The 13th (3 page)

If Brenda Bean hadn’t spent so much time trying to get that one pink strand of hair to tuck in “just so” behind her ear, she probably would have caught the #190 bus into Oak Falls and not ended up spending the evening with the hicks at the Clam Shack. A lot of things might have been different if Brenda had caught the #190. But while she may have been a punk, Brenda was still firmly a girl, and so she
did
lean over the sink again and again, first wetting the strand, then blow-drying it out, then pasting it with some gel, then shaking her head in disgust, rinsing it out, and starting all over.

When she left the bathroom and saw the time,
she swore out loud. The bus only ran this route every couple hours and the next one would be too late. Her mom heard the
F
word from down in the kitchen.

“Brenda! You know what I told you about using foul language.”

“Sorry, Mom,” she answered, and then did a double take on the stairs. She was wearing the ripped black T-shirt her mom hated, and she really didn’t feel like dealing with a lecture on
that
at the moment. Brenda didn’t know what her mom hated more about it—the fact that it was two sizes too small and showed very clearly that Brenda hated bras, or the sayings that middle-fingered the world on front (“Fuck You If You Can’t Take A Toke”) and back (“Virgins Do It Behind Your Back”). She slipped back into her bedroom and pulled her dad’s old khaki button-down off the doorknob. He had dropped the shirt in the basement on the rag pile a few weeks ago, but she’d instantly retrieved it.

“Why would you want to wear that?” he’d said the first time she had appeared in it, untucked shirttail hanging way below her butt.

“It’s a cool color,” she’d said. “And it’s cool to wear a guy’s shirt.”

Her dad had grinned and then shrugged. “Suit yourself. Just as long as it’s not some other guy’s shirt. Because then I’d really have to ask why you were wearing it.”

“And I’d just have to tell you probably ‘cuz he forgot it when he climbed out of my bedroom window this morning after sleeping over last night,” she’d teased, and ducked when he threatened to cuff her.

“Kidding, Dad!” she’d laughed. “I’d never make him climb out the window. He’d just have to wait ‘til you left for work.”

She ran out of the room at that one, khaki shirt flapping behind her like a pauper’s gown.

The shirt was ratty, but looked too-too comfortable against her faded denim jeans, and it effectively hid the offensive T-shirt from her mom’s eyes as she breezed through the kitchen on her way out of the house.

“Gonna be late?” Dorrie Bean asked.

“Not as late as I’d planned,” Brenda moaned. “I missed the 190, so I’m staying in town tonight.”

“Good.” Her mom nodded. “I hate you taking that bus home from Oak Falls so late. You never know what kind of loser could be on that bus.”

“Same losers who are everywhere, Mom. The bus doesn’t have a lock on lowlifes.”

“Yeah, well, the freaks come out at night. I’m not too fond of you hanging out at the Clam Shack either. Talk about asking for trouble.”

“Mom, everybody hangs out at the Clam Shack. If you don’t head into Oak Falls, where else IS there to go?”

And that was the truth. As Brenda stepped out onto the sidewalk and headed down the hill toward Main, she saw a couple other heads bobbing along the streets below, moving in the same direction. You could always find someone to talk to at the Shack, because it was the only watering hole for at least twenty miles in any direction. You could also usually find someone there to go home with after last call for the same reason. The running joke at the Clam Shack was that you could eat your clam and take it home too. And the more you drank, the better your catch.

Brenda didn’t want to catch anything at the Shack tonight…she just wanted to get buzzed. She was
bummed about not going into Oak Falls, because the conversation there was always more interesting. Here, well hell, everyone in town already knew everybody else’s business…What else was there to talk about? Ron O’Grady’s latest scheme to start an Internet porn site with high-school girls…Well, cops’d nipped that one right quick. Or how about Sheila Halterman’s latest recipe for holiday eggnog—with just a hint of that secret spice she’d never reveal? Oh, the talk went from sinfully perverse to diabolically dull in the span of a heartbeat at the bar. And most of the time, she’d heard it all before anyway. But, it was still better to hang at the bar than to sit in her room or downstairs with the parents all night.

The breeze kicked up the back of her dad’s shirt, and Brenda unbuttoned the front, setting it free to billow like a cape as the wind slipped deliciously around her cleavage like the most tentative lover. She felt her nipples harden instantly, and she shimmied just a little, letting the cotton and the cool dusk wind work together to remind her breasts of how close freedom lay.

Brenda giggled to herself and threw back her head, taking in a deep breath, and letting it out with a slow whistle. She felt good tonight. Maybe she would catch something at the Clam Shack tonight, she mused. Only it wouldn’t be a clam. No way. Bring on the sausage, hold the fish!

It was still early, so he had his pick of the perches. When David slipped one leg over the bar stool at the Shack he groaned as the aches from the accident reminded him of why he was here and not out riding.

“Slow night,” he said, but Joe, the bartender, only grinned.

“Give it an hour,” he said. “And you won’t be able to leave that stool to hit the head or you’ll lose it. And don’t even think of asking someone to save it for you. There is no honor during happy hour!”

“Sounds dangerous,” David laughed. “I’d better prepare myself. How ‘bout a Lite?”

Joe hadn’t finished pulling the beer when the door rattled open and shut, and two more stools were quickly claimed. As Joe delivered the beer and then turned to the newcomers to say “What’ll you have?” the door rattled again, and the inside screen slammed shut with a crack.

“Really oughtta fix that, Joe,” a feminine voice said over his shoulder. The woman slid onto the stool next to David’s.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Joe groused. “I’ll fix that right after I repaint the siding, reshingle the roof, dig out the weeds from that thing they used to call a flower bed out front and rod out the plumbing in the men’s john so it quits overflowing every night just before close.”

“Fixing the door would be a lot easier than the rest,” she suggested.

“Holding the handle an extra second so that it doesn’t hit you in the ass on the way in would be even easier,” the bartender shot back.

“Blah blah blah,” the woman said. “Just set me up.”

“You drinking vinegar on the rocks, or straight up?”

“You get tips with a mouth like that?”

“Only from
pretty
girls.” Joe turned away to pull a Guinness and a maraschino cherry hit him on the back of the neck. “Starting out spunky tonight, heh,” he said, flicking the fruit to the floor.

The woman shrugged off a dingy old shirt and slipped it under her jeans on the bar stool. David saw that the equally beat-up T-shirt beneath it was tight enough to be a crop top, and as mouthy as the girl who wore it. The creamy small of her back was clearly visible between the hug of the lower end of the shirt and the chain-cinched jeans beneath. “‘Virgins Do It Behind Your Back,’” he read on the back of the shirt, and snorted.

She heard him, and turned to raise an eyebrow. “Something funny?”

“Like your shirt,” was all he could think to say. Instead of skewering him though, she only smiled and puffed out her already well-defined chest. David realized the front held an even more offensive saying than the back, but he couldn’t focus on what it said, because his eyes were reading what was beneath the thin cotton.

She shook a mass of shoulder-length raven hair, and a hot-pink strand slipped out from where it had been slicked back behind her ear to trail across her cheek and the black neckline of the tee. “If you’re done, I’m going to have my beer,” she said, and David felt the blood rush to his face. He had been staring, and not even trying to conceal it.

“Sorry,” he said, and then took a deep breath before venturing, “How ‘bout I pick up that tab for you, to make up for being a horrible male pig?”

She snorted and rolled her eyes. They looked dark in the dim neon glow of the bar, but he wasn’t sure if they were gray, green or brown.

“Only if I pick up the tab on yours,” she said. “But I won’t pay good money for that swill you’re sipping. Don’t you have any self-respect?”

“I don’t drink much,” David admitted. “I’m usually in training.”

“If you’re going to spend the night drinking you need some training on what to drink. And putting Lite in your gut is just asking for a gunshot ache in your head and a shitty taste in your mouth tomorrow morning.”

“So what would you suggest?”

“Guinness always starts the night good for me, or, if you can’t handle that, you might go with a Sam Adams. They’re kinda hoppy though.”

David shrugged and kissed the morrow good-bye in his head. He caught the bartender’s eye and laughed as he said, “I’ll have what she’s having…”

TG stretched one beefy arm behind his neck and with just a slight jerk, popped a vertebrae loud enough to be heard around the corner of the shack. He groaned a little, and then grinned as he let one rip from his other end. Call it the yin and yang of stretching.

“Oughtta get that looked at, man,” Billy said, huffing as he threw an armful of rope, duct tape and a
cooler into the trunk of the black Mustang. “Necks shouldn’t make that kinda sound.”

TG shrugged. “I’ve made a neck sound worse.”

“Okay.” Billy grinned. “Necks on a livin’ human being shouldn’t sound like that, not iff’n that human bein’s gonna keep on living any length of days.”

“Nothin’ a couple quarts of ‘shine don’t fix. You ready yet?”

Billy slammed down the trunk and nodded. “Yeah, man, but…” He stopped short of saying that he didn’t want to do the run this time. Though he really didn’t. It’d kept him up lately, thinking about these poor girls they were pulling off the street and hog-tying and throwing in the backseat or trunk. And delivering to God knew what kind of fate. He’d done a lot of things he wasn’t proud of to make a buck in his life, but he’d never thought that being the middle link in a chain of…what? White slavery?…would be his claim to fortune if not fame.

“But what?” TG barked. He buttoned up a blue-checked flannel shirt to hide the stained white T-shirt beneath. You going out on the town, you try to show a little decorum (never mind that the flannel had grease and a small bloodstain on the left shoulder). “You gonna go chickenshit on me?”

Billy shook his head. “No, man, you know I’m with you. And we need the cash bad right now.”

“Damn right we do. If we’re gonna buy the old Hanson place and set up that bar yer always yammering about opening, we need a stack a green.” He nodded at the car and then rubbed the roll of his gut. “And the kegs and gasoline to keep these machines running ain’t cheap neither.”

“I just wonder what they’re doing to those girls, is all,” Billy said quietly. He felt unusually empathetic today.

“Whaddya care?” TG said, smacking Billy on the
shoulder and pushing him at the passenger’s door. “Ain’t like any of ‘em are ever gonna drop drawers for you.”

The two men slid into the Mustang, and in seconds the rev of the eight-cylinder engine echoed across the canyon as TG slipped the car into gear and gunned it down the twisted road and toward town.

Night had fallen, and as most people were already home from a day’s work, finishing the dinner dishes and tucking the kids into bed, TG and Billy had only just begun their day. After an afternoon of steady drinking, they were going to work.

The Mustang shimmied like a snake as it hit the asphalt of Crossback Ridge.

“Yee-ha!” yelled TG, waving one arm out the window.

Billy didn’t answer. He was staring down the ridge at the tiny lights and the small plume of chimney smoke from the place that paid their admittedly unusual salaries.

Castle House Asylum.

Christy Sorensen stripped off the leather jacket and the shoulder holster hidden beneath it, and angrily hung both from hooks in her locker. She slammed the door with a metallic crash and didn’t look back to see if it latched or not.

What a fuckup. Her first “undercover” gig and she manages to hit a stupid biker. Nothing like blowing your cover before you even start. She’d had no choice but to take the kid into the asylum to seek any
medical attention he might need immediately. But that also meant that there’d be no casual snooping from Castle Point’s finest (or at least, youngest!).

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” she hissed to herself as she stalked through the station. Chief wanted to see her as soon as she got in, and he wasn’t going to like what he heard. Not that he hadn’t gotten most of it already over the radio.

“Close the door,” he said when she stepped into the closet he called an office. The place was so tight she could practically feel his breath when she squeezed into the chair wedged in front of his desk.

She complied, and crossed her arms over her gray T-shirt. Then she realized that the motion only accentuated her cleavage, and that probably wasn’t the right message to be sending at the moment. She dropped her hands to her lap, where her fingers insisted on intertwining, and cracking knuckles.

“The kid is okay, is that right? He’s not going to sue the department?” His voice came in a low rumble, chimney-smoke thick and deep.

She nodded.

“And you are okay?”

“No bruises, Chief,” she said. “No physical ones anyway.”

The chief had a way of letting his silver-rimmed glasses slip down his nose so that he could peer at you over them, light blue eyes glinting with almost electric light over the metallic frames. Those stares could last for minutes at a time, as his hands continued filing papers, or reaching for the phone, or any number of other independent tasks. His gaze never wavered. It could be unnerving to the uninitiated, but Christy was ready for it.

“It happens,” he finally said. “That’s not an excuse—you weren’t careful enough. But it happens. Don’t let it happen again.”

“I won’t,” she promised, and popped a knuckle. Bad nervous habit.

“What did you see while you were there?”

“Not much,” she admitted. “I took the guy in and a nurse helped us into an exam room. The doc checked him out, said he was okay, and then showed us a couple of their new patients on the way out.”

“And…?”

“And nothing, really. Couple of thorazine flyers buzzing about the color of the air, I think. Hospital gowns and tranquilizers…that’s about all I got before we were out the door again.”

“And the kid?”

“I put his bike in the car and drove him home. Gave him a couple twenties to cover any damage to the bike, and gave him my number in case he had a problem. I don’t think I’ll hear from him though.”

Chief puckered his lips a moment, and looked at a corner of the ceiling populated solely by cobwebs. Then he stood up and pulled a drawer open from the three-drawer file tucked in the corner directly in front of the door. When it slammed shut, he held a manila folder in hand. The chair complained as his 6′2″, 290-pound bulk crushed its cushion back toward the ground, but he squeaked it back toward the desk and passed the folder.

“You’re still on this one,” he said. “You can’t do it undercover anymore, but maybe we don’t need that. For now, we’re just keeping an eye out in that direction. There’s something not quite right about this guy’s operation out there, I can feel it.”

“What do you want me to do, Chief?”

“Just keep your ears open, for now,” he said. “Take some drives out to Crossback Ridge when you can. And read the folder. It’ll give you the history of the place, and a couple notes I found regarding our new owner.”

“What do you think’s up, Chief?”

“I wish I knew,” he said. “Maybe nothing. But I always trust my gut. And my gut says otherwise.”

He nodded, indicating her dismissal, and he had already picked up the phone to make a call before she’d risen to leave.

“Hey, Harry,” he spoke into the receiver, voice a full octave above the plateau of the immediately preceding conversation. “What would you say to heading out to Autumwa this weekend and laying some lures on a few bass?”

Christy slipped out of the office, glad that she’d escaped with so little censure, but still pissed that her first big investigation had stumbled right out of the gate.

“Hey, Sorensen,” someone called. She glanced around and saw Matt Ryan grinning like he’d swallowed two thirty-eight double-Ds and just taken a short break for air.

“Yeah, Matt.”

“You know when they say fifty points for a biker, they’re not really serious.”

“Ha, ha, ha.” She grimaced.

“Did you at least smack him good with the car door?”

“No dents, sorry,” she said.

“So what’s the deal with Castle House? They really turning the place into a crazy house up there?”

“’s what it looks like. Chief has a feeling about it though. So I’m on surveillance duty for a while.”

“You know what they say—if you go looking for trouble…”

“…It’ll find you. Yeah. Well I’d say it
did
find me today.”

Christy sat down at the booking desk and logged in to the computer. She had to file a report on the accident before she went home. She opened up the
form and started to type…but stopped after only a sentence. She hated reliving her stupidity.

Abruptly she rose from the desk, and walked over to Matt’s desk. He was holding down the call desk tonight, but the phones were mercifully quiet.

“Did you ever hurt anyone in the line of duty?” she asked.

Matt was a lifer on the Castle Point force (though
force
may be overstating the case a bit—Castle Point’s police force consisted of the chief, Matt, Christy and a night-call operator. The three officers traded off every three nights). Matt and the chief had patrolled the town since before Christy was born. If there was a skeleton in anyone’s closet, they knew about it. And Matt, in particular, loved to talk about them. Christy had answered the recruitment ad during her last month at the police academy, and Matt had been the first to interview her.

“Did you ever meet a man with three testicles?” he asked during their first conversation. She’d gaped at him, shocked both at the inappropriateness of the question, and at the oddity he described. She shook her head no.

“We got one here in Castle Point.” He grinned. “Lives up the ridge near the crossback. Then there’s the guy who lives down near Smythe’s Grocery who thinks that when he shaves and puts on a wig and a pair of panty hose and a dress that nobody recognizes him when he goes shopping. We pretend not to. Got a lot of weird shit here. You’ll get to learn it all by and by.”

Christy had grown to like Matt over the past couple months. He was older, but he never treated her like she was a kid. And he needled her like an older brother. Now though, as he looked at her face and saw how troubled she was by the day, he got serious. Matt stood, and put both hands on her shoulders.

“Listen,” he said. “I was just kidding before. We all screw up once in a while, sometimes because we’re not careful, and sometimes because we can’t help it.”

His long fingers squeezed her arms in reassurance. “I’ve never hit anyone with a car on duty, no, but I had to shoot a guy once.”

Her eyes widened at that. While it was a daily possibility that you’d have to pull a gun while on police duty, she knew that in a tiny town like this, it rarely happened. His eyes held hers, and his chin nodded, just once. For the first time, Christy really looked hard at Matt’s face, and saw the crow’s-feet rippling there around his eyes, and the amount of silver that salted his close-cropped hair. On the surface, Matt barely looked forty, but a closer inspection revealed someone who’d been here for the long haul. He was weathered, but still hale.

“It’s not something I’d care to repeat,” he said. “I’ve fired plenty of rounds into the sky, but we had a holdup down at the gas station one night a few years back. Stupid kid—wore the ski mask and everything. I was actually just a block away when the clerk pulled the alarm, and so I was out in front of the door on foot before the kid could get to his car. He took off running, and I yelled for him to stop. He did. But then he turned toward me, reached into his pants, and pulled out a gun. He’d tucked it right there at his belt buckle when he left the store.

“‘Back off,’ he yelled, pointing the piece right at me. I was shitting my pants, I’m not ashamed to say. This guy’s got a gun on me, the first time that had happened in something like twenty-five years as a cop. I pulled my own and yelled for him to drop it.

“He just laughed, raised the gun in the air and then aimed it at me again and yelled, ‘Bang, bang, you’re dead.’

“I fired. He didn’t. And when I got to him, he was shaking and crying on the ground. I picked up the ‘weapon’…and it was a kid’s cap gun. I pulled the hat off and saw he was just a kid. High-school kid. I’d tried to shoot him in the arm, but I’d hit him right in the chest…He was bleeding all over and coughing.”

Christy gulped as she saw the pain that crossed Matt’s steel blue eyes. The humor normally so much a part of his every motion was completely erased.

“That was the worst day of my life,” Matt said, and then gave her a little shake and a pat on the back. “Bad shit can happen to you, whether you’re a cop or not. You screwed up today, but in the scheme of things, it wasn’t bad. Now get out of here, sleep on it and forget it.”

He grinned then, finally, though his eyes still looked sad.

“C’mon. Tomorrow there’ll be more bicyclists to run down.”

She slapped him in the shoulder and shook her head. “Nice. And for just a moment there, I was feeling bad for you.”

“Sympathy will only get you ulcers,” he said.

Christy grabbed a cup of coffee from the kitchenette, dosing it heavily with sugar and creamer. She liked it black in the morning, but by nightfall, a cup was more like dessert. So it should be sweet, right?

She sat back down with the Styrofoam cup and banged out the quick summary of the accident and visit to Castle House Asylum, hit save and logged off. Tossing back the last gulp of stale java, she gave the peace sign to Matt, who had two feet up on the desk while reading this week’s
People
, and headed for the door.

“Night, Chief,” she called, and thought there was an answering rumble from the back office.

There was nothing quite like the air of a fall night in the hills, Christy thought, as she fished for her keys. She’d grown up in the suburbs of St. Louis, and the air there had smelled like rubber and decaying tenements, but never like heaven.

Here…she took a deep breath and savored it while staring up at the stars that sprinkled the sky as thick as shells on a Florida beach. It was crisp and clean, and sometimes redolent with the faint scent of lavender or roses or some type of sensually extravagant flower. The brush that struggled to cover the limestone outcroppings jutting from the sides of Crossback Ridge was riddled with wildflowers, and Christy couldn’t identify most of the colorful blossoms, but she loved to see them. And smell them. There might not be a lot of choice in guys or bars here, but Castle Point did have some advantages.

She keyed open the Olds, and slid into the cool but well-worn seat. She’d bought the car in her second year of college for $500. A boyfriend had helped her pour an equal amount of money into it over the next six months to get it running dependably, but since then, except for oil changes, the car had run like a rusty dream. Sooner or later she was going to have to do something about the clouds of blue smoke it coughed up when she started it, but not yet. She had student loans and an apartment to finish furnishing. She patted the dash and whispered, “Stay with me, buddy.”

Then she gunned the engine and shot out of the police lot like a bullet.

She’d not become a cop because she liked to uphold the speed limit.

Christy took Main through the center of town,
and noted that the Clam Shack was already packed for the night. She hoped Matt wouldn’t be getting called down this evening to break up a fight. That was usually about the only action that happened in this one-bar town, and it was the one thing she still felt a little apprehensive about dealing with. Blue uniform and nightstick or no, a twentysomething blonde who didn’t even stand five and a half feet tall and barely weighed enough to tip the 120 mark on the scale didn’t exactly engender fear in the hearts of drunken loggers and mechanics and fishermen…or gypsies, tramps and thieves, her mental voice sang with a silent smile.

Physical intimidation was never going to be her strong suit in law enforcement. Nevertheless, she could handle herself. She’d worked hard in the academy to learn all the moves she could to turn her slight size to her advantage in hand-to-hand combat, and she’d gotten damn good at dropping 180-pound guys without breaking a sweat. They were always stunned to find themselves lying faceup on the wrestling mat. The dumb ones always wanted another go.

Christy left the Shack behind and wished Matt a quiet night. But then, instead of taking the left at Arbor Street and heading up the short street to her apartment, she threw her signal on and took the next right.

If the air in town smelled sweet, the air that settled over Crossback Ridge after dark was nectar. Christy rolled both windows down as she eased the car up to sixty miles an hour and took the curves around the ridge like a jittery roller-coaster ride. As she came down the stretch just before the turnoff to the old hotel, another car came barreling down the road in the opposite direction. A black Mustang. She caught a glimpse of the unkempt faces of two
laughing men in the glare of her headlights as the cars whooshed past each other in the dark. For a second, she considered pulling a U and going after them. She didn’t have a radar gun, but she knew they had to be doing twenty over, if they were moving at all.

Then she shook her head and looked at her own speedometer.

“Off duty,” she murmured.