“Yeah,” she said, looking down. “Well. I get the feeling we all get lic—err, hit sometimes in this demon hunting business.”
“I’ve taken my fair share before I got here, it’s true,” Hendricks said. “But since I got here … it’s been worse. Worse than any other hotspot.”
“Part of that might have to do with the company you keep,” she said, and it sounded just a little like she was poking at him on that.
“Well, I don’t intend to get rid of y’all,” Hendricks said, “so—”
“I was talking about that red-headed harlot you’re still palling around with,” Alison said, turning her head to give him a knowing look. “She’s been showing up at your motel, hasn’t she?”
Hendricks just froze. It wasn’t like he’d done anything wrong, but he had a feeling like she’d caught him with his pants down. “Nothing’s happened.”
“Something will,” Alison said, looking away from him. “It’ll happen sooner or later, you just watch. She’s setting you up for it.”
“I can’t even—” Hendricks looked back to make sure no one was lurking inside the house and lowered his voice. “I can’t even sleep at night, Alison.” He stared right at her, and she didn’t dare to look back. “Ain’t nothing happening.”
“It will,” she said, full of self-assurance and still refusing to make eye contact. She started off around the house, and he didn’t follow. “I just hope when it does, nothing comes out of it worse than a case of syphilis.”
*
Lauren was on her way out to the site of the attack to make a house call, with Reeve next to her in the car, when her phone buzzed hard in the pocket of her scrubs. “What fresh hell is this?” she asked, tossing out her favorite Dorothy Parker quote as she went to answer it and stopped as soon as she saw the number.
“What?” Reeve asked. The man was all slumped against the side of her car, and the Advil she’d given him hadn’t taken hold quite yet. Not that any OTC medication was going to do much, but even if she’d written a script for him, it wasn’t like he’d had a chance to stop by a pharmacy and get it filled yet, anyway.
“Work is calling,” she said, frowning at the caller ID. “Probably my boss.” She cast Reeve a look that was designed to prick him with a little guilty. “Likely pissed that I evaporated right before my shift was supposed to start.”
“Oh, well, just explain to him your town has been flooded with demons and I’m sure he’ll back right the hell off,” Reeve said, clearly trying to beat her at her irony game, the fucker.
“In all seriousness, how am I supposed to deal with this?” she wondered, mostly to herself, as she sent the call to voicemail.
Reeve grunted as the car hit a bump, and then lapsed into a silence that she interpreted as him actually trying to come up with an answer for her. “Maybe you should ask Arch,” he finally said, and she couldn’t tell if he was resentful or just being shitty, “I think he came up with a few gallons of bullshit when he was in your situation.”
“Why does that not surprise me about the pious and holy one?” Lauren rolled her eyes.
“Because you’re predisposed to dislike him,” Reeve said with certainty. “Why is that, exactly?”
Lauren just grunted in a similar manner to Reeve’s noise when he hit the bump. “Doesn’t matter.”
“Probably not to Arch, no,” Reeve said, “but it’s clearly a bee in your bonnet. You might think about letting it out at some point, if only for the novelty of it stinging someone else besides you.”
“I’ll take that under advisement as I’m doing more unpaid work while my boss probably reams me a new asshole via voicemail,” Lauren said.
“That’s the spirit,” Reeve said, once more playing the sarcastic asshole to placid perfection. “Charity work is good for the soul, anyway.”
“It’s not so good for the wallet or the résumé, though, especially since you can’t add it to your résumé. ‘Worked as a doctor in a demon-riddled hot zone.’ Yeah. You don’t see that much.”
“So you’d be saying you have unique experience. Seems like a selling point to me.”
She rolled her eyes again, but she doubted the asshole noticed. Home or career, that was what this came down to. Why was it she’d suddenly been driven to pick the former, again?
*
“So it has come to this,” Brian said quietly, staring at the phone and the radio in front of him like they were his mortal nemesis. They weren’t, not really. His mortal nemesis was actually the Marvel movies/TV shows/corporate synergy product. But the radio/phone combo was running a close second at the moment, just barely edging out Wall Street and the Koch Brothers.
“I’m so glad you’ve finally found a job,” said his mother, a master of the backhanded compliment. “I was worried after you came back from Brown, figured it was like you crawling back with your tail between your legs, an admission of defeat. But you persevered, biding your time, smoking your ganja down in the basement—”
“Mom,” Brian said with a horrified look. Mrs. Reeve, the sheriff’s wife, was standing right there, barely containing herself from laughing. “Oh, hah hah, I smoke marijuana and I’m unemployed, so obviously I’m ripe for lots of little shots, because this is the South, where intelligence and drug use are worse than being an actual member of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.”
“I said I was proud of you,” his mother said lightly. “Which I wouldn’t be saying if you had joined the KKK, I assure you. Though I doubt they’d have you. Probably figure you for a snitch.”
“This is just …” He put his face in his hands, hanging over the radio and phone. “This is not how I pictured my life turning out.”
“I don’t think anyone who’s been fighting these demons imagined this was how their life was going to turn out, my darling boy,” his mother said, pulling a chortle out of Mrs. Reeve. “I suppose I could be wrong, it might be that Erin Harris was just waiting for the day she could become a demon fighter—”
“That’s not what I—” He slumped. “Would you just … maybe leave me alone for a few minutes?”
“I can take over for you if you want, Brian,” Mrs. Reeve said, surprisingly gently over the air of amusement.
Brian didn’t look up from the task before him: watching a radio and phone and waiting for one or the other or both to make noise at him. “No, I’ve got this. Why don’t you … go get donuts for the team or something and just … leave me to this for a while.”
“We could get some lunch for everybody,” his mother said, clearly already moving on to being solicitous. She’d scored her points on him and his ego already, anyway. Her work was done, and he felt appropriately shamed for his lack of humility.
“That sounds like a real good idea,” Mrs. Reeve said as they gathered their purses and made their way to the door. Brian listened to them go without looking up from the desk.
When he heard the door close, he said, “Now maybe that fucking possession demon will get his ass over here and end me.” And a little piece of him actually wished it would happen.
*
Alison watched the kids playing in the backyard with a more detached eye than she had before. She wasn’t in charge anymore, thank God, and that was just fine by her. She’d done what she’d needed to, and was perfectly content to pass off the responsibility to someone else, at least in this regard.
But she kinda figured it might be different if the kids had been her own instead of someone else’s.
Listening to the two older kids trying to do handstands and cartwheels and failing, laughing all the while, was like a potent reminder that when adults took spills like that, they didn’t usually do it with as much grace. In this, she was thinking of Hendricks. Her conversation with the cowboy had left a bitter taste in her, a worry she’d pushed to the stove’s back burner for a while. Him, by himself, being all self-destructive following what Kitty Elizabeth had done to him, that was worry enough.
Him plus that cunt Starling? That felt like a form
ula for disaster. Like mixing chlorine bleach and ammonia in a toilet and expecting not to die horribly.
She didn’t mention a peep of this to those around her, though. Because although her dad, Duncan and Erin were here, so were Taylor and Brenda Matthews, and she didn’t need that thought to get spread through the entirety of Midian, metastasizing like cancer, out of control and garbled like the message in a game of telephone.
That bounty hunter Lonsdale was lurking out on the far end of the yard. Alison saw him and furrowed her brow. “What’s he doing here?” she asked, giving no fucks if her wonders about a British demon hunter spread from here to Timbuktu.
“He said he wanted to help me,” her father said in his smooth voice, “but he hobbled his way after me slower than an old lady, and he disappeared on me when I came up to the storm the back door of this house.”
She stared out at Lonsdale, who was wandering around the side of the garage of the house across the back yard from them. He looked like he was sniffing the ground or something, peering down at the grass. “That’s peculiar, isn’t it?”
“It is indeed,” Arch said, getting into the conversation. “Maybe we ought to go have a conversation with him.”
Alison chewed on that for a second. “Maybe I ought to get my rifle first.”
*
Arch had collected Hendricks with the intent to talk a thing or two over with Lonsdale, but when they actually got over to him, any questions he might have asked went poof like smoke before he got a word out.
“I think this demon is splitting off pieces into other bodies,” Lonsdale announced, surprisingly clear for once. He was squinting against the daylight, and Arch wondered if he was just used to more cloud cover in England.
“Well, it seems that’s what he does, Mart,” Hendricks said, making it sound like Lonsdale was stupid in the process. Arch didn’t necessarily approve of making people feel bad, but Hendricks was a different sort of communicator than he was.
“Fair enough, fair enough,” Lonsdale said, coming away from the side of the garage. “I think he stole these peoples’ car.” He landed a hand on the side of the garage. “Door’s open, no vehicle inside.”
Arch looked at the house. He wasn’t real sure who it belonged to, but that wouldn’t be a hard thing to find out. He keyed his mic. “Dispatch, this is fifteen.”
It took a minute, and then Brian’s voice came crackling back. “Uhh … I guess I’m dispatch. What do you want?”
Arch waited a second. “I need to know about who owns a certain house.”
There was another pause. “Lemme … okay, I got Google up on my phone. Fire away.” The sound of Brian whistling on the other end filled the air.
Hendricks spoke up. “Does the idiot not realize he needs to let go of the button in order to let you speak?”
“He’s a tit,” Lonsdale opined, causing Arch to frown at him. “I didn’t even use rhyming slang on that, you don’t know what a tit is?”
“I know what a tit is,” Hendricks said. “They’re real fun to—”
“Oh, sorry!” Brian crackled back. “Okay, I’m letting go of the button now.”
“The address is 916 Worth Street,” Arch said, and he settled in to wait.
The answer took a minute. “I have the Calhoun County Property Tax search record here … man, I’m surprised they put this online … owner is Michael Fordham.”
Arch turned that name over in his head. “I don’t know who that is.”
“Yeah, I’ve never heard of him, either,” Brian came back. “I guess I could Google him, too …”
“You know we have tools to search for property owners without having to resort to Google like a civilian,” Reeve’s voice broke into the conversation. He sounded a little funny to Arch, and when he turned around, there was Reeve, across the lawn at the back door to the house with Dr. Darlington, who was tending to people. Reeve was talking a little breathless, like he was still hurting.
“Yeah, my on-the-job training for this position kinda sucked,” Brian said. “I’m trying to narrow the results for Michael Fordham.”
“Don’t bother,” Reeve said. “Michael Fordham is in a nursing home. His granddaughter lives in the house now. Her name is Clarissa, I think.”
“Where does she work?” Arch asked, looking at the sheriff across the sixty or so yards of empty lawn that separated him. He looked tiny, and he was slumping a little.
“I don’t believe she had a job,” Reeve said. “I think she was on disability for some reason after the factory she worked at downsized her.”
Arch exchanged a look with Hendricks, who didn’t look worried, per se, but he didn’t look happy, either. “If she was home and this demon came a callin’,” Hendricks said, confirming Arch’s suspicion about his mood, “she might just be part of our problem now.”
*
Chester and the others pulled up to the farm in the country, the sounds of nature all around them as the car’s motor faded to silence. He stepped out of the vehicle and just listened for a moment. William had been right; this was so much different than Queens, and certainly a worthwhile place to seek a change.
A light breeze whipped around him as he stared up at the older farmhouse. It was fading in the sun, dark crimson paint turned rust-colored by time and weather. Chester had no opinion about the aesthetics of the look; his attention was centered on how it would fit for their needs. It had taken almost twenty minutes to get from town to here, which Chester considered a reasonable margin of distance to keep them away from the law that would be hunting them. In addition, the farmhouse was owned by a very distant relation of their newest acquisition, and thus it was unlikely that the sheriff, Reeve, and his allies would manage to track them down here.
Chester took a deep breath of the air around him and nodded to their newest body, who was under the control of Thurston. Thurston nodded the woman’s head and headed toward the door. Thurston had almost fifty of their fellows within the body, which would make it eminently possible to quietly subdue any resistance within the house.
Yes, this was the next move, Chester thought as he heard Thurston knock upon the door. Chester took a deep breath of the cool, crisp, country air as the door opened, and a greeting was given and then cut off halfway through as Thurston merely touched the newest member of their team, the latest prize in their war. That was the beauty of what they could do, really; turn any person, no matter how old or young, into a fighter for their cause.
William would have liked this place, Chester thought, as he marched up onto the porch once he was assured that the house was theirs. But even he would not have liked what was happening now, Chester knew, the things that would be done in his name. It was a shame that it had come to this, but it had, and Chester’s resolve to finish the thing left him without a doubt about what had to be done next.
5.
The search of the nearby houses had been a deeply unsatisfying bit of business for Reeve. He’d knocked on doors with the rest of them, and when he did find people home, a good portion of them viewed him with absolute suspicion, eyes narrowed like they were waiting for him to kick down the door. That may have been normal in the city, but here in Midian he’d always enjoyed the full cooperation of the citizenry, and seeing just how many people slammed their doors after talking to him with only the thinnest veneer of civility was disheartening, to say the least.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, somewhere along the way, that idiot Brit demon hunter, somehow more annoying than Cowboy Hendricks, had started following him around like he was a brand new puppy put in Reeve’s charge. “Why don’t you go on back to the house and wait there?” Reeve asked, gesturing toward down the street toward the front lawn where his old car was still parked, driven by Erin up onto the lawn.
“I’ll just follow at a distance,” Lonsdale said in a heavy accent. At least he didn’t throw in any of that nonsense slang. “I won’t be any Barney at all.” There it was, goddammit.
Reeve just kept his rage on a ch
ain. Letting it go on this bastard wasn’t going to do any good anyway. He keyed his mic and spoke into it. “Dispatch, this is One, over.”
It took a second for the response to come back, Brian Longholt’s voice breaking over the air. “Yep, what’s up?”
Reeve just shut his eyes and sighed for a second before keying the mic. “I think we’re done here, unless anyone else wants to keep knocking on doors and talking to people who don’t want to talk to us.”
Arch’s voice crackled through. “The response today does seem a lot frostier than usual.”
“Goddamn Pike,” Reeve said, not bothering to filter his assessment of the situation. “He’s turning the town against us.”
“Uh, Sheriff?” Erin broke in. “What are we supposed to do with Evelyn’s kids?”
Reeve thought about it for a second. “Leave ’em with Brenda, unless someone wants to take them back to the station while we’re in the middle of planning a damned war.”
“Uh …” Erin paused, and Reeve could hear muted conversation. “Okay, Brenda says that’s fine, she’ll get ahold of Evelyn’s husband if we haven’t already.”
Reeve cursed, keeping his finger off the mic button. When he pushed it again, he was keeping his rage bottled up inside, but only barely. “Dispatch usually handles that.”
“Oh, uh, yeah, I don’t know how to do that,” Brian’s voice came back, not even the least bit apologetic.
Reeve closed his eyes against the mid-afternoon sun and counted to five before answering back. “You seemed pretty handy with that Google thing a little bit ago. Why don’t you try it again? Or maybe just have Erin, who’s on scene, ask Brenda for Evelyn’s husband’s cell phone number?” Wasn’t Brian Longholt supposed to be some kind of brilliant kid? Didn’t he go to one of those fancy schools? This was not exactly contradicting Reeve’s assumption that people who went to those schools lost connection with reality and common sense.
“Oh, uh, yeah, good idea,” Brian said. “Erin—”
Legion (Southern Watch Book 5) Page 22