Starling (Southern Watch Book 6)

by Robert J. Crane

  Maybe?

  He didn’t seem to be looking at her either, which was fine with her. He was looking straight ahead, paying attention to what Barney Jones was saying, which surprised her, because she knew that while she might have been agnostic, he was pretty firm in his total non-belief.

  But here he was in the church, listening politely, head down slightly, eyes up and forward. She kept stealing glances at him out of the corner of her eye, occasionally reaching out to touch the baseball bat, reassure herself it was there in case shit went down. Was it likely to happen during a funeral? Well, hopefully not, but it was tough to tell in Midian these days.

  She looked to the side, and there was that guy again, the skinny one in his suit with the long face, the one that had been at Donna Reeve’s funeral. She’d never seen him before today, had she?

  The thin man looked sideways at her and smiled, as if sensing her attention toward him. She didn’t return the smile; she was in uniform and felt plenty all right glowering suspiciously in his direction. He didn’t react, just kept smiling and went back to paying attention to the preacher.

  “… and pray the way You have taught us to pray, oh Lord … Our Father, who art in heaven …”

  Shit. She hadn’t even noticed Jones had started a prayer. She hurriedly bowed her head and started murmuring along.

  *

  Lauren strolled in through the front door of the whorehouse, Molly trailing behind her. “My feet hurt,” Lauren complained, kicking off her heels and sighing in relief. The shoes that Ms. Cherry had lent her, literal hooker heels, pinched like hell.

  “You look about two sizes too big for Ms. Cherry’s shoes, that’s why,” Molly said, taking off her sneakers. It was all she had because neither of them had gone back to their house since … well, since.

  “Hey, if you think we should have hit up our own wardrobes, you should have said so,” Lauren retorted.

  “No thanks,” Molly said, paling slightly. Lauren knew she remembered what happened, but she didn’t want to press. It wasn’t as though Molly had wanted to slit her grandmother’s throat, after all. It was those goddamned demons that had done it. “Though we are going to have to get some clothes soon. We can’t just keep raiding Ms. Cherry’s closet forever.”

  “Have you seen her closet? We can live out of it forever. We should,” Lauren said. The woman had style, taste, and a lot of extra clothes in various sizes for reasons that Lauren didn’t want to delve too deeply into.

  “I’m amazed how much she has that fits me,” Molly agreed. “Though most of it is a little lower cut than I prefer …”

  “Oh, it’s you.” Lucia spoke from just behind the curtain to the living room. She was barely visible, scarcely more than an eye and her legs in view behind the parted cloth. She was standing in shadow, which was something Lauren had noticed that she and Ms. Cherry did quite often before greeting a “guest.”

  “Yeah, just us,” Molly said. “Did you do anything, uh … fun … while we were gone?” She blushed as soon as the words were out of her mouth.

  If Lucia caught her discomfort, she didn’t let on, answering with a shrug of her thin shoulders. “Mostly just sat around and watched TV. Only one customer, and he didn’t stay long.”

  Lauren waited a second, two, then three. “That’s nic—” she started.

  “Why didn’t he stay long?” Molly asked.

  Lauren blanched. Here was another problem with living in a whorehouse: her inquisitive sixteen-year-old daughter was now asking questions about the business.

  “He just wanted a blowjob,” Lucia said with another shrug of the shoulders. “In and out in less than ten minutes.”

  Molly’s face was a study in cascade reaction. “Wait, so he just wanted you to—”

  “That’s about enough,” Lauren said.

  Molly was making a face. “But … I mean … he just wanted that, not—”

  “Please stop asking questions.”

  “But I want to know why—I mean, why a guy would only want that when he could have so much—so much more.” Molly waved a hand to indicate Lucia’s crotch. “You know?”

  Lauren frowned, putting her hand over her eyes. “I—this is … it’s so wrong …”

  “You want to know why he just wanted a blowjob?” Lucia asked, regarding Molly with a sort of world-weary amusement.

  “Well, yeah,” Molly said, flushing. “I mean … I thought guys wanted to get laid, you know?”

  Lauren thought about thrusting her fingers in her ears and humming really loud until the conversation was over. It wouldn’t help. She’d imagine it, and that might be worse than what was playing out in front of her.

  “Sweetheart,” Lucia said, unflinching, “men just want to get off. Some men want to get off by getting laid, yeah. Some would prefer to see a woman on her knees in front of them, working them between her lips until—well, until they get there.”

  “You said it so politely too,” Lauren muttered.

  “But I thought oral was just a warm-up!” Molly said. “You mean … they actually …” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “… get there … like get there … in your mouth?”

  “Yes.” Lucia maintained that dry amusement.

  “Really …?”

  “Okay, please stop,” Lauren said, closing her eyes. There was no way to imagine this worse.

  “Wait. Mom, have you ever—”

  “I’m not answering that,” Lauren snapped.

  “Oh, God, you have,” Molly said, mouth falling open. “You totally have. How often—”

  “NOT ANSWERING!”

  “Do a lot of guys like that?” Molly asked. “To skip, you know, straight-up sex and go for—”

  “Enough!” Lauren seized Molly by the upper arm and started to drag her away. “Lucia … seriously,” she shot back, “kindly—not—with my teenage daughter!”

  “That’s a pretty basic thing to learn,” Lucia said quietly, “what guys like.” She eyed the two of them. “I’m guessing you knew at her age.”

  “I also knew what it was like to be pregnant at her age,” Lauren snapped, trying to pull Molly away, away from this conversation. “I’m trying to keep her from learning how that feels too.”

  “Blowjobs don’t cause pregnant,” Lucia said with a barely contained smirk.

  “I don’t want to get pregnant,” Molly said, mostly going along with Lauren but still looking back at Lucia, “but, I mean … Lucia and Ms. Cherry are, like, sex experts, and it’s stupid for me not to take advantage of their knowledge while I’m here—”

  “NO,” Lauren said again, practically dragging her upstairs, toward their room.

  “But this is really interesting!” Molly said, turning to her with a slight pout. “Why can’t you and I have conversations about sex like that? You know—honest, engaging, fact-based—”

  Lauren felt her blood run cold. “Because if your grandmother wasn’t already dead, hearing you and I talk about oral sex would have pretty much killed her.” She caught the blush from Molly, the hot shame at the invocation of her grandmother’s name, on this day of all days, and the slight resistance she’d been putting up faded instantly, allowing Lauren to drag her back to their room and shut the door, both to the whorehouse and the conversation that her daughter had been wanting to have.

  *

  “No one among us is irredeemable,” Barney Jones said, his words a little like nails screeching on a chalkboard to Hendricks. Hendricks hadn’t spent a lot of time talking to the preacher since he’d joined the watch. The pastor was a little evangelical for his taste; not too over the top, but a few degrees too warm with the spirit for him to want to spend much time with the man. “The apostle Paul was originally known as Saul, a persecutor of Christians so virulent that he was among the chief of them to hunt down believers.”

  Hendricks kept from rolling his eyes, but only just.

  “One day,” Jones said, raising his hands up above the pulpit theatrically, “Saul was walking down the road t
o Damascus. Here he was, the fiercest enemy of the Christians. He walked along, and was struck blind by the Lord—”

  “If only your Lord would strike me deaf right now,” muttered Hendricks, rolling his eyes and getting a nasty look from an older black lady a row ahead of him. He shrugged in mild penitence, then let his gaze drift around the church.

  He didn’t know any of these people who weren’t with the watch. He’d been in town for a while now, but he hadn’t done much socializing. He’d run across a few people in the course of fighting demons, but really, his wasn’t the most social of occupations. He’d talked more with people here in Midian than he had on any other job, but that wasn’t saying much.

  He caught Erin looking at him again. God, that was annoying. She was playing a fucking teenage game with him, he could feel it. For his part, Hendricks considered them done. He was getting his pussy elsewhere at this point anyway.

  He blanched inwardly at the slight swell of guilt that presented itself after that thought. Sure, maybe he’d felt something more for her at some point, but that was damned long gone now, wasn’t it? Fucking a crazy redhead without complication was way better, wasn’t it?

  Sure it was, he told himself, but his guts churned, telling him something slightly different.

  “… and through this man, Saul, God gave us this lesson—that no one is irredeemable. That every man has his part to play, his choice to make. That among the flock are welcomed even those who once hunted the flock. Saul became the Apostle Paul. He went from dogged hunter of Christians to a leader of the church in its incipient form.” Barney Jones looked around. “I see dark days. I see people willing to fight. Alison Stan was one of them. I knew that girl since she was a little thing, long, long before she stepped foot in my church with Arch, who would become her husband. Alison and I had a few conversations about her faith.” Jones smiled. “It was strong. Alison believed. John 3:16 says that, ‘Whosoever believes in me shall not die, but shall live forever.’” He looked over the parishioners. “Alison believed …”

  Hendricks barely suppressed the eye-roll. Maybe she had believed, but he didn’t. He believed in a whole lot of nothing after death. That the brain died, the body died, and the consciousness was just gone. Black, empty nothingness. Hell, he’d wished for it when Kitty Elizabeth had gotten hold of him. Wished for an end to it, for his lights to get switched out, for his struggles to be done. Another life after this? Shit, this one was more than enough. Sure, they said eternal peace or bliss or whatever, but really, that didn’t sound any more believable than anything else they professed.

  “… and the thought of redemption for some us seems like a … like a distant sort of idea.” Jones was smiling again, down at the flock, and it made Hendricks queasy. “We go about our daily lives, and maybe the Lord isn’t much with us, isn’t much in our thoughts. We can make our way without him, after all. We can do what we gotta do, get through the day.” Jones raised a clenched fist. “Get caught up in the concerns of man. Live our shallow lives, looking for the things that’ll keep us busy, keep us … entertained. There are things aplenty to preoccupy a man in this world.”

  Hendricks listed a few of the more fun ones off in his head: pussy, beer, whiskey, pot.

  Jones went on: “It is easy to walk through the world preoccupied by those concerns, by the pleasures of the flesh. They offer a respite from the pains of the day, from the pains of being human.” Jones gave a knowing smile. “We’ve all had bad days. We’re looking at a lot of ’em in both directions right now, forward and backward. It’d be easier for a body to lose hope. To think, ‘Heck, why bother? There’s fun to be had, and what’s the point of fighting on? Of … believing?’”

  Not a terrible point, Hendricks thought. Other than sheer orneriness, maybe a desire to cram a sword into the face of every single demon he could. Those were reasons, weren’t they? They’d carried him along this far.

  “Man can act for himself, selfishly. That’s one way to live life.” Jones slumped dramatically. “It’s a terrible way to live your life though, driven by crass desire, moving from one pleasure to the next, these shallow compulsions the only thing that gets you out of bed in the morning. I knew a man in my youth who struggled with drink. His eyes were bloodshot, his nose a red bubble on his face.” Jones mimed a bulbous attachment. “I came around an alleyway corner one morning and found him there, drinking deep from a bottle of rotgut. He was retching, gagging up and spitting, the smell of sick just terrible in the air. I watched him wrestle with the nausea, the desire to heave up his guts. Just when he got hold of himself, with a little drip of spittle still making its way down his chin—he took another drink. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked him. And he looked up at me, not even noticing I was there before, and he said, ‘If I can get past the gagging on the first bottle, the rest of the day goes just fine.’” Jones shook his head. “Friends … we need not go through our days gagging our way, dragging our way, through to the next pleasure. That man in that alley … he was focused on his pleasure, not realizing he’d lost himself long ago. If all you do is chase your satisfaction, you’ll find yourself strangely unsatisfied. There are other people in this world, people who could use your help. Even the worst of us have our moment on the Damascus road where we can keep going—pursuing power, pursuing lust, pursuing our … our own selfish desires …” Jones turned solemn. “Or we can seek redemption. Become better. Be washed in the blood of the One who forgives us when we do our wrongs. We all do wrong. No man is perfect. We all fail. We are all by turns terrible, and that’s all right—not that we do terrible things, but that we can be forgiven for them …”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Hendricks said under his breath, drawing another nasty look from the lady in front of him. She reminded him a little of his former mother-in-law. He didn’t say what he was thinking, probably because she did look like Renee’s mom: I didn’t realize I was coming here for a fucking sermon.

  *

  Nora Wellstone woke up in darkness, stone blocks surrounding her on all sides. Chains bound her to a table. She tried to move, but the table squeaked beneath her, the legs slightly uneven. The chains rattled in the darkness, the sound unsettling her further.

  Her head felt foggy, like she was still coming out of a deep sleep. She had a little double vision going too, the lone bulb hanging overhead resolving slowly into one filament, then diverging again into two. “H … hello …?” she asked the darkness, rocking experimentally once more.

  What had happened? She’d been in the car with Mack … they’d blown the tire … she’d pulled over …

  What had happened next? It was vague, a blur, and she recalled … wasn’t there a man there? Yes, a man who’d … he’d been pulled over too, hadn’t he?

  “Oh, you’re awake.” A squeak behind her, just out of her field of vision, which ensured she couldn’t turn her head to look far enough to see him. His footsteps suggested he was on a set of stairs, descending slowly toward her. “Good.” He sounded pleased about this.

  “Wh … where am I?” she asked, catching sight of him finally. Her vision was blurry around the edges, and the grey concrete block that made up the room wasn’t very clear, wasn’t easy to see. “Where is … where’s Mack?”

  “I take that to mean the boy that was in the car with you,” the man said, coming around into her field of view. He was carrying a … a …

  Oh, God.

  “I don’t know where he went,” the man said, lips pursed together. He didn’t look terribly pleased, nor terribly upset one way or another. He looked vaguely troubled, as though thinking carefully about something. “I wish I did.”

  “What are … what are you going to do with me?” Nora asked, her thoughts slow, like a drip from a coffee pot about to run out of water.

  “Nothing you’re going to enjoy,” the man said emotionlessly. He was eyeing her, the hacksaw in his hand, and he brought it down slowly, where she could see it, until it rested on her throat. Ignoring the pleas, then the screams,
he started to saw, teeth biting into her flesh as the warm blood began to run.

  *

  “The service was nice,” Reeve said, lingering near Arch, who was taking condolences with his head held high. Well, what else could he do? He was a man, and the point of this was to give folks a chance to grieve Alison’s death. Arch was grieving in his own way, in his own time, and danged sure in his own place. He needed to be strong for others right now.

  “Thank you,” Arch said, as gracefully as he could. It was kind of Reeve to say, especially given how poorly attended things had been. Arch didn’t really know how to explain that, other than by the attrition of folks worn out by grim events. He’d be pretty happy never to contemplate another funeral, but the only sure way out of that was to get to his own, and quickly.

  “I like the flowers,” Erin said, sidling up to join their conversation. She’d been watching at a distance for a little bit, easing into their small conversational circle just like she might have at work.

  Arch glanced at the flowers. The arrangements were spread out all over the church, and he realized dimly that they were the same ones that had been here for Donna Reeve’s funeral. “They’re nice,” he said simply, not interested in commenting further. Why bother? There were a lot of funerals, and if no one was getting the attention they deserved, at least they all had flowers.

  “Arch,” Erin said, leaning in toward him and putting a gentle hand on his arm, “you gonna be all right?”

  Arch nodded slowly. “I’m not entirely all right now … but I will be.” He kept his voice strong. It was surprisingly difficult, even though he thought he maybe had a handle on himself now. Well, the mind was a powerfully self-deceptive thing. “He’ll see me through.”