Darker Things (The Lockman Chronicles #1)

by Rob Cornell

  No flashing lights. No elaborate ritual. Just checking a map on the internet.

  Turned out Creed hadn’t moved far. Assuming the info was legit, Lockman’s old boss lived in a small farming community in southeast Michigan. From the satellite map, it had looked like he lived on a large amount of acreage, possibly an old farmstead. Not the kind of place Lockman pictured his old boss retiring too. Then again, he never imagined his boss would retire in the first place. He saw the old man sticking to the job until he keeled over in the middle of an operation.

  Jessie tapped on her armrest, a specific rhythm to a song that must have played in her head. “He didn’t have to help us.”

  Lockman set down the map. “That garbage about prophecy and the foretelling of my arrival? He has his own agenda, I’m sure.”

  “You don’t believe that foretelling stuff?”

  “I believe he believes it. Whatever he thinks is going to happen, he has his own angle.”

  “Everyone’s got an angle to you.”

  “That’s because everybody does. Including you. You didn’t travel across the country to see me for my benefit.”

  She shrugged. “That doesn’t mean I’m out to get you.”

  “I never said Marty was out to get me. I said he has an angle. That means his interests come first.”

  “You don’t think anyone does anything just to be nice?”

  “No. And before you forget it, Marty is not your friend. He’s dangerous, chip or no chip.”

  “People change.”

  “Maybe. But Marty isn’t a person.”

  * * *

  Kate waited for them to question her as the man with the radio voice had promised. How long, she didn’t know. Time had warped and stretched after they put the hood on her head. Her claustrophobia had leveled off to a manageable level, probably because she was more afraid of what would happen if they took the hood off. Whatever questions they had for her, she was certain she didn’t have the answers. And when she couldn’t answer? What then?

  She thought about Jessie and Craig. Hoped he had found her and was keeping her safe. Hoped he would be willing to continue doing so for some time if Kate didn’t make it out of this alive.

  The idea of leaving Jessie behind burned her. She twisted her wrists against her bonds, trying to pull some slack into them so she could slip out. The plastic cut into her skin and forced her to stop before she hardly got started.

  The bitterness on her breath sharpened. Hot sweat rolled down her sides from under her arms. “Come on you assholes. Question me already.”

  The shrill echo of her own voice answered back. Nothing else so much as stirred. Could they even hear her?

  In her mind’s eye she saw Jessie grinning proudly as she screened her first short movie on their TV at home, Kate the only audience member. This was before Alec. The movie had a few friends made up like zombies with several scenes showing the zombies chewing on the leftover barbeque chicken Kate had made for dinner earlier in the week to stand in for human flesh.

  She remembered laughing. Exactly the wrong reaction. Jessie’s face darkened, shoulders hunched. She turned off the movie before the end and stormed out of the room. Kate’s apologies had no effect. From then on, Kate had to view her daughter’s creative efforts the same way as everyone else—on the web. No more special screenings just for her.

  Despite the pain, Kate tried to pull her hands through the zip tie around her wrists. She bit down as lines of fire seared across each wrist. Tears welled in her eyes. She tasted the salt of her sweat off her upper lip.

  She had to stop when her head grew light and her ears rang from holding her breath against the pain. Wet warmth coated her wrists. She hoped it was just sweat, but suspected she had drawn blood.

  Her daughter was out there, needed her. She had to escape, no matter the pain. Even if she had to tear the skin from her wrists, she had to get free.

  She took a deep breath to steel herself. A good, hard yank might be enough to tear a hand free. The pain would no doubt be magnificent.

  On three.

  One.

  Two.

  The sound of rust corroded hinges cried out close by. The door to the room they had taken her to. Footsteps marched in.

  “What have you done with my husband?”

  At least three, maybe four, bodies moved to surround her. Two sets of hands grabbed her by the arms again.

  A man said, “Christ, look what she did to her wrists.”

  “Shut up and let’s go,” a woman answered.

  Then they had her on her feet and stumbling along to God knew where.

  “Can’t you see you’ve made a mistake? I don’t know anything.”

  The crew escorting her didn’t speak. Their silence disturbed her more than any possible reply. It spoke of disconnection, a denial of her humanity, just as an executioner would not speak to a prisoner to be hanged.

  “Please don’t kill me.”

  They walked through what sounded like a large space based on the quality of echoes their footsteps made. A moment later the thinnest breeze touched the skin on her arms. They had taken her outside. She could hear car traffic in the distance.

  Certain they had taken her to a back alley of some kind to put a bullet in her brain, she let loose with all her fear and anger as fuel. She kicked and pulled and thrashed. Her elbow connected with the side of someone’s head. A kick landed on another’s shin. Then something hard collided into her stomach and knocked the air clean out of her.

  She dropped to her knees, gasping for air, made all the more difficult with the hood over her head. She kept sucking and getting the hood’s fabric in her mouth.

  Her lungs finally opened enough to allow the air back in and the clenching in her chest gave way to the deep ache in her belly.

  She no sooner caught her breath and the hands grabbed her again and lifted her off her feet. A dizzying moment as they held her aloft then the hands released her and she tumbled onto a familiar surface—the carpeted floor of a van.

  “You never questioned me,” she said. Her voice sounded weak and stunned to her. “What about Alec? Where is my husband?”

  “Kate?”

  She twisted on the floor to face the direction of his voice. “Alec? Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “What did they—”

  “Shut up.” The van rocked as someone climbed in back with them. “Time enough for family catch-up later.”

  The van doors slammed shut and the engine rumbled to life.

  Kate struggled to a sitting position then scooted until she came against Alec. “Are you sure you’re okay?” she whispered.

  “A little banged up, but I’m fine.”

  “I said, ‘Shut up.’”

  Kate rested her head on Alec’s shoulder and waited for whatever came next.

  It turned out what came next was easy. Too easy.

  The van stopped. The door thunked open. Again hands grabbed her and dragged her out of the vehicle. The heat of a body stood close behind her. She felt pressure on the tie around her wrists, which excited the pain from the damage she’d done to them. Then the pressure released and her hands hung free.

  The heat from the body behind her grew closer. Hot breath touched the back of her neck below the line of her hood. “Count to one-hundred, then you can take the hood off. A second sooner, you and your hubby become corpses.”

  He moved away from her.

  She started counting as the van’s doors shut. After a while, the sound of the van’s engine faded. By the time she reached one-hundred, all she heard was the chatter of birds and what sounded like a humming air conditioner.

  She yanked the hood off. Standing beside her, Alec pulled off his a second later. They both looked around.

  They stood behind a grocery store. Opposite the store a cement wall separated them from a wooded area. A bird’s nest sat on a bough that had grown to hang over the wall above where they stood. A mix of smells from sour milk to old fi
sh leaked from a nearby trash bin.

  “Where the hell are we?” Alec asked.

  “Not far from home.” She pointed to the wall. “That’s got to be Grady Park. Which means this is Donald’s Market. We’re only about six blocks from the house.”

  She turned to Alec. “What did they want?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Didn’t they ask you anything?”

  “They asked me if I knew where Jessie and your old boyfriend were.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “The truth. I didn’t know.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. Why kidnap us like that, question you, not bother questioning me, then just let us go back in our own neighborhood?”

  Alec held his hands out at his sides. “I have no idea. I’m just glad you’re okay.”

  She lifted her hands and looked at the groves she had carved into them from the plastic tie. They didn’t look as bad as she had thought, but the smeared blood made it look like a bad suicide attempt.

  Alec took her hands and gently kissed each wound.

  Kate felt a sob growing thick in her throat. She swallowed it. If she started crying she worried she wouldn’t stop for a while. She didn’t have a while. She needed to find Jessie. “We need to call the police.”

  “No,” Alec said. “They told me if we call the police they’ll kill us both. I believe them.”

  “We can’t just let this go.”

  “I don’t know what else to do.”

  “I do. We need to find Jessie and get her the hell away from Craig. You were right. All this started with his arrival. If it’s him they want, I want my daughter far away from him.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Lockman chose a chain motel one step up from seedy. He would have preferred something even more obscure, but didn’t think Jessie could stomach the by-the-hour kind of place he had in mind. The advantage to the lower-class accommodations was a lack of questions and a practiced disinterest. But he didn’t want to expose a thirteen year-old girl to that environment. Bad enough he had introduced her to all manner of supernatural beasts. She didn’t need to have a run in with a drug dealer or hooker on top of it all.

  Lockman had Jessie stay in the car while he checked in using his stale credentials. After fifteen years getting used to the name, when the clerk thanked Mr. Banks it took Lockman a moment to realize she was talking to him.

  Jessie got the bed. Lockman took the floor. He expected to crash the instant he pulled the sheet over him. Instead, he lay on his back listening to Jessie’s breathing as it slowed and steadied.

  He had drawn the curtains closed, but daylight seeped out along the sides. Lockman watched the room grow lighter as he lay awake.

  He rubbed his eyes and tried to will himself to sleep. No go.

  When the clock on the nightstand read seven AM, Lockman threw the sheet off and started his morning sit-ups. By the time he flipped over to do his pushups, Jessie stirred. She peeked down at him over the edge of the bed.

  “I can barely lift my head. How can you exercise?”

  “How’d you sleep?”

  “Like the dead. Which is a really crappy metaphor now that I think about it.”

  He continued with his pushups as he spoke. “I’m trying to decide if I should leave you here for a night or take you with me. I don’t like either option.”

  Jessie propped her head up on her hand. “Are you asking my opinion?”

  “Do you have one?”

  “Does it really matter if I do?”

  Lockman exhaled a laugh as he pushed up, locked his arms straight. “You really have to make every little thing a struggle, don’t you?”

  “Now you sound like mom.” She dropped her head, buried her face in the mattress, and howled.

  Lockman pulled his knees in and knelt up. “I told you we would get her back.”

  She lifted her face off the mattress. Her eyes bore into him. “Don’t make a promise you can’t keep.”

  “They won’t harm her until they have me.”

  “That’s comforting.”

  “It means we have a chance to get to her before anything bad happens.”

  Her lips pressed together. The color around her mouth drained. “You think your boss is going to hand mom and Alec over because you asked?”

  “I’m not going to ask.”

  Jessie puffed her cheeks and blew out a long breath. She sat up, swung her legs off the edge of the bed. Lockman noticed even her toenails were painted black.

  “I think I’d rather stay here,” she said.

  Lockman held back a smile. He didn’t want to give her any reason to change her mind. “It’s your choice.”

  “Yeah,” she said, “but that’s the choice you want anyway.”

  He stood and padded to the phone. “Let me call the front desk and tell them we’re staying an extra day.”

  * * *

  Since Creed’s property sat off a rural dirt road with a driveway long enough to qualify as a road all its own, Lockman did not have many surveillance options. He thought about parking down a ways and hiking around the back of the property, but based on the satellite map, most of the acreage was open land. The moment he approached the house on foot, Creed would spot him.

  So he decided on the direct approach and pulled into the driveway. About a quarter of a mile long, the driveway snaked through a line of trees that blocked the property from sight of the main road. Once through the trees Lockman spotted the old farmhouse on a hill, its arched windows like hooded eyes keeping sentry on the surrounding landscape.

  The driveway led to a restored pole barn with the original door replaced by a retracting metal one like you would find on a garage. A muddy pickup truck sat parked in front of the door. A wild turkey stood on the side of the driveway opposite the house and watched, like a disinterested bouncer, as Lockman approached.

  He parked behind the truck and got out. The turkey flapped its wings and wriggled its waddle, but did not give up its post.

  “Hey fella. You waiting for Thanksgiving?”

  The bird cocked its head first to one side, then the other, studying Lockman.

  “His name’s Able.”

  Lockman spun toward the voice and found Victor Creed standing on the porch of the farmhouse. He wore a short sleeved plaid button-up with a pair of dusty coveralls. His ruddy face and tousled gray hair only added to the farmer look and Lockman wondered for the first time if his former boss actually worked the land on this farm. When he glanced toward the acreage behind the house, sure enough he saw a seemingly endless stretch of soybean plants that rolled out to the far tree line at the back of the property.

  “I wondered how long it would take you,” Creed said. “Longer than I expected.”

  Lockman pulled the .44 Magnum Desert Eagle from the back of his waistband—one of several items courtesy of Marty. He trained the weapon on Creed. “You gave me up.”

  Creed calmly raised his hands. “You think it’s worth shooting me over?”

  “You’re god damned right.”

  Creed narrowed his eyes. “I did what I thought was best.”

  “For who? Sure as hell not the interests of national security.”

  “Aren’t you blowing this out of proportion?”

  Lockman’s skin prickled. Out in the open, a breeze cut the humidity, but not enough to cool the heat boiling within him. “You sent Dolan’s vamps right to my door. You betrayed me.”

  Creed staggered. His face creased with new lines formed by old age. “You’re mistaken.”

  “You deny you gave that PI my location? You’re the only one who had that information.”

  Creed rubbed a hand over his mouth. His eyes looked shallow and haunted. “Put the gun down, Craig. Let’s talk this through.”

  “I can talk just fine like this.”

  “Well I can’t. I’m too damn old to have my heart beating this hard.”

  Lockman tilted his head toward the soybean fields. “But
you can farm all that land without trouble?”

  Creed’s face cracked open with a grin. “You think I work that field? That’s all rented out to a local down the road. Most I do is work on my tomato garden around the house. I guess the coveralls are a bit disingenuous, but everybody wears them in these parts.”

  Lockman’s ears burned. How could Creed stand there so smug, making jokes? He pulled the hammer back on his pistol.

  Creed lifted his hands a little higher. “Whoa. Honestly, there’s some mix up. Dolan is old news. He has nothing to do with this.”

  “Then those were your vamps?”

  “What vamps?”

  “The ones that followed my daughter to my home and vented it with automatic fire, nearly killing us both in the process.”

  The old man’s face turned ashen. “Is Jessie with you now?”

  “So it was you.”

  “Did I tell that PI how to find you? Yes. But only so Jessie could find you, too.”

  Lockman’s arms started to ache from holding the gun out and tensing his muscles. He relaxed his grip on the weapon and bent his elbows slightly. “You’ll have to do better than that.”

  “I don’t know anything about any vampires or Otto Dolan. I’ve been keeping an eye on Kate and Jessie ever since you left.”

  “How did you know about Kate?”

  “Craig, I had to keep tabs on all my people. I knew about your relationship with her from the beginning. I also know you were engaged the night Dolan ambushed you.”

  “You’d been spying on me while I worked for you?”

  “Like I said, I kept a close watch on all my people. How do you think we got to your place that night in time?”

  That had always nagged at Lockman, but he never got the chance to ask, and didn’t think it important anyway. What was important was that Tanner and Creed had saved his life that night.

  He felt a jolt shoot down his spine.

  “It was Tanner you had watching me.”

  Creed looked off at the wall of trees blocking the frontage from the road. “He’d kill me for telling you. He never felt right about it after the way you two bonded. But that was his assignment. He didn’t have a choice. If you want to blame anyone, blame me.”