by D V Wolfe
Bad Company
D.V. Wolfe
Lightning Strike Press
Copyright © 2020 D.V. Wolfe
All rights reserved
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Cover design by: Lightning Strike Press
Printed in the United States of America
For Jimbo and Glenn, who rode shotgun on this crazy train.
“Go to heaven for the climate, hell for the company.”
- Mark Twain
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
Books In This Series
JOIN THE HUNT!
Acknowledgment
About The Author
1
“Stop messing with your tie,” I muttered to Noah. The suit wasn’t a great fit but it was all that was available on the rack at the thrift store. “You’re going to blow the whole thing.”
“Bane, my tie has flamingos on it. If anything is going to be a red flag that we’re not actually FBI agents, it’s going to be this tie.”
“Probably not a red flag,” I said, trying to suppress a grin. “More of a pink, feathery flag.”
“Up yours,” Noah spat as I pulled Lucy into a parking space in front of the Garland Funeral Home. “Besides my tie, what about this truck? You do know that no FBI agent in the history of ever has driven around in a rust-bucket like this.”
“Hey,” I said, putting a hand on Lucy’s dashboard. “She can hear you. Besides, what about undercover?”
Noah rolled his eyes. “But we’re not undercover. We’re going to morgues and then funeral homes asking to look at dead bodies. That is the opposite of undercover.”
“Over-,” I started to say but paused at the withering glare on Noah’s face. He was tired and cranky and I knew he was looking forward to his afternoon catnap in the truck while we barrelled down the highway towards the next shit storm. “Well, it’s a good thing we parked her in a full lot around the corner every time, then isn’t it?”
“And who’s idea was that?” Noah asked. I could hear the smugness in his voice, but I wasn’t going to look at him and see it. I cut the engine and we looked up at the white clapboard building. They’d attempted to make it look like a normal house, but instead of armchairs and couches framed in the big picture window, there were coffins.
“Cozy spot,” I said.
“Geez, I wonder if during Halloween they have to decorate at all. Maybe they just prop the coffins up in the window and get people to lay in them and wave as the trick-or-treaters pass by and piss themselves.”
“You should ask,” I said. I put my hand on my door and I leaned back against the seat as the weight of the last few days caught up with me. It had been over a week since Sister Smile and Joel had disappeared from the trailer park in Sicily. At first, we thought she would have headed for Lancaster again or another old spot. But when Noah and I headed back to check the old campgrounds, they’d been cleared out by the local police. No sign of Sister Smile or Joel.
We went back to Rosetta’s after that. But, within a couple of days, I’d started getting antsy. There had been no unclaimed hunts or signs of Sister Smile from Walter, and no word from Festus. Nya called and I caught her up on everything that had happened and then she read me the riot act for going after the tribe and almost getting killed. She was still hung up on the demon front, trying to figure out what was coming next. I’d told her about the soul stone and the fact that I was now carrying around a homing beacon, supposedly, for the demon. She’d yelled some more about that and I knew it was probably not the best idea to keep it, but what was I supposed to do? I couldn’t leave it somewhere to be found and risk the red-eyed asshole killing whoever was in the proximity when he came for it. So, I just figured it was safest with me. Frankly, compared to finding Sister Smile and Joel, the demon with my death on the top of his wish list, was the least of my worries at the moment.
Then, three days ago, a report came in from Walter that bodies were turning up with parts missing in Oklahoma. The wounds around the missing parts had looked like they were chewed off, rather than cut. Walter couldn’t be sure of what exactly was in the area. But something was giving off a supernatural vibe. Normally, that would rule out Sister Smile, but since Sicily, I’d started to wonder. Maybe Sister Smile was a supernatural. I spent the entire drive back to Oklahoma being pissed at myself that we had left it in the first place since Sister Smile had been there the whole time. The thought that she might be leaving half-eaten corpses all over Oklahoma was enough to make me wonder what kind of lasting effects Mastick’s tricks and her desperation were having on her. Usually, when someone was a victim of the H.A.N.D. tribe, you didn’t even find the bones. They just disappeared. The cannibals weren’t wasteful, leaving parts of corpses lying around, well, unless they were at home in their tribe’s campground.
This was our third funeral home today. Jethro, Oklahoma, where three people had been chewed up. We’d already been to two other towns nearby, and though those corpses had been gnawed on, they weren’t the work of Sister Smile. It was too sloppy to be her.
Still, this had been the biggest lead we’d had so far in finding her. So, Noah and I were driving around Oklahoma, hoping to trip over her and Joel while we were visiting the cop shops, morgues, and funeral homes, examining the bodies. After getting run out of the first town, we decided we needed to camouflage ourselves, so, with a little help from some of Stacks’ connections, we now had fake FBI badges. With those and a stop at a thrift store in Tulsa, we were ready to roll. Well, almost. This moment at each of the stops so far had been the hardest. In a few minutes, we’d know if this was the work of Sister Smile. If it wasn’t, she was still out there, undetected, and I didn’t know what that would mean for Joel.
“Well, are we going to whip out some canvas and oils and paint a still art rendering of the front of the coffin house or are we going inside?” Noah asked.
I glanced at him and pushed my door open. “Well since you’re so gung-ho, why don’t you do the talking on this one?”
Noah went whiter, if that was possible, under his freckles. “What? I don’t know what to say.”
“Well, your sass sure says otherwise,” I muttered as we made our way down the sidewalk. Noah was grumbling under his breath and yanking at his tie as he proceeded me up the walk. The men's slacks I was wearing were pretty comfy and of course, I didn’t have to wear a tie. I wanted to rub it in, but I knew it would just reignite the fight we were having about him wearing a tie in the first place.
The three bodies in Jethro had been discovered two days ago and had already moved from the ‘city morgue’ to the one funeral home in town. Jethro was small and losing three bodies was like losing ten percent of their population. The police were baffled when we showed up saying we were FBI agents. They’d been hoping there was a reasonable explanation for the bodies that didn’t include the possibility that they might have a serial killer hiding amongst the other tw
enty-six or so townsfolk.
We walked up the wooden wheelchair ramp rather than the stairs and I knocked on the front door. We waited. Nothing. I pressed my ear to the door to see if I could hear movement inside. Silent as a cemetery. I tried the knob and the door swung open. There was a jingle bell attached to the inside of the doorknob that tinkled when I pulled it wide. The door opened onto a room that held a large desk, a battered dark couch, and two folding chairs. The picture window was to the left where the three ‘display’ coffins, basked in the warm sunlight.
“Can I help you?” I turned to see a round, elderly woman smiling at Noah and me. She looked like Betty Crocker’s maiden aunt and she was even wiping her hands on a flowery apron tied around her waist. She seemed to remember suddenly that she was in a funeral home and her expression turned to empathetic sadness. “My apologies, I’m Miriam Applegate. I’m so sorry for your loss.”
I shook my head, drawing my badge out of my back pocket, but Noah beat me to it, thrusting his badge at her and saying. “No, we’re agents looking into the masticat...mangled corpses…”
I cut him off. “We’re looking into the deaths of Millie Smith, Darren Hughes, and Vickie Sutherland. We were told at the morgue that their remains had been transferred here.”
The woman looked shocked, her eyes becoming too wide to fit behind her granny glasses perched on her button nose. “FBI? Do they think this...this wasn’t an accident?”
“An accident?” I asked, dumbfounded. “Is the funeral director or maybe a mortician available?”
The woman smiled and shook her head. “That would be me on both accounts. I was just making cookies for the memorial service tonight. Normally we’d have a viewing but under the circumstances…” There was a grim set to her mouth as she looked down the hallway behind her, before returning her attention to us. “It’s so strange. I was just in Red Dirt and Weston earlier this week. I give the Dixons and the Marsky families a hand at their funeral homes from time to time. Sometimes when bad luck hits, it hits the whole county.”
I nodded. “We saw the Dixons this morning and then the Marskys just before coming to Jethro. We’ll just take a look at the bodies you’ve got here and we’ll be on our way.”
She looked confused. “I was told that Darren was killed by a cougar while he was out hunting. Vickie was a jogger and someone’s rabid dog seems to have gotten her. And poor Millie was mulching her flower beds in her backyard when she fell into her wood chipper. All accidents. Just like those poor folks in Red Dirt and Weston.”
I nodded again. “Most likely,” I lied. “We just need to see them so we can finish our report and be on our way.”
Miriam didn’t look happy about this, but she sighed and turned towards the hallway. “I suppose if you need it for your report.”
Noah and I followed her down the hall. I peeked into the kitchen where, sure enough, hot cookies were resting on a cooling rack. As we passed the doorway, their sugary smell smacked us in the face. I hoped that Miriam had washed her hands and changed her clothes between fiddling with corpses and making cookies. At the back of the house, she led us down a set of rickety steps to the embalming room. The room was so cold that our breath rose in a fog around us as we reached the bottom of the stairs. The air was filled with the pickle-like odor of embalming fluid.
“Sorry about the temperature,” Miriam said softly. “This old house has trouble keeping the temperature down to a degree that’s capable of keeping the bodies from...overripening, so I had to install an industrial cooler.”
“Understandable,” I said, wanting to move this along. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but something in this room was making all the hairs at the back of my neck stand at attention. “Where are the bodies?”
“Over there,” Miriam said, her voice still soft as she pointed to the opposite wall. It was almost entirely taken up by what looked like a stainless steel cabinet stretching from floor to waist height. There were three drawers. Miriam was moving away from us, back towards the stairs. “I have the paperwork upstairs, I’ll be just a moment,” she said, her shuffling footfalls sounding on the bottom step.
“It’s a good thing there were only three bodies, right?” I asked, giving Miriam a small smile. When she looked confused, I motioned at the cabinet. “Because you only have three drawers.”
“Oh no,” she said, giving a strange little laugh. “As I’m sure you know, there wasn’t much left of them so I just have them in separate containers in the middle drawer. The drawer is bent. You’ll have to use that rubber mallet on the embalming table to get it open. Help yourself!” She continued up the stairs and Noah and I gave each other a look.
“Well that was creepy,” Noah whispered after Miriam’s steps had faded above us.
“I think she’s spent too much time alone down here,” I muttered. I looked at the drawer. “Open it.”
Noah’s lip curled back in disgust. “You open it.”
I rolled my eyes. “Aren’t you supposed to be my sidekick? The Robin to my Batman? When Batman tells Robin to do something, he does it.”
“I doubt Robin ever had to do the shit that you tell me to do,” Noah said. “Just open it, Bane.”
I took a breath of pickled air and picked up the black, rubber mallet. I pulled on the drawer. Nothing. I hit the warped metal front of the cabinet, next to the drawer, pulled and the drawer slid open. We both leaned over the drawer’s contents. Three, clear plastic, thirty-gallon tubs were in the long drawer, neatly labeled with the person’s name in black marker on masking tape stretched across the top.
“Where do you want to start?” I asked Noah, trying to ignore the unmistakable smell of decomposition that was leaking through the gaps between the plastic lids and the sides of the tubs.
“Dealer’s choice,” Noah said, repressing a gag. I reached in and popped the lid on Darren’s case at the front. Inside, there was Darren’s head, what looked like one of his shoulders with half his bicep still attached, his hip bones, and a pile of sludge at the bottom that looked like a combination of decomposing flesh and internal organs. Noah was openly gagging now. I turned to look behind me and found a box of white latex gloves. I snapped on a pair. “Take a couple of steps back, Noah.”
“Thanks, Bane,” Noah said, staggering back and giving a dry heave. I was doing my best to just focus on what we had to do so we could get out of there, but the sound of his dry heave had my stomach-churning. “I’ll be fine in a minute.”
“No you won’t,” I said. “I’ve seen you do this same routine twice already today. I just don’t want you to puke, because then I will.” I gritted my teeth and picked up Darren’s head. Darren must have been a big guy in real life. His head was like a bowling ball. The skin on his face, what was left of it, had deep scratches and two puncture wounds, one on either side of his temple. “We’re getting warmer,” I said. I held the head up for Noah to see and in the artificial light from the single fluorescent fixture above us, I saw Noah turn green. “They’re puncture wounds,” I said. I held the head close enough to study the holes. They were small, no bigger than the blade of an ice pick. For some of Sister Smile’s tribe, this was the preferred way to slaughter their victims. It wasn’t something I’d ever seen Sister Smile do for herself. From what I’d seen, and from the accounts of other hunters who’d witnessed dinner time with Sister Smile, her preferred way to cook her dinner was roasting them...alive.
Whoever had chowed down on Darren had taken the time to kill him and then chewed on him raw, which was also something I’d never seen or heard of Sister Smile doing. I tugged on Darren’s bottom jaw and stared in at his teeth. They were all there. A disappointing weight settled on my shoulders. Darren wasn’t killed by Sister Smile.
“Has he got all his teeth?” Noah asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Definitely not her.” I studied Darren’s jaw. “No teeth that look like they were jammed in his gum to replace the one she took either,” I said. I turned the head over to get a better look at the up
per jaw. “Darren actually had pretty good dental hygiene and ridiculously straight teeth. I think Darren might have even had braces at some point.”
Noah shook his head. “Money well spent. Next?”
I put Darren’s head back in the tub and clamped the lid shut on him. I pulled the drawer out further to check Vickie and Millie. The tubs held similar remains for both of them. All three heads were accounted for which had made identification rather easy. That was also something Sister Smile would have probably been careful of. We had hoped that being on the run and without a tribe would make her sloppy. Which would explain why the authorities kept finding remains, especially with heads for easy identification. I checked the other two tubs, but Vickie and Millie’s teeth were all accounted for. I put Millie’s head back in the container and stared down at her. “I don’t get it,” I said. “These three have definitely been chewed on, just like the others from this morning. The flesh is ragged and uneven where something’s teeth tore into it. But it’s not Sister Smile. It’s too sloppy. And she always takes a tooth from every victim.”
“I mean, it can’t be every victim,” Noah said. “We only have what, like thirty teeth in our heads? Has she killed more than…” He paused when he saw me nodding.
“She changes them out. She still keeps some of her original teeth because I mean, the others don’t have natural roots in her gums, so they’re not really strong enough to chew with.”
Noah visibly shivered. “And you found this out how?”
I turned away from Noah and studied the bins in front of me, reaching for the lid to Millie’s container. “Oh, it’s one of her favorite topics. When I went to her for help with pinpointing where the Rawhead was, she told me all about it. Of course, when I realized that she was checking out my teeth, things kind of went downhill from-” There was a snarl behind me and something heavy crashed down on my head. My vision went red and I fell forward, knocking Millie’s open container onto the floor. Her head bounced once and then rolled across the cracked concrete. The rest of her bones tumbled out, followed by the liquified flesh, fat, and organs that had been at the bottom. I was laying across the open drawer and I could feel the metal cabinet groaning under my weight. I turned my head, to see what had hit me while I struggled to get my feet under me.
