Unearthed (10 page)

Reeve stepped out onto the warm pavement. The sun was behind the horizon, a little leer of red and purple lighting the sky, a hint of chill seeping in with night. The woods were rustling, tall pines forming the channel that the road ran through. Reeve knew the place pretty well, had driven through here more times than he could count in his numerous patrols.

Didn’t figure he’d be driving out here to inspect the corpse of one of his deputies, though.

Ed Fries was already on site, shaking his head, standing at the foot of the corpse. The body lay on the dusty shoulder, off the pavement and with an arm dangling onto the grass. From this angle, Reyes looked normal, but as Reeve approached, he could see a comic distension at the man’s neck. It narrowed, tissue misshapen and bulging, coming back to almost normal at the base of the head. The skin looked like a paper bag someone had crumpled up.

“Goddamn, Nick,” Fries said, using the occasion to address him with a familiarity that wasn’t totally out of place. Reeve had known Fries for longer than any of them. He and the big man had spent many a day together out on the Caledonia, back when they’d had more time off and less shit like this to panic over. “I mean … Reyes. What the fuck is going on here, right?”

“I don’t know,” Reeve said, stopping at the feet of his fallen deputy. Reyes’s eyes were bulging, like they’d been squeezed out of his head. “Forensics team coming up from Chattanooga?”

“Uhh,” Fries said, turning, his bulky body following with him, “about that … I get the feeling they’re real sick of us calling.”

Reeve just stared at him, trying to work through the sense of thinly veiled disbelief at what he’d heard. “I’m pretty fucking sick of calling them, too.”

“It’s gonna be a while before they show up,” Fries said, and the big man was clearly uncomfortable with even voicing this thought, like he figured Reeve was going to blow up on him like a bag of lit cherry bombs. “Say they’ve got their own business to attend to. That they’ll be out tomorrow morning.”

“Yeah, they’ve got their own business to attend to,” Reeve said, sharply, ignoring the two paramedics just hanging back near an ambulance. “It’s called sleeping, and they’re doing it while my fucking deputy lies here all goddamned night on the side of the road.”

Fries blanched. “You want me to call ’em back?”

“Yes, I want you to call them back,” Reeve said, feeling fury and disgust coming up in equal measure. “You tell them that I’ve got an officer who worked this beat for ten years lying dead on the side of the road from homicide, and that I would hope that if any of them ever died, their fellow officers would exhibit a courtesy they’re not displaying here.” He tensed, ready to kick something, then remembered that he was in a crime scene and bellowed instead. “Fucking pricks!” His foot skipped in the dust and stirred a small cloud that whirled along the side of the road for a few feet.

“I’ll give ’em a call,” Fries said, nodding as he backed up. “See what they can do. Maybe you’re right, maybe mentioning that we got an officer down here—maybe that’ll get ’em thinking right.” Fries hustled away, not running but close.

Reeve sat there for a minute, trying not to look at Reyes’s body. The man didn’t deserve this. Hell, no one deserved this. That neck was crushed like a gorilla had gotten hold of it. A gorilla, or a real big guy. Reeve felt his eyes narrow. The cowboy wasn’t all that big … but Arch Stan sure was.

Reeve threw that thought away. There was a world of difference between being sneaky and hiding something, maybe lining his own pocket somehow, and being a murderer who would choke a fellow officer to death.

Wasn’t there?

The sound of an engine approaching at high speed broke off that line of thought for Reeve. He turned to see an old Honda come racing up, a little wobbly between the lines. He stared at it as it came to a halt with a screech of the brakes, pulling off the side of the road and parking at a cockeyed angle, like the driver was just angling into a diagonal space at Wal-Mart. “What the …” Reeve found himself muttering under his breath.

Erin Harris threw open the driver’s side door and staggered out. Her petite frame took a little effort to lever out of the car, but she managed it on the third try, steadying herself by holding onto the open door. She was dressed in civilian clothes—hadn’t even bothered to change into her uniform—and when she got off the door she walked in a decidedly crooked path toward Reeve.

He sat there under the darkening sky and felt himself simmer. He was boiling by the time she got up to him and said, “Hey, Sheriff.” The words hit him in the face along with a whiff of whiskey and beer, and he knew that if it was possible to get drunk just by breathing air, this would be the breath to do it to him.

“What the hell, Erin?” He didn’t even hold back.

She blinked at him. “What?”

“You’re drunk, that’s what.” Reeve barely held it down, barely kept it from coming out in a yell so loud it’d send the paramedics racing away with their lights flashing, heading for the county line to get away from him. “I’d tell you to get out of here but I can’t spare anyone to drive you home.”

Her eyelids fluttered at him. “Donna called, I came. You wanted me to stay at the bar? ’Cuz I figured you could use help.”

“What kind of help are you gonna be right now?” Reeve put his hands on his hips. He hadn’t done the lecturing parent thing in a while. “I ask you to put up crime scene tape and I’ll be lucky if it don’t look like a fucking tangled ball of yellow yarn when you’re done. I can’t even put you on traffic diversion, because you’d probably get yourself run over. I mean,
goddamn
. Could you pick a worse time to get hammered?”

“I had time off,” she said, sullen at the criticism.

“Yeah, I had time off today, too,” Reeve said, turning his back on her. “But I didn’t take down a whole six pack during it.” He waved a hand at her, too disgusted to look. “Go … sleep it off in your car or something. You ain’t leaving here until you can pass a breathalyzer, so don’t even think about starting the ignition. Just lay down and pass out, will you?” He heard her shoes crunch on the dusty shoulder as she traced a path away, and Reeve just stood there, cursing Archibald Stan for not being what he was supposed to be—for not being here now, really—as he stood on the side of the road in the deepening twilight.

“How we gonna do this?” Hendricks asked as they crept through the last hundred yards of woods. He hadn’t drawn his sword yet, but Arch had his shiny new one in hand, a gift from Hendricks’s patroness that Arch still had no clue about. It was better that way, keeping him in the dark, since she’d shared a little detail about Arch that Hendricks didn’t feel either inclined to share or even necessarily believe at the moment.

“Two in the front,” Arch said, “one in the back.”

“Huh,” Hendricks said with a grin. “Like the shocker?”

“The what?” Arch looked at him with a distinctly
What the fuck?
expression. Except Arch didn’t use words like that, which was too bad.

“Don’t ask, sweetie,” Alison said, carrying her rifle case like it was a hell of a burden. She wouldn’t let anyone else carry it for her, though, that big beast of a .50. “You don’t really want to know.”

“Marine’s on about ass again,” Bill said.

“In fairness, the shocker is not just about ass,” Hendricks said. “But leave it up to the Army to ignore that it’s two-thirds about pussy, since none of you have ever seen one.”

“Will you knock it off!” Arch hissed into the dark.

Silence fell over them. The sun was well under the horizon now. Branches crackled as they moved through the woods, heralding their approach. A house lay in the distance, lights shining through the trees. Hendricks could see headlights farther off, to his left.

They kept going through the quiet woods. There was conversation in the distance, too, a couple people walking and talking. They’d come from the headlights, Hendricks realized, and were heading toward the house. The trees thinned ahead, the quiet eeriness of the forest giving way to a still clearing with the house in the middle of it like a lone boat on the ocean.

They slowed as they came to the edge of the woods and started the cell phone conference call that Bill had set up for them a while back. Hendricks threaded the wire and earbud into place, then snugged the phone on his belt. The wire got in his way during fights sometimes, but the microphone was live all the time. Which had been embarrassing the first time they’d staked out a demon haunt and he’d had to take a piss. There had been laughs. Lots of laughs. Hendricks didn’t care; it wasn’t like any of the others never took a piss. Except Duncan. He probably didn’t.

“Motion,” Alison said, about ten feet from the edge of the woods. She was on the ground, low, had her case open and was starting to get set up. He couldn’t tell if she was winded at all by the trek, but she sure didn’t look it. Girl was full of surprises. He peeled his eyes off of her with a little difficulty.

“Guess you’re setting up here, then,” Arch said, like he was a little miffed she’d taken the initiative.

“It’s a good vantage,” she said, not looking up at him. She hefted the big Barrett rifle and set it on the bipod legs, pointing it down range toward the house. “I can cover the front door from here, can see in some of the windows.”

The house looked like it might be a big L, with the top to Hendricks’s left. There was a porch out front, and he could see it from here. He pulled a small pair of binoculars out of his pocket and peered through. The low light didn’t give him much, but he could see in some of the windows, too. The bottom of the L came pointing toward him on the right, and he could plainly see into kitchen windows, with what looked like people milling around inside. There was a back door and a porch behind it, too.

“I’ll set up at the back,” Bill said, slinging his rifle over his shoulder. “I should be able to cover the two sides of the house Alison can’t see from here, and we can put together a pretty good crossfire if need be.”

“Not gonna do us much good when we’re inside, though,” Hendricks said, looking at the setup. “You’ll be likely to hit one of us.” He glanced at Arch, then Duncan. “If we’re going in.”

“We’re going in,” Arch agreed.

“In the shocker formation,” Hendricks added with a smile.

“I wish I could cover the front from over there,” Alison said, nodding toward the left, where the driveway was a parking of cars, a rainbow shape that stretched along the U of the unpaved access road. “Straight shot into the house, none of this side-to-side motion from my targets—”

“Huge, battleship-sinking holes in the place,” Hendricks said, “and your teammates.”

“That could happen anyway,” she said coyly, not looking up from adjusting her scope.

“Bill, go for it,” Arch said, and Longholt took off at a trot. He moved decently well for an old man, Hendricks thought. And for an Army guy. “Duncan, you want to go in the back door or you want me to?”

“I’m surprised you let him do that, Alison,” Hendricks quipped.

“I like it,” she said, and he caught a smile as she looked sidelong at him. “It’s really hot and intense once you get used to it, great thing to do other than blowjobs when I’m on the rag.”

Hendricks felt his face burn on that one. He was used to her firing back like it was nothing, but every once in a while she caught him off guard, giving him a dose of too much information coupled with a voyeuristic thrill. This was one of those times, and he caught a hint of shame mixed with a curiosity to know maybe just a little more.

“Let’s go,” Arch said, dour and sour again. Hendricks couldn’t blame him for that one. Duncan took off dutifully after Bill, and Hendricks watched Arch take off out of the woods toward a nearby weeping willow tree in the yard before he followed behind, doing his damnedest not to look at Alison as he passed her by.

Arch was feeling more than a little embarrassed himself, hearing his wife say things about their very, very personal life just to get a rise out of Hendricks. The cowboy was more than crude; he was one of the basest men that Arch had ever met. Every once in a while he considered himself unfortunate to have met him.

But, the rest of the time, he had to admit he wasn’t sorry at all. Even now, as he was bent double under a willow tree, peering into the dark, about to crash a demon house party, he felt the rush that told him he was having the time of his life.

It wasn’t that the prospect of being on the other side of the law—even though he was only under suspicion—didn’t bother him. It bothered him a lot, in fact. It crawled right under his skin like one of those cheg’tuatha that they’d run across up in the hills a couple weeks back. He hated being on the outs with Reeve, not just for loyalty reasons, but because Arch had a reputation he’d worked hard to cultivate. If the line was at knee level, Arch would jump and pull his legs up waist-high in order to clear it. He’d lived his life by that principle, and the hit to his pride that being called a crooked cop brought held its own special kind of sting. It had kept him awake the first few nights, worrying about it.

Then he’d gotten into a rhythm of demon slaying, and slept like a baby during the days. The guilty feelings, the burning sense to his pride, it was near-gone.

He looked over Hendricks, whose once clean-shaven face was now buried under a few weeks of scruff. The cowboy squatted next to him, down on a knee, peering into the lit windows of the house. “You got a count?”

“More than we could handle by ourselves,” Hendricks said, then turned his eyes to the driveway to their left. “Look at all those cars. This ain’t no demon picnic. This is like a Christmas party.”

“More like an Antichrist-mas party, given the audience,” Arch said, voice a little thicker with emotion than it might have been if Hendricks had used a different example, like Halloween.

Hendricks just grinned, teeth catching reflected light in the dark. “Duncan, you think we can handle this?”

“Sure, why not,” Duncan said, flat as ever.

“I can put a few down before you hit the door,” Alison said in his earpiece. “Might start ’em toward the exit, or get ’em ducking.”