Crane, R [ Southern Watch 03] Corrupted (3 page)

“Hope you had a good ride,” Richie said with a knowing smile. Mick knew if Mandy had been a little older and a little wiser, she’d have figured out it was all a big setup. “Everybody out.”

She wasn’t that old, though, and she wasn’t that wise, though she was getting there now, Mick knew. She looked crushed as he stood up and hopped out of the car. His feet hit the solid ground, the subtle rocking motion he barely noticed anymore stopping as he landed. He didn’t put out a hand to help Mandy down, not this time, just walked away from her without a care or a goodbye. He didn’t need to look in her eyes to know that innocence he’d thought was so wonderful earlier in the evening was gone, blissfully and blessedly. He’d taken it. Taken it and loved every minute of it.

He passed Gail, the housewife that had been in the car below them, leaning against a railing on the edge of the platform. She was still flushed in the face, and her big, fat husband was next to her. “I just don’t know what came over me,” she was saying as Mick passed. She started to say something else but stopped and stared at him as he went past her. He didn’t say anything to her, didn’t even look at her, but he could tell she knew. He didn’t care, though. He got those looks all through the carnival as he made his way out—women being attended by the guys they were with, all of them wondering what the fuck had happened that had left them all weak in the knees and uncertain.

Mandy would probably feel it the worst tonight, though, Mick knew as he threaded his way between the Fortune Teller’s tent and a ball-throwing game. But he didn’t need the Fortune Teller’s crystal ball—she was a fraud anyway, that old bitch—to tell him that they’d all be feeling it tomorrow, and the day after, and in the weeks and months to come.

Mandy woke up the next day still feeling it. And for the next weeks, too. Her mother called it “being blue,” but she didn’t know the why. Not that it mattered; she thought it was just a little lovesickness. And then a regular sickness, when she started to throw up in the mornings a few weeks later. It took about a week for her mom to work it out after that.

It took another week for them to put together that every woman her age and older in the town who hadn’t already been pregnant was now. Married, single, even the divorced ones. Young and damned near impossibly old.

Mandy had cried for weeks, and when she found out she cried some more. When she found out she wasn’t alone, she cried again, like that wasn’t any consolation at all. It was still terrible, still a fresh wound, still the end of her world like someone had burned down everything and killed everyone that mattered to her.

But then, nine months later, all of Hobbs Green really did burn down, and everyone that mattered to her got killed.

And all that was left was Mandy—and she damned sure didn’t feel innocent anymore.

“This is such a fucking goddamned mess and a half,” Sheriff Nicholas Reeve opined, standing in the middle of Berg Street. Arch might have shared that assessment, minus the colorfully added swear words, but he didn’t feel a need to voice it now. It was a mess and a half, no mincing words on that score.

“I know we’ve seen some weird shit this last week,” Erin Harris said, standing off the curb, straddling the cracking pavement as the sun beat down on the trio, “but this is monumentally fucked. Not quite the Mount Rushmore of fucked, but maybe like the Lincoln Memorial of it.”

“Ahuh,” Arch said, more than a little preoccupied, and not just by the grisly mess in the middle of Berg Street. There was blood every-dang-where, splattered all over the pavement like it had been dripped on a canvas by a painter trying to make a statement— the statement being,
“Let’s drench this beast!”
Though some avant-garde painter who covered an entire canvas in red probably wouldn’t use the word beast.

Still.

“I’ve seen a lot of traffic accidents in my day,” Reeve said, shaking his head, “but I ain’t never seen nothing like this shit.” He waved a hand at the remainder of the body. “If he didn’t have his damned wallet on him, you’d never even know that was Tim Connor.”

Arch nodded and caught Erin doing much the same out of the corner of his eye. Tim Connor had been a pretty active guy, always running. He wasn’t gonna be running no more, that was sure and certain.

“Whoever fucking did this had to be going a hundred and twenty on a residential street,” Reeve said. “Kids play here, people jog—like Tim.” He indicated the remainder of the corpse. “This is so goddamned reckless I can’t even define it.” Arch could tell Reeve was shaken because he was dropping the Lord’s name in vain at ten times the usual rate. Arch had gotten over flinching every time the sheriff violated the Third Commandment by now; if he hadn’t, dealing with Lafayette Hendricks would have been well-nigh impossible for him.

Arch shook off the thought of the cowboy-hat-wearing demon hunter and looked back at the sack of butchered meat that had been Tim Connor. He’d been a middle-aged guy, in good shape, always drinking protein shakes whenever Arch ran into him somewhere. He’d seen him at the diner a few days ago, and the guy ordered a bare fish, no fried topping.

“He was such a healthy motherfucker,” Reeve said. “Always running, eating right, trying to push the damned envelope.” Reeve unconsciously reached for his own belly, which hung over his belt. “Son of a bitch should have outlived me by a long shot, but he didn’t because some cocksucker ran him down going a hundred miles an hour in a thirty. This is whole fucking town is turning into a fucking slaughter fest out of goddamned control—”

“Sheriff,” Erin said, catching Arch’s eye as she spoke. Probably to avoid looking Reeve in the eye. “It ain’t your fault.”

“I’m the law in this goddamned town! When
County Administrator
Pike,” Reeve put a special sauce of sarcasm on that title, “gets wind of this, the blame’s gonna come one way, and it’s mine.”

Arch drew a breath and felt a certain tightness that had nothing to do with how well his shirt fit. Unlike Reeve, he did tend to do that whole exercising, eating right thing. Or had, until a couple weeks ago when things had got suddenly busy in his life. “Still ain’t your fault,” Arch said.

“I appreciate your support,” Reeve said without an ounce of sincerity, “but I doubt the voters are going to share your enthusiasm for the results of our law enforcement efforts this last month. Disappearances, kidnappings, entire families getting wiped out, some sort of crazy highway massacre, and a hooker that got burned alive from the inside. Not to mention those security guards up on the Tallakeet Dam.” Reeve pulled his hat off his head and ran his fingers through thinning hair. “Yeah, I can’t see how I could possibly be blamed for anything.”

“At least the town didn’t flood,” Erin said sympathetically. She shot Arch a sidelong look that was full of meaning—and the meaning was “What do you say at a moment like this?” Arch didn’t say anything because he didn’t know either. It wasn’t Reeve’s fault.

It wasn’t like he’d set out a sign inviting every demon in North America to Midian, Tennessee. Heck, he probably didn’t even know that was the source of his problems. It wasn’t like mass murders and slaughters and burnings of people alive automatically brought to mind the idea that demons were real and walking among humans like regular people. That was crazy talk.

But then, these were crazy times.

Arch glanced at Erin and found her looking at him. Thought maybe she was thinking the same as him—that they were both crazy and bound for the same asylum. “How long ’til the corpse wagon gets here?” Erin asked, drawing her gaze back to Reeve.

“Who fucking knows?” Reeve said, and for a moment, it looked like he was gonna spike his hat.

“We should probably get back out on patrol,” Arch said, shrugging his shoulders. “Unless you want us to stick around to help you guard the scene?”

“Get the hell outta here,” Reeve waved his hat at them. “Maybe you can do some good elsewhere, because there ain’t nothing going on here other than me trying to keep the lookiloos from peeking at the hamburger someone made of Tim.”

Arch’s gaze danced over to Connor’s body again. Hamburger wasn’t far off. Limbs were missing, knocked clean from the body. There was a straight line of blood from the site of the impact some fifty feet or more from where the body rested now to where it had started, and the terminus of that line near the corpse was filled with the evidence of a long, skidding roll that it had undertaken before it came to rest in its current position. An arm was missing at the elbow, and one of the legs was hanging by a string of flesh so narrow it looked like an onion straw. But drenched in blood.

Nope, that wasn’t a good way to go.

“Get on out of here,” Reeve said again, waving his hat at them. “Go patrol, just … get the fuck outta here.”

Arch didn’t need to be told again. He’d never really seen Reeve in one of these moods before.

He thought about trying to say something else reassuring, but he still couldn’t think of anything. So instead he just fell into line with Erin as they headed toward the barricades set up just past the site of Tim Connor’s launch. They stayed quiet all the way ’til they were on the other side of the first blood splatter, and Arch knew that was as far as he was gonna get before Erin said something.

“What the fuck do you think did this?” Erin asked. She had the sick feeling in her stomach that came from knowing something the sheriff most assuredly did not but being totally unable to voice it to him. It made her feel bad, made her feel—if she admitted it to herself—a little bit excited, too, like she was on the inside for a secret that no one else knew.

“No idea,” Arch said, the big, stoic man that he was. He was stalking away from the scene in a hell of a hurry, his eyes hidden darkly under the brim of his hat. She couldn’t tell if he was trying to be shadowy and shit or if he was annoyed with her.

“But it was a demon, right?” Erin asked a little louder than she intended and realized a moment later there were people out on their porches all down the sides of the street.

Arch played it cool and didn’t even bother to turn his head to look, like she hadn’t just said anything. He was a cool customer, Arch. “Probably,” he said in a low voice that was probably more appropriate to the situation than hers had been. Erin kicked herself mentally. She should have been a little more circumspect, she knew. “But it’s not like I know enough about them to tell what kind.”

Erin thought back to that book of Hendricks’s that she’d pilfered a couple days ago, before the dam. It had all types of demons in it. Crazy shit. She was sure it meant he was crazy, too, but then she’d seen a guy breathe fire out of his mouth like some kind of dragon, and suddenly the ex-Marine didn’t seem quite so insane. “You think Hendricks would know?”

Arch just looked tense now. “Maybe. If not him, maybe his new buddies.”

“You mean Lerner and Duncan?” Erin shot him a coy smile. Lerner and Duncan seemed all right, even though they were demons. Or Officers of Occultic Concordance, as they’d pronounced themselves when she’d gotten the full intro. Lerner had said it with a swagger. Duncan hadn’t said anything at all.

“Yeah,” Arch said tightly as they crossed through a gap in the barricades to where their patrol cars were parked on the other side. “Them.” Arch’s Explorer’s lights were flashing, and so were the dashboard lights in Erin’s car—which had until really recently been the sheriff’s own. She didn’t exactly consider this a moment appropriate to smile, considering how straight-to-shit things had gotten in Midian lately, but the thought of having her own car was almost worthy of one, even under the circumstances. Even if it was still missing the driver’s side mirror.

“How did you explain that mirror to the sheriff?” Arch asked, like he could read her fucking mind or something.

“I haven’t,” she said. “Figured if he had time to notice it, it’d be the least of his problems. He hasn’t said shit about it yet.”

Arch paused next to his car, lowered his voice. “What about those spent shells from the rifle in the back?” He kept his cool gaze on her. “He find out about those yet?”

“The gun’s clean,” Erin said. To this she smiled, though politely and coolly rather than with any kind of satisfaction. “Cleaned it myself after I took it to the range. Bought some replacement ammo while I was there, so no need for anyone to be the wiser about that little ordeal.” Because losing a mirror was one thing but discharging an AR-15 in a gun battle with a demon on top of Tallakeet Dam was the sort of thing Reeve might pay attention to, even in his current state. “What about those big .50 cal rounds hiding up in the tree line near the dam?”

Arch didn’t even flinch. “Picked ’em up myself the day after.” He opened his driver’s side door and got in. He shot her a little half-assed look of pure chagrin. “No need to leave that thread hanging out for anybody to yank on.”

Hendricks was running down the goddamned hill at a high enough speed that it ought to have scared the shit out of him. Maybe it did a little, but after clearing doors in Ramadi a few times, the fear factor for running down a steep hill turned down a few notches. It was like being afraid of getting in a bicycle accident after learning to drive a car at a hundred and ninety miles an hour; it could still happen, but it wasn’t something you gave a lot of thought to.

Tree branches whipped at him as he descended the slope, hauling ass and all else while whipping around tree trunks and shit. He wasn’t winded, not yet, but he wasn’t in near as good a shape as he’d been in the Marines, either, so it was bound to catch up with him soon. He thought that, anyway, as he ducked his head slightly to avoid a low-hanging branch and nearly fucking toppled. That would be an embarrassing thing to have to cop to—
yeah, I rolled down a fucking hill while chasing after a demon. I’m a serious demon hunter, all right.

He’d busted down the front door of the demon’s home as impolitely as he could. About like he imagined Arch would do, crashing in some meth dealer’s house if he had to. Knocked it off its hinges before his companions could volunteer to do it for him; he was always more of a DIY guy, hating to delegate shit. Do it yourself it gets it done right. He wasn’t an officer, after all.