The 13th Read online

  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.

  But a voice in her head said, “Then why are you driving up the ridge to spy on the asylum?”

  “Maybe I’ve just got a thing for crazy people?” she answered the voice.

  “Well, you are talking to yourself.”

  She shook her head and hit the brakes. The asylum was just down the ridge from here. Christy found a section of road with a wider shoulder than most of the route, which dropped off a hundred steep feet at the edge of the white line. She killed the lights, but left the car idling, and stepped out on the gravel. From the backseat, she pulled out a pair of binoculars that she’d bought for bird-watching up here in the hills. Then she rested her butt against the trunk, and stared through the darkness at the tiny lights below.

  The breeze rustled the leaves around her, and she shivered just a little in the night air. Otherwise, it was quiet. Deathly quiet. That was one thing Christy hadn’t yet gotten used to about the ridge. Every other place she’d ever lived, the air had reverberated with the distant vibrations of something—factories, cars, trains, music—something. Here…there was only a void at night. And the faint whisper of the wind.

  She shivered slightly, and shook her head, looking away from the binoculars and out at the faint snake of the road winding up and away. What did she think she was going to find here? What made the chief suspect there was anything odd about this new business?

  Christy was just about to get back in the car and head home when the bend in the ridge suddenly lit with twin beams of yellow light. Unconsciously she shrunk down, closer to the trunk, and put the binoculars back to her eyes.

  The vehicle was some kind of van, she saw. White. It slowed before it reached her cutoff, and instead turned onto a side road.

  The side road.

  She watched as it made its way down the gravel path to finally pull up in front of the twin lights that marked the front door of the asylum.

  A man got out, but she was too far to tell anything about him. He was just a dark smudge against the side of the van for a moment. And then the back doors opened and closed, and the man walked up to the asylum. The door opened before he even raised a fist to knock, and in a heartbeat he was inside.

  Christy turned the binoculars back to the van, and struggled to read the block lettering stenciled on its side.

  INNOVATIVE INDUSTRIES it read. And below that, in smaller type, TAKING THE FICTION OUT OF SCIENCE FICTION.

  After a few moments, the man reappeared at the door of the asylum and carried some kind of package to the back of the van. Then he slammed the door, got back in the cab and pointed the vehicle back up the ridge.

  Christy slipped back into her own car, in case the van opted to exit in the opposite direction that it had come, but by the time she’d sat down and looked back over the seat, the van was already nothing more than a pair of red lights in her rear window.

  Hrmmph, she thought to herself. Medical supplies? Delivered at eight o’clock at night? Was it really a suspicious delivery, or was she just inventing suspicion?

  Pursing two very pink lips together, she eased the car back onto the road, and followed the van back toward town.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “Let’s take a walk,” Brenda said.

  David nodded. “Yeah, I could probably use a little air to clear my head. Guinness is not Lite.”

  “Thank God,” she laughed and steadied him with her hand as they walked out the door of the Shack. The door cracked like a rifle behind them and from inside Joe yelled, “Just hold the door, all right?”

  They’
d been talking and drinking for the past three hours now, and Joe had lost track of how many times his glass had been refilled. Brenda seemed none the worse for the alcohol, which only made David feel more of an idiot as he stumbled against her as much from the booze as from the aches from the accident earlier that day. The stars were doing a slow, hazy dance, and Brenda led him around the side of the bar. When they got to the far side, away from the parking lot, she pressed him against the cinder block wall and said, “Stay here. I need to pee.”

  “Out here?” he slurred. “Are you nuts?”

  She laughed, and squatted down a few feet away in the shadows. He could see the pale skin of her thigh presently, but nothing else.

  “I’d be crazy to pee in the john inside,” she said. “That place stinks like a three-day-old used tampon.”

  “Are you trying to make me get sick?” he asked, not totally kidding.

  “Nah,” she laughed. “Just sayin’. You might want to take care of your business too, while we’re here.”

  David frowned at the idea of unzipping when a woman was just a few feet away. But then the pressure in his bladder caught up with the slow motion in his brain and he said, “Yeah, maybe I will.”

  “Just don’t point it this way!”

  They both laughed, and then were silent for a minute as nature took its course. When Brenda made her way back to David, she took his hand, and pulled him away from the building. “There’s a path over here,” she said. “And I think you should walk a little.”

  “Couldn’t hurt,” he agreed, afraid to say much more since his lips seemed to have turned to rubber.

  There was indeed a path behind the bar. A small rut of dirt that looked like a biker’s route. They followed it for a few minutes as it led up a short hill and then down again and around a small copse of oaks before it disappeared from view. The starlight gave everything an eerie, fairy glow. Or at least, David thought it was the starlight. But then he considered, maybe it was the Guinness?

  He laughed at that, and Brenda stopped, looking up at him. She took his other hand and pulled him to face her. “What’s so funny, drunk boy?”

  Her face was angelic in the night glow, white and perfect, with softly jutting cheeks and deep, dark eyes. Her hair hung in long black waves behind her, and he struggled not to follow the pink strand, which slid down across her T-shirt, away from the rest.

  “I just was thinking how beautiful the night was,” he said, trying to speak very deliberately so as not to slur like a drunk. “Thank you for bringing me here.”

  “Hey, I don’t want it on my conscience if you fall and crack your head open on the way home,” she said. “It’s my duty to sober you up a little.”

  David found himself staring at the tiny reflections of sky in her eyes, and the crinkle of humor in her forehead. “You’re beautiful,” he said, without thinking.

  “Shut up and kiss me, you moron,” she laughed, and pulled him down to her lips.

  David closed his eyes and the cool breeze of the night slipped across his neck as her arms wrapped around his back and slipped down to cup his ass. The warm flicker of her tongue in his mouth made his knees go weak, and he clutched her tighter, pressing her chest to his. His hand slipped under her shirt and he ran his fingers up along her bare shoulder blades, feeling the gentle bump of vertebrae, and slipping to the side to caress the soft, silky slope of a breast. When she broke the kiss, gently, he actually staggered backward a step, and gasped.

  “Um, wow,” he said.

  She wiped the moisture from her lips and winked. “Not bad for a drunk.”

  Then she took his hands and put them on her chest, holding them there with her own. “I think this is what you were avoiding, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, I guess.” He gulped, paralyzed. He wanted to knead and clutch at her breasts—they had looked perfectly lush through the black tee, and now they felt like warm, wanton velvet pillows beneath his fingers. But instead he only left his hands where she placed them, enjoying the lusty feel of her slipping slightly beneath the thin cotton.

  “Not tonight,” she said, gently moving his hands around her waist again. “But if you’re still interested tomorrow, when you’re sober…”

  She leaned up and kissed him again, but just a peck this time.

  “…I might be interested too.”

  Then she pulled him back the way they’d come. “C’mon, I want one more before last call, and I think you could use a pitcher of ice water.”

  The door to the Clam Shack slammed hard behind them and Joe shot a dirty look at Brenda, but she only smiled sweetly. “You should fix that, Joe.”

  She settled David in a booth and went to the bar to order another beer and an ice water. When she settled again, she opened her purse and wrote down her number on a scrap of paper. Then she slipped it into the chest pocket of his shirt. “Don’t forget to look for it before you do wash again,” she said.

  He downed the water in one long gulp, and then chewed a cube of ice.

  “Your eyes are really bloodshot,” she said. “Put your head down for a minute. I’m going to go get you another water.”

  At that moment, the door to the Clam Shack opened again, but this time, it didn’t slam, and with the noise of a couple dozen conversations buzzing in the air, nobody noticed. Two men sauntered in slowly, the larger of them in a blue-checked flannel. He surveyed the crowd, head moving from side to side like a bank camera, slowly, deliberately.

  “Sit down,” the big man said, and pointed to a single empty stool near the bar.

  “You want a beer?” his partner said, sliding a pair of dirty jeans onto the stool. The bartender hadn’t noticed them yet; he was talking to a dark-haired girl in a black T-shirt a few feet away.

  “No,” he said, eyes fixed on the pink streak that shot like neon across the side of the dark-haired girl’s head. “We’re not going to stay long.”

  David didn’t fight it when she told him to rest his head. It was throbbing with a dull buzz and his eyes felt like two poached eggs. He knew the hangover was going to be something spectacular. He could feel the pulse of his temple against his forearm, and relived the long kiss of just a few moments before. Just thinking about it made something stir beneath his belt, and he smiled and slipped deeper into the memory. So deep, in fact, that he dozed off.

  In his dream, Brenda skinned the T-shirt over her head and this time, instead of pressing his hands to her chest, she pressed his lips between a pair of breasts that he could only describe as spectacular. Full and soft and white and tipped with pink buds that begged for sucking, he lost his eyes and cheeks against her flesh, rolling his face back and forth across the sin of her flesh. He could feel her hands running up his back and into his hair, stroking him and driving him deeper into her mystery.

  But then the gentleness of her hands changed, and she was pulling at his hair. He cried out, and she rapped a knuckle against his skull, again and again with increasing force. Finally he pulled away from her, and found himself blinded by the glare of a bald electric light and a neon bar sign screaming BUDWEISER in Christmas red.

  “That’s it buddy, time to go,” Joe said, standing next to his booth. “You all right?”

  David blinked, and found the throb behind his eyes was no longer dull. It was drill-sharp.

  “Um, yeah, yeah,” he said, pushing off the seat unsteadily, and taking a couple steps toward the door. There were only a couple other people left hunched over the bar, talking in low tones.

  Joe held the door open for him, but just before he stepped through, David panicked, and looked back inside.

  “Wait,” he said. “The girl I was with…”

  “Brenda?” Joe said, and gave a sad smile. “Sorry friend, I haven’t seen her in at least an hour. Ain’t gonna happen tonight.”

  David frowned, but moved out into the night, focusing his meager abilities on setting out on the right path home. The sky was a fog, but the sidewalk shambled on, crack by crack, toward home. He wondered
why she had just left him there, and then mentally kicked himself. She’d done what she could to sober him up, but after that…She wasn’t his babysitter. Just a mouthy chick who’d split a few beers with him. What did he expect?

  Ten miles away, wedged in the back of a tight trunk, Brenda squirmed and screamed beneath the duct tape that crossed her lips and bound her wrists together. The floor bounced and rocked with a steady muscle-car hum, but then slowed until it finally came to a stop. Brenda stopped trying to scream out when she heard the key in the lock. Instead she stared at the black spot just beyond her forehead, and waited for the trunk to open.

  CHAPTER NINE

  There was a jackhammer pounding away somewhere just outside of the covers.

  Or no. It was inside the covers. It was in his pillow.

  Or no.

  It was in his head.

  David rolled to his elbow and began to sit up and then promptly collapsed back to the heat of the mattress.

  “Oh God,” he moaned. His mouth tasted like shoe leather, and he could feel the alcohol evaporating in waves from every pore of his body. The red LED on his clock radio read 11:13.

  “And she said Lite was bad,” he mumbled. The sound of his voice hurt his head, and he decided to keep his thoughts to himself for a while.

  Slowly he eased his way out of bed and into the bathroom, because while his head didn’t want to go, other things did. Once relieved of the baser needs, he shakily pawed through the medicine chest for a bottle of Motrin, popped four, and turned on the shower. Somehow he had to face his aunt today, who would no doubt be amused at his discomfort.

  “Oh God,” he moaned again as the water pummeled his temples, before he remembered that he wasn’t going to speak for a while. He rested his head against the cool tile above the spray and let the water dance down his chest and thighs.

  He considered that the world was not a wonderful place to be.