Was this a trap? A test?
How did he get here?
Ding!
His phone that had been placed in the centre console lit up with an incoming text message. Singh leaned forward and checked the display. There was something attached to his phone. He pulled the bundle into the backseat and saw that someone had used a rubber band to attach a plain white envelope. Singh opened the envelope and counted the money inside. It was easy. There was a band around the bills.
$10 000
He checked the phone display. It was a single word texted from an unknown number.
Thanks
Singh opened the back door and stepped out onto the asphalt. The cool night air felt good on his skin. He stood up too fast and felt the blood rush to his head. He needed to grab the roof of the car to stop himself from falling. Whatever the woman had given him, it was extremely potent.
The last thing that he remembered he was back at the burned out farm house. His shoulders and back aching from delivering countless rounds of CPR, his nerves were raw.
The woman, Dr. Foster, had met him at the Camry’s door and as he climbed inside he felt a sharp pain at the base of his neck. He had tried to whirl around, reaching for the spot on his back but he was already falling. His arms numb and useless. Unable to turn his head, his face hit the backseat with a dull thud, bounced, and then he was all the way gone. As if someone flipped a switch in his head, and killed all the lights at once.
Singh checked his watch and saw that he still had an hour left in his shift at the hospital. He opened the envelope and took out the thick bundle of cash.
Thanks
Who the hell were those people?
If Constable Duane Carlton had quit smoking like his wife and doctor had told him to he might never had seen it. At first he thought it was nothing. A white plastic bag blowing in the wind. God knows there was enough bits of garbage blowing across the empty lot that stood to the west of the police station. Grocery bags, beer cans, he had even seen a little pup tent roll across the vacant lot like a tumbleweed from one of those westerns he loved to watch.
Duane dragged hard on his cigarette and watched the pale bit of trash bobbing in the dark and frowned. It was coming closer. He stepped off the cement walkway and edged into the knee-high brush. He pinched off his cigarette and tossed it away in favour of his flashlight.
What the hell was that?
He snapped on his halogen light and aimed it directly into the jade-green eyes of Charlotte Walton. She was on all fours, her blonde hair stuck to her dirty face in sweaty tangles. Her mouth hung open and her back and rising and falling as if she were building up air to scream.
“Holy shit,” Duane whispered as he reached for his radio.
Carlton stepped closer to the girl and she scrabbled backward issuing a horrible keening sound.
“It’s okay,” Duane said. “You’re safe now. You’re safe.”
He eased himself down next to her and gently gathered the thin girl up into his arms.
Maura had been sitting in the lobby of the police station since the afternoon. She couldn’t go home as her entire house had become a crime scene. And she didn’t want to leave for fear that there would be some news and she would miss it.
She checked her watch, it was nearly midnight. She had watched as the old constable shuffled outside to have his hourly nicotine fix. She had even joined him on a couple of occasions, but after so many cigarettes and too much bad coffee her stomach was starting to turn. She would have to find somewhere else to stay tonight. She couldn’t sleep here, as much as she wanted to. She would have to find a hotel.
Maura stood up and worked the kinks out of her lower back from the unyielding waiting room chairs as two uniform officers hustled past her. Maura watched them push through the front doors of the lobby and run out into the darkness. Slowly, she drifted toward the wall of windows that overlooked the vacant lot next to the police station. The two officers that had run past her had joined the older constable that had gone out for a smoke. And he was carrying something. Maura pressed closer to the glass and for a moment she met the old cop’s eyes and she just knew.
Charlotte
A moment later Maura was racing through the front doors and running down the front steps to the small huddle of officers. Duane Carlton saw her coming and tilted his bundle so that Maura could see her child’s face.
“Momma,” Charlotte whispered.
Maura scooped Charlotte into her arms and, squeezing her daughter painfully tight, they collapsed together into the high grass. Maura breathed in her daughter’s scent, kissed her face and vowed to never let her out of her sight, much less her arms, even after the paramedics arrived and offered to examine her. Even then, Maura held her daughter’s tiny hand in a death grip.
“I’m so sorry, Charlotte.” Maura whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
In the harsh lights of the ambulance Charlotte’s green eyes were ringed with dark circles, and her skin looked like wax paper, but she still managed a small smile as she squeezed her mother’s hand.
“Love you, Mom.”
After seven plus hours on the road a beige Camry bumped over the edge of raised concrete that surrounded the parking lot of Big Bob’s Roadside Inn.
From behind the registration desk Johnny Lee Baker saw the headlights sweep across the near empty lot and pressed pause on the soft-core movie classic Caged Heat. He watched the man with the bandaged hands slid out of the passenger seat. As he pushed through the front door the dented cowbell clanged overhead.
“Help you?” Johnny asked.
Haden saw that the registration clerk hadn’t changed much in the last thirteen years. A little fatter, and what little hair he did have was now entirely grey.
“I think you can.” Haden said with a smile. “Its been a while since I’ve been here. Is room number three available?”
Nyah sat in the car and watched as Haden checked them in. Moses meanwhile, stewed in the backseat.
“Why would he want to come back here?” she asked.
“Who knows?” Moses replied. “Closure? I don’t get it.”
They watched as Haden stepped out of the small glass-fronted office dangling the key to room number three from his bandaged hand.
“Here we go,” Nyah said.
She pulled the car around and parked it facing the road. For the next hour while Nyah scouted their exit strategy and noted possible choke points, Haden flipped idly through the limited tv channels until he settled on watching a re-run of the Munsters through a flickering screen of snow.
It took the better part of the night, but just before dawn when Nyah had finally fallen asleep and Moses was nowhere to be found, it happened.
Haden stood and drifted toward the window and peered out into the empty lot. He knew she would come. It was only a matter of time. He scanned the darkness and the shifting shadows and there, standing just outside the pool of sickly yellow light he found what he was looking for.
Gloria Church.
The motel room door didn’t squeak. The hinges replaced and well oiled over the years. He was halfway across the parking lot before he saw that the ghost of his mother was not alone. More wraiths had gathered behind her, following Gloria across the road and onto the parking lot of Big Bob’s Roadside Inn.
“Hello Mother.” He said, his breath frosting in the chilly pre-dawn air.
She didn’t reply. She simply stared at him with her flat dark eyes. Her mouth was a pale pink slash across her moonlit face. She was still holding the belt, the tail of leather dangling beside her right leg, the fingers of her right hand flexing around the belt buckle.
“Have you come to repent?” she hissed.
Haden shook his head.
“Not today,” He said. “Today, I’ve come for you.”
A flicker of confusion rippled her features. Her jittery eyes scanned left and right. The wraiths that had gathered behind her began to retreat, as if sensing what was about to happen.
“Do you know what today is?” he asked her.
She stared at him blankly, her dull eyes pinned to him.
“Judgement day.”
Also by Patrick McNulty
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The Blood Singer_A Haden Church Supernatural Thriller Page 11
