Darker Things (The Lockman Chronicles #1)

by Rob Cornell

  “That’s because it wasn’t that long ago.”

  “Thanks. Jerk.”

  Lockman smiled. “I figure there’s a good reason I can’t remember. I’m probably better off.”

  “That’s a big part of your life to lose.”

  “I can’t complain if I don’t know what it is I lost.”

  Jessie looked down at her glass of lemonade, still as full as when Creed poured it for her. “You think this Tanner person will know where Mom is?”

  Lockman wanted to say “no way,” but he knew she had been listening to her and Creed hash it out. “I can’t be certain about anything anymore.”

  “At least you were certain about some things. I don’t even know what that’s like.”

  “Yes you do.”

  She flashed him that lip-curled look of total skepticism. Lockman didn’t mind. He had missed her attitude. He didn’t like the somber, disconnected Jessie, even if he did have to take a few jabs.

  “What about Ryan?” he asked.

  She winced.

  Lockman cringed inside. He shouldn’t have brought the kid up.

  Jessie recovered, nodded. “You’re right. I loved him. I know I did.”

  “And he loved you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then that’s better than most people have.”

  “Do you still love Mom?”

  The question took Lockman off guard. While he fumbled for an answer, he hemmed and hawed like an amnesiac who had been asked his name.

  Jessie laughed. “That’s a yes.”

  “I don’t even know her anymore.”

  “Doesn’t matter. You aren’t over her. You still pine.”

  “Pine?”

  “Like only a true lover could.”

  Lockman rolled his eyes. “You’re full of it.”

  Jessie stood and walked over to sit in the wicker chair Creed had left. She set aside her glass and leaned her elbows on her knees like a conspirator laying out a plan.

  “Why won’t you tell me what you did to make Dolan hate you so much?”

  “I thought you wanted to make movies when you grew up, not be a shrink.”

  “I already make movies. I don’t have to wait until I ‘grow up.’”

  “Fine. Stick to what you know then and leave my personal life out of it.”

  “You’re my dad. I want to know you.”

  “You don’t.”

  “Yes I do.”

  Did he want her to know him, though? Hadn’t he made the decision to stay emotionally detached? But at every turn he had let his emotions undermine the larger danger. Whatever Dolan wanted, it couldn’t be good. If Jessie was right, and there was some specific piece of intel he wanted, it could only mean terrible things for the nation’s security. Which made it all the more important he keep out of Dolan’s clutches. Which also meant he should consider walking away. Disappear again, this time on his own, so no one could trace him.

  “I get it,” he said. “But you’re making a mistake. Getting to know me isn’t going to fix you.”

  “Okay, that’s lame. I don’t need fixing.”

  “Why come all that way, Jess? Why go through all the trouble to find me?”

  “I was just curious.”

  “You’re unhappy with your mom and your stepdad. So you thought finding your biological father would change something. But it won’t.”

  “That’s a shitload of assuming you’re doing there.”

  “Forget it. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  She pushed out of her chair and stalked down the porch steps.

  “Where are you going?”

  “For a walk.”

  Lockman stood. He should let her go. She would cool off, come back. If he’d hurt her feelings, it was for the best. Neither of them could get emotionally attached.

  “Jessie, wait.”

  She rounded the porch and started toward the front of the house.

  Lockman went to the railing. “I killed his brother.”

  She stopped. “What?”

  “Dolan was using his brother’s basement as a weapons cache. We found out and hit the house. His brother was home and in the heat of the moment I shot him.”

  Jessie looked up at him on the porch, mouth open and silent.

  “We don’t know how involved he was in Dolan’s operation. Maybe complicit just by allowing him to store weapons in his home. But still...”

  “Sounds like an accident.”

  “Doesn’t make it any easier.”

  “No. Guess it wouldn’t.”

  He leaned on the porch railing. “Forgive me?”

  “I shouldn’t have been so nosy.”

  “Water under the bridge.”

  The screen door knocked against the jamb behind Lockman. He turned.

  Creed held a sheaf of papers in one hand and a pen in the other. He took in the scene of Lockman on the porch and Jessie around the side. “Everything all right?”

  “It’s cool,” Jessie said. “I was going to check out that turkey while you guys talk strategy.”

  Lockman could tell Creed wasn’t fooled, but the old man played along. “Don’t go feeding him anything. He’s spoiled enough as it is.”

  Jessie waved and strolled off toward the barn. Lockman watched her until she disappeared around a corner of the outbuilding.

  “Thirteen and tough as Kevlar,” Creed said. “Reminds me of you.”

  “Funny,” Lockman said. “She reminds me of Kate.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The young man tasked with killing the ghost’s wife went by the moniker Chaz while among his fellow soldiers in the Movement. His real name, Charles Eaton, he kept to himself. But alone with the woman in the cement-floored room with the cinderblock walls, he didn’t feel like Chaz at all.

  Make it nasty, Mr. Dolan had said. He had even offered the services of their resident priest. Truth was, Charles didn’t believe much in God. He believed in vampires, werewolves, and ghosts. But he had seen those things with his own eyes. He had never seen any evidence of God.

  Right now he wished he had.

  The woman’s blouse had soaked up so much of her sweat, it barely provided much cover. She was an older lady, in her mid fifties, a little younger than his own mother, crying, and handcuffed to an exposed pipe.

  She gazed at Charles with wet eyes and a tortured face. “Please. Don’t hurt me.”

  He hadn’t bothered with his ski mask, as her ID-ing him wouldn’t be an issue after she was dead. He wanted it, though. He didn’t like the idea that his face would be the last she ever saw. Especially knowing that sometimes the dead came back and Mr. Dolan himself planned on raising a whole lot of dead right here in Detroit if all went according to plan. Her ghost could be one of them. She might want to come after Charles for a little postmortem vengeance.

  Didn’t matter. He had a job to do.

  He set the metal toolbox he’d brought with him on the floor by his feet. Flipped it open. Not a usual assortment of tools, though some would look at home in any suburban garage or shed. Hammer. Pliers. Duct tape. Power drill. After that, though, not so much the average tool selection—syringe and pack of needles, rubber tube, brass knuckles, some contraption consisting of a leather strap pierced with evenly spaced nails and a set of stripped wires wrapped between them. That might also explain the car battery that sat beside the toolbox when he had retrieved it.

  These were Mr. Dolan’s tools, and either he had let them get rusty or he never bothered to wash the blood off from previous victims.

  Charles reminded himself that whoever had received the brunt of these tools had deserved it. They had stood in the way of world enlightenment.

  His stomach twitched like a big nervous slug.

  “What are you going to do?” the woman asked.

  “It will be easier if you don’t talk.” Easier for him, anyway.

  “Who are you people? Why are you doing this?”

  She had no idea why she was here. Charles wo
ndered why Mr. Dolan hadn’t shared with her the glory of enlightenment. Wouldn’t she want to know that her husband’s spirit had been brought back? Knowing that, wouldn’t she want to join them?

  But it sounded like she was the only way to destroy the ghost on the loose. She had to be sacrificed, just as many others were sacrificed to harness the great powers.

  “Are you going to kill me?”

  Charles hovered his hand over the selection in the toolbox, uncertain which would provide the necessary energy to banish the ghost. He understood the rudimentary physics behind the supernatural. Much of the work behind splitting the barrier between here and another reality involved high levels of emotional distress. Somehow that distress generated the power necessary to create a rift. Not all rifts—very few, in fact—manifested as an actual tear, though. It wasn’t like walking through a door, it was more like pulling—or throwing—something through the surface of a pool.

  In this case, Mr. Dolan must have figured the emotional connection between the husband’s ghost and his living wife would provide the necessary means to send him back where he came from. Charles was curious how the ghost had been summoned in the first place. As far as he knew, mortal spirits didn’t respond well to living mortal command. Raising one ghost was hard enough. And yet, Mr. Dolan planned on raising an army of them. Charles’s rank in the Movement did not qualify him to know the method behind such a feat.

  “You’re hesitating.”

  Charles looked up from the toolbox at the woman. The agony in her expression had softened some. The effect only reinforced her motherly appearance.

  “I’m just trying to work some things out.”

  “How old are you?”

  The hammer. It would work to start. He pulled it out of the box and tested its weight in his hand.

  “You can’t be much older than twenty.”

  He needed to work her up before death. He would have to start small. He could hammer at her knee caps.

  “I have a son not much older than you.”

  “You need to shut up now.”

  “I don’t need to do anything. If you’re going to kill me, I have nothing to lose.”

  He took a step toward her. She sat with her legs tucked under her, her body twisted to the side to accommodate the way her hands were cuffed to the pipe. “Stick your legs out straight.”

  “I’m sorry honey, but I’m not going to do that.”

  He feinted with the hammer. “Do it.”

  She tucked her chin against her chest and scrunched up her face, anticipating the strike. When it didn’t come, she looked up at him, eyes watery, quivering lips. She did not move her legs for him.

  “Are you nuts, lady?”

  “Do you really expect me to make it easy for you to torture me? You want me to move my legs, move them your damn self.”

  A shrill hysteria wrapped her words like barbed wire, but he still couldn’t believe the way she was talking to him

  “You don’t want to do this,” she said. “Otherwise you would have already started.”

  “Lady, what I want doesn’t make a bit of difference.”

  “God gave everyone free will.”

  Charles lifted the hammer over his shoulder. “The man I work for doesn’t give a damn about God. I’m sorry.”

  He swung the hammer.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Turned out the address Creed had on file for Benjamin Tanner was no longer valid. But the location of his sister’s funeral plot sat within Detroit’s city limits. Lockman and Creed both figured, based on Tanner’s psychological profile, that he wouldn’t move far from where his sister was buried. So Lockman prepped himself for a long surveillance.

  “Can you watch her for me?”

  “You trust me enough?”

  Lockman and Creed stood by the kitchen table, Tanner’s file spread across the surface—photos, maps, and pages of data that included a full psychological profile as well as a family tree and medical records dating back to early childhood.

  Lockman looked over all the papers. “You have a file like this on me.” Not a question, but a way to deflect the conversation Creed seemed to want to have that Lockman did not. Talking about trust did nothing more than rub the shine off of any trust already there.

  “It’s not as extensive. Tanner was one of my first men. And since he did a lot of internal affairs work for me, I had to know more about him than most.”

  “You have my records from when I was a kid?”

  Creed’s eyes narrowed. “Why are you asking about that?”

  “Just wondered since I don’t have much memory of that time myself.”

  Creed clapped him on the back. “I wouldn’t worry about it. And don’t worry about Jessie, either. I’ll guard her with my life.”

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

  “So you do trust me?”

  Lockman stared at him a moment. “I trust you know that if anything does happen to her, I’ll get the tools back out and I won’t stop until you’re dead.”

  Creed raised his eyebrows and pressed his lips together. “You couldn’t have just said ‘yes’ to make me feel better?”

  “Not my style.”

  * * *

  Lockman found himself wondering about Jessie while he sat in his car inside the entrance to the cemetery. He sipped a bottle of water. He wanted to chug it. Even with the windows down, the heat seemed to sap every bit of moisture from his body. But he had another long day ahead of him. The water would go right through him and then he would have to urinate. He was prepared to use one of the empty water bottles to relieve himself in, but the less he had to do that, the better.

  This was day two of his cemetery stakeout and already he felt antsy. In the past he had conducted surveillance jobs that went on for weeks. He didn’t have that kind of patience anymore. The only thing that kept him settled was thinking about Jessie, conjuring what if scenarios about how life could be after this was over with. Ridiculous ideas that had him playing a major role in her life.

  Not all of the what ifs held such a cheerful sheen, though. Sometimes he worked out worst case scenarios. Many of them ended with one or more of them dead—him, Kate, Jessie.

  Bored beyond the reach of any mind games, Lockman picked up the pre-paid cell phone he bought shortly after arriving in Detroit. He dialed Creed’s number, which he had programmed into the phone.

  Jessie answered.

  “Where’s Victor?” Lockman asked.

  “He’s here. But I saw it was you on the caller ID. I figured you wanted to talk to me.”

  “You did, huh?”

  She laughed. “You’ve only called about a hundred times to check if I’m okay. I’m fine. Mr. Creed is pretty cool, actually. He’s telling me stories.”

  “What kind of stories?”

  “About you, of course. Did you really have a priest bless a fire hydrant so you could wipe out a vampire nest with a fire hose?”

  “Not single-handedly. My team backed me up.”

  “That is so awesome.”

  “Are you going to say it?”

  She groaned. “It’s so lame.”

  “It’s not lame. It’s a precaution. If you are safe, say it.”

  “How long will you be gone?”

  “Good. Next time I call, the phrase will be, ‘The farm sure is beautiful.’”

  “You make these up on the spot, or did you write a list.”

  Lockman drew a pen from the center counsel and crossed off a line in the spiral notebook on the passenger seat. “I make them up as I go.”

  “Okay. Now that I’ve said the secret phrase, is there any progress on your end?”

  Lockman rubbed the stubble on his face and realized it didn’t qualify as stubble anymore, but more like the beginning of a beard. “Quiet so far. Did Creed have any more luck tracing Tanner in the area?”

  “He says he’s tapped out. If Tanner’s in the area, he’s covered his tracks.”

  “And you’r
e sure he’s treating you okay?”

  “Do I sound like I’m in distress?”

  He did feel a little better after establishing their routine with the code phrases that he changed every time he spoke to her. If Creed had any connection to Dolan, even remotely, Dolan would have hit the house by now. He wouldn’t be talking to Jessie.

  Which only made things look worse for Tanner.

  A light green compact car pulled into the cemetery grounds. Lockman tried to peer through the car’s windows to see the driver. He couldn’t make out details. It did look like a man. And he was alone.

  “You still there?” Jessie asked.

  “I’ll call you back in a bit.”

  He disconnected the call and tossed the phone onto the passenger seat. He watched the car drive toward the center of the grounds. The basic layout of the cemetery mimicked a wagon wheel with blacktopped roads that fed out of a center hub, each spoke ending in a sort of cul-de- sac. Plenty of trees lined the roads, providing shade to the graves nearest these paths. The only change in the standard pattern was at the entrance. An additional pathway curved off to the cemetery’s main office. Lockman had chosen this driveway to set up shop and had paid off the groundskeeper to keep his questions to himself. It gave him the perfect vantage point to watch vehicles enter the grounds and he found a spot where he could see through to the central hub. Depending on which way the vehicle turned from there, Lockman would know if it warranted further study. He had taken note of how to get to Tanner’s sister’s plot.

  The green compact pulled through and disappeared behind a line of maple trees. A few moments later, the car returned to view in the hub and took a ninety-degree turn to the left.

  Toward the sister’s grave.

  Lockman started the car, hoping he could finally end this. The compact didn’t look like anything Tanner would drive. He always favored sleek, impractical cars that either went too fast or burned too much fuel—or both.

  Fifteen years changed things, though. Lockman wondered if Tanner had a family now. Kids of his own. Kids he had the opportunity to see grow up and participate in their lives.

  He eased the car onto the entry road and headed toward the hub. This wasn’t the first time Lockman followed a car down here. Plenty of other graves were accessible down the same path. He had to check them all.