Demon Road

by Derek Landy

  “Is that when you were beaten up?”

  “Yeah,” Walter said, with an impressive amount of bitterness. “Broad daylight. Had to stay indoors the whole summer after that. People in this town are nuts, and they all worship that Medina chick.”

  “Who?”

  “Heather Medina. She’s the one who stopped Dacre Shanks from killing any more kids. According to the story.”

  “Does she still live around here?”

  “Yeah, lives over on Pine Street. Works in the library.”

  “Brown hair?” asked Milo. “Silver in it?”

  Walter nodded. “That’s her. She won’t even mention his name, though, so good luck trying to get anything out of her. She looks perfectly normal, but she’s as crazy as the rest of them. That’s why her husband left her, I heard. They expected us to believe a story like that, and then they were actually angry when we didn’t. Moment I’m old enough to drive I am out of here. I may not be able to spell or rhyme, but I’m pretty smart. Smarter than everyone in this town, anyway.”

  “Definitely looks like it,” said Amber. “Thank you so much for your help.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” the kid replied. “I’m assuming you’ll take care of this?”

  He held up his bag of doughnuts so the teller could see it, and Amber smiled. “Sure thing, Walter. See you around.”

  “Stay frosty,” Walter said, and walked out.

  Amber paid for the doughnuts, and rejoined Milo and Glen as they were putting on their jackets.

  “You think you’ll be able to get back in the librarian’s good books?” Amber asked.

  “Don’t know,” admitted Milo. “Women have a tendency to learn fast around me.”

  “Told you I should have talked to her first,” Glen said.

  They left the cafe and walked back to the Charger, where a stocky man in his late sixties stood admiring her. He gave them a quick smile as they approached, and when Amber saw the star on his shirt her own smile faded.

  “Now this is a damn fine automobile,” the man said. His moustache was a deeper shade of grey than his hair. “A friend of mine had one, back in my youth. Light gold, it was. A thing of beauty. He crashed it not far from here, going too fast, and he just lost control. That’s all there was to it. Nobody else was hurt, thank God, but my friend, he was killed instantly. I don’t know, ever since then, I see one of these cars and I just think … death.” He gave a little smile and a little shrug.

  “Well, that is a story with a sad ending,” said Milo.

  “Isn’t it just?” The man smiled at them, for real this time, though there wasn’t much friendliness in it. “How are you folks? My name is Theodore Roosevelt, no relation to the big man, I’m afraid. You can call me Teddy. As you can probably tell by the badge, I’m the sheriff ’round these parts. If no one has bothered to do it, I bid you welcome to Springton. Now what brings you nice people to our little town, I wonder?”

  “Just passing through.”

  “Ah, that old staple. Just passing through. It’s hard to make new friends when everyone’s just passing through, that ever strike you as a truism? I’m collecting them – truisms, that is. Collecting them, coming up with them, going to put them all into a book when I’m done, try and get it published some day. Kind of going for a homespun sort of feel, you know? Going to call it Words of Wisdom, something hokey like that. Hokiness sells.”

  “That another truism?”

  Teddy smiled. “I guess it is. Might not include it in the collection, though. So is this a family trip?”

  “That’s what it is,” said Milo.

  “You and the kids, on a family trip. Your wife not come with you?”

  “I’m afraid she’s not with us anymore.”

  “Oh, I am sorry to hear that, Mr Sebastian. I am truly sorry.”

  The air went quiet around them.

  “You checked the plates, huh?” said Milo.

  “One of the perks of being the sheriff,” Teddy answered. “Funny, your details mention nothing about you having a family.”

  Milo nodded. “The kids were born out of wedlock. They’re very self-conscious about it.”

  “Very,” said Glen.

  “Your kids don’t look a whole lot like you,” Teddy said. “Also, from what I hear from a certain elderly librarian, your son is Irish.” He hooked his thumbs into his belt loops. “We get people like you passing through all the time. Oh, and by ‘people like you’, I don’t mean the Irish. I mean gawkers. What I like to call bloodhounds. They hear about our town, hear we used to have a serial killer, and they come sniffing around, thinking how exciting it all is, how fun. But the wounds that man made still haven’t closed over, and you walking around asking clumsy questions is just going to get people’s backs up.”

  “It’s my fault,” said Glen, his shoulders drooping. “I’m not his son, I’m his nephew. Yes, I’m from Ireland. But I’m dying. I don’t have long left.”

  “That so?”

  “It is. I came over here to see America before I … before I pass on. And yeah, you’re right, I asked to come to Springton because of the serial killer. I’ve always been fascinated with that stuff. A kind of morbid curiosity, I suppose. But I never intended to upset anyone, Sheriff. I’m really sorry.”

  “What’s your name, son?”

  “Glen, sir.”

  “Well, Glen, I’m sorry to hear of your ill-health. What have you got, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “Lupus,” said Glen.

  Teddy frowned. “Is that fatal?”

  “Oh yes,” said Glen. “Very.”

  “You sure? I don’t think it is.”

  “It’s not always fatal,” Glen said quickly. “If you get treatment for it, no, it’s not fatal. Rarely fatal. But I have a rare form of lupus that is very fatal.”

  “Glen, forgive me for asking this, but do you know what lupus is? A friend of mine has lupus, a reverend. His joints get all swollen up, he gets rashes, he’s tired all the time, and his hair even fell out.”

  Glen nodded. “I have the other kind of lupus.”

  “The kind that has none of those symptoms?”

  Glen bit his lip for a moment. “I get the feeling you’re not believing me.”

  Teddy sighed. “You’re not too bright, son, and that’s okay. There’s no law against being stupid. There’s also no law against being a bloodhound, but I’m going to have to ask you to stop pestering people with questions – especially my daughter.”

  “Your daughter?”

  Teddy nodded. “She works in the library. She’s the librarian who is not elderly.”

  “Ah,” said Milo. “Heather called you.”

  “She may have mentioned it during one of our regular father-daughter chats.”

  “So are you going to run us out of town?”

  Teddy chuckled. “I don’t think I have to do anything quite so dramatic, do you? Quite the opposite, in fact. It’s getting late in the day and, as you folks aren’t from around here, I’d like to invite you to stay overnight in our little town.”

  “That’s mighty Christian of you.”

  “And to save you some money, you’ll be staying with us, my wife and I. Have a good home-cooked meal. That sound good?”

  “We really couldn’t impose,” said Milo.

  “It is not an imposition, I assure you,” said Teddy. “I insist on you staying with us. That okay with you?”

  Milo glanced at Amber, and nodded. “Sure,” he said. “That’d be great.”

  “Excellent,” Teddy said, beaming. “I’ll tell her to make up the rooms. Our bed-and-breakfast rates are quite competitive, just so you know.”

  SHERIFF ROOSEVELT’S PLACE WAS a neat little house out on the edge of town. It had pebbles instead of grass in the front yard, and a path of cobblelock paving. Mrs Roosevelt – Ella-May – was a handsome woman who struck Amber as someone playing at running a B&B. She had a way about her, a way of asking questions and getting answers, that suggested a w
hipsmart mind, even in her advancing years. Running a B&B seemed a rather tame endeavour for someone like her.

  The house looked like a picture-perfect amalgamation of various local tourism brochures. Everything was pretty, with a restrained, folksy charm. Milo and Glen had to share the twin beds in the double room, but Amber got a room all to herself. It had a small TV in the corner, the very opposite of a flatscreen.

  Dinner was at eight. Amber had a bath to pass the time, and as she lay in all those bubbles she tried not to look at the countdown on her wrist.

  438, it said now. Three days gone out of her twenty-one. Lots of time left. Plenty of time. Providing they find Dacre Shanks.

  When eight rolled around, she was dressed and hungry. She went downstairs, following the aroma.

  Teddy sat at one end of the table. Amber and Glen sat to his right, and Milo to his left. Glen kept his hand curled, hiding the Deathmark from sight in the same way that Amber’s bracelets hid her scar. When Ella-May was finished serving the food, she sat opposite her husband.

  Teddy interlocked his fingers and closed his eyes. “Lord, thank you for this meal we are about to enjoy. Thank you for our guests – after some initial frostiness, they have proven themselves to be nice enough people, and they’ve paid in advance, which I always take as a sign of good manners. Thank you for no dead bodies today and no real crime at all, to be fair. Thank you for my beautiful wife, my wonderful daughter, and for the continuing wellbeing of my town. Amen.”

  “Amen,” Amber muttered, along with Glen. Milo and Ella-May remained silent.

  “So, Milo,” Teddy said as he reached for the potatoes, “what do you do for a living?”

  “I get by.”

  “That it? That’s all you do?”

  Milo smiled like he was a normal, good-natured kind of guy. “I make ends meet, how about that?”

  Teddy shrugged. “That’s fair enough. A man who doesn’t want to talk about his business shouldn’t have to talk about his business. Where you from, originally?”

  “Kentucky,” Milo said.

  “Aha,” said Teddy. “The Bluegrass State.”

  “That’s what they call it.”

  “You a farm boy, Milo?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Pigs? Cattle?”

  “Some.” Milo’s smile was easy and his tone was relaxed. He was like a different person. “Ella-May, this is one humdinger of a dinner.”

  Ella-May smiled. “Why, thank you, Milo. Humdinger, eh? Never heard my cooking called that before.”

  Milo actually chuckled. “How long you two been married?”

  “I was nineteen,” said Ella-May, “he was twenty-three. We were married in the summer. My father, who was sheriff, could not let his future son-in-law waste his natural gifts in an aluminum factory, so he made him a deputy and started him on the road to becoming the fine, upstanding law-enforcement official you see before you with gravy dripping down his chin.”

  “Goddamn it,” Teddy said, dabbing at himself with his napkin.

  “We were so in love.”

  Teddy winked at Amber. “She was besotted.”

  “Yeah,” said Ella-May, “I was the one going all moon-eyed. I was the one blushing and stammering and falling over bushes …”

  Teddy pointed his fork at her. “Hey. I fell over one bush.”

  “But it was a big one.”

  “Damn near broke my neck,” Teddy muttered.

  “I swear, my husband is brighter than he lets on.”

  “I’d have to be,” said Teddy.

  “Was your dad sheriff when Dacre Shanks was killing people?” Glen asked Ella-May.

  Milo’s smile vanished. “Damn it, Glen.”

  “What?”

  “Boy, you have got to be the most tactless person I have met that I haven’t punched yet,” said Teddy.

  Glen looked confused. “We were talking about cops and sheriffs and stuff. I’d have thought that’d be a natural segue into, y’know …”

  “We don’t talk about that man at the table,” Ella-May said.

  “Right. Um, sorry.”

  She nodded. Teddy shoved another forkful of food into his mouth and chewed. Milo looked pissed. Thirty seconds passed where no one said anything. Amber’s wrist burned. She parted the bracelets and took another peek: 436 hours.

  “We’re looking for him,” she said quietly.

  “Looking for who?” Ella-May asked.

  “Shanks,” she said. “We need to find him.”

  Milo watched her, but didn’t say anything. Glen shot her a glare and kicked her under the table. She kicked him back harder.

  “Ow! God!”

  “We lied to you,” she said. Teddy put down his knife and fork and listened. “My life is in danger. I’m not going to tell you how or why or who is coming after me because, I’m sorry, but you’re safer not knowing. And I’m safer with you not knowing. We lied. We’re not family. We didn’t even know each other until a few days ago.”

  “I’m not her cousin,” Glen said, rubbing his shin.

  “They don’t care about that,” said Milo.

  “But I am dying,” Glen added. “It’s just I’m not dying of lupus. I’m not even sure what that is. I’ve got the Deathmark, see, and—”

  “They don’t care about any of that, either,” said Milo.

  “Dacre Shanks is dead,” said Teddy. “Shot him myself. Me and three other deputies. One of the bullets caught him in the head. We never bothered figuring out who fired that one. But it took off the top of his skull.”

  “We know he’s dead,” Amber said carefully. “But we also know there’s more to it than that.”

  “You’ve been listening to too many ghost stories,” Ella-May said, getting up from the table.

  “No,” said Amber, “but I have seen too many monsters.”

  Amber went to bed and had a bad dream. Her demon-self was crouched over Ella-May’s dead body, and she was scooping out and eating the woman’s insides. Standing behind her were her parents, scooping out Amber’s own guts from a gaping cavity in her back.

  She woke up and cried for a bit. When she stopped, she heard a creaking – slow and regular. She got up, looked out of the window, saw an ember glowing in the dark. She put on jeans and a sweatshirt, went out on to the back porch.

  “Did I wake you?” Teddy asked from his rocking chair.

  She shook her head. “I haven’t been sleeping too well, that’s all. I’ve never known anyone who smoked a pipe before.”

  He smiled. “I didn’t used to. Took this up in my forties when my hair started going grey. Thought it’d make me look wise and somewhat distinguished. Does it?”

  “Somewhat.”

  He nodded, and puffed away.

  “I’m sorry for the upset we’ve caused,” said Amber.

  “Ah, you seem like you’re going through a lot, so I’m not going to hold it against you. Ella-May isn’t, either, despite her silence earlier. That man has been a plague on our family, so we don’t especially like talking about him at the dinner table.”

  “You knew him?” she asked.

  Teddy nodded. “Everyone knew him. Nobody knew him well. Probably how he got away with it for so long.”

  “How did you find him? How did you figure out what he was doing?”

  Teddy tapped the stem of his pipe against the chair, and put it back between his lips. “We didn’t,” he said. “Ella-May did. I’m a smart enough fella. I was a good deputy and I make a good sheriff. But Ella-May is my secret weapon. She paid attention to the little things, the little details. She added things together. She made enquiries. All under the radar. Not even her father suspecting for one moment that what she was doing was gathering evidence.

  “Then her dad passed away. Nothing dramatic. He wasn’t killed in the line of duty or anything like that. His heart just gave out one sunny afternoon while driving back to the station. He pulled over to the side of the road and had his heart attack and died. Responsible to the last. Hi
s replacement was not a particularly intelligent man. I brought Ella-May to him and she gave him all her evidence, told him her conclusions, and he ignored it all. He didn’t want to imagine that a town like Springton could hold a horror like that. Dacre Shanks was a creepy little guy in a creepy little toystore. Sheriff Gunther, that was his name, was content with that. Creepy was fine. He could understand creepy. But serial killer? That was beyond him.

  “So I started an unofficial investigation. My fellow deputies trusted me, and they trusted Ella-May. All the work she’d done meant we hit the ground running. We quickly had enough so that we could call in the Feds. Gunther found out, was not happy, threatened to fire us all. He called the FBI, told them it was all a big misunderstanding. That same night we got word that someone else had gone missing, a boy who fit the profile of some of Shanks’s other victims. We convinced the judge to get us a search warrant – without Gunther’s help – and we raided that toystore.”

  “Did you save the boy?” Amber asked.

  “No, we did not.” Teddy puffed on the pipe, but it had gone out. He didn’t seem to notice. “We ran in on Shanks standing over him, though. All four of us opened fire. You know the rest. Gunther lost his job after that and I was elected in his place. For some reason, the folks around here have been electing me ever since. I don’t think they’re too smart.”

  “And what about after? There were other murders, weren’t there? Ten years later, something like that?”

  “Feds came to investigate. Thought there was a copycat. But, by the time they got here, the killings had stopped.”

  “Did your daughter have anything to do with that?”

  Teddy struck a match, lit his pipe again. Gave it a few puffs. “The world is full of bad men, Amber. Bad women, too, I guess. Some of them hide in plain sight, and some of them don’t. Some of them wear masks, and some of them wear smiles. I thought I’d seen the full extent of evil when we burst in on Dacre Shanks. Turns out I was wrong. There’s another evil, a whole other layer of evil that I’d only read about in the Bible. I believe you know what I’m talking about.”