I don’t have the heart to tell him that his foster child was a ticking time bomb, about to end his life at any moment. There’s something strange about this home. I’m sure the Parkers didn’t have anything ill to do with Damian, but the whole place feels off. The way they decorate everything with knick-knacks like they’re eighty years old. The creepy cat clock on the wall whose eyes look the opposite direction to the pendulum tail. The whole place is unnerving. It’s not the kind of place that a teenager would want to spend time.
“Do you have any idea who his friends are in the area?” I ask him. “I’m trying to locate him for questioning, but he’s proving to be rather elusive.”
“No, I didn’t keep up with his friends,” Mr. Parker shakes his head. “I know that he had a friend named Mike, but that’s it. Honestly, girls and sex was all that was on his mind before he left.”
Who doesn’t care about those things more than anything else? I wanted to ask him that and to see what kind of smug, dickish expression his face could come up with. I take one more drink of the potent coffee that’s coming out of a Keurig, the laziest form of coffee that there is. Damian was an asshole in the parking lot, but I kind of feel for him, looking at this sad lot that he was forced to call a family. Hell, I would have gone off and joined the Marines too. I would have done anything to get away from a house as creepy as this.
“Is there anything else you might be able to tell me?” I ask Mr. Parker as he strokes his chin, just under the two sides of his fat, black mustache that looks like some kind of sea cucumber. “It might help us track him down.”
“Not that I can think of,” Mr. Parker shrugs. “Do you mind if I ask what this is all about?”
“We just need to talk with him,” I say to him, not wanting to give him any kind of idea as to why I’m here. I look at him and watch him, studying him as he watches me like a hawk, studying my own moves. It’s like a reflection studying the man on the other side of the mirror. It’s just creepy. “He’s a witness to a crime that we need his statement on.”
“So you wake us up in the middle of the night?” Mr. Parker looks down at his coffee, shrugging. He clearly doesn’t believe me. I look at him. What exactly do I have to justify to him? Am I supposed to divulge details about my investigation to warrant my nocturnal pursuit of a man who is unwittingly now a victim to a hellish entity’s game of cat and mouse? No, I don’t have to tell you a goddamn thing, Mr. Parker. “It would just be nice to know if he’s okay.”
“I’m sure he’s fine,” I lie brazenly. Besides, what the hell do these two care about? They’re occupational foster parents. They’re not doing this out of the kindness of their hearts. This is just some time for them to enjoy kids without actually having any of their own. “I’ll let you know if anything turns up. If not, I’m sure he’ll be back on the plane to the military without a hitch.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” Mr. Parker sighs. “He was a good young man. I hope that he’s not in any sort of trouble.”
“He’s not,” I lie again.
He shows me out and before I’m back in my car, the lights in the house go dark. They’re back, nestled in their beds and sleeping off all that worry they have for their old foster child. It makes me sick. The foster program works for some and it looks excellent on paper, but the sad majority outweighs the positive. It’s a clusterfuck and a meat grinder, chewing up children and spitting out cynical, jaded criminals who feel like there’s no one in the world who gives a fuck about them. Of course, the sad part is, that’s pretty much the truth.
Pulling out of the subdivision driveway, I fish my phone out of my blazer’s inner pocket and dial the number that Lola called me on. I have no idea how she got my number, but it doesn’t surprise me. She’s supposed to be some sort of tech prodigy that honestly is in need of a good night on the town. She spends way too much time at those computers, it seems like. I hit the call button and hold the phone to my ear with my shoulder as I make my way down the silent, morning traffic that feels like a leisurely stroll down a country road compared to congestion that normally packs the roads and streets of this godforsaken city. I glance into the rearview mirror every once in a while, staring at my own tired, weary eyes, wondering when I’m going to see sleep again. Who knows? Maybe sleep truly is for the dead.
“Hey, Steven,” she answers with her cheerful, chirping voice. “Oh, I’m sorry. Do you prefer King? Is it alright if I call you Steven? I know cops are kind of touchy about that, but here we usually call each other by our first names.”
“I don’t care,” I attempt to silence her. “Lola, the address you gave me was to his foster parents. Apparently he skipped out of the place when he turned eighteen. Either way, he’s not there. He’s got a truck, though. Check the DMV data-whatever and see if we can track him down with the license plate.”
“Absolutely,” Lola answers very professionally. “Sorry I sent you to the wrong address.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I tell her. “He’s probably holed up somewhere. Keep me posted with what you find.”
“You got it,” she answers. “What are you going to do now?”
“I need you to find out where my daughter is living,” I tell her. “I need to go have a chat with her. If this thing is really going after her, then I’m going to try and warn her. I’m going to try and get her out of here.”
“Let me get it for you,” Lola says excitedly. “From what I was looking up, she works at Parker High School. She teaches English. If that’s what Damian is going for, then the demon is taking a very long route to get to his victim. It could take weeks before Damian gets his assignment, trained, and sent back here. I don’t think the demon is that patient.”
“Or maybe it’s waiting for me to retire,” I tell her, trying to get one step ahead on this thing. So far, it doesn’t know that I know what it is. Or at least I hope it doesn’t. “It might want me to be retired, out of the loop, and unable to stop it. That might be everything it’s working towards, my complete helplessness.”
“Yeah, but in that amount of time, Kelly could be long out of reach,” Lola argues. “I think that this would be an unnecessarily and uncharacteristically risky route for this thing. I don’t think it’s about the long con here. I think it’s going to try to get to her sooner.”
“Then I need to get to her first,” I reply. “Do you have that address for me?”
“Yeah,” Lola answers. “She lives in a small house on the outskirts of the city. She has quite the commute to Parker High. I’m texting it to you now.”
“Lots of teachers have long commutes,” I answer. “Get me Sullivan’s location, Lola.”
“You got it, Steven,” she answers before hanging up.
I kill the radio and keep it dead for a while. I listen to the silence of the car and the sounds of its interior workings, the rumbling of the engine, the growl of the tires on the asphalt, and the vibrations moving through the metal and the paneling. It’s a thing of beauty. This car has been in my life since I first saw it as a child, my father polishing her and introducing me to her as if she were a human being. I understand his affection. It was why I got the car when he died and my brother didn’t. I appreciate cars like he did. It was something genetic, I’m certain of it. We were kindred spirits.
Spirits. That word has more weight to it now. It’s not just something abstract or nebulous. It’s no longer a joke word that doesn’t have any consequence to it. I look out the window and wonder what else I haven’t been seeing in the world. I don’t think I want to know. I look out that window, at the darkness, at the blackened windows of houses and wonder what other creatures lurk beyond reason and science. Maybe they’ve known all along—the upper echelon of society. Maybe they’ve known and kept us in the dark because they didn’t think we could handle it. If that’s the case, I don’t blame them. I’m barely keeping it together. The bolts and nuts are rattling, jangling, and about to fall out.
What am I supposed to tell Kelly? How is an absentee fat
her supposed to convince his estranged daughter that a demon has killed her mother to get back at him and that she’s next on his ethereal hit list, so she needs to pack up and get lost for a while and make certain that she doesn’t touch anyone until I call and tell her it’s safe? Who am I kidding? When am I going to know with any form of confidence that it’s safe? Where the hell did this thing even come from? How did it start on this path of blood and madness? Did someone read about it in a book and conjure it up? I don’t know. I don’t even know what I’m thinking about anymore. This is madness. It’s all stupidity and chaos. I feel the rumbling of the car underneath me and wish that I had never taken this case. If I had a nickel for every time that thought rolled through my head, I’d be rich by now. I could retire and live a fat life elsewhere, away from demons and suicides.
I jump at the sound of my phone ringing and pull it out of the cup holder where I’ve gotten used to tossing it. I look at the number and once again find myself impressed with the speed in which Lola operates with. “King,” I answer.
“Hey, you’re going to need to take a quick detour,” Lola informs me with a disappointed tone in her voice. She gives me the address and I know exactly where it is on Shakespeare Boulevard. It’s a shitty little motel that I’ve used more than once to take a call girl to finish off a particularly difficult day. I pull a U-turn, almost getting T-boned in the process. The other driver lays on his horn and I flip him off before turning on my sirens and heading back the way I came. This is just my fucking luck. “I did a check on the DMV database and that’s when my uncle called, hoping that you were still here. They found him at the Gampton Inn right around when I found him in the database. He’s dead, Steven.”
“I’m not surprised,” I answer before hanging up on her.
It takes close to an hour to make my way back into town to Shakespeare Boulevard and to follow it all the way back up to where the Gampton Inn is nestled with its dying sign. The lights on the second floor walkway flicker with pale, blue fluorescent fury. I hated this place. I’ve always hated this place. It’s a trashy, nasty place to go, but it’s always been convenient and served my purpose when I’ve needed it. I think about the girl at the diner and how I’d be more than willing to take her here for a nice long, relaxing fuck. I have a problem. I realize this now more than ever. It’s getting out of control. I wonder if perhaps I have some sort of pedophile sex demon within me, driving my urges.
Police cars have flooded the parking lot along with a fire truck and an ambulance that’s parked next to the coroner’s van. Clearly there was something going on here that brought the attention of the fire marshal. I park toward the back of the parking lot, watching as the uniforms speak with neighboring tenants about what transpired. Most of them are poor families just passing through or visiting family in this rather dank part of town. Others are johns with their girls who are pretending to be in a relationship so they don’t get slapped with cuffs and hauled off on an unrelated incident. I make my way toward the yellow tape where one of the uniforms waves me through the crowd of gawkers.
I pass under the yellow tape and listen as the uniform tells me the room number and that Detectives White and Landsmen are already there, investigating the scene. I roll my eyes and feel my fingers constricting into fists as I make my way toward the room. There’s a uniform stationed outside of the room with a rather grim and serious expression on his stone face, one he most likely learned in the army. It must be difficult to see a fellow serviceman ending his life in whatever gruesome fashion that the demon has no doubt inspired in him. I cringe at the thought of what a military man could consider morbid to do to himself.
I cross the threshold and step into the room, covering my face with my tie at the immediate assault upon my senses of smoke. The whole room is scorched, blackened and stained with smoke from what looks like a bonfire that has been made from the mattress of the bed. I immediately look up to the spots on the walls where the smoke detectors have been ripped off and shattered on the desk top. Clearly there was some premeditation here.
“Detective King,” White says to me, with his hook nose and his circular glasses that make him look even more like an owl. “We sent word to dispatch to contact you about this. I hope they got through.”
“Must have slipped their mind,” I growl. He never sent word to dispatch. Who is he trying to convince here? I know exactly what he is. He’s a vulture circling the inevitable feast. Mendez doesn’t see me wrapping up this case before I’m sent on retirement, and White and Landsmen are here to take up the torch once I’ve passed. Well, fuck them. “Damian Sullivan?” I ask them.
“Who?” Landsmen lifts his head from the corpse, a furrowed expression of confusion across his face.
“The victim’s name is Damian Sullivan,” I inform them.
“There’s been no identification found,” Landsmen informs me, leaning over the body.
What’s left of Sullivan is grotesque, horrendous, and haunting. It appears that he heaped everything he could onto the mattress before shattering the smoke detectors and setting it ablaze. Turning the room into an oven, he let the mattress burn to a crisp, leaving only red hot springs like a grill waiting for him. He didn’t get out of the bonfire unscathed. His entire naked body is covered in boils, peeling skin and ruined flesh. He must have started cooking himself alive before he turned around and jumped onto the bed, letting the last of the flames lick at him while the red hot metal springs dug, burning and searing into his flesh, overloading his nerves and eventually killing him. The smoke might have suffocated him, but there’s no knowing until Whitman gets a look at him. I look at the pool of blood underneath his limp fingertips, running down his lips and across his seared face.
“Another terrible end,” Landsmen says to me, like we’re walking the same path here. I shake my head at him. He’s so far behind that he can’t even watch my sweet ass sway anymore. I look at Damian and wonder who it was he was with last. I know that there’s probably no way of knowing, but from the looks of the way things are going, if I camp outside of Parker High School tomorrow, I’m going to get a glimpse at whoever my next suicide is.
His skin is cracked and separating all over his naked body, his ears shriveled along with his lips, his dick, and his nose. His hair has curled and melted and all that I’m looking at are the peeled back eyelids that are crispy and broken, dried eyes staring at me, half shriveled themselves. I look at the white teeth baring themselves. I can see something soaking up the blood that has pooled in the back of his mouth. I look at it and decide to fuck protocol. Reaching forward, I grab the tip of the paper between his barely parted teeth.
“Whoa, gloves, King!” Landsmen scolds me, but I could care less.
I yank the piece of paper out of his mouth. It’s drenched in blood that hasn’t dried yet, and I hold the crimson paper up and look at it, drops of blood pattering across the carpet, hissing as they hit the embers of the bed’s remains. I push past White, who is looking at me with a full expression of contempt and scorn as he too doesn’t approve of the neglect of protocol. I don’t care. This case is going to get lobbed at them once I’m gone. I’m going to have to retire, taking the secrets of this case to the grave with me, while these two jackasses are going to be left holding their dicks walking in circles, looking for a killer that isn’t there.
Spreading the note out across the top of the desk, I look at it and try to resist the urge to laugh. The only thing I know about this demon thing right now is that it doesn’t know that I’m on to it. It knows that I’m tracking it, thinking that it’s a killer, but it doesn’t know that I know what it is. It’s masquerading as a killer still. I look at the blood-soaked note, the Sharpie-marked words, boldly remaining on the piece of crumpled paper.
“Steven, I’m sorry for using people. The ones you love deserve better. Damian,” White reads over my shoulder. I read the words over and over again, knowing that this thing is wanting to play with me. It’s wanting to latch on to someone that it can mess with
. That someone just unfortunately turned out to be me. I think about how lucky Evans was to send Owens packing. She could be in my position now, but she’s not. Thankfully, it’s me. Thankfully I have only so few in my life that I will regret losing. All I know is that this thing has a personal interest with me and I’m not going to let it win. “This guy has a hard on for you, King,” White says with a grunt.
“No shit,” I answer.
IV
I step out of the motel room, seeing enough to satisfy me for a lifetime. I don’t need to look at another dead body, another corpse that the demon can add as a notch to his belt. It disgusts me that there’s something out there that would take delight in not only doing this to another being, but rather that it takes pleasure in making that person do it to themselves. I scan the yellow line, a wall against all the gawking faces, all the macabre stares, and all the morbid curiosities staring at me with quizzical looks in their eyes. It’s a sort of curious hunger that gets under my skin, but this time, it’s something different. No, when I look in their eyes, in their vacant, hungry faces, I see a hundred different demons, all staring at me, mocking me. It could be inside any one of them. I look at them, wondering which of them the demon is, watching me work. It’s spying on me like some kind of voyeur, wanting to see what I do next before it takes delight in its next horrid act.
What’s its game plan here? If I fail to keep Kelly safe and this bastard ends up killing my daughter and she is planted six feet under, then I’m left broken, miserable, a husk of what I once was, and is that it? Is it going to kill me? Or is it going to just let me languish, lingering onward until I die an old, remorse-ridden man? Or is it going to jump into me, make me kill myself as well? What is its long game? There has to be something beyond either it kills me or I end up dead and bitter. Those can’t be the only two ends. Is there any stopping it? If not, what is the point? It has already won. Congratulations and let’s give the demon a round of applause. Then what?
The Darkness Inside Us (A Detective King Suspense Thriller) (A Detective King Novel Book 3) Page 3