And yet grabbing his wrist the way Ed was now had struck fear directly into his heart.
Maybe this isn’t such a wild goose chase, after all.
Chapter 12
“What do you remember about your childhood, Shel?”
Robert was lying in bed beside her, his hand tracing a circle on her belly. They had slept until noon, and they would have slept for even longer had the sun not been blazing in through the single window in the room.
The question caught Shelly off guard, and she turned on her side, away from him. His fingers tickled her pale back gently.
“Why do you ask?”
Robert shrugged, trying to sound natural.
“I dunno, was just thinking…we’re going to have a child together, and yet I realize that I know next to nothing about you.”
Shelly rolled over again, her expression severe.
“You know everything about me, Rob. It doesn’t matter where I was born, who I was raised by—what matters is who I am now, and that you know—and that should be enough.”
Robert squinted at her. His question had been innocuous enough, and yet her reaction didn’t match it.
He probed a little harder.
“I didn’t mean anything by it. Just wanted to know where you were born, what your childhood was like. You never speak of your parents. I mean, is this baby going to have grandparents? That’s a reasonable question, isn’t it?”
Robert detected a hint of sadness in her features, but it faded quickly.
“All you need to know, Robert, is that we are going to be good—great—parents to the child in my belly. That’s all that matters. If, of course, you stop treating me like a child.”
Robert ignored the comment and stared, trying to figure out if Shelly was either lying to protect her secret of being at the church or if, like him, she was embarrassed by not being able to remember her childhood.
“Why the fuck are you staring at me like that?”
She doesn’t remember, Helen said with conviction. She’s acting this way because she doesn’t remember.
“Sorry, just don’t know why you are getting so upset,” he grumbled.
Shelly sighed.
“No, I’m sorry. It’s just—it’s been a fucked-up two days, Robert. I didn’t mean to be short with you. Things are…well, fucked up.”
She leaned over and kissed him on the lips.
“But enough about me; it’s not like there’s anything going on with my body, hormones and all that. You know, a fetus sapping my strength, stealing my food.” She smiled a weak smile. “How are you? How’s the hand? The scrape? The ankle?”
Robert shrugged. To be honest, he hadn’t actually thought about his injuries since he had awoken.
With a groan, he slipped the covers off and pulled himself into a seated position.
He hadn’t thought about them until now, that is. The scrape on his chest was not as bad as he had initially thought, and even though the gauze that Shelly had placed over it was peeling back in some places, it seemed to have stopped bleeding. It was going to leave a nasty scar, but that was about it—no permanent damage there. A quick roll of his ankle revealed a limited range of motion, but he doubted it was broken.
That left his ear and his finger.
His ear had lost a small chunk from the top where the bullet had grazed him, but it was just an ear and he could still hear just fine.
His finger, on the other hand…
Robert brought the mangled digit up to his face and examined the crude wrapping that had long since turned a deep crimson. The sight of it ending long before it should have was bizarre, and Robert instinctively tried to bend it.
It was a mistake he soon regretted, and it was all he could do not to cry out.
“Fuck!”
Shelly was upright in an instant, moving fluidly despite her new figure.
Robert stared as the cloth started to get more and more wet as new blood soaked the cloth. Pain shot up his arm.
“Gonna need to stitch that up, Rob,” Shelly informed him softly.
Robert shook his head as he straightened his finger once more. Reluctantly, the nub went back to its original position.
“No time.”
“You’re gonna lose more than your fucking finger if you don’t take care of it.”
“Can you get a bowl of warm water, some towels, disinfectant, and some Super Glue?”
Shelly made a face.
“What the fuck do I look like? A pharmacy?”
Robert couldn’t bring himself to smile. Instead, he just shook his head.
“It’s under the sink. I put it there when Amy was—when Amy—Amy—”
Shelly wrapped her arms around him and held him tight. Just mentioning her name had become a challenge now, as he imagined Leland gripping her shoulders, his horrible face staring down at her.
And the Goat…the Goat is coming…
Robert shuddered, and then composed himself.
“I put some first-aid supplies under the sink when we first moved in. Maybe you can grab it for me? I think I put some glue in there, too. We can stick it together, hopefully that’ll keep the swelling down and stop the bleeding. There’s some ibuprofen in there, too—could use maybe two dozen of those, as well.”
“Sure,” Shelly said, and stood.
At some time during the night—or morning, by the time they had actually gone to bed—she had removed all of her clothes, and as she made her way to the bathroom to collect the supplies, he marveled at her body.
Even with her growing belly, he found her nearly irresistible, the extra meat in her thighs and ass looking even more beautiful to him now.
And so very different than Wendy.
The thought had come out of nowhere, but that didn’t make it any less true. Where Wendy had been thin and wiry, all angles, Shelly was curvy.
As he watched her ass as she made it to the bathroom, and despite everything, he felt the front of his boxers start to tighten.
Just outside the bathroom door, Shelly half turned and looked back at him.
“You fucking perv,” she said with a laugh. “Ogling a pregnant woman. Fetish much?”
Robert blushed.
In a way, her response was a relief. No matter how much things had changed over the past six months or so, it was good to have some constants, something reliable.
Something real.
***
It was bad; really bad. So bad, in fact, that once Robert caught sight of the gleaming white bone poking up through the ground beef-looking skin where Michael’s teeth had gnawed it off, he had to look away.
“Oh God…just get it over with,” he said through gritted teeth. Shelly worked quickly, first cleaning the wound and then applying the antiseptic lotion. But it quickly became clear that she was out of her depth. She would make a great mother, cleaning out scraped knees and dealing with minor cuts, but she was ill-prepared for cannibal wounds.
In fact, the bite was so ragged that Robert’s initial plan to glue the nub wasn’t going to work. There just wasn’t enough skin left to cover the exposed bone—he needed a skin graft, and they both knew it.
“Robert, you have to go to the hospital—you need to get this fixed. And you need broad-spectrum antibiotics—who knows what kind of bacteria that guy, that fucking freak, has in his system. You’ve gotta take care of this now.”
Robert’s eyes flicked to her face, then her stomach.
There was no way in Hell—no way in the Marrow—he was going to let her come with them to see Sean, let alone to confront Carson.
And with this realization, a plan began to form in his mind.
“You’re right. And these”—he shook the bottle of Advil in his other hand—“aren’t going to cut it for much longer.”
It was always best to sprinkle truth on top of lies. Like when he had been staring at Jonah’s burning corpse, this callousness saddened him.
But it didn’t change his mind. He had lost one wife and child;
he wasn’t about to lose more people he loved.
Shelly’s shoulders sagged with relief. Encouraged by her response, he started nodding and continued, “I’ll going to the hospital, see if they can fix me up quick.”
Shelly’s posture changed again.
“A quick fix? You think that this is a quick fix?”
“Probably not,” he admitted. “But I can’t leave it like this.”
“And the meeting with Sean? What about that?”
Robert tried his best to look dejected.
“I dunno. I’ll tell Aiden to call Sean back, tell him that something came up.”
Shelly looked dubious.
“Something came up? Sean’s really gonna buy that?”
“Fuck, I don’t know, Shelly, I just—arrgh—”
He grabbed the wrist of his injured hand and bent at the waist.
“—it fucking kills…”
Shelly shot to her feet.
“Yeah, we’re going to the hospital, all right. Let me just—”
Robert stared at her belly, at the dirt that covered her skin.
“Go have a quick shower, clean yourself off first and I’ll go tell Aiden and Cal. Get them to call Sean.”
Shelly stared at him for a moment, and he could literally see her gears turning.
She’s not buying it, Helen thought. She knows you’re lying.
But for once, Helen was wrong. Shelly nodded, then reached over and grabbed the gauze from the basket. Then, as gingerly as possible, she wrapped it loosely over the exposed bone and glistening flesh.
“Put this on it for now.”
With that, she rose and headed to the shower.
“I’ll be down in ten,” she said, running her hand through her short blonde hair. When her fingers snagged, she corrected herself, “Make that fifteen.”
Robert smiled as he watched her go. When she closed the door, his face went slack.
“I’m sorry, Shelly,” he whispered as he stood and quickly dressed. “But I just can’t risk it.”
As he put the bottle of Advil in his pocket, his fingers brushed the hard corner of a photograph.
Chapter 13
Grabbing the bartender’s arm had snapped his tough veneer. That simple act, disregarding, of course, that Ed had technically assaulted the man, was arguably the best piece of ‘policework’ of the day: the man had veritably opened up like a leaking dam, and now he wouldn’t shut up.
The bartender described in great detail a man who had come in here, sat down beside one of the regulars, ordered some tequila shots, and then, without warning, grabbed his arm much like Ed had a moment ago.
“It’s not the first time some guy grabbed me across the bar, and it won’t be the last, but this was different…it was his eyes…”
The bartender went on to describe them as cold, dead eyes, along with three dozen other adjectives, and Ed was instantly reminded of what the woman in the park had told them.
His eyes definitely weren’t smiling.
“I think he would have cut me up right then and there, sliced and diced me without a second thought.”
Ed nodded, and Hugh shot him a glance.
It appeared as if they might have gotten lucky after all.
There are no coincidences.
It looked like they might have caught their goose.
“The video camera is a simple feed, works on VHS,” the bartender said as he took them to the kitchen. “Records right here.”
“Jesus, what’s with these archaic security systems today?” Hugh muttered. But the way he lifted up a filthy pot, Ed wasn’t sure if the man was more surprised by the equipment or the fact that the Panty Snatcher actually had a kitchen.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
The man pulled a key out of his pocket and opened the drawer beneath the TV/VCR combo unit that sat beside a couple of kegs of beer.
“I usually only keep the footage for a few days—tapes are expensive, you know, and there’s no point in keeping this shit if ain’t nothin’ happened.”
Ed nodded.
“But something did happen last Tuesday, so you kept it.”
“Yep.”
He pulled out the tape—unlabeled, Ed noted—and put it into the unit. It whirred and remained dark for a moment, but then the monitor flicked on. The bartender fast-forwarded a couple of hours, but when a dark-haired woman in a tight leather outfit sat down and ordered a drink, Ed asked him to play it in real time.
“Any audio on this?”
The bartender shook his head.
“Who’s this?” Hugh asked, tapping the back of the woman’s head on the screen.
“A regular, comes in at least once a week. Never says a word; men come up to her all the time and hit on her, but she just brushes them off. Pretty gal like that, you’d think this isn’t the place for her. But I’m thinking she fits right in, if you know what I mean.”
A man suddenly walked into the shot, a thin man with short black stubble on his recently shaved head.
“She never says a word; until today, that is.”
Hugh hushed him, for which Ed was grateful. The man’s ramblings had quickly gone from helpful to annoying.
In the video, the man walked directly up to the bar and took up residence beside the woman. He seemed to be leaning away from her at first, and then he ordered a drink, and their incredibly cheery neighborhood bartender served him after a short delay. Then the man reached for the woman. She turned and instantly dropped her glass, a mixture of shock and recognition forming on her pale face. The man took several minutes trying to convince her of something, but she was having none of it.
And then the altercation with the bartender came next, just as he had described it, with the addition of spilled tequila.
For a split second, the man at the bar’s eyes flicked upward and he appeared to stare into the camera. And then the image exploded into static, and Ed instinctively pulled away from the monitor.
“Stays like this until about three minutes after they left—no idea what happened. They chatted, kissed, then took off,” the bartender managed, his voice sounding constricted.
The video alone was enough to bring back the feelings of fear in him.
“Go back,” Ed instructed. “Go back to where he looked up at the camera.”
The man pressed the rewind button and backed up the tape.
“There. Stop there.”
The man on the screen was pretty much the way the woman at the park had described him: thin, bordering on sickly, with gray-colored skin and sunken cheeks. His head had been shaved recently, maybe a couple of weeks ago, but was now showing signs of growing back.
But it was his eyes that convinced Ed that this was their guy. His eyes weren’t cold and dead like Michael’s, or even crazy like the guy in the Mickey Mouse t-shirt; rather, these were alive. Dancing, flickering without light, excited like a child on Christmas morning.
But, paradoxically, they were also soulless pits that Ed felt he could get lost in by staring too long.
He shook his head, trying to shake the strange feelings that threatened to overcome him.
“This is our guy,” he whispered more to himself than to anyone else. Hugh surprised him by answering.
“Yep, that’s him. That’s definitely him.”
“Take a picture, Hugh.” Then, to the bartender, he added, “Anything else you can tell me about these two?”
The man seemed to mull the question over for a moment. After seeing the man onscreen, he’d apparently suddenly decided that maybe it was best to slow his wagging tongue.
Fear could do that to a man.
Ed prodded a little deeper.
“I’m not asking for Social Security numbers and credit cards here. Help us out.” When these appeals failed to break his stern expression, Ed tried a different tactic. “Look at it this way: you tell us something that helps us get this guy, and you won’t have to ever risk seeing him in your classy establishment ever again.
And when we bring him in, I’ll forget all about the little story you just told us; about how, oh, maybe you didn’t rat him out.”
The man grimaced, realizing now that he had been played. He had no choice but to offer up any information he had.
“The guy mentioned something about being in prison, out on parole, and the woman called him Carson, I think.”
Ed nodded, locking these facts away in his brain.
Hugh leaned forward and tapped the back of the woman’s head.
“You said the woman’s a regular? Any info on her?”
The bartender shook his head.
“No, like I said, she never says much. Her name is Bella, but that’s all I know.”
“Take a few more pics, Hugh.”
As the man snapped away, Ed turned to the bartender.
“We’re gonna need the tape—you don’t mind, do you?”
The man shrugged, and looked almost relieved at the thought of getting rid of it, of putting the entire encounter behind him.
“Whatever.”
“We’re good here,” Hugh said.
“Send the pics to Mac, see if he can come up with anything. Let him know about the name Carson and to check prison databases.”
The bartender pressed eject, and when he went to go grab the tape, Ed reached for it. The man recoiled, clearly fearing that he would be grabbed again.
Ed smirked and took the tape.
“C’mon, Hugh, let’s head back to the station. Thanks for the help, bud. And thanks for the beer,” he added as he turned and left with Hugh in tow.
“That’ll be three fifty each!” the bartender hollered after them.
Without turning, Ed said, “I think your beer’s gone bad. Better get that checked before the inspector comes through.”
As Ed passed the two kegs, he reached out and yanked the tubing from the one nearest him, and beer started to spray onto the floor behind them.
“Fuck! What the fuck!”
Sacred Heart Orphanage (The Haunted Book 5) Page 6