Depths: Southern Watch #2

by Crane, Robert J.

  He stretched his mind along toward the hospital, like fingers dancing over a bedspread trying to get to a nightstand just out of reach. He did finally feel it, could get a basic sense of the souls there, but there was nothing moving. He knew they were there, but that was it.

  No one was dying.

  He took a ragged breath and rolled to his side on the scratchy motel comforter. It smelled like stale cigarettes even though he was in a non-smoking room. It had never been dry like this in any of the cities he’d lived in. It had occasionally been like this in the days when he traveled between cities, back when he did it by bus or even horseback, a hundred years ago.

  The problem was the damned county was just too sparsely populated. He didn’t know how many people were within his reach, but he knew the two biggest cities nearby, Knoxville and Chattanooga, were just too damned far away. They weren’t even close to within his grasp.

  He felt the first throbbing of pain in his head as he pondered this possibility. He could hear a noise outside, the first sounds of rain starting to come down again. Gideon crossed to the window and looked out at the parking lot. The cop car was gone, for which he was thankful. The sole lamp illuminating the parking lot showed nothing but a flooded puddle over the entirety of the pavement.

  Gideon narrowed his eyes as he looked at it, something scratching at the back of his mind. He let the curtain fall back into place and grabbed the convenience binder that some maid had left on the dresser. He opened it up to the local map that they’d thoughtfully enclosed on page five.

  Gideon scanned over it until he found what he was looking for and started to crack a smile. Maybe. Just maybe. If that was really set up the way he thought it was, it would surely let him kill people. A whole lot of people. Maybe more than anything else he could devise, short of a nuclear bomb.

  But first he’d need to take a car ride to see if what he was envisioning was even feasible.

  * * *

  Erin was back in her car because the rain was fucking coming down AGAIN. The THP was sorting shit out anyway, and that colonel was already off the scene, presumably to file a report with his superiors. Erin watched the wreckers moving the cars out one by one, like they were deconstructing twisted metal sculptures. She shuddered when she thought about this particular statuary represented.

  The morgue wagons were loading up the last even now, and she could see the bodies going into the bags in the rain, the steady fall of water wetting the ones still under white sheets. Red spotted the white, like paint splashed on pure canvasses. It had been unnerving enough when they’d just been shapeless things, but now that they were being drenched, they were looking like corpses under sheets again.

  Erin hadn’t seen any human dead bodies before. Until today, and suddenly she’d seen a mountain of them. The acrid taste of stomach acid reminding her she hadn’t eaten was coupled in her stomach with the rumbling, churning feeling of disquiet. Part of her wanted to leave, maybe run up to the gas station or the diner up the ramp on Old Jackson Highway and satiate it.

  But that other part of her—the one that remembered she was in the middle of her big chance—that part kept her ass anchored to the seat of the patrol car.

  She tried not to think about Hendricks and the redhead, but it was defying her ability to keep it out. Like she was slamming the door on it in her head, but the thought was some abusive gorilla-sized offender, and it kept breaking though.

  Well, okay, it wasn’t really like that, but it wasn’t good.

  The thing that itched her the worst of all was that even though she knew she’d screwed up with Hendricks, even though she’d had it out with him, told him to go fuck himself, and was certain—to a T—that she’d massively fucked up by ever taking up with the cowboy—it STILL bothered her that he was wandering around a crime scene with some strange redhead.

  And Arch. What the fuck was going on with him? Wasn’t he supposed to be on patrol somewhere?

  Erin was steaming and trying to figure out whether to just say fuck it and get something to eat when the radio crackled. “Fifteen, this is dispatch, what’s your twenty, over?”

  She started to reach for her shoulder mike. Fifteen was Arch’s badge number, his call sign, and the voice was the sheriff’s wife. Erin didn’t say anything, though, and the same message was repeated twice more without a word of reply.

  * * *

  Hendricks was watching out the window with his good eye while Arch drove the Explorer. He had no idea where they were going, exactly, though it felt like they might have been following the interstate on a frontage road. He thought about asking, but Arch seemed more than a little touchy. Not that Hendricks could blame him; the sheriff’s deputy had gone from a calm life one week to in-over-his-fucking-head the next.

  Hendricks looked over and saw Arch with his cell phone in hand, the face plate lit up and buzzing. The deputy didn’t make a move to answer it, though, and after a moment the light faded and then died.

  Hendricks thought about letting it pass without saying anything, but his curiosity got the better of him. “Who was that? Your wife?”

  “No,” Arch said, and his voice was subdued. “My boss.”

  “The sheriff?” Hendricks asked, feeling a little bloom of nervousness. “Why wouldn’t he try and reach you on your radio?”

  Arch didn’t react, just stared stone-faced at the front windshield. “Because I turned it off.”

  * * *

  Erin’s cell phone lit up in the falling dark and she scrambled for it, hitting the talk button almost before the caller ID told her it was Reeve on the line.

  “Where the fuck are you?” Reeve barked.

  Classy fucker. “Still out at the wreck,” she said.

  “Okay,” Reeve’s voice calmed down a little. “Thought the wife was having some trouble getting radio commands out. Did you hear that call for Arch a minute ago?”

  “Yep,” Erin said, and there was that itch again. She felt a desire to twitch, to bleed off some nervous energy somehow. “I heard it.”

  “Well, he’s usually pretty quick to respond,” Reeve said. “He’s like our constant in that regard. You seen him?”

  “Yeah,” Erin said, and for a moment she pondered lying for him. Then she just figured fuck it. “He was up on the overpass here a few minutes ago with that cowboy friend of his and another woman—some redhead I’ve never seen before.”

  There was a full ten seconds of dead air. “Excuse me?” Reeve’s voice was extra polite, extra condescending.

  “You heard me,” Erin said. It was probably the equivalent of spraying the man in the face with a cold hose, but fuck him too. “He was here, not twenty minutes ago. Looking over the scene.”

  “His ass was supposed to be on patrol in town,” Reeve said, and Erin could hear his voice rise on the other end of the phone. “You see where he went?”

  “Back toward the Sinbad,” she said and felt that itch beneath the skin get a little worse, her face burning. With shame or something else, she didn’t know. “That’s where Hendricks is staying.”

  “Get up there and see if you can find him,” Reeve said, and she could almost feel him reigning in some much harsher words. “Call me if you do. I want to talk to that—” Reeve cut himself off, she was pretty sure.

  Just as well. Knowing Reeve, she could imagine what would have come next, and it was probably not anything that would have been flattering to Arch. Or his mother.

  Chapter 10

  Lerner had a few ponderous thoughts clicking through his head as they came around a bend in the road. They’d followed the frontage road down the highway for miles, watching the near-empty freeway through a wood and wire fence. One lane was moving just fine, heading north. The other was empty, presumably shut down by the Tennessee Highway Patrol. The rain was coming down lightly at the moment, which allowed him to see all that.

  Really, though, to Lerner, it was like a perfect metaphor for life as a human. They’d be going along, and suddenly the road would be bloc
ked. What would they do? Well, some would pull off and eat. Some would detour and hurry like hell to find the fastest way to get back on the road. Some would just pull off and give up.

  No, that analogy didn’t work. It was a shame, too; it had seemed so promising when he’d started it.

  Lerner looked over at Duncan, sitting peacefully in the passenger seat, his hand resting on the handle that hung over the door. He’d never really thought about what that thing was called before. The emergency handle?

  He started to voice this thought to Duncan when they came to a T in the road and his path ended at a stop sign. The car’s headlights shone into a fence and an empty pasture beyond.

  “Take a right,” Duncan suggested.

  “I’m not stupid, I know I take a right,” Lerner said, giving Duncan a scathing look. Duncan just shrugged.

  Lerner turned his head back to the road and his headlights illuminated a police cruiser as it passed in front of them. He caught a glimpse of the driver and passenger as they went by; it was the cop and the cowboy. “Hm,” he said.

  There was a pause. “Hm, what?” Duncan bit.

  Lerner could feel himself smile. Duncan almost never bit on these sort of queries. “Is it serendipity that led us to the point in the road where we fortuitously picked that exact moment to argue, thus stalling us long enough to—”

  “Shut up and follow them.”

  * * *

  Erin slid a key into the lock of Hendricks’s motel room door. She’d knocked and heard nobody, sitting there with the rain blowing in under the overhang and soaking her again. After that she walked in the seeping chill down to the manager’s office, idling cursing the name of Lafayette Hendricks and wondering why she’d ever thought a man named Lafayette could even be attractive. The manager had been surprisingly compliant and quick to give her a key, which she’d dutifully taken and trudged back down to Hendricks’s door. By this time, the hems of her pants were soaked again. Goddamned Lafayette Hendricks.

  She pushed open the door and paused before crossing the threshold. She wondered a little idly why she was even going to these lengths; it wasn’t like Reeve would have expected her to do this. Probably. She lived in the grey space between what she thought his expectations might be and what he’d told her to do. This fit neatly in there. Somewhere.

  The room was dark, and the outside light didn’t do much to help the situation. She fumbled to her left and then her right before finding a switch to flip. It made a crisp noise as it clicked up, and a light popped on in the corner.

  What it illuminated wasn’t much more than she’d already seen. Some ghastly red/purple/beige hybrid design on the wall that might have been wallpaper. Maybe. Beat-up furniture and threadbare chairs. A bed that hadn’t been made. A bachelor pigsty with little in the way of possessions and even less in the way of cleaning. Didn’t this motel have a maid?

  She took a step, her wet shoes soaking the carpet. She closed the door behind her, taking special notice that her car was the only one parked in the entire front row. Wherever Arch had gone, it looked like he’d taken Hendricks with him. She nudged the door to the bathroom open when she reached it just to be sure.

  It looked about like it always had, too. Towels on the floor, and one of them wasn’t hers this time. Looked like Hendricks had declined housekeeping services for the day. Probably because he’d been hanging around for some reason or another. Nowhere to go, maybe.

  His toiletries were pretty standard. She poked around in his toiletry bag but didn’t see anything too outrageous. An aging prescription bottle of Percocet that was ready to expire, but otherwise just the normal Tylenols and ibuprofen one might expect from a …

  She picked up the bag again and rifled through it. Hendricks had ibuprofen, Tylenol and a couple other brands of over-the-counter pain relievers. She scrunched up her face as she looked at them then rattled the Percocet bottle before opening it. There were a handful left, which was odd on a prescription bottle nearing a year old. He could have just kept them in case he needed them at some point, or maybe he just forgot about them.

  But why all the other pain relievers? She tried to probe her memory, see if she could recall him taking any. She came to the conclusion after a minute that he might have bought them today. He was in at least some pain, she had to concede. That bar fight didn’t look like it had gone in his favor at all, no matter what he said.

  She exited the bathroom, still frowning. The place had his smell, a kind of worn scent. Maybe a little bit of a hint of something from his boots, too, but it wasn’t bad per se. Neither was it super attractive. He didn’t seem to have much in the way of cologne, either, just his deodorant, which smelled all right. It didn’t permeate the place like the smell of his boots did, though.

  His duffle lay on the metal folding luggage rack in the open closet area. She gave it a quick rummage, but there was nothing save for a couple old, leather-bound books and a mess of clothes. She didn’t spend much time on it and came to the conclusion that he was pretty boring in terms of his wardrobe. T-shirts and jeans, that was pretty much all he had. A couple of collared denim shirts for colder weather, with some flannels in there as well.

  She was just about to put the books back in the bag when something stopped her. She hesitated and put one of them in the crook of her arm while she looked at the other. Neither was very big, maybe a little thicker than a Bible but smaller in overall cover size. She opened one of them and flipped to the front page, where her eyes felt like they were about to explode out of her head.

  Disposition and Types of Unholy Creatures

  She looked up, like she could just glance away for a second and come back to see the book was actually something totally normal, like The Hunger Games. In a leather-bound, super-old edition. She looked back.

  It wasn’t The Hunger Games.

  She thumbed through the book, noticing the old paper pages and the even older-sounding way the book was written. Lots of “thees” and “thys.”

  When she got to the first illustration, that was when she really thought her eyes were going to pop out.

  What the fuck was wrong with Hendricks?

  * * *

  Arch pulled the car off the road onto a moonlit country lane, the Explorer shuddering with every rut it hit. He had the window cracked just a little, cool night air circulating through the cab. The rain was coming in dribs and drabs, the windshield wipers slinging it off the glass every few minutes and giving him a clear view of the dirt road, grass growing up in the middle of it. He could hear the car whine as it bogged down on the loose soil. He squinted and saw that there was standing water in the tracks. Nope, that was not good.

  “This road is all washed out,” Hendricks said from across the cab. Helpfully, Arch was sure.

  “I noticed that, too,” Arch said, keeping a level tone. “The four wheel drive can handle it.” He reached down and turned a dial on the Explorer’s console, flipping it to “Snow, Grass and Gravel” mode.

  They bumped along for another minute before entering a small copse of trees. The rain subsided as they went under the boughs, and appeared again on the other side as they pulled up to a trailer on blocks at the end of the road.

  “A little slice of paradise,” Hendricks muttered.

  Arch nodded. The trailer was an older one, metal-sided and covered with rust. There was a place in the yard where it looked like there might have been a dog staked to a chain at one point in time, the ground torn up in a circle all around it. Grass had started to sprout there again, though, so the dog probably wasn’t here anymore. Arch stopped the car and pulled the key out of the ignition, opened the door and let the overhead light blind him for just a minute.

  The rain was down to just a patter now, and Arch could feel it sprinkle on his shoulders and head. The last embers of day were hidden somewhere behind the clouds, barely casting any light. A lone lamp hung from a wood pole out in the trailer’s yard. Coupled with the headlights that were still aglow from Arch’s cruiser, it shed e
nough light that he could see just fine.

  The windows of the trailer were lit, like someone was home or had left a light on for themselves. Arch started to lead the way, but Hendricks ducked out in front of him, sword drawn. Arch started to throw the cowboy an ugly look but had to concede that might have been the right idea. “Be careful with that thing,” he said.

  “I’ve yet to stick a civilian with it,” Hendricks said. His long, black coat fluttered behind him. The fluorescent light overhead gave it a greenish tinge.

  They walked up the steps to the trailer together, the sound of the wood creaking into the night. Hendricks tried the door and it squealed, opening with a rattle.

  Arch tried to look inside over Hendricks’s shoulder, but his view was limited to a television sitting on an old table. His fingers clutched the switchblade.

  The TV had a commercial on for some local dealership in Chattanooga, barking out its incredible deals. Hendricks swept through the door in a hurry, like his life depended on clearing through it.

  Arch followed as the cowboy surged into the room. The smell of cannabis filled Arch’s nose the moment he was inside.

  “Clear,” Hendricks said in a clipped tone, turning his body to the left. “Kitchen clear.” Arch glanced over to see that in the direction Hendricks was facing there was indeed an empty kitchen, no lights on overhead within it.

  Arch turned to look to his right and saw an empty room spread out in front of the TV. Hendricks had probably given it a once over when he came through the door, Arch decided, but it was definitely empty.

  The hallway beyond the main room, however, had an open door that was moving slightly, like it just been thrown ajar.

  “Hendricks,” Arch whispered, triggering the switchblade and pointing toward the door.

  “I see it,” the cowboy whispered from at his elbow.