Deep Down (Hallie Michaels)

by Deborah Coates

  Finally, she turned to face him.

  “You know,” she spoke carefully, because this stuff counted, “you know that I can take care of myself. That I choose what I do and don’t get involved in. You know that. And I’m involved in this. You don’t get to change that.”

  Boyd turned and walked away from her, as if he hadn’t heard a word she’d said. Quick steps, like he wanted to run but couldn’t—wasn’t going to anyway, because it was one of the things she liked about him, that he didn’t run. He walked from the bathroom door into the large living room, paced it in half a dozen long strides, then turned when he reached the sideboard by the dining room door. His face was shadowed. Hallie couldn’t see his eyes.

  “We can’t hole up here forever,” he said, his words clipped and short, as if Hallie had misunderstood the situation, as if she hadn’t realized what was at stake.

  “We know he can’t get past the hex ring. It buys us time.” And it was weird, though in line with all the other weirdness of the day that she was the one saying, Wait, think, and he was the one saying, Go.

  “We don’t know where he is. Or when he’s going to be here. We don’t even know where he comes from.”

  “We know where he comes from,” Hallie said. “He comes from the other side.”

  “What does that mean, Hallie?” Boyd asked, like if she couldn’t answer that, then she didn’t know anything. “He comes from the other side? There is no other side.”

  What was wrong with him?

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  Boyd took a deep breath and let it out. He unbuttoned his jacket. With careful deliberation, he took it off, folded it, tucked it under his arm, and shoved his hand in the front pocket of his jeans. When he spoke again, his tone was measured, as if he’d reverted back to type, to calm and rational. He didn’t fool Hallie. She could see the muscle jumping along his jawline. “I’m tired of guessing,” he said. “We’re always guessing. We never know what we need to know. Never. We guess and we’re wrong and people die.”

  “Yeah,” Hallie said after a minute. “All right. Here’s what I know.” She ticked things off on her fingers. “I know Travis Hollowell is a reaper. I know what a reaper does. I know that the walls between living and dying have gotten thin. They’re getting thinner all the time. I know the hex ring keeps them out and that iron or the combination of steel, blood, and sacrament can hurt them. That’s what I know.”

  “That’s not enough. It doesn’t solve anything,” Boyd said when she was finished.

  “It’s more than nothing.” Hallie was irritated too. She wondered if this was what he wanted, if he wanted a fight. It had been a long day, her ribs and head ached, and she was tired. But she didn’t want to fight with him, not when he was angry and not when he was looking for one. “We will figure this out. We figured out Pete and Martin and we’ll figure this out too.”

  “Why us? Why now? Why here?”

  “I don’t know,” Hallie said.

  “Yeah,” said Boyd. “Exactly.”

  “What are you so pissed off about?” she said.

  He tilted his head when he looked at her, and though she still couldn’t read his expression it felt like he was looking down his nose at her. “What?” he said. “Do you think you’re the only one who gets to be angry? You think you’re the only one bad things happen to? Lily was my wife. I should have protected her. I should have saved her. It was the only thing she asked and I couldn’t do it.”

  “She saved you. Is that what you can’t deal with? That she saved you? Maybe she was never asking you to save her. Maybe she just wanted you to be her friend.”

  There was a stillness about him that nevertheless seemed like tension, like wound so tight, there could only be an explosion. Hallie didn’t care. She liked explosions.

  And besides, he’d started it.

  “But I wanted to save her,” he finally said, quiet like the prairie after a storm.

  He left before Hallie could reply.

  22

  Fine, she thought after he’d left.

  After a minute, she went back out to the kitchen where Pabby was bustling around the stove. She’d managed to draw Beth from her huddled form in the kitchen chair and set her to work chopping vegetables. She turned her head when Hallie entered.

  “Supper’ll be ready in an hour,” she said. “You want to tell that boy?”

  Despite things and the way they were, Hallie grinned at the idea of Boyd as “that boy,” though her own father called him the Boy Deputy—because he looked younger than he was. He probably looked younger than Hallie did these days. Because Death follows me around, she thought as she grabbed a jacket and went outside.

  The yard and corral lights came on as Hallie walked back through Pabby’s yard toward the barn, casting the area in yellow light and lengthening shadows. The wind, still out of the north, was cold and dry. It carried the scent of old leather and horse manure and damp hay. She heard Boyd before she saw him, a rhythmic banging, like he was hammering on something.

  Pabby’s barn was fairly small with a shed attached to the northeast side with a high slant roof and three dirty cobwebby windows on the long end. Hallie could see light and movement in the shed, but dirt obscured the detail.

  She reached the doorway and paused. The shed held a heavy oak workbench and, on the far wall, wooden base cabinets with open shelving above. Boyd had found some old cast-iron pipe and was smashing it to bits on the workbench with a light sledgehammer. He’d hung his jacket on a hook by the door and rolled up his shirtsleeves.

  She slipped back out the door and went to her pickup to get the shell reloader she’d put there earlier and the steel-jacketed bullets. She came back to the shed and gathered the scrap iron Boyd had created, laid everything out on a second bench built into the wall, and started making shells and fixing the bullets so they’d actually be useful the next time Hollowell appeared. They worked together for a good fifteen minutes, neither of them talking, comfortable in a way that Hallie loved more than all the conversations they’d ever had. And they’d had some good conversations.

  The hammering stopped.

  “Things are complicated,” Boyd said.

  When she stood, he was right there, right next to her. “That doesn’t bother me,” she said. She put her hand on his arm. “What are you dreaming about?” she asked.

  “Hell,” he said.

  Her hand tightened. “Literal hell?”

  “In my dream, everyone I know is there. They’re all dead. And they’re in hell. And every mistake I ever made, everyone who’s ever died because I couldn’t save them, they’re all there.” He looked at her. “You’re there, Hallie.”

  “Well, I’m not going to die,” she said.

  “You don’t know that,” he said. “You don’t know.” He looked haunted and Hallie remembered that he’d told her once that it wasn’t just the dreams, but the feeling when he woke from them, as if the world had ended, as if everyone had died.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He shrugged a shoulder and it was one of those gestures that made him look young, years younger than he really was, Boy Deputy young. “It’s just a dream,” he said, though they both knew that it wasn’t.

  “I’m not angry at you,” he continued. She could see the lines around his mouth relax, as if telling her made things easier. “Or at anything you’ve done. I know who you are.”

  Hallie set the shell she’d just finished loading on the workbench and put a hand on the back of his neck. She brushed the short bristles of his precisely cut hair.

  “You are not my type,” she said.

  He smiled, a slow smile, not like his usual quicksilver there-and-gone smile. “Yes, I am,” he said.

  He kissed her, and for the first time in a long time, even in that brief time between Martin and the reapers, Hallie felt safe. Not safe like no one was attacking them, or she couldn’t handle a fight when it came to her. Like time enough and space enough. Like this moment belong
ed to them.

  She kissed him back. He tasted like sunrise and ocean breezes and warm winds in January.

  She was about to kiss him again when she heard the sharp rattle of someone knocking on the loose door frame. She turned to find Beth standing in the doorway of the shed. Boyd’s arm was still around Hallie’s waist, her hand on his chest. Beth ducked her head, but Hallie thought she saw a tiny smile.

  “Mrs. Pabahar sent me to find you,” she said. “She says if everyone isn’t at the table in six minutes, she’s throwing the food out the back door for the birds.”

  “Six minutes?” Hallie said.

  “I know,” Beth said. “But that’s what she said.”

  23

  It was a little more than ten minutes by the time they walked back to the house and Boyd and Hallie washed up and made their way to the kitchen.

  “I thought you were giving it to the birds,” Hallie said. The kitchen smelled of roast beef and steamed potatoes and warm applesauce and— “Is that pie?”

  “You can clean up after,” Pabby said as she slapped a plate of butter and a pitcher of milk onto the table. “Since you weren’t here to help.”

  “Oh, I will,” Hallie said. “This looks terrific. Thanks.”

  “You been helping me all week,” Pabby said gruffly. “I appreciate it.”

  The meal was eaten mostly in silence punctuated by talk about the weather and the late hay crop and the price of cattle at the Rapid City auction. Like kissing Boyd in the work shed, it was a moment out of time. No one mentioned black dogs or reapers or death.

  After, Boyd and Beth went with Pabby to strip the beds upstairs and replace the sheets. Hallie was putting the last dish in the rack when she heard a huge racket outside—howling dogs, a piercing scream, and a low rumble that sounded like thunder.

  She grabbed her shotgun from where she’d left it by the front door and ran outside.

  Curving around the hex ring on the field side were at least forty black dogs. And Hollowell. So it hadn’t been her moment of death out there on the road and she hadn’t managed to kill him. Good to know.

  At the opposite end of the line of dogs was the reaper in white. Behind them was a phalanx of men and women. All of them dressed in a varied assortment of white and black. All of them screaming.

  Hallie heard pounding footsteps behind her, and Boyd and Pabby joined her on the porch.

  “What’s that screaming?” Pabby said.

  “What screaming?” Boyd asked.

  “You can’t hear that?” Hallie had to yell to hear herself over the dogs and the women.

  Boyd grabbed her arm just above the elbow. He frowned. “No.”

  “What?”

  “No!”

  “Stay here,” Hallie said to Pabby. She grabbed Boyd and headed to the edge of the yard.

  “Shut them up,” Hallie said when she and Boyd finally faced the line of dogs. Both the unnamed reaper and Hollowell had paced her as she approached, so the two reapers were now next to each other. The white reaper looked at Hollowell with a sour expression on her face. Boyd stood next to Hallie—so close, she could almost feel his shoulder against hers, which was good, helpful to know that he was there and that he trusted her.

  “I can see Hollowell,” he murmured in her ear, “but nothing else. I don’t hear anything. Is there something else?”

  Hallie nodded but she didn’t answer him. Even with the hex ring between them, she didn’t want to get distracted.

  The reaper in white raised her hand. The dogs stopped howling. The screamers stopped screaming.

  “Let me in,” she said.

  “No. It’s not Pabby’s time.”

  “Is that what she told you?”

  “You know it is, we had this conversation already.”

  The reaper looked at her with a disconcertingly steady gaze, like she knew a secret she thought Hallie ought to know. And she probably did. Reapers were all about secrets. Hallie’s secret was she didn’t care.

  “Things are getting worse,” the reaper said. “All I’m trying to do is redress the balance.”

  “You think this is Pabby’s fault?” Hallie said. She shifted the shotgun. The iron-loaded shot was back in the toolshed, so the shotgun was more or less useless. But she felt better having it in her hands. “I want those people back. The ones who’ve disappeared.”

  “And then you’ll bring her out?” the white reaper said.

  “This isn’t a negotiation,” Hallie said.

  Hollowell stepped in front of the white reaper. “I’m tired of playing games,” he said.

  “This is not your space.” The white reaper glared at him. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  Hollowell looked down his nose at her. “Rules don’t matter anymore,” he said. “You’re wasting your time.”

  “Everything matters,” the white reaper said. “It’s all ripples. What you’re doing now, changes everything.”

  “Still here,” Hallie said, because couldn’t they argue with each other somewhere else?

  The white reaper said, “Ask him why he’s here.”

  “I know why he’s here,” Hallie said. He wanted Beth Hannah.

  “Shut up,” Hollowell said to the white reaper; his face was a mask, but Hallie could see that he was angry.

  “You think what you want hasn’t been tried?” the reaper said. “You think others haven’t wanted that?”

  “You never had the courage,” Hollowell said. “None of you.”

  “Wanted what?” Hallie said.

  “To be a real live boy,” the reaper said, and laughed.

  “What’s going on out there?” Boyd asked. “What else is out there?”

  “Like he wants to be human again?” Hallie asked, ignoring Boyd momentarily. “And immortal?” Because he’d told her that himself, that he wanted to live forever. “How does Beth fit into that?”

  “That’s the key, isn’t it?” the reaper said. “Ask yourself what two sisters have that no one else has. No one.” She cocked her head again like she was listening, though even Hallie couldn’t hear whatever it was she was listening for or to. “Gotta go,” she said. “Tell Delores I’ll be back.”

  She disappeared as reapers did, with just a breath of wind.

  Hollowell started to say something, stopped abruptly; then he disappeared too. Something darker than the evening, something that looked almost like a tornado though it was the wrong time of year and the wrong weather rose up a hundred yards out in the field and just as quickly died.

  The screamers had already faded. Only the black dogs remained. One by one they stood and trotted into the grass until three were left—one standing, one lying like a sphinx, and one sitting.

  Hallie didn’t realize until she shifted the shotgun again that she’d been holding it tightly enough to make her fingers ache.

  “What was that?” Boyd said after a moment.

  Hallie turned away from the open field to look at him. “I think it was interoffice politics.”

  “What?”

  She drew a breath and began walking back to the house. As Boyd fell in beside her, she said, “Okay, there’s Hollowell, right? But there’s also another reaper who’s trying to take Pabby, and it’s not Pabby’s time.”

  “How do you know?”

  Hallie grimaced. It was complicated. Like everything. “Pabby told me. And it goes with everything else, with why Hollowell is here. Things are changing.”

  Boyd stopped walking and Hallie faced him. “What things?” he asked. She felt like they’d had this conversation but she was pretty sure they hadn’t—he’d been gone.

  “Did you talk to Teedt? Did he tell you? People are disappearing. People all over Taylor County just … gone.” She ticked items off on her fingers. “Hollowell, Pabby, Beth, black dogs. What are we supposed to do about it? About any of it?”

  “We sit down,” Boyd said. “We go over each and every piece of information we have. We write things down. We see where things connect and where we h
ave gaps. And we fill them in.” He said it so calmly, so reasonably. And Hallie wanted to believe him. She did.

  She drew a breath, let it out. “All right,” she said. “Who knows? It might actually work.”

  “Yeah,” Boyd said. “Sometimes it does.”

  Briefly, Hallie told him everything Hollowell and the white reaper had just said or at least enough to make sense out of the half he’d been able to hear.

  Pabby and Beth came off the porch to meet them. Pabby was half-bent, like she’d just tried to lift something too heavy for her and she looked frail, which Hallie hadn’t noticed before—older and frail. Hallie hoped she was okay. Beth had her arms wrapped around her chest in a now-familiar posture.

  “Who was the woman with Travis?” Beth asked. “Is she helping him?”

  Hallie looked at her. “You could see her?”

  “Well … yeah.” Beth looked at Pabby and Boyd and back to Hallie. “I mean, she was right there.”

  Hallie looked at Boyd. He frowned, but he didn’t say anything.

  “She looked—,” Pabby began, then stopped. She shook her head, like shaking something off, then said in a much stronger voice, “Come back in the house. I’ll make coffee.”

  Five minutes later, they were sitting around the kitchen table once more.

  “Do you know why Hollowell wanted to marry your sister?” Boyd asked Beth when they were all finally seated. “Did your stepfather ever say?”

  “Old Daddy. That’s what we called my stepfather. O.D. Actually. Odie.” Beth smiled. “He wasn’t a bad guy. Not really. But he always cared about my mama more than he cared about Lily or me. And … I don’t know. Not that I didn’t love my mother. Or she didn’t try to be good to us. But—” She paused, wrapped her hands around the white coffee mug as if she were suddenly cold. “—I never said this. It’s not something we talked about. But Mama was married to Odie before I was born.”

  “So, you and Lily were half sisters?” Boyd asked.

  Beth looked up, an expression on her face that Hallie couldn’t quite place. “No. Oh, no. That’d be simple, see. And nothing was ever simple in our family. No.” She looked down, then back up, first at Hallie, then at Boyd. “No, Lily was five when I was born. Mama’d been married to Odie almost three years. But Lily and I, we had the same father.”