Starling (Southern Watch Book 6)

by Robert J. Crane

  “I reckon someone needs to call Benny and tell him to whistle up those boys from the fire department before the whole woods burns down,” Reeve said, marshaling his thoughts. The smoke was getting heavy. “And the reason we’re all standing around is because Arch just slayed the biggest goddamned demon ever.” He caught motion out of the corner of his eye and turned to see Hendricks and Duncan both shaking their heads. Guthrie’s shoulders were shaking with silent mirth. “That wasn’t …? Fuuuckk.”

  “There’s a lot bigger stuff out there than fire sloths,” Duncan said. “But hopefully not around here.”

  “That thing,” Reeve said, gesturing to where it had stood, and where now the grass still showed the churned-up impression of its feet in the dust, “it had a bigass scratch down the side of it, like a scar. You don’t reckon it got in a fight with something bigger?”

  Duncan just stared at him. “I hope not. You know, for your sake.”

  “Shit,” Reeve said, and shook it off. “Someone go call Benny. Get the fire engine out here.”

  “Go pee on the flames, Arch,” Mary said. “Settle it all out before they get here.”

  Arch just pursed his lips. “I don’t believe that’ll do what you suggest it will.” At least he wasn’t running off in shame or something. Reeve damned sure would have, but then, he didn’t have Arch’s physique. Then again, maybe he wouldn’t have bothered either, because people probably would have averted their eyes to avoid his old ass rather than looking. Except for Mary. She seemed like she still might have looked anyway, just out of curiosity.

  *

  Erin was already on her way up the hill, dialing Benny Binion on the phone. When he answered, she said, “I need you to roust the volunteer fire department.”

  Benny sounded like he was in a wind tunnel. “What’s that, Erin?”

  She had a fair amount of noise to overcome herself, what with another house coming crashing down next to her, sending ashes and embers into the air. The wind caught some of them and sent them her way, and she scrambled up the hill as the ground behind her caught them, sparking a few little patches to light up. “I said I need the fire department, Benny. Right fucking quick, because Whistling Poons is burning. And don’t text ’em either; I want you to call Marty Ferrell—he’s the captain. His number’s on the call sheet next to your desk, and he always answers or calls back within five minutes.”

  “I’m surprised the fire department ain’t left town,” Benny said, papers rustling in the background of the call.

  Erin was sweating, the damned flames overcoming the chill of the day. Shit, she was sweating, and she smelled like wood smoke from all those burning timbers. “Thankfully they ain’t, because we need ’em right now in a bad way.”

  “I’ll get right up on that, Erin,” Benny said, and hung up.

  A shadow moved in the smoke, and it took Erin a few seconds to distinguish who it was. At first she thought it was probably Guthrie, dedicated to hounding her to the ends of the goddamned earth, but no, a few seconds later Duncan emerged, the black smoke streaming off him like he was in danger of lighting up like a match himself. He picked his way up the hillside past patches of flaming weeds and came to lean on the car next to her, as casually as an OOC probably could. Or at least as casually as Duncan could, which was to say not fucking casual at all.

  “What’s up?” Erin asked, eyeing him with a due amount of suspicion.

  “Not much,” he said. “What’s up with you?”

  “Chaos,” she said. “Chaos is up with me.”

  “It has been a busy day.”

  “Day? It’s hardly noon.”

  “So it can only get better from here.” Duncan didn’t exactly smile, but here he came close.

  “I like your optimism,” she said. “Wish I shared it. But that’d buck the current trend real hard.”

  “Trends don’t stay trends forever,” he said. “I mean, look at parachute pants.”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “Most people would rather not look at parachute pants, but still, the point stands.”

  She settled back against the car next to him. “I just don’t see how it gets better from here, Duncan. I really don’t.”

  “That’s what most people probably said about parachute pants, and look. Now they’re gone.”

  She chuckled under her breath, less from the joke and more from the fact that he’d chosen this moment to try and be funny. She felt herself lighten up a degree or two. “What’s going on with Guthrie?”

  There was an almost imperceptible shift in Duncan’s posture, but Erin caught it. “You’ve been hanging out with her. You tell me.”

  “I haven’t known Guthrie for a century or ten or however long you two have been gal pals,” Erin said. “How long has it been, anyway?”

  “Long time.”

  “Cheerful, that answer.”

  “I don’t know that I recall,” Duncan said. “But you’re right: it’s been a spell, as you might say around here.”

  Erin stewed for a moment. “She’s changed.”

  Duncan didn’t move this time. “Yep.”

  “A lot.”

  “… Yep.”

  “… Better or worse?”

  Duncan didn’t stir, except to look at the burning houses as another load of timbers came crashing down with a terrible rumble and smoke billowed into the air. “Not for the better, I think. Not for the better at all.”

  *

  Hendricks wasn’t too excited to sit around and watch the woods burn and the framed houses collapse, but that was what he was doing, because every other idiot seemed to be doing exactly the same. Besides, the frames had done most of their collapsing now, and the wind was such that they weren’t getting a face full of smoke anymore. Points for that.

  Still, these sit-and-waits were growing kinda old, because they seemed to be happening all the time lately. When he’d first gotten here, he could have spent whole days in his motel room, catching some HBO between the various shitshows of demon activity that cropped up in a hotspot like this. Westworld was a favorite, when he caught those reruns.

  Now, he’d be lucky if he could get through half an episode of Veep before something fucking broke loose. At least nothing had happened while he was pounding Starling’s vag. Yet. Given the pace at which this shit was picking up, though, he’d be balls deep in her and get a call, soon.

  Fortunately, he already had a plan for that: ignore the hell out of it and bust his nut. If things got serious, there was always time to join in later, after all, and he wasn’t going to be much use to the watch if he was tripping over his own boner and readjusting for blue balls, was he? That was how he justified this pre-made decision in his head.

  “Howdy there,” someone said, sidling up to his elbow. Hendricks looked back to see Arch’s preacher standing there, smiling politely—maybe more than politely, for all he knew.

  This was the second shitty thing about the stand-and-wait shit. Sometimes you could get into a real good conversation, like he had last week with that Sam Allen guy about the heyday of the WWE Attitude era—before the poor dumb bastard had gotten chopped to pieces.

  And others, you’d get trapped nodding as Casey Meacham spent twenty fucking hours regaling you with personal reviews of all the sex toys he had tried out in the last month. Hendricks had eventually called Arch over on that one, and when that didn’t dissuade Casey, he’d summoned over Guthrie. That hadn’t stopped the taxidermist either, but it had given Hendricks cover to bail the fuck out and leave those two holding the bag.

  “Howdy back,” Hendricks said, wondering why the preacher was talking to him. He was immediately suspicious, of course, because his natural belief was that a man in a collar like Jones’s wasn’t truly happy unless he was inflicting his religion on someone else, especially a perceived heathen like Hendricks.

  Jones was quiet for a second, keeping his smile on as he worked himself up to talking out what was on his mind. He looked sincere, but looks were deceiving
. After all, Erin hadn’t looked like a crazy ex-girlfriend when he’d first met her, but here she was. “Have you talked to Arch lately?”

  Hendricks almost let out a sigh of relief. “Not in what you’d call detail.”

  “Mmhm,” Jones said. “He’s been avoiding heart to hearts lately.” The pastor looked around for Arch, and, finding him some distance away, now covered in someone’s flannel sweatshirt—inadequately—from the waist down, went on. “I don’t think he’s in a good place.”

  “Speaking from experience,” Hendricks said, watching the big man try to knot the flannel sleeves to cover his genitals, “losing a wife to demons ain’t the sort of shit you just get over, Reverend.” He’d have been better off just tying them around it, like a fucking bow on a present.

  “You lost a wife to demons?” Jones asked, crossing one arm over his body and propping the other up on it, fingers resting just below his lips.

  “Once in life, and over and over again in my dreams for years afterward,” Hendricks said.

  Jones seemed to look him over as if trying to see something he might have missed before. “I was going to say you seem to have adjusted, but … given what you’ve devoted your life to, I don’t reckon you have, have you?”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” Hendricks said airily. “This life of killing demons seems to fit me right to a T. Hopeless causes keep me busy, you know.”

  “I don’t think Arch is a hopeless cause,” Jones said. “He’s a good man, and he deserves better than to see his wife die and his town follow after.”

  “Well, what we deserve is a funny thing, Rev,” Hendricks said. “I feel like I deserve a blowjob, but if the woman I feel like I deserve it from doesn’t feel the same, I ain’t getting one, am I?”

  Jones didn’t flinch from Hendricks’s analogy, but he did put on a disapproving frown. “You think you’re going to shock me by talking like that, cowboy? I was a Navy chaplain in Vietnam. I’ve heard shit that’d turn you whiter than a jug of milk, boy.”

  Hendricks let out a loud guffaw. “Well, I was in the Sandbox for a couple years and been in this particular fight for more, so … I think my days of paling at the sight and sound of horrible things? Probably over.”

  “I’m sure you and I, we could get into a pissing contest all day long, the sort of thing that’d please nobody but maybe Casey, and nothing’d get done about Arch and his state of mind.” Jones looked over at Arch. “I’m concerned about him as a friend. I thought maybe you were too.”

  Hendricks looked over at Arch again, and, sure enough, he’d just given up, leaving the sleeves of that flannel knotted in front of his junk. It was doing a pretty half-ass job of covering him up, and Hendricks figured a couple weeks ago, that would have mattered to the big deputy. A lot. But his give-a-fuck was clearly busted, and that was … worrying. Hell, it’d been the reason Hendricks had been trying to sidle his way into a conversation with the man for a couple weeks now, not that his strategy was working. “Yeah, I’m worried,” Hendricks said. “Maybe I’ll just … head on over and see if I can bring something up.” And he started to do just that, working his way, casually, through the scrum of locals, toward the man who was wearing a flannel shirt like some kind of fucked-up kilt to keep his dick from swinging out in the breeze.

  *

  Arch wasn’t real pleased about standing around with his twig and huckleberries dangling out in the breeze, but what else was there to do? They were sitting around watching the Whistling Pines development burning its way to the ground, and the woods were lighting off now too. It wasn’t looking too good, in his opinion, but he wasn’t going to head back to town while everyone else was sitting here. He hadn’t forgotten that there were still packs of those shadowcats out here, and the last thing he wanted was to hear about everybody else getting into a fight with those things while he was off putting some clothes back on.

  The smoke shifted directions with the wind, and Arch waved a hand in front of his face like someone had cut the cheese. It didn’t do much against the smoke, but there wasn’t too much heading his way—yet. There sure was a whole lot to be had though, black clouds piping toward the sky. Nobody seemed real sure about what to do save for just hope the cavalry would be arriving soon in the form of a fire truck.

  Hendricks sauntered his way over, a little too casually. “Casual” was tough for a man dressed like Hendricks was to pull off, which was maybe why he failed. Something in the train of that long black coat didn’t quite cover the intent within his movements. Either way, a few seconds later the man was standing near him, somber, and not too terribly comfortable-looking, neither.

  “Thanks for, uh … saving my life back there,” Hendricks said. Sounded like a tough thing for him to cough up.

  “No big deal,” Arch replied.

  “Well, I almost got burned to death by a demon the size of one of those delivery vans, so … it was a big deal to me.” Hendricks kicked at the ground with one of his boots, stirring up some dust in the process.

  “Anyone would have done the same.” Arch adjusted his flannel shirt. The breeze kept disturbing it, leaving him feeling even more exposed. The sleeves, knotted as they were, didn’t do squat.

  “No,” Hendricks said, quiet and measured, “no one else would have jumped in front of a fire sloth bellowing flames the way a virgin spits out a mouthful of cum, okay?” He quieted for a second. “And damned sure no one else who would have survived it like they’d just gotten a little hairspray on them or something.”

  Arch froze, wondering if that was why he was feeling a little stiffer in the pubic hair. Nah, that had to be the heat. “Don’t mention it,” he said.

  “Well, I feel obliged to mention it,” Hendricks said, “because—like I said—you saved my life. And if you’d been wrong about that thing breathing hellfire, you’d have died in the process.”

  Arch shrugged. “I’ve been through hellfire before. Gideon. It was pretty hot up in old Ygrusibas too.”

  “Yeah, lucky you remembered how those turned out,” Hendricks said dryly. “What amazing presence of mind you had.”

  Arch frowned at him. “You trying to say something?”

  Hendricks looked ready to argue for a moment, and then backed off. “Nah. Look … I been where you been, Arch. You know that. When Renee died—”

  Arch cleared his throat. “We don’t need to be talking about this right now—”

  “Dammit, Arch,” Hendricks said, “I’m the one guy here who would understand what you’re going through. Lost a wife to demons? Boom. I’m the guy.”

  Arch stood there, looking down at him, straight-backed. “Sheriff Reeve lost his wife to demons too. Reckon the grief’s fresh for him as well. Maybe you ought to go spend this counseling time with him.”

  Hendricks waved a hand back over his shoulder dismissively. “Arch, I haven’t been hunting demons since I came into this town with Reeve. Shit, I barely know the man, and I’m kinda answering to him right now, like a new CO that you follow because your buddy said he’s good.” He lowered his voice, getting serious. “We’ve been in this since the beginning, and I’d think that’d have bought me a little credibility with you. We’ve been in the trenches together, and I’m telling you—I know what you’re feeling. That reckless desire to jump in front of a fire sloth? To have it maybe be over? Done that. Several times. And only by the grace of—well, whatever you believe in—and maybe the skin of my damned teeth am I here to talk to you now.” He settled down. “Don’t keep shoving it all down inside you, okay?”

  “I’m fine,” Arch said, crossing his arms in front of him. “I’m sure you went through a real struggle. And I can’t pretend it’s been easy. But I’ve got this problem under control.”

  “Is that so?” Hendricks asked, not bothering to hide his doubt. “Doesn’t look like it from here, pal.”

  “Well, maybe you’re a little myopic,” Arch said, feeling like he was getting near to thundering at the man. “You went through the grief alone, believin
g in nothing but yourself. That ain’t me.”

  Hendricks’s reply was devoid of his usual insolence: “You mean because of your Lord?” He sounded somber, almost sad.

  “I do,” Arch said, staring at him, looking for a sign of that sass. He was feeling pretty close to snapping at the man, sick up to the ears of everything he’d said in this vein. “It’s different for me than for you. I’ve got this. I can do all things through Christ my Lord, who strengthens me.”

  Hendricks didn’t look like he was feeling particularly argumentative about it, but he did open his mouth to reply. A few different ghosts of emotions passed behind his eyes, but all that came out his lips was, “I hope you do. For her sake … and yours.” Which was more than Arch might have expected, really.

  And with that, the cowboy wandered off, on up the hill back toward the road.

  *

  “I’ll tell you,” Casey said, back at the wheel as he steered the big truck up the path out of the quarry, “it feels like they don’t want men to be men anymore. Like, I get it, there’s bad parts of being a dude, historically speaking.” He was waving a hand, and Brian didn’t really care, listening only because he was stoned enough that Casey’s diatribes were vaguely interesting. “I mean, we do raping like 99 times more than women do. That’s bad. Some of us got a real stupid head on our shoulders, and we’re too aggressive, and—”

  Brian just nodded. The sins of man were plain to him too, like the nose on his face. Which he was totally looking at right now. He’d once heard that the brain filtered out the sight of the nose most of the time, for some reason or another. Made sense to him, because looking down the side of it was kind of trippy now that he couldn’t seem to look away.

  “—anyway, my point is, there’s bad. No doubt. But there’s good, too! You know? And it feels like all of it, good and bad, is just trying to get stamped out, baby and bathwater, you know? Crazy stuff. Like that law that says you can’t fire a gun while giving your partner an orgasm—”