This time, he grabbed her by the wrist, yanked it taut. If the look in her eyes was any indication, the move caught her completely off guard.
“You can knock it off now.”
The young woman tugged and pulled, huffing out little grunts of displeasure. “Ow!” she finally said, panting. “You're hurting me!”
Hatcher reached for her face. Despite her bobbing and weaving to keep her head out of reach, he managed to hook a couple of fingers behind one of the gills. She let out a screech when he yanked, half of the scaly part of her face pulling off, flapping as it hung off her jaw.
He turned toward the elder woman, who didn't bother to look away this time. “Nice little scam you got going here.”
The Kermit woman said nothing. She narrowed her eyes and tightened her face and mouth into a scowl.
He switched his gaze back to the redhead. “Men are either scared out of their wits and run away, mortified by shame and guilt over the urges she brings out, or –and this probably applies to most – they have some very memorable sex. Who's going to refuse to pay after that? And I would lay money that many pay a lot more than they expected to after they're shown some iPhone footage they'd have a hard time explaining.”
The redhead tried to yank free of him again, failed. Hatcher raised her arm a bit, looking her in the eye. He wiggled a finger at her, then let go.
“What gave it away?” she said, rubbing her wrist.
“Seriously? Aside from the absurdity of the whole thing? Well, the nail polish for one. Poor country girls kept in a cave wouldn't have manicured nails. Or bikini waxes and perfume, for that matter. And, of course, there was the whole jump-right-to-the-carnal-knowledge part without so much as a spray of vomit or spin of the head.”
He looked over to the older woman. “The family-cult story was a nice touch, only it happened in Tomahawk, a good thirty minute drive from here, and in a cabin, not a cave. Pretty easy to find on Google. Throwing in that stuff about the Mohawks was smooth, though, I'll give you that. Hard to disprove. They were known for some nasty stuff, and once a group is associated with one bad thing, people are quick to believe anything about them.”
“Yes, yes, you've proved how clever you are, Mr Hatcher. Congratulations. I held up my end of the bargain, it's time you held up yours. We'll take the rest of that money.”
“How do you figure?”
“I agreed to take you to see my daughter. I told you about the family lore. I never claimed she was actually possessed by anything.”
“Oh, right. Well, even if I were to go along and pretend that's all you said, there's no way in hell this is your daughter. No pun intended.”
The woman pursed her lips but said nothing.
“I'm sorry, but you don't have red hair or this skin type. Neither do any of your sons. And a body like hers came from swimming in a totally different gene pool. What did you do, find her by trolling escort services? Ask if they had anyone with a girl-next-door look, sexy but innocent? I guess the pitch was easy. How'd you like to earn a few grand a trick out in Cobbler's Hollow rather than a few hundred in Louisville.”
“You are a very annoying man, Mr Hatcher.”
“So I've been told. What I really want to know is, how did you get my private email and cell phone number? And who gave you my home address?”
“I have no idea what you're talking about. Don't think I'm going to let you change the subject. We were discussing the amount of money you still owe. I think it's time you pay up. It's not like you don't have it on you.”
Dunham laid his torch on the cavern floor and took a step closer. This was obviously the moment he'd been waiting for. “Hand it over, asshole.”
Horace stayed where he was, but Grady moved a bit to the side so that the three of them formed a rough triangle around him. The mother stood back, looking like someone mildly irritated that she should have to go through so much trouble for so little money.
“I don't think so.”
The three brothers exchanged glances, then Dunham said, “You really think you can take all three of us? Isn't one of us don't have fifty pounds on you.”
Hatcher nodded. “More like eighty. Let me ask you something. Why do you think they have a super-heavyweight division in mixed martial arts?”
More glances, but no one said anything.
“I'll give you a hint – it's not because those guys were winning all the heavyweight bouts.”
“You tryin' to tell me size doesn't matter?” Dunham said. The others chuckled at that.
“No, I'm telling you it matters a lot. I'll share something with you. True story. This Army doc was giving me a physical and he made a comment about how I was on the large end of acceptable for SF duty. So I asked why that was, why so many special-forces guys were small compared to, like, a college football team. He said it was because of the way the human body was made.”
Hatcher flicked his gaze from one to another, assessing. They were all listening, casting indecisive glances. Two of them looked to be breathing through their mouths. Listening meant thinking, or what passed for it with this type, and thinking meant doubt. Doubt was a weapon.
“You see, it turns out there is an optimum size for the human physique. Has to do with gravity more than anything else. As height is squared, volume is cubed. Past a certain point of physiological optimality, you get diminishing returns. Too much effort to carry the extra weight on a large frame, too much energy required to pump all that blood so far. It limits the body's versatility, and versatility is the key to combat. Bigger you are, the more of a problem it becomes. You have to keep in really, really good shape to make up for it, and even then you can be at a disadvantage in some circumstances. The bigger you are, the more of a disadvantage.”
Dunham arched his back, stood a little taller. “Is that so? Well, I think you're full of shit, trying to talk your way out of this with that smart-ass mouth of yours. And you're forgetting, there's three of us, dipshit.”
“Oh, I haven't forgot. I'm still trying to figure out which of you is the ass-faced ugliest. Of course, you take the prize for dumbest, hands down. You're probably used to that, but given the competition here, it's still quite an accomplishment.”
The man tensed, arms and shoulders bowing. Hatcher saw his lip quiver, his fist clench and unclench. Noted the moment his eyes tightened, caught the micro-change in his expression as his facial muscles shifted.
And then the man lunged, arms shooting forward, hands set to grasp, aimed at taking hold of Hatcher's neck. Hatcher had figured that was one of the two most likely moves, and the preferred one. He pushed off his rear foot and dropped into a thrust, dipping beneath the grasping hands, bursting forward and launching a straight right square into the man's solar plexus.
The air left the man's lungs with an oof! as Hatcher's fist bounced off. Now came the trickier part. Hatcher sunk lower and rammed an elbow off the inside of the man's thigh, driving the point of it between the muscles. Dunham started to double over and flounder forward at an angle. Hatcher slid to the side and hooked both hands behind the man's neck. He yanked with as much leverage as he could muster.
The momentum propelled the man headlong several stumbling feet, his skull smashing dead-on into the face of his brother Horace, who was caught in a full sprint, charging in.
The wet crack of bone resounded, amplified by the shape of the cave. The redhead gasped, the mother's eyes pied, and Grady made a face like someone had just kicked him in the nuts. Even Hatcher winced at the sound.
After the echoes had faded, Hatcher looked at the last brother standing. “Before you decide you have to be a man and salvage the family honor or whatever, let's be honest. You've never been in a real fight in your life. You had two older brothers the size of post oaks running interference for you, and you grew even bigger. Now, if I was able to read your brothers so well that I knew who would make the first move an
d how far behind the other would be, how do you think it's going to end if it's just you and me? Trust me, sport, you'd much rather suffer the ass-kicking your mother's going to give you than the one I will.”
Grady shifted his weight from one foot to the other uncertainly, looking over to his mother, then back to Hatcher, then back to his mother again.
“Oh, go on,” she said. “Get out of here. Two sons lumped on the ground is enough.”
The boy didn't need to hear it twice. He swallowed hard, nodded, then scampered out of the cave.
“The sheriff is a cousin,” the woman said after her son's footfalls faded into the distance. “Several times removed, but blood is blood.” She glanced down at her two sons. One was on his back, completely out of it, arms lazily alligatoring near his chest. The other was on his face, out cold. A small trickle of red leaking from beneath his head. “You'll likely get in more trouble than we will.”
“I have no interest in turning you in. I just want to know who gave you my name and private information. That's the only reason I'm here.”
“In that case, I don't know what to tell you. I don't even understand the question. You contacted me, remember?”
Hatcher studied her for tells. Eye movement, hooding of the lids, dipping of the head. Hand gestures caused by subconscious concerns regarding her truthfulness. Nothing. She simply stared at him, a blank, disapproving look on her face.
“Sounds to me like you've come a long way for nothing, Mr Hatcher. Unless you enjoy unnecessary violence.”
He looked over to the redhead. This had started with a text, telling him to check his email. The return number was blocked. That led him to the email in his inbox, no sender – an email address for him that hardly anyone knew – instructing him to cut open the cantaloupe in his refrigerator. Inside the cantaloupe was a postcard. The postcard had a phone number and a message in neat script: Ask for a private session with the Devil's Consort.
Below the message was a single word.
Hatcher thought of that word as he looked at the redhead. She was kneeling, only partly visible, half in the light.
“Can somebody please get me out of this damn cuff?” she said.
Hatcher hesitated, then thought, what the hell. “GLASYALABOLAS.”
The redhead gave him a funny look, and started to speak, but her body snapped straight before anything came out. She shot off the ground and stopped; rigid, floating, tethered by the chain latched to her wrist.
“Oh my God!” The Kermit woman's hands shot to her mouth and she tottered back on her heels.
“Get out of here,” Hatcher said.
The redhead looked at Hatcher, eyes at first confused, then pleading, but before either spoke she was sucked back into the shadows. A whump, deep and windy, like a tanker of naphtha catching fire, sent a jolt through the cave. The rattle of the chain dropping to the floor resounded off the walls. The scream that followed it was so sharp it hurt Hatcher's ears.
The next sound he heard was a breath. The sudden stench almost made him retch.
Hatcher angled his head toward the Kermit woman, not taking his eyes off the shadows. “I said, get out of here! Your boys will be fine! Go!”
The woman mumbled something incoherent, hand covering her mouth, tripping as she backed away. Within a few seconds, she was out of sight, wrapped in the night.
A shape three times the size of the girl moved in the darkness. Hatcher heard another breath. A sharp, deep snort, like the puffing of a bull.
“I, uh, got your message,” Hatcher said, because he couldn't think of anything else to say.
The shape in the shadows let out a sound, the creaking of a sinking ship about to implode. Then it walked out into the uneven light. It moved faster than Hatcher could react, but it didn't seem to be rushing. It seemed, if anything, to be taking its time. But its time and Hatcher's were obviously two different things.
With a smooth motion Hatcher barely glimpsed, it caught him beneath his jaw in the V of its taloned hand and lifted him off the ground.
The creature elevated him several feet and held him that way, eyes leveled toward his. It had a face that was vaguely canine, but one stretched over the massive skull of a something like a buffalo. Two horns spiraled from the sides of its head. Every inch of it seemed to be solid muscle, stuffed into the well-oiled skin of a reptile. An enormous pair of leathery wings stretched out and retracted behind it.
The pressure building in his head was unbearable.
“Okay,” Hatcher said, coughing each word. “Maybe it wasn't your message.”
Red serpent eyes, slits for pupils. The thing regarded him with an annoyed curiosity, barely inches away. It pulled Hatcher's face in close, pinching it. It parted its lips, and Hatcher thought it was about to take a bite out of him when it spoke two gargling words, its breath hissing out, practically singeing Hatcher's eyeballs.
Sahara. Doyle.
It looked Hatcher over again, eyeing one side of his face, then the other, then it pitched him onto the cavern floor with a flick of its arm and turned away. Hatcher landed squarely on his ass between the two Kermit brothers.
“That all you got?” Hatcher said, getting to one knee and rubbing his throat.
The creature stopped just as it reached the edge of shadows. It cast a half glance back over its shoulder and its mouth stretched into what looked unmistakably to Hatcher like a smile. Then it stepped into the dark.
There was another sound of air violently consumed by flame, another wave of putrid odor. Hatcher heard a scrape, a shuffle. A pale hand emerged, followed by red hair and blinking blue eyes. She stopped halfway into the light, crawling on all fours, and looked at him.
“What just happened?” she asked.
Hatcher pushed himself off the floor, managed to stand. He scanned the cave with a new perspective. Horace groaned at his feet, head lolling. Dunham was still out.
“Well,” he said, massaging his neck. “For starters, I'm gonna venture at least some of what Mrs Kermit tells people about this place is true.”
Chapter 2
When Hatcher emerged from the woods, picking thorns from his jeans, Amy was leaning against the rental car, arms crossed in a way that framed her breasts, one foot cocked back against the tire. It was a desolate stretch of byway, but the interior lights of the Range Rover were bright, and the headlights reflecting off the rear of the pick-up in front were even brighter.
“Took you long enough,” she said. “So, what did the 'devil' have to say this time?”
“Other than being generally thrilled with the job they're doing in DC, nothing much.” She pushed off and reached her hands out. He took them. “Another dead-end, then. Big surprise.”
“I wouldn't say it was a complete waste.” He hadn't told her about the chain of events that had led them there. He'd just mentioned a lead, let her think it came by email. Which was, he convinced himself, partly true. He kept the details to himself, because he had to stay focused. She was still a cop, badge or no, and she'd have become obsessed with finding out who'd broken into their house, would have lost sight of the big picture.
If there was one thing he didn't want, it was her losing sight of the big picture.
She leaned forward to get a better look, then moved in closer and touched his neck. “You're hurt.”
“Just some bruising.”
“You didn't hospitalize any of those boys, did you?”
He considered the question. “Does a trip to the ER count?”
She gave him that look he'd come to know so well in the last year and change, the one where she cocked her head and tightened her eyes and set her mouth just so. It was a look that simultaneously made him feel like a child about to be dressed-down and a beast that wanted to rip her clothes off and run his mouth over her body.
“You can't go around beating up every fraud out there who does
n't come through.”
“That's a bit of an exaggeration. Most of them have been women. You know I only slap them around some.”
She shook her head then tilted her head up to kiss him. “What am I going to do with you, Hatcher?”
Before he could think of a way to respond, she pulled away and circled around to the driver's side. “You can tell me all about it on the way back to the hotel.”
A few miles down the road she said, “And that's it?”
“That's it. I left them in front of the cave. Only one of them couldn't walk. The other was confused and kept saying he had a headache. I figured the deposit I sent would cover the doctor bills.”
“So, let me get this straight... this redheaded prostitute with the huge rack posing as the daughter was completely naked? The whole time? And trying to get you to have sex with her?”
“I think you're missing the point. And when did I say anything about her rack?”
“Missing the point. Ha!”
“Can we try to keep the focus on the new lead, just for a moment?”
Amy sighed, adjusted the rear-view mirror. “You mean, the name this demon spit out?”
“Yes. At least, I think it was a name.”
“And what was it? You didn't say.”
“It sounded like Sahara Doyle.”
A burst of air whiffled through her lips.
“What's so funny?” he said.
“You. You and that dry sense of humor.”
“I don't get it.”
“Are you serious? That's really what he said?”
Hatcher looked at the dashboard, replayed what happened. “I think so.”
“And you don't think that's funny? Don't you know who Sahara Doyle is?”
“Should I?”
“Uh, she's only like the most famous psychic in the country. She's got that show on the Supernatural Channel? She used to be on Oprah all the time. And CNN.”
The Angel of the Abyss Page 2
