Starling (Southern Watch Book 6)

by Robert J. Crane

  He’d figured he’d only had maybe five good years left, maybe less, as sheriff. The old Lethal Weapon line rang true, and he was getting too old for this shit, even before the demons showed up.

  “Got work to do,” he told himself, trying for a pep talk. He stared at the face in the mirror and, not for the first time today, remembered his name was on the ballot in a special election to decide whether or not he got to keep his job. Sure, he could have said it didn’t matter, that he was going to keep on fighting anyway, but that wasn’t entirely true, was it?

  Losing Donna hadn’t fully sunk in yet. Losing his job because the people who’d elected him, trusted him, invested him with the power of the law, the authority to try and keep them and their families safe? Having them say, “Nah, no thanks, you’re doing a shitty job here,” no matter how undeniably true it was … it would be a blow, even if he’d keep fighting.

  Reeve didn’t like to play the blame game. He’d kept his eyes shut to the fact that demons were walking his town for entirely too long, and he knew it now. He wished he could go back in time, slapped the ragged, lined face looking at him in the mirror, grab that man staring back by the shoulders a few worry lines ago, and said, “It’s demons. Stop fucking around worrying about Arch and get to the real problem.”

  But there was no use crying over it now. He turned the faucet back on, cold water running down the white, immaculate porcelain, and he splashed some on his face. “I am going to keep fighting,” he promised the face in the mirror, “regardless of how this election comes out.”

  He was readying himself for that gut punch. He had a feeling it was coming. The headache was maybe the worse of the problems right now, but his stomach felt like it was chewing itself up too. If there was another man who wanted his job, Reeve just about figured they could have it if they’d just take the goddamned brain aneurysm and stomach ulcer he seemed to be developing with it.

  Staring at himself in the mirror, he wasn’t sure what he saw other than an old man. Tired, sure. Haggard, yep. A little unshaven? Without doubt. Time was, he’d be looking in a mirror to shave and Donna would wander past behind him. He’d smile at her, she’d smile back at him in the mirror, and he knew there was pride in her eyes. That she was proud of her man, the sheriff of Calhoun County—the mightiest law enforcement man in their world, the steady rock the people of Midian and the outlying areas could count on no matter what.

  But now Donna was dead.

  Midian was getting fucked. People were dying.

  And he was about to go into a goddamned budget meeting.

  “What is there left to be proud of?” he wondered, and a little scrap of poetry from his youth came jumping out at him. “… and though We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven …” He took a breath, trying to remember the rest. “… that which we are, we are.”

  He pushed off the sink, and went for the door, opening it up. The lines kept rolling through his head; he’d had to memorize this back in high school, and they’d stuck for some reason.

  One equal temper of heroic hearts,

  Made weak by time and fate but strong in will

  To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

  Reeve crossed the empty lobby and headed up the stairs, coming out in an open hallway. There were a few offices here, all shut for the night, and down the way he could see a woman, blond and pretty, though she was starting to show a little age, her glasses thick around the frames, look up and meet his gaze. She smiled, and he smiled back politely.

  “Aren’t you Mrs. Pike?” Reeve asked, stepping up to the receptionist’s desk. It was neatly organized except for a book that this lady had out. It looked old, but she had a piece of paper out and covering the pages, so Reeve could only see the edges. It could have been a first edition of Shakespeare, or a collection of poetry that included the verse that was rolling unbidden through his head.

  “Howdy, Sheriff,” she said, putting on a Southern accent that was as fake—and terrible—as George Clooney’s. “And yes, I am. My husband’s secretary is gone, so …” She smiled. “I stepped in for a few hours.”

  “Well, that’s mighty kind of you,” Reeve said. “My Donna used to do that too, a little secretarial stuff around the office when we needed it.” He drew up, all serious now, thinking about her again, goddammit. She’d done that all unpaid, like this lady probably was. “I believe your fella is expecting me.”

  “He surely is,” she said, still with that fakey Southern accent. Reeve concealed a grimace. The woman was a Yankee, for fuck’s sake; everyone knew it. Why bother trying to blend in by using such a tone-deaf approach? It almost sounded like mockery to him, but he smiled through it. She pushed a button on the phone and said, “Jason? Sheriff Reeve is here to see you.” She smiled back at him. “He’ll be right with you.”

  Reeve glanced up at the door. He could hear a little movement inside, and sure enough, Pike opened the door a second later, grinning expansively, lit by the windows behind him. “Sheriff,” he said, sounding almost … pleasant, like he was greeting a long-lost friend. “I do appreciate you coming out here this afternoon. I know it’s not a short trip.”

  “Well, you came out to me this morning,” Reeve said, trying to conceal his stiff unease. Something about Mrs. Pike annoyed him, and it wasn’t just the accent. The smile was fake too, and her clothing wasn’t quite right. She was wearing a blouse that was a little low cut for his taste, and sleeveless. In fall. “Seemed only fair I came out to you, and … I was out at that fire anyway.”

  Pike’s eyebrows knitted in a thin line across his face. “Fire?”

  “Yeah, we had a fire demon hiding out in that new development, Whistling Pines,” Reeve said, putting Mrs. Pike and her irritating flaws out of his mind and heading over to the man himself, still waiting at the door. “Burned down some houses in construction, damned near set the woods on fire.” He caught a hint of concern from Pike. “It’s all out now,” Reeve said, trying to put the man at ease. “Under control. For the moment.”

  “That’s good,” Pike said quietly. “Why don’t you come on in?”

  *

  They walked on inside, and Pike sat down behind the desk, trying not to grin. Reeve ambled in after him, a hair slower, and paused in front of his desk. Reeve’s nose prickled; he was getting the scent of something, probably the smell of Jenny soiling herself after death.

  “Had one of my kids in here this afternoon, and we had a little accident,” Pike said. That was damned easy; he just thought about how many times he’d smelled shit in the last few years and it sprang out, pretty as you please.

  Reeve seemed to accept that with a nod, a little stiff, but then, he was like that a lot. “I remember those days.” He was wearing a real tight smile. “Seemed like we were dealing with diapers forever and then one day, shit, they were off to school and moving away.”

  Pike had learned over the years to smile and nod his head while people said boring-ass shit. “How old are your kids?” he asked, playing polite politician again.

  Reeve’s face clouded up. Something was bothering him there. “Old enough I don’t have to worry about wiping their asses anymore,” he said, trying to paper over it. “You wanted to talk about something? Budget? Money?”

  “I do indeed,” Pike said, as Reeve winced and touched his forehead. “You, uh … got a headache there?”

  Reeve’s eyes were slightly squinted. “Yeah. Bad one. All danged day.”

  It’s about to get a fuck-lot worse, Pike just kept himself from saying. “You want Darla to get you some Tylenol?”

  “I’ve taken a few. Doesn’t seem to be helping,” Reeve said, removing his hand from his bald scalp.

  “You know what the best cure is for a headache?” Pike asked. “An orgasm.”

  Reeve just stared at him stonily. “Well, I don’t reckon I’m going to be having one of those anytime soon, so … maybe I’ll just take that Tylenol after all.”

  Pike just grinned at hi
m, and called out, “Darla—Sheriff Reeve’s got a headache. You mind bringing him that Tylenol in the drawer?”

  *

  Reeve’s headache was spreading like—well, wildfire, if it wasn’t contained by Marty Ferrell and his boys. It seemed like it was moving down his spine. Sitting across the desk from this jackass wasn’t helping, listening to him try and make politician small talk.

  It didn’t help that the whole office smelled like shit. Shit and something else, a little below that, something he couldn’t quite place over the screaming fire in his head. Reeve shut one eye; cutting out the light helped a little, at least temporarily.

  He heard the scuff of a footstep behind him and there was Mrs. Pike, holding out a bottle of Tylenol. He took it from her and said, “Thank you, ma’am,” with a polite nod, and she was turning around and walking off again. He hesitated, then added, “Do you have a water fountain I could—?” and held up the Tylenol bottle.

  “Oh, she can get you something,” Pike said quickly and then nodded to his wife.

  This was the slow grind of hard pain, like someone had taken ice picks and shoved them in Reeve’s temples, twirling ’em like they were trying to stir his brains up. Fuck, there was no joy in this. And talking to Pike about whatever this jagoff wanted to talk about? Not a help. Orgasm’s the best medicine for a headache? Shit, who the hell did he think he was talking to?

  Reeve hadn’t been with another woman since he’d married Donna. And now, after thirty-something years, he wasn’t interested in branching out again. It had been a funny thing; he had figured—worried, really—that when he got married, things would get scary at some point. You couldn’t look around at all the older, married women and not notice a disparity between them and the young woman he was marrying at the time. And sure as shit, his wife had aged. Her bottom had gotten bigger, gravity had taken hold upstairs.

  But he hadn’t given much of a shit. Those pretty things he’d chased in his youth, stuck his dick in whenever he’d been offered the opportunity—they seemed to get younger and younger while he got older. They started to get … less appealing, almost, especially after the kids started coming along.

  He’d wanted Donna every chance he could get his hands on her, and that hadn’t changed in all these years. Oh, sure, he could still appreciate the beauty of some tuned-up supermodel with an ass the size of a paper plate if she walked by, but he didn’t crave them the way he might have when he was nineteen. Maybe he’d gotten old. Or maybe he’d just grown in the direction of wanting what he had.

  “… you know what I mean?” Pike asked, and Reeve was lightly jolted back to reality, and to the office that smelled like shit.

  Reeve blinked a couple times, and looked at Pike’s desk. It was covered over in papers. He hadn’t been to the man’s office too many times—only a few—but every single one of them, he’d found Pike’s desk meticulously neat. Now there was shit strewn everywhere, almost papering over the surface. He stared at that for a second, then dazedly drew his attention back up to Pike’s face, intent on him and awaiting his reply.

  “I’m sorry,” Reeve said, touching the side of his head again. “I … I’m having trouble concentrating today.” Because you’re boring as shit and so full of yourself I’m surprised you don’t have your own dick in your mouth all the time.He retained the sense not to say that aloud, but only barely.

  “Oh, yeah, I understand,” Pike said, nodding sympathetically. It could have been false sympathy, and Reeve wouldn’t have known. He expected just about everything this man did was false. That was probably why it was so goddamned galling that the prissy fucker was sitting between him and something he needed. Reeve had some pride, and this was straining every bit of it. “Oh, here comes Darla now with your water.”

  Reeve nodded, turning to see her. Mrs. Pike came on up again with a glass, tall cylinder filled to the brimming with tap water. Reeve took it with a grateful nod, and found himself looking at her ass as she turned to walk off. He didn’t mean to, but his gaze lingered a second longer than he intended. She had the hips and the ass that told him she’d spit out a couple of kids. It was a strangely compelling feature to him, and he looked a little longer than he needed to. When he came back around, Pike was smirking at him.

  Caught, Reeve reckoned. Not that he much cared.

  “Thank you for this,” he said, raising the water cup and putting it on Pike’s desk gingerly. That done, he opened the bottle of Tylenol and poured a few out. Carefully, he replaced the cap, then put it down on the desk and threw four extra-strength pills in his mouth. Picking up the water, he tossed them back, feeling the Tylenol roll down his throat, striking the sides like pinballs on the way down. The water sluiced on down his throat, room temperature but a little like heaven, honestly.

  He set the water down on the desk, a few sips left. “Thanks,” he said again. He knew it’d be a while before it started to work, but there was a psychological effect of relief he felt like he was receiving already.

  Pike leaned over the desk and picked up the Tylenol bottle. “Isn’t it amazing?” He brandished the bottle.

  Reeve just sort of waited, wondering where the hell he was going with this. “It’s a bottle of pills.”

  Pike grinned. “This was something that they couldn’t have comprehended a couple hundred years ago. The modern pharmaceutical industry, I mean.”

  “They also would have had some trouble understanding indoor toilets,” Reeve said. What the hell was wrong with this asshole?

  Pike just grinned bigger, and raised his index finger, wagging it. “See, there’s this failure among us modern folk to really appreciate progress. Because we’ve always known things to be this way, we don’t appreciate something as small as Tylenol for the miracle it is. If you went back in time just a few hundred years and asked people about the nature of matter, about the universe, science—the answers you’d get would convince you that these people were all primitive idiots—even the ones that were the most brilliant of their time, titans that helped change the world.” He was still grinning like a fucking idiot, and Reeve felt it best to just let him go on. “I like to remember that whenever I get to feeling too smug—” That must be all the goddamned time then, thought Reeve “—because I figure in a few hundred years, if humanity survives, we’ll be the same kind of ignorant, unknowing idiots to our descendants.” He tapped the side of his head. “The benefit of perspective.”

  Reeve just sat there uncomfortably, praying for the Tylenol to work and for Pike to shut the fuck up, and he wondered if he’d see either of those happen in the short-term. He kind of doubted it. “Well, that’s an interesting way to think of things,” he said, trying for diplomacy and a little too pained in the skull to give a fuck if he missed the mark wide.

  “You don’t agree?” Pike templed his fingertips together and leaned back at his desk.

  Reeve tried to string a couple thoughts together to avoid sounding like an idiot when answering. “I don’t reckon I give much thought to how I’m going to look a hundred or two hundred years from now when we’re sitting here fighting for our lives. Probably the same way primitive man didn’t give a shit about vegetarianism or TV repair. It didn’t apply to him surviving the day.”

  Pike chuckled. “You got a point there. You’re a man focused on the immediate needs of the town. And that’s what makes you so vital to this effort.” Pike leaned in, the squeak of his chair like another icepick thrust into Reeve’s head. “You’ve organized the townsfolk against this demon invasion. No one in this county has more credibility than you, which means when you step up and say, ‘Hey, there are demons here,’ people actually believe you instead of thinking you’ve gone batshit crazy the way they would if some new deputy were to come in and tell people to cast aside their deeply held beliefs about the way the world works. And make no mistake, that’s what we’re up against.” Pike’s eyes seemed to go fuzzy. “Can you imagine the massive gap in our scientific knowledge, not having seen demons coming? They’ve been here
for as long as we have, and we just … missed them.”

  Reeve stared at him, concentrating. Pike had gotten on this demon train now, it seemed. He was on it enough to be admitting that they’d been here all along.

  This news should have come as a relief, but for some reason, it made the hairs on the back of Reeve’s neck stand up. Or maybe that was the headache talking. “I’m glad to hear you say that,” Reeve said, trying to temper his response. “It seems to me that they didn’t get ‘missed.’”

  “Oh?” Pike leaned back again. “How’s that?”

  “We’ve got accounts of demons going back thousands of years,” Reeve said. “The Bible talks about ’em. Probably a few other holy books, though I’ll admit my knowledge of … well, any of ’em, honestly … is a bit thin. But I did go to Sunday school when I was a kid, and I’ve gone to church, uh … maybe a little unenthusiastically over the years, preferring to worship at the TV when the Titans or Vols were on.” He forced a smile; surely this limpdick city slicker could understand that. “But it talked about demons. Ancient knowledge, and a head-on confrontation with modern reality. This is the shit we don’t believe anymore because it don’t fit into our—our ‘modern framework.’” Reeve avoided using air quotes, because he didn’t feel like he was that kind of a guy. “It’s like the death of common sense in favor of pie-in-the-sky unproven theory that sounds nice. I’d be the first to admit that I ain’t gonna follow large tracts of the Bible, but … damn if there ain’t some useful things in those pages that hold true to this day. Even an old lapsed Christian like me can see that some of the thoughts they held that seem a little quaint to our modern sensibilities—they weren’t rooted in some far-out idea. Some of them were just … useful observations about how human nature worked, and how best to be a good person.”