Chapter 12 Trust
Trust
“Get a grip, Anna. Get a grip.”
I repeated this over and over to myself like a mantra, clutching the El Camino’s sticky steering wheel as I drove back to familiar ground.
Viv was playing me, and she was likely unhinged from the trauma in her family, existing in a fantasy world she’d created.
She just happened to be really good at reading people, like so-called psychics who fleeced folks at festivals.
Right?
I didn’t like how she’d decided I was some kind of dark entity creeping around the margins of Bayern County.
I was a Girl Scout den mother. I always turned my library books in on time.
I had commendation medals from work. There was no fucking way this woman could peer into my soul and decide I was tooling around the county’s occult underbelly.
There was no way she could tell I was my father’s daughter.
Right.
I headed by the Grey Door bar, tucked away on a side street near the Copperhead River. It was the kind of place I had no interest in, having broken up more than my share of fights there during my Patrol days. It was a one-story building with no windows and with a scuffed door painted gunmetal gray.
As I opened the door, a bell jingled. My eyes adjusted to the dim light, my gaze sweeping over the bar, the sticky floor, the booths, and the cracked jukebox playing vintage hair band music.
There were only three patrons, including a couple of guys in a booth who seemed to be deep in conversation.
When I walked by, they glanced up at me and shut up. Probably for the best.
A familiar figure sat at the end of the bar. Rod Matthews looked at me like a deer caught in headlights.
I nodded at him. “I’m surprised you made bail this early, Rod.”
He looked down at his drink and mumbled something.
“I’m sorry?”
He cleared his throat. “My mom bailed me out.”
“Ah. You gonna show up for your hearing?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He hiked up his pant leg to show a GPS tracker fastened around his ankle.
Well, at least I’d know where to go looking for him next.
“Is your brother, Timmy, back in town? I thought I saw his car.”
He shook his head. “I haven’t heard from Timmy.”
“I ran into one of your friends the other day.” I described the man who’d followed me into the gorge at the Hag Stone. “Does that sound like a guy you know?”
He stared down at his shoes. “No, ma’am.”
He was lying; he wouldn’t meet my gaze.
“Would this be someone who might be involved in a certain criminal enterprise with you?”
“It doesn’t sound like it.” His voice was a whisper.
“I’d very much like to find out what this guy is up to, and what your brother’s doing back in town.”
He lifted a shoulder. “I dunno. I hear a lot of guys are getting work from some rich guy. Side jobs, like scrapping and construction and stuff.”
“A rich guy? Do any of these people look familiar?” On my phone I summoned pictures of the Kings of Warsaw Creek.
Rod looked away. “I dunno. I don’t hang out with guys like that anymore.”
“You wouldn’t happen to know where the supplies you guys were getting for meth manufacture came from, would you?”
“No, ma’am. My mom told me to behave myself.”
“Mm. Well, you’d let me know if you hear anything, wouldn’t you, Rod?”
He nodded vigorously. “Yes, ma’am.”
Rod wasn’t breaking the law at this exact instant (that I knew of, anyway), so I left him alone. But he’d pretty much confirmed my suspicion that my pursuer had been hired. And that led me back to the Kings of Warsaw Creek. But which one had hired him?
I sat down at the opposite end of the bar and waited for the bartender. I knew him to also be the owner, Owen Destin. Owen kept a shotgun under the bar, and I didn’t comment on it. Wasn’t what I was here for.
Owen was bald, clad in a flannel shirt, and had a tattoo of a snake peeping out above his collar, where it seemed to lick his jaw. “Can I help you, Lt. Koray?”
“Yeah. Could I get a Coke and a few minutes of your time?”
“Coming up.” He poured a drink for me and stood behind the bar. “What’s up?”
“Does Vivian Carson work for you?”
He nodded. “Viv’s been working here since high school. Good girl. Never misses a shift.”
“Could you tell me if she was here the past few days?”
“Yeah. She worked two p.m. to close every night this week. I was here.” He frowned. “Is Viv in some kind of trouble?”
“No. I’m just checking on some things, and her name came up,” I said vaguely. “Do you happen to have her time cards?”
“Sure. Let me go get ’em.” He disappeared into the back.
Rod scooted toward me and lowered his voice. “Did she hex somebody?”
“What?”
Rod whispered: “Viv’s my favorite server.
I saw on the news that Jeff Sumner’s kid nearly drowned.
She’s been pretty open about hexing his ass.
Him and his other little rich bitch buddies.
I told her to shut up about that, but she just laughed at me and told me she’s not afraid of them.
I told her not to be going on about that kind of thing at work. ”
“You think Viv can hex people?” Viv had denied touching the children of the Kings of Warsaw Creek. She’d hexed their fathers…did she hex the children, too?
“I seen it.” Rod looked right and left. “There was a customer here last year who backed into her car and busted her taillight. She said she cursed him. Dude wrapped his car around a tree a week later and was in the hospital for a month.”
My mouth turned down. “That sounds like a natural consequence of drinking and driving.”
“Maybe. But I do not fuck with that.”
I slid Rod a fifty-dollar bill with my card. His eyes lit up, and he snatched up the bill and card.
“There’s more where that came from if you remember other stuff.” I was skeptical about what he’d told me, but I felt uneasy enough to keep lines of communication with Rod open.
Owen returned with the time cards, which looked legit. I thanked him and paid for the drink. By then, Rod had retreated to the men’s room and was offering no further commentary on the magical powers of the staff.
The door banged open, and I squinted at the sudden light. A familiar figure darkened the doorway in a rumpled dress shirt, a loosened tie, and a bad attitude: Jeff Sumner.
Sumner stomped over to the bar.
“Where the hell is Vivian Carson?” he demanded.
His cheeks were red, and he looked drunk.
He slammed something down on the bar, and it took me a moment to figure out what it was.
It was a skeleton of a snake, curled in a perfect circle, with its tail tied into its mouth with baling wire. “I found this on my car.”
The bartender’s fingers surreptitiously slipped under the bar, toward the shotgun, but he replied evenly. “No idea.”
“She’s supposed to work here,” Sumner growled. “I need to talk to her.”
I slid off my stool and approached the other side of the bar. “Mr. Sumner, I have to ask you what you’re wanting with Vivian Carson.”
Sumner wheeled on me, eyes narrowing. “None of your fucking business.”
The bartender remained with one hand on his hidden shotgun. “I think you should leave.”
Sumner turned back to him. “You can’t kick me out.”
“I reserve the right to refuse service to anyone. You can leave of your own accord, or the lady and I can make you.” The bartender nodded at me.
Sumner swept his arm across the bar, sending glasses sliding across it and shattering on the floor.
“All right, that’s enough.” I reached for his arm. He shrugged my arm away and stomped to the door.
I glanced at the bartender, then at the glass on the floor. “You want to press charges for destruction of property?” I was hoping to hell that he’d say yes, but Owen shook his head. “Not worth the headache.”
I reached the parking lot in enough time to see Sumner’s SUV peeling out of the dusty lot in a cloud of irritation.
By now, the sun was beginning to lower on the horizon.
There was still a good five hours of daylight left.
Somehow, standing in the sunshine in a crumbling parking lot with crabgrass growing out of cracks in the sizzling asphalt felt safe.
Like everything was normal and fine with the world as long as the sun was shining. After dark, though…
Fuck. I didn’t really want to expand my personal cosmology to include curses if I could help it. Since there was nothing illegal about cursing someone…I wasn’t sure what the hell I was supposed to do about this.
Maybe Viv’s hexes and the misfortune of the Kings of Warsaw Creek were just coincidence.
But I’d seen enough strange shit that I couldn’t rule it out.
My attention was snagged by a flyer stapled to a telephone pole. I approached it, my eyebrows crawling up into my hairline. Tucked between a lost dog poster and an ad for a mattress sale was a neon pink flyer reading, in Gothic script letters:
“There shall not be found among you any…that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer.” (Deuteronomy 18:10–11)
Our community is under assault by the occult. Find God and be placed under his loving umbrella of protection.
I frowned at the word “witch.” I noticed that there was church information at the bottom: Greenwood Kingdom Church’s.
My phone rang, and I picked it up, wincing at the BEEP that greeted me before Detwiler’s voice: “El-Tee, this is D6. Dispatch received an anonymous call about a girl screaming at Greenwood Kingdom Church. I’m en route, but I thought this might relate to your case.”
“Yes. Yes, it might.”
—
I headed out to Greenwood Kingdom Church. Despite it being a weekday, the massive parking lot contained maybe a dozen late-model cars, and Sims’s vintage black Mercedes. A billboard out front encouraged congregants to Give your souls to God and prosper.