Unearthed, p.23
Unearthed, page 23
part #4 of Southern Watch Series
Lauren surveyed the damage. She had a small laceration across her forearm, pretty superficial. Might need a bandage. She’d tangled with that demon in a nasty little swing, a tooth-and-nail sort of fight where she didn’t really know what she was doing. She’d gotten in one fight in school, but that had been a long time ago. This was a pure-rage assault, punches against a hard and unyielding skin, fingers gouging the demon's eyes, whatever she could do to vent her spleen at him.
It had worked, too. The demon didn’t seem to know quite what to do, couldn’t lay a fist on her, she was so close in, and he’d been too flustered to simply grab her and throw her down. She’d gone at him for a good five seconds, and then she felt the surge of darkness as he collapsed in on himself, disappearing right out of her grasp.
That other guy, the one in the suit, he was that federal agent she’d seen for about two seconds up on the mountain, when he’d flashed a badge at her. He stood there, baton in hand, on the other side of where the demon she’d been grappling with had been. He looked ragged, his suit torn, sleeve shredded. “You okay?” he asked.
She’d taken her assessment. She was fine as wine, which she realized she would not say no to a glass of right now. “As okay as I can be considering I just tangled with a demon. That’s something.”
The guy raised an eyebrow. “And survived. That’s everything.”
“Wow,” Belzer said, causing her to spin around to look at the journalist. He still had his phone out, filming. “Wow. This is just … this is so …”
“Alison?” the guy in the suit asked. He dropped right there to check on Mrs. Stan. Lauren just stood there for a second, stunned, then remembered she was a doctor and fell right next to him, brushing the blond hair back from Mrs. Stan’s eyes. She was so damned young; too young to be a Mrs., right?
“I got this,” Lauren said to him, nodding as she started to assess the damage. “Scalp lac. It’s a bleeder. She took a hard hit, probably concussed.” The eyes fluttered open, and Mrs. Stan looked at her blearily. Her pupils were big and black, like a miniature version of the vortex that had just sucked that demon back to hell. “Definitely concussed.”
“Hendricks,” the guy in the suit said, standing up. “That idiot. That fucking idiot.”
“How you feeling?” Lauren asked Alison, who just stared at her blearily.
“Is it morning?” Alison asked, voice thick with tiredness.
“I need to get her out of here,” Lauren said. “She needs medical attention.”
“We’re kinda light on time,” the guy in the suit said, standing up, baton back in hand. He started to stride off across the room, toward the far corner where a recessed hallway led into darkness.
“Where the hell are you going?” Lauren called after him.
“We brought someone with us,” the guy called back to her, not breaking stride, and starting to jog away. “We got separated in the fight when he went to confront Kitty Elizabeth.”
“Who’s Kitty Elizabeth?” This from Belzer, who was hovering over Lauren’s shoulder with that goddamned phone, filming away.
“Yeah,” Mrs. Stan said weakly, “who names their fucking kid Kitty? That’s gotta be like a … complex-inducing thing, am I right?”
“Watch her for a minute,” Lauren said to Belzer, knocking his phone aside. She stared him right in the eyes, saw the surprise there. “Watch her. Don’t let her get up. Call out to me if she starts to lose consciousness.”
“Where are you going?” Belzer asked as she stood.
She looked down at him. “Following the …” she waved at the guy in the suit, “… following him.” She took off at a jog toward the hallway. The guy had already disappeared around the corner.
Lauren heard her shoes make that soft, sucking noise of the rubber tread against the tile with each step. The lighting in this place was lovely, like something out of a fancy restaurant. It even smelled like a restaurant, the probable consequence of the buffet table in the corner of the room. Silence greeted her ears save for her own movement, and Belzer’s quiet murmurs behind her.
Lauren turned the corner and found herself in a short hallway. Double doors were open ahead, a lit room that looked like a library or lounge laid out in front of her. She slowed as she crossed the threshold, and the man in the suit just stood there like a big damned pillar holding the place up, right in front of the doorway.
“What the hell?” Lauren asked, stepping inside. The lights gave the room an almost candlelit aura, an orange glow from electric candelabra on wood-paneled walls. Bookshelves lined most of the surfaces, filled with old, leather-bound volumes and newer ones that weren’t leather bound but seemed to be missing their dust jackets, probably for effect.
In the middle of the floor, just in front of a loveseat lay a single object, one that she recognized because she’d actually held it before, although the hilt had looked a little different at the time.
A sword.
The guy in the suit had a phone out already, had it dialed and up to his ear quicker than a hiccup. “Arch, Kitty Elizabeth has Hendricks.” He waited a second. “Arch, do you hear me?”
*
Arch heard. He stood there with the cold metal of the handcuffs draped around his wrists, his face against the chill steel of his old Explorer’s hood below his cheek, legs spread. “Arch?” Duncan’s voice blared in his earpiece.
“I hear you,” Arch said. “I hear you.”
“I didn’t say anything,” Reeve said, pausing from his search at Arch’s ankle.
“Wasn’t talking to you,” Arch said.
Reeve made his way up and found the cell phone on Arch’s belt, ripping the headset right out of his ear even as it tangled with the handcuffs. “Who is this?” he asked, shoving the earpiece into his own ear. There was a moment’s silence. “Hello? Who’s there?” Arch could hear him breathing in the night. “Duncan, huh?” The sheriff shoved the phone in front of his face, the plate lit up with the last calls, the three-way conference with Bill that Duncan had called into. “Who’s Duncan?”
Arch just sat there, cheek against his old car, staring into the night. “I don’t think I have anything to say.”
There was a taught silence before the sheriff spoke. “Figured as much. Archibald Stan, you are under arrest. You have the right to remain silent—”
“Skip it,” Arch said.
“I don’t think so,” Reeve said. “We’re going by the book on this one. Not a chance I let you slip out on a procedural detail.” And he continued his reading of Miranda like Arch hadn’t heard them—hell, read them himself—more times than he could count. For his part, Arch just sat there, breathing onto the black hood of the police Explorer, watching it fog into a dull grey under the moonlight, and wondered if Lafayette Hendricks was even still drawing breath for himself.
8.
“We gotta get out of here,” the guy in the suit said, scooping up the sword while Lauren just stood there, watching him. The low-lit library walls were a strange sight after fighting a demon. Then again, everything was probably going to be a strange sight right now. The world had just changed around her, hadn’t it? Was it spinning?”
“Hey,” the guy in the suit said, bumping her with a shoulder as he passed. “You might want to move.”
“Move where?” Lauren asked, her eyes following him out of habit.
“You’ve got a patient to care for, don’t you?” the guy asked. “Doctor, right?”
“Darlington,” Lauren said. “Dr. Lauren Darlington.”
“I remember you from the mountain,” the guy said. “My name’s Duncan.” He made a gesture to show that his hands were both full, unavailable to shake. “My friend could use your help.”
Lauren blinked at him. “She needs a hospital.”
Duncan didn’t show any emotion. “She shows up to a hospital, she’ll be arrested moments later.”
“Right,” Lauren said, following him back down the hallway to the ballroom. “But listen, concussions are tricky things. She needs observation at least, we need to rule out—”
“Can you do that?” Duncan asked. “Yourself, without a hospital?”
Lauren stopped. She felt like she needed to stop, like being taken aback mentally required her to physically halt. “Well, yes, but—”
Duncan stopped too, just shy of the ballroom, and gave her a look. “You know the truth now in a way you didn’t at the carnival. About the other world at play here. Knowledge is power, and you get to choose your own fate. Most people never do. You can go back to your life, pretend none of this, from the mountain to the festival to here, ever happened. You can keep your head down, and you may make it out clean. Or you could leave, take your daughter—right?—and get the hell out of town. You’d be fine, then, both of you, at least for a time.”
Lauren just stared at him, hearing the echo of words she’d spoken herself. “Or?”
“We could really use some help with my friend,” Duncan said. “Medical help. Like now.”
Lauren just stood there for a split second, and the answer came instinctively. “You’ll need to carry her for me. Be careful with her neck, I can’t do an x-ray.” She strode past Duncan, already back on target. She heard him dialing the phone as she made her way back to Mrs. Stan.
“Any change?” she asked as she made it back to where Belzer was sitting about a foot away from Mrs. Stan, just staring at her like she was some sort of disease patient, one touch away from infecting him.
“Uh …” Belzer just shrugged. His camera was cradled in his hand, not pointed at anything. “She seems pretty out of it.”
“Is this a party?” Mrs. Stan asked, staring at Lauren with glazed eyes. “Was I dancing? Is this prom?”
“Bill?” Duncan said from behind her. “Where are—yeah, I heard. Did you see? Aww, shit.” Duncan walked around and looked straight at Mrs. Stan. “Alison, the sheriff got Arch.”
Mrs. Stan just blinked. “He got a job with the sheriff?”
“She’s not going to comprehend you for the next little bit,” Lauren said, looking up at Duncan. “She’s disoriented. Her LoC—loss of consciousness, coupled with—”
He cut her off. “We got a problem. We need to leave. My other associate had to run to avoid the cops in the woods, and my guess is that the sheriff’s office is about to show up here in force.”
“Okay,” Lauren said, running through it all in her mind. The course of action was obvious, wasn’t it? “You give me the sword, pick up Mrs. Stan and carry her to his car,” she nodded to Belzer. “He drives, I take care of her, you guide us to your hideout.”
Duncan just stared at her, almost blank. “You want me to take you to our hideout. A, who calls it a hideout? This isn’t Little Rascals. B, how do I know I can trust you?”
Lauren sighed. “The sheriff would have to be an amazing sort of genius or awfully stupid to try and infiltrate your little gang with a doctor who’s not a cop, just randomly counting on one of your people getting hurt during a demon party. There’s odds, then there’s Vegas odds, then there’s this. You choose, but if you don’t want to take us back to wherever you’re laying low, I’m gonna take her to the hospital so she can get proper medical treatment.” She stared him down. “No negotiation on that one. She needs care.”
Duncan just stared at her flatly, weighing it all. To his credit, it only took him a second and he offered her the hilt of the sword. “Careful with this,” he said as she took it, feeling the weight of it in her hand for only the second time. It felt … kinda good. Duncan stooped down and picked up Mrs. Stan in his arms like she weighed about as much as a chicken. “Lead on, Dr. Darlington. Looks like you’re calling the shots for now.”
*
Reeve should have felt triumphant, but he didn’t. He had Arch Stan in the cage in the back of his car, sitting there as docile as if he were filling out a report at his desk. That was Arch, though, a cool customer even in a store full of cool customers. The man was calm for a big guy. Most of the people he’d arrested thought they had some kind of get out of jail free card because they were big. Arch knew better; he’d been on the arresting end too many times to act like that, probably.
Fries pulled up next to where Reeve had parked, just down the driveway of the Venus Plantation. When Reeve had heard the gunfire coming, he’d pulled off and killed the lights. He’d followed the treeline until he heard Arch’s shout then just froze. From there he’d crept closer, trying not to spook his gift horse until he had it good and saddled.
“Whatcha got?” Fries asked, window rolled down, peering out at Reeve in the night. “Is that …?”
“Arch,” Reeve said.
Fries let out a whistle. “Nice. What’s going on here?”
“Disturbance at the Plantation,” Reeve said, nodding. “Gunshots, people running like hell all over the place. Car just about ran me over as I was bringing him back. I get the feeling whatever was going on, it’s about wrapped up now. Maybe we’ll get some answers out of him.” He cocked his head toward Arch, glancing back at the shadowed shape in the tinted windows of the Explorer.
Another car turned the curve just then, another cruiser with lights going. Reeve felt a moment’s pain as he realized it was Reyes’s car, but not Reyes. That was Erin, wasting not and wanting not. She pulled even with Fries on the other side of the driveway and popped out. She certainly looked fresher than the last crime scene she’d shown up to. The wind wasn’t quite right, but he suspected she wouldn’t be wafting booze at him now if he took a sniff of her. She nodded at the Explorer. “What’s going on?”
“Sheriff got Arch,” Fries said.
Erin was inscrutable for a moment, staring at the Explorer. “Huh.” Reeve watched her, waiting to see her reaction. She just gave a subtle nod, then a shake of her shoulders. “Good.”
“How do you want to run this?” Fries asked. His engine was idling, the exhaust stinking up the quiet night air a little.
“Park here,” Reeve said. He’d already planned it out. “Fries, you come with me and we’ll give the plantation a quick look. Harris, you stay here with the prisoner and make sure he doesn’t get out.” He looked at her. “Okay?”
She got that look like she did sometimes, like she wanted to object, like she wanted to say she was sick of being shitlisted. She’d truly earned her way onto it this time, though, and he figured she knew it. Before it’d been a matter of seniority; now it was a matter of driving drunk to an incident. “All right,” she finally said, to his relief. The last thing he needed was for her to use the word “sexism” right now.
“Come on, Ed,” Reeve said, pulling the flashlight out of his belt and pulling his pistol. He heard Fries’s car shift to park and the door opened. “We got work to do.”
*
Lauren was holding a swatch of cotton shirt to Mrs. Stan—Alison’s—head as the car flew down the road as fast as Belzer could drive it. Credit to the journo, he apparently wanted to avoid the cops as bad as Duncan did. Lauren was somewhat indifferent to the situation, thinking back. It wasn’t like there were any bodies in the mansion that she’d seen, although unless she’d missed her guess, that table filled with bowls of varying powders and green herbs she’d sighted on the way out was probably the mother lode of narcotics Molly had warned her about. At least there hadn’t been any hookers in sight.
“Where are we going?” Belzer asked as they hit a bump on the country road.
“Turn left in about a mile,” Duncan said. “We’re a ways off yet. I’ll warn you when we get closer.”
The car thudded over a rut in the road, and Lauren winced. “Any chance we could slow down? I don’t want to end up concussed myself.”
“All the law left in the county is back at the Plantation, unless I miss my guess,” Duncan said. “Speeding seems like a good idea right now, so you might want to just brace your head.”
Lauren stared up at the two of them in the front seat. The engine did not throttle back at all. “Brace myself. Yeah. Okay. Sure.” Jackass, she didn’t say. It was implied.
“Where’s Arch?” Alison asked—again, slurring her words a little.
“The cops got him, Alison,” Duncan said from the front seat.
Alison’s eyes seemed to register it a little more this time. “Got him? Got him how?”
Lauren exchanged a look with Duncan, whose expression was inscrutable. “Just rest,” she said, not taking her eyes off the man in the suit. The car hit another bump, and Lauren swore, loudly. Maybe this hadn’t been the best decision after all.
*
Arch breathed a sigh of relief as Reeve and Fries made their way down the driveway in the direction of the Plantation. He watched them go, keeping a tentative eye on Erin, who was standing out in the night, looking around. She had her arms folded and wasn’t looking at him, was doing her duty and trying to keep an eye on the parking lot of the Plantation up ahead and the road behind. Arch probably wouldn’t have worried about it quite as much if it had been him; you could hear a car approaching from miles off, after all.
He waited until Reeve and Fries were almost out of sight, tiny figures against the light of the white plantation, and then he carefully brought his hands up from where they were good and cuffed behind his back. He scooted backward toward the door nearest to Erin, extending them enough to land a knuckle on the window, and then he knocked carefully, tapping the glass. He waited a moment then tapped again.
She heard him the first time, he was sure, but she didn’t spin to look at him immediately. Instead she took her time, surveying him with a jaded expression that was obvious even through the darkly tinted windows of the patrol SUV. He rapped against the window again, more insistently this time, and she came sauntering over slowly. She was clad in her uniform, and her badge caught the light of Fries’s car as she passed in front of it. Her blond hair was out of place, a short ponytail pulling it back off her face. She stared at him through the window for a moment and then opened the driver’s door and sat down in the seat, not deigning to look back at him. “What do you want?” she asked.
It had worked, too. The demon didn’t seem to know quite what to do, couldn’t lay a fist on her, she was so close in, and he’d been too flustered to simply grab her and throw her down. She’d gone at him for a good five seconds, and then she felt the surge of darkness as he collapsed in on himself, disappearing right out of her grasp.
That other guy, the one in the suit, he was that federal agent she’d seen for about two seconds up on the mountain, when he’d flashed a badge at her. He stood there, baton in hand, on the other side of where the demon she’d been grappling with had been. He looked ragged, his suit torn, sleeve shredded. “You okay?” he asked.
She’d taken her assessment. She was fine as wine, which she realized she would not say no to a glass of right now. “As okay as I can be considering I just tangled with a demon. That’s something.”
The guy raised an eyebrow. “And survived. That’s everything.”
“Wow,” Belzer said, causing her to spin around to look at the journalist. He still had his phone out, filming. “Wow. This is just … this is so …”
“Alison?” the guy in the suit asked. He dropped right there to check on Mrs. Stan. Lauren just stood there for a second, stunned, then remembered she was a doctor and fell right next to him, brushing the blond hair back from Mrs. Stan’s eyes. She was so damned young; too young to be a Mrs., right?
“I got this,” Lauren said to him, nodding as she started to assess the damage. “Scalp lac. It’s a bleeder. She took a hard hit, probably concussed.” The eyes fluttered open, and Mrs. Stan looked at her blearily. Her pupils were big and black, like a miniature version of the vortex that had just sucked that demon back to hell. “Definitely concussed.”
“Hendricks,” the guy in the suit said, standing up. “That idiot. That fucking idiot.”
“How you feeling?” Lauren asked Alison, who just stared at her blearily.
“Is it morning?” Alison asked, voice thick with tiredness.
“I need to get her out of here,” Lauren said. “She needs medical attention.”
“We’re kinda light on time,” the guy in the suit said, standing up, baton back in hand. He started to stride off across the room, toward the far corner where a recessed hallway led into darkness.
“Where the hell are you going?” Lauren called after him.
“We brought someone with us,” the guy called back to her, not breaking stride, and starting to jog away. “We got separated in the fight when he went to confront Kitty Elizabeth.”
“Who’s Kitty Elizabeth?” This from Belzer, who was hovering over Lauren’s shoulder with that goddamned phone, filming away.
“Yeah,” Mrs. Stan said weakly, “who names their fucking kid Kitty? That’s gotta be like a … complex-inducing thing, am I right?”
“Watch her for a minute,” Lauren said to Belzer, knocking his phone aside. She stared him right in the eyes, saw the surprise there. “Watch her. Don’t let her get up. Call out to me if she starts to lose consciousness.”
“Where are you going?” Belzer asked as she stood.
She looked down at him. “Following the …” she waved at the guy in the suit, “… following him.” She took off at a jog toward the hallway. The guy had already disappeared around the corner.
Lauren heard her shoes make that soft, sucking noise of the rubber tread against the tile with each step. The lighting in this place was lovely, like something out of a fancy restaurant. It even smelled like a restaurant, the probable consequence of the buffet table in the corner of the room. Silence greeted her ears save for her own movement, and Belzer’s quiet murmurs behind her.
Lauren turned the corner and found herself in a short hallway. Double doors were open ahead, a lit room that looked like a library or lounge laid out in front of her. She slowed as she crossed the threshold, and the man in the suit just stood there like a big damned pillar holding the place up, right in front of the doorway.
“What the hell?” Lauren asked, stepping inside. The lights gave the room an almost candlelit aura, an orange glow from electric candelabra on wood-paneled walls. Bookshelves lined most of the surfaces, filled with old, leather-bound volumes and newer ones that weren’t leather bound but seemed to be missing their dust jackets, probably for effect.
In the middle of the floor, just in front of a loveseat lay a single object, one that she recognized because she’d actually held it before, although the hilt had looked a little different at the time.
A sword.
The guy in the suit had a phone out already, had it dialed and up to his ear quicker than a hiccup. “Arch, Kitty Elizabeth has Hendricks.” He waited a second. “Arch, do you hear me?”
*
Arch heard. He stood there with the cold metal of the handcuffs draped around his wrists, his face against the chill steel of his old Explorer’s hood below his cheek, legs spread. “Arch?” Duncan’s voice blared in his earpiece.
“I hear you,” Arch said. “I hear you.”
“I didn’t say anything,” Reeve said, pausing from his search at Arch’s ankle.
“Wasn’t talking to you,” Arch said.
Reeve made his way up and found the cell phone on Arch’s belt, ripping the headset right out of his ear even as it tangled with the handcuffs. “Who is this?” he asked, shoving the earpiece into his own ear. There was a moment’s silence. “Hello? Who’s there?” Arch could hear him breathing in the night. “Duncan, huh?” The sheriff shoved the phone in front of his face, the plate lit up with the last calls, the three-way conference with Bill that Duncan had called into. “Who’s Duncan?”
Arch just sat there, cheek against his old car, staring into the night. “I don’t think I have anything to say.”
There was a taught silence before the sheriff spoke. “Figured as much. Archibald Stan, you are under arrest. You have the right to remain silent—”
“Skip it,” Arch said.
“I don’t think so,” Reeve said. “We’re going by the book on this one. Not a chance I let you slip out on a procedural detail.” And he continued his reading of Miranda like Arch hadn’t heard them—hell, read them himself—more times than he could count. For his part, Arch just sat there, breathing onto the black hood of the police Explorer, watching it fog into a dull grey under the moonlight, and wondered if Lafayette Hendricks was even still drawing breath for himself.
8.
“We gotta get out of here,” the guy in the suit said, scooping up the sword while Lauren just stood there, watching him. The low-lit library walls were a strange sight after fighting a demon. Then again, everything was probably going to be a strange sight right now. The world had just changed around her, hadn’t it? Was it spinning?”
“Hey,” the guy in the suit said, bumping her with a shoulder as he passed. “You might want to move.”
“Move where?” Lauren asked, her eyes following him out of habit.
“You’ve got a patient to care for, don’t you?” the guy asked. “Doctor, right?”
“Darlington,” Lauren said. “Dr. Lauren Darlington.”
“I remember you from the mountain,” the guy said. “My name’s Duncan.” He made a gesture to show that his hands were both full, unavailable to shake. “My friend could use your help.”
Lauren blinked at him. “She needs a hospital.”
Duncan didn’t show any emotion. “She shows up to a hospital, she’ll be arrested moments later.”
“Right,” Lauren said, following him back down the hallway to the ballroom. “But listen, concussions are tricky things. She needs observation at least, we need to rule out—”
“Can you do that?” Duncan asked. “Yourself, without a hospital?”
Lauren stopped. She felt like she needed to stop, like being taken aback mentally required her to physically halt. “Well, yes, but—”
Duncan stopped too, just shy of the ballroom, and gave her a look. “You know the truth now in a way you didn’t at the carnival. About the other world at play here. Knowledge is power, and you get to choose your own fate. Most people never do. You can go back to your life, pretend none of this, from the mountain to the festival to here, ever happened. You can keep your head down, and you may make it out clean. Or you could leave, take your daughter—right?—and get the hell out of town. You’d be fine, then, both of you, at least for a time.”
Lauren just stared at him, hearing the echo of words she’d spoken herself. “Or?”
“We could really use some help with my friend,” Duncan said. “Medical help. Like now.”
Lauren just stood there for a split second, and the answer came instinctively. “You’ll need to carry her for me. Be careful with her neck, I can’t do an x-ray.” She strode past Duncan, already back on target. She heard him dialing the phone as she made her way back to Mrs. Stan.
“Any change?” she asked as she made it back to where Belzer was sitting about a foot away from Mrs. Stan, just staring at her like she was some sort of disease patient, one touch away from infecting him.
“Uh …” Belzer just shrugged. His camera was cradled in his hand, not pointed at anything. “She seems pretty out of it.”
“Is this a party?” Mrs. Stan asked, staring at Lauren with glazed eyes. “Was I dancing? Is this prom?”
“Bill?” Duncan said from behind her. “Where are—yeah, I heard. Did you see? Aww, shit.” Duncan walked around and looked straight at Mrs. Stan. “Alison, the sheriff got Arch.”
Mrs. Stan just blinked. “He got a job with the sheriff?”
“She’s not going to comprehend you for the next little bit,” Lauren said, looking up at Duncan. “She’s disoriented. Her LoC—loss of consciousness, coupled with—”
He cut her off. “We got a problem. We need to leave. My other associate had to run to avoid the cops in the woods, and my guess is that the sheriff’s office is about to show up here in force.”
“Okay,” Lauren said, running through it all in her mind. The course of action was obvious, wasn’t it? “You give me the sword, pick up Mrs. Stan and carry her to his car,” she nodded to Belzer. “He drives, I take care of her, you guide us to your hideout.”
Duncan just stared at her, almost blank. “You want me to take you to our hideout. A, who calls it a hideout? This isn’t Little Rascals. B, how do I know I can trust you?”
Lauren sighed. “The sheriff would have to be an amazing sort of genius or awfully stupid to try and infiltrate your little gang with a doctor who’s not a cop, just randomly counting on one of your people getting hurt during a demon party. There’s odds, then there’s Vegas odds, then there’s this. You choose, but if you don’t want to take us back to wherever you’re laying low, I’m gonna take her to the hospital so she can get proper medical treatment.” She stared him down. “No negotiation on that one. She needs care.”
Duncan just stared at her flatly, weighing it all. To his credit, it only took him a second and he offered her the hilt of the sword. “Careful with this,” he said as she took it, feeling the weight of it in her hand for only the second time. It felt … kinda good. Duncan stooped down and picked up Mrs. Stan in his arms like she weighed about as much as a chicken. “Lead on, Dr. Darlington. Looks like you’re calling the shots for now.”
*
Reeve should have felt triumphant, but he didn’t. He had Arch Stan in the cage in the back of his car, sitting there as docile as if he were filling out a report at his desk. That was Arch, though, a cool customer even in a store full of cool customers. The man was calm for a big guy. Most of the people he’d arrested thought they had some kind of get out of jail free card because they were big. Arch knew better; he’d been on the arresting end too many times to act like that, probably.
Fries pulled up next to where Reeve had parked, just down the driveway of the Venus Plantation. When Reeve had heard the gunfire coming, he’d pulled off and killed the lights. He’d followed the treeline until he heard Arch’s shout then just froze. From there he’d crept closer, trying not to spook his gift horse until he had it good and saddled.
“Whatcha got?” Fries asked, window rolled down, peering out at Reeve in the night. “Is that …?”
“Arch,” Reeve said.
Fries let out a whistle. “Nice. What’s going on here?”
“Disturbance at the Plantation,” Reeve said, nodding. “Gunshots, people running like hell all over the place. Car just about ran me over as I was bringing him back. I get the feeling whatever was going on, it’s about wrapped up now. Maybe we’ll get some answers out of him.” He cocked his head toward Arch, glancing back at the shadowed shape in the tinted windows of the Explorer.
Another car turned the curve just then, another cruiser with lights going. Reeve felt a moment’s pain as he realized it was Reyes’s car, but not Reyes. That was Erin, wasting not and wanting not. She pulled even with Fries on the other side of the driveway and popped out. She certainly looked fresher than the last crime scene she’d shown up to. The wind wasn’t quite right, but he suspected she wouldn’t be wafting booze at him now if he took a sniff of her. She nodded at the Explorer. “What’s going on?”
“Sheriff got Arch,” Fries said.
Erin was inscrutable for a moment, staring at the Explorer. “Huh.” Reeve watched her, waiting to see her reaction. She just gave a subtle nod, then a shake of her shoulders. “Good.”
“How do you want to run this?” Fries asked. His engine was idling, the exhaust stinking up the quiet night air a little.
“Park here,” Reeve said. He’d already planned it out. “Fries, you come with me and we’ll give the plantation a quick look. Harris, you stay here with the prisoner and make sure he doesn’t get out.” He looked at her. “Okay?”
She got that look like she did sometimes, like she wanted to object, like she wanted to say she was sick of being shitlisted. She’d truly earned her way onto it this time, though, and he figured she knew it. Before it’d been a matter of seniority; now it was a matter of driving drunk to an incident. “All right,” she finally said, to his relief. The last thing he needed was for her to use the word “sexism” right now.
“Come on, Ed,” Reeve said, pulling the flashlight out of his belt and pulling his pistol. He heard Fries’s car shift to park and the door opened. “We got work to do.”
*
Lauren was holding a swatch of cotton shirt to Mrs. Stan—Alison’s—head as the car flew down the road as fast as Belzer could drive it. Credit to the journo, he apparently wanted to avoid the cops as bad as Duncan did. Lauren was somewhat indifferent to the situation, thinking back. It wasn’t like there were any bodies in the mansion that she’d seen, although unless she’d missed her guess, that table filled with bowls of varying powders and green herbs she’d sighted on the way out was probably the mother lode of narcotics Molly had warned her about. At least there hadn’t been any hookers in sight.
“Where are we going?” Belzer asked as they hit a bump on the country road.
“Turn left in about a mile,” Duncan said. “We’re a ways off yet. I’ll warn you when we get closer.”
The car thudded over a rut in the road, and Lauren winced. “Any chance we could slow down? I don’t want to end up concussed myself.”
“All the law left in the county is back at the Plantation, unless I miss my guess,” Duncan said. “Speeding seems like a good idea right now, so you might want to just brace your head.”
Lauren stared up at the two of them in the front seat. The engine did not throttle back at all. “Brace myself. Yeah. Okay. Sure.” Jackass, she didn’t say. It was implied.
“Where’s Arch?” Alison asked—again, slurring her words a little.
“The cops got him, Alison,” Duncan said from the front seat.
Alison’s eyes seemed to register it a little more this time. “Got him? Got him how?”
Lauren exchanged a look with Duncan, whose expression was inscrutable. “Just rest,” she said, not taking her eyes off the man in the suit. The car hit another bump, and Lauren swore, loudly. Maybe this hadn’t been the best decision after all.
*
Arch breathed a sigh of relief as Reeve and Fries made their way down the driveway in the direction of the Plantation. He watched them go, keeping a tentative eye on Erin, who was standing out in the night, looking around. She had her arms folded and wasn’t looking at him, was doing her duty and trying to keep an eye on the parking lot of the Plantation up ahead and the road behind. Arch probably wouldn’t have worried about it quite as much if it had been him; you could hear a car approaching from miles off, after all.
He waited until Reeve and Fries were almost out of sight, tiny figures against the light of the white plantation, and then he carefully brought his hands up from where they were good and cuffed behind his back. He scooted backward toward the door nearest to Erin, extending them enough to land a knuckle on the window, and then he knocked carefully, tapping the glass. He waited a moment then tapped again.
She heard him the first time, he was sure, but she didn’t spin to look at him immediately. Instead she took her time, surveying him with a jaded expression that was obvious even through the darkly tinted windows of the patrol SUV. He rapped against the window again, more insistently this time, and she came sauntering over slowly. She was clad in her uniform, and her badge caught the light of Fries’s car as she passed in front of it. Her blond hair was out of place, a short ponytail pulling it back off her face. She stared at him through the window for a moment and then opened the driver’s door and sat down in the seat, not deigning to look back at him. “What do you want?” she asked.
