Chapter 14
“You fucking sure about this, Robbo?”
Robert opened the car door while shaking his head. The familiarity of his car was oddly soothing to him. In a completely foreign world, it was nice to have something from the time before.
This was only after he disregarded the emotions that came with the realization that it had been stolen from him in South Carolina, and the only reason he had gotten it back was because Aiden had told him where he had parked it.
“No,” he added, before stepping inside. “I’m not sure of any of this.”
“I mean about Shelly.”
Robert sat in the driver’s seat and shut the door. He waited for Aiden to climb into the back, and Cal into the front, before answering.
“I told you, she had some morning sickness. Was feeling awful. She’ll be fine—she’ll come with us when we go get Carson,” he lied. “Let’s get a fucking move on.”
Cal closed the door, and Robert glanced up at him in the rearview mirror.
His friend’s expression was one of such disbelief that, had the situation been different, Robert might have laughed. Cal knew he was lying—he knew Shelly, after all—but for some reason, he refrained from calling him on it. Maybe Cal had come to his senses and realized that what they were about to do should not—could not—involve a pregnant woman, for Christ’s sake.
It didn’t matter his motivations. What mattered was that they had less than an hour before they had to meet Sean, and Shelly would be safe here back at the Estate.
For some reason, despite what happened here yesterday, he knew this last part to be true.
Robert put the car into drive and rolled around the statue, and pulled up to the gate.
“You wanna open it, Cal?”
Cal hopped out without a word, and Robert glanced nervously in the rearview mirror, waiting with bated breath. The horrible screeching of the gate opening drew him back. Out of all the things wrong with the Harlop Estate, he hated the gate the most. No matter what the hell they did—grease it, lube it, replace the gears—it remained an obstinate piece of wrought iron that was like a physical pain in his side.
Robert leaned out the window.
“C’mon, Cal, I can fit through. Let’s go!”
Cal hurried back and jumped into the passenger seat. Before he had even closed the door, Robert peeled out of the driveway.
Despite his best efforts, he couldn’t resist the urge to glance in the rearview one final time.
The Estate door was suddenly thrown wide and a familiar figure with a round belly stood in the entrance, hands on her hips. The car jostled and a scraping sound filled the evening air.
“Fuck,” Cal grumbled.
By looking in the mirror, Robert had veered to the right and scraped the passenger side door on the gate.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Robert said before any of them could change their mind.
***
“I feel like a fucking child,” Cal said absently after they had been driving for about an hour.
“How do you mean?”
“Well, you know how a child will, like, burn their hand on the stove, and then do it again and again?”
Robert thought of Amy, how sweet she was, how much she liked to draw. He recalled the incredibly detailed drawing that she had made in the bar on the day of Wendy’s funeral.
It’s the ocean, Daddy. I drew it for you.
Cal didn’t have children, so he couldn’t blame the man for being so wrong about them. They weren’t helpless, mindless creatures.
They were, in fact, a lot smarter than people gave them credit. And Amy was definitely on the high end of that scale. Still, he understood what Cal was saying, despite not comprehending the context.
“What do you mean?”
Cal sighed and rubbed his eyes. Clearly, he hadn’t gotten the same sort of rest that Robert and Shelly had.
“Do we have a plan? Seriously, we did the same shit at both Pinedale and Seaforth: barge in there like retarded GI commandos, minus the training.” He turned to Aiden in the backseat who had acquired his typical deadpan expression. “No offense. But, Robert, what are we supposed to do this time when we meet Sean, huh? Kidnap him?”
Robert said nothing, and instead deferred to the ‘retarded GI commando’ for an answer. When Aiden realized that they were both waiting for him to speak, he shifted the chaw from one side of his lip to the other. In that moment, a strange thought came to Robert.
What happens when he spits? Does he have to spit?
The man’s words brought about renewed focus.
“You bring the stuff I told you to? Put it in the trunk?”
Cal nodded.
“Shovel, rope, heavy bag? Jug of water? Put it all in there.”
Aiden took a deep breath.
“Then, yeah, that’s exactly what we’re going to do. Kidnap the man. Make him talk. Make him tell us where Carson is.”
“And you’re sure this is going to work?” Robert asked tentatively.
Aiden reached for the empty coffee cup between the front seats, causing Robert and Cal to dramatically lean away, toward their respective doors. It was the same cup that he had used to spit in when he had held a gun to Robert’s head outside Callahan’s church. Aiden swirled it a bit, made a face, and then spat a thick stream of tobacco juice.
And that answers that.
“Fuck no. I’m not sure about nothin’ anymore. But it’s all we got.”
Chapter 15
“Alrighty, Hughey, let me hear what you got.”
Hugh raised an eyebrow.
“Hughey? What ‘I got’? Alright there, Martin Riggs.”
Ed just kept on smiling, then indicated the photographs laid out on the table in front of them. It had taken a good hour to get from the Panty Snatcher to the precinct, despite thin traffic for a Tuesday night. Once back, they had taken up residence in the empty lunch room. Hugh had spun his magic with the computers and had managed to print out larger and seemingly better-quality images of the four suspects, who they had promptly named Larry (man in the Mickey shirt), Curly (man with the dead eyes), Mo (the girl), and Mike (Michael Young), and laid them out on the table. Mike was in the middle, with Larry and Mo on one side and Curly on the other.
“Seriously,” Ed said at last when it was clear that a hypothesis from Hugh wasn’t forthcoming. “What are you thinking happened to our boy Mike?”
Ed observed his new partner closely, even before he began to speak. The fact that underlying all of his sarcasm and wit Hugh genuinely liked the challenge, got a kick out of putting together these human puzzle pieces, was something to be admired.
Throughout his tenure as a detective, and as a beat cop before that, Ed had seen many different types of police officers: the macho type, the aggressive, usually short, asshole of a cop; the quiet, contemplative, insecure type; the paycheck type; and the least common, the puzzler.
Hugh was a puzzler, through and through. With a dash of the paycheck type thrown in and a sprinkling of contemplation to boot.
“I don’t know, Ed. I have no idea why this guy, a wealthy Wall Street psycho”—he jabbed Mike in the nose—“would hang out with this guy.” He thumbed the fatso in the Disney shirt.
“Well—”
Hugh held up his finger, stopping Ed.
“So that leaves Curly and Mo. Huh. They have to be the link between the two; there is no scenario I can imagine—correction, no reasonable scenario I can imagine—in which Michael interacts with Larry.”
“Not in a past life? Childhood?”
Hugh shook his head.
“No. No way. Mike here has been keeping his devil a secret. Has been since the day he was born, I figure. Speaking to this man here, that’s just a recipe to get caught.”
“You saw his setup, right? The cage, the sub-basement dungeon?”
“Yep.”
“Why would he leave that? What would make him give all that up? I mean, for a sick fuck like him, he seemed to be
like a pig in shit.”
Hugh sighed.
“We went over this already. Blackmail, death, prison.”
“Can’t be the latter two; we saw him on video.”
“Which leaves blackmail, buuuuut…”
Ed reached forward and poured himself another two fingers of Crown Royal Northern Harvest. He wasn’t fond of drinking at work, but there was no one around and it had been a long, busy day. A quick glance revealed that Hugh was still working on his drink.
He took a sip.
“Does our boy Mike look like someone susceptible to blackmail?”
Hugh grimaced.
“Maybe. Doubt it, though.”
“So then why?”
Hugh grabbed his drink, finished it, and held the empty mug out for a refill. The Nose obliged.
“Don’t know. I don’t fucking know.”
“Don’t get frustrated. Let me ask you something: why does an alcoholic leave the bar?”
Hugh rolled his eyes so dramatically that Ed wouldn’t have been surprised if they popped right out of his head and plunked on the table like two ceramic ball bearings.
“Holy fuck, you’re like the Sunday crosswords with this shit. Fuck, I dunno. Why does the alcoholic leave the bar? More booze? Free booze?”
Ed smiled big and broad.
“You’re smarter than you look.”
“Better than looking smarter than I am, I suppose. But me no understand.”
Ed just stared, knowing that it would come to the man.
And it did.
“Wait, you think that—what—one of these two is giving him girls? A fucking cannibal buffet?”
Ed shrugged.
“No think—I know. Why else would he leave his dungeon setup behind with no heat on him?”
Ed leaned forward and took another swig of his Rye.
“Was it the girl or the guy—Carson?”
“There’s no way Mike would take orders or even instruction from this honey here. More apt to eat her, I’d say.”
Ed leaned forward suddenly and jabbed a finger right between Carson’s eyes.
“So this guy is our key.”
Hugh leaned back, a smile on his face. He was obviously content, impressed with himself. But Ed didn’t blame him. Truth be told, he was impressed by his partner as well. Puzzler or not, he hadn’t expected Hugh to make the connections as quickly as he had, irrespective of the breadcrumbs Ed had dropped along the way.
Hugh suddenly became serious again.
“Okay, we’ve set up our organigram, sure. But we still don’t know who the hell these people are, or how to find them. Which is what we really need to figure out.”
“Oh, that’s the easy part.”
Hugh scoffed and rolled his eyes again.
“The easy part? Sure—sure it is. Colonel Mustard in—”
“No, really. Mac called me an hour ago. The fat guy in the Mickey Mouse shirt’s name is Jonah Silvers.”
Hugh scoffed.
“Give me a fucking break. You knew this all along?”
Ed chuckled.
“Sure did. And get this: last known place of employment? A crematorium, not more than two hours from here.”
Hugh practically jumped to his feet.
“Well what the hell are we waiting for? Let’s get going.”
“Easy, Tonto. What are we gonna do? Run in there, guns a-blazin’? Let’s get some rest tonight, head out tomorrow. I’ll make a couple calls, see if I can get some help from the FBI.”
“The FBI? Forget them, this is our case.”
“Easy now, Hugh. Remember your first lesson of the day: we’re detectives, we detect. Leave the rest to the grunts.”
But despite his words, in the back of his mind, the idea of actually getting into some action appealed to Ed on some level.
Maybe…maybe we’ll do more than detect this time.
PART II - Cloaks and Ghosts
Chapter 16
“No…not enough. It’s just not enough,” Carson said, purveying the pile of bodies beside the oven. He counted twelve, not including the toddler.
Jonah had been right: his partner Vinny had come and gone without even questioning Carson’s odd story about replacing Jonah in Scarsdale’s basement. The thin, bird-like man hadn’t even asked to see ID or bothered to inquire as to why Carson was piling the bodies instead of burning them.
Still, he knew that Vinny had about one or two more shipments before even someone as dull as he started asking questions. And Carson intended to deal with him before that happened.
If the man brought five or six more bodies, and adding Vinny himself to that number, then maybe—maybe—it would be enough. But then again, maybe it wouldn’t. What Robert had managed to do back in the Harlop Estate—to somehow control the dead, not just with verbal orders, but to somehow go deep inside them, control them with his mind—well that was something.
And given their similar pedigree, Carson figured that he might be able to do the same. He just had to figure out how.
To his left, Michael breathed heavily, and Carson turned in time to see him wipe some filthy perspiration from his brow with the back of his hand. The man had a nasty bruise that ran from his temple to around his left eye from where the little bastard Allan had kicked him, and he looked like he hadn’t slept in about a month.
“How many do we need? When is it going to be enough, Carson? Fifty? A hundred bodies? Will that be enough?”
Carson shrugged.
“The more, the merrier, as they say. Robert may have gotten the upper hand on us last time, but it won’t happen again. We need to work fast, open the rift before Sean and the other Guardians block us.”
“Block us?”
Carson shrugged.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if Robert and his band of misfits are taking a more proactive approach. Just keep piling up the bodies, Michael.” He bit his lower lip. He could tell that his little puppy was getting anxious, that Carson needed to throw him a bone to keep him satisfied soon. “Next time Vinny comes back with the bodies, help him move them down here. Then you can have him.”
Michael raised an eyebrow, and even Bella moved away from him slightly.
“Have him?”
Carson chuckled.
“A snack, you know. Appetizer before the main course.”
Michael smiled, and when he went back to stacking the corpses, he did it with a little more vigor.
***
“You remember when we first met, Bella?” Carson asked absently. He was lying beside her on the floor, their bodies drenched with sweat.
She turned to look at him. After the corpse had yanked out a large hunk of her hair, she had had no choice but to chop it all short. Despite her best efforts, and her uncanny dexterity with a blade, Bella had done a poor job of covering the bald area. And without her beautiful black hair, she had immediately been bumped down a grade on the attractiveness scale. Her severe eyebrows and the deep grooves around her mouth were more obvious, the scar on her temple more noticeable without the distraction of those shiny locks.
“Of course. You were a cocky juvie bastard, you know that?”
Carson smiled. He remembered the time well.
After murdering his foster parents, the state had done their best to try him as an adult, but leave it to the system to fuck that one up. He had confessed to stabbing his stepfather, who’d moonlighted as his stepmother’s pimp and dealer, in the chest. When his stepmother had found him, he had slit her throat without a moment’s hesitation. And yet he had only been sentenced to a psychiatric juvenile facility from the age of eleven to the age of maturity.
It was a joke, really. Everyone and their mother knew that Carson would kill again, the same way that he knew Robert would do the same after getting a taste of murder back at Seaforth.
Despite what Robert thought, or what the man struggled to convince himself of, they were cut from the same cloth, of the same genetic makeup.
Carson reached over and
moved a thicket of Bella’s hair over the bald area, which was still red and glistening.
Back in juvie, she had been straight, perfect. Back then, a young Dr. George Mansfield, loud and obnoxious, had been so negligent as to allow naive Bella, in just her first year of her psychiatry internship, to spend time with Carson alone.
Back then, Carson had only started to realize his potential, to understand his role to play in this world and the other. And so, evidently, had Bella.
“Remember when you taught me to meditate? To completely enter my own head?”
Bella nodded. As she did, the hair he had brushed over the bald spot fell away, and she quickly pushed it back.
“Can you help me go deeper, Bella?”
Bella appeared to contemplate this for a moment, her tongue pushing into her cheek.
“Maybe,” she admitted at last. “Are you going to talk to your father again?”
Carson shook his head.
“I want to go there, Bella; this time, I want to enter the Marrow.”
Bella sat bolt upright.
“You can’t. You—”
Carson laughed.
“Look at you! So sensitive all of a sudden…are you worried about me? Worried that I won’t come back? Ha! I only want to go there with my mind. I want to go and I want to come back, Bella. I need to come back—Leland can’t open the rift from the Marrow. He needs us to help him.”
“And we need Robert.”
Carson nodded.
“That’s right; we need a Guardian.” He looked off to one side, thinking about what Leland had told him last time they had spoken, back when he had been locked up in Seaforth. There were other Guardians out there, including that bastard Sean, but Robert was the most logical choice. Perhaps the only choice. “We need to find him, before he finds us.”
Bella stared at him with her vibrant green eyes for what felt like an eternity.
“Yes,” she finally said. “I can help you go deeper. But I have to warn you, the deeper you go, the greater risk of losing yourself.”
Carson laughed again.
“Oh, my dear Bella, that’s exactly why I have to go to the Marrow—to make sure that doesn’t happen to me, to you, to anyone else.”
Sacred Heart Orphanage (The Haunted Book 5) Page 7