Hard Times (A Sam Harlan Novel Book 2) (27 page)

There was a long pause before he finally said, “You’re hurt.”

I sighed. “I am.”

He raised his head and caught my gaze. “Don’t die, Sam. I couldn’t stand to see your spirit.” He nodded at the bottles. “I want to drink these, but I won’t. Not anymore.” He shuddered. “I never meant to be a worthless drunk. I wanted to be a spirit-warrior. I don’t know
how
it happened.”

I could relate. I approached him and put my hand on his shoulder and gave a gentle squeeze. “I forgive you, Billy.”

* * *

“I need you to drive,” I told Callie, thrusting the keys at her.

She stared at me with concern. “Are you hurt that badly?”

I pulled the trench coat tighter around me, warding off the chill. “Let’s get this over with.”

She took the keys without further argument and drove us back to the Mendoza home. We didn’t speak on the trip.

The day’s events replayed in my head, all the violence and death, but my thoughts were slow and fuzzy. I felt like I was missing something, something that bounced around in the back of my head, almost on the verge of memory.

Callie pulled the truck in front of the Mendoza house and turned off the engine. “We’ve got a lot of work to do before dawn,” she said.

Tommy pulled up behind us and followed us into the house. We stared at the piles of ash that were the only remnants of Santiago and Leticia Mendoza. Then I went upstairs, yanked a sheet from Leticia and Juan’s bed, and went back downstairs and covered Franco’s body with it.

“It just doesn’t feel real,” Tommy said. “You know?”

I agreed. “Let’s see if we can find cleaning supplies,” I said.

We rummaged through the kitchen until Tommy opened a tall, thin door in the corner. “Jackpot,” he said, pulling a vacuum cleaner from the closet.

Callie found a bottle of spray carpet cleaner and Tommy got busy vacuuming the ash. When he had given the carpet a first pass, Callie sprayed the greasy spots with cleaner that formed a thick white foam. I rummaged through the kitchen drawers until I found a hand towel, then used the towel to dab at the foam, working the cleaning solution into the fibers of the carpet.

We were waiting for it to dry so we could vacuum again when I felt the buzz against the back of my teeth, the electric jolt of a vampire.

It was a whirlwind of power, a feeling I remembered well. I stood and headed to the door, pulling my Kimber, but I couldn’t get the fingers of my right hand to work correctly.

I didn’t think I would need it, though, because I had an idea of what waited on the other side.

I opened it and greeted the tall man standing on the front stoop. “Henry. How did you find me?”

The man that stood there was easily six foot four, with broad, powerful shoulders. He was wearing his dark brown sheriff’s coat, a blue denim shirt, black denim jeans, and a well-worn pair of cowboy boots.

Henry Hastings—the sheriff of Hot Springs County, and a thousand-year old vampire—touched his fingers to his wide-brimmed hat. “Sam,” he said in his rich baritone, with just a hint of a Southwestern drawl. “You look like shit.”

“You should see the other guy,” I said.

“I’m hoping you staked the other guy,” he said mildly. He took off his hat, exposing his long brown hair. “May I come in?”

I opened the door and ushered him in. Tommy lurched to his feet and stared at Henry, scowling, his hand close to his Glock. “Who is this?” Tommy asked.

Tommy may not have killed a vampire, but he was sensing something that put him on edge.

“Tommy,” I said, trying to ease the tension, “this is Henry. He’s here to help.”

“He’s—”

“A vampire,” Callie finished. She nodded at Henry. “Sheriff.”

“Sister,” Henry said respectfully, bowing his head. “I hope I find you well.”

Callie fixed him with a neutral stare, then bowed her head. “We’ve had a rough day,” she admitted.

Henry scanned the room, his eyes pausing on the carpet where I had been dabbing, and then on the bullet holes in the walls, holes that I still didn’t know how we would explain. “I see that.”

“How did you find us?” I asked again.

He snorted. “Your cell phone. I’m a lawman, remember?”

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“I was worried,” he said. “I left yesterday morning. I was already in Iowa when you called.”

“Ah,” I said. “Thought I might need help?”

He looked me in the eyes, just for a moment, and I felt an unbearable sense of pressure before he glanced away. “You weren’t filling me with confidence.” He nodded at the floor. “You staked him?”

“I did.”

“Tell me about it.”

It wasn’t a suggestion. I got the distinct impression that Henry wasn’t in town just to help out, but in his official capacity as the sheriff working for the Ancients. I gave him a quick recap of what he already knew, then filled in the gaps since our last phone call.

He listened with an astonishing intensity, occasionally asking questions to tease out a detail or a forgotten fact. Several times he raised an eyebrow, then asked Callie or Tommy to clarify, before urging me to continue.

He shook his head when I was done, then looked me over appraisingly. “You could have died, son. Helluva risky plan.”

He had a point, but I wasn’t in the mood for second-guessing. “It worked, didn’t it?”

“You’re hurt,” he said. “Badly.”

“I’ll live.”

“You will,” he acknowledged with a tip of his head, “if you get some rest.”

I didn’t question how he knew. If Henry said I would live, then it was probably true. “We have to clean this up.”

He walked over to the sheet-covered body of Franco, then turned back to us. “You said there were others?”

“Yes.” I described the Glick house and then the Bent house.

“Messy,” he said. “You’re going to have to do better, Sam. Keep this up and you’ll die on a hunt. You’ll take the Sister down, too.”

Callie started to speak, but Henry fixed his stare on her and she shrank back.

“Look,” I said, “if you want to help—”

“I
am
here to help,” Henry said. “I just hate these kinds of messes. Leaves too many unanswered questions.”

“What are we supposed to do?” Tommy asked.

“I’ve had some experience handling these kinds of situations,” Henry said. He motioned for me to come to the door.

I looked out at his dark SUV parked in the driveway and saw a man sitting in the front. I squinted and tried to identify him, but the interior of Henry’s SUV was too dark.

I was afraid to ask, but I did anyway. “Who is that?”

“Darren Jenkins,” Henry said. “I picked him up in Des Moines. He was a willing meat treat. He helped a vampire bleed a pair of teenage girls. He’s going to take the blame and hang himself in his cell within the day.”

Callie and Tommy were listening, horrified. “You can’t do that,” Callie said. “You can’t compel him to kill himself.”

“Why not?” Henry asked casually. “You think God will save him? That man kidnapped two girls and fed them to a vampire named Colin Fleming, a forty-year-old vampire who was on a three-state bender.”

“Was?” I asked.

Henry smiled, and it was cold and ruthless. “I took Fleming’s head and staked his body, then grabbed Jenkins. He fed that vampire his own blood, then offered up those two girls. Two families out there will never kiss their girls goodnight, or see them graduate high school, or see them get married and have kids of their own.”

His smile disappeared in an instant and his voice lowered, his accent gone. “If Jenkins’s death can help you, all the better. His soul will be judged by the Lord. Until then, his ass is mine and I will do with it as I please.”

Callie paled and took a step back. Tommy was looking everywhere but at the sheriff.

There was a certain symmetry to it, and I didn’t have the strength to argue. “Fine,” I said. “Jenkins takes the blame.”

Henry nodded. “If it makes any difference, it was either this or I cut off his head and burn his body.”

It
didn’t
actually make me feel better.

After all that had happened, I didn’t want to see anyone else die. I stared at the man in the front of the SUV. The streetlight from the corner did little to illuminate Jenkins’s features, and it was hard to tell whether he was young or old.

I wondered if he was a cruel man, or whether he just longed for the vampire’s promise of eternal life. Did he have a family that would miss him? Even after the terrible things he’d done, did someone still love and care for him? Would their life be turned upside down when he was found dead in a jail cell?

Then my thoughts turned to the girls he’d helped murder and my heart went cold. No, there was a twisted logic to Henry’s actions. Henry’s compulsion would force Jenkins to kill himself. Jenkins
would
pay the price for his actions.

May God judge his soul. Harshly.

* * *

Henry helped me ransack the Mendozas’ house, making it look like a robbery gone wrong. We made a grisly discovery in the basement. Maria Diaz’s body was wrapped in several thick garbage bags, the kind that contractors use, next to the water heater. The putrid smell that came from them was enough to make me gag.

Henry shook his head. “It’s a damned shame.”

I choked back bile, eying the floor drain in the corner in case I had to vomit. “Yes, it is.”

“There’s only one thing I don’t understand,” Henry said. “Her spirit told you to save the girl. Are you sure it didn’t say
girls
?”

“I must not have heard it correctly,” I said.

“A spirit strong enough to speak through a human?” he scoffed. “Not likely. If I were to hazard a guess, it told you what it had to so it could get what it wanted.”

“Have you ever heard of a ghost doing that?” I asked.

Henry was scooping up the black bag with Maria Diaz’s torso inside. He paused, squinting at me, still holding the bag. “I don’t deal with spooks, spirits, or haints. That’s not my bailiwick.”

We climbed the stairs back to the first floor and found Callie and Tommy in the living room. The stains on the floor were gone. When they saw the bags we carried, their faces turned green.

“The grandmother shot at Jenkins and left those bullet holes,” Henry said. “Jenkins killed her, cut her up, stole her gun, and then killed Franco. The father saw this and went mad. Jenkins went to the Bent house looking for drug money and tortured and murdered the Mendoza boy and his girlfriend after they pointed him to the Glicks’. He murdered Duane and Carrie Glick before Deputy Mueller here shot him in the shoulder. The Mendoza woman’s body and the gun will never be recovered.”

Tommy grunted. “That’s thin. The evidence—”

“Won’t make a lick of sense,” Henry said. “It won’t matter. You’ve got a small-town police department with limited resources. No need for expensive forensics. You’ve never seen cases closed with less?”

Tommy nodded slowly. “It happens,” he said.

My cell phone buzzed. I grabbed it from my pocket and checked the number. It belonged to Mary Kate, and when I answered it, her voice bordered on hysterical. “Sam, you have to get back here.”

I held up my hand and everyone, even Henry, stopped talking. “What’s happened,” I asked.

“Colden and Elena are dead.”

“What?”

There was a moment of dead air. “Come back as soon as you can,” she said. The call ended.

“What’s wrong?” Callie asked, concerned by the expression on my face.

“That was Mary Kate,” I said. “Colden and Elena are dead.”

Tommy’s jaw dropped. “How? Is there
another
vampire?”

“I
don’t
know,” I said. “We have to go. Now.”

Henry dumped the bag containing Maria Diaz’s remains on the freshly cleaned carpet and we made the trip back to the Glick house, a line of vehicles threading through the night.

Halfway there, Callie started to speak, but I cut her off. “Damn it,” I said. “We
saved
the girls. How could this happen?”

“You’ve done all you can,” Callie said. “There’s only so much one man can do, even if that man is you.”

I was exhausted. My hands turned the wheel and my feet worked the pedals, but it was like moving in a dream.

I had missed something and now two more people were dead.

Please let this night be over.

Our procession of vehicles made it to the Glick house in record time. It wasn’t quite three in the morning, according to my cell phone. I ran up the sidewalk and into the house and found Lori Glick sitting on the couch next to Juan Mendoza. Neither of them looked up when I entered.

Olivia rushed to Tommy and hugged him, crying so hard she couldn’t speak. Mary Kate sat on the chair next to the couch, her head buried in her hands. She looked up at the sound of my footsteps and I saw shock and horror on her face. She stood and rushed to me, wrapping her arms around me in a tight embrace, holding me tight.

“Oh, thank God,” she whispered.

“What happened?”

“Y-you need to see for yourself,” she finally said.

I turned to the rest and said, “Wait here.”

I ran down the hallway, past the kitchen. Billy was nowhere in sight, but the five bottles were still lined up on the kitchen table. I heard a desperate sobbing coming from farther down the hall. I followed the sound and turned left. It was coming from one of the bedrooms, and when I entered, I saw why.

Colden was stretched out on the bed, the red-and-white-striped bedsheets covered in thick, sticky blood. There were dozens of punctures on his neck, and his lifeless eyes stared at the woodgrain ceiling fan slowly spinning over his bed. Elena was sprawled facedown on the floor, a blood-stained T-shirt wrapped around her neck.

The coppery scent of blood was thick in the air, along with the smell of bowel and urine, and it assaulted my nose the way Maria Diaz’s body just minutes before.

Billy was huddled in the corner, staring at his hands, and I realized the sobbing came from him. He looked up when I entered, but his eyes stared through me.

“What happened?” I asked.

He spun his head, like he was trying to figure out where the sound came from.

“Billy!” I said sharply. “Can you hear me?”