The Dark Ones Page 6

  “We doing them all?” Schuler asked.

  Mike nodded.

  They wound through the weeds under a bright October moon.

  Mike found the gas cans near a Dumpster. They were under a paint-splattered tarp. He took one of the cans and Schuler grabbed the other. Mike also grabbed the tarp and would burn that along with everything else.

  They pried off a piece of plywood that covered the door to the first building and went inside. They climbed the stairs and entered the upper unit. A toolbox and cordless drill had been left on the unfinished floor. There was another door in the room, this one wide open. It led to a small balcony.

  “Start at the far wall,” Mike said. “We’ll work backward so we don’t step in gas.”

  “Okay, chief.”

  Schuler lugged the can to the porch door and set it on the floor. It made a small thunk when he set it down, and to Mike it sounded like a sledgehammer striking an anvil. He was sure any little noise would get them caught.

  Schuler went onto the porch. Christ, but he was wasting time. “Schuler,” he whispered. Mike set his gas can down, thinking they’d already been here too long.

  “Hey Mike?” Schuler called from the balcony. “There’s someone down there.”

  “Get down.”

  Schuler squatted below the half wall of the balcony. Mike ducked low and joined him. He sniffed, taking in a sour smell on the air that he had first attributed to the lake. But no, that wasn’t the lake, but something else, something that had rotted.

  “Who is it?” Mike asked. That was all they needed, someone nosing around while they were trying to work. If they spotted him and Schuler, that left two choices: cap them, or scare them off and ditch the job. Neither option was preferable. Letting Hark down would have dire consequences, to say the least.

  “Don’t know. He’s walking around the building.”

  Mike pulled his .45 from the holster in his jacket. He joined Schuler on the balcony, keeping low. He peered over the railing. He got a glimpse of the guy, who rounded the building and headed up the ridge near the old ironworks. He took the hill with long strides and paused at the top. In the darkness, Mike could make out stringy hair and a linebacker’s build. That was it. The stranger turned at the top of the ridge and stood watching.

  “What’s he doing?” Schuler asked.

  “I don’t know. I’ll go ask him.”

  “Really?”

  “What the fuck do you think?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Let’s go,” Mike said. “This whole thing’s going bad.”

  “What about Hark?”

  “We get spotted and jammed up, the cops show? We’re dead. We’ll come back, do it right. No witnesses.”

  Schuler paused, frowning, the internal gears of thought working. “We came here to light this place up.”

  “Listen to me.”

  Schuler grinned. “Okay, yeah, you’re right.”

  They crawled away from the railing and grabbed the gas cans. The inside of the condo had filled with fumes, and Mike’s eyes watered. His piece in one hand and the gas can in another, he went first down the stairs, Schuler following and muttering the whole time about how they should have set it off, anyway.

  Outside, even the dead-fish smell of the lake was refreshing compared with the stale air and gasoline odors in the condo. Mike gathered his thoughts. They needed to ditch the gas cans where they wouldn’t be found, and then get to the getaway car. Hark would be pissed the job wasn’t done, but maybe Mike could talk to him. Hell, he had been smart not to light it up with witnesses around. And it wasn’t his fault someone showed up to ruin things. At least he hoped that’s how Hark would see things.

  “To the car?” Schuler asked.

  “That way. Bring the can with you.”

  They inched along the side of the condo, the building blocking the sight line between them and the ridge. At the corner of the building, Mike peered at the ridge.

  The visitor had company. Along the ridge were dark shapes, some of them men with twisted limbs, others hunched over, and one that had wings. Wings? Mike counted twelve, not including the guy they saw first. They stood still. A breeze blew, carrying the scent of something sour and stale at the same time. The way his grandfather Shawn had smelled in the weeks before his death, when cancer ate him from the inside out. Rot. That was it.

  “Schuler, you got to see this,” Mike said, and turned. But Schuler was gone, and from around the corner, Mike heard gentle lapping sounds and gas fumes drifted to him. That crazy fucker’s going to—

  There was a noise like WHOOMPF! Mike looked in the window to see the glow of fire and flames eating up the plywood subfloor. Schuler came back around and said, “I told you I thought we should torch it!”

  “You stupid bastard,” Mike said. “Come here.” Mike grabbed him by the shirt and yanked him along. “Look,” he said, and pointed to the ridge.

  Schuler poked his head around, kept it there for a moment, and ducked back behind the condo. A worried look crossed his face. One eyelid twitched. “Who are they?”

  “Homeowners’ association? We need to get gone.”

  Behind him, the flames began to hiss and then crackle. He smelled burning wood. Mike sincerely hoped the fire wouldn’t bring the men on the ridge down here. He didn’t like the looks of them, and the one with the wings really freaked him out. What kind of moron went around in a giant bat costume? You could only get away with that if your last name was Wayne.

  The heat from the fire began to bake the back of Mike’s neck. They had to move and there was no way to torch the other buildings—at least not without the Halloween people on the ridge seeing them. That left getting to the stolen car and beating it out of here. He would decide his next move after that.

  Besides, it wouldn’t be long before someone called the cops.

  He motioned for Schuler to follow him. They set out, Mike watching the people on the ridge, waiting for them to come down. But they stood still. The others, including the one with the bat costume, stood a few feet behind old tall, long, and stringy, as if he were the leader of the freak show.

  Behind Mike, the fire crackled and popped and he turned to see a gout of smoke rising into the air.

  They continued past the far condo and came upon a parking lot with cracked, jagged asphalt. Mike stepped over a pile of hypodermics and wrinkled his nose in disgust. Damned junkies. He saw a tangle of bushes and branches at the far end of the lot, and knew this is where Hark’s people had hidden the car.

  As they reached the car and began pulling away the branches used for camouflage, Mike looked around again. Silhouetted against the black sky was a winged form, big as a man. It climbed high, flapping its wings, and then dove like a Spitfire, whooshing over the ridge and disappearing.

  He didn’t know what he just witnessed, only that they needed to drive away fast.

  “What were you thinking?” Mike asked. He gripped the steering wheel, his knuckles most likely white under the black gloves he wore.

  “We had a job to do.” Schuler shrugged his shoulders.

  He wanted to scream, but in the vacant scrap yard among the heaps of cars, his would be the only sound ringing through the night. They had pulled up to Brown Recycling, slid the busted gate open, and parked the car between two rows of junked Fords and Chryslers. Mike needed to think, plan his next move, because when Hark found out what happened, his next move would be to serve up Mike’s balls on a platter.

  “We should get going,” Schuler said.

  “Why? Nobody here but the cars.”

  “Still think we should go.”

  “That so? We wouldn’t be sitting here with our thumbs in our asses if you did what I said.”

  “You backed out. I expected better.”

  “Yeah, I backed out. ’Case you didn’t notice, we had an audience.”

  “I tried, Mike. Hark will respect that.”

  Mike rolled his eyes. “The job’s not done, the cops are all over the
place, and they’ll be watching the condos. If we walked away without torching anything, we could’ve gone back another day, maybe tomorrow. Now we’re fucked.”

  “Enjoying your new television? How’s Mom’s medicine?”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  Schuler pointed a long finger at him. “You’re in this business because of me. Your ma gets her medicine because you’re in the life. She’d be dead right now, Mikey, remember that. I brought you in.”

  Schuler was acting like he’d just given Mike a kidney. “Leave her out of this.”

  “Why? She looks at me like I’m a cockroach.”

  “Cool it.”

  “Half a cockroach.”

  “Schuler.”

  “The crap on half a cockroach’s ass.”

  Now Mike felt the buildup, a hot anger spreading through his torso, up into his cheeks. He had a vision of pounding Schuler’s head against the window to see how many whacks it would take to bust glass. “I swear to God—”

  Schuler raised his voice into a high falsetto and affected a brogue. “Oh, now ya wouldn’t be hanging around with that piece of shite Schuler, now would ya, Mikey boy? That Schuler boy is not fit to wipe yer arse.”

  “You want me to kiss your ass because we robbed a corner store together?”

  “Naw, not kiss my ass. Just a little respect. That’s all.”

  “You fucked up.”

  Schuler crossed his arms, looked out the passenger’s window. Beyond him, the dead cars rose like relics from a past industrial age. “I tried, you ran.”

  There was no winning this argument. “Take back what you said about my mom.”

  “She does hate me.”

  “Don’t give you the right to rag on her.”

  Schuler turned back toward Mike. The moonlight coming in the window gave his already pale skin an even milkier tint. “I take it back. So what do we do?”

  “You need to leave town for a while,” Mike said.

  “And you?”

  “I can’t leave Mom,” Mike said. “I’ll just have to watch my back.”

  “You better have eyes in your ass,” Schuler said.

  “Eyes in my ass?”

  “Yeah, instead of the back of your head?”

  “So I can watch myself take a shit?” Mike asked.

  “You know what I meant.”

  “Just makes no sense, that’s all.”

  “Clever, okay. Trying to be clever. I like it,” Schuler said.

  “Try harder.”

  Schuler waved him off. “Just drive the car.”

  “Fine.” He would need an extra set of eyes, especially when Hark got word of the botched arson job. Just not in his ass. Fucking Schuler.

  CHAPTER 7

  Sara’s sleep was fitful and while in the throes of a light sleep, she felt the bus slowing down. She knew the other passengers were in danger while she rode the bus, but perhaps she could use the Light to drive off her pursuers again. Every so often, she caught one of the passengers creeping up to peek at her. The heavyset lady, the older man, and Ritchie. As if she were some sort of circus freak.

  You expected them not to be curious?

  She saw the bus driver swing the Greyhound into a rest stop. There was a pickup truck and a motorcycle parked in the slanted spots. A single sodium vapor light cast its beam on the lot. There was a squat brick building with bathrooms and a few park benches in a wooded area. Why the hell were they stopping?

  The brakes hissed and Sara sat up. The driver left his seat, stood, and turned.

  “What was that you did back on I-81?” he said.

  “Where are we?”

  “I-90.” he said.

  “So, what was it? You got some sort of weird flashlight?”

  “Something like that.”

  “What was that? I saw men in the fog. You wanted by someone, the cops?”

  “I’m on the FBI’s Most Wanted List.”

  “Smart-ass,” he said. “Who were they?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And that little light show you put on?”

  “Can we just get moving? It’s important I get to Buffalo.”

  “I’m not taking you any farther. The other folks on this bus are nervous as a canary in a coal mine, and it’s because of you. You’re going to have to leave the bus,” he said, and pointed to the door.

  “You can’t just leave me here.”

  “You’re disrupting the other passengers.”

  “By snoring too loud? I’ve been asleep.”

  He started toward her. Sara gripped her bag, ready to swing it into his gut. “Don’t touch me.”

  “You getting off the bus or not?”

  Sara stood up and turned, looked at the other passengers. The heavyset woman looked down, playing with her hands. Ritchie caught her gaze and then quickly looked out the window. The old guy was sleeping. “You’re all just going to sit there, then?”

  The bus was as silent as an empty church.

  “I can call the state police, you know.”

  “You’re a real gentleman.”

  “Maybe you can hitch a ride.”

  She picked up her bag and brushed past him. She paused on the bus steps and looked back at the passengers, none of whom would look at her. “Cowards.”

  Sara stepped into the night.

  She sat on the bench, arms wrapped around herself. She had buttoned the jacket up to her neck, but it provided little warmth against the breeze. After kicking her off the bus, the driver had retrieved her suitcase from underneath. Sara had tried getting his name, but he would not give it, and she imagined the other passengers would corroborate his story if she complained to Greyhound. One pain-in-the-ass passenger removed from the bus. Yea for the bus driver.

  Leaving home was beginning to seem like a horrible mistake. Hitching a ride didn’t seem like a great idea. The driver of the pickup truck, a bearded man in hunting camouflage, gave her a glance and drove off. The motorcycle rider was a white-haired guy, maybe in his sixties, who had stuffed himself into a set of leathers. It looked like a Halloween costume. The prospect of hitting either one of them up for a ride didn’t thrill her.

  After ten minutes on the bench, she decided to move to the alcove outside the restroom. A glass wall partially deflected the breeze, and she felt some warmth creep back into her body. Beyond the rest stop, she watched the cars zip past, making lonely humming noises on the asphalt, all of them unaware of her. Every so often, she heard a branch snap or grass rustle and worried that her pursuers had found her. Since she had not been attacked, she assumed it was a raccoon or deer.

  She thought of calling home, having David (thinking of him as Dad didn’t seem to fit at the moment) come and get her, but that would prevent her from finding Laura Pennington. She wanted to see the woman, touch her, embrace her. Her supposed mother. Who had been taken from her. But could she build a relationship with a complete stranger? She wasn’t a little girl anymore, and would Laura Pennington even be interested?

  She suddenly felt even more miserable. Her gut hurt and a lump formed in her throat. She told herself to be tough.

  A car pulled into the rest stop, and as it approached, Sara saw it was a midnight-blue BMW. It swung into a parking spot and the driver got out. The driver was a blond woman, striking in her features. Long hair, pale eyes. She wore a long leather coat, and underneath that a turtleneck and knee-length skirt. The ensemble was topped off with knee-high black boots. She looked as if she belonged on a runway in Milan.

  Sara shrank against the brick wall. The woman approached, her boots clicking on the pavement. Sara smelled perfume and under it, a whiff of cigarette smoke. The woman nearly passed her, then paused.

  “Oh, didn’t see you there.”

  “Didn’t mean to startle you,” Sara said.

  “You didn’t. Are you here by yourself? I didn’t see any cars in the parking lot.”

  “My bus pulled away without me.”

  “You po
or dear,” the woman said, and placed her hand on Sara’s arm. “I live nearby. Can I give you a ride?” She smiled, revealing small, perfect teeth.

  She didn’t know the woman, but at this point, she couldn’t be choosy about a ride. “Okay. I’m Sara, by the way.”

  “Joanne,” she said. “Let me just use the bathroom and we’ll hit the road. ’Kay?”

  Sara nodded. She expected the woman to have an exotic name, like Nadia or Eva, but she was just plain old Joanne. Not that she looked plain.

  Joanne swung the bathroom door open, and the odor of disinfectant and old urine wafted out. “Come on,” she said and got ahead of Sara, taking impossibly long strides. She had no idea what Joanne did for a living but if David saw her, he would no doubt categorize her as a “nut buster.”

  Sara grabbed her suitcase and followed Joanne, who took the luggage from her, popped the trunk, and tossed it in. Sara climbed in the car, keeping her travel bag on her lap. The car smelled of new leather and perfume.

  Joanne climbed in and started up the car. They pulled out of the rest area parking lot and merged onto I-90. Joanne kept her foot steady on the gas and Sara watched the speedometer creep to seventy-five.

  “Nervous?”

  “Just that you’re driving like Dale Earnhardt Jr.”

  Joanne gave a throaty laugh. “Speed limit’s sixty-five. And I’ve never been stopped below eighty.”

  The car cruised along and when they reached the next exit, Joanne flipped on the blinker. They took the off-ramp, made a right and a left at the next exit, down a road called Cherry View Lane.

  “So where were you headed?” Joanne asked.

  “Buffalo.”

  “Any reason?”

  “None that I want to discuss.”

  “Fair enough.”

  They reached a pair of green mailboxes and a driveway and Joanne turned up it. The drive wound up into the hills and there were lights planted in the ground about every twenty feet. They turned right around a bend and Sara saw the house, a huge colonial, all brick. A three-car garage jutted out from one side, and it looked as if they had built living space over the garage.

  Joanne reached over and pressed the garage door remote, which was clipped to the visor on Sara’s side. The door opened with a squeak and Joanne pulled the BMW into the garage. She killed the headlights and got out. Sara followed, clutching her bag so as not to scrape it against the car. God knew what a machine like this cost.