“I’m no hero, Father.”
“Bullshit! You saved my life by tackling that biker.”
Carter made a clicking sound with his tongue.
“The Lord has plans for you, son. Big plans. And they start here. They start by being at the frontier of a new county.”
There was a pause, and Carter hoped that he hadn’t laid it on too thick.
Out of practice, all this waiting and watching. I need to stay sharp, I need to do something.
At long last, Robert answered.
“I—I think that is a fine idea, Father.”
Carter slammed both hands down on the bench and the other man jumped.
“Excellent!”
Then he stood and pushed the rotting wooden door to the confessional open with his foot.
“Pike! Pike, get over here! We have some business to attend to!”
The smirk on his face grew into a full-fledged smile.
This was perfect, better than he could have ever imagined.
Modern County. I will change this place; I will turn it into my own.
43.
“Hi,” Seth Grudin said.
The woman behind the desk spied him through a set of reading glasses that were perched halfway down her beak-like nose.
“Yes? Can I help you?”
He tried a smile, but it felt so fake that he immediately abandoned the effort. It was too late; the woman’s white eyebrows travelled up her forehead suspiciously.
“I’m here to see someone,” he offered quickly.
Get the girl.
The woman put her book down—a John Milton thriller, he saw—and stared, waiting for him to continue.
“I’m a, uh, a friend. Do you guys have, like, visiting hours?”
“Family only, unless you make an appointment.”
Seth’s expression lifted.
“Can I make an appointment, then?”
The woman shook her head.
“By phone only. Sorry.”
“Phone only? But I’m right here.”
The woman quickly averted her eyes, a clear indication that she was lying.
“Sorry, it’s policy.”
“Hmm.”
When Seth didn’t react and remained rooted in place, he slowly detected her temperament begin to change: her perfunctory, abrupt posture and tone were transitioning into tepidity.
She was nervous, made clear by the way her beady eyes glanced first at then behind him. She sensed that something was wrong, Seth knew it. But she was underestimating just how terribly wrong things were.
Because if she had known, the woman would have turned and ran.
“Phone only,” she reiterated, her voice slightly higher-pitched than before, “and then we get security to take you to the room. Who is it specifically you are looking to visit?”
Now it was Seth’s turn to look around.
Security? At a long-term care facility?
He smirked.
Not likely.
“Just a friend. So I can’t make the appointment now? I mean, I’m here. I’m right here, standing in front of you.”
The woman leaned further away from the counter and shook her head.
“I’m sorry, it’s nothing against you. It’s just policy.”
Seth smiled.
“Oh, okay then.” He showed his palms. “No problem.”
He noticed a pen on the counter, one of the old-fashioned ones like from the bank with a beaded chain keeping it attached to the countertop.
“Do you think it would be alright if a wrote a note at least? I mean, I drove a long way to get here.”
The woman hesitated.
“Yeah, that sounds okay. Let me just get you a sheet of paper.”
The woman turned and started flipping through a pad of doodles, and Seth picked up the pen. He gave the chain a slight tug. It was only about eighteen inches in length, but it didn’t seem very stable. With one hard pull, he was positive it would come loose.
A moment later, the secretary placed a blank piece of note paper down in front of him.
“Here you go.”
This time the woman was the one that offered the smile, and Seth wasn’t sure which one was more fake, his or hers.
This was an observant woman, Seth realized. She had an inkling that something was wrong here, something that went beyond a strange visitor at six in the morning not entirely sure who he was here to see.
No, there was something else wrong here, something very wrong.
But it was too late for her now.
Seth nodded and offered a quick thank you. Then he put the pen to paper.
Alice Dehaust, he wrote.
A name. One that he had never heard before, but just knew that it was right.
His smile grew, and he lifted the pen.
“Get the girl, you have been chosen.”
“Pardon?”
Seth chuckled.
“Nothing. It’s just that my writing is so bad.” He spun the paper around for her to see. “Can you read this?”
The woman leaned her head back and scrunched her nose, forcing her reading glasses upward. Then she tilted the paper up and began reading.
“Alice Dehaust,” she said with a shrug. “I can read—”
With speed he didn’t know that he possessed, Seth’s left hand shot out and he grabbed a fistful of her tight gray hair. She cried out and tried to pull back, but his gripped was too strong. With his other hand, he drove the pen into the soft area of skin just beneath her chin, snapping the ball bearing chain that tethered it to the counter.
The woman’s eyes went wide, and blood immediately shot forward, soaking Seth’s hand and arm in a warm spray. Still gripping both her head and the pen, he tried to drag the latter across her neck, like one might with a knife—to open her throat. But the pen was too flimsy, and he felt the plastic bend instead of cut through her skin. He quickly abandoned this idea and instead rammed the pen deeper, twisting it back and forth as he pushed.
The woman gurgled as her blood continued to flow, soaking Seth’s entire hand now, leaking heavy drops onto the piece of paper with Alice’s name on it.
Blood also leaked from her mouth, and her eyes went wide.
The woman tried one last-ditch effort to push back from the desk by jamming her hands on the counter edge, but Seth leaned against her, holding the pen and her hair so tightly that his hands ached. She struggled for only a few more seconds before her eyes rolled back. Seth kept his position until the pumping of her blood had become but a slow trickle. Then he let go of her hair and the woman slumped forward, her body weight driving the pen even deeper. Seth counted to twenty and then slid the now red pen out of her neck.
The woman’s head smacked on the counter, and blood immediately began to pool beneath her as the last of her life seeped out.
“Get the girl. I have been chosen,” he whispered, the smile still plastered on his narrow face.
Alice Dehaust.
The girl.
Seth Grudin.
The chosen.
44.
“So, did you used to be a criminal too, or is that just me?” Dirk Hannover asked.
The other deputy looked over at him.
“Huh?”
Dirk chuckled.
The two men were alone in the station, left to their own devices when the sheriff had taken off suddenly. Deputy Williams, the senior ranking officer in the sheriff’s absence, was out on a drug-related call. For a time, Dirk had been completely alone, manning the station after being deputized for no more than a few hours. That was okay, though. So far the job had seemed simple enough: placate the populace. This wasn’t much of a challenge, of course, as not only did he have very little knowledge about what had happened, but no one else seemed to know anything either. Or if they did, they weren’t sharing. So it wasn’t as if he had to lie.
Around dinnertime, the flow of citizens had slowed, just as Deputy Reggie returned from the church shooting.
“Nothing,” Dirk said. “I guess we’re both newbies here, aren’t we?”
“Speak for yourself—I’ve been a deputy for a whole week.”
Dirk laughed.
Yeah, both newbies, that’s for sure.
He leaned forward in his chair.
“What’s your connection here, man? You from Askergan?”
Reggie’s face darkened, but only for a moment.
“No, not from here.”
“Then what?”
Reggie hesitated. There was a connection, that much was certain, but it was obvious that the man was hesitant to share.
Dirk didn’t blame him. As he waited for the man to reply, he smoothed his handlebar mustache, then tightened his ponytail.
“Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but I don’t know you. I don’t even think the sheriff knows you. I think—I think we should keep this”—Reggie indicated the two of them—“professional.”
Dirk shrugged. He caught the man’s eyes fall on the missing first three fingers of his right hand.
Nope, definitely don’t blame you for being apprehensive.
In fact, when the sheriff had asked him to be deputy, he’d thought it was a ridiculously impulsive move. After all, he had been a biker up until a few hours ago—part of the problem that the sheriff was hell bent on eradicating from the county, the same group that had threatened his life and the lives of the ones closest to him.
The sheriff couldn’t possibly know that this wasn’t the first time that Dirk had worn this type of uniform.
He made a fist, hiding his missing fingers.
If only they knew.
“No hard feelings. But the sheriff left in one hell of a hurry, and I have no idea when either he or the other deputy is going to be back. We are going to be here for a while. Gonna be awfully quiet if we can’t find something to talk about.”
Reggie nodded and looked away.
The two newly deputized men sat in silence for a good five minutes before Reggie finally broke it.
“I’m not much of a religious man, and I don’t have much experience with this, but there is something strange going on out by the church.”
“Sure. But I wasn’t much of an altar boy either, as you probably guessed.”
“Yeah, well, there is something weird out there. I mean, I went out there, just as the sheriff ordered. After hearing of the shots fired, I thought there would be some extremely distraught people, you know?”
Dirk nodded. Although most people in rural America, for which Askergan County most definitely qualified, had at one point or another during their lives fired a gun, and more still had in the very least heard shots fired, he knew that context played a huge role in their subsequent reactions. A gun was a gun, and a bullet a bullet, but it made all the difference in which direction they were aimed.
“But nobody seemed to care about that. I mean, I’m going to be honest, most of the dozen or so people there actually seemed happy about it, as if it was a good thing.” He lowered his voice. “I found blood, too. Lots of it in the church. But no body, and none of the people that I talked to could give me a straight answer as to what happened. Kept saying something about how Askergan was going to change, modernize or some shit. That a couple of bikers came in trying to either sell drugs or collect from the sale—this was hard to get a bead on, too—and that they had shot at them and then vanished.”
Dirk mulled this over in his head.
“Yeah, I thought the same thing,” Reggie continued, reading Dirk’s expression. “Vanished? That’s bullshit. Bikers don’t ‘vanish’. They are covering for something, or someone. But what? I mean, I’m new at this shit, but it was just weird, you know?”
Dirk frowned, recalling what had happened at Sabra’s.
“Yeah, I’ve been in Askergan for less than a day, and I already know that there is something strange going on here.”
And now it was his turn to host a far-off expression on his face.
What he had seen at Sabra’s had been more than weird—it had been fucking horrible. He still wasn’t sure what he believed, even though he had seen what he had seen with his own eyes. Although he was one of the very few bikers that didn’t even occasionally indulge in the drugs that they peddled, he had more than once considered that maybe there was just so much of it in the air in Sabra’s office that he had gotten high by accident. At this point, there really was no way to know.
Regardless, he wasn’t surprised that the people at the church were acting strange; heck, if there was ever a time to seek salvation, the time was nigh.
But that wasn’t for him. Not for Dirk Hannover. What mattered to him was finding the one that had crippled his hand and stolen his family.
“But that wasn’t the weirdest thing. The weirdest thing was the priest. He was—how should I put this?—smooth.”
Dirk stopped tracing lines on the wooden desk with the two good fingers on his right hand and looked up.
He raised an eyebrow.
“Like James Brown smooth?”
Reggie shook his head.
“Like a used car salesman smooth, you know? Just less sleazy.” He brought his hands together in mock prayer. “Father Carter Duke—saying all the right things, all the while keeping a smirk on his bearded face.”
Dirk’s breath caught in his throat. The deputy kept talking, but he wasn’t hearing any of the words—he was preoccupied with the man’s name: Carter Duke.
Clive Dirkson.
Chris fucking Donovan.
CD; always the initials CD.
For nearly two years he had been ensconced in the Skull Crushers, using their influence and connections to help him find the man that had become more and more elusive, his extortion, not to mention his reputation, shrinking in both magnitude and exposure.
And then about a month ago he hit the jackpot. A rumor about a pedophile priest, and pictures stolen by someone described as stone-faced man dressed in a tuxedo, had spread through the biker ranks, and when it had reached Dirk’s ears, he knew that he was close.
But not in a million years did he think that he was this close.
Dirk swallowed hard.
“What did he look like?”
“Huh? Who?”
“The priest.”
“Oh, I dunno. Regular-looking guy. Medium height, medium build. Thick black beard.”
Dirk could barely get a new breath in, and his heart had started to race. He unfurled his fist and stared the nubs on his right hand.
“Hey, man, you okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Father Carter Duke.
Dirk got to his feet, ignoring the other deputy.
I’ve found you, CD. I finally fucking found you.
45.
“Take whatever you want,” Sheriff Paul White said. When the man that stepped out of the closet raised an eyebrow, the sheriff clarified his statement. “Take me. Just leave her out of this.”
He was standing by the side of the bed, wearing nothing but his police shirt. Nancy wasn’t so lucky: she was completely naked.
Naked and trembling.
The man with the gun had a shaved head, and it was covered in tattoos. Like all of Sabra’s old crew, he was wearing a cut-off jean jacket.
“Well, here’s the thing,” the man said, wagging the silver pistol back and forth. His voice had an obnoxious nasal quality to it. “The Crab gave me some very specific instructions. And, unfortunately for you, it involves her.”
Nancy moaned.
“Please,” the sheriff pleaded. “It’s me he wants. Take me.”
The man shook his head.
“No can do.”
The sheriff’s eyes glanced to the middle of the floor where he had carelessly dropped his pants... and his gun.
“Don’t move,” the man warned.
It was an incredibly disarming thing, standing there nearly naked in front of a man with a gun. But there was no time to be bashful. He had read in a book once that the hardest thing for a man to
do was to fight naked. At the time, he had scoffed at the idea, but now it dawned on him that if that was indeed the case, he was in for one hell of a night.
“Take me,” he hissed through clenched teeth.
Nancy glanced over at him, and he saw fear plastered on her pretty face. Even when they had battled the crackers together, she hadn’t shown this much emotion.
This was different; this danger was human—it was something that they both understood.
“Please,” he begged, but when the man just smiled, he knew that all was lost.
It ends here. One way or another, it ends here.
“Get over here,” the man ordered, indicating Nancy with a nudge of the pistol.
The woman stood firm, and he leveled the gun at the sheriff’s head.
“Now.”
Nancy again looked to Paul for something, anything, a hint at a plan, but the big man was at a loss.
The biker rolled his eyes.
“I’m going to ask you one more time, and then I start shooting. Get. Over. Here. Now.”
And then, to Paul’s disbelief, the naked woman took a small step forward.
I’m sorry, she mouthed, and took another step.
This can’t be happening, this can’t be happening.
It ends now.
When Nancy took a second step, Paul suddenly sprung to action. He reached out and shoved Nancy forward, confident that if shots were fired, they would be aimed at him and not at her.
Nancy stumbled forward and nearly fell flat on her face. Paul had hoped that she would fall, that she would land on the carpet and just lay on the ground. But she regained her balance just as Paul lunged for his gun belt.
It was a shitty plan, and the result was predictably poor. Even if Paul had made it to his gun, he would have never been able to unhook the clasp and actually draw the gun, let alone get a shot off.
But shots rang out nonetheless.
The first whizzed by the sheriff’s arm, and Nancy screamed. When the second shot was fired, Paul wasn’t so lucky. He felt a pressure in his left bicep, followed by a searing pain. He grunted and was reduced to crawling for his gun.
Parasite Page 20
