Unearthed (8 page)

“You all right there, cowboy?” Arch asked, lingering by the door.

“Yeah,” Hendricks said, talking around the brim of his hat. He was enjoying the semi-dark it provided. This time of day, the sunset shone in through the spider-webbed window over his head and turned the whole place a fiery color, highlighting all the dents and dings and damage to the baseboards. He wasn’t picky about where he slept, but the fleabag onramp motel that had occasionally charged by the hour where he last stayed had been nicer. Cleaner, too. “Be down in a minute.”

“Alison’s making something,” Arch said in a low voice. “Take your time.”

“Yeah,” Hendricks said, feeling a little sour but trying not to show it. “Maybe I’ll show up after dinner.” He was ravenous but not exactly thrilled about the prospect of Alison’s cooking. She was working on an old camp stove and didn’t know how to balance the heat. Undercooked beans were likely to be the result again. Cold, too. How hard was it to stick a finger in a pot to see if you’d cooked something?

“Heh,” Arch said, almost a laugh. “Chow’s in ten.” He did shit like that sometimes, like he thought it’d appeal to Hendricks if he tried to make it sound like Lafayette was still in the Marines. He didn’t mean anything by it, but after this many weeks, Hendricks was about to crawl out of his own damned skin from being confined in this place with these people. He heard Arch’s footsteps moving away, the soft steps as he reached the stairs and began to descend, floorboards squealing in protest.

“What’s on your mind?” Duncan asked, a whisper in the quiet.

Hendricks stared into the dark of his hat. “Why does something have to be on my mind? Can’t I just be tired?” He adjusted his hat. “Can’t I just be sick of sleeping during the day so we can go out at night?” And not to party, either. Hendricks had always taken his demon hunting pretty seriously, but he’d also allowed for a little down time here and there. He’d never been bunkered down in a house with three other people and only thirty percent of the place livable before. He heard every noise from every one of them, including the sounds of Arch and Alison fucking like rabbits every goddamned night. However shy the big man had started out, he’d gotten quite used to having an audience in audible range at this point, and either he’d gotten confident or he just didn’t care.

It annoyed the hell out of Hendricks. He just wanted to get out, to leave this crawling sense of claustrophobia behind so he could feel normal again. He wanted to eat food that didn’t suck, to drink something other than bottled water and warm canned Cokes, to—hell, to fuck again. That would be nice. To feel the sun on the back of his neck, to not be out in the middle of the night humping it through the damned woods so he could kick down the door of a trailer infested with groth-targh-uah and start slashing and burning.

“You can be sick of anything you want to be,” Duncan said, still lying flat on his back. His voice was quiet enough not to produce the weird echo this room had. “Just feels like there’s more to it than that. You’ve got a … restless sense about you.”

“Restless,” Hendricks said, adjusting his hat. Light flooded in, bright, disorienting, and he squinted. “Yes, I’m restless. Got restless legs, restless arms, and a restless dick.”

“Never heard of that last one before.”

“It’s a thing,” Hendricks said, gradually opening his eyes, letting them adjust to the sight of the wrecked room. “I’m so horned up, I could just about fuck anything that moves.”

Duncan kept quiet for a few seconds after that. “I’m just going to lie here, real still, then.”

Hendricks felt a smile crack through his frown. “Your lips are still moving.”

“Reckon we should both start moving,” Duncan said.

“
Reckon
we should,” Hendricks said, mocking. The demon hadn’t talked like that before. But then, they’d all changed these last few weeks. Things had gotten tense, hadn’t they? It wasn’t just Hendricks’s imagination, was it?

Resignedly, he rolled to the edge of his mattress and prepared to stand. His stomach was growling anyway, and even cold beans would be better than listening to it rumble all night, especially if they were going out tonight.

Reeve took his time getting out of the car, still lagging as much as he could. He grabbed his fishing rod and tackle box, too, and walked real slow across the hot black asphalt in the parking lot, just sauntering. He could see Pike inside, behind the counter, watching him walk up, and hoped the bastard enjoyed every slow, miserable second of it.

When he got to the heavy Plexiglas door, he made a show of fumbling it, moving the rod and tackle box around like he couldn’t carry it all, tried to look a little flustered. In reality, he was just boiling on the inside from Pike’s insult, and felt no need to rush things at all. Why even bother being civil to this asshole, after all? This meeting had been brewing for months, and the bastard decided to pull this crap by just dropping in unannounced? Fuck him. Fuck him with the whole fishing pole, up the ass, and the tackle box, too, for all Reeve cared. Let him deal with fish hook polyps for a spell, see how that worked on his disposition.

Pike came out from behind the counter around the time Reeve managed to get the outer door open, and the county administrator himself opened the second door for him. In his forties, wearing a suit that was too highfalutin for his job by half, Pike was a reasonably good-looking guy, Reeve had to concede. He had hair somewhere between blond and brown, cut short and combed over even though he didn’t look like he was going bald at all.

“Well, it’s kind of you to join me here, Sheriff,” Pike said as Reeve came through the open door. Pike let it swing shut behind him. “I appreciate you taking the time on your day off.” Not a hint of insincerity, which didn’t surprise Reeve. Pike was a politician, and he was good at acting sincere about everything he said. Rumors had pegged him for a state representative slot in the near future, which Reeve rated as unlikely since Pike’s party of choice hadn’t won a seat in Calhoun County for more years than he could remember. Being able to run without the party affiliation next to his name was a real boon for a local government role like county administrator.

“You call, I answer,” Reeve said, letting his face settle into a mask.

“Shall we?” Pike asked, lifting an arm to indicate Reeve’s own office.

“Sure.”
Yes, you can invite me—and yourself—into my office, you smug bastard. Why not?

Pike led the way, past Donna manning the desk. She gave Reeve a sympathetic smile, one that told him to keep his temper in check. All these long years of marriage, and he could get that much out of a passing glance. There might have been something in there about dinner tonight, too, but he didn’t pay attention to that bit.

Reeve passed into his office second, a little slower, and watched Pike stand in front of his desk. Reeve took his time, shuffling over to the corner and putting the tackle box down, then fiddled with the rod, letting it appear like it was going to fall over a couple times. He smiled while his back was to Pike; this was likely to be the only satisfaction he got out of this meeting.

“So …” Pike started as Reeve slid into his seat. The County Administrator was already seated, hands behind his head, fingers interlaced. He was leaned back and comfortable, his lanky legs up on Reeve’s desk and the door shut. As though Donna wasn’t going to hear about this immediately after Pike left, straight from Reeve himself. Or through the door, if things got loud enough.

“So,” Reeve said, settling into his own chair. He put his own feet up, figuring if this jackass was gonna do it uninvited, he might as well be comfortable his own damned self.

“How many deputies you got out on duty tonight?” Pike asked, looking at him evenly. He parked his tongue against his cheek, pushing it out a little. Reeve wondered what that indicated.

“Just the one,” Reeve said, tense. “Reyes is out tonight. Fries and Harris are off. I’ll be listening to the radio and taking emergency calls here for a while before we switch over to the outsourced call center from midnight to six.” That had been a boon this last month, having that resource. It meant his wife got to sleep every now and again.

“And in the rest of the county?” Pike asked.

“We got a couple reserve deputies on call out near Culver,” Reeve said. He’d had to call them in occasionally, but he kept them in the more sparsely populated southern section of the county. Ninety-plus percent of the department’s calls came near Midian. It hadn’t always been that way, but lately …

“Uh huh,” Pike said, and his tongue disappeared from where it had been pressing on his cheek, making him look like he had mumps. “Hmm.”

Reeve stared at him, Pike stared back. What the hell was this about? “You know, we got problems around here …” Reeve started, figuring he’d begin with the obvious opener.

“I know we’ve had our differences,” Pike said, taking his hands off his head. His legs came down off the desk and the man leaned his torso forward. “I know I’ve been a pain in your ass during the budget process. But your department and this county are hurting, and I’m not about to step on you while you’re down.” He finished, licked his lips, and settled back a little in his chair. “How can I help?”

Reeve just sat there, stunned. Pike had a prick since day one; an uppity one at that. If there’d been a way to insert himself in meetings, he’d done it, and if there’d been a way to tut-tut about an expenditure, the bastard had spoken up to do so. This admission, in and of itself, made Reeve wary.

Wary, but not jaded enough not to jump all over it. “We need more money,” Reeve said, shaking his head. “I’m trying to cover the county, but our incidents have—I mean, spiked ain’t even the right word for it. Our 911 call volume for major incidents is up 1,000%—no bullshit. I gotta send deputies out to investigate every single one of them, and we just don’t have the manpower.” He checked his watch, an old black digital model that bulged on his wrist. “On an average night six months ago, we’d get one call, and it’d be something minor. Now, on a good night, we get at least twenty calls, and you can flip a coin as to whether there’s a homicide or three in there somewhere.”

“I was looking at the numbers,” Pike said, face inscrutable. “We’re averaging ten murders and/or unexplained disappearances a week right now. What do you attribute that to?”

“Big number incidents,” Reeve said, pulling off his fishing cap and running a hand over his bald head. “That freeway thing pumped it up. The Crosser Street Massacre—”

“Cute name for it,” Pike said.

“Blame the local fish wrapper for that one,” Reeve said. “That was at roughly the same time as the freeway thing. Between the jogging incidents that followed, the disappearances … I mean, it’s a goddamned mess.”

“Hmm,” Pike said. His eyes were piercing, dark. “And that missing deputy you got? Archibald Stan?”

Reeve felt like someone waved a caution flag on that one. “He’s a person of interest in that business at the festival.”

Pike stared at him. “You can’t find him?”

Reeve hesitated then shook his head. “If he’s smart, he’s left town.”

“I see,” Pike said. “So that’s a dead end?”

“I think so,” Reeve admitted, though he felt like he had to drag it out. “I don’t know what he had going on at the Summer Lights, but I find it hard to believe he’s involved in this other … stuff. I mean, he could be, but …” Reeve ran a hand over his head again, feeling his fingers slide over the grease of a day’s sweat on his bald scalp, “… I guess I have a hard time imagining
anyone
doing what’s been happening here lately.”

“Dangerous people out there,” Pike said, shaking his head. “I’ll tell you what I think’s happening.”

Reeve felt his eyebrow raise involuntarily. “Please do.” …
share your ignorant, shit-brick opinion. I could use some fertilizer
.

Pike went on without pausing. “Other counties see a rise in their crime rates like this, there’s no doubt what’s going on: meth production out the wazoo. You got drug gangs moving in from somewhere—maybe even international—and they kickstart the shit out of crime. You get gang-related killings, slayings, trying to get people to shut their mouths about what’s going on. Kidnappings, rape, all hell else.” He folded his arms across his chest.

“I’ve talked to the state police about that possibility,” Reeve said, finding he was suddenly hesitant to put the kibosh on the County Administrator’s enthusiastic theory. “Not that there’s an exact profile for when that sort of thing happens, but there’s some commonalities.”

Pike kept his arms folded, but looked like he was bristling slightly. “Such as?”

“Increase in drug arrests, for one,” Reeve said. “State police haven’t caught any more trafficking going on in this area than usual. We haven’t seen a rise in arrests for possession, or caught anyone with anything exotic, either. Mostly pot and crappy meth, oxy, and not in high numbers. We’ve got a few CI’s out there, too, and they ain’t saying nothing about new operations or supply.” He let out a low breath. “Town like this, we know almost everybody, right?”

Pike nodded, eyes to the side like he was in deep contemplation. “Sure.”

“If the victims were into drugs in any way,” Reeve said, “well … hell, most of ’em definitely weren’t. But if there were a few who were, I honestly believe they would have been on the usage side of the quadrant, not the distribution or manufacture.” Reeve sighed and put his hands behind his head. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen anything like this before, and if I’m being real frank, I almost feel like no one at the state police has, either.” Not that they’d been of much help. Ever since the freeway pile-up, getting the state police to send him anything other than a standard email or BOLO had been like trying to drag a bull around by its cock: not fruitful and kind of painful.

“Way I see it,” Pike said, “you’re sort of caught between Scylla and Charybdis here.”

Reeve blinked. “Come again?”

Pike smiled. “They were navigational hazards for the ancient Greeks. Myth held Scylla to be a sea monster and Charybdis to be a whirlpool. They were placed,” he leaned forward and put his hands opposite each other on the surface of the desk, “on either side of a strait. You got too far to avoiding one, you hit the other.”