Supernatural: Coyote's Kiss (4 page)

“Just trying to spice up our relationship,” Dean replied. “But listen, never mind that.” He tipped his chin toward the doorway though which Mrs. Keene had drifted. “Booze in the house. No visible religious stuff. All this sex talk. You sure about this born-again thing?”

Sam looked down at the file folder in his hand. Rifled through some papers.

“According to this, the Keenes have been active members of the Living Word Baptist Church for fifteen years.”

“Fifteen years,” Dean echoed.

Mrs. Keene returned with a heroic three-finger knock of straight Bourbon in a thick, square glass. She tossed back more than half the amber liquid and then drifted over to the glossy leather couch. She didn’t sit, just stood there.

“You were saying,” Dean prompted.

“Was I?” Mrs. Keene looked puzzled and slightly anxious, like she’d just woken up in an unfamiliar bed. She sat down after all.

“You were saying,” Sam reminded her. “That you felt like the last time you saw your husband was fifteen years ago.”

“Right,” she said. “The day after Ritchie’s seventh birthday party.” She downed the rest of her bourbon. “Davis went to work that night just like he always did, but when he came home, he was like a different person. Shut down inside. He never touched me again.”

She shook her head, shifting the empty glass from one hand to the other. Dean felt a terrible empathy for her, all alone in that clean, perfect house, as empty as her glass.

“I know something happened that night,” she continued. “But he would never talk about it. He made us all get baptized the next day. I went along with it because it was easier than trying to argue him out of it, but I never really believed. I haven’t been back to church since his funeral. Closed casket, of course, since they never found his head.” She was suddenly angry, bitter as frostbite. “I mean, what’s the point? So I can listen to a bunch of sanctimonious hypocrites tell me that what happened to Davis was God’s will?” She made a harsh, half-suffocated sound that was probably meant to be a laugh. “God’s will? I don’t want any part of a God that would let something like that happen to one of his followers.”

Lady
, Dean thought,
you don’t know the half of it.

Border patrol officer Manuel Léon didn’t know what to make of his new partner. Charlie Himes was a decent guy, but very guarded. Didn’t joke around. Didn’t say a single word that wasn’t directly related to the job or responding to a specific request. He was the only black guy on the Tijuana River ATV team and he was also the oldest by a good ten years. Léon was the youngest. They were a Mutt and Jeff team, Himes tall and wiry and Léon short and stocky. Their CO called them Rocky and Bullwinkle. But despite their differences, they’d been working pretty well together for these past four days. Himes been showing Léon the ropes along the river, and although Léon might have preferred to partner with someone he could kid around with a little every now and then, Himes was a crack shot, had a black belt in Brazilian Jiujitsu, and held the highest arrest record in the unit. He was in better shape than most guys half his age. Léon could do worse.

Their designated section of the Tijuana River was barely what you’d call a river. It was more like sludgy trickle of toxic chemicals and raw sewage that ran along a wide cement channel littered with dead dogs, burning tires, and discarded needles. The stench was overwhelming, but that never stopped people from wading through the filth to try and make it to the American side. Himes claimed that you got used to the smell after a while. Léon wasn’t sure if he believed that. There weren’t enough showers in the world to wash the memory of that smell out of Léon’s head.

It was just after midnight when they spotted a trio of junkies squatting and huddled together on the American edge of the river. Male in an illegible death metal T-shirt and dirty jeans. Long, tangled hair and lurid red Kaposi’s sarcoma legions on his arms and face. Two females. One overweight and painfully young. Childish, pink-and-black T-shirt featuring a bad knock-off of Hello Kitty. Way too much bloated belly exposed between the hem of the shirt and the saggy waistband of her torn pink leggings. Faded pink hair, with a good six inches of black roots. Maybe sixteen, tops. Dead, hopeless eyes. If she was sharing needles, and who knew what else, with her male companion, she was probably already HIV-positive. Léon hoped she was just fat, and not pregnant. The second female wore a hooded sweatshirt, hood up and curly black hair spilling out from around its edges. Jeans and dusty hiking boots. What skin was visible was corpse pale in the harsh sodium lights. The first two were totally absorbed doing something furtive with their hands, probably prepping their heroin, but the second female sat stone still and seemed to be watching the border patrol agents. Léon couldn’t see her eyes under the hood, but she gave him the creeps.

“Paid diversion,” Himes said as they pulled their ATVs up on the lip of the channel.

“Paid?”

“Smugglers pay junkies to shoot up along the river,” Himes told him. “Divert our attention away from their operations.”

Himes lifted the visor of his helmet and raised a pair of compact binoculars to his eyes to get a closer look at the action. He watched the junkies for a silent minute, then handed the binocs over to Léon. Léon pushed up his own visor and scoped the trio for himself, adjusting the focus and zooming in on the male junkie’s hands.

Sure enough, he was dumping something from a tiny plastic envelope into a metal bottle cap. The chubby girl was pressed up against him, holding a disposable lighter and a syringe. She had sparkly glitter polish on her bitten nails, and a cheap ring shaped like a star.

“Should we try to apprehend them?” Léon asked.

“We can try,” Himes said. “But they’ll probably run back over to the Mexican side.”

“So, what?” Léon said. “We just watch them?”

Léon was zoomed in so tight that when something suddenly happened, it just looked like a fast shuffle and blur. He lowered the binocs, squinting at the three junkies. Now there were only two of them. They were both laying face down in the oily sewage, rivulets of crimson feeding out into the sluggish current. The chubby girl didn’t seem to have a head.

“What the...”

He turned to Himes and saw that the second female was standing right beside them, between the two ATVs. She was inexplicably nude. Impossible, but not any less possible than her running all the way up to the top of the steep concrete bank in the half a second it took Léon to lower his binocs. Her chin and chest were slick with gore. Her eyes did not reflect any light, just swallowed it all and gave nothing back. She was holding something, something that Léon’s baffled brain translated as a dirty red mop. But when he saw that the mop had streaks of pink, he realized what he was really looking at. It was a human spine with the head still attached, clotted pink hair brushing back and forth against the naked woman’s bare toes.

Léon looked at his partner. Crack-shot, bad ass Himes. Highest arrest record on the team. He didn’t draw his weapon. Didn’t take action. He was just staring at the woman with a drowsy kind of dread, like a suicide on a ledge, looking down. Like he knew what was coming. Like he deserved it.

When the girl dropped the spine and leapt on Himes like a hungry animal, Léon scrambled sideways off his ATV, thought processes utterly short-circuited by what he was seeing. It would have made sense to punch the gas and speed away, but he wasn’t thinking. Couldn’t think. All he could do was stumble backward, hands up and head shaking in endless, wordless denial. Because the woman was changing, form and substance flickering like a fire, bleeding off into the air around her as she tore into Himes with raptor claws and a thousand jagged teeth dripping glistening venom like rattlesnake fangs.

Léon tripped and fell on his ass as what used to be a woman threw back what used to be a head and screamed. That sound, that agonized, furious scream, was the single most terrible sound Léon had ever heard. Then something happened that was so strange, stranger even than all the other madness of the previous impossible moments, that Léon could feel his mind snap like a broken bone. In a way, it was almost a relief, not to have to try and make sense of anything anymore. Because there was no way to make sense of what he was seeing.

The sky around the woman’s head was unfolding. The earth was torn wide open like Himes’ corpse and things started to fall upward, twisting like trash caught in a high wind. There was a blinding flash and a burst of excruciating pain like a plane crash inside Léon’s head and then the woman was gone. So were the two ATVs and Himes’ body. So was the lower half of Léon’s body. Everything from the navel down was gone, neatly severed and bloodless for a surreal moment. Then, the blood came in a dizzy sickening rush, flowing down into the oily river and mingling with the blood of the dead junkies. Léon thought he heard the buzz of ATVs, backup on the way, but it didn’t matter. It was too late.

Dean stood at the single window of a motel room. He’d been looking out at the freshly washed Impala sitting in the mostly empty parking lot, but now let the scratchy plaid curtain drop. The room was identical to every room he’d ever stayed in, nearly invisible in its generic blandness. The only thing that stood out and reminded him that he was in Arizona rather than Nebraska or Montana or Vermont was a creepy painting of an anthropomorphic saguaro cactus wearing a cowboy hat and a mildly demented expression on its prickly green face. When they first checked in, he’d been tempted to take it down and stash it in the closet, but discovered that it was bolted to the wall. Like anyone in their right mind would want to steal that atrocity.

Sam had his laptop set up on the rickety table on the other side of the narrow room, surrounded by open files and crumpled papers.

“So what have you got on little Ritchie Keene?”

“He’s in a band.” Sam said. “They’re terrible.”

“How about something useful? Like his DOB?”

“April 16th,” Sam read off the screen. “1988.”

“When Mrs. Keene was talking about whatever she thinks might have happened to her husband on the job,” Dean said, “she referred to it as the day after the youngest son’s seventh birthday party. Not the day after his
actual
birthday.”

“Still,” Sam said. “At least that narrows it down, gives us a window of about a week or so. I’d say we should look for something that occurred between April 10th and 20th, 1995.”

“Looks like I’d better pay a visit to our friends at Customs and Border Protection,” Dean said. “Where was Keene stationed?”

“There’s no way either one of us is getting into a CBP station,” Sam said.

“Why not?” Dean asked.

“Look,” Sam replied. “I want to bag this creature too, but we need to play it smart. Weigh the risks. A CBP station isn’t some podunk sheriff ’s office where you can fool everyone with slick talk and a fake badge. In case you haven’t been keeping up on current events over the past eight years, the CBP and the Department of Homeland Security have combined forces to crack down on any possible terrorist threat to our great nation. And they take their jobs very,
very
seriously. I think it’s safe to say they’re basically Dean-proof.”

“I’m deeply hurt by your lack of faith in my ability to sweet-talk,” Dean replied, opening the closet door and pulling out a garment bag containing two unremarkable navy-blue suits. He unzipped it, removing the smaller of the two jackets. “I’m like the Chuck Norris of sweet-talking.”

“I’m serious, Dean,” Sam said. “Federal prison serious.”

Dean pulled off his T-shirt and slipped into the white button-down that had been hung underneath the jacket.

“What? You’re saying you couldn’t go on without me?” Dean buttoned the shirt and draped a dull striped tie around his neck. “You love your dear big brother so much that it would break your heart if I went to prison?”

Sam looked away.

“I’m just trying to be practical,” he said.

“Practical,” Dean repeated, tightening the knot on the tie. “Uh huh. Just give me the damn address.”