Supernatural 8 - Coyote's Kiss

by Christa Faust

  When he heard shots, Ojon scrambled awkwardly to his feet and spun toward the truck. He couldn’t see what was happening from his angle, so he crept closer, peering through the brush and trying to get a glimpse of the action. When he did, he wished he hadn’t.

  At first, he thought he was looking at a naked woman with wild black hair, facing away from him as one of the CBP officers drew down on her. If there had been a woman like that in the group, Ojon was sure he would have noticed. In fact, he definitely would have offered her his special discount. The officer was an older man, late forties with salt-and-pepper hair and a thick mustache. Ojon remembered him from one of his previous arrests, remembered that he was a real hardass. But he wasn’t acting like a hardass now. He was staring at the naked woman with wide eyes and a look first of horrified recognition and then stunned disbelief. The disbelief became terror as the thing that looked like a naked woman melted into something different. Something terrible.

  Ojon turned and ran.

  THREE

  Dean Winchester eased the Impala up to eighty miles per hour. It was a knockout of a day. Sunny and perfect, like a vintage ad for America the Beautiful. Sky so blue it hurt. The red rock canyons of Sedona, Arizona had given way to windswept dunes as they headed west, toward the California border. He had a belly full of good greasy burgers from a Mom and Pop roadside stand a few miles back. Iron Maiden’s “Running Free” pumped through the speakers. His brother Sam rode shotgun, long legs bent at what had to be an uncomfortable angle and balancing his laptop on his knees, a scattering of clippings and photos spilling across his seat. The road seemed to stretch out forever. If Dean squinted, he could almost pretend things were the way they used to be. The way they were supposed to be.

  Then the song ended and a new one came on. When Dean heard the opening riff of ACDC’s “Hell Ain’t a Bad Place to Be” he reached out and switched the music off.

  Sam didn’t seem to notice or care that the music had stopped. He was utterly absorbed in whatever he was reading.

  “Got something?” Dean asked.

  “Maybe,” Sam replied.

  Minutes and miles rolled by in silence, broken only by the shuffle of pages and the click of keystrokes. Dean could feel the cumulative weight of everything he’d been trying to forget crouching between them like a solid living thing. The elephant in the room. So much left unsaid. So much that had already been said and could never be taken back.

  “So,” Dean finally said. “You gonna share with the rest of the class?”

  “Border Patrol intercepted a truck full of illegals just south of Choulic,” Sam responded. “A routine stop. Only something went wrong and the officers involved never reported back at the station. When they sent a back-up unit out to the last known location, they found fifteen mutilated corpses, including the three officers. COD is listed as ‘wild animal attack.’”

  “Fifteen corpses, at least three of which were heavily armed and probably wearing body armor? That’s some animal.”

  “Our kinda animal,” Sam said, clicking through to another page. “Truck door was busted open from the inside. Says here there’s been some speculation that the smugglers involved may have been trying to import some type of large exotic mammal, like a tiger or a bear.”

  “Great.” Dean rolled his eyes. “Not another damn werewolf.”

  Sam shook his head. “It gets weirder.”

  “Doesn’t it always?”

  Sam showed one of the photos to Dean, who glanced sideways to look at it.

  “Can a werewolf do something like this?” Sam said.

  The photo showed an official Customs and Border Protection SUV. Well, half an SUV. A little less than half, to be precise. The front half was perfectly normal, undamaged. The back half had been removed with surgical precision, metal and plastic melted shiny smooth along the cut edges. As if someone had drawn a slightly curved line in the sand and everything on one side of the line had simply vanished, while the rest remained untouched. On the ground nearby was the uniformed body of a CBP officer. His Kevlar vest was torn to rags. So was he. And he didn’t have a head.

  “Werewolves are stronger than any normal predator, but their claws can’t go through Kevlar like that.” Sam tapped the photo. “And what the hell happened to the SUV? It looks almost like some kind of large protective circle had been drawn and then everything inside the circle disappeared. Transported, maybe. But where?”

  Dean glanced over at his kid brother. Sam was staring intently at the laptop screen once more. He’d caught the scent of something new and was intrigued. It was the closest thing to a human emotion that Dean had seen in his brother’s face since Sam had been brought back from Hell.

  Maybe this was just what they needed. Something to take their minds off the big picture.

  Dean could feel the old, familiar excitement building inside him. The thrill of the hunt. He looked away toward the raw, jagged mountains. Was he kidding himself to think that they could forget the past and the weight of a potentially bleak and hopeless future and lose themselves in an interesting job? Maybe so, but that wasn’t gonna stop him from trying. He needed a distraction too badly.

  “Where the hell is Choulic anyway?” Dean asked, turning back to Sam.

  The corner of Sam’s mouth twitched, just a little. Dean chose to interpret that as a smile.

  FOUR

  Choulic, Arizona turned out to be pretty much nowhere. A few trailers, and a ranch with three stoic horses watching the Impala from behind a crooked, endlessly repaired fence. A gas station straight out of the forties that sold beer and Jarritos soda from a Styrofoam cooler, along with weird “Indian Curios.” A billboard advertising a rattlesnake roundup that was supposedly “fun for the whole family.” That particular episode of wholesale reptile genocide had already happened more than four months ago.

  If the town of Choulic itself was nowhere, the actual location where the truck and the bodies had been found was even further away from anywhere. The road, such as it was, was barely more than two hardened ruts in the stony ground. The amount of abrasive grit and yellow desert dust that was rapidly coating the Impala’s slick black skin was starting to give Dean heart palpitations. He silently promised her a carwash the second they got what they needed from this particular patch of nowhere.

  Sam was out the passenger door even before Dean had come to a complete stop. Dean sat for a moment with his hand on the key in the ignition, just watching. Sam had the EMF meter out and was walking a careful grid across the area where the event had occurred. Dean killed the engine and got out himself. He already felt that there was something disturbing about the place.

  The heat was all over him the second he left the air-conditioned comfort of the Impala. There was hot and then there was this. Within seconds, his T-shirt was soaked through with sweat. The sun was swiftly barbecuing the top of his head and forcing his eyes down to a tight squint even behind his dark sunglasses. Suddenly, the idea of wearing a cowboy hat made perfect sense. He tried to imagine what it would be like to cross this inhospitable desert on foot.

  “How do people live out here?” Dean asked, stepping up next to Sam and pulling his damp shirt away from his sticky chest. “I’ve been here five minutes and I already feel like a 7-Eleven hotdog in a microwave.”

  “Yeah,” Sam replied, smirking without looking up from the readout. “But it’s a dry heat.”

  “Hell’s a dry heat, too,” Dean said. “It still sucks. Let me know if you pull anything. I’m gonna go get a cold beer and pour it down my pants.” He looked around uneasily.

  “I got nothing,” Sam replied, shrugging. “The area’s clean. Whatever happened here, I don’t think it’s tied to this location and it didn’t leave behind any detectable fluctuations.”

  If there had been any ordinary physical evidence, blood or tire tracks or anything like that, the stealthy, endlessly shifting sand had erased it. Nothing physical and nothing electromagnetic. No sulfur. No visible hexes. Nothing at all except for a
strange feeling in the pit of Dean’s stomach. A sense of profound wrongness about what had happened there.

  “Heads up,” Sam said.

  Dean turned to face his brother. Sam gestured to the left with his chin.

  “Looks like we got company,” he said.

  There was a rocky ridge about twenty-five feet away from the road that Dean realized gave a perfect sniper’s view of the location where the attack had occurred. At the crest of the ridge was a figure in black astride a matte-black custom Suzuki Hayabusa motorcycle. The figure’s eyes were hidden behind the dark visor of a full-face helmet, but there was no doubt that the brothers were being watched.

  For a handful of heartbeats, nothing happened. The three of them just regarded each other in silence. Then the Hayabusa’s engine turned over with a throaty roar, the bike spun 180 degrees in a spray of gravel and dust, and the mysterious figure was gone.

  As the sound of the bike’s engine faded into the distance, Dean turned to Sam with a slight frown.

  “Nice bike, the Hayabusa,” he said. “But pretty noisy.”

  “Yeah,” Sam said. “So?”

  “So,” Dean said. “Did you hear a motorcycle engine at any point since we got here?”

  The desert around them was quiet and peaceful. The only sounds were the raspy, repetitive call of a small bird, the bone-dry rattle of wind through thorny brush, and the whisper of sand around their boots.

  “Or how about on the drive out here?” Dean continued. “Hell, I don’t think we passed a single vehicle on the road since that crappy pick-up about ten miles back.”

  Sam’s eyes went wide. He got it.

  “Whoever that was,” Dean said. “They were already here. Waiting for us.”

  The brothers didn’t discuss the appearance of the mysterious rider on the drive from Choulic to Bullhead City, but Dean found himself mulling over the incident, wondering. Could it have been an off-duty CBP officer who had taken a special interest in the case? If so, how did they know Sam and Dean would be there? Or did they? Was Dean reading too much into it? Could it be a simple coincidence that they both chose the same time on the same day to check out the location? But Dean didn’t think so. Coincidence was a concept that normal people used to explain away things they didn’t understand. Things Dean understood all too well.

  Maybe it had been the perp, returning to the scene of the crime?

  “Okay,” Dean said, pulling the Impala up to a modest but immaculately landscaped Spanish-style home on a residential street. “Tell me more about Officer Headless.”

  “Davis James Keene,” Sam replied. “Age forty-seven. Hardcore evangelical Christian. Born and raised right here in Bullhead. Highway patrol officer for ten years before joining CBP. Wife Loretta doesn’t work outside the home. Four kids. All boys, all grown.”

  “But the question is, what makes him different than the other two murdered Border Patrol agents?” Dean asked, killing the engine and pulling the keys from the ignition. “I mean all the corpses were in bad shape, but Keene’s body seems to have suffered way more damage than the other victims. Like whatever did this was particularly pissed at him.”

  Too hot and sweaty—at least in Dean’s case—to face putting on their FBI suits, they had decided to go plain-clothed for this interview, figuring the grieving widow would have other things on her mind than to question their attire. Dean opened the glove compartment and pulled out a pair of fake FBI badges and handed one to Sam. Sam took the badge and shrugged.

  “I guess that’s what we’re here to find out,” he said.

  The woman who answered the door was surprisingly beautiful. From Sam’s description, Dean had been expecting some kind of sweet, chubby church-lady type. Loretta Keene looked more like a retired fashion model. Mile-high legs under a short sundress. Elegant cheekbones and big blue eyes that were just starting to crinkle at their corners. Thick blonde hair pulled back in a casual ponytail. Her feet were bare, toenails perfectly polished. She looked tired, like she’d been crying.

  Dean showed her his badge.

  “Mrs. Keene?”

  The woman nodded, let out a resigned sigh. She stepped aside to let Dean and Sam enter without asking them who they were or what they wanted.

  The interior of the house was just as immaculate as the exterior. Tasteful, but not too expensive. Simple brown-leather furniture and lots of well-groomed houseplants. Photos of four good-looking, athletic boys at various ages. A fresh lemony smell of recently applied furniture polish. The large windows were crystal clean. Not a speck of dust or a single item out of place.

  But the thing that Dean found the most unusual about the room was what wasn’t there. Not one single religious object. No bibles. No crosses. No framed religious sayings. Nothing to indicate that they were in the home of an evangelical Christian.

  “I’m Special Agent Crockett,” Dean told the woman. “This is Special Agent Tubbs.” Sam shot Dean a warning look, but Dean ignored him, face still deadpan serious. “We’re investigating the unusual circumstances surrounding your husband’s death.”

  Loretta Keene picked up a small spray bottle and started misting the leaves of a large potted ficus, her back to Dean.

  “It’s like he knew this was coming,” she said, almost too softly for them to hear.

  “What makes you say that,” Sam asked, frowning slightly and taking a step closer to the widow.

  She looked down at the spray bottle and shrugged.

  “From the day Davis and I met, it was... We had this... this crazy kind of passion. That’s the only word I can think of to describe it. Passion. He was the love of my life. We couldn’t keep our hands off each other.” She blushed and turned back to the plant, spraying it again, even though it was already soaked. “All my girlfriends said that would change once our first baby was born, but it didn’t. Not then, anyway. Not until years later.”

  Dean looked at Sam but didn’t say anything. They just waited for her to continue.

  “This was fifteen years ago. Ritchie, our youngest, was seven. I remember because it was the day after his seventh birthday party. Everything was normal, the way it always was. Davis had just started working for the CBP. Nights, which was tough for me, because we really only saw each other for a short time each evening before he left. But we would always... Anyway, he left for work that night and...”

  She finally turned to look at Dean. Her eyes were shimmering with unshed tears.

  “I feel like that was the last time I saw my husband.” She put the spray bottle down on the windowsill beside the damp ficus. “I’d like a drink. Would you boys like a drink?”

  “We’re not allowed to drink on the job, ma’am,” Sam replied before Dean could say yes.

  “I’d like a drink,” she said again, to no one in particular, then drifted slowly out of the room.

  “Crockett and Tubbs?” Sam said, leaning close to Dean and speaking fast and low. “Come on. Isn’t that a little too obvious? You oughta stick with your usual obscure rock and roll names.”

  “Just trying to spice up our relationship,” Dean replied. “But listen, never mind that.” He tipped his chin toward the doorway though which Mrs. Keene had drifted. “Booze in the house. No visible religious stuff. All this sex talk. You sure about this born-again thing?”

  Sam looked down at the file folder in his hand. Rifled through some papers.

  “According to this, the Keenes have been active members of the Living Word Baptist Church for fifteen years.”

  “Fifteen years,” Dean echoed.

  Mrs. Keene returned with a heroic three-finger knock of straight Bourbon in a thick, square glass. She tossed back more than half the amber liquid and then drifted over to the glossy leather couch. She didn’t sit, just stood there.

  “You were saying,” Dean prompted.

  “Was I?” Mrs. Keene looked puzzled and slightly anxious, like she’d just woken up in an unfamiliar bed. She sat down after all.

  “You were saying,” Sam reminded he
r. “That you felt like the last time you saw your husband was fifteen years ago.”

  “Right,” she said. “The day after Ritchie’s seventh birthday party.” She downed the rest of her bourbon. “Davis went to work that night just like he always did, but when he came home, he was like a different person. Shut down inside. He never touched me again.”

  She shook her head, shifting the empty glass from one hand to the other. Dean felt a terrible empathy for her, all alone in that clean, perfect house, as empty as her glass.

  “I know something happened that night,” she continued. “But he would never talk about it. He made us all get baptized the next day. I went along with it because it was easier than trying to argue him out of it, but I never really believed. I haven’t been back to church since his funeral. Closed casket, of course, since they never found his head.” She was suddenly angry, bitter as frostbite. “I mean, what’s the point? So I can listen to a bunch of sanctimonious hypocrites tell me that what happened to Davis was God’s will?” She made a harsh, half-suffocated sound that was probably meant to be a laugh. “God’s will? I don’t want any part of a God that would let something like that happen to one of his followers.”

  Lady, Dean thought, you don’t know the half of it.

  FIVE

  Border patrol officer Manuel Léon didn’t know what to make of his new partner. Charlie Himes was a decent guy, but very guarded. Didn’t joke around. Didn’t say a single word that wasn’t directly related to the job or responding to a specific request. He was the only black guy on the Tijuana River ATV team and he was also the oldest by a good ten years. Léon was the youngest. They were a Mutt and Jeff team, Himes tall and wiry and Léon short and stocky. Their CO called them Rocky and Bullwinkle. But despite their differences, they’d been working pretty well together for these past four days. Himes been showing Léon the ropes along the river, and although Léon might have preferred to partner with someone he could kid around with a little every now and then, Himes was a crack shot, had a black belt in Brazilian Jiujitsu, and held the highest arrest record in the unit. He was in better shape than most guys half his age. Léon could do worse.