by J. S. Bailey
Bobby drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “It wasn’t Graham’s fault, though. Thane made him do it.”
“Thane can’t control minds. Remember?”
“Thank goodness for that. Let’s just get this over with.”
They got out of the Nissan and trudged up to the small, two-story house Bobby had first visited back in July. It had a much friendlier appearance now that the windows weren’t boarded over and the flowerbeds had been landscaped, though all the plants growing in them were now dead from the cold.
Lupe opened the door before they could knock. Her long black hair was brushed out straight today and she wore purple leggings and a sky-blue tunic sweater the same style as Carly’s. Apparently she and Carly liked to shop at the same stores.
Lupe’s eyes were bloodshot. “I’m glad you could come,” she said in a low voice, giving Carly and then Bobby a hug. “Come in, I made hot chocolate.”
They walked past a Christmas tree listing to one side from an uneven distribution of ornaments and into the aqua- and coral-themed kitchen. Randy was conspicuously absent.
Lupe had already lined up mugs on the counter and started pouring hot chocolate into each of them from a saucepan that had been steaming on the stove. Her jaw was clenched tight, and her hands shook when she set the saucepan down.
“Are you going to be okay?” Carly asked, gingerly taking a steaming mug for herself.
Tears sprang into Lupe’s eyes. “I’m a terrible person! After what Graham did to Randy…what he did to us…making me betray Randy and then him tying Randy up in a barn and slicing him open…” Her voice took on a hard tone. “I’m glad he’s dead.”
No one said anything for several moments. Bobby sipped tentatively at the hot chocolate, trying not to burn his tongue.
The ceiling creaked, and heavy footsteps moved toward the unseen stairwell at the back of the house, making Bobby smirk as he remembered the day he and Randy met back in July. Bobby had acted jumpier than a frightened squirrel upon entering Randy’s house for the first time, thinking that the man was some kind of killer.
Funny, how perceptions could change.
Randy padded into the kitchen in sock feet, wearing one of his customary black skull t-shirts and black jeans, which were missing the chain he usually had attached to them. A Santa hat was perched at an angle atop his shaggy, coffee-colored hair.
Bobby immediately remembered that Randy and Lupe had invited him to a Christmas party at their house that was supposed to be held at five o’clock that evening.
And he still hadn’t gotten anyone gifts.
“And to think,” Randy said, “that I assumed my day off would be fun.”
“How’s the new job coming?” Bobby asked, not knowing what else to say. He’d never been very good at discussing hurtful matters, and he silently chided himself for his immaturity.
“I like it.” Randy gave a halfhearted shrug. “I never imagined myself collecting garbage for a living, but at least I’ll never have to worry about outsourcing. You’d be amazed to see what people throw away.”
“I’ll bet.”
Silence settled over the four of them. Bobby fidgeted in place. He didn’t see how his coming here could be of any help to Randy and Lupe. He just wasn’t good at this kind of thing. Carly had more experience with it, but she didn’t seem to have anything to say, either.
“So,” Bobby said. “Um.” His face grew hot, and he quickly took another sip of hot chocolate.
“The man of many words says it all again,” Randy said with a weak smile. He sank into one of the kitchen chairs and avoided eye contact with everyone. “I just think about how Graham took me in all those years ago when I didn’t have anywhere else to go. He didn’t have to do that. It was a dark time in my life, and I thank him for it despite his many, many flaws.”
Bobby remembered Randy saying something about mourning the person someone could have been rather than the person they were. “It was for the best,” Bobby said. “Him dying, I mean.” Graham had suffered the aneurysm shortly after being arrested for his attempt on Randy’s life and lost nearly all motor function. It was a terrible way for a person to live, regardless of what crimes they’d committed.
“Yeah.” Randy blinked and shook his head. “Did I tell you Lupe’s been teaching me Spanish?”
“No. Um, that’s great.” Randy, formerly blessed with the gift of Tongues, had lost his ability the previous summer after being healed by a man with demonic powers. Bobby had briefly lost his own ability, too, but Kevin Lyle, a former Servant blessed with the gift of Healing, had restored Bobby’s gift of Prophecy, unknowingly sacrificing his own powers in the act.
It hardly seemed fair. Bobby still wondered if there was a way by which Kevin and Randy might get their abilities back.
“It’s harder than I expected it would be,” Randy went on. “Mi casa es su casa. Uso el baño. Comí demasiadas pizzas.”
“Very nice,” Bobby said.
Carly threw her hands up into the air. “For crying out loud, listening to you two being awkward is making me feel awkward. Randy, we hate to be the bringers of more bad news, but Bobby says Thane appeared in his kitchen again a little while ago.”
Randy’s eyes grew round. “He did?”
Bobby nodded, feeling a little guilty that the issue had been brought up at all. He hadn’t wanted to pile more bad news on top of the news about Graham. “He wants me to turn myself over to him so he can kill me.”
“We always seem to deal with the nicest people, don’t we?” Randy sighed. “Have you thought about what you’re going to do?”
“Remember, he could be listening to us right now.”
Randy’s expression hardened. “I don’t care. I’m not going to live my whole life in fear of some little creep who thinks he can just wish harm upon anyone he wants.”
“His ‘wishing’ got Graham to put a couple bullets in you.”
“And I’m still here, right? So it’s all good.”
Bobby clenched his teeth. “For the time being. Thane is going to start killing people if I don’t turn myself over to him pronto. I thought I’d stop by Arbor Villa to negotiate with him, and he isn’t there anymore. None of the staff or residents remember him. It’s like he was a ghost.”
Randy rubbed at his chin. “If you don’t know where he is, why don’t you do your thing?”
“My thing?”
“Yes. Your thing.”
“Oh.” Bobby grinned. “That thing.”
CARLY, RANDY, and Lupe stayed in the kitchen while Bobby got comfortable on one of the living room couches. Sometimes he could glean a person’s location if he meditated hard enough. Thus far it had enabled him to save three abducted people, two of whom stood in the kitchen at that very moment.
Bobby closed his eyes. Okay. Let’s focus here.
Images tumbled around behind his eyelids. He caught flashes of Carly sitting in his living room armchair while he played her his own rendition of “Creep” by Radiohead on his baby blue Fender Stratocaster, Trish Gunson lying dead on Randy’s basement floor, waking up in the Domus and seeing his own mother for the first time in his memory…
He shook his head. No, no, no. Not these things. Thane. I need to find Thane.
A whisper intruded into his thoughts. Thane is going to kill you.
Then came the image of seeing Bobby’s lanky, baby-faced doppelganger standing in the hallway outside the meeting room door at St. Paul’s.
He’s going to kill you, and you’re too weak to stop him.
Bobby ground his teeth together as hard as he could. I need to find Thane!
An immense house took shape in his mind’s eye: a mansion, more like it. It nestled at the foot of wooded mountains, and Bobby got a hazy impression of white columns and gabled windows. He willed the image to become clearer so he might be able to pinpoint its exact location…
…and then his cell phone rang, making him flail like a fish on a deck.
The mansion vanished as reality returne
d.
Bobby fumbled his phone out of his pocket. His heart skipped a beat at the sight of the number on the screen.
Bradley was calling.
His hand shaking from having his concentration derailed so abruptly, Bobby accepted the call. “Hello?”
“Bobby? It’s…it’s Bradley. I guess you probably knew that already. I, um, can you come to Father Preston’s? It’s important.”
Bobby gave an instinctive nod even though Bradley couldn’t see it. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
CARLY, WHO seemed completely amazed to learn that Bobby had found someone to cleanse, stayed behind with Randy and Lupe to help them get ready for the Christmas party while Bobby broke a few more speed limits driving to the priest’s house. Apparently Frankie hadn’t mentioned anything to her about helping Bradley last night, which didn’t surprise him.
Bobby parked behind Father Preston’s car and shivered when he got out. The temperature had dropped a few degrees since he’d first set out that morning. One downside to living in Oregon as opposed to Southwest Ohio: the winters could be absolutely brutal compared to the mostly mild winters he’d been used to. Eleanor, Ohio hadn’t seen a blizzard since he was a baby.
He let himself inside Father Preston’s house without knocking and could hear two male voices conversing in the kitchen, one much more frantic than the other.
“You’ve got to cancel it!”
“I’ll do nothing of the sort. This conference is important to a lot of people.”
“Aren’t they calling for a snowstorm? That should be reason enough to cancel!”
Bobby stepped through the living room, which was decorated with paintings and models of sailboats and other maritime knickknacks, and into the kitchen, where Bradley and Father Preston stood on opposite sides of the table mid-argument. A platter of pancakes sat between them, uneaten.
Bradley’s face lit up at the sight of Bobby. “I know what happened!” he said.
Bobby narrowed his eyes, doing his best to ignore the black aura still pouring off the man like tar. It did seem to have lessened a few degrees from last night, though that might have been wishful thinking. “What happened?”
“The thing I overheard. The thing I couldn’t remember last night.”
Father Preston held up a hand, looking unusually grim. “Now Bradley, you can start at the beginning, same as you did with me.”
Bradley cleared his throat and swallowed. “Last night before Jess told me to go stand on the tracks, I was drinking at the bar.”
“The Pink Rooster?”
“No, a different one—Vern and Chuck threw me out after…never mind about that. I heard people talking in the booth behind me. They said…they said something about an assassination. At first that’s the only word I heard. It was loud in there and they were talking kind of low, but that’s not a regular word for people to be saying, so it just sort of stuck out at me.” Sweat gleamed on Bradley’s face. “Do you believe me?”
“I don’t have any reason not to.” Actually, Bobby did: this could simply be another instance of Bradley’s tormentor scrambling his thoughts as a distraction. “What else happened?”
Bradley nodded a few times as if rehearsing his memories before uttering them out loud. “I kept on listening after that. It was pretty hard to do with all the noise. I heard them say something about a conference, and about ministers.”
“Maybe they were talking about an assassination that happened at a conference of ministers somewhere.”
Father Preston gave Bobby a withering look. “No offense, Bobby, but have you been living under a rock? I’m taking part in the Interfaith Conference in Eugene this coming Saturday. Counting myself, there will be six ‘ministers’ speaking at the event.”
Bobby took a moment to digest that. “Oh.”
“You can understand Mr. Scholl’s concern?”
Bobby looked back and forth between the two men, his heart sinking. Was Father Preston really in danger of being harmed, or would someone else be the target of this so-called assassination attempt? “What am I supposed to do about it?” Bobby asked, hating the way his words came out. How could he deal with something else on top of Bradley and Thane?
Father Preston raised his eyebrows. “Nobody said you have to do anything. Not all of the world’s problems have to fall on your shoulders, you know.”
“Oh,” Bobby said again, his face flushing. “Maybe we should go to the police.”
Bradley started shaking his head before Bobby even finished his sentence. “I don’t know what I’d tell them.”
“Why not tell them exactly what you’ve told us?”
“I’ve got nothing for them to go on. I never saw who was talking in that booth. I—I sort of got scared and went home before I could overhear anything else. Their booth was in the opposite direction from the door so I didn’t pass it when I left.”
“Why didn’t you call the police then and there?”
Bradley’s eyes glistened. “I don’t know. I didn’t even think of it. I just thought, I knew I needed to get out of there. I didn’t want them to catch me listening in and kill me.”
“Does that bar have security cameras?”
“Like I’d know.”
Bobby could feel his stomach turning slow somersaults. “Bradley, we need to go to the police about this. If this bar you went to has cameras, they’ll be able to see who was in the booth and hopefully identify them before they can hurt anyone.”
Bradley looked like he was about to be sick, and the black aura in Bobby’s mind flared stronger for a moment. “Okay,” he said. Then, “I think I’m gonna throw up.”
BOBBY DROVE Bradley to the little police station in Hillsdale, Bradley enduring the journey with a plastic bucket sitting in his lap just in case he did in fact get sick. It was likely a combination of nerves about speaking to law enforcement and stress from demonic possession, so Bobby couldn’t blame him. His stomach didn’t feel so great right now, either.
The police station sat on a quiet street next to the fire station, both of which appeared dead at this pre-noon hour.
“Are you going to be okay?” Bobby asked once he’d parked the car.
“I don’t know. I hope so. It’s getting hard to think again. I—I’m going to leave the bucket in here so they don’t think there’s something wrong with me.”
If the situation hadn’t been so dire, Bobby would have laughed. “Okay. Let’s go in.”
They got out of the car. Bobby stared at the red brick building that matched the fire station next door, frowning at how unimposing it all looked.
Then he drew in a deep breath and went through the door.
Bobby wasn’t sure what he’d expected before going inside—maybe sterile walls and tile in addition to a few Wanted posters tacked to the walls. He did not expect to see red and gold garland festooned around the rustic wooden pillars supporting the ceiling, nor did he expect a plank floor that creaked when he walked across it, like something fresh out of the 1800s.
If not for the glass window separating the lobby from the front desk and the large sign reading “Hillsdale Police Department” hanging on the wall, Bobby would have thought he’d walked into the wrong building by mistake.
Bradley didn’t seem to be nearly as surprised as Bobby at the rustic décor, but Bobby attributed that to the fact Bradley now had his eyes scrunched shut.
“Take it easy,” Bobby said to him as Bradley started to hyperventilate. “Everything is going to be fine.”
Bobby crossed the creaking floor and went to the window, through which he could see a more modern area filled with desks and computers. A uniformed woman sitting at the window smiled at him. “What can I do for you today?”
Bobby glanced back at Bradley, who stared longingly toward the door. “My friend and I…we think there’s going to be a crime committed soon in Eugene. Could we maybe sit down and talk?”
“OKAY,” SAID a portly, middle-aged officer whose badge read “L. Yancey.” �
��Talk.”
Bobby and Bradley had been taken not into an interrogation room, but an office that also had creaky plank flooring—Bobby was almost surprised the officer didn’t wear cowboy boots and a Stetson. Yancey propped a clipboard on his knee, prepared to take notes.
When Bradley didn’t say anything, Bobby nudged him. Bradley nervously cleared his throat. “I was at the bar last night, and—”
“Which bar?”
“Um…it was The Tipsy Scotsman over on—”
“I know where The Tipsy Scotsman is. Go on.”
Bradley wrung his hands together in his lap. Bobby could feel black tendrils prodding at his own mind to distract him from this quasi-interrogation, so he could only imagine what Bradley must be going through. “I overheard people talking. They said…I think they said they were going to kill someone at the Interfaith Conference.”
Yancey scribbled down something on his clipboard. “Could you describe these people?”
“Describe?”
Yancey let out an irritated huff. “Were these men, women? Young, old?”
“It was men. I couldn’t hear how old they were, though. The bar was too loud.”
“What precisely did they say?”
“I—I’m not sure. It was too loud. I heard them say something about an assassination. I wondered if maybe you could get security footage from the bar and see who it was and stop them before someone is killed.”
Yancey made no comment. “What specifically did they say that led you to believe they were planning an assassination attempt?”
“I don’t know. I only caught bits and pieces. Like I said, it was loud in there. I heard them say the word ‘assassination’ and I heard them mention the Interfaith Conference.”
Yancey met Bradley’s gaze with skepticism. “I assume you think these were hired killers.”
“Yeah. I guess.”
“Do you really think hired killers are going to throw that word around in public?”
“I don’t—”
“A Middle Eastern ruler survived an assassination attempt earlier this week. It was on the news.”
