Insatiable Series Omnibus Edition (Books 1-3)

by Patrick Logan

  “Aye, aye, Captain.”

  * * *

  “Delicious as always, Mom,” Corina complimented between mouthfuls.

  She looked over at her mother, who was staring off into the distance, her plate mostly untouched.

  “Yeah, Mom, it’s really good,” Henrietta followed up.

  Marley shook her head slightly.

  “What’s that, dear?”

  Corina frowned.

  “We just said that the dinner is good; yummy. You should try some.”

  Reminded of her meal, Marley looked down at her plate, but instead of bringing her fork to her mouth, she laid it back down on her placemat and turned her eyes to the counter. Corina followed her gaze and noted the stack of torn envelopes and sheets of tri-folded paper, which could only be—were always only—one thing: bills.

  “What’s the matter, Mom?” Corina asked hesitantly, even though she already knew the answer.

  “I think—I think—” Marley couldn’t hold her daughter’s gaze, and she looked away. “I think you need to get a job,” she finished simply.

  Corina slowly put her own fork down on her plate and folded her hands calmly in front of her.

  “How many times do you want to go over this, Ma?”

  Marley’s eye flicked up and she glared at her daughter.

  “You’re eighteen now, almost nineteen—”

  “Thanks, Mom. I know how old I am,” Corina said, glaring back just as hard.

  Marley shook her head, her tired face beginning to sag. It was times like these that she looked much older than her age. Even though Mama Lawrence had been Cody’s mother and not Marley’s, Corina was reminded of the woman now.

  “Corina, please, we—I need some help.” She gestured to the pile of bills on the counter behind her. “The bills keep piling up, and I can’t take any more shifts over at the home.”

  Corina stared at her mother for a moment. There was a time when she had been pretty, very pretty, with soft features, a delicate, almost upturned nose, and big hazel eyes that could draw the attention of any man in the room.

  But not now.

  Now she was just old; old, tired, and desperate.

  It was not a good look on anyone, much less Corina’s own mother.

  Anger slowly displaced the embarrassment and ignominy she felt for her mother then, and this anger soon bled to her deceased father; she was furious that he was gone, that he had left them. Fueling this feeling was the fact that Cody had opted to take Henrietta with him when he had entered the blizzard. These feelings were mostly irrational, especially given her delicate condition at the time when Cody had left Mama Lawrence’s home, but still…her father had picked her—a fact that could not be denied.

  Corina’s gaze slipped downward, and she found herself staring at the pink plastic of her artificial leg that peeked out from just below the hem of her jeans.

  Without warning, she brought a fist down on the hard plastic and her eyes shot up again. Everything suddenly came rushing back, as it was apt to do at times like this: her dead father, her amputated leg, the missing piece of her ear, being kicked out of the dojo for nearly a month, and even the patches of white skin on Henrietta’s neck and hands that had never regained their normal flush after being frostbitten.

  “I told you already! I’m not working, Ma, not in this shit—”

  “Hey!” Marley said, her eyes darting to Henrietta, who had buried herself in her meal in an attempt to drown out their bickering.

  But it was a weak look, one from a defeated mother, a look akin to caving and letting her daughter stay out passed curfew.

  “I hate this shit town,” Corina continued, her teeth clenched, “and I won’t work here. I need to train, Ma, you know this. I’m not ready to work.”

  Her thoughts quickly drifted to what had happened that afternoon, how she had gone spastic again and was now suspended from the training facility for a month.

  Corina pushed these thoughts away.

  “I need help, Corina.”

  The woman’s fragility and weakness angered Corina more than anything; she couldn’t even stand to stare at her mother’s downcast face, her eyes welling up and in danger of spilling over at any moment.

  When did you become so fucking weak? What kind of role model is that for Henri?

  Corina stood with a start, her chair toppling noisily onto the parquet tiles behind her.

  Marley’s tired eyes looked up at her.

  “It’s not my fault that Dad is gone, Mom.” Corina jabbed at her chest with a stubby nail. “It’s not my fault.”

  7.

  “Coggins, I want you to meet Deputy Andrew Williams,” Sheriff Paul White said, holding his thick arm out in front of him as introduction.

  Coggins stared at the man across from him and couldn’t help the thoughts that entered his head.

  This is—was—my replacement?

  The man was a little shorter than Coggins, maybe five-foot-ten on a good day, and had a shock of slicked black hair that looked as hard as frozen ice cream. The man had narrow, pointy features, a beak-like nose, and was thin bordering on skinny. His beige ACPD shirt was perhaps one size too big, and it had been tucked in tight and then pulled out of the front of his pants so that it billowed just a little, making him seem a little larger, a little thicker.

  Coggins knew this, because he used to do the same.

  His eyes drifted to Sheriff White’s heavily muscled frame and dark, almost ebony skin, and then back at the pale, thin man with the slicked hair.

  Bonnie and Clyde.

  “Nice to meet you,” Deputy Williams finally said, extending his hand.

  The man had eyes that turned downward slightly at the outer corners, something that gave him this perpetual sleepy appearance.

  Coggins took the man’s hand and shook it briefly.

  “Same,” he grumbled.

  The sheriff gave him a strange look, and when he spoke, although his words were clearly directed at Deputy Williams, his eyes remained firmly locked on Coggins’.

  “Coggins here is going to be deputized… again. At least until this case is solved.”

  Sheriff White reached over and cuffed the side of each of Coggins’ arms with enough force to jolt him. It was meant as a friendly gesture to break some of the tension, but it also conveyed another meaning: Buck up, boy. Look alive.

  Coggins feigned a smile, revealing a row of crooked lower teeth that peeked through his thick red beard.

  “Deputy Coggins, at your service.”

  The stern look on the sheriff’s face stopped him from going into a full salute.

  A silence fell over the three of them, their thoughts clearly pasted on their faces. Deputy Williams’ expression was one of uncertainty, what with their shared knowledge of the fact that Askergan now only had the financial resources to support one deputy. Sheriff White looked confused, unsure if bringing this bearded, harder version of Coggins onboard was a good idea. And Coggins—now Deputy Coggins again—wondered what in God’s name he was doing back here after swearing that he would never step back into the town again, let alone back here—back here in the police station where it had all begun.

  Sheriff Paul White shook his head.

  “Let’s get this started,” he finally instructed, breaking the silence. “Coggins, there is something that you need to hear.”

  * * *

  The boy, who couldn’t be much older than fifteen, had a hard time making eye contact. Sure, this was partially due to his guilt, which was especially apparent when he started talking about how he and his friends had been drinking, but there was more to it than that; Coggins didn’t need his decade plus experience as a police officer to figure that out.

  The boy was terrified.

  “Go on, champ, tell the officers the story again,” the boy’s father encouraged.

  The man’s father, who Sheriff White had introduced as Gregory Griddle, was a good-looking man, tall and athletic, with light brown hair that was parted n
eatly atop his head. He had boyish, symmetrical features and a smattering of crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes that were a lasting reminder that this was a man who liked to laugh—who loved life.

  But he wasn’t laughing now.

  When the boy didn’t immediately respond and bowed his head, leaving the two deputies and Sheriff White to stare at the mess of reddish-blonde hair, the boy’s father cleared his throat and interjected.

  “We were camping,” he began, but the sheriff raised a large hand and cut him off.

  “Let him tell the story, please, Mr. Griddle.”

  The man nodded and turned back to his boy, resting a hand gently on his back.

  “C’mon, Kent, tell them the story again.”

  The boy’s back hitched as he took a deep breath, and then he turned his face upward to meet them.

  Like his father, the boy was handsome, but he still had to grow into his features, which were all just a little too big for him: his lips, nose, and even his ears were just a tad oversized for his small, round face. His eyes, on the other hand, were a dark, deep hazel—they were the eyes of a much older man, one who had seen things.

  Coggins knew those eyes; they were the eyes that his father used to have before he passed, the same eyes shared by the rest of his father’s whiskey and cigar troupe that had come over once a month, every month, since the first time that Coggins could remember until his very last day. They were the eyes of men who had seen things, who had seen horrible things, the eyes of men who had been to war.

  The boy—this young Kent Griddle—began to speak, and with his words he weaved an elaborate and fantastical tale that even Deputy Coggins, for all he had seen in his time, his own eyes the same dark, dull pits as his father’s, had a hard time believing.

  When Kent was done, he bowed his head again, tears streaming silently down his freckled face.

  “Thank you,” the sheriff said softly, and he indicated to the boy’s father that they could rise. “You can go now, just please stay local until I let you know different.”

  Gregory Griddle nodded.

  “C’mon, Kent, let’s get going.”

  The boy curled into his father’s chest as he stood, and with his arms wrapped around his son, the two Griddle men left the small interrogation room. Left alone now, the two deputies and the sheriff remained silent for some time. Sheriff White leaned heavily onto the table that had just been vacated, while Deputies Williams and Coggins sat leaning against opposite walls, their thin arms crossed over their narrow chests.

  Eventually the sheriff cleared his throat to speak, but before he could get the words out, the door to the interrogation room burst open and Gregory Griddle poked his head in.

  “Listen,” he said, almost breathlessly. It was clear that he had left his son in the car running out front—they could all hear the roar of the car’s engine—and that he didn’t want Kent to be alone for very long. “I—I mean, we—me and the other boys’ fathers—can help. We want to help find Tyler…”

  His eyes dropped.

  “I mean, we should have kept better watch…”

  “They are boys, Mr. Griddle,” the sheriff interrupted, grinding his knuckles even deeper into the table.

  Gregory nodded.

  “But we want to help, Sheriff. We—I need to help. Please, call us if there is anything we can do,” the man pleaded.

  The big sheriff nodded, a gesture that was quickly returned before Mr. Griddle once again fled the room.

  This time, there was no silence when the three officers were alone again.

  “Well? What do you think?” Deputy Williams asked. “You think the boys took something else instead of just the vodka?”

  No one answered.

  “Acid, maybe? PCP?”

  Coggins shook his head.

  “This is not nineteen eighty-four,” he sighed, bringing his fingers up to his temples and rubbing them. He was well past the point of getting hangovers—six years of solid drinking would make you pretty good at it—but for some reason, today his mind felt foggy. It might have been the boy’s outlandish story, or the fight last night at the bar with Sheriff White, or maybe it was just being back here, seeing them all. It was fucking up his mojo.

  He swallowed hard.

  Or maybe it was talking to Mrs. Drew; Mrs. Drew who was sitting at the desk that Alice had manned for so many years before…

  “Fuck,” he swore, closing his eyes tightly.

  “You alright, Coggins?” White asked.

  Coggins blinked hard a third time and looked at the man who had been his partner for the better part of a decade.

  “Yeah,” he said, but the words came out strained and he could tell by the look on the man’s face that his response hadn’t been convincing.

  “What, then?” Williams asked, trying to butt into Coggins and White’s silent, private exchange. “Ecstasy?”

  The sheriff shook his head.

  “I doubt it.”

  With a sigh, Sheriff White straightened his back and removed his fists from the desk. His knuckles were red from having been driven into the cheap fiberboard.

  “Look”—he indicated the chairs on which Gregory Griddle and his boy had sat moments ago—“these are good people. They aren’t hiding anything—you saw the way the boy was even ashamed to admit that he had been drinking. And who doesn’t drink when they are fifteen?”

  Coggins found himself nodding. He lacked the ‘spidey sense’ of recognizing good boys that the sheriff and his predecessor had, but he had become fairly adept at figuring out if someone was lying. And, in this case, he didn’t think so.

  It was the eyes; that hardened look that could not be faked. And the boy had it when the father had not. This was telling enough.

  “So, what, then?” Williams asked again with a shrug.

  The sheriff shook his head slowly before turning to Coggins for an answer.

  “It’s a missing person,” Coggins said, trying his best to be pragmatic about the entire situation. “A missing person—nothing more, nothing less… at this point. We can forget about parasite crabs burrowing beneath flesh for the time being. We should focus our efforts on finding the boy first.”

  Both the sheriff and Deputy Williams nodded in agreement.

  “Alright, so what’s the first thing we do when looking for a missing person?” Coggins continued.

  When no one answered right away, Coggins extended his neck and made a face.

  “Paul! I’m gone for a few weeks and this whole place has fallen to shit! What kind of operation are you running here?”

  The comment was meant to be humorous, to break the ice, the tension, whatever membrane of anxiety had slipped over the Askergan County Police Department, but it fell flat.

  “Well?”

  The sheriff looked up at him, his heavy brow pushing down over his eyes. There was no humor in his face.

  “We go to the last place the person was seen,” he replied dryly.

  Coggins kept the charade going, raising his arms out in front of him, palms up.

  “That’s right, children, we go to the last place the person was seen. This is what you called me back in for? You need me to regurgitate Police Procedure 101?”

  Deputy Williams rolled his eyes, but Coggins ignored him.

  Why hire a skinny white dude to replace me if he has no sense of humor?

  Coggins remembered the hours of playing poker he had spent with the then Deputy White, riding him about anything and everything. The man used to get so worked up that several times Coggins had been seriously worried that one of the thick veins in the man’s neck or forehead might burst.

  When his eyes fell back on the sheriff now, however, the man’s expression was blank.

  “And where was the last place that little Tyler Wandy was seen?”

  The sheriff swallowed hard and averted his eyes.

  Coggins’ arms immediately fell to his sides, and the smile on his face vanished so rapidly that it was as if it had been s
lapped off. Even before the sheriff answered, Coggins knew what he was going to say; the answer had been in his eyes the whole time.

  “The Wharfburns’ Estate,” Sheriff White said dryly.

  Deputy Bradley Coggins felt his entire body go numb.

  8.

  Corina Lawrence went immediately to her room after finishing dinner, not even bothering to clean up her or her sister’s dishes as she usually did.

  Marley was fuming.

  And then she had been irate, irrational, and violent. Corina didn’t blame her; after all, what she had said was horrible.

  No wonder Dad left you.

  Even now, just the thought of the words she had spoken made her shake her head in disgust.

  Left you—as if Cody had been fed up with her and had demanded that they separated or divorced, or that he had found himself a young trophy mistress and had fled town with her.

  Left you—implying that Corina and Henri might be able to go and visit him, to hold him, to hug him.

  Corina started to cry.

  Cody Lawrence had left because he wanted to save Henrietta, of course, and she knew that… but still, her mother had a way of getting under her skin like no one else.

  Corina wiped the tears from her eyes and crawled onto her stomach. She propped herself on her elbows and switched on the small TV at the edge of her bed, quickly flipping through the channels to try and find something stupid on to distract her before she tucked her pride between her prosthetic leg and went to apologize. Tonight, however, the task was proving more difficult.

  She wants me to get a job, to help pay some of the bills.

  This is what Marley wanted, but Corina wanted to get a job and make money and move out. It wasn’t that she didn’t love her sister and get along amicably with her mother most of the time, but she was turning nineteen soon, and she needed to spread her wings—figure out what the hell she wanted to do with her life. And to keep training; she loved training.

  Corina had been completely lost after what had happened at her grandmother’s house more than six years ago, and had accidently stumbled on the MMA gym one evening while wandering the snowy streets in Downtown Pekinish just after they had moved. Usually she just wandered the streets aimlessly, practicing walking with a normal gait, lost in her own thoughts, but on that particularly frigid November afternoon, a man had been standing outside the gym, a man in his mid-sixties, dressed in only a pair of gym shorts. His muscled chest and arms, which looked like they belonged to a man at least two decades younger, were covered in sweat. At first, Corina had tried to hurry by, to slide by without being noticed, which was something she had become rather adept at over the past few months. But then someone had hollered from inside the open door of the building, and her attention had been drawn back.