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

by Robert J. Crane

  ***

  Arch stopped counting what he considered inappropriate public displays of affection from teenagers after the first dozen. He was fully aware that his bar was bound to be set lower than most, and he tried not to let it bother him as he moved through a crowd, the lights glaring like someone had let Las Vegas off the leash and spun it around him.

  He’d conference-called Bill and Alison, and Alison had tied Duncan into their conversation. He could barely hear them even with the volume turned all the way up; the sound of people talking, shouting, jubilant laughs and the ringing of bells from booths and electronic noise from rides and games nearly blotting them out. The smell of something deep fried tickled his nose, reminding Arch he hadn’t eaten in far, far too long.

  “Looks like a big, happy carnival,” Arch heard Bill’s voice through his earpiece. He had to agree. Midian went all-out on this, the perfect time to celebrate the end of summer and herald the coming of fall with its cooler nights and shorter days.

  “Nothing obvious so far,” Alison concurred. He wondered if they’d split up to cover from different angles. He didn’t ask, though, because he didn’t want to be the one to tell his wife how to do her job, volunteer gig though it might have been.

  “Just one big clusterfuck of lights,” Duncan’s sour voice came through. “Cowboy looks kind of out of place here.” Arch heard something said in the background. “Simmer down, man in black.”

  Arch nearly bumped into two teenagers walking close together, casting them a gaze that he hoped looked like adult disapproval without venturing into creepy territory. They didn’t even notice.

  ***

  Lauren nearly ran into Sheriff Reeve. He was loitering, she realized, hanging about on the edge of the crowd, flying the sheriff’s department colors so everyone would see law and order was present at the festival and they could relax. She wasn’t an expert on security, but it seemed like a good strategy. Though it didn’t look like attendance had suffered any from the shit that had landed all around Midian of late.

  “Dr. Darlington,” Sheriff Reeve said, ever the voice of politeness. She would have ducked him if she’d seen him coming, of course. “So lovely to see you. And not in your scrubs this time.”

  “But you’re still in uniform,” she said, nodding at him. “Making a showing to reassure people?”

  “All business tonight,” Reeve said with a nod. “Which is a shame, because I’m a pretty fair skee-ball player.”

  “The things you sacrifice for your work,” she said, only slightly mocking.

  “Tell me about it,” Reeve said. “So-o … you’re not here to commit murder, are you? Because … my official presence would frown on that. And I’m not ashamed to admit, I would probably cry at having to deal with another corpse.”

  “You may relax,” she said. It was a county fair, for fuck’s sake. She’d make nice with him for two minutes and be on about her business of darting between booths, pretending not to look for her daughter. “My intentions are more in the direction of the corn dogs, I think.”

  “Ill intentions for them, I suspect, but that’s not a crime,” Reeve said with a little humor. The man looked a little pallid, worn.

  “Depends on what you do with them,” Lauren said, scanning the crowd. “I was on an ER rotation, and this guy came in complaining of rectal pain—” She stopped herself, blinking as she realized she’d launched into the story without thinking about it. Reeve had an eyebrow slightly up, at least a little amused. “Sorry,” she said, feeling mortified already. I did not stop to think before speaking.” She lightly thumped her temple with a forefinger. “Long day.”

  “I can assure you,” Reeve said, and his tone reflected the amusement, “I actually want to hear the end of this one. It sounds like a better story than any I’ve got from this week.”

  Lauren thought—just for a second—about protesting. She gave it up with only a thought of the bodies she’d seen in his company. “Right. Well.” She pushed her embarrassment aside. “So, he comes in, and he’s complaining of pain in his ass—”

  “One sympathizes. I’ve felt a few of those of late,” Reeve said.

  “I doubt yours also carried a symptom of a wooden stick peeking from your anal sphincter like a telephone pole towering over a city street, though,” Lauren said, trying to keep the smile from breaking out too early. It actually was a funny story, though not exactly safe for work. Except hers. This was life in the ER.

  “Indeed it does not,” Reeve said, with a smile of his own. “At least, not as yet. Go on.”

  ***

  Mick took her on the roller coaster next. It wasn’t quite like the olden days, he reflected. There were bigger ones, better ones, ones that were fixed in place. Thrill riding was an industry, and companies like Walt Disney, Six Flags and Anheuser-Busch dominated the field, making his little piddly coaster that could be disassembled and put on trucks at the end of the day seem positively quaint compared to the excitement it had brought thirty years ago.

  But then he got on the car and they started moving, and Mandy—no, wait, it was Molly—started screaming like it was the best damned thing ever, and he had to concede that maybe this old-fashioned ride still could get a girl lubed up. She gripped his hand tight, and he could feel the dampness of her palm against his as the ground dropped from underneath them, screams filled the air, and they shot down an incline at what felt like a ninety-degree angle. Mick just screamed along, but not out of fear.

  ***

  “This is not gonna be good,” Alison’s daddy muttered as they both lay, prone, about fifty feet from each other. She could hear him because he was talking loud enough to be heard that far away.

  She had her cheek against the rifle, eye a little back from the scope with the butt against her shoulder. The pad was already in place, but she had it safetied against possible discharge. “Can’t imagine what you mean,” she said back, conveying by tone that she knew very damned well what he meant. “Limited backstop, huge crowd … what could possibly go wrong?” She said it with sarcasm, but the idea of what would happen if she fired the big Barrett, even at her slightly downward angle, into the fair was the stuff of nightmares. She could easily kill half a dozen people with a poorly placed shot. More if she had to fire multiple times. People she knew, people who shopped in her store, people she’d grown up with, been to church with.

  Plus, there was still absolutely no obvious sign indicating two teenagers were having carnal knowledge on the premises. The likelihood they’d do it out in the wide open seemed low, though, especially since she’d seen Nicholas Reeve wandering around in her scan of the crowd. She hovered her sights over the line of seafoam green porta potties, looking for any of them to be rocking subtly. That’d be a sign. True romance.

  “What do you reckon?” she asked her father.

  “Reckon if I were a betting man, I’d like to place some money on the long odds against us.” He sighed. “But since I’m not, I reckon I’ll just put my eye back to this scope and see if I can find a couple young adults rubbing up against each other like a flea-ridden dog against a fencepost.”

  ***

  They got off the roller coaster breathless, Molly flushed with that red-cheeked excitement that couldn’t be faked. Mick didn’t know if it was the night, the lights, the feeling of the place—music was playing, in the background, some old Springsteen song that was the kind of thing he could still get behind. The first fireworks started to go off overhead and the night was lit up like it was the Fourth of July. The air carried just the littlest hint of briskness, the first breath of fall, and it was a perfect, signature end to summer. Mick took a big breath in through the nose and smelled that whiff of cotton candy mingled with the suggestion of cool air coming. He looked over at Molly’s cheeks, those happy, rose-red cheeks, and couldn’t keep from smiling himself. He often thought humanity was a contagious condition, and in moments like this he felt like it was catching, just a little. “Wanna ride the Ferris wheel?” he asked with a grin.
She nodded with a placid smile of her own, and their fingers met to interlace once more as he led her off to the night’s capstone.

  ***

  “You don’t seem impressed,” Duncan said as he and Hendricks charged through the crowd at a brisk walk. Brisk was the word for it, all right, Hendricks thought as they paced through the crowd. They passed a funnel cake booth and Hendricks nearly did a double take at the smell.

  “My hometown did something similar,” Hendricks said, catching his thousandth funny look of the night for the drover coat and hat. He had the coat all buttoned up and considered himself lucky the ticket taker hadn’t asked him to undo it. He actually considered it lucky, too, that the night was just a little chilly for the locals. Not anything to write home about in Wisconsin, but for Tennessee it was something. He saw a few others wearing windbreakers.

  “Oh, yeah?” Duncan didn’t sound too impressed, either.

  “Amery—the town I’m from—had this thing called the Fall Festival,” Hendricks said. “Of course, in western Wisconsin, every town had its own little fair or carnival or whatever. I mostly went to the Fall Festival in Amery, but there was New Richmond Days, Good Neighbor Days down in Roberts, the St. Croix County Fair down in Glenwood City, the—”

  “I stand in awe of your boring story,” Duncan cut him off. He hadn’t been quite this abrupt a few days ago, had he? Hendricks wondered if it was Lerner’s loss or some sort of fatigue that was pinching the OOC’s personality. “This is fucking pointless.”

  Hendricks didn’t remember the demon swearing as much a few days earlier, either. “It’s not looking too good for the home team, I’ll be the first to admit.” He glanced at a couple in their early twenties walking along. The guy had his hand around her shoulder, firmly cupping the girl’s tit. It looked like a pretty decent handful, Hendricks had to concede, but they weren’t really showing much sign of anything other than that, at least not yet. “Half this town’s teenagers could be heading off to fuck right after this and we wouldn’t know it.” He paused. “Wait a minute.”

  “What?”

  “We’re not looking for a guy from this town,” Hendricks said, shaking his head at the stupidity. He leaned in to Duncan and lifted the strand of black headphone wire off the OOC’s shirt and spoke into the little lump of plastic. “We’re looking for a total stranger, team. Keep your eyes peeled for a guy you’ve never seen before.”

  ***

  “That doesn’t exactly narrow it down,” Arch said, making his way slowly through the crowd next to a ball toss game. He was watching a guy in full bib overalls trying to knock over a series of bottles at ten paces. Arch hadn’t watched for more than five seconds before he came to the conclusion the game was rigged. “The guy’s a carnie, right? What do they dress like?” He stared at the booth worker, hard pressed to tell much difference between him and any of the other people he’d seen that night.

  ***

  “Looking.” Alison trained her eye through the scope again. She focused on a knot of school-aged kids and was a little shocked to find how young they looked. She tried to put it out of her mind that they were almost a decade younger than her, and when she’d figured out that she knew every single one of them, she moved the scope onward, taking only a moment to ponder that she’d violated a rule of gun safety by having her weapon continually pointed in a very, very unsafe direction.

  ***

  Mick felt the thrill of upcoming victory as they passed Troy at the ticket-taker stand for the Ferris wheel. He got the nod and the arched eyebrows from Troy, which was like a compliment to his skills before the job was done. That was fine with Mick, though, because he could just about smell her cooch from here, and she hadn’t even lifted her skirt or slid down her panties yet.

  He took her hand as they made their way across the little platform to get on the wheel. He’d picked a carnival that had enclosed buckets—for privacy. This was always the place. He could have gone somewhere else, he supposed, but the truth was that the Ferris wheel was his favorite ride, too, and ever since he’d rode his first one in Chicago over a century earlier, he had never gotten over the idea of being lifted to breathtaking heights in the sky.

  The bucket rocked as they stepped inside. He closed the door and watched Troy come by and lock it before pulling the lever and sending them up. He’d talked with Troy about this moment beforehand, and here in the heavily used, sweaty compartment, he stopped to stare at the weave of fiberglass that made up the inside of the bucket. It looked like little roots, connecting to each other, to him, like things of life that joined people and time and events together. His head always filled with these heavy thoughts just before time, like his mind was expanding in advance of the event itself. Soon he’d be tasting every woman in the entire carnival, smelling their sweat and perfume as he released himself into them. He could already feel himself stiffening with anticipation as he looked in Molly’s eyes. He felt a gleam as he kept his hand on hers and willed the Ferris wheel into motion. It started on its slow path to the stop between the seven and eight o’clock positions, and he found he could barely wait a second more.

  ***

  “I’ve got something,” Alison heard her father say. “Young man I’ve never seen before, hand in hand with Molly Darlington. About to get on the Ferris wheel.”

  Alison pulled her eye off her scope for a second. She’d been trolling near the gates, scoping out the pretzel stand. She swiveled her weapon to the Ferris wheel and looked back through the scope, centering on the ticket taker. She saw a blur of motion, a couple moving to get in the bucket. “Got eyes on him,” she said, watching as they stepped inside. “I don’t know who he is, either.”

  ***

  “Heading that way,” Duncan said in response to what Hendricks presumed was a voice in his headphone. He cuffed Hendricks on the shoulder and pointed toward the Ferris wheel that towered above everything. Hendricks shrugged and fell in beside the demon. They weren’t far away, and it wasn’t like Hendricks had anything else to do but follow the OOC.

  ***

  “This has been a real special night,” Mick said, looking over at Molly. He could smell that sweet aroma of sweat in the air, feel the hard bench beneath his ass, the wind creeping in through the slit of a window that overlooked the ten thousand lights of the fair below. The bucket bobbed from the motion, but gently, rocking them both with a Rolling Stones song faintly audible from the loudspeakers below as their lullaby. Or mood music, Mick thought. That was probably closer to right.

  “It has,” Molly said, and she was just a little sphinx-like, as if she were holding something back. Girls always did, though, in Mick’s experience. Probably nerves.

  The bucket started to move again, this time toward the nine o’clock, and Mick knew he only had about ten minutes left. He leaned in and kissed her, again, full and deep, parting her lips with his tongue, feeling hers press back gently. She broke from him unexpectedly, pulling away sooner than he would have thought. She looked out the slatted window on her side, out on the brightly lit parking lot below.

  “What is it?” Mick asked.

  She looked back at him and smiled. “Nothing. I just want to enjoy the ride.”

  So she was a little reticent. He’d run across this a couple times before, and it was easy enough to solve. He’d forgotten what it felt like to have a girl resist, he’d gotten so good at picking the ones that would put out. He hadn’t even had to put his mouth on the wet snatches of the last two, something he didn’t really enjoy save for what it got him. He sniffed audibly, could almost imagine his tongue dancing on her—

  “What?” Innocent. She was looking at him, wondering what he was thinking. It was obvious, written on her face.

  “I was just thinking how beautiful you look tonight,” Mick said. He rested a hand gently on her thigh, and it wasn’t there for more than a second before she jerked away from his touch like he’d burned her. Now it was his turn to frown. “What?”

  “Umm …” She swallowed heavily. �
�Let me just stop you there … I’m okay with making out a little, but … that’s about it. That’s the line.” She had some strength in that voice, and it raised Mick’s eyebrow.

  He smiled. Things that were easy were never as worth it as the things that were hard. “It’s okay.” He turned on the charm. “I understand if you’re, y’know, inexperienced. It’s not a big deal.”

  She cocked an eyebrow at him, and something in the way she did it looked far, far different from anything he’d ever seen in this situation before. “What do you think is going to happen here?”

  Mick felt a hot flush creep up his neck and settle in his cheeks. “I figured we’d, uh … you know.” He arched his eyebrows once.

  Her expression got hard just as the lump in his pants showed the first sign of softening. “Listen … I like you,” she said gently, “but … I’m sixteen.”

  “You’re a woman,” he said, a little flustered. “Baby, you’re old enough to—”

  “To make my own decisions?” She was sounding patronizing now, and that heat in Mick’s cheeks belied just a little, tiny grain of anger. “I agree, which is why I’m saying that we’re not going any farther than first base. Like I said, I like you. Which is why I’d like to enjoy our time together without feeling, like … pressure and stuff.”

  “But … but … I took you all over this place,” Mick said, lamely even to his ears.

  “It was a good date,” Molly said, still looking cool but with just a speck of pity mixed in, “but that doesn’t entitle you to carte blanche.” She smiled at him, but all he could see was this building rage in him that reflected back. “Can we just … have fun?”

  He could feel his hands shaking, and he grabbed one of the lap bars to stabilize himself as he watched her pale slightly from his reaction. “Oh, we’re gonna have fun. You bet your sweet little snatch we’re gonna have fun.”