The Pale: Volume One, Jacob Long [best beach reads TXT] 📗

his wife zoning out in the entryway and stopped to observe her. She stood stock still. Her pose was almost like that of a monkey watching for something in the trees, head up, stance wide.

“What’s going on, babe?”

Chrissy snapped out of her trance and whirled to face her husband. She looked like she’d seen a ghost.

“Everything all right?” Danny asked.

Christina tried to answer. “There was a . . . a thing. It was . . .”

Danny moved closer to her, supporting his towel with one hand. “A thing?”

Christina sputtered, and her vision was becoming cloudy with tears. “It’s like a monster. It was out by the toolshed. It might be coming in here.”

Danny wrapped his arms around his wife comfortingly, shushing her like a coddling parent. “It’s okay. I’m here. You say you saw a monster?”

Christina closed her eyes and pressed her face into Danny’s chest. It felt pleasantly cool. “Yes! It was back by the toolshed. It hit it. It punched a hole in the side! You can see it was there!”

“Hey! Hey! Hey!” Danny cooed, squeezing her. “It’s all right. I believe you. You want me to go outside and see about it?”

Christina looked urgently into Danny’s eyes. “No! You can’t go out there! You didn’t see this thing! It was huge! And ugly! And it had spikes and glowing yellow eyes like something out of nightmare!”

“Okay! Okay! Please, just calm down. Take a deep breath, sweetheart. Gosh, I’ve never seen you like this.”

“It was horrible!” Chrissy sobbed, resting her head against Danny’s chest. “And it saw me. It looked right at me with those eyes. And I heard something on the house, and I don’t know if it’s coming to get me!”

“Shh, shh, shh.” Danny kissed his wife’s forehead. “It’s okay. Do you want to leave? We can get out of here for tonight.”

“No . . . I don’t want to go out there.”

“Okay, we’ll just stay here. I’ll protect you. We can go upstairs and lay in bed, and in the morning, I’ll check around outside. It can’t hang around forever, something like that would be seen.”

Christina sniffled. “Okay. We should go to the cops too.”

Danny questioned that idea. He wanted to support his wife, but he knew it was a silly notion. “Sweetheart . . . I don’t know if they’ll believe you.”

“They have to believe me!” Christina said. “It was the chupacabra, Danny! I don’t know if it was the same one or another one, but I saw a chupacabra!”

“A chupacabra?” Danny asked skeptically. “Chrissy, there’s no such thing as a chupacabra. Those were wolf attacks all those years ago. We got them, remember? The attacks stopped.”

“I saw what I saw, Danny!” Chrissy cried. “It was a monster!”

“Okay! Okay!” Danny squeezed her. “All right. We’ll go to the police in the morning. It can’t hurt anything just to check in with them.”

Christina buried her face in Danny’s chest and wept for a time. Eventually, her husband guided her upstairs, and they lay together in bed, but it took another long while for her body to relax. The rise and fall of Danny’s breath and gentle touch did wonders for her. He nuzzled her neck and stroked in all the right ways only he knew. Then while she rested on his chest, the calm rhythm of Danny’s beating heart lulled Christina to sleep.

18

The rain stopped and the clouds parted just in time for the sun to arrive and clean up the mess. Sergeant Fisher was awakened from his pleasant sleep by the buzz of his alarm, but at least he could say that the sun was shining instead of descending, as was usually the case when he had to get up and go to the precinct. It was the first time he’d spent the night next to his wife in a long time, and she was delighted to have him. If nothing else, it meant he could get up to see what their infant daughter was crying about for a change.

Lamont made to get out of bed, and his wife’s long, smooth, dark leg extended from under the covers. May caught him by the waist. “Where you goin’?” she asked.

Lamont chuckled softly. “I gotta go in and see the shrink. Standard practice after something exciting actually happens for a change.”

“Mmm,” May groaned. “No kiss?”

Lamont smiled. “Of course.” He crawled over the bed and pulled the sheet from over his wife’s head. Her Afro was a mess, and she was exhausted from the baby giving her grief, but he thought she was a vision. She squinted into the sunlight coming through the blinds with a thin smirk on her face. Lamont planted a long kiss on those lips.

May approved. “Mmm.”

Even after breaking the kiss, Lamont hovered over her. “I should be back in just a few hours. I might pick some stuff up from the store on my way back.”

When Lamont stood, his wife gave him a little kick. “Oh! Hey-ey!”

“That’s for leaving me here with the baby. You hurry on back,” May chided playfully.

Lamont smiled. “I will. I promise. Unless they decide to throw me in the loony bin.”

“Somebody ought to,” May jibed.

Lamont got dressed and completed his morning routine of teeth brushing, head and face shaving, whatever breakfast he could find, and then he visited his daughter’s room. Amberele was sound asleep blissfully. He placed a light kiss on her little forehead, and then went out into the world.

Lamont didn’t like lying to his wife. Sure, he really did need to see the shrink, and he did tell his wife about the perp who attacked them in the alley, but he never told her about all of the crazy parts. That was lie enough for him. Everyone else worried about him; he didn’t want the mother of his infant child to worry too. And he didn’t want her to know that he was chasing down this demon all by himself, or that more than seeing the shrink, he wanted to speak with his buddy in CSI.

Even as Lamont entered the bullpen, he spotted Scott, the forensic investigator assigned to the boutique theft. He was a soft middle-aged man of short stature wearing thick-rimmed glasses. His Farol Verde Police Department CSI coat and faded jeans denoted a man not too concerned with his looks either. He had every right to be as peevish as a librarian, but Lamont had never met a nicer guy. The sergeant weaved his way through the desks and cubicles swiftly to catch the investigator before he could disappear into the lab.

Lamont clapped Scott on the shoulder to announce his presence. “Hey, man. What’s up?”

Scott flinched at the rough clap, but smiled when he saw his friend. “Oh, hey, Sergeant. How are ya? I heard about your little break. Tough luck.”

“Thanks, man.” Lamont said. “That’s actually what I’m here for, sort of. Captain said I gotta see the shrink for some . . . I don’t know, messed-up reason. But hey, I wanted to ask you . . . did those fingerprints ever come back? On the boutique thing?”

Scott suddenly looked more pensive than usual. His life could be pretty stressful, what with everyone and their mother expecting something from the lab on a minute-to-minute basis, but he didn’t usually seem so off balance. “Uh, yeah. They did.”

“And?”

“Well, uhh. We really didn’t get any good, complete prints. Everything was smudged. But uhh, we got a decent, partial thumb on your partner’s safety.”

“That’s interesting.”

“Yeah, I thought so too,” Scott said. “But more than that, even when I saw the print at first, there was something off about it.”

Lamont folded his arms. “Yeah? Like what?”

“Well . . . I don’t know, man. It’s weird.”

“No, no, no, I’m ready for weird. Hit me with it,” Lamont goaded.

“Okay.” Scott gathered his thoughts. “The print looked kind of fake.”

“Fake?”

“Yeah, like someone was imitating a fingerprint but could only get so close, you know?” Scott rubbed his chin and furtively glanced at the other people going about their jobs in the office. He looked like a bag man handing off secrets. “We put it through the system and . . . well, okay . . . you know how when we do ACE-V we check it out see if it’s viable, at least?”

“Yeah?” Lamont was hanging on every word, just itching for more evidence of his perp’s abnormality. “Spit it out, man.”

“Well, yours wasn’t, technically,” Scott explained. “But I checked it against the records anyway, because . . . it was nonviable for an unusual reason. Normally, it would be because it was too smudged or too old, but yours . . . your guy’s . . . was just . . . weird. Ugh, shit. It was all wrong. There wasn’t even a human number if ridges. The whorls were strange. It looked more like a damn monkey’s or maybe a koala’s. Like . . . someone drew it, and it was a good drawing, but someone with a trained eye would know something was wrong.”

“Wow” was all Lamont managed to say at first.

“Yeah,” Scott pulled his half-used pack of cigarettes out of his jacket and popped one in his mouth. He’d quit but missed the feeling of having a cigarette between his lips sometimes when he got nervous. “Obviously, I didn’t find anything in our system that matches. I can put it through IAFIS, but I don’t think we’ll get anything back.”

Lamont leaned up against the copy machine, his brow knit tightly. “What do you think this means?”

Scott leaned beside him. “I don’t know, you know? I’ve . . . I’ve really got no frame of reference for this.”

“Me neither, Scott,” Lamont said. “I’m reaching here. I need whatever you’ve got. Give me some ideas.”

“Who has false fingerprints?” Scott shrugged. “Some thieves burn them off, sure, but fake? And good fakes too. Somehow still excreting oils to leave a fingerprint?” Scott rubbed his eyes with the span of his hand. “Who does that? Who is this guy? Witness protection? That’s a little extreme. I thought maybe military, something secret for espionage. I know it sounds off the wall.”

Lamont shrugged. “Maybe not. I’d actually thought of the military angle myself. Gray said the guy knew some form of jiu-jitsu.”

“Maybe he’s a robot.” Scott chuckled. “Military robot. Just has to look human enough.” He shook his head. “Stupid. He probably just has a genetic anomaly that makes little things like that different on him. It would be great for being a criminal.”

Lamont shook his head. “Nah. You didn’t see this guy. You didn’t see what he could do. It was definitely weird.”

“Like what?”

Lamont immediately regretted his words. He rubbed his bald head and wanted to change the subject. Besides, he saw Dr. Harrington making a beeline for him from the other side of the office, looking uptight and well-meaning in her slate skirt suit. “Look, man, I’ll have to tell you another time, hopefully when this is over. Hey, do you mind running that through IAFIS anyway? Maybe some army guys are missing a robot.”

Scott smirked. “Yeah, okay, Sergeant.”

Lamont clapped him on the shoulder again. “It’s Lamont, man. Come on.”

Scott nodded sheepishly. “Okay. I’ll bring you the packet for your book too.” He left for the lab just as Dr. Harrington arrived.

“Hello, Sergeant Fisher,” the doctor said upon her arrival. “It’s good that you came in. Captain Michalis said you might have something you want to talk about with me this morning.”

Lamont shrugged. “Yeah. I guess I should. Perp beat down my partner, and I couldn’t help him.”

“Uh-huh . . .” Dr. Harrington’s fine, straight, brunet locks barely shifted with her movements. “And wasn’t there something else a little more complicated you mentioned in your report?”

Lamont had to fight hard to stifle a heavy sigh. Looking for an exit, he spotted a handsome young couple who had just entered the station. A queue had developed at the reception sergeant’s desk, and he was about to make them wait.

Sergeant Fisher touched the doctor’s arm and smiled his best, most charming smile as he slid from her sights. “Excuse me, Doctor, there are citizens in need.”

Lamont reached the couple just before they took their seats on one of the waiting benches. “Hi.” He pulled his jacket aside to reveal the shield on his belt. “I’m Sgt. Lamont Fisher. Did you two need to make a report?”

The husband spoke first. “Uh, yeah. I’m Dan Lacey. This is my wife, Christina.