back in my pocket the next morning. I tried to give it away to this homeless guy, which I felt bad about after, but it didn’t matter, because it just came back.” He pushed himself away from the truck and slipped the marble or whatever it was back into his pocket. “So, yeah,” he said, “it is what it is. You got questions for me? I’ll do the best I can.”

  “Why you?” Hallie asked.

  “I got no idea.” He laughed. “But if I ever figure it out, I’m getting rid of this thing. I’d like to say it cost me my ranch or my marriage, but it didn’t. I’d have lost those anyway. I just don’t want it. I want the world back like I thought it was.”

  Hallie could understand that. She’d wanted that for a while too. But it wasn’t something she could give to him or that she figured he could ever really have. Instead, she told him what she wanted—more information about reapers and particularly what their weaknesses were, whether the dead knew anything about what the black dog had said—that things were changing.

  “Sometimes they want a price,” Laddie said when she was finished.

  “Like what?” Hallie asked.

  “Doesn’t matter. It’s a mistake to give them anything. Never ever give them anything.” His voice had a developed a distinct edge.

  “Thanks,” Hallie said.

  “Yeah.” Laddie whistled up the border collie, who’d been poking at the old yellow dog, trying to get him to play. He opened the door of the truck. The border collie jumped in. Laddie turned back to Hallie. “Mostly, you know, people come by, they want to know if someone’s going to fall in love with them or if they can talk to someone who just died. Sometimes they just want to know if the price of corn is going down. I don’t know what you’re doing.” He raised a hand. “And I don’t want to know. But it sure is a change.”

  She thought she heard him laugh as he climbed into the cab.

  13

  A breeze rose out of the west and rustled dry leaves along the edge of the yard. Hallie decided to walk the quarter mile down the drive and see if Jake had come back to pick up his car. The beginnings of a low cloud cover sat along the western horizon, just beneath the setting sun, heavy and dark, but narrow, like a thin band of winter storm.

  It took Hallie less than ten minutes to hit the end of the drive, Jake’s car another hundred yards east. Still there. Hallie pulled her cell p
hone out of her pocket. She didn’t have Jake’s number, but she called Big Dog’s Auto on the chance that Tom would still be there. He answered on the second ring.

  “Well, goddamnit,” he said when she told him why she was calling. “You know, I tried to call him this afternoon. We got a couple of unexpected rush jobs, and you know Jake, he usually doesn’t have a lot going on. Haven’t heard from him.”

  “You know Forest Buehl,” Hallie said, “over in Templeton? I hear he’s missing too.”

  “Well, I’m not saying Jake’s missing,” Tom told her. “I just can’t get ahold of him.”

  “Yeah,” Hallie said. It was almost full dark now, stars popping out overhead.

  “Maybe it’s the flu or something,” Tom said. “Tammy Tarracino was in this afternoon, said both her waitresses never showed this morning. Didn’t call or nothing. Maybe there’s something going around.”

  “Maybe there is,” Hallie said.

  Tom told her if he hadn’t heard from Jake by the morning, he’d come out and tow the car himself.

  Hallie walked back up the drive in the dark, thinking about missing people in Taylor County, about whether it was a real problem, and if it was, about what it meant.

  Hallie’s father came in, and they ate a mostly silent supper of hamburgers and baked potatoes and canned green beans from someone else’s garden. After, her father went back to his office and Hallie was finishing up the dishes when her phone rang.

  Boyd.

  “Has he been back?” He didn’t even say hello.

  “Who? Hollowell?”

  He was silent and Hallie wished, not for the first time, that he was standing in front of her instead of on the phone, because Boyd said a lot in the silences, in the way he stood, the set of his jaw, what he did with his hands. On the phone all she had were the words he said and the tone of his voice.

  “He’s clearly dangerous,” Boyd continued. “We don’t know what he wants or even why he exists. We don’t know how he finds you or, I guess, anyone. We don’t know, Hallie. And I don’t want— I can’t watch your back from here.”