by Amie Gibbons
I smiled. “Technically that requires his cooperation a little bit. He has to let me touch him. Though technically, I could try getting visions just off his stuff. Might be easier.”
“I’ll see what I can do to get some of the evidence over here on Monday,” Grant said.
“But for now, I play with the psycho. Yeah, yeah.”
Grant looked at Jet and he cleared his throat.
“Um yeah, I’ll get to doing… that thing,” Jet said, hurrying off down the hall.
“Does he actually have a thing or were you telling him to clear out, sir?” I asked.
“Don’t ask questions you know the answer to,” Grant said.
“Sorry, sir. Lawyer for a mama, remember? Kinda had the opposite pounded into me.”
His lips didn’t even twitch.
“Okay, so I’m not funny.” I shrugged. “I… was there something, sir?”
He took my shoulders. “He’s going to try something. You know it. I know it. I will be right outside that room, but if anything happens, shoot him.”
My jaw dropped.
Okay, wasn’t expecting that.
“Sir, you think-”
“I don’t know, Ryder. He has powers. If anything happens in that room, don’t wait, don’t think, just shoot him.”
I stared up at him. He was so close.
Heat came outta his hands like ovens. The musty smell that was all him and very male was obvious.
I bet he was workin’ on his basement again today.
He wanted to do the work finishing the basement himself, instead of hiring people to do it, and he smelled like he’d been workin’ hard today.
He let me go.
“Anything I can do to help?” he asked.
“Yeah, um, I wanted to ask you, that staring thing you do. How do you do that? Just look at someone and make them cower and do what you want?”
“Most people don't focus their full attention on anything. I do. I turn my full focus on the person in front of me and that force of attention and will, and what you could do with it, scares most people shitless.”
“Can I learn how to do that?”
“Maybe. Not in one minute.”
I nodded.
“Get in there,” he said. “You know what to do. If he stalls, leave. If he plays games, ignore them. Just touch him and get visions. No pussy footing around. You got that, Ryder?”
“Yes, sir.”
He handed me two folders. I flipped the first open. Financial records, pictures of houses, probably the ones he used, a few hotel rooms, real estate searches before and after the missing chunks of time. I opened the second and it was more pictures and profiles of missing college kids.
“Don’t let anything slip,” Grant said. “Don’t give him anything. We have some witches working on doodads to block his powers.”
“That’d be good,” I said. “It’s gotta be magic, sir, how he got the money and stuff.”
“But if he was that powerful, why hasn’t he broken himself out?” Grant asked.
“And why did he need me to signal boost?” I said, nodding.
Grant’s big hand clamped down on mine.
He gave it a squeeze as I looked up at him. His wide face was drawn in, his eyes locked down tighter than a chastity belt. He squeezed me again before letting go and nodded towards the hall.
We headed over to interrogation, and watched from the observation room as they brought Truck in and chained him up again.
Grant nodded at me after the other agents left through the backdoor and I walked in.
“Okay, I’m here,” I said, shutting the door behind me, suddenly feeling very tired.
“I see that,” Truck said.
He smiled as I put the folder on the desk and sat across from him. I put my wooden bowl next to me, pulled two sticks of incense out of my purse, lit them, and rested them in the bowl.
“Does that help you see things?” he asked.
“We’re here to talk about you. It’s a Saturday night, but we’re here, so talk.”
“I thought you didn’t need me to talk. You could just see.”
“Sometimes, but it’s easier if you talk. You said you would.”
I stared into his eyes, focusing on him, imagining I was a vamp trying to hypnotize.
He burst out laughing.
“Hey!” I sat back.
“I’m sorry, Ariana,” he said, “but you’re trying to pull that stare down your boss does, and you just don’t have it. It’s cute, actually.”
I tossed my hands up. “Fine, I’m not intimidating. I don’t need to be.”
“Now, don’t get me wrong, you’ve got some defensive power. But that’s all it is. You can push back if someone tries to break into your head, but you can’t attack, not like Grant.”
“Or you,” I said. “When did you get your powers?”
He stared at me a moment and finally shrugged. “No clue. They happened so slowly, I couldn’t say when they started, just developed over puberty.”
“Puberty? Wow.”
A blink was his only show of surprise. “You didn’t get yours then?”
I shook my head. “Nope, twenty-one. Not even a big day like my birthday, just some random day my senior year.”
“Strange.”
“Well, so are psychics.” I got up and pushed the folder of missing persons at him. “We really do need to get going.”
“Hot date?” he asked as I walked behind him, flippin’ the folder open and spreading out the pics.
“Something like that. Mostly, I just don’t want to have to work on a Saturday night. They don’t pay me enough for that.”
He laughed. “Yeah, and the others would probably rather be home with their families.”
I paused as a shiver ran up my spine. “Any chance you wanna tell me where people are buried, who they were, the whole magically appearing money thing, save me the trouble?”
“Save you from such entertainment? Of course not.”
“It’s not entertainin’ for me.”
He smirked at me in the mirror. “Maybe not. Then again, what happened with you and Grant after I left yesterday?”
I went bright red, my reflection tossin’ back a mocking parody of embarrassment and shock back at me.
He laughed, clapping his hands together. “Damn! Right here in the building?”
“What! No!” I said. “Nothing happened.”
“But you both wanted it to. Face it, you like the power, want to take it in.”
Oh my God, this was being recorded!
He met my eyes in the mirror and the world outside fuzzed away.
“You like being taken over,” Truck said, the mirror fadin’ to show Grant behind it. “All women do, because a man with that kind of power will give them the strongest babies, but you even more so. You want to touch it.”
He stood, hands going through the cuffs like they weren’t there.
“I’m dreamin’ again,” I said, feet refusing to move.
“No,” he whispered, “mental walk. You’re just staring off into space right now. Your Grant will probably come in and pull you out any minute now, but until then.”
He grabbed my hips and pulled me back into him, rubbing against me.
I gasped.
“Do you know how much you project?” he asked. “I don’t mean just your expressiveness or even the other day when you were putting out a call. I mean, every day, just by being, you project.”
“Project what?” I asked.
“Energy. Youth.” He tucked my hair behind my ear, and pushed it over one shoulder. “You never had a problem getting men to want you,” he said. “You’re young and beautiful, but so are lots of girls. You have a body built to show your fertility, big breasts, wide hips, small waist, but again, so do lots of girls. So have you ever wondered why you are so desirable? I can tell you.”
I licked my lips and nodded.
“It’s because you are literally throwing energy into the world,” he said, “calling
out to men to come to you, to have you, to let you take them in.”
“Psychic pheromones,” I said.
Last February a demon said something similar. He tried to kidnap me so we could make little demon baby hybrids. He said few women could carry their babies and I was one of them.
“Precisely,” Truck said.
“Not the first time I’ve heard this.”
“Not surprised. What I want to know is, what is it about the darkness that you love so much?” he asked, sliding a hand up my thigh and taking my skirt with it as he ground into me.
I grabbed his hand and pulled it away, turning to stare him down.
“Maybe it’s cuz I’ve got some darkness too,” I said, grabbin’ his face. “Vamps can’t hypnotize me against my will. I don’t know why you thought you could.”
I blinked and he was back chained up, me staring at the mirror.
“That was impressive,” he said.
“You ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” I said. “You’re startin’ to piss me off.”
“Oh, just starting to?”
“You don’t have an accomplice, do you?”
He grinned. “Wondered when you’d go there.”
I glared.
“Oh, getting better at that,” he said. “And I already told you all you need to know about that.”
It clicked.
My jaw dropped. “You. You said you wanted to come to Nashville. You said something about making others think it was their idea. You left that girl there for something like this, and directed the locals towards it. You set this all in motion.”
He leaned down so he could tap his nose. “Ten points. Didn’t even need your powers to see that.”
“Why?” I asked. “You set that all up years ago, and set it off now just to get here and what, meet me? You’re still in prison. So why?”
He met my eyes. “I’ll answer that if you’ll turn off the recording devices in the room.”
“You know I can’t do that.”
He shrugged. “Then ask me something else. You are here to find out how I got that money, those houses, without any records, and oh yeah, where the bodies are, after all.”
“Now that we know you were workin’ alone, yeah. Do you get the money through magic?”
He didn’t say anything.
“How about the records?” I asked. “Make those disappear with your powers? What are your powers?”
He smiled.
I tapped the first photo. “Where’s she buried?”
“Not one of mine.”
Sure, that he answered.
“Now, Truck, why don’t I believe you?”
“JB, please, Ariana.”
“No. How about this woman?” I tapped the next.
He shrugged. “Nope.”
“Start talkin’, or this interview’s over, and we go back to playing during work hours like civilized human beings.”
“What is civilized?” he asked.
“Something you will never be.”
“And you are?”
“Not right now, I’m not.”
He clucked his tongue at me. “Careful, Ariana, you know the first one to lose their temper is the one who loses.”
“Loses what, exactly?” I leaned close and pulled the next pic in front of him. “No matter what, how much you piss me off, or get under my skin, you’re still the one chained up. So you tell me, who’s the loser here?”
“Oh, and she comes out swinging!” Truck sat back, slouching into the position as much as the cuffs would allow. “You’ve gone straight past intimidation to win, to realizing it doesn’t matter. I’m impressed. Most of the cops I’ve talked to lately actually have the delusion that they can outsmart me.”
“Outsmart? I thought you just said they tried to intimidate you?”
“Ah, but that’s what intimidation comes down to. Intimidation is when you look at someone and you know, so much that they know, that you can do whatever it is you promise.”
That sounded oddly close to what Grant was sayin’.
“Your boss is intimidating,” Truck said like he read my mind. “He is willing to do whatever it takes, whenever he has to. You can see it in his eyes. A lesser man would have cracked within ten minutes of sitting in a room with him.
“But that’s where intelligence comes in. See, I acknowledge what a man like him could do to me. I also look at the logic of why he won’t. I’m already in jail, I’m already on death row, and I’m not going anywhere. So no matter how much I piss him off, he can’t really do anything to make my life worse. And if he kills me, I’ll be done, but it will be so much worse for him.”
“That’s not gonna happen any time soon, so.” I walked to his other side and hit one of the pictures there. “Know her?”
“Her name is Samantha Hammond.”
“We already knew that. It says it on the profile right there. Where is she?”
“Oh, she’s not one of mine.”
“Okay. We’re done.” I grabbed his wrist.
Flash.
Dawn lay on the bed, pretending to be asleep.
If she could make him believe she was out, then she’d have a shot to take him by surprise and make a run for it. It was worth a try.
She was good at puzzles, so he kept giving them to her. She was well fed and could use the little bathroom in the master suite to go bathroom and shower. She had books and a TV to keep her entertained.
But still, it was only a matter of time before he got sick of these games and moved onto others.
He’d already said what he was going to do to her one of these nights.
The window had bars on it so she couldn’t get out that way, but could see they were in some kind of farmhouse overlooking a field at the edge of woods through the window.
She knew they weren’t in the middle of nowhere though. She heard cars on a road nearby all day.
All she had to do was get out, run to the road and flag down the first car that drove by.
There was a jingling sound and then scraping as the door unlocked. It swung open with the barest squeak and she held stiller, making her breathing slow and even. He always came home about this time during the week.
The unmistakable sound of a gun being cocked clicked and Dawn sat up slowly.
“Oh, so you weren’t asleep,” Truck said. “Color me shocked.”
“I was resting,” Dawn said, voice shaking. “I was hoping you’d go away if I wasn’t awake.”
“Is this about what we talked about yesterday?”
She gulped and nodded.
“That’s only when you want it,” he said, eyes boring into hers. “When you’re lying back on that bed begging for it.”
“Not a chance then,” she said.
Truck leveled the gun at her, then shrugged. “Alright, you want me to go, I go.”
He turned and left without another word.
It shouldn’t have been so easy.
Dawn sat in her room, waiting for him to come back.
He didn’t.
Her stomach was growling by the time it really was time for bed.
She drank water from the tap in the sink but there was no food in here.
She went to bed and got up in the morning. She read and watched TV. The sun set again. And he still didn’t come. She showered but since he hadn’t been by, there were no clean clothes to change in to.
So that was her punishment for daring to send him away. No Truck meant no food or clean clothes.
She heard him leave in the morning and got up in bed, listening to the car as it vroomed down the street.
He’d said what he’d do if she tried to escape, but that only worked if he caught her after.
She went to work on the bars on the window. They weren’t fastened into the wall with anything more than sturdy screws.
She pulled out the hefty metal file she’d found in the bathroom drawers with other toiletries and put it into the screw, undoing it slowly.
Time slipped by and
she went through the screws, getting them out with patient, gentle twists.
When the bars came off, she nearly screamed.
She pushed the window open, climbed out onto the roof, and headed for the drainpipe. She’d done this as a teen sneaking out of the house. It couldn’t be that hard a few years later.
She grabbed on and scooched down, the pipe sagging under her weight.
She hit the ground and took off.
Freedom!
She went maybe five steps before she heard it.
A loud, warning growl.
She turned around and the beast leaped, knocking her down.
She screamed and the giant dog ripped out her throat.
The vision faded out, reappearing with a flash of bright light.
The forest was smelling clear and spring sweet.
Truck followed the massive dog through the field to the dead girl. The scent of rotted, bloating body filled me, coated my mouth with its oily consistency, and I wanted to gag. Flies were already crawling over her corpse.
“It took her that long?” Truck sounded surprised. “I’d bet she’d make a run for it that first day. How long did it take her to find the file?” He sighed and scratched the dog’s ears. “Good boy.” He walked over to his car and pulled out a shovel.
I snapped out of the vision, the scent and sight seared into my brain, and ran for the door. I barely threw it open and grabbed the small trash can in the corner of the hall before I tossed my cookies.
Grant was behind me, holding my hair off my face.
“What did you see?” he asked as I flopped to my butt and leaned against the wall.
I told him, the taste of dead flesh and vomit lingerin’ in my mouth.
“Has that ever happened before? Where you can taste it?”
“No, sir. I’ve smelt it, but it’s never been something that lingered after I got out of the vision.”
“Okay, you’re done for the night.” Grant helped pull me to my feet. I opened my mouth and he shook his head, face hard and unyielding. “No, you’re done. You can talk to him Monday.”
“What if he doesn’t want to talk?” I asked.
“Then he can sit in the room and stare at me,” Grant said. “I’m intimidating, remember?”
“I already knew that, sir.”
He didn’t smile.
He nodded and went into interrogation.
Truck said something I could barely hear. Grant must’ve turned off the intercom.
