Sinners & Sorcerers: Four Urban Fantasy Thrillers (31 page)

“You gonna get some sleep?” Arch said. He picked himself up out of the chair and heard his knee crack. It hurt a little bit, but not too much.

“Eventually,” Reeve agreed. “Probably some this morning, before things get ‘busy’ this afternoon.” He looked up from his paperwork and smiled. “Oh, and hey—I took a call from my wife this morning, something about calling out to the MacGruder dairy farm and not getting an answer. It’s probably nothing, but your route takes you by there this afternoon, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Arch agreed. It did, right out along Kilner Road, and he’d probably be past there before noon. “Want me to drop in and knock on the door, have them give her a call?”

“If you would,” Reeve said. “And you’re not too busy.” He laughed. “As if you ever are in this county.”

“I’ll drop by,” Arch said, stopping at the frame.

“Good,” Reeve said and turned back to reading the report in his hand. “It’s not like Old Man MacGruder to just drop off the face of the earth. He’s way too ornery to just lay down and die.”

+ + +

Nothing ever went as it was fucking planned. Hollywood had gone to Chattanooga’s version of a five-star hotel, something that was supposed to showcase Old-South charm and luxury, and they hadn’t even had the fancy water in the squarish bottles from those islands in the Pacific that he couldn’t remember the names of, ever. Not that it was important, but people looked at him funny when he tried to describe it to these ignorant savages. Fuck. In L.A. they would have fallen all over themselves trying to get him what he wanted, but when his egg white and spinach omelet showed up for breakfast, he had to argue with the dumb bitch who’d brought it up because she couldn’t seem to get the fucking message.

“Well, I’m sorry, sir,” she said, and she was red enough in the face that he believed she was sorry. Just not sorry enough to scour the fucking town to find him the water he was looking for.

“Look,” he said, trying to be diplomatic after what had probably been the most epic bout of screaming he’d ever delivered, “I understand that your hotel and probably this whole town are just a little too backwoods to understand what kind of water I’m talking about. It’s pure. It’s clean. It’s …” He searched for the right word. “It’s elite. It’s a cut above. So I can understand why you might not have heard of it down here—”

“I think they have some at the corner store,” she said, still flushed. Her hair was dirty blond and she was freckled. Not homely, not compared to probably most people in this town, but she was ugly compared to the girls Hollywood was used to having on the casting couch. And fat. She was probably a size six. But not a terrible face, just not classic. He took a sip of the water she’d brought and avoided spitting it out in her face. Narrowly.

“I doubt they have my elite, cut-above-water at your fucking mom and pop convenience store,” he said, biting back the snarl. He took a deep breath of air, realizing that the smell of cow shit was still with him, even after a shower. “This is so fucking ridiculous.” His eyes alighted on hers. “How do you people live down here, like this? I bet you smoke a lot of pot just to get by.”

“Um, no,” she said, and there was a hint of wounded pride in how she said it. “I like it here.”

He felt a lot of pity for her right then. “Well, aren’t you a fucking simple little creature. I like that.”

She flushed redder, which he wouldn’t have thought possible with her farmer’s complexion. “Other than this water problem—which I will try and solve—is there anything else I can get for you, sir?”

So she knew her place. She was pissed but biting it back. He owed her a smile, at least. “Just one thing. Maybe a couple things.”

He managed to get her to stop screaming after only one good, long one.

+ + +

Arch set the Explorer bumping down Kilner Road. It was gravel, “unimproved,” as they called it sometimes when they were talking about paving roads that hadn’t ever been paved. There wasn’t much point to improving it, though, since only a half dozen people lived out here, and none of them cared that it was a gravel road. At least not enough to complain about it to the County Board of Supervisors.

He had the window down and the smell of the dairy farm wasn’t too strong, yet. It’d get worse when he got closer, and the flies would get thicker. Arch had toured MacGruder’s dairy farm sometime back in school, though he couldn’t recall exactly when. Probably elementary school, back when things like cows were still exciting. He remembered the teachers saying Mr. MacGruder kept a pretty clean operation, unlike the big company farm closer to town. Being practically a one-man show, MacGruder probably took some pride in what he did. Arch wondered if that had slipped as MacGruder had aged because the white fence along the edge of the road was showing serious wear, the paint peeling off in long strips, revealing greyed wood beneath. Beyond was an empty field, no sign of cows, which were probably grazing at the backside of the property at this time of day.

Arch steered the Explorer into the drive, up toward the big white house, which was fading only a little less than the fences were. Beyond a little ways was the dairy barn off to his right, and straight ahead was a big metal gate about chest-high that kept the cows from wandering out of the fields and into MacGruder’s driveway. The funny thing was, it was open. Arch frowned at that then shrugged it off, filing it away for later. It wasn’t like there was a herd of cows wandering around out here, so they must be shut away in a field further up the hill. He settled his car into position behind MacGruder’s old truck and got out, taking a long look around through his sunglasses.

His khakis didn’t do much to defray the midday heat. This wasn’t the hottest part of the day, even with the sun blazing overhead. That would come later, just about sunset, unbelievably. Still, it was hot, and Arch could feel his undershirt begin to stick with the first beads of sweat beneath his khaki uniform top. He was lucky in that at least he had short sleeves, but he would have seriously considered killing someone if it had meant he could wear shorts to work on a day like this. It brought him back to three-a-days, the murderous football practices his coach used to inflict when they were at camp in the summer. And southeastern Tennessee in the summer wasn’t good picnicking weather, no sir.

Arch took in the MacGruder house with one long look. It was a fairly typical old southern style, with a porch that wrapped all the way around the thing. They had a couple rocking chairs up front, looked new, like maybe they’d been bought at Cracker Barrel in the last couple years. Nice woodwork. He’d thought about getting some, maybe when he had his own house instead of the little apartment.

He put that thought out of his mind as his shoes clomped up the short stairs to the screen door and he knocked on it good, three times. Old Man MacGruder was probably out in the fields, after all, and his wife was getting up there in the years. Better not chance her not hearing him. He gave the door one more good rap, then heard movement from inside, and saw a face appear from behind the curtain in the middle of the circular window in the door. When he caught sight of it—just a flash—he immediately that it was not a human face, with human eyes.

Arch took an involuntary step back, toward the edge of the porch, minding his footing, and drew his gun to low rest, pointed at a forty-five-degree angle down, the barrel on a trajectory to kneecap someone. It was a demon, he was damned near sure of it from that flash he’d seen behind the curtain, but when the door opened a moment later, he wasn’t so sure.

“Krauther?” Arch asked, seeing the guy in the door frame. He hesitated, kept his gun low. He knew the guy, a good-for-nothing who had been that way for a long time. Had a half dozen disturbing-the-peace citations, had spent a few nights in the county jail.

“Hey, Arch,” Krauther said, looking dark around the eyes. He was wearing a Metallica t-shirt and had a weak mustache across his upper lip, looking like a scrawny caterpillar had nested there after dipping itself in black ink. “What’d I do this time?”

“What are you doing in MacGruder’s house?” Arch asked, keeping the gun out and low, ready to raise it and fire if necessary. Maybe he’d just seen things; active imagination, little sleep, and that cowboy had put him on edge, after all. Easy explanations were usually the closest to right. He’d known Krauther forever, for years, even before he became a sheriff’s deputy. The guy was many things, criminal included, but a demon? Hard to believe.

“Oh, uh, yeah,” Krauther said, looking every bit like the lying lowlife Arch knew him to be. He also looked tired, eyes drawn, like he’d been sleeping one off. “Old Man MacGruder hired me to do some work for him, you know, around the house. Me and some of the boys.”

“Oh, yeah?” Arch scoured his memory for the names of the boys who ran with Krauther. “Who you got in there with you?”

Krauther tried to look innocent. Tried, but failed. “Just McGuire and Kellen.” Both low-level, petty criminals as well.

“And Mrs. MacGruder?” Arch didn’t stop staring at Krauther, looking for a sign of what he’d seen before, that flash from when he lifted the curtain and looked out.

“Oh, yeah, she’s in here too,” Krauther said. Another lie. A demon should be better at lying, shouldn’t they? Not like a two-bit dumbass who’d had more brushes with the law over stupid things than anyone with half a brain ever should have.

How to play it, then? Arch only knew one way to handle things, and that was as close to the book as he could get while allowing for the possibility of demons, which weren’t in the book. The rule book, at least. They were pretty clearly enumerated in the other book he read regularly, though. “I’m going to ask you to keep your hands visible and come out here and lay down on the driveway, Krauther. Your friends, too.”

Krauther squinted at Arch, but in an unsurprised way. This wasn’t his first arrest; he knew the score. “What for, Arch?”

“It’s Deputy Stan to you, Krauther.” He gestured once with his pistol, keeping it ready to be lifted and fire at Krauther if he got uppity. Unfortunately, Arch had seen what bullets did to the demon last night, which was to say nearly nothing. He was already frantically formulating a backup plan in case Krauther decided to try something. It mostly involved running.

“Deputy Stan is here to cuff us while he comes in and searches the house, boys,” Krauther said, his hands still lazily resting on the frame and the door, spread between the two in an irritatingly casual show of unconcern. “What do we think of that?”

“I don’t like it,” Kellen said, appearing just off the porch to Arch’s left. He was wearing shorts and a stained wife-beater shirt that might have been white once, many moons ago. Which was probably about the last time it’d been laundered. He had hair coming off his arms, his chest, sticking out from under the shirt in tufts.

“I don’t think I wanna do that,” McGuire said, appearing on the other side, up on the porch. “I don’t like the feel of metal handcuffs against my skin. Not very sensuous.”

“Yeah,” Krauther said, pursing his lips and twisting the mustache with them. “I don’t think we’re coming with you today, lawman. The rules are fixing to change around here.”

If Arch had been a swearing man, being at the center of a triangle of these three would have surely brought it out of him. As it was, he kept his cool, almost as much for lack of anything to say as any other reason. He knew they were demons, was sure of it now, and knew just as surely that shooting them in the face was unlikely to do much other than slow them down. In the absence of a neatly formed plan involving a sword that he could jab in their faces to cause them to be sucked back into whatever hell they came from, slowing them down was just about all he had. Even if these boys were human, they clearly meant him malice. They looked different, predatory, not like the small time losers they’d been before. He looked from Krauther to Kellen and wondered what had emboldened them.

Arch was normally restricted in the amount of violence he could use in a situation like this, but he was only a couple of percentage points away from one hundred percent certainty that these things were demons, so he gambled. He shot Krauther in the face three times.

Krauther staggered back, clearly not dead or missing his jaw. In fact, it made the demon face bleed through again, with a horrible scree’ing noise that chilled Arch’s blood even in the hot summer sun. He snapped left and dealt with the next threat, shooting McGuire thrice in the chest for more than luck, and as the thing staggered from the shots, he turned and fired on Kellen, who was already coming up the porch steps. He actually knocked this one off his feet with the gunfire, dropping him onto the back of his neck on the ground. It didn’t kill him, but it made him squirm and caused him to writhe, which was enough for Arch’s plan to take effect.

He fired blind once more back at Krauther, who was starting to recover and come back at him, then Arch high-tailed it over Kellen’s fallen form with an athletic leap and tore off for the Explorer. All three of them were back on their feet and running at him by the time he got the car started and into gear, and they’d just about caught him by the time he’d executed a roundabout in the drive. He floored it and doused the three of them with gravel as he shot out onto Kilner Road and left them in the dust as he cranked the speed up into the triple digits, trying to figure out what he could tell Sheriff Reeve about this whole mess.

+ + +

Creampuff watched the whole thing go down, Ygrusibas whispering to her the whole time. It was nothing more than a curiosity to old Creampuff, chewing grass as she watched the tall, dark-skinned man in the dirt-colored uniform talking to three of the beasts that had eaten her farmer.
Demons
, Ygrusibas said as the thing in the doorway had yelled for his fellows and she’d seen them come out on either side of the uniformed man. She kept chewing, though, no reason to be that concerned.

He knows
, Ygrusibas said to her as the dark-skinned man started making loud noises with the wand in his hand, and the demons started falling, falling and hurting, she knew, like that time she’d brushed up against the metal fence in the far pasture. The uniformed man made a hurried run and went back to his moving building, and it thundered off with the three demons in pursuit.