Sinners & Sorcerers: Four Urban Fantasy Thrillers (27 page)

“Like a chihuahua?” Arch raised a don’t-give-me-no-bull cop face. He hadn’t learned that at the academy. “Didn’t look like no little yappy dog to me. It didn’t even look human.”

The cowboy gave a grudging nod of his head. “Well, you got that much, at least. Most people don’t make that leap straightaway. You’re right, it wasn’t human.” He gave a look left, then right, as though he half expected another of those things to come leaping out at him. “You mind if I pick up my sword?” Arch shook his head. “No?” The cowboy’s disappointment seemed mild. “Well,” there came a kind of exhausted, long sigh, “in that case … it’s a demon. A Chu’ala is a demon of the old school, and when I stabbed it in the neck with my sword,” he gestured at the blade that lay upon the grass, shining in the lamplight, “the rupture loosed his essence, sending him right back to whatever hell he came from.” The cowboy said it all plain, matter-of-fact, like he was giving directions to Rogerson’s just down the highway. He waited a second, watching Arch, watching the gears spin.

“A demon?” Arch’s logical mind butted up against the problem once, then twice, then once again. He had no suspect, no body, no evidence of an assault, no victim—or attacker, as the case might have been—nothing but a cowboy with a sword, strolling through the town center of Midian just before midnight, getting into a fight with a man Arch thought he’d known, who had turned into something improbable, then promptly dissolved into shadow and disappeared, maybe back to hell, if indeed that’s where he came from.

“Yeah,” the cowboy agreed. “Sounds pretty fucked up, doesn’t it? Like I said, you might wanna just stroll on away from this one and pretend you didn’t see anything. It’d probably simplify your life.” There was just a touch of apprehension under ‘don’t-give-a-damn’ in the cowboy’s tone. “I know it’d simplify mine if you did.”

Arch pondered that for a moment as he slipped his Glock back in his holster. He was running it through his brain, trying to figure out how to explain it to the sheriff in a report—explain a man who didn’t run away, didn’t disappear by hiding behind something, but a guy who vanished, evaporated into the air itself. Trying to imagine explaining to Reeve that he’d been off duty and seen something staggering, absolutely amazing and impossible. Imagine having to file a report on it—which would technically mean he’d have to punch in, or be in violation of regulations. And that would go over … not so well.

He looked around the square. No lights were on, no sounds were made. His gunshots were loud, but not that uncommon in a rural area like Calhoun County. People shot in one of the fields behind the square from time to time, and firecrackers during July weren’t exactly the most unusual of sounds. No cars, no lights, nothing. A quiet night in Midian. Not a soul about. He eyed the sword, and the cowboy took a step back from it. Arch took a couple steps forward, stooped and picked it up, looked at the fancy swirls of runes that made the blade look particularly intricate. “You think I should just let you go, I expect?”

“Well, of course,” the cowboy said. “Doesn’t everyone you catch hope that you’ll just let them go?”

“Not all of them come at me with stories of demons and hell as alibis for what they’ve done, though. Almost none of them are strangers, in town for just an hour before they start waving a sword around and killing some poor bastard that works at the local paper mill by making them disappear like something out of a Criss Angel performance.”

The cowboy inclined his head slightly. “I can see why this might be a little disturbing to you. It took me a little getting used to myself when my eyes first got opened to this sort of stuff. Might I suggest a little something to ease the passage …?”

The cowboy was ever so mild in his suggestion, and it made Arch just a little curious what he thought might make this easier in the slightest. This idea of demons and disappearing people that didn’t really fit into Arch’s world, not at all. “What’s that?” Arch asked.

“We should go get a beer.”

+ + +

The cop hadn’t let him have his sword back, but Hendricks wasn’t all that worried about it, not yet. He’d gotten in the back of the patrol car, and the cop had put the sword up front with him after searching him for weapons. That had caused a tense moment, but he’d been up front with the officer. “I have a 1911 pistol in my belt,” Hendricks had said. “My ID’s in my back pocket, along with a permit to carry it.”

The cop had taken the gun out of Hendricks’s belt. The guy was big, broad, muscular, a black man who, if Hendricks had still been a gambler of any sort, he would have laid money on having been a football player at some point in his academic career. He didn’t just have the build for it; he had the power. The cop was at least six foot two, and even with his Marine training, Hendricks wouldn’t have wanted to get in a scrape with the fellow. No chance. Demons were easier, because you could just kill them. Fighting humans sucked.

After the cop had taken Hendricks’s gun and sword, and asked him to remove his coat, Hendricks got in the back of the cop car, a new model Ford Explorer that rode real nice. He was tempted to ask which he was headed for, a bar or jail, but they buzzed right on past the sheriff’s office without turning, though Hendricks caught a backwards look in the rear-view at him as they neared, as though the cop expected him to crack or something at the prospect of going to jail. It wouldn’t exactly be the highlight of Hendricks’s night, that was for sure, but a jail cell still beat the hell out of being devoured, guts-first, by a raging Chu’ala in the town square.

Besides, he at least got to keep his cowboy hat. That was something.

There was a glaring patch of neon up ahead, and Hendricks recognized the same stretch of strip malls he’d seen when he’d come into town from the interstate. The Wal-Mart was up there and a few other stores, a fireworks outlet, and a bar with a red neon sign blaring the name “Fast Freddie’s.” It sounded like a pretty jerkoff place, but Hendricks wasn’t too picky, being both hungry and parched and not having had anything to eat nor drink nor even had a chance to piss since being picked up at the Cracker Barrel outside Nashville hours earlier by the trucker. The last concern was still mild; the first two were growing in importance rapidly. He was parched and hungry enough to skin a coyote and eat it ass-first.

Fast Freddie’s was a shitty looking place, all wooden eaves and paneling outside, like it was supposed to be an authentic Texas roadhouse. Old Father Time had clearly had his way with the joint, though, and it was faded enough that even the red neon sign looked worn. Hendricks would have bet that it looked like hell during the daytime, probably like it had been damned near forgotten by the owners, needing all manner of improvements. Still, Midian was a one-horse town, or possibly less, maybe a one-mule town, or even lower, a one-cat town or something. It was damned small; a micropolis, he’d heard this type of place called before. It only looked as big as it did because it served the rest of Calhoun County, drawing in people from the rural reaches of the county to the surprisingly wide array of commerce it offered.

When they were in the parking lot, the big cop turned over his shoulder and looked back at him. “Your weapons stay in the car. I’ll listen to your story over one beer. If I don’t like the sound of it, your next ride is to the sheriff’s station.”

“Can I get a last meal, too?” Hendricks grinned.

The deputy was impassive. “If you want. Not sure I’d trust Fast Freddie’s to handle my dietary needs, but it’s your digestive tract.”

Hendricks let the grin hang. “You paying?”

“Nope,” the cop said and stepped out, shoes squeaking on the wet asphalt.

Hendricks shrugged. It wasn’t like he didn’t have money. He waited for the cop to open the door and considered himself lucky he wasn’t cuffed. When it opened, he stepped out, walking slowly in front of the deputy, leading the way without much concern. It was understandable, after all; the deputy wanted to keep an eye on his potential prisoner.

Stepping inside Fast Freddie’s was like taking the dial of the time machine and spinning it back to the Old West, if the Old West had had neon signs. After thinking about it for a moment, Hendricks decided maybe it was more like a rodeo king’s worst nightmare, the inside of this place, some garish cross between a honky-tonk and a bullrider’s bar, or maybe more of a caricature of what some jackass thought those things oughta look like rather than what they really did. It didn’t matter either way, though, because the people at the bar were there for one reason alone—to drink—and they were all about that serious business when Hendricks walked in with the deputy just behind him. He imagined the cop’s khakis probably turned a few eyes his way, then realized that in this sort of bar, all the eyes were on a pullstring attached to the door handle anyway, and whenever someone walked in they got the once over from the entire patronage. In most cases, this was not a good thing. In one instance, though …

A damned fine-looking girl wearing a V-necked white t-shirt came flouncing up, on her seventh or eight drink if Hendricks were gambling (and in this case he would have, gladly), jeans too tight by half for anywhere but a bar or a rodeo, but there were no complaints from him on that score, not for this girl. She was blond, and not just perky but pretty, wasted on this establishment. He tried to draw himself up a little straighter, and for a half a flash he let himself imagine that she might actually be coming to the door to talk to him.

That image was dispelled a half second later when she went straight up to the cop. “You came!” she said and gave the guy a big hug. Here the height difference was blatantly obvious; the deputy was a damned giant, and this girl was average height. Hendricks had never really been insecure about his height, but then he was a shade under six feet and always considered that reasonable. He’d been in the same barracks with a guy in boot camp on Parris Island who was even taller than the deputy at his side and always felt bad for the fella because what they’d always said about tall guys being well-hung had turned out not to be true for this guy. To the disappointment of a girl in his training platoon. Of course she told everyone. Poor bastard.

“I’m uh …” The deputy looked just a little discomfited to Hendricks’s eyes. More than a little, actually, the man looked like he’d been dunked in cold water and forced to confess to a particularly heinous crime, all in one expression. “I’m just here for a drink with my friend …” The deputy looked at him, gave him a pointed,
Help me out, pal
kind of look.

“Lafayette Hendricks, ma’am,” he said doffing his cowboy hat to the blond lady. She looked a little younger than him, not much, probably twenty-two, twenty-three. Her blue eyes glimmered with vague interest, he thought, but he hadn’t seen that in a long time and wasn’t practiced enough to tell whether she was just being polite or if it was something more.

“This is Erin Harris,” the deputy said, nodding to the blond. “She’s the dispatcher down at the station.”

“Name like Lafayette, you ain’t gonna start speaking French to me?” she asked. Maybe that was interest.

“Not likely,” Hendricks said, keeping it cool. “I’m from Wisconsin. Can’t speak a lick of French ’cept for maybe
merci
and
oui
.”

“I think, technically,” Erin said, beset by a case of the giggles that was probably induced by the bourbon that he could smell on her breath, “that the
oui
would come before the
merci
.” Another giggle, and it was cute. “But I might be out of practice.”

Hendricks wondered if he was blushing visibly. There was every chance she was going to regret this flirtation later, if she even remembered it. “I’m afraid I’ll have to trust your experience with the language is greater than my own, because mine is pretty limited.”

She giggled again then stopped as the cop cleared his throat. “Sorry, Erin,” the cop said, “I’m just here to have a beer with my friend.”

She blinked, kind of wide-eyed, and Hendricks was sure it made her even cuter. “You’re gonna have a beer? Like an actual one? Holy shit.” She shook her head, and it looked like she almost lost her balance. “Well, okay, then,” she touched the deputy all around his collar, then tried to straighten it but left it popped out on one side. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay, I got it.” The deputy’s mild chagrin was obvious as he fiddled with his collar, straightening it out.

“I’ll just leave you boys alone, then,” she said, and Hendricks caught the first hint of slurring in her speech. “But when you get done, you should come over and join me and the boys for another round. I would definitely buy you a beer, Officer Stan.” She shuffled away under her own power, barely, not quite falling down drunk but definitely happier than she would have been without the alcohol coursing through her veins.

When she was gone, the cop she’d called Officer Stan guided Hendricks over to a corner table and gestured at the barman by holding up two fingers and getting a nod in return. “I thought you didn’t drink?” Hendricks asked.

“I haven’t had a beer in two years,” the deputy returned.

“But you have good enough code with the bartender that you can hold up two fingers and he knows what to bring you?”

The deputy shrugged. “All beer tastes the same to me—bad. Reckon he’ll bring me whatever he sells the most of.”

“We could shoot whiskey if you’d prefer,” Hendricks suggested. He’d gladly shoot whiskey, and lots of it. Mainly because he was likely to be hurting tomorrow anyway, courtesy of the Chu’ala. Why not add a little distraction behind the eyes, just to give the bruises a competition for what would hurt the most in the morning?

“No, thanks,” the deputy said.

“So the pretty blond you work with called you Officer Stan,” Hendricks said as he took in the place again. The girl who’d talked to the deputy was in the corner with a couple of other guys and looking over at him. Maybe some interest. Maybe. “You got a first name, or is it Stan and she’s just real formal?”

“Everyone calls me Arch,” came the reply. Damn, the guy was tall, like a mountain sitting across the table from him, and forbidding, too, near humorless.