Hard Times (A Sam Harlan Novel Book 2) (17 page)

I nodded. “Believe it.” I pointed to Mueller. “If Tommy hadn’t tried to plug it with Mary Kate’s thirty-eight, we might have lost someone.”

“For all the good it did,” the deputy muttered, staring through the remains of the front window to the darkness that lay beyond.

I turned to Davenport. He shuffled from foot to foot, his face red and sweaty. “Billy,” I said. “Do your thing.”

Davenport pulled his satchel tight against his side. “I tried to tell you. I don’t have it in me. It’s too close. Too thin.”

“I don’t care,” I said. “I need you to look at these people.
Look
at them. They’re scared. I need you to do whatever it is you did at Jack’s house.”

Davenport’s eyes flickered to the Glicks, then back to me. “I
want
to—”

“Then try,” I urged. “What have you got to lose?”

“If only you knew,” Davenport said. He shuddered. “If only you
knew
.”

“Do it,” I said. “Whatever you can.”

He nodded slowly, then glanced down at the door resting on the floor. I grabbed it and yanked it up and immediately felt a stabbing in my side where my cracked ribs cried out for attention. I stood and slowly manhandled the door next to the door frame. I wedged it in the opening and found Duane Glick staring at it.

“I can go to Menards,” he said and started to grab the door.

I resisted the urge to slap him. It wasn’t his fault. Focusing on things like the door was probably the only thing that kept him going. “Duane? Do you really think it’s a good idea to go out in the dark? With that thing out there?”

His eyes found mine and he shook his head. “No?”

“No,” I said. Mueller watched the exchange and he nodded his approval. I leaned in to Duane and spoke softly, so that only he could hear. “Why don’t you go sit with your wife and kids? Tell them about your day. Keep them distracted, so they don’t think about what’s happening.”

He pulled himself straight. “Yes,” he said. “That’s a good idea. I’ll keep them distracted.”

He made his way to the couch, and with a little effort soon had them sitting next to him while he told a story about how he’d almost run a forklift into the side of the building that morning.

Callie turned to me, smiled, and whispered, “You’re a good man, Sam Harlan.”

“Don’t tell anyone.” I sighed. “It might ruin my image.”

* * *

The Glicks listened to Duane telling his story. Mary Kate had joined them, but Mueller, Callie, and I waited for Davenport to begin his ritual. Tommy was still twitchy, his hand always near his holster. I kept my own hand near the Kimber, just in case, and Callie’s crucifix was hanging between her breasts. She reached up every few seconds and stroked it, a nervous twitch that had appeared after the attack downtown.

Davenport removed a small metal bowl, wide but shallow, and lit a small bundle of sage the size of my finger. The smoke drifted lazily to the ceiling. He removed a feather from his satchel and held it in his hand while watching the rising smoke.

I had no idea what he was doing. “Is this some kind of Native American thing?” I asked.

He looked up, his black eyes sparkling with intensity, and he suddenly didn’t seem like an innocent drunk. “I don’t cotton to the old ways.” He held up the feather and shrugged. “This helps me focus, but I don’t
need
any of it.” He stared at the feather, spinning it between his fingers.

“Then why do you have it?” I asked.

He turned his eons-old stare back to me. “Just because I don’t
think
I need it doesn’t mean I don’t. Who knows what I need in
this
world? Maybe I just need it in the
other
world.” He shrugged. “At least it’s something familiar.” He paused and licked his lips. “I wish I had a drink.”

Callie stood behind Davenport, frowning, and I could tell by her expression that she was as clueless about his speech as I was.

“Is this dangerous?” I asked.

Mueller watched intently, waiting for Billy to speak.

I guess it never occurred to Tommy that this carried a risk.

“Not to you,” Davenport said bitterly. He sat down, in a style I used to think of as Indian style, and then remembered he
was
an Indian.

Native American, at least.

He looked up and caught me smiling. “You think this is funny?” he demanded.

“Sorry,” I said. “It’s just been a hell of a day.”

He grunted and used his hand to fan the sage embers, then leaned over the bowl and inhaled deeply. His eyes rolled back until only the whites showed, then he coughed, a dry and unproductive cough. When he finally caught his breath, his eyes stared forward. He let out an agonizing moan and turned his head, as if watching some invisible movement.

It was so realistic that I turned my head too, half-expecting to see something walking across the room, but there was nothing there.

He continued to moan, jerking his head back and forth, his face going pale, his mouth drawn open in a silent scream, then he shook his head like a wounded dog. “Oh, no!”

I resisted the urge to grab him. There was a buzzing against the back of my teeth. I had no idea what would happen if I touched him, but I figured it best I didn’t find out. “Billy,” I said. “What’s happening?”

He stared at an unseen object, clearly horrified. “Too thin. They see me. I shouldn’t have tried. I shouldn’t have—”

“Billy,” I snapped. “What’s happening?”

Callie watched Billy intently, but she suddenly gasped. “Do you feel that?”

I started to ask what she was talking about, but a wave of cold hit like an arctic blast. I heard a gasp and realized it came from me. I exhaled and the moisture condensed in a billowing cloud in front of me.

With the door open and the front windows missing, the room had still been ten degrees warmer than outside. Whatever Billy was doing, it had dropped the room temperature into the single digits.

I heard the Glicks squealing in terror, as if from far away, before Mueller shouted, “What the hell?”

The sound echoed weirdly between the walls, and I realized I may have underestimated Bill’s reluctance to perform the ceremony or the danger it presented.

Maybe Billy had a good reason for being drunk.

Billy gasped for breath and started choking, a wet sound that grated against my ears. The plunging temperature made my lungs ache, the pounding in my head so intense I thought it might split open.

I smacked Billy across the face. The slap of skin on skin broke the spell and he bounced across the carpet as if tossed before slamming into the couch, where the Glicks watched in dread. The temperature snapped back in an instant, so suddenly that I almost believed I had imagined it, except that Tommy and Duane and Colden’s mustaches were covered in thick frost and everyone’s faces were a mottled blue.

“What in the … hell … was that?” I choked out, staring down at Billy.

He rolled over. Tears stained his face, frozen solid against his skin, little icy diamonds that glittered in the overhead light. “Told you it was too thin,” he said, hugging himself. “Almost got caught.”

Callie approached Billy and knelt down to place her hand on his face. “By what?” she asked.

He turned to stare at us. “By the dead,” he said, as if speaking to children. “It’s almost Halloween. They can see me as easily as I can see them.” With Callie’s help, he sat up, then rocked back and forth. “Tried to warn you.”

I started to speak, but he turned his gaze upon me and it contained a mix of emotions. “It’s done,” he said. “Take me home. Please. I
need
to drink. You understand? I
need
to drink.”

What began as a suspicion solidified in my mind. He
did
need to drink, not only because he was an alcoholic, but because somehow the liquor kept him focused on our world and away from whatever haunted him in the next. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know.”

He avoided my gaze and hugged himself tighter. “I just want to go home.”

Mueller muttered, so softly that I barely heard it, “Don’t we all.”

* * *

We left Billy Davenport with the Glicks while Tommy, Callie, and I took my truck and parked down the street from the restaurant. The street in front of Fiesta Cancun was almost deserted—like the rest of downtown Marshalltown—either from the upcoming holiday or because traffic was normally light on Thursday nights.

It was thirty minutes past their nine o’clock closing time and we were parked a block south, waiting for the Mendoza family to leave. If their restaurant was anything like my diner, they would be cleaning the kitchen for the night, sweeping the floor, and making sure they were ready for the next morning.

Callie sat next to me, pressed close, and I felt her body heat through my trench coat. My mind flashed back to her sister, Katie, and the nights we’d spent holding each other, first in Peoria, then in an abandoned motel outside Rockville, Indiana.

I still wasn’t clear on my feelings about Katie. We’d only known each other for a handful of days. I had been desperate to get my daughter back, desperate to try and save my wife, until I’d realized Stacie was beyond saving.

My feelings were muddled, and the remaining six weeks hadn’t done much to un-muddle them. Callie suspected something had occurred, but hadn’t pressed me on the issue. In the mind-numbing sameness of our lives at Jack’s house, I couldn’t seem to find a way to broach the subject.

Or, I don’t want to.

Stacie and Lilly had been my life, my world. I had never even thought about another woman since meeting Stacie. People talked about soul mates and I used to think it was nonsense, but nothing else explained how I felt when I saw her across the Oval for the first time. It was like a static charge ran up my spine, and then I was in class and the same beautiful girl sat next to me, her blond hair shimmering in the light, her eyes a blue so deep I thought I could get lost in them.

We struck up a conversation, and it was like we had known each other our entire lives. Soon we were eating at the Waffle House down from the Book Exchange, talking all the way through hamburgers and hash browns. I watched her slurp on a Coke and wanted to kiss her, right there, in the front booth staring out into the street.

We were inseparable. Months passed in a rush. Classes were stolen hours from our kisses and embraces. Sex was like nothing I had experienced with my other girlfriends. It connected us on a deeper level. Another semester and we were ready to marry and start our lives, when the hospital called, telling me my dad had suffered a heart attack.

There was a mad rush to the hospital, a trip I barely remember making, but it was too late. By the time we arrived, my father was dead. I cried over his body, and the nurses gave me time with him, respectfully keeping hidden from view. Stacie held my hand while I said goodbye. He wasn’t just my dad—he was my best friend. Without Mom it was the two of us against the world, and I never regretted the time we spent working at the diner.

I filed the will after the funeral and found the diner was mine, along with my childhood home. Stacie and I rushed to get married. Her parents even made the trek from New Jersey, then everything was over and we were alone, graduation long since forgotten.

It never occurred to me to sell the house or the diner. It wasn’t until the week after I killed my wife and daughter that it dawned on me I could have done just that. I could have sold everything and we could have finished our degrees. We might have moved to Columbus or Dayton or even to New Jersey to be closer to Stacie’s parents.

A long list of clues added up to one fact—Stacie never loved Arcanum the way I did. She never loved the diner. It was just the means to an end. A way to pay the bills.

She stayed and worked the crushing hours and tried to make it work, but she told me the truth before I staked her. Arcanum was never her home. She had been profoundly unhappy and I was oblivious. I had the diner, the house, and Stacie and Lilly. My life was fulfilled.

Hers wasn’t.

Silas and Jack and the truth about my family changed all that. Katie was the one thing that felt real when Jack and I were on the hunt for Lilly, and feelings I had only experienced with Stacie bubbled to the surface.

Did I latch on to Katie because there was something there? Or was it just a natural reaction to almost dying?

The life faded from Katie’s eyes when she died, the smell of death and her releasing bowels hitting me like a hammer. I buried those feelings until suddenly her identical twin followed me home from Peoria.

Tommy startled me by clearing his throat. “If vampires are real, is there anything else?”

Callie glanced at him, then turned to me and raised an eyebrow. I turned back to Fiesta Cancun. “What do you want to know?”

Tommy’s voice cracked as he continued. “If vampires exist, there must be other stuff, right?”

I thought about lying to him but said, “Magic is real.”

“Magic?” he asked. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Nope. I met a witch.”

He laughed nervously. “A witch? You’re messing with me, right?” There was a long pause, then he shook his head. “God, you’re serious.” He sat quietly for several moments before speaking again. “What else?”

Callie reached out and squeezed my wrist. “There are horrors in the world,” she said. “The Church keeps meticulous records. The things documented in them are the stuff of nightmares.”

“Like what?” Tommy asked. “Are werewolves real?”

I glanced back his way. I honestly didn’t know. “Callie?”

She nodded.

“Christ,” Tommy breathed.

“
Language
, please,” Callie said.

“Sorry, Sister,” Tommy stammered. “Uh, what about ghosts?”

I
had
seen a ghost, outside the window of my great-uncle Warren’s house. “Yep,” I said. I didn’t mention it was one of the most disquieting things I’d ever experienced and that it had unnerved me.

“Anything else?” he asked. “Anything you’re
not
telling me.”

“Tommy,” I said, “it’s probably best you don’t think about it.” I didn’t finish by telling him that once he started thinking about it, he wouldn’t ever sleep well again. Then again, given what he had
already
seen, he probably wouldn’t sleep well, anyway.