by Mark Henry
“I don’t.”
“Well then, I guess we just get back to work and you keep this stuff to yourself. I don’t have to point out that it was you that kissed me, right? That was clear?”
Wade nodded.
“In the interest of transparency, you’d be correct if you’re currently thinking that I didn’t stop you. I was shocked for a second, but then, well, you’re pretty good at it.”
Wade’s brow furrowed, his face taking on a confused, boyish quality that Luce couldn’t quite coalesce with her initial impression. She wondered what was inside his personnel file.
What kinds of cracks ran up his walls?
Chapter Eight
Gravel snapped, crackled, and popped beneath the Porsche’s tires as Wade steered them into the empty parking lot of a lonely diner. A single waitress the only life visible behind the wall of glass facing the freeway. The woman hunched over a crossword puzzle, jotting an occasional answer and kicking the toe of her shoe against the floor.
Luce followed Wade into the room. His shoulders stiffened, and his ass clenched. If she didn’t know any better, she’d assume he had eaten something that was fighting its way out. But no, his hand was deep in his pocket, gripping the can he always seemed to carry and on the floor between them and the waitress was the reason.
A roach, bigger than she’d have expected to see this far in country.
“Allow me,” Luce said, slipping around him. She brought her foot down on the bug with a crunch and moved on without a hitch in her step. The waitress, having inexplicably ignored her only two customers as they drove into the gravel lot and speared her with a blaze of headlights, turned sharply to stare at Luce’s action.
“May I help you?” Her tone belied the words. She might as well have told them to kiss her ass, her lack of interest was so apparent.
Glancing back at Wade, whose smile was as broad as she’d seen it—seemingly waiting to see if she’d handle the apathetic woman with the same verve she had the roach—she gathered her energy and struck.
“My friend here is a huge fan of cockroach-infested diners and since you seem to work at a stellar example, we were wondering if we could get a couple of cups of coffee…and if you could, please skim the sloughed carapace’s off the top of the pot before you pour. I don’t care for the crunch. Thanks.”
Wade spit out his breath in an extended, “Puh…”
The waitress slapped her palms against her hips and cocked her head cruelly. “We reserve the right to refuse service to—”
Luce cut her off with a jovial laugh. “I was just joking. Though honestly, for a place that seems to have zero business, you’d think you’d be a little more welcoming of customers. You act like we’re grifters or something. Also, I stepped on a big bug.”
Wade gulped. He’d begun to scan the edges of the counters, the surfaces, the shadowy chasms between the booths. Luce could see the gooseflesh rise on his tattooed forearms, nobbing the grayscale crosses oddly.
She turned to him. “You know,” she said. “I can wait to get something to eat later. Let’s get out of here.”
Wade’s response to the suggestion was immediate. He turned and hightailed it back to the car, a rolling shudder jarring his shoulders.
“Forget the coffee,” Luce said. But the waitress already had, barely registering the statement, and had turned back to her crossword, as though they’d never been there at all.
Who says service is dead? Luce glanced back and noticed the name of the place for the first time.
…
Wade dreaded the inevitable question. He’d escaped inquiry the first time Luce had seen the can of Raid in his pocket simply because she’d been so embarrassed, but now, it was clear she knew something was up. He winced as she sat down next to him, chuckling.
She pointed to the sign atop the diner’s roof. Several of the neon letters had burned out of the diner’s sign, turning The Big Angus into The Big An-us. “I guess we didn’t heed the warning.”
“Or,” Luce laughed, a joyful tittering of notes like the tinkering of keys on the far right of a piano, “we subconsciously crave big anus.”
“What?”
“Nothing. You wanna tell me about this bug phobia?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
Luce reached into the floorboard, dug under her seat a bit, and extracted a trio of empty Raid cans. “Then why have I been kicking these around for the last two hours?”
Wade had been seven years old when a giant centipede crawled out of his father’s screaming mouth and rustled across the floor toward him. He remembered it like it was that morning. The priests’ black patent shoes stomping, their aim woefully off target. His father had slumped back in the bed, wrists slack in the stretched fabric binding him to the headboard, his body smelling of sweat and brimstone.
Fathers Thomas and Morgan decried the creepy crawly as a beast from the lowest depth of hell, if not THE beast. It was apparently impossible to tell as they quickly revealed, “Each exorcism is different.”
The centipede, its bronze exoskeleton articulating like the bellows of an extended commuter bus, spindly legs scribbling waves into the dusty floor, slithered toward Wade without hesitation and despite his kicking and pushing himself away, the bedroom wall stopped his escape abruptly and the thing found him, clambering over his bucking feet, coiling around his ankle and up his pant leg.
Wade had screamed then.
Screamed like never before in his short life and not once since.
The younger priest, Father Morgan dropped to the floor and snatched at the short length of the creature left exposed and yanked. Wade swatted at his pant leg as the demonic centipede bit into his inner thigh, an indescribable pain exploded through him—he could describe it now, of course, as blistering, but back then, simply didn’t have anything to compare it to, except for possibly the time he accidentally zipped up the tip of his penis (no worries, the scar is barely noticeable). His spine arched and he came off the floor, only moments later to drop back, soaking wet with Father Thomas standing over him with an empty bucket.
Because, as he put it, “Real exorcists don’t come to a party without enough holy water to get the job done.”
The centipede sizzled against his leg, burning into his skin, an insta-phobia. Later, when they cut his pants away from the area in the emergency room, the imprint of the insect, and all ninety-seven of its legs—that they have exactly one hundred is stereotyping—wrapped around Wade’s leg like exactly what it was…a completely inappropriate tattoo for a seven-year-old.
Twenty years later, Wade rubbed his leg absently and checked his pocket for the can of Raid he carried like a crucifix.
…
The next exit had a vestige of civilization in the form of a drive-thru espresso place. Not great, but warm and sweet, which is how she liked it. Before long the pastures and forests gave way to strip malls and fast-food restaurants cluttering the sides of the freeway. They were getting closer to something big.
“I can’t tell you how excited I am,” Luce said, beaming out the window. “We’re like Mulder and Scully.”
“Oh this is gonna be good,” Wade said. “Which one are you?”
“Mulder, obviously.” She looked at him like he was crazy.
“You’re Mulder?” he scoffed. “You?”
“What?” Luce looked him up and down. “You think I’m Scully?”
He shook his head quickly. “Oh no. You’re not Scully.”
“Well then, what’s your take?”
Wade clapped a hand to his chest and proudly proclaimed, “I’m clearly both. Like an awesome amalgam of the two.”
“Oh Jesus. Then who am I?”
Hitch popped up between the seats and whispered, “Special guest. Emphasis on the special.”
Luce grizzled. “Do you have something to say to me?”
Wade sighed, clearly measuring his words very carefully. “I should probably clear the air. You saw Thorwald’s report. And I’
m guessing you know that we have your psychiatric history.”
“Oh fuck.” Luce shaded her eyes, hardly able to look at him.
What the hell must he be thinking of her?
“I. You. I,” Wade stammered. “It doesn’t mean anything. Mental disparities can be useful for our work.” He nodded optimistically.
“Really?” Luce asked, glancing from under her palm, less than convinced.
“No, for real. Despite how easy it seems in the movies. Demons don’t have that easy a time engineering a person’s brain when it’s completely clear and healthy—not that anyone is entirely sane. I know I’m not.”
Luce straightened. “Oh yeah?”
“I’m depressed.” He paused, pounding his palms on the steering wheel, anxiety bongos. “For years.”
Luce laughed.
Wade’s mouth fell open. “What? Seriously?”
“No. It’s just, I would have pegged you for bipolar,” she said, and then falling into her gruffest Wade impersonation. “We can never be together like that…oh wait, except for let’s make out real quick…nope never again. You run hot and cold like a bad water heater, dude.”
“Yeah? Well, I’m more of a self-diagnoser. But it’s mostly just this heavy sadness that drops like a curtain sometimes.”
“Cut the crap, Wade. If you think it’s weird, just say it’s weird. ’Cause it’s weird sometimes. You don’t have to pretend. You’re pissing me off.”
“Woah!” Wade cried, throwing his hands up. “It’s weird. Yes.”
“See? Was that so hard?”
“You’re right.” He nodded, licking his lips and shaking his shoulders like he was completely relaxed. “I feel so much better about it now.” He rolled his head back toward her. “Also, I’m depressed for real.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“Have you ever taken medication?”
“I can’t afford to dull my senses. Plus, it’s situational, not chemical.”
Luce watched his reflection in his window. His eyes distant, confused. She knew the look. Regret. Maybe he really was depressed. He certainly had reason to be, though the extent of that was lost on her.
“Do you wanna talk about it?”
“No.”
“Well if you ever do. I have some experience with that.” Among other things, she thought.
Wade turned toward her and smiled, nodding. “If I do, then you’ll be the first to know. And listen, I didn’t mean to bum you out, or us out. I just wanted you to know that it’s out there. I know about it, so you don’t have to keep that a secret from me. It’s a step.”
“A step?”
“Partners need to build a level of trust, right?”
“Right.”
Luce left out the part about him sharing his past. The horrors that seemed to haunt him. Clearly he let that stuff eat at him, take whole chunks out of him. Wade came across as a tank, both physically and emotionally. Layers of steel, but not hollow.
Taillights blazed in the coming distance and Wade sighed. “Ah man, I hope this isn’t the motorcade Quince was talking about because it’s a long way to the next exit.” Cars slowed to a crawl and then to a stop, farther up ahead, he could swear he saw people actually getting out. Cars cranking down.
“I think it is,” Luce said, slouching into her seat. “You wanna go look?”
Wade shrugged, turned off the car and they both reached for the doors. Fifteen cars ahead of them, they arrived at a row of cop cars blocking the road at an angle from an on-ramp. Nothing moved beyond this or from the direction of the entering road. Cars honked angrily, people shouted, and Wade couldn’t think of a single thing to say to this woman at his side. There was no question that she was smoking hot, petite but dangerous with the kind of face you wanted to go to bed with and wake up to.
It wasn’t that Wade didn’t have any skills in the dating department, or even that he’d classified Luce as off-limits, it’s that he knew every interaction with her was going to be a temptation. He’d be tempted to flirt, to touch, to wrap her in his arms and kiss her, again particularly the hollow of her throat, which had called his name twice in so many days.
So what was it? What would it take to turn this situation around?
With his wife Catherine he hadn’t hesitated; he’d felt some of these same urges and acted on them. They’d made love the first night, wound up tight in his bedsheets, sweaty and grinning ear to ear times two. They were alike, Catherine and Luce. Funny didn’t cover it. Catherine had broken through his walls with her jokes and flirting, her ability to turn a situation into the most bizarre and unbelievable experience observationally. She noticed things that he didn’t.
Luce was like that.
He knew that skill would make her a good partner and he needed that more than he needed a woman.
Wade needed her to be as strong and stormy as he’d seen her be at The Parts Department, fending off attacks on her own terms with no need for him to rush in and save her no matter how much he wanted to, or how turned on it made him to watch her exert her power so masterfully.
He loved that she hadn’t realized she had it in her, the violence, the thrust of intent.
What Wade really needed to do was stop thinking about Luce midassault before he really did get an erection in public. It had already been established that Luce would bring it to everyone’s attention if he did and to her great pleasure.
“You gonna tell me how you got into this?” Luce said, breaking the silence. She didn’t look at Wade but rather up at the overpass, listening for the motorcade to arrive with Bishop Lazy Eye.
“Same as you, recruited.”
“Thorwald?”
“No. Sister Mary-Agnes found me.”
“Really? It’s hard to imagine her out in the world, she seems to be synonymous with gray concrete cells. I guess it’s because she looks like a prison matron.”
“She has her moments when she’s not so abrasive—”
“—Or drunk,” Luce quickly threw in.
“—but they’re few and far between. She wasn’t always like that. The job makes you hard and it happens a lot quicker than you’d imagine. It only takes a few mistakes, a few deaths at your hand before the callouses start to form.”
Luce turned, glancing at his hands.
“Figuratively, I meant.”
“You wanna talk some more about your partner?”
“Yeah, of course. Rachel was a hothead, I keep telling myself that, but I can’t help but blame myself for not being on guard for her erratic behavior. Sometimes it only takes a brief separation and things can go terribly wrong. The demons smell weakness.”
Luce looked up at him with those bright blue eyes with something akin to admiration. “It’s hard for me to imagine you weak. Everything about you is strength. You even resist cracking a smile most times, I think I see it quivering at the edges of your lips but then you stash it away. Am I seeing things, or is that happening?”
“I find you incredibly funny, Luce. In that easy way that people have of being themselves and snatching humor out of the air. But what I observe doesn’t get me to that place. I see horrors and death.”
“The fun stuff is on the other side,” Luce said, nodding. “I understand though. It’s hard to see past a wall so heavily bricked. You’ve lost a lot, I know.”
“How do you know?”
“Jessica.”
“Ah, she’s a talker.”
“And Grace.” Luce realized she wasn’t certain that was the Satanist’s name. “I think she’s into you. I got the distinct impression she saw me as a threat, somehow.”
Wade shook his head and with that ended the conversation.
The police left their cars as the motorcade approached, lining up in front of each and turning toward the on-ramp. The growl of motorcycles cued the rest of the assembled to swivel.
“What are they expecting, do you think?” Wade asked.
“Probably not a wandering eye.”
A dozen motorcycle cops descended onto the freeway in formation. Six by six and followed by a black diplomatic limousine, Vatican flags flapping atop the front fenders. Windows tinted as black as night, except for the one behind the driver which was wide open, billowing incense smoke like the car were a mobile hookah lounge. A black-sleeved arm jutted and shook a silver holy-water disperser violently at the uniformed officers, flecking their faces and open mouths, wincing notably.
“There’s the bastard,” Luce heard a woman say behind them, and playing off a yawn, glanced over her shoulder to see someone that could have been Polly Petruschka’s twin assuming the awful girl hadn’t killed her sister in the womb—which seemed unlikely. Polly was totally the type. She wore the same pinched face, but the nose was narrower, making her look even more rodent than she had as a teen instigator.
Beside her a man pointed a camera at the passing motorcade, blond and full-lipped and sturdy. About Aaron Statlender’s height.
“Couldn’t be,” Luce mumbled. “I don’t have a grenade or anything.”
“What?” Wade asked, brows arched lightly.
“Oh nothing. Just thought I recognized someone.”
Wade craned his neck, following her gaze. “Isn’t that the reporter from To Catch a Perv? You know, that show where they lure child molesters into barely furnished apartments with the promise of fresh lemonade.”
“Not sweet tea?”
“Nope, that’s the other network. I’m pretty sure that’s…”
Don’t say it, Luce thought. Don’t you dare say it.
“Polly Prentiss.”
Luce goggled, trying to get an unobstructed view, but the motorcade having passed, the film crew was already racing back toward the tangle of cars.
“Come on!” Luce grabbed Wade’s arm and pulled him toward the fleeing pair.
“Jesus!” he replied. “Never a dull moment with you.”
A van sat about ten cars beyond Wade’s Porsche, Polly and her cameraman were facing them now, cramming their equipment into the back and keeping an eye on the now moving cars.
