Depths: Southern Watch #2 (16 page)

“No time?” Hendricks asked.

Arch looked back at him evenly, tried to keep from showing any irritation. He wasn’t really irritated at Hendricks, anyway. “No. Just wasn’t sure it was worth following up. Besides, until now it’s not like we’ve had a shortage of demons to chase.” He felt an urge to lean against his car, so he did, and then felt the water droplets resting there soak his shirt. He sighed. “Remember those demons that busted up my apartment?”

“Yeah,” Hendricks said.

“One of them was a woman who I’d arrested before, named Amanda Severson.” He tried to brush the water off his sleeve, but it was already soaked in. “I’ve got a last known address for her, just outside of town a ways. I figure we probably killed off all her roommates, if she had any—”

“But you don’t know for sure,” Hendricks said, and the cowboy was nodding. “Not a bad idea. Especially since we’re out of leads. If nothing else, we might be able to catch a demon and get a line on what’s going on around here.”

“See, that’s what I was wondering,” Arch said, nodding along, starting to feel like this might not be as desperate of an idea as he’d feared, “the demons, they’re social enough that they know what others are up to?”

“Some of them,” Hendricks said, and the cowboy made for the passenger door. “But hey, if nothing else, we’ll punch some more sulfur-stink tickets out of town, and that’s never bad, right?”

“Well, if it doesn’t get us closer to solving this problem, I’m not sure it’s the best use of our time.”

Hendricks seemed to think about that for a minute. “Well, let’s ask—” The cowboy’s head swiveled around, and it took Arch a second to realize he was looking around for someone. Someone with red hair who was nowhere in sight. Arch heard Hendricks swear and ignored it, just like always. What the cowboy said on a regular basis would have gotten Arch’s mouth slapped until his jaw was broken when he was a kid. “She does that all the damned time,” Hendricks said.

“Would have been nice to get a little direction from her,” Arch said. “Seems like she knows what’s going on here better than we do.”

Hendricks frowned. “Seems like a lot of people do. Doesn’t that bother you?”

Arch shrugged and headed around the front of the Explorer to the driver’s side. “Could be worse.”

“Oh?” Arch heard Hendricks say as he opened the door and got in the car, careful not to hit the door of the grey sedan parked next to the Explorer. It hadn’t been here when he’d driven up, he was pretty sure of that. “How so?” Hendricks asked.

“We could be as in the dark as my boss,” Arch said. “Or Erin.”
Or Alison,
he didn’t say. But he thought it.

* * *

Gideon was back in the motel. He was wheezing, lying on the bed, his gut out and heavy on him. It felt like it was squeezing his essence out from the sheer weight his midsection, but it felt like that all the time. The TV was on in the background, where some local weather forecaster was predicting more rain. Gideon thought about the sky on his drive back from Cleveland and didn’t exactly die of shock at that.

The feeling of what had happened to him on the overpass that afternoon was still lingering. He was too exhausted to do anything about it right now—like relive it for pleasure—but it was a kind of euphoric afterglow that he could get used to. His head was filled with lightness, and so was that spot in his chest where he imagined a heart might be if he’d had one.

He was still thinking ahead, though, reaching his feelers out. This feeling wouldn’t last, after all, and he’d need to be on to the next one soon enough. That was a problem, though, because he couldn’t feel the next one anywhere on the horizon. And he was trying. Stretching his mind out, expanding the radius.

There had to be something out there. Anything. A coronary. This was the south; weren’t people fat here? He knew he’d read that somewhere. Someone had to be dying of a heart attack soon.

He stretched his mind along toward the hospital, like fingers dancing over a bedspread trying to get to a nightstand just out of reach. He did finally feel it, could get a basic sense of the souls there, but there was nothing moving. He knew they were there, but that was it.

No one was dying.

He took a ragged breath and rolled to his side on the scratchy motel comforter. It smelled like stale cigarettes even though he was in a non-smoking room. It had never been dry like this in any of the cities he’d lived in. It had occasionally been like this in the days when he traveled between cities, back when he did it by bus or even horseback, a hundred years ago.

The problem was the damned county was just too sparsely populated. He didn’t know how many people were within his reach, but he knew the two biggest cities nearby, Knoxville and Chattanooga, were just too damned far away. They weren’t even close to within his grasp.

He felt the first throbbing of pain in his head as he pondered this possibility. He could hear a noise outside, the first sounds of rain starting to come down again. Gideon crossed to the window and looked out at the parking lot. The cop car was gone, for which he was thankful. The sole lamp illuminating the parking lot showed nothing but a flooded puddle over the entirety of the pavement.

Gideon narrowed his eyes as he looked at it, something scratching at the back of his mind. He let the curtain fall back into place and grabbed the convenience binder that some maid had left on the dresser. He opened it up to the local map that they’d thoughtfully enclosed on page five.

Gideon scanned over it until he found what he was looking for and started to crack a smile. Maybe. Just maybe. If that was really set up the way he thought it was, it would surely let him kill people. A whole lot of people. Maybe more than anything else he could devise, short of a nuclear bomb.

But first he’d need to take a car ride to see if what he was envisioning was even feasible.

* * *

Erin was back in her car because the rain was fucking coming down AGAIN. The THP was sorting shit out anyway, and that colonel was already off the scene, presumably to file a report with his superiors. Erin watched the wreckers moving the cars out one by one, like they were deconstructing twisted metal sculptures. She shuddered when she thought about this particular statuary represented.

The morgue wagons were loading up the last even now, and she could see the bodies going into the bags in the rain, the steady fall of water wetting the ones still under white sheets. Red spotted the white, like paint splashed on pure canvasses. It had been unnerving enough when they’d just been shapeless things, but now that they were being drenched, they were looking like corpses under sheets again.

Erin hadn’t seen any human dead bodies before. Until today, and suddenly she’d seen a mountain of them. The acrid taste of stomach acid reminding her she hadn’t eaten was coupled in her stomach with the rumbling, churning feeling of disquiet. Part of her wanted to leave, maybe run up to the gas station or the diner up the ramp on Old Jackson Highway and satiate it.

But that other part of her—the one that remembered she was in the middle of her big chance—that part kept her ass anchored to the seat of the patrol car.

She tried not to think about Hendricks and the redhead, but it was defying her ability to keep it out. Like she was slamming the door on it in her head, but the thought was some abusive gorilla-sized offender, and it kept breaking though.

Well, okay, it wasn’t really like that, but it wasn’t good.

The thing that itched her the worst of all was that even though she knew she’d screwed up with Hendricks, even though she’d had it out with him, told him to go fuck himself, and was certain—to a T—that she’d massively fucked up by ever taking up with the cowboy—it STILL bothered her that he was wandering around a crime scene with some strange redhead.

And Arch. What the fuck was going on with him? Wasn’t he supposed to be on patrol somewhere?

Erin was steaming and trying to figure out whether to just say fuck it and get something to eat when the radio crackled. “Fifteen, this is dispatch, what’s your twenty, over?”

She started to reach for her shoulder mike. Fifteen was Arch’s badge number, his call sign, and the voice was the sheriff’s wife. Erin didn’t say anything, though, and the same message was repeated twice more without a word of reply.

* * *

Hendricks was watching out the window with his good eye while Arch drove the Explorer. He had no idea where they were going, exactly, though it felt like they might have been following the interstate on a frontage road. He thought about asking, but Arch seemed more than a little touchy. Not that Hendricks could blame him; the sheriff’s deputy had gone from a calm life one week to in-over-his-fucking-head the next.

Hendricks looked over and saw Arch with his cell phone in hand, the face plate lit up and buzzing. The deputy didn’t make a move to answer it, though, and after a moment the light faded and then died.

Hendricks thought about letting it pass without saying anything, but his curiosity got the better of him. “Who was that? Your wife?”

“No,” Arch said, and his voice was subdued. “My boss.”

“The sheriff?” Hendricks asked, feeling a little bloom of nervousness. “Why wouldn’t he try and reach you on your radio?”

Arch didn’t react, just stared stone-faced at the front windshield. “Because I turned it off.”

* * *

Erin’s cell phone lit up in the falling dark and she scrambled for it, hitting the talk button almost before the caller ID told her it was Reeve on the line.

“Where the fuck are you?” Reeve barked.

Classy fucker. “Still out at the wreck,” she said.

“Okay,” Reeve’s voice calmed down a little. “Thought the wife was having some trouble getting radio commands out. Did you hear that call for Arch a minute ago?”

“Yep,” Erin said, and there was that itch again. She felt a desire to twitch, to bleed off some nervous energy somehow. “I heard it.”

“Well, he’s usually pretty quick to respond,” Reeve said. “He’s like our constant in that regard. You seen him?”

“Yeah,” Erin said, and for a moment she pondered lying for him. Then she just figured fuck it. “He was up on the overpass here a few minutes ago with that cowboy friend of his and another woman—some redhead I’ve never seen before.”

There was a full ten seconds of dead air. “Excuse me?” Reeve’s voice was extra polite, extra condescending.

“You heard me,” Erin said. It was probably the equivalent of spraying the man in the face with a cold hose, but fuck him too. “He was here, not twenty minutes ago. Looking over the scene.”

“His ass was supposed to be on patrol in town,” Reeve said, and Erin could hear his voice rise on the other end of the phone. “You see where he went?”

“Back toward the Sinbad,” she said and felt that itch beneath the skin get a little worse, her face burning. With shame or something else, she didn’t know. “That’s where Hendricks is staying.”

“Get up there and see if you can find him,” Reeve said, and she could almost feel him reigning in some much harsher words. “Call me if you do. I want to talk to that—” Reeve cut himself off, she was pretty sure.

Just as well. Knowing Reeve, she could imagine what would have come next, and it was probably not anything that would have been flattering to Arch. Or his mother.

Lerner had a few ponderous thoughts clicking through his head as they came around a bend in the road. They’d followed the frontage road down the highway for miles, watching the near-empty freeway through a wood and wire fence. One lane was moving just fine, heading north. The other was empty, presumably shut down by the Tennessee Highway Patrol. The rain was coming down lightly at the moment, which allowed him to see all that.

Really, though, to Lerner, it was like a perfect metaphor for life as a human. They’d be going along, and suddenly the road would be blocked. What would they do? Well, some would pull off and eat. Some would detour and hurry like hell to find the fastest way to get back on the road. Some would just pull off and give up.

No, that analogy didn’t work. It was a shame, too; it had seemed so promising when he’d started it.

Lerner looked over at Duncan, sitting peacefully in the passenger seat, his hand resting on the handle that hung over the door. He’d never really thought about what that thing was called before. The emergency handle?

He started to voice this thought to Duncan when they came to a T in the road and his path ended at a stop sign. The car’s headlights shone into a fence and an empty pasture beyond.

“Take a right,” Duncan suggested.

“I’m not stupid, I know I take a right,” Lerner said, giving Duncan a scathing look. Duncan just shrugged.

Lerner turned his head back to the road and his headlights illuminated a police cruiser as it passed in front of them. He caught a glimpse of the driver and passenger as they went by; it was the cop and the cowboy. “Hm,” he said.

There was a pause. “Hm, what?” Duncan bit.

Lerner could feel himself smile. Duncan almost never bit on these sort of queries. “Is it serendipity that led us to the point in the road where we fortuitously picked that exact moment to argue, thus stalling us long enough to—”

“Shut up and follow them.”

* * *

Erin slid a key into the lock of Hendricks’s motel room door. She’d knocked and heard nobody, sitting there with the rain blowing in under the overhang and soaking her again. After that she walked in the seeping chill down to the manager’s office, idling cursing the name of Lafayette Hendricks and wondering why she’d ever thought a man named Lafayette could even be attractive. The manager had been surprisingly compliant and quick to give her a key, which she’d dutifully taken and trudged back down to Hendricks’s door. By this time, the hems of her pants were soaked again. Goddamned Lafayette Hendricks.

She pushed open the door and paused before crossing the threshold. She wondered a little idly why she was even going to these lengths; it wasn’t like Reeve would have expected her to do this. Probably. She lived in the grey space between what she thought his expectations might be and what he’d told her to do. This fit neatly in there. Somewhere.