Redemption Song
Authors: Craig Schaefer
REDEMPTION
SONG
(Daniel Faust, Book Two)
by Craig Schaefer
Redemption Song
Copyright (c) 2014 by Craig Schaefer. All rights reserved.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author or publisher.
Cover design by James T. Egan of Bookfly Design LLC.
Contents
One
•
Two
•
Three
•
Four
•
Five
•
Six
•
Seven
•
Eight
•
Nine
•
Ten
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Eleven
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Twelve
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Thirteen
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Fourteen
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Fifteen
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Sixteen
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Seventeen
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Eighteen
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Nineteen
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Twenty
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Twenty-One
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Twenty-Two
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Twenty-Three
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Twenty-Four
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Twenty-Five
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Twenty-Six
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Twenty-Seven
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Twenty-Eight
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Twenty-Nine
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Thirty
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Thirty-One
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Thirty-Two
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Thirty-Three
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Thirty-Four
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Thirty-Five
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Thirty-Six
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Thirty-Seven
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Thirty-Eight
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Thirty-Nine
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Forty
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Forty-One
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Forty-Two
•
Forty-Three
•
Forty-Four
Prologue
T
he ghost of Merle Haggard kept Sophia trapped in her house for two weeks. Every time she went to the door she’d see him standing on her lawn, clutching his guitar and wagging a disapproving finger at her. She knew her medication would probably make him go away, just like she knew the real Merle Haggard was alive and well in California, but she hated how the pills made her feel. Stuffy, slow, like scratchy wool was wrapped around her brain.
Merle left one morning, and another apparition took his place. This one came inside her house, ignoring all her wards and charms and trinkets, and stood in the corner of her kitchen. This one wore a crisp vintage suit and a featureless smudge of black smoke where its face should have been.
Sophia hid in her closet until hunger got the better of her. She skittered into the kitchen with her head down and arms crossed over her fluffy pink bathrobe, making a beeline for the pantry. The smoke-faced man waved its arms frantically.
“Hie!” it cried in a buzzing voice, like a thousand flies fluttering their wings in unison. “You! On our wavelength! Carry our message! It’s heavy, made of rocks!”
“You aren’t real,” Sophia repeated like a mantra, shaking her head violently as she rummaged through the cluttered pantry. “You’re a hallucination, not real, no, nothing to see here.”
“Apocalypso dancing! Sunday Sunday Sunday! You’ll want to cut your wrists with the whole knife,
but you’ll only need the edge
!”
She found a box of saltines and grabbed it hard enough to buckle the cardboard before fleeing the kitchen.
Another smoke-faced man floated from her bedroom, this one dressed in an old-time professor’s smock and cap. It advanced slowly up the shadowed hallway, feet dangling an inch above the faded shag carpet.
“We know you can see us,” it buzzed.
“Go away!” she shouted over her shoulder, running for the living room.
“You must warn the Faust,” it called out. “You must carry our message—”
The doorbell chimed. Sophia scrambled to undo the deadbolts and yanked open the door, desperate for company. The woman on her porch could have been an Avon lady, dressed in a prim gray pantsuit with her hair done up in a neat bun, but Sophia’s gaze shot to the jagged scar carved along the side of her face. The scar stopped just short of one cold eye.
Sophia took a halting step over the threshold, out into the sunlight. She blinked back tears and asked in a small voice, “Are…are you real? I’m having problems today.”
Meadow Brand curled her lips into an unpleasant smile.
“I’m very real,” Meadow said. Then she showed Sophia the tiny pistol in her hand and shoved her back inside the house.
One
I
jumped out of the passenger seat of Jennifer’s Prius and hit the ground like a tourist at the running of the bulls, charging across a scraggly yellow lawn. The front door of Sophia’s ramshackle tract house hung open, swaying in an errant desert breeze that didn’t begin to cut the heat. Blood spattered the white shag carpet. It sprayed out in loops and puddles like a mad Jackson Pollock painting.
We’d gotten the call twenty minutes earlier. Sophia’s “visions” tended to be ninety percent hallucination, ten percent psychic, but when she started rambling incoherently about the smoke-faced men in her house, we dropped everything and hit the highway. Three weeks ago those same smoke-faced men had damn near set off the apocalypse.
I froze in the wreckage of her living room. Static blared from the blood-streaked screen of her boxy television set, and a fallen lamp cast angled shadows over Sophia’s mutilated corpse. Her murderer wasn’t human. It was a faceless wooden mannequin with jointed limbs, like a life-sized version of an artist’s posing doll. One of its hands ended in a wooden nub, the other in a jagged, rusty knife. The mannequin hunched over her body and plunged the blade into Sophia’s stomach over and over again, a murder machine that didn’t understand its victim was dead.
Meadow Brand stood on the far side of the bloodbath. Her smug smile twisted the scar I’d given her. We’d faced off for the first time in a room a lot like this one, but it was a different friend of mine lying dead on the floor. Now I owed her for two.
The scene was too much to take in, too fast, and I forgot the hard lesson I’d learned from going up against Meadow and her mannequins: there was never only one of them. The second puppet lurched from its hiding spot behind the door. It crashed into me and grabbed me in a bear hug, its stiff wooden arms squeezing the breath from my lungs.
I thrashed my head backward. The move would have broken a human’s nose, but all it gave me was a sharp shock of pain as the back of my skull slammed against smooth wood. With my breath gone and black spots blooming in my eyes, I leaned forward and twisted my shoulder, using the mannequin’s own weight to hoist it up and over. It smashed against the floor and flailed like a flipped-over cockroach.
Jennifer was a few steps behind me. She appeared in the doorway, eyes shrouded behind blue Lennon glasses, gripping a gun the size of Texas. The hand cannon barked twice, blasts that pounded my eardrums and left streaks of light hovering in my vision. The fallen mannequin’s head exploded in a spray of wooden shards. The second one caught the slug square in the chest, and what was left of the creature fell to the carpet in a twitching ruin.
“Brand,” I gasped, catching my breath. I didn’t need to explain. Jennifer had been there with me, facing Meadow’s creations in a derelict hotel littered with deathtraps.
“Where?”
I looked across the room at an empty doorway. The back door slammed. My stomach clenched like a fist.
We ran outside in time to see Meadow pulling out of the neighboring driveway in a black Mercedes. She paused just long enough to look in the rearview mirror and give me a wink.
“Not this time,” I said, jumping into Jennifer’s car. She tossed me her pistol and gunned the engine. “She’s not getting away. Not this time.”
Jennifer gripped the wheel and stared dead ahead like a falcon zeroing in on its dinner.
Meadow hit the on-ramp for Interstate 15 at fifty miles an hour, the heavy Mercedes bottoming out and scattering sparks across the asphalt. We followed, close on her tail, weaving through the morning traffic. Meadow hit the gas, and Jennifer’s little car shook as it struggled to keep up the pace.
“Plan?” Jennifer’s voice was as strained as the engine. She blamed herself for letting Meadow slip away the last time, and now another innocent victim was dead because of it. I knew how she felt, because I felt the same way.
I clutched the pistol, feeling its weight, and rolled down my window.
“You pull up alongside her, I shoot her in the goddamn face.”
“Good plan.”
We almost made it, zooming up on the left while she got stuck behind a slow semi in the middle lane, but she slipped right and stomped the accelerator again. I watched, gritting my teeth, as the black Mercedes inched farther and farther away.
“She must have bushwhacked Sophia,” I said. “Made her call us, then killed her.”
“And laid a trap with her little puppet critters,” Jennifer drawled, her voice smooth as Kentucky syrup. “Doesn’t make sense, though. We took on dozens of those things at the Silverlode. Why’d she think she could beat us with just two?”
Up ahead, the Mercedes held its speed steady, lazily gliding between lanes. It slowed down, just a little, then sped up again.
She’s playing with us
, I thought, and my heart sped up as I figured out her game.
“Jen, don’t follow her! Get off the highway!”
“What? Why?”
“That wasn’t the trap!” I shouted. “
This is the trap
!”
Red and blue lights blazed in the rearview mirror as two Nevada highway patrol cruisers flew up the on-ramp and slid in behind us. Moments later, a third chase car, an unmarked SUV with its flashers mounted behind the front grill, joined the fun. I looked down at the gun in my hands.
“Can we outrun them?” I asked, feeling stupid as the words left my lips.
“It’s a Prius,” Jennifer said through gritted teeth.
It was a setup, and we had walked right into it like a cow guided down the killing chute. We weren’t going to get away. All we could do now was minimize the damage. Jennifer moved into the slow lane, making as if to pull over, while I grabbed the tail of my shirt and wiped the gun down as best I could. I tossed the piece out the window. No chance they didn’t see it drop, but at least with my hands empty I wouldn’t be committing suicide by cop.
We drove another quarter mile and pulled over. Jennifer killed the engine. The squad cars boxed us in. Next thing I knew, there was a uniform and an unholstered pistol in every direction, and a loudspeaker bellowed for us to stick our hands out the windows.
They hauled me out of the car and slammed me against the hood, pinning my hands behind my back. As the cuffs clicked around my wrists, I looked over my shoulder and smiled politely.
“What seems to be the problem, officer?”
The cop stared at me from behind mirrored shades as he patted me down.
“Let’s see,” he said, “reckless driving, endangerment, speeding thirty miles an hour over the limit, and a lady called in and said you were chasing her and threatening her with a firearm.”
“Must be a mistake, officer. We’re both unarmed.”
A young cop ran up, breathless, wagging his thumb over his shoulder. “Found the weapon, Sergeant. Retrieved it about a quarter mile back.”
“Ooooh,” I said, snapping my fingers. “
That
firearm. Sorry, I forgot.”
State cops, for the record, have no senses of humor.
They shoved me in the back of one cruiser, Jennifer in another, and called a tow truck from the impound yard for the Prius. The command station was nice, as command stations go, and they wasted no time getting me fingerprinted and photographed. I knew the routine.
What happened next, though, I didn’t expect. They uncuffed me and sat me down in an interview room, a dank little cinder-block chamber with a one-way mirror and an overhead light covered in wire mesh. Then they left me there. The minutes stretched into a long, slow hour.
I had a record. All misdemeanors, though, nothing that would raise a red flag or lead to inquiries across state lines. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’d committed plenty of felonies. I’d just never gotten caught. By all accounts, I should have been booked and tossed in a holding cell. Instead, I sat and waited, listening to the faint hum and pop of the overhead fluorescents.
None of this made sense. If the idea was to frame us for Sophia’s murder, forget about it. Sophia was stabbed, not shot, and I guarantee Meadow would have gone back to pull her mannequins out of the wreckage before the cops showed up. The most anyone could do was place Jennifer and me at the scene. We’d walk on that.
As far as the charges went, what could they get us on? Reckless driving? Brandishing a firearm? Worst-case scenario, I’d do maybe two months in a county jail. Not a vacation at Club Med, but not the end of the world either. As far as I could tell, Meadow Brand had murdered someone and set up an elaborate snare for the sake of a mean little prank. While I wouldn’t have put that past her, that nagging itch at the back of my brain told me I wasn’t seeing the full picture.