by Ninie Hammon
“I thought you said the efreet was in the summoner,” Jack said.
“I did and it is. But demons come from a spiritual world that don’t work the same way the human one does. An efreet ain’t bound by our rules of what’s possible and what ain’t. That monster is in the summoner. But it’s still inside that pentagram, too. Both at the same time. We got to find the efreet in the pentagram…” He paused. “And we got to send it back to Hell.”
Shock drained all the color from Daniel’s face. “Us?” His voice croaked like it’d just started changing, right there, that minute.
“God wouldn’t a’ brought us here and shown us what we’ve seen less’n he intended to use us to make things right.”
Jack sounded like a parrot. “Us?”
Bishop couldn’t help the smile that sprang to his lips at the looks on their faces.
“Not all by our lonesome. We gone have help.” He smiled down at the little girl at his feet. She was as beautiful, pure and good as any human being he’d ever known. He was deeply saddened, but not at all surprised, she’d been picked out for this. “Becca, sugar. Why don’t you tell us about the angel.”
She’d already shared the story with Bishop, and he watched the looks on the boys’ faces as she recounted it again. Theresa had come into the room, drying her hands on a dish towel, and she stood leaned against the door frame, listening to the child’s words spoken in a voice like tiny bells.
“She’s just…there sometimes. It’s not like I can call, and she’ll show up. I don’t know when she’s going to come to me…except that she said when the demons appeared, she’d be there to hold my hand so I wouldn’t be afraid.” She stopped, seemed to realize something. “They’re afraid of her!” She turned to Bishop for confirmation, and he nodded. “The demons. She scares them. I can tell by how they act when she’s there. She’s stronger than they are.”
“And I figure she’s been sent here to help us do what we got to do,” Bishop said.
“Find the efreet…” Jack said, awe in his whispered voice.
“And send it back to Hell,” Daniel finished softly.
CHAPTER 31
2011
After Dreadlock Man slapped her and threw her into the back of the van, Andi was so scared she couldn’t get a breath all the way down into her chest, felt like she was panting, probably sounded like a dog on a hot day.
The van was a cargo van with no seats or windows in the back. She sat on the floor, huddled up into the back corner while Speedy Gonzales sat on an upturned milk crate near the front and talked to Dreadlock Man, who was driving. She wasn’t tied up or anything, and she eyed the back door handle, wondered if she pulled on it, could she jump out. But they were going fast, and she didn’t know if it was possible to survive hitting the pavement at sixty miles an hour, and if they were on a highway, the car behind them would run over her before it had a chance to stop. Besides, the door was probably locked.
The fear kept her stomach all squeezed up in a knot until they finally stopped. When they dragged her out of the van, she saw that it was parked in the backyard of a house out in the country. They took her inside, shoved her into a room and locked the door behind her.
She’d seen all this before, been in this room with the dangling bare light bulb and the blankets on the floor and the boarded-up window. Of course, she hadn’t really been here, just seen it.
She sat down on the floor and leaned her back against the wall, trying hard not to cry. Daddy would come get her and take her home. Or maybe Uncle Jack. Everything would be all right.
But everything hadn’t been all right when that man came to the church that time with a gun, and Andi'd hidden in the pageant storage room. Mommy said it would be, but it wasn’t. She got shot. Mommy died.
She reached down and tenderly fingered her mother’s cross necklace that Uncle Jack had fastened around her neck the day of Mommy’s funeral.
Would Andi get shot this time and die and have a funeral? She put her hands up over her face and started to cry.
******
1985
The fog was so thick it was like trying to drive through cotton candy when Theresa Washington set out for Potter's Funeral Home that morning. She hadn’t seen fog this thick since…well, she couldn’t remember that she ever had, and she thought the unseasonably cool, damp weather was fitting somehow, almost like the world was mourning with Amelia. It was a terrible thing to have to say your final goodbyes to a child, but it’d somehow be worse if you had to do it on a bright summer day when the birds was singing and you could hear the sound of healthy children playing. Theresa was glad she wasn’t the one sittin’ on the front row in a funeral home with her son lying dead in a casket in front of her! Glad Isaac was fine…just gone somewhere, that’s all—and he’d be back. He’d be home soon. He was just…
Her eyes welled with tears. She wiped them roughly away, shook her head and concentrated on the road. Hard enough to see through this fog ’thout making it worse with tears when there wasn’t nothin' to cry about!
Amelia Grant had been one of Theresa’s best friends since they was both in grammar school. She’d gotten married and had five children—four little girls and finally the son her husband had always wanted. Christopher had been barely two years old when they found out he had leukemia, and Theresa’d always known Christopher wouldn’t make it. He was so small and frail and…docile—there didn’t seem to be any fight in him at all.
Now, Theresa was dressed in her good black dress with the acres of full skirt for the funeral service at nine o’clock. There’d be a brunch in the fellowship hall of the First Baptist Church after the service, and burial would follow this afternoon. Folks was saying Amelia was taking it real hard and wasn’t nothing you could do when a friend was grievin’ a loss except stand beside her and grieve with her. She’d left Bishop at home, asleep. He’d said he’d go with her, but the poor man hadn’t come to bed at all last night after he told them children about the efreet. She’d found him asleep in the recliner this morning, and she’d left him there.
The parking lot was full but not jammed. She made her way toward the building through air so wet it left water on every surface it touched, and for some reason the fog didn’t seem so welcoming anymore. It swirled in little clouds around the cars, drained everything of color, made the familiar alien and foreign. She felt an unusual sense of foreboding as she stepped up onto the porch and greeted the funeral director.
“Morning, Mrs. Washington,” said Elmer Potter as he held the door open for her. Elmer was the third generation of his family to operate the facility, and they was a time when it was for white folks only. Black people had they own place. Elmer’d been the one who’d changed all that, and she liked him for it. He was a reserved little man who seemed a mite frazzled this morning. She looked around for his sons, who helped with the business, but they was nowhere in sight.
“Mornin’ to you, Mr. Potter,” she said. “You doin’ all right?”
“Can’t complain. You?”
“Where’s you boys?”
“I’m flying solo this morning.”
“It’s a lot to do all by yourself, ain’t it?”
“Not now. Everything was done yesterday. The graveside service is the thing, and they’re going directly there from the airport. They were supposed to be home from their grandmother’s yesterday, but their flight got canceled.”
Most everybody was in the viewing room already, so Theresa hurriedly signed the guest book, stepped inside and took a seat in the back row of folding chairs that was arranged neatly in double rows across the room with a center aisle cleared between them. Almost all the seats was taken.
After a small group of people in the hallway had seated themselves, Mr. Potter quietly closed the big double doors at the back of the room. Probably didn’t nobody like funeral homes, but Theresa suspected she disliked them more than most. Amelia and her family didn’t go to church so Theresa understood, but having a funeral service in a place
like this seemed almost…despairing. At least in a church, there was a sense of the presence of God all around, and a church had windows. Theresa’s church had three huge stained glass windows on each side of the building. This room was a dark, dignified cave, with no windows at all and only the big double doors at the far end. Even open, they didn’t admit much natural light, though, particularly on a dreary day like today.
Theresa could see the tops of the family’s heads seated on the front row. Four little stair-stepped girls and Amelia with her head on her husband’s shoulder. In front of them, resting on a curtained platform with wheels on the bottom, was the casket, with a huge spray of roses and gardenias resting on top. It was a grownup’s casket, looked like, not small for a child. Special-made little ones was probably more expensive, and with all Christopher’s medical bills, Amelia’s family didn’t have hardly nothin' left.
Set back on a small dais behind the casket was an old-fashioned wooden pulpit, wide and bulky, must have been five feet high. If the minister hadn’t been a tall man, he’d have looked like a munchkin behind it. He said a prayer and then nodded, and Mr. Potter moved quickly and efficiently to the casket. He lifted the spray of flowers and placed it on a shelf behind the curtains of the platform. He stepped to the end of the casket, so as not to block the family’s view, reached out and released the catch and lifted the half lid on that end.
Somebody gasped, and Reverend Peterson staggered back.
There was…movement. Something was moving in the casket! That’s when the screaming started. It began in the front of the room and washed through the crowd back toward where Theresa was seated, a wave of screeching horror. At first, Theresa couldn’t understand what—
Then she saw it—saw them. Two enormous snakes had slithered out of the opening and wriggled up to the top of the casket. Black rat snakes, maybe six feet long, they slid together down the length of the casket to the end as other snakes——smaller ones, bull snakes or garter snakes—swarmed out of the opening in a tangle of writhing motion.
It took Theresa a moment to process the reality of it.
Oh dear Lord, that casket’s full of snakes.
******
2011
“What’s wrong, Daniel?” Senator LaHayne peered at him over the top of the Ben Franklin glasses parked precariously on the end of his nose. “Daniel.”
Focus!
“I’m sorry. What did you say again?”
“I’m not saying anything until you tell me why you’re giving me about ten percent of your concentration. Where’s the other ninety percent?”
All the way to the senator’s office from the airport, Daniel had bounced around the emotional pinball machine, lighting up terror, rage, fear, hope, guilt—each bright red when he bumped into it. And when he could wrench his thoughts for even a moment away from Andi, he considered what he’d say when the senator asked him that question. How could he possibly tie all this up in a way the senator would understand—what had happened to Andi that really had nothing to do with Chapman Whitworth. And yet it had everything to do with him because it was about Becca.
He now sat before the man the country expected to take the mantle of the presidency of the United States only a few months from now and had no more idea what to say than he had in the car.
“Bad things are going on back home,” he said. “Worse, even, than we told you about.”
The senator didn’t speak, waited expectantly for Daniel to continue.
“A long time ago, something happened to Jack and me—and Chapman Whitworth. Something indescribably horrible.” He actually shuddered, felt chill bumps pebble his arms. “It’s how we know…who…he is. But it wasn’t only Jack and me. There were three of us—Jack, me and Becca. And now, Becca’s in trouble—and so’s my little girl, Andi.”
“Would you tell me the whole story if I asked?” the senator said. He leaned across toward Daniel and put his elbows on his knees. The skinny arms, the big head…Jack thought of a praying mantis.
The two of them were seated alone in some kind of sitting room that Daniel assumed was in close proximity to the senator’s office. The aide who’d picked him up at the airport meandered up and down the halls of the senate office building for so long that Daniel couldn’t have found his way back out if he’d left a trail of bread crumbs. The chairs were comfortable, leather, well worn by the backsides of uncounted men who’d gone out from this room and made a difference in the world.
“I thought we settled that.”
“If I asked?”
“Yes sir,” Daniel said. “But don’t ask. Please.”
The man studied him.
“One day I will. You know that, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir, I do.”
“Right now, we keep the main thing the main thing,” the senator said. “Are you able to do that? Can you give me your full and undivided attention? What I’m about to talk to you about will require every bit of your strength and focus.”
No. Absolutely no way! But he had to. Daniel resolutely shoved Andi out of his mind and slammed the door hard behind her.
“I will do my best, sir. But…I don’t understand what you need me to do here, what either of us can do. We haven’t found Bosko. Jack told you that.”
“I’ve checked in twice a day, every day. I know the status of the investigation.”
“Then you know we don’t have any proof.”
“I do know that. But Chapman Whitworth does not.”
Daniel merely looked at him.
“Clearly, you are not a poker player. When you’ve been dealt lousy cards, you have two choices. You can toss your cards onto the top of the chips and give up. Or you can bluff. We’re going to bluff.”
“Sir?”
“Whitworth knows you’ve come to me. That’s all he knows.”
Daniel wanted to ask why the senator had leaked information about their meeting to the press, but didn’t.
“Seeing you here with me will rattle him.” The senator leaned back, in that relaxed pose that was anything but. He was stretched as tight as a bow string. “I intend to get him to fold, to withdraw his name from consideration for the seat on the court by getting him to believe we can prove way more than we really can.”
“But why would he do that? Withdraw? Why would he give up without a fight?”
“Because I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse. I’m going to give him a Get Out of Jail Free card.”
Daniel had absolutely no idea what Senator LaHayne was talking about.
******
Jack leaned over the gigantic map of the greater metropolitan Cincinnati area—which included all the suburbs and small towns on both sides of the Ohio River.
He’d spread it out on the break room table, not concerned someone would stop by and ask what he was doing. Since he’d become persona non grata at the station, he could have been disarming a nuclear warhead and the other officers would have walked right past him and out the door without comment. For a moment, Jack felt the pain of their disapproval and hostility. He wasn’t one of the Good Guys anymore. But then maybe he never had been.
He shook it off and wondered yet again if he should have asked for Crocker’s help to find Andi. But he couldn’t bring himself to divert Crock from chasing Bosko. It was likely futile, but they had to keep trying.
Now, he sat alone, staring down at the map in front of him, and felt utterly defeated. He’d used Google maps to locate all the BetterBuy stores in the Cincinnati area—twenty-eight of them—and another nine in Boone and Kenton Counties in northern Kentucky.
Then he thought about the ice cream and narrowed the search to the southern half of Cincinnati—which lopped off seventeen of the stores. Bright red stickpins now marked the locations of the remaining twenty BetterBuys. The blue stickpins were Tony Barroni Pizza carryout shops. He’d drawn a semicircle bulging out south from the river that encompassed the BetterBuys and the fourteen pizza parlors. And that wasn’t counting liquor stores. When
Jack did a Google Earth search for them, there were so many little red dots on the screen, it looked like the map had measles.
Train tracks crisscrossed the area, and tomorrow morning when somebody was in the office, he could start narrowing down which trains had run through this piece of real estate and on what schedule. Given enough time, he could canvas the stores and pizza parlors one at a time, ask about New Mexico plates and dragon tattoos, and eventually he’d scare up a rabbit.
Trouble was, he didn’t have time.
Had he been wrong to advise Daniel not to call in the FBI? But even if they’d believed him, their manpower and resources weren’t unlimited. They couldn’t check out thirty-four different businesses and more liquor stores than he could count in less than a day. It would take an army of investigators to do that.
Jack froze for one beat. Then two. On the third beat, he grabbed his cell phone and punched in Daniel’s number.
Daniel answered on the first ring. “What have you found?”
“Nothing yet.”
“Do you know anything?”
“I know I need your help to find her.”
“What can I do from here?”
“Everything.”
CHAPTER 32
1985
Even from the back of the room, Theresa could identify the big brown snake that next rose out of the opening of Christopher Grant’s casket.
It was a rattlesnake. A diamondback.
Panic went off in that room with the force of a stick of dynamite.
Shrieking in terror, people lurched to their feet and bolted for the door in the back of the room. They didn’t make their way down the rows of chairs to the aisles in the middle and on both sides. They turned and crashed through the chairs behind them, knockin’ the chairs and the people that’d been sittin’ in them out of the way, pushin’ and shovin’, their eyes wide and wild.
