Watcher of the Dark: A Jeremiah Hunt Supernatual Thriller (The Jeremiah Hunt Chronicle) (9 page)

He was quiet for such a long time that I thought he wasn’t going to answer me, but eventually he spoke up.

“I wasn’t always this way,” he began, and I knew by his tone that he was talking about his ability to pinpoint an object with just his thoughts. “Had a normal childhood. Or at least as normal a childhood as one can have when you’re dirt poor and living on the wrong side of the tracks in Bentonville, Nebraska.”

Nebraska? Ugh.

“We didn’t have much, so I started working at fourteen and didn’t stop until the accident when I was twenty-five.”

He went quiet again, so after a few minutes, I prompted him.

“The accident?”

“It was winter. I was late coming home from work one night and my truck broke down on Route 23. I was a good five, six miles from home if I stuck to the road and went the long way round, but only a mile, maybe a mile and a half if I cut across the fields. I knew going that way meant I had to cross the ass-end of Lake Jessup, but it had been below freezing for so many days that I didn’t think it would be a problem.”

He sighed. “Shows what I know. I was almost to the other side when I felt the ice beneath my feet start to crack. I knew I was in trouble—I still had a good fifteen, maybe twenty feet to go—but I gave it my best anyway, scrambling for the bank as fast as I could go. Almost made it, but almost wasn’t good enough. My feet were still kicking when I slid beneath the water.

“Next thing I knew I was waking up in a hospital bed somewhere in Lincoln, which was more than a hundred miles from where I’d gone under the ice. Folks there told me I’d been in a coma for six months. A miracle, they called it.”

From the tone of his voice, he thought it was anything but.

“It wasn’t long after that when I started getting the feelings, that sense where something was. I’d be in a room with a bunch of people and one of them would say something about an item they’d misplaced. Just like that,” he snapped his fingers to show what he meant, “I’d know where it was. If I’d never met that person before or had never been to their house, I could still describe exactly where the item was.

“I was this human dowsing rod. Ask me where something was, picture that something in your head, and I could find it for you.

“Didn’t matter what it was. Misplaced cell phone. Missing jewelry. Well water in the backyard. The family heirloom you’d tucked away for safekeeping and then promptly forgotten what you’d done with it.

“I was scared at first, not sure how to handle things, but eventually I came to see that I had a gift, a gift that could be used to help people. Namely, me.

“So I went to Vegas.”

I knew what he was going to say at that point—the details might differ a bit, but the essential story was going to be the same, I just knew it—but I kept my mouth shut and let him talk. He was on a roll, after all.

“I thought I’d go in, make a killing, and get out again. All I had to do was ‘find’ the winning hand. But that turned out to be a lot harder than it looked. You can’t find the winning hand in a room full of card players with multiple games going on. The same held true of the baccarat and roulette and poker. There were just too many games, too many distractions. I’d pick a winning hand only to find I was at the wrong table. Or I’d find the right number, but it would be the wrong color. It seemed I couldn’t work with more than one variable at a time.”

Talk about frustrating
, I thought.

“Furious, angry with myself that I had this supposedly amazing power and couldn’t even use it to help myself, I left the casino, caught the first bus I came to, and ended up in L.A.

“I saw a sign in the bus station for the local horse track and figured what the hell. I only had a few bucks left in my pocket; I was going to be out on the street the next day anyway, so why not give it one last shot?”

He fell silent for a minute, and then, “Did you know they bring the horses out before the race to this little grassy section on the side of the track?”

I didn’t and told him so.

“Yeah, they do. Like five minutes before the race starts the jockeys lead the horses out of the stables and over to this grassy area where they stand around for a few minutes, waiting to be let onto the track. With the right kind of ticket you can go down there and get a good look at the horses, right up close, ya know? That’s all it took. My hands started tingling and I knew right away which horse was going to win. I went up to the window and, with something like ten seconds to spare, I bet everything I had on that horse.

“Turns out he was the long shot and paid 30 to 1. I waited a few races and then did it again. By the time I left the track that day, I had ten thousand dollars in my pocket and a smile on my face as wide as a Buick.”

Being able to pick the winning horse every time? That was a far more useful skill than the one I’d been blessed with.

Perkins didn’t think so.

“I got greedy. Won too many races.”

I could see where this was going. “Which brought you to the attention of track security.”

“Track security?” He laughed. “Hardly. Even if they’d been on to me, which they weren’t, they wouldn’t have been able to figure out how I was doing it.”

That left only one option.

“It brought you to Fuentes’s attention.”

“Exactly. Turns out he owned the track and offered me a deal. Come work for him or pay back all the money I’d ‘stolen’ by using my powers to win the races.”

Sounded familiar. “Why didn’t you just pay it back?”

I could almost hear him shrug. “Couldn’t. I’d already spent most of it.”

Even knowing I’d been shanghaied in similar fashion, I still felt bad for the guy.

“I’m not the only one, you know,” he said.

“Only one what?”

“Tricked into working for Fuentes. Rumor is that Grady and Verikoff had to face choices of their own.”

Now that was interesting.

“How do you know?”

Before he had a chance to answer, the door behind him opened and Grady’s voice filled the room.

“Let’s go, ladies. We’ve got a job to do.”

12

We piled into the Charger just as we had the other night, except this time it was Rivera behind the wheel instead of Perkins. Grady rode shotgun while I was sandwiched between Ilyana and Perkins in the backseat.

No sooner had I sat down than Grady leaned over the front seat and handed me a pair of sunglasses. I tried to give them back, saying, “Thanks but I already have a pair.”

He, however, refused to take them.

“I know you do, Princess, but trust me, you want these. Just put them on over your others.”

Over the other pair?
For all I knew he was trying to help me win the worst-dressed award for the evening, but something in the tone of his voice made me decide to trust him. Heaven only knows why. I opened up the earpieces and slipped the glasses on over the pair I was already wearing, just as he’d suggested. To my surprise, the outer pair fit quite neatly over the inner pair and even had extensions on the sides of each lens to cover my peripheral vision.

With the glasses on, I cautiously opened my eyes.

Instead of being drowned in a sea of white, I could see!

Not well, and certainly not with any detail, but the combination of the two pairs of sunglasses allowed me to see the sketchy shapes of the things around me, similar to the way in which I can see the real world, like a faint negative of the spirit one I can see while using my ghostsight.

My surprise must have shown on my face for I heard Grady grunt with satisfaction.

From the seat beside me, Perkins asked, “What are they, Grady?”

“Prescription sunglasses made especially for glaucoma patients. Extreme UV protection and some of the darkest polarization you can find. I thought Hunt might be a bit more useful if he had some idea of what was going on.”

Amen to that
, I thought.

We drove for about a half hour and then left the smoothness of the highway behind, exchanging it for the rugged bumps and potholes that dotted the back road we’d turned onto like lumps on a measles patient. Fifteen minutes later we slowed to a stop. Grady got out of the car and disappeared from view ahead of us.

“What’s going on?” I asked, not really expecting a response.

To my surprise, Verikoff answered.

“There’s a chain blocking the way. Grady is dealing with it.”

It didn’t take him long; just a few moments later the door reopened and he slipped back inside. “’Bout a hundred yards up on the right,” he said.

Rivera drove us forward, the tires crunching over dirt and gravel, and then he brought the car to a stop. The engine idled for a moment and then stopped.

We’d reached our destination.

As we all got out of the car, Rivera said something beneath his breath in his native tongue. I’ll be the first to admit my Spanish isn’t all that great, but it sounded to me like he said “
Madre de Dios, protégenos y sálvanos
,” which roughly translates into English as, “Mother of God, protect and save us.”

From what?
I wondered.

That’s when I felt them.

Ghosts surrounded us, their attention like a physical weight on my neck and shoulders, heavier than anything I’d ever experienced before. Curious, I took my sunglasses off, both pairs, and slipped them into my pocket before I mentally reached into the back of my head and flipped the switch that activated my ghostsight.

What I saw made me gasp in surprise.

The car was parked at the end of a long drive. Ahead of us was a massive Spanish-style villa that sprawled across the land on which it had been built, like a fat spider sitting patiently in its web, waiting for its prey to wander into its trap. The house had been the victim of a fire at some point in the past; one wing was partially collapsed, the brick and tile twisted and warped by the heat of the flames and still covered with the soot that the fire had left behind. No effort had been made to repair the damage; judging from the look of things, that side of the house had been open to the elements for some time, perhaps even since the immediate aftermath of the blaze.

It did not feel empty, however. Abandoned, yes, maybe even forgotten, but not empty. Something lurked there, behind the darkened windows and closed doors, something dark and malevolent that suffused the entire structure with a miasma so thick that it felt as if the house was going to reach out and drag you down into its depths before you had the good sense to turn and run.

But as uncomfortable and strange as the house appeared, it was the presence of the ghosts that surrounded it that made me stiffen in surprise. Not since the Angeu had amassed his army of wraiths on the outskirts of New Orleans to invade the world of the living had I seen this many ghosts assembled in one place. They surrounded the house, staring in our direction, their attention concentrated on us with the kind of unblinking focus that only the dead can manage.

For a moment I was struck with such an overwhelming sense of hatred and malice that I literally staggered beneath the weight of it, my knees buckling, and only my grip on the frame of the open car door kept me from collapsing to the ground. Then, just as quickly as it had come, that psychic assault dissipated as the ghosts turned their attention away from us and focused once more upon the house that they had no doubt been watching prior to our arrival.

“You all right?” Perkins asked at my elbow, and it took me a moment to find my voice.

“Yeah. What is this place?”

“Lovely, isn’t it? Once upon a time, it was the home of man named Glenn Wagner. Perhaps you’ve heard of him?”

Who hadn’t? Wagner was perhaps the most notorious mass murderer since Jeffrey Dahmer in the late ’80s. Selecting his victims from the film that was brought in to be developed at the local photo processing store where he worked, Wagner had murdered twenty-nine men, women, and children before he was caught eight years ago. The first attempt to convict him for the crimes ended in a mistrial when a member of the jury slipped out of the hotel where they were being sequestered to give an exclusive interview to a local reporter. Despite the fact that the rate of acquittals rises precipitously for second trials, Wagner was still convicted of twenty-three of the twenty-nine murders for which he was charged. He’d been sent to Sing Sing to serve a 165-year sentence with no chance of parole, only to be beaten to death by a fellow inmate a year later when Wagner had refused to pass the salt during the evening meal.

The investigation, trial, and subsequent murder of the murderer himself had been national news for months on end. There probably wasn’t an adult over the age of twenty-one in this country who hadn’t heard of Glenn Wagner, myself included.

“Yeah, I’ve heard of him,” I said dryly. Then, “What the hell are we doing here?”

I could almost hear Perkins shrug as he said, “Looking for another piece of the Key, would be my guess, though you’d have to ask Rivera to be sure.”

“The Key?” I asked. I had no idea what Perkins was talking about.
What key?

The answer to my question, however, would have to wait. Verikoff appeared at my elbow, interrupting my exchange with Perkins.

“Stay close once we’re inside,” she told me. “If you wander off I can’t protect you.”

“Protect me from what?” I wanted to know, but she walked off without answering, following Grady and Rivera as they headed toward the front door. The ghosts parted before them, but only Verikoff seemed to know they were there. While the others walked blithely forward, oblivious, she turned and snarled at the closest bunch of spirits, causing them to pull back enough to give Rivera and his party room to pass.

“Don’t know about you, but I’m not staying out here alone,” Perkins said to me and hurried to catch up with the others, leaving me standing there next to the car on my own.

“You have got to be freakin’ kidding me,” I muttered, as I did the same.

The lodestone around my neck generally worked to keep ghosts at bay, but I still shoved my hand in my pocket and kept it wrapped around my harmonica as I passed through the throng, ready to pull it out and play at the first sign the spirits were getting restless. To my surprise, however, the ghosts left us alone, and soon we were all standing in front of the door, waiting, as Rivera reached out and tried the handle.