The Southern Watch Series, Books 1-3: Called, Depths and Corrupted

by Robert J. Crane

  “We’ve been fucking for a couple weeks,” Erin replied matter-of-factly. “We haven’t exactly had deep and epic conversations.” She changed posture, and he thought she looked a little more standoffish now. “Look, I slept with you because—I’ll be honest—you really own that whole cowboy thing. It’s a good look, and you wear it well, even with the coat, which is weird, by the way. Arch knew you, and he’s about the nicest and most stand-up guy around, so I figured you couldn’t be too bad. I mean,” she said with a mirthless laugh, “I didn’t even make you wear a condom.” She blushed a little at this. “But I don’t know you, not really. I know your name, I know you were in the Marines, but that’s about it.” She shrugged. “I know you get into fights, based on the bruises I’ve seen. So I guess I know you’re not that good at fighting.”

  Hendricks frowned and felt his hackles rise. “You don’t tell a Marine he’s not any good at fighting unless you want an argument.”

  “Maybe I want an argument,” Erin said, and he could tell by the testy way she said it that she probably did.

  “Well, let me oblige—” Hendricks said, but the trilling of a cell phone cut him short.

  She held up a hand palm out, like he was a kid on a trike and she was telling him to stop. She pulled the cell phone off her nightstand and answered it. “Hello?”

  He stood there, kind of slack-jawed, wondering what the hell kind of argument this was. Wondering what kind of man he was, just able to be put on hold like this in the middle of what was kinda, sorta their first fight. He wondered if there would be another. He could feel his temper flaring, that sense of stubborn irritation and embarrassment, and he realized he was standing there in his boxer shorts while Erin was just listening to the phone.

  “Fuck this,” he muttered and started to pull his jeans on.

  She walked out of the bedroom and pulled the door nearly shut behind her. He could hear her mutter, “Are you fucking kidding me?” into the phone as she went.

  Hendricks pulled his shirt on, the cold chill of anger washing down into his guts. He tugged his shirt on, grimacing the entire time from the pain. He pulled on his socks as he heard a faint voice saying something indecipherable in the next room. He put on his cowboy boots one by one then pulled his coat out of the pile he’d made of it and put it on, careful to keep the sword hidden in its depths.

  He grabbed his hat off the bottom post of her bed and put it on, checking himself once in the mirror. Yep, still looked like shit. There wasn’t much he could do about it, though.

  He walked through the apartment without bothering to glance at her. He saw her still on the phone, her mouth slightly open, out of the corner of his eye, but he didn’t stop to say anything. She didn’t get off the phone anyway, so he just walked over to the door, unlocked it, and left without saying a word.

  She didn’t say anything either.

  ***

  Arch was on the scene less than ten minutes after Sheriff Reeve called him. He’d heard the basics from the sheriff, and it sounded like nothing he’d dealt with in his time with the department. Reeve was calling in everyone, Arch knew that for a fact, because that was what you did in a situation like this; you called for all hands on deck and got to work solving the crime.

  Arch had gotten the thumbnail sketch from Reeve, but he still wasn’t quite sure what to expect when he got there. It left him with a kind of nervous tension in his stomach, belly rumbling at him for leaving home without anything to eat or drink. He hadn’t even bothered to shower, just tossed on his uniform and sprinted out the door without saying a word to Alison. He knew she was faking sleep, but he didn’t have time to deal with it at the moment.

  The Explorer’s engine rumbled as he took it down a side street. He was only a few blocks from home, here in the heart of Midian. If there was such a thing. The town square was only a few blocks away also. He pulled onto Crosser Street and saw the squad cars. They were the older models, the Crown Victorias driven by Sheriff Reeve and the other deputies, three of them lining the road in front of a big white house. Arch flipped on his lights but not his siren. He hadn’t even needed them to get here. Midian didn’t exactly have a roaring rush hour.

  The red and blue lights flickered in the dim early morning. Clouds covered the sky and cast a grey pall over the day. It was the kind of day that would be perfect for a funeral, Arch thought. The clouds were sapping all the joy and light, leaving nothing but a lifeless feeling over the usually vibrant town.

  And as Arch stepped up to the white picket fence and opened the gate, he reflected that it would probably be an appropriate feeling.

  He took the steps to the front porch in one bound, heard the squeak of the floorboard he landed on as he did so. The front door was open, and he could hear talk from inside. He recognized the voice of Ernesto Reines, the second-most junior patrolman in the department, one rung up the ladder from him. Reines was speaking in a low voice with Ed Fries, a portly officer in his early forties. Arch stepped in and saw them both, just off to the side of the dim entry hall.

  Reines nodded to Arch as he entered, and Fries turned to him to do the same. Reines had a soul patch, a little growth of black hair just under his lower lip that was probably not department regulation, at least not the way Arch read the regs. Sheriff Reeve never said a word, though, probably figuring that in Midian, Tennessee, there were better uses of one’s time than enforcing regulations about the length and location of facial hair.

  “Man, Arch,” Fries said in his low, drawling voice, “you better bring a damned plastic bag in there with you.” Fries was looking unusually pale today, Arch thought, his chubby jowls bereft of their usual ruddy color. “I ain’t never even seen anything like that.”

  “Reeve said on the phone it was Corey Hughes?” Arch had heard Hughes’ name before but didn’t really know the man. Worked at the paper mill, according to Reeve, just a single man living in a city house by himself.

  “Yeah,” Reines spoke up, his voice a little gruffer than usual. “But you wouldn’t know it by looking at him.”

  “Right,” Arch said. “The scene’s a real mess?”

  Reines and Fries exchanged a look. “You could say that.” Fries shook his head, jowls flapping as he did so.

  Arch walked on past them, taking his time, steeling himself. He’d seen photos of crime scenes at the academy, some videos where they’d gone in and catalogued evidence in some truly heinous murder cases. He came into a family room, the lights left off so as to avoid touching the switches and possibly disturbing whatever fingerprints might be resting on them. No, they’d leave the lights off and tread as carefully as possible until the crime scene unit from Chattanooga came and took apart the whole place, cataloguing all the evidence.

  “Arch?” Sheriff Nicholas Reeve stepped into an open door to Arch’s left. There was a light behind him, shining off his balding head. Reeve had short grey hair growing up from his sideburns that stretched around the back of his head in a strip, but the top of his skull was completely bare. The man had an open, earnest face that was creased with frown lines today. He was a little overweight but not too much. Certainly not as much as Fries. “Arch, you might want to bring a bucket with you in here. Ed already contaminated the scene by throwing up in the sink.”

  “Nice going, Ed,” Reines said from down the hall behind him.

  “Shit, man, you only just made it outside yourself,” Fries shot back at him.

  Arch felt the stale air in the house, warm and rank and humid. It smelled like when he’d visited the morgue during his time at the academy but fresher and more pungent. He could hear the faint hum of civilization somewhere in the distance, under the hushed voices of Fries and Reines. “I’ll be all right,” he told Reeve, and the sheriff stepped aside to let him pass into the kitchen.

  The first thing he noticed was red where it shouldn’t have been. The room was done in yellow tones, old wallpaper in amber and white that was faded with time, but there was red everywhere. It was on the ceiling, the oa
k floor, and it drenched the table. It pooled underneath on the floorboards, looking like black oil in the shadows.

  The body was on top of the table, and Arch couldn’t rightly recall seeing anything quite like it before, not even a post-autopsy corpse. He swallowed hard and then turned around, leaving the room before he could feel any more ill. He stood just outside, letting the smell of the scene permeate his nose. He didn’t feel any sicker, but he didn’t feel any better, either. He just stood there for a few minutes, trying to get his breath and realizing that what he’d just seen probably couldn’t ever be unseen.

  ***

  Erin drove along above the speed limit. She didn’t have a police vehicle, just her old Honda, but all the cops in town were already at her destination, so who was going to stop her?

  She hammered the accelerator as she went down a city street at forty, about ten miles over. Reeve had called, telling her to get her ass down to the crime scene immediately. She was a little excited and a little horrified, since she hadn’t really been to any real crime scenes before. Most of her horror came from the fact that he’d told her to stop and get coffee for everyone. That stung. She tried to decide if he’d asked her because she was the most junior member of the department or because she was the only woman. With Reeve, it could have been either.

  She took the corners with care, four Styrofoam cups on the seat next to her in one of those fancy holders they gave out nowadays. She was surprised that Pat at the Surrey Diner on the square had them, but she did. It was a little surprise, like Midian was slowly entering the modern world.

  The prospect of what she was about to see, about to be involved in, was so overwhelming that it nearly eclipsed the thoughts still hanging around her head about Hendricks. She was still kicking herself over everything related to him. Sure, he was cute, and she’d thought because of his association with Arch it was like he came stamped with a personal recommendation. But that was kind of dumb, on reflection. She’d known all the other guys she’d slept with for pretty much her whole life. They were all local, and she knew through rumor and admission the people they’d slept with. The seedier ones she was careful with.

  With Hendricks, though, it was like any good sense she might have had fled at the sight of his cowboy hat and lovely abs. And they were lovely. She liked to run a hand over them just to feel the firm ripples. She shook that thought out of her head.

  He was a mystery, and who didn’t love a mystery? Still, just because someone was mysterious, it didn’t mean you had to sleep with them without a condom. Quite the opposite, in fact, because one of the secrets he could have been hiding under that coat and hat might just have been syphilis. At least she was on the pill; wondering what a baby cowboy would look like was one mystery she didn’t want solved at present.

  He’d showed up last night, beaten all to hell, then left this morning in the middle of a burgeoning argument. Didn’t even say goodbye, and Erin had to admit that stuck in her craw more than a little. The next time she saw him, she wanted to give him a little hell of her own. The other part of her, the non-confrontational part, which was small but present, just hoped he’d pick up and leave town. Problem solved.

  But most of her kind of hoped he wouldn’t.

  She pulled up behind Arch’s Explorer on Crosser Street and killed the engine. She had to admit, she was more than a little envious of Arch. He’d gotten the last squad spot, the new car the department had bought last year, and he spent his days on patrol. Meanwhile she got stuck behind the desk working dispatch and filing and computer shit, had to drive her own personal vehicle, even on department business, and got stuck doing coffee and lunch runs (though she had to admit Reeve did split the lunch runs with her fairly often).

  She didn’t begrudge Arch any of what he’d gotten, but she did wish, as the sole owner of a vagina in the Sheriff’s Department, that some affirmative action would kick in on her behalf. Maybe next year.

  But probably not.

  She made it through the gate and up the walk before she saw Reines and Fries just inside the door. It was dark and she nodded to both of them as she came in. Her khaki uniform was a little wrinkled because she’d run out the door without a chance to iron it, but she doubted that would matter here. She had the steaming cups of coffee in her hand, carrying the little Styrofoam tray. She wordlessly held it out and Reines and Fries each grabbed one, thanking her profusely.

  She went on, listening to the squeak of the floor as she made her way down the hall. The crime scene unit from Chattanooga was probably still an hour out, which meant they’d all sort of stand around and try not to fuck things up until the pros got here. For her money, the best way to do that would be to get Fries and Reines outside, but she wasn’t exactly in charge. Or anywhere approaching a mile of in charge.

  She came around the corner into a family room complete with sofa and TV. The TV was half the size of the room, which screamed bachelor to her. Part of her wondered if that was because she knew Corey Hughes was a lifelong bachelor or if it genuinely was just because of the TV and the sofa.

  The room was dark, the curtains pulled to. The day was gloomy anyway; it was doubtful that opening them would do much to brighten the place.

  It took her a second to realize that Arch was standing against the wall to her left, just next to an open door leading into a lit room. Light was spilling out and she could hear someone moving in there. She surmised it was probably Reeve, since she knew he was on scene and she’d yet to run across him.

  “You already go in?” she asked Arch, and he looked up at her. He looked like he’d been lost in his own little world before she’d said something, and she stepped over to him and wordlessly offered him a coffee.

  “No, thanks,” he said, shaking his head. “And yeah, I went in. It’s …” Arch’s voice got kind of choked. “It’s bad.”

  She wondered at how bad it could be. Took a couple steps toward the door, but Reeve was there, holding out a hand and taking a coffee from the tray. “You don’t want to go in there,” he said. “It’s just nasty. Ain’t a fit way for anyone to die, and there’s no reason for you to see it—”

  “Sir,” she said, and all the irritation she’d felt and bottled up at being asked to get coffee sort popped out, “please move aside.”

  Reeve cocked an eyebrow at her, and she could tell he was trying to decide whether or not to argue. He must have decided against it, because he shuffled left, leaving the door open for her to walk through.

  She took a tentative step toward it, then another, wishing her pace was a match for the voice she’d just used to order the sheriff around. She stepped into the lit kitchen and the smell hit her.

  It was like a memory she had of childhood, when her three brothers, all older than her, had conspired to drag her six year-old self out to the barn when her daddy was killing a hog. They told her it was something else, she couldn’t remember what, that she had to see it and she went, dutifully, as though the three of them hadn’t steered her wrong a thousand times before. She was naive like that as a kid. Thinking back to Hendricks, she wondered if maybe she still was.

  She’d watched through a crack in the barn door as her daddy slit the hog’s throat. She’d known the name of the creature at the time, though it escaped her now. Her brothers had stood behind her and snickered as she peered in. Their hushed whispers came back to her now, their excitement in the anticipation of seeing her reaction.

  They were dreadfully disappointed when they actually saw it.

  She remembered watching her dad raise the hog in the air once he’d gutted it, once he’d pulled out the innards and put them in a wheelbarrow. She could recall the smell of it, of the shit and piss and gawdawful rancid nastiness of the hog’s carcass opened to the air. She just watched, though, not a word, not a sound, her brothers getting restless behind her. She watched her daddy crank the body into the air and she looked at that empty stomach cavity, saw the ribs from the inside.

  And she never made a sound. Just watched while
he cut it to pieces, reducing that hog to individual cuts of meat over the course of the next hours.

  Erin looked into the kitchen of Corey Hughes’s house. There was a carcass on the table, something that had been opened up. The ribs were cracked at the sternum and pulled back, and she could see that the heart and damned near all else had been removed. She took a step forward and peered in. The chest cavity was empty all the way to the spine. She took a sniff, and it was damned rancid, but it didn’t bother her stomach. She heard Reeve catch his breath from the stench, a few paces behind her.

  Just like slaughtering a hog all over again.

  “I ain’t never seen anything like this shit,” Reeve said from behind her.

  Erin didn’t answer him. She looked into the open cavity, that empty space where life had mysteriously once existed. The thighs of the corpse were laid open, large chunks of meat removed by something. It was uneven, whatever had done this, not smooth like a knife. It was like teeth had come in and ground their way through one of the legs, even breaking the femur, which she knew wasn’t a picnic. Which the rest of the corpse looked like, come to think of it.

  A picnic for something.

  Or someone.

  “This place is a goddamned slaughterhouse,” Reeve said behind her.

  “Yeah,” she breathed and tried to tear her eyes away. She couldn’t, though.

  ***

  Hendricks’s long-ass walk was just about nearing its end. He was crossing the interstate bridge, the sky above was making noise like it might start dropping water on him again, and he was hustling to make sure he missed that. His stomach was rumbling but he had some snacks back at the motel. He wasn’t in the mood for a greasy breakfast anyway, not even after walking for the last hour and a half, and that was just about all the diner across the interstate offered. Grease fried in grease, with some eggs possibly somewhere under the oil.

  He wasn’t really pissed at Erin anymore, not now. He’d walked it out of himself. Now he was just sullen and irritated. It’s not like he knew her all that well, either. He’d never even asked if she was on the pill, just assumed it. Probably been too carried away with having sex for the first time in five damned years to even care. Like he forgot it could have consequences.