“McDermott is recovering, but he doesn’t remember a thing. Our people made sure of that.”
Scott pushed his glasses up on his nose. “What about David and his friends? Doesn’t that leave them on the hook?”
“The four were released early this morning. Some new evidence came to light. The murder now looks like a suicide. Just took us a while to find the note and the knife he used. Police incompetence. The papers will be all over it.” He allowed a tired smile. “But, hey, I have to ask.” He patted the top of his empty mug slowly. “How did you figure out my connection to…”
“The Champions Program?” Janis held up her watch with the positional locator inside and tapped it twice. “You always seemed to know where we were, for one. The post office, on Beach Drive later that night, at Dr. Fields’s office yesterday. And you seemed a little too interested in what we were doing. Problem was, I could never quite get a handle on your thoughts. My powers weren’t at a hundred percent, true, but that was another clue. You were being shielded somehow. It then occurred to me that if there were agents around the town, it made sense to have at least one agent on the inside. Someone who would blend in.”
Detective Buckner chuckled in what sounded like equal parts dismay and admiration.
“Once I’d figured that out,” Janis went on, “I decided you were keeping me and Scott in town because something about the case bothered you. You suspected we were closing in on Dr. Fields’s real killer.”
“How long have you been here?” Scott asked. “I mean, I remember seeing you when I was, like, ten.”
“I was placed on the force the year your parents bought the place. To keep an eye on you, make sure you stayed out of trouble. Fortunately, between the arcade and the hobby store, you never strayed too far. Until this visit.” He shook his head. “But it looks like my work here’s wrapping up.”
“Because we outed you?” Janis asked, awash in guilt.
“No, because his parents just sold the house.”
Janis wheeled toward Scott. “They did? When?”
“The realtor called this morning,” Mrs. Spruel said, pausing beside the table. Above the box in her arms, a smile broke out—the first one Janis had seen on her face all week. “She said a buyer came through out of the blue. Someone who asked to remain anonymous. Probably some big wig.”
“Anonymous?” Janis turned back to Scott.
You?
He shrugged slightly. Figured it would calm her down. Plus, winter’s coming and Cassie and her father are going to need a place to stay—not to mention the eight or nine others at that camp. There’s room enough here.
Janis’s love for Scott felt tidal and huge.
Detective Buckner stood from his chair. “Well, guess I should get back to the department. Lots to type up.” He took his hat from beside the coffee mug and fit it over his head. At the door, he turned. “It’s been an honor working with you two. Maybe I’ll see you around.”
“Take care,” Janis said.
She stood on her swollen knee and limped until she was behind Scott. A pair of mismatched crutches—one wooden, one chrome—that she had found among his father’s junk leaned against the table. Janis kissed his cheek and massaged the cords of his shoulders.
“You’re a good man, Scott Spruel.”
“Be that as it may,” he said with a world-weary sigh, “a man is only as good as the woman beside him.” He reached around to pat her thigh. “Just ask Mayor Walpole.”
Janis snorted. “We have exactly ten minutes left on this vacation. Let’s not talk about them anymore.”
“Fine by me.” Scott’s voice sank with his relaxing shoulders.
“Hey, uh, kids?” Mr. Spruel lumbered in from the garage, where Mrs. Spruel had given him the painful task of either loading up or throwing out what remained of his beach-combing collection. “I don’t mean to break you up, but there’s someone out here asking to see you.”
Scott raised his eyebrows as he reached for his crutches.
Outside the garage, the sun showed as a pale smear through a soot-colored cloud ceiling. Janis tightened her ponytail as they turned the corner onto the driveway. She was not surprised to see David Dacula sitting astride his motorcycle. Paulo and Duane flanked him. Markus was in his usual position in the rear. Gone were their orange prison jumpsuits, replaced by black dusters and shades.
“Nancy Drew and Frank Hardy,” David said with a grin.
Janis tried to read their faces. Paulo’s looked banged up from his trip into the woods, courtesy of Scott’s laser. And Duane’s was scab-pocked from the shotgun she’d made backfire.
“We heard you’d gotten out,” she said carefully.
David’s face narrowed around his sharp lips. “That’s actually why we decided to roll by. The good detective wouldn’t say how, but he suggested you two had something to do with it.”
Janis didn’t know how to answer. Neither did Scott, who remained silent.
David craned his neck around to his friends. “Where are your manners?”
Paulo rolled forward slightly. “Thanks,” he said.
“Yeah, thanks,” Duane mumbled.
Markus lifted his face. “Thank you.”
Janis nodded back at each one, noting that David had never voiced his own gratitude.
Scott cleared his throat. “We had our differences,” he said, “but you were all innocent.”
David stroked his chin as though Scott had just uttered a profound truth.
“Innocent in the eyes of the law, yes,” he said at length, “but not in the court of public opinion. I’m afraid we’ll always remain suspect in the eyes of Murder Creek’s discerning citizens.”
Janis thought about the raw hand the four of them had been dealt.
“So, now what?” she asked.
“We ride, Miss Graystone. West. There’s a lovely town on the southern California coast where they say folks are a little stranger.” He flashed another fang-toothed smile. “We’ll fit right in.”
“Well, I hope you’ll consider another occupation when you get there,” Janis said.
“You know something?” David waggled a finger that was already beginning to sprout a new talon. “I’ve always thought I’d make a decent defense attorney. And my boys here could take courses to become my paralegals. Night school, of course.”
David and the others found something humorous in this, and they broke into a cackling fit of laughter.
Inside joke, Janis guessed.
“Well…” David started to turn his bike.
“Wait a sec,” Scott called. He had left Janis’s side to poke through a pile of clothes beside the garage door, and now he limped back with a black shirt clamped around one of the crutch handles. He held the shirt out. “Here.”
David pinched the shirt by the shoulders so that it flapped in front of him. Recognition softened his face. When he turned the shirt around, a heart-shaped stain showed above the left breast.
“I had a shirt just like this once.”
“Well, it’s yours again,” Scott said.
Paulo held David’s black duster while David pulled his own ragged shirt off, revealing a sallow blue-veined torso, and slipped on the black V-neck. He shook it into place and then replaced his jacket. Splaying his hands in front of him, he seemed to examine his several rings.
“Catch.” He twisted a ring from his pinky finger and tossed it toward Scott.
The ring bounced around Scott’s hands. Finally getting control of it, he turned it upright. Janis peered down, too. Embossed in the ring’s pewter face, a gargoyle with fangs to his bent knees smiled up at them.
“To ward off evil,” David said with a final grin.
Janis and Scott stood back as the bikes puttered in a circle and revved out onto Beach Drive. Janis and Scott walked to the top of the driveway and watched them motor north, Markus’s curly hair blowing in the rear.
“I wonder if he’ll ever see Chastity again,” Scott said.
Janis thou
ght about that. “Do you remember that feeling I had when we rolled into Murder Creek? That something bad was going to happen? Well, looking at Markus, I’m getting a different feeling. Something good is waiting for him down the road. And it involves Chastity.”
The Volvo honked twice from the garage.
“Well,” Scott said, turning on his crutches, “ready to join our teammates and become Champions again?”
Janis sighed. Did they have a choice? She walked alongside him, a hand on his low back.
“I know we’re both a little banged up, but…” Scott crutch-hopped into a sudden run. “Last one to the car’s vampire meat!”
“Hey!” As Janis limped after him, laughter seized her.
She passed him and piled into the backseat through the far door at the same moment Scott reached the near one, laughter possessing both of them now. Janis collapsed against him. His arms wrapped her convulsing ribs. When it came to the Champions, they didn’t have a choice. Not really.
As Janis tilted her face up to receive Scott’s smiling kiss, she thought maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing.
The series continues...
XGeneration 6: Greatest Good
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Books by Brad Magnarella
PROF CROFT
Demon Moon
XGENERATION
You Don’t Know Me
The Watchers
Silent Generation
Pressure Drop
Cry Little Sister
Greatest Good
Dead Hand
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