The Wrong Goodbye (19 page)

  The roadway blurred. I raised a hand to my eyes, and wiped away the moisture with my sleeve. "Yes." 

  "Hey, that's somethin', right? I mean, you two got to live out your happily ever after for a while before you got collected – didn't you?"

  Happily ever after? Yeah, that's how I thought my deal would play out, too. But it very fucking
didn't
– Dumas made sure of that. See, part and parcel of my deal was, I was at his beck and call – required to do his bidding at a moment's notice, day or night. At the time, I didn't know he was a demon; Dumas had fashioned himself in the image of a gangster, which made me a gangster's errand boy. For months, he pushed me and he pushed me toward a life ever more dark and violent and despicable, until finally, I pushed back and killed him. Well, I
thought
I did, at least – turns out bullets aren't so effective when it comes to killing demons.

  But the fact he couldn't die doesn't absolve me of his murder; when I pulled the trigger, I thought I was ending a human life, and that level of moral corruption doesn't come without a price. The blood I spilled that night served to seal my deal for good. And of course the fucker played dead just long enough for me to tell Elizabeth what I'd done. She couldn't stand the man that I'd become, and so she left – left me broken, alone, afraid – and took our unborn daughter with her.

  I suppose Dumas could've had me collected then, as I lay reeling from the loss of the woman I traded everything to save, but he didn't. Instead, he made sure I stuck around long enough to see Elizabeth find someone else – and to watch our daughter grow inside her, knowing full well that I'd never get to meet her, hold her,
know
her – before he sent the meanest, most vicious Collector hell had to offer to deliver me to my fate. By then, the pain of death seemed like a respite. Sure beat the pain of a life without Elizabeth. 

  Or, at least, that's what I thought at the time.

  Now, of course, I know better. Now I know that I'll be living without Elizabeth for eternity. I'm sure the thought would bring a smile to that shit-bag demon's face, maybe put a little spring in his step. 

  So
happily ever after
? 

  "Not exactly," I replied.

  
  
  

"Hey, Sam? I think I got something."

  We'd been at the library maybe twenty minutes. The first five of them I'd spent online searching the local paper's database for any mention of sulfur or further instances of naked wandering. I spent the next fifteen wrestling with the fucking microfiche machine, because it turns out if you want to read more than a line or two online, you have to pay for it. Gio watched over my shoulder for a while as I cursed and scowled and occasionally rapped the obstinate piece of junk on its side in an effort to get it to work, all to no avail. When he tired of chuckling at my expense, he returned to the bank of computers on the far wall, leaving me to stew in peace.

  I craned around in my seat to face him, and in so doing, knocked a spool of microfilm onto the floor, where it dutifully unraveled. I'm pretty sure I heard the old lady making bake-sale flyers at the photocopier snicker. "I swear, Gio, if you're calling me over there to watch another video of a monkey dancing, I'm going to be pissed."

  "No monkey this time, honest. Stop fucking with that thing and come over here, would you?" 

  Turns out, Gio
had
found something: a series of hits about an old hospital nestled in a narrow box canyon a few miles outside of town. Abandoned since the Fifties, its sandstone façade was crumbling and decrepit, and it had been all but reclaimed by the desert that surrounded it. He had enough windows open to make my head hurt – I think people born into the digital age must be wired differently to process so much shit at once – but most of the hits were pretty useless: a piece from the local historical society, too dry to bother reading; a couple hikers' websites, chock full of photographs of the hospital and the surrounding desert; a video piece from the local NBC affiliate on the perils of teen drinking that highlighted a story of a kid who, several years back, fell to his death from a window of the abandoned structure while he and a bunch of his friends were out partying in the desert. I began to wonder what the hell Gio dragged me over here for.

  But as I read, there were others that were more illuminating. The minutes from a city council meeting in which the purchase of the old hospital was discussed. The results of a formal land survey – complete with map – submitted to the city by the developer, who declared his intent to build a resort upon the land in question, to take advantage of the natural sulfur springs that bubbled up from beneath the canyon floor. And the subsequent announcement on the city's website that all construction of the resort had ceased due to lack of funds.

  For each of them, the developer was listed as Walter Dumas.

  I clapped Gio on his borrowed shoulder, and fought the urge to do a little end-zone dance. His meaty face broke into a grin. "Nice work, Gio – this is
perfect
."
  "So what now?"
  "Print it. Print it all."

 

It was dusk when we arrived back at the squat, and the house was submerged in shadow, the nearest working lights over two blocks away. The second we pulled into the driveway, I heard Roscoe screaming "
HELP
!" over and over again, to no one. He must've been carrying on like this a while; his voice was hoarse, and his calls sounded more rote than plaintive, as though his heart wasn't really in it anymore. He picked up a bit when he heard us coming in, but when he spotted me through the open bathroom door, he slumped against his restraints, and his shouting ceased. Seeing him there, glaring at me in petulant defeat from atop the unplumbed toilet, he looked for all the world like a child sentenced to a time-out. 

  "Oh," he said. "It's you."

  "You been shouting like that the whole time?" 

  "No," he said, too quickly.

  "I'll take that as a yes. Don't worry – it doesn't bother me any. It's just there's no one around to hear – you really could've saved your breath." 

  "You two are gonna kill me, aren't you?"

  I laughed. "Roscoe, if we were going to kill you, you'd be dead by now – if only to save ourselves the trouble of carrying your ass around. Look, I know this sucks, OK? But tonight, I've got some business to attend to, and once that's done, me and Gio will be on our way. So just sit tight a while, and everything's gonna be just fine."

  "Fine. Right. Says the guy who thinks he's a Grim Reaper."

  "Roscoe, look at me. Whatever it is I think I am, I'm telling you, it ain't your time to die. Now, maybe I'm nuts, or maybe Gio was just fucking with you, but either way, I promise you you'll be just fine, OK?" 

  He locked eyes with me a moment, and then he nodded. "Shit," he said, though it sounded more like
SHEE-it
. "I guess I believe you. And it ain't like I got nothing better to do, I suppose. But do an old man a favor, would you?"

  I smiled. Roscoe had no way of knowing it, but I had a few decades on him easy. "Name it," I said. 

  "Whatever damn-fool thing you're fixin' to do tonight, you be sure to get it done and come back in one piece. Last thing I need is to die strapped to a toilet 'fore my divorce is even finalized – then that thieving devil-woman would wind up with
everything
insteada just half."

  I smiled. "It's a deal."

  "Oh, and one more thing – if it ain't too much trouble, that is."
  "Yeah?"
  "I could sure as hell use another beer."

 

"So what's the plan?" Gio asked, once I got Roscoe settled down.

  Gio and I were in the midst of a convenience store feast, polishing off the last of the junk food we'd picked up that morning and washing it down with lukewarm beer. Truth be told, it was making me kind of queasy – or maybe that was the thought of what I was about to do. 

  "The plan?"

  "Yeah – like, are we goin' in guns blazin', or what?" 

  "Last I checked, Gio, we didn't actually have any guns."

  "You know what I mean. Whaddya use to take down a demon, anyway? You stake 'em or some shit? Hit 'em with holy water? There some kinda prayer you gotta say?"

  I shook my head. "None of that stuff works." 

  "Then what does?"

  "Aside of a mystical object designed specifically to kill a demon? Pretty much nothing."
  A pause. "You got one of those?"
  "Nope."
  "Know where we can find one?"
  "Nope."

  "So what the hell're we gonna do then?"

  "
We're
not going to do anything.
You're
going to stay here and babysit Roscoe, while
I
go out there and see what I can find out."

  "So lemme get this straight: I'm supposed to sit here on my hands while you go pokin' around a demon crack-house fulla scary monsters that want you dead with no strategy, no backup, and no weapons of any kind?" 

  "Yup."

  "Actually, you know what? My end of this plan don't sound half bad."

  "You sure?" I asked. "Because it's not too late to trade."

  Gio laughed. I took a pull of beer, and wished that it were something stronger.

  "Listen," I said, "there's a damn good chance I won't come back from this–" 

  "Aw, come on, man, don't talk like that."

  "– and if I don't, you let him go and then you
run
, you hear me?"

  But Gio shook his head. "No need, man. You'll come back. And Sam?"
  "Yeah?"
  "Make sure you come back."

  
  
  

Plumes of red-brown dust billowed outward from beneath the Caddy's wheels as it barreled through the hilly landscape north of town. I hadn't seen a paved road in over twenty minutes, and the steering wheel struggled against my grasp like a living thing. Storm clouds gathered over the mountains to the east, blotting out the rising moon, and the breeze was thick with the heady scent of creosote resin – a sure sign of coming rain. As darkness descended over the desert, my world shrank to whatever was illuminated by the jitter of my headlights as I jounced along the uneven dirt drive.

  Even with my map, I damn near missed the entrance to the box canyon. A stand of cottonwoods obscured its entrance, their thick foliage creating the illusion of a solid mass of rock when really it was cleaved in two. But something in the way the breeze disturbed the leaves gave me pause. A rock shelf should have sheltered them, but instead, they whipped about as though they were in a wind tunnel – which, upon closer inspection, they were. 

  I ditched the car behind a thicket of tamarisk and plunged into the canyon. Lightning flickered in the distance, providing snapshots of the world around me. The entrance to the canyon was maybe twenty yards across. The canyon floor sloped downward, dense with scrub brush and mesquite, and strewn about with massive hunks of rock. A narrow ribbon of dirt, more trail than road, wound through it all, and disappeared into the nothingness beyond. And, without so much as a flashlight to guide my way, so did I. 

  Mindful of the fact that the darkness that enveloped me would provide me little in the way of camouflage to the keen eyes of any watching demons, I clung to the edge of the trail, taking shelter among the underbrush. It was slow going, and I stumbled more than once, tearing the knee of my suit pants and scraping the hell out of my palms. An hour in, the rain began, plastering my hair to my scalp and my clothes to my weary, borrowed frame, but I pressed onward, grateful that the noise of it would serve to mask my stumbling gait.

  Eventually, the ground began to rise, and above, the pitch-black shadows of the canyon walls gave way to the softer purple-black of storm clouds. A smell like rotten eggs hung in the air, mingling with the scent of desert rain. My pulse quickened, and I scanned the darkness for any sign of sentries or booby traps or the like, but as far as I could tell, there weren't any. Doubt crept in, and I wondered if I'd been wrong in coming here – if I was wasting my time chasing down a flimsy, dead-end lead as all the while the clock ticked down to Nothing. 

  No. Dumas was here.  

  He had to be.

  It was the graveyard I discovered first: several dozen simple wooden crosses encircled by a low iron fence, and jutting at odd angles from the uneven canyon floor. They'd once been painted white, it seemed, but a good long while out in the desert sun had seen to that; now they looked as gray and dead as the bones they served to mark.

  Beyond the graveyard sat a smattering of squat, stone ruins, built upon a series of rock terraces carved into the crook of the canyon, and linked by a winding set of stone steps. The smaller outbuildings scattered at the bottom of the incline were reduced to just a couple crumbling walls, but the large main building that presided over them was largely intact – and its windows flickered with candlelight. 

  Looked like this was the place, after all. I wished like hell I had some kind of weapon; all of the sudden, this plan of mine didn't seem like the best idea. 

  I scaled the steps, noting as I did the iron bars that still graced the framed-out, glassless window holes of the ruins that I passed. The bars seemed somewhat out of place on the windows of a hospital – not to mention, this campus was way too small to have required such a large cemetery on its grounds. 

  That's when it clicked for me. What I was looking at. The town historians could call this place a hospital all they wanted – but this far out of town, with bars on every window and a goodly cache of bodies in the ground? 

  This place was no hospital. 

  This place was a sanitarium.

  Isolated. Reinforced. Impossible to escape. A prison in which to stash the terminally contagious, so that the healthy people of Las Cruces could go about their days unburdened by any worry about suffering and death. Once upon a time, I sold my soul to Walter Dumas to keep my Elizabeth from winding up someplace just like this. It's only fitting that I'd find him here tonight.