Midnight Rider

by D V Wolfe

  “What did you do this time?”

  “Had a little run-in with Sister Smile.”

  Stacks sighed. “Why don’t you just take the plunge and get the ‘kill me’ sign tattooed on your forehead?” Stacks stretched his legs out and I heard his foot crunch down on cardboard.

  “Tell me you did not just stomp on my Peeps,” I said.

  Stacks groaned. “You’re still eating those disgusting things?”

  “I know, right?” Noah said.

  I reached over and tugged the box of Peeps out of Stacks’ hands after he retrieved them off the floor. “More for me,” I said, popping one of the yellow globs of sugary goodness in my mouth. That was the last moment of bliss on the trip.

  When we hit Indianapolis, we were all stiff and had had more than enough of each other. Stacks’ boney elbow had found a resting place in my ribs and in the last ten miles, Noah’s hands had started to smoke.

  “What the shit is wrong with you, son?” Stacks spat when he noticed the cab had started to fill up with smoke.

  “Sorry,” Noah said. He moved his hands to his sides as if he was about to sit on them.

  “Now Noah,” I started, as I took the exit for a Motel 6. “If you set my seat on fire, I’m going to make you walk around with your hands in your shorts for the rest of this little escapade. Roll the window down and stick them outside till they cool off.”

  Stacks leaned across Noah and cranked down the window. “Is this some kind of medical condition?” Stacks asked me. I could feel him shifting in my direction to get away from Noah and his elbow dug deeper into my side.

  “You’re about to have a medical condition if you don’t quit trying to puncture my lung with your elbow.” I shoved Stacks with my shoulder and he moved over a centimeter or two. “Do you want to tell him the good news, Noah, or should I?” I asked.

  Noah sighed. “My hands can set people on fire sometimes. It’s not something I usually do on purpose.”

  “Usually,” Stacks said. He looked over at me. “Remind me not to piss this guy off.”

  “Well you’re ahead of me, Noah. For years I’ve been trying to get the reaction from Stacks that you just got. Savor it. There’s not a lot of people in this world that Stacks tries not to piss off.”

  “So when did that start?” Stacks asked Noah, ignoring me.

  “Had an accident with my girlfriend.”

  Without missing a beat, Stacks asked, “Are you one of the X-Men?”

  “No,” Noah said. “I’m not a comic book character.”

  “Oh, the comic book is just a cover….”

  “Here we go,” I said.

  “It’s a government cover-up, Bane. The government is experimenting on children, trying to create a bigger, stronger, more powerful human.”

  I looked past Stacks and caught Noah’s eye. “Stacks has the government’s number. They can’t get one over on him.”

  “Mock all you want, Bane. At least my head isn’t so far up my ass that I can’t tell a mutant when I see one. How else do you explain his condition?”

  I shrugged and turned into the lot for the Motel 6. “With all the bizarre shit in this world, honestly

  I’m not sure that I’d be worried if the kid had a little man growing out of the top of his head that laid eggs. Weird shit happens.”

  Stacks sighed and slumped back in the seat. His foot kicked the stick shift and Lucy roared as she downshifted. I glared at him and shifted back. “It would take a miracle for you to actually follow my reasoning on this, Bane.”

  “Guess so.”

  I steered Lucy into a spot and killed the engine. We stared up at the partially lit neon sign. As we watched, the M-O-T went dark, leaving the sign to say EL 6.

  “Lovely spot, don’t you think,” I said as I kicked Lucy’s door open.

  “What are we doing here?” Noah asked, carefully climbing out, trying to keep his hands from touching anything flammable.

  “Well, the library opens at nine tomorrow,” Stacks said. “And as much as I love a good ‘smash and grab job’, I think I’ve had about as much of Johnny Law today as I can stand.”

  “What do you think the Sheriff’s doing right about now?” I asked, pulling a duffel bag from the toolbox in Lucy’s bed. Stacks started laughing.

  “What’s so funny?” Noah asked, his voice suddenly panicky. “Shouldn’t we be changing our tags or something? I’ll bet the Sheriff puts out an APB for us or something.”

  I grinned at Stacks. “Noah, go look at the license plate, memorize it, and then come tell me what it says.”

  Noah frowned, but went to the tailgate and looked down at the tag. After a few seconds he looked up at me. “It’s 5…Q…wait.” He looked back down, “no it’s P-R….what? Why can’t I say what I’m seeing? What's wrong with me? I….” He looked back down at the tailgate and he concentrated on the plate. After a minute he looked up at me, surprised, “What? Why are you staring at me?”

  “No reason,” I said.

  “Why am I...?” He looked down at his hands and realized they were empty. “Where’s my bag?”

  “In here, Carnac,” Stacks said, throwing Noah his backpack before rolling up Lucy’s window. Stacks turned to look at me. “I don’t have anything on me.”

  “You can borrow my toothbrush,” I said, grabbing the sawed-off from behind the seat. “But I’m drawing the line at you borrowing my clean underwear.”

  Stacks snorted. “Fair enough.”

  I asked for accommodations on the first floor and we piled into a room with two queens that smelled like the smoking lounge at an airport.

  Noah fell onto one of the beds face first and didn’t move. I threw four hex bags to Stacks and I unrolled the salted tape and stretched it across the doorway. Stacks put a hex bag in each corner of the room and flopped onto the other bed. I put a line of tape across the window sills and then dumped the rest of the contents of the duffel bag out on the little table; a deck of Tarot cards, shells for the sawed-off, and a small portable radio. I turned the radio on and started twiddling the knob, looking for 115.8 AM. Walter was in the middle of a weather report.

  “...and a rash of heavy winds are sweeping across the plains and into Illinois and Indiana. Scattered showers and flood warnings over parts of Indiana expected late tonight.”

  Stacks groaned into his pillow. “No Bane.”

  “I didn’t say anything. You just rest that trap of yours and drift off to a dreamland where every conspiracy you believe is true and you were the person who broke the truth to the rest of the populace.”

  “That worked on me once,” Stacks said. “And it ended with me alone in a hotel room waking up to forty federal service pieces in my face, a missing hotel door, a blood pool I couldn’t explain, and the threat of jail time.”

  I flipped my sawed-off over my thigh and loaded two new shells into it. “But as I recall, I was the one who served said threatened jail time.”

  “I meant to send you a ‘thank you’ card for that,” Stacks said. “I just couldn’t find one that had the right sentiment.”

  “Hey about that,” Noah said. “Why did the feds come after you? What the hell did you do?!”

  I looked at Stacks. “I believe the words firewall, federal server, and possible terrorism were thrown about. Regardless, I’d been hunting a skinwalker based on his intel who happened to be wearing the same face as a federal judge. I took the skinwalker down which unfortunately still looked like the judge. I had to leave the body because Johnny Law showed up, so in exchange for his own skin, Stacks rolled on me.”

  Stacks sighed. “I knew it would be overturned seeing as the judge himself was just on vacation and came back two weeks later, very much alive.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But then they didn’t know what to do with me. They decided first that I’d surgically changed the face of my victim to look like the judge before I killed him, but they couldn’t figure out how I’d done the surgery with no physical scars, etc. Or why I would have don
e that in the first place, so they tossed me around for a while, having me serve time in a variety of locales.”

  “Where?” Noah asked

  “In a women’s prison, and in protective custody, and then at a federal psychiatric lockdown facility if I’m not mistaken,” Stacks said.

  I shrugged. “They didn’t believe my story. If the shoe was on the other foot, I’m sure you’d have ended up in the same bed I was at the end.”

  “You were in prison and in a mental facility? You’re an escaped convict AND mentally unstable?”

  Noah asked, looking, if possible, even more terrified than I’d ever seen him.

  “Turned in and convicted by his sorry ass,” I pointed at Stacks. “And placed in the psychiatric hospital at my own request.”

  “I heard they found you in the laundry room riding the ironing board like the Lone Ranger rode Silver,” Stacks said.

  “Gross fabrication,” I said.

  “And you were buck naked.”

  “Doesn’t sound familiar.”

  Stacks turned his head on the bed to look at Noah. “No, she pretended to go insane to get into the state mental hospital so she could kill a… what was it? A Batibat?”

  “A Dab Tsog,” I said.

  “Why do you do this supernatural killing stuff, Bane?” Noah asked.

  Stacks turned his head to look back at me. “You haven’t told him?” He mouthed.

  I cleared my throat. “Well if we didn’t do this, it would just mean that someone else would have to.”

  I fished my phone out of my pocket. Still no call from Nya. I sighed and flipped it open before hitting the six on the speed dial and waiting for Walter to pick up.

  “Bane?” The voice croaked. Somehow he always sounded smoother on the radio than over the phone. Probably he’d learned to convince himself over time that he was an actual weatherman on the radio, rather than a Harbinger.

  “Hi, Walter, how ya doing?” There was a moment of silence.

  “Uh, fine Bane. What…uh, what do you want?”

  I frowned. “Walter, has someone got a gun on you or something? You sound like someone’s got your southerners in a vice.”

  “Wha? No, everything’s fine…What can I do for you?”

  “Well I happen to be around Indiana at the moment, what can you tell me about the scattered showers and flood warnings?”

  “There’s a haunting in Evansville, a Weeping Woman in South Bend, and I heard that some scared shitless innocent described a Hayman to authorities after a massacre in a shopping mall in Indianapolis.”

  “A Hayman, huh? I haven’t heard of one of those being in the city before. What’s it feeding on?”

  “Based on the carnage, it seems to be young mothers.”

  I groaned. “Winner, winner, chicken dinner.”

  “West Gates Shopping Center, two days ago. The witness is named Cassie Springer. She’s a freshman at Butler University and has a part-time job waitressing at Wimpy’s. It’s a dive bar on Center Street.”

  “Thanks, Walter,” I paused and then said. “You call me if you need anything, let me know if it’s a ‘crazy train’ you’re riding out there.”

  He snorted. “Crazy train, right. Bye Bane.” The dial tone sounded in my ear.

  “Well that’s not good.”

  “Dare I ask?” Stacks muttered.

  “Someone’s got Walter.”

  “The Harbinger?”

  I nodded. “But I have a feeling he’s not who they really want.” If it had been Walter they were after, they would have just killed him, rather than let him answer the phone.

  “Why does that sound really ominous?” Noah asked.

  Not a lot of time to ponder what was happening with Walter at the moment. I knew I couldn’t get to Evansville to shut down the haunting before another hunter got there, and the Weeping Woman in South Bend would be in Devon’s territory. That left us with the Hayman and a little recreational hunting to pass the time.

  I stood and stretched. “You boys feel like getting a drink?”

  13

  Wimpy’s didn’t have a parking lot. Not in the traditional sense. What it had was a burned-out foundation of a building in the rear. Someone had dumped a truckload of gravel on the foundation and installed pieces of rebar in coffee cans, filled with concrete in shallow holes to stretch a fence across. On the far end of the lot, a three hundred pound white guy sat on top of a discarded grade school desk, staring at his cell phone. He wore a black shirt that said, SECURITY.

  We parked at the back of the lot and I turned to look at the sourpusses sitting in the seat next to me. Neither of them had been all that excited about coming. Stacks looked annoyed and Noah was sweating through his tie-dye shirt.

  “They are never going to believe I’m 21, Bane.”

  “Sure they are,” I said. “Just try to look older. Look like you’re thinking about something older guys think about. Like prostate exams.”

  “Yeah or getting arrested and having to play ‘mommies and daddies’ with Hugo the Strangler in prison.” Noah gulped and his Adam's apple looked like it punched him in the bottom of his jaw.

  “You’re gonna be fine. I gave you that ID. That’s all you need.”

  Noah held up the Nevada license I’d given him. “Jesus Alvardo-Ramirez.” Stacks and I both looked at him. Noah had pale skin and frizzy orange hair. The man in the photo on the ID did not.

  “It’ll be fine. He’s just going to check the birthdate,” I said, climbing out. I could hear Stacks talking to Noah as soon as Noah opened his door.

  “Don’t worry Noah, I hear bouncers are very tender lovers.”

  “Knock it off, Stacks. We’re here to do a job. We just need to talk to Cassie Springer,” I said.

  “Then why couldn’t I have stayed at the hotel?” Noah whined.

  “Because if you fell asleep and had one of those pre-adolescent dreams that got you all hot and bothered, you’d likely set the bed and the rest of the room on fire. And that would attract the kind of attention that we don’t have time for,” I said.

  “I still think it would have been better if I’d stayed behind,” Noah muttered as we sidled up to the bouncer.

  “Let me do the talking,” Stacks said. “This is my type of guy.”

  “Really,” I said with a shrug. “Learn something new every day.”

  Stacks glared at me. “Not like that. You know, I used to be a bouncer.”

  I sighed. “Watching over the kids in the bouncy castle room at Mr. Wiggles’ Funtime Playland, doesn’t count as being a bouncer.”

  “Eat a dick, Bane.”

  We were a foot away from him before the bouncer looked up. His face was red and he was obviously upset by something he’d been reading on his phone.

  “Howdy partner, nice night for some...drinking, ain’t it,” Stacks said. He seemed to wilt a bit under the venomous look the bouncer now gave him.

  “What did you say to me, poindexter?”