Starling (Southern Watch Book 6)

by Robert J. Crane

  Erin put the car in drive and wheeled it around hard, stomping on the accelerator. It surged forward, headlights illuminating Faulkner Road’s leaf-covered pavement as the high beams spread out from the front of her vehicle.

  Nothing but the leaves moved, that and the rustling boughs overhead. She turned the wheel and brought the car around hard in front of the abandoned vehicle, blocking the road but casting the lights over the ground in front of the other car.

  Did something move again? Or was that just shadows slinking away from the high beams?

  “Dammit,” Erin breathed. Once again she wasn’t sure what she’d seen. Could it just be a trick of the lights?

  Or was something moving around the car?

  The quiet but ever-present muffled engine noise kept her from being able to hear footsteps, or breathing other than her own that might have been taking place outside the vehicle. She couldn’t smell sulfur, but the air conditioner was on recirculate, and the heater’s smell was the only thing she could detect, that warm, blowing air carrying the heavy tinge of pine from the air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror.

  “Sonofabitch,” Erin muttered, peering out the windshield. What the hell was she supposed to do now?

  *

  Brian’s phone buzzed, and he checked it as he walked into Red Cedar hospital. It was a simple text message of the sort he got frequently nowadays, a group text that went out anytime one of the watch reported danger.

  ABANDONED CAR ON FAULKNER ROAD, BLOOD IN VEHICLE. OFFICER ON SCENE, REQUESTING BACKUP. ANYONE NEARBY?

  Brian furrowed his brow. This one was coming from the dedicated cell phone they left in the sheriff’s station, always plugged in so that they could dispatch help at all times. It was getting toward late in the evening, and people would be winding down. They had a dedicated night shift now, and if they felt they needed more help, they could always start ringing people up, but …

  This didn’t sound too serious, and Brian wasn’t exactly combat ready, even without his limp. He put his phone on Do Not Disturb mode and pocketed it, noting that a couple text messages had already joined the stream, announcing imminent backup for Erin. That was good. Even if they weren’t attending all the funerals, the town had pulled together in this regard. He slipped the phone into his pocket and wandered over to the elevator, catching it just as it was about to slide closed.

  He slipped inside, eyeing an orderly dressed in blue scrubs. He didn’t give her a lot of notice, save for catching the yellowed fingers on the right hand. Smoker, then. He almost opened his mouth to say something to her about bumming one, but the truth was, he didn’t really like to smoke cigarettes. Weed was his vice, or it had been before all this demon mess had happened. He’d given it up when he’d joined the watch, figuring it was more important to have a clear head going into possible danger.

  “Fuck,” Brian muttered, drawing a curious look from the orderly. She blinked at him, and he said, “Sorry. I was just … thinking about getting high.”

  She raised both eyebrows at him and smiled like he was crazy. “That’s nice,” she said with a heavy amount of sarcasm. Yeah, he probably would have reacted the same way if a stranger in an elevator had said something weird like that to him.

  The elevator door dinged and she walked out, giving him a last look over her shoulder as though he might stalk her out. He rolled his eyes. If he’d said, “I was just thinking about getting drunk,” would she have evinced the same reaction? Probably not, but alcohol was legal in Tennessee.

  He got out at his floor and wandered down the hall, still thinking about how nice it would be to get baked right now. Not enough to make him paranoid, just something to take the edge off. It had been a few weeks since he’d last smoked out, and they hadn’t been easy ones.

  Brian paused outside his father’s room, putting a hand against the wall, mentally steeling himself against what he’d find inside. His dad had been alone for a few hours now, since his mother had gone to the funeral and headed home afterward. He’d offered to relieve her here, the better to … well, to get the hell out of town.

  He couldn’t get away from his thoughts though.

  “Hey, Dad,” he said as he came into the quiet room. The heartbeat monitor still beeped quietly, but his father was moving a little, head bobbing up and down. He couldn’t quite fix on Brian. Instead his eyes drifted around, meeting his gaze only occasionally, as though he couldn’t control his muscles enough to keep them steady.

  Brian was getting used to that. His father had suffered a traumatic brain injury, after all, a bullet gouging its way up from below his jaw, tunneling through the bone at the top of his mouth before entering his brain and then exiting at the top of the skull.

  It was a miracle he’d survived, really.

  Brian didn’t believe in miracles though. And even if he had, he damned sure wouldn’t have called the state his father was reduced to any kind of blessing.

  “Had dinner yet?” Brian asked, not expecting a coherent reply. He didn’t get one. Bill Longholt moaned, moving his head up and down on a slight diagonal, the only manner of reply he could make these days.

  “Yeah,” Brian said, nodding for no reason. His dad might have been making sense to himself, but Brian doubted it.

  This was a fucking shame, Brian reflected. He and his dad had had their fair share of arguments, of fights, of disagreements, especially since he’d come back from Brown. “I wanted to spread my wings,” Brian mumbled, ignoring the grunting noise his father made. “Guess I picked a bad time.”

  He hadn’t done much wing-spreading though. No job, no girlfriend. His life had squarely landed in the shitter since he’d come back to Midian. Hell, he hadn’t wanted to come back anyway, but it wasn’t like his dad was going to keep paying for him to live elsewhere in the country, forking over cash for an apartment when Brian didn’t want to get a job and bash his head against the wall doing stupid, meaningless shit work. He’d wanted to do something intelligent and meaningful, and failing that …

  Well, failing that, he just wanted to get high, watch TV, and contemplate finding something that would matter. Something that would stir his passion.

  Fighting demons had felt like the ticket, oddly enough. It had been the thing that had gotten him out of bed long before noon lately, which … hell, even classes hadn’t gotten him out of bed before noon. Now he was fighting the good fight for Midian, a town he hadn’t wanted to come back to, but …

  Jesus, what a fucking series of hits they’d taken. He’d figured out where the last one was coming, but not nearly in time to stop it. He considered himself lucky, after a fashion, that he hadn’t seen the slaughter on the square. He’d had a couple nightmares about it nonetheless, because maybe imagination was as bad or worse than seeing what had happened. He didn’t, couldn’t, know for sure, but he’d woken up sweating and screaming a couple times in the basement, clutching a pillow and his holy dagger, scared shitless that demons were coming in through the windows to get him.

  “It’s bad, Dad,” Brian said, loud enough his father could hear him. If he was listening. The grunting and head-bobbing continued unabated, and Brian closed his eyes. “The town is … fucked. So many people have died the last few weeks.” Brian rubbed his eyes. “Reeve says it would have been worse if I hadn’t figured Halloween out, but … I don’t know. It’s such a goddamned disaster that it’s hard for me to feel like I did any good. And the number keeps ticking up. Hundreds dead … how do you call that a win? Alison dead?” He choked back that heavy lump in his throat. “In what mirror universe does that sound like victory …?”

  His father’s grunts grew in pitch, and his head rocked harder back and forth.

  Brian stared at his dad. “You understand about Alison, don’t you?” There was no change in his father’s manner. “Maybe? You know?” He watched for a sign, any, but there was no change. His dad started to settle a little, eyes still drifting wildly. His eyes were glistening though …

  Brian got out of the c
hair and drifted over to his father. He tried to look into his eyes. There was still a blood-tinged bandage under his jaw and at the top of his head. The dressings were being changed daily, but what good was that going to do? Stave off infection, maybe. But to what end? So his father could live this life—a fucking vegetable’s life, grunting from now until his end?

  “Alison’s dead, Dad,” Brian said, catching him carefully on each cheek and holding his head in place. His father’s eyes darted still, unsteady. Brian tried to bring himself around, tried to match their twirl, but he couldn’t. They moved too much, wouldn’t hold still. “She’s dead.”

  A mild grunt answered him, and Bill Longholt’s eyes rolled up as he tried to pull against Brian’s hands. Brian let him go, let him pull away. He saw the source of the glistening now, the very small tears at the corners of his father’s eyes. He teared up a lot though … for all Brian knew, his dad had no memory of who Alison was, let alone had any reason to be sad about her death.

  “Welcome to hell,” Brian muttered to himself, turning his back on his father for a few minutes to close his eyes, let his own tears flow unimpeded and unwatched. His father might be permanently handicapped, but Brian still couldn’t bring himself to show weakness in front of the man. It just felt … unseemly for some reason.

  *

  Reeve came over the last hill as his high beams illuminated the police Explorer stretched across both lanes of Faulkner Road like a barricade set up at a right angle with the abandoned car on the side of the road. He saw the flat tire on the abandoned car, the front left wheel sunk all the way down to the rim. Erin was in her the Explorer and he caught a perfect picture of her, baseball bat leaning across the top of her steering wheel.

  He couldn’t blame her for waiting in the car, and she was peering at him where a minute before she’d been looking out the front window at … something. He wouldn’t have been able to see it, hidden as it was by the car, except—

  Reeve applied the brakes; he could have sworn he’d seen something in the shadows along the far side of the abandoned car as he pulled in behind it, figuring he’d cover the back and right side of it. Erin had the front pretty well lit up with her own headlights, but …

  Was there something lurking in the shadows along the side farthest from the road?

  Erin’s voice crackled in his ear, his radio flaring to life. “I swear to God there’s something moving around here.” He could see her looking at him from within her vehicle, though now the abandoned car was positioned between them.

  “I thought I saw movement a minute ago too,” Reeve answered back. “On the far side over here, maybe moving toward the woods. Get a look at anything?”

  “No,” Erin said.

  “We got a few more of the watch inbound on y’all,” Casey said, breaking in. “PRIEST is on the way; so is WRECKER.” That was Sam Allen’s codename. “Oh, and DRUMLINE, but he’s probably ten minutes out.” That’d be Keith Drumlin.

  “What do you think?” Erin asked. She was staring out at him through the car, partially bisected by one of the dark metal strips between the windows. “Wait for backup?”

  “I like numbers on our side in a case like this,” Reeve said. “But …”

  “I don’t like ‘buts.’”

  “I like butts,” Casey said. “I’m an ass man.”

  “Jesus, Casey,” Erin muttered over the open channel.

  “The driver of the car might be out here somewhere, hurt—if that blood on the steering wheel don’t mean they’re dead,” Reeve went on. “I hate to leave someone like that, not knowing what’s happened to them.”

  “Shit,” Erin said. “That’s a damned good point.”

  “Casey,” Reeve said, “did y’all—”

  “I got a match back on that license plate—well, HARLOT did,” Casey said. Reeve twitched a little bit. HARLOT had been Melina Cherry’s choice of a code name. The fact that one of his biggest supporters in this endeavor was the town madam … well, it didn’t quite sit right with him, but what could you do? “Registered to a John and Nora Wellstone of Knoxville.”

  Reeve blinked. “Goddammit.”

  “What?” Erin asked.

  “That’s the mom of the kid that Hendricks and Arch brought in this morning.” Reeve felt almost physically pained. “She drove in to pick him up and must have tried to get back to the interstate this way.” He opened his door and killed the ignition, decision made. “I’m getting out to take a look.”

  “Knew you’d say that,” Erin said, and he saw her open her door as well, the sound of her engine idling greeting Reeve as he stepped out into the brisk evening air. She didn’t key the mic for the next thing she said. “What do you want to do?”

  “Keep your voice down, for one,” Reeve said, keying his own and speaking quietly into it. He slid his sword out, gripping it tightly. “We don’t know if there’s someone watching us, or if it’s something.”

  “Aye aye,” she said with a fair amount of sarcasm, hefting the bat, “though I’m pretty sure given we’ve lit the scene up like a fucking night game, it probably knows we’re here.”

  Reeve didn’t care to argue that point, because it was a damned fair one. “How far out are PRIEST and WRECKER, HQ?”

  “Uhmmmmm,” Casey said. “I guess they’re not online with comms yet, huh? I could text ’em, but …”

  “Never mind,” Reeve said. A thought occurred, and he swore, loudly, and not into the mic.

  “What?” Erin asked, dispensing with her own.

  Reeve drew a sharp breath. “If the mom was driving …” He took a few steps to come alongside the abandoned car. Sure as shit, there was the deployed airbag, and there was the blood, like someone had taken a blow to the head. Those bled like crazy, even when they weren’t too serious, all the capillaries in the skull.

  “Yeah?” Erin asked. There was a rustling of leaves, and they both jerked. Erin shone a light, keeping the unwieldy baseball bat clutched in her other hand, looking more tentative now that they’d heard something.

  Reeve tried to search out the source of the noise, peering along the beam of Erin’s flashlight. Nothing was there, was it? She swept the ground toward the woods slowly, and that rustling sound came again. “I’m wondering …” he said, trying to see into the dark. Even with two sets of headlights and her big flashlight, it wasn’t an easy task. Night was falling.

  “Yeah?” she asked, barely breathing.

  Reeve just stared, still trying to see something, anything, really, out there. “Where’s the kid?”

  *

  Hendricks stretched, the long, lazy stretch of a man who’d just gotten his rocks off good. Starling was a hell of a lay, giving head like a champ in order to get him hard like a rock, then she let him piston his way in and out of her for almost a half hour before he finally came, dropping a load inside her without so much as a word of protest that he was firing live ammo. Starling was wearing a hooker’s body, but Hendricks didn’t worry too much about pregnancy or STDs in this case. Why would he? The kind of STDs he was most apt to catch could be wiped out by antibiotics, and he doubted a practiced hooker got into bed in the mornings without taking the pill.

  It wasn’t the attitude he’d had when he’d had things to live for, but … what the hell did it matter now anyway? It was a measure of how few fucks he gave, psychologically, that the ones he gave literally didn’t trouble him, consequence-wise. So he blasted Starling full of his semen without giving it hardly any thought, just an idle musing now and then in the shower as he washed the strange smell of her sex off his cock.

  “Was that good?” she asked. She didn’t sound insecure about it, or as if she truly cared. It was a question as disinterested as any other she asked, devoid of the sort of emotion he might have gotten from Erin under the same circumstances. She didn’t want to cuddle afterward either, and that suited him just fine.

  “Worked for me,” Hendricks said. It had been pretty good, yeah. He hadn’t had much urge built up, but she’d damne
d sure gotten him hard in a hurry. “You?”

  “Yes,” she said simply. He couldn’t tell if she meant it, and wasn’t sure he cared. It was pretty hard to get a read on Starling, to know what she was thinking, why she was doing anything.

  “Good,” he said, probably meaning it. He hadn’t asked her why she’d suddenly started sleeping with him. Now that he thought about it though … “Hey—”

  He turned to find her already gone, just vanished, as though she hadn’t been lying next to him a moment earlier, breasts and body exposed, totally unlike those chicks on TV post-coitus. The lower temps in the motel room didn’t seem to bother her, though her nipples were pretty decently erect most of the time.

  Well … now they were just gone, but still.

  “Figures,” he muttered. He doubted he could have gotten it up for another round anyway, but it was kinda nice to have her around, have her watching over him. He wondered idly what she was up to now. Probably back to being Lucia.

  That thought prickled at him a little bit. First she’d showed up to warn him cryptically about stuff. Then she’d started saving his life. Now she’d taken to sucking and fucking him.

  What was next? A marriage proposal?

  Hendricks guffawed lightly at that thought, then slipped out of bed. He was headed to the shower when he saw his phone’s screen light up. He’d put it in Do Not Disturb mode when he’d come in and found Starling waiting for him, barely getting that done and casting it aside before she’d dropped in front of him and taken his zipper down, pants to the floor, deep-throating him before he’d had a chance to get more than half hard.

  He snatched up the phone and woke it up, taking a look at all he’d missed. Thoughts of a shower flew right out the fucking window, and two minutes later he was dressed and in the car, putting the purloined SUV in drive as he floored it out of the Sinbad’s parking lot toward Faulkner Road.

  *

  Lauren had stepped out of the parlor to return a call, getting hold of Ms. Cherry for a basic breakdown of what was going on out on Faulkner Road. She’d missed the text message string while she’d been in the bathroom, crying a little. Shit, she had kept it all in during the funeral, but this was her mom, for fuck’s sake.