Demon Hunt (2 page)

The blackjack dealer’s hiking boots crunched pockets of snow as she trudged past another casino. The laughter of the closing employees and ring of slot machines shutting down floated outside. Marie glanced up but none of the crew joined her on the street. A few “Creekers” still puttered about but no one else headed to the parking lots.

The ghost of a grin crossed Marie’s face at the mental picture of Clark’s face when she got to his house and showed him the lace teddy she wore under her clothes. A little booze, a little pot, a scrap of lace and Clark and his one hundred thousand dollar-a-year casino manager salary would be locked up.

Behind her, a tiny figure scampered out of an alleyway. It stood on the sidewalk for a moment, head cocked, watching the woman. The creature gave a little shiver of glee before scampering away.

Marie glimpsed movement out of the corner of her eye. Whirling, she spotted nothing.

New Year’s Eve had been busy, as usual. Dealing blackjack to the masses filling the old gold mining town to capacity for the celebration had exhausted her. Marie’s leg and back muscles ached but her mind already spent the tips she pulled in during the long grind of the evening. She concentrated on cleansing her lungs of secondhand smoke by sucking in bucketfuls of clean air.

After an eternity of striding uphill, she turned down Fourth Street, descending to the Myers Avenue employee parking lot. There, her Jeep stood like a sentinel by a forlorn lamppost.

The cold worked its way up her coat sleeves, and she fumbled with the cuff of her parka while quickly marching towards the back lot.

By focusing on the cuff and not where she stepped, Marie sank a booted foot into the center of a smoking pile of fresh burro dung. One of the wild descendants of the miners’ pack animals that roamed the streets at will had deposited the manure within the last few moments.

Cursing, Marie stooped to scrape her boot on the curb, trying not to breathe in the fumes rising from the moss green goo.

Nearby, a shadow detached itself from the darkness behind the Old Homestead Whorehouse. The graceful white brick building was the sole remnant of Myers Avenue’s main source of revenue in the gold rush years, the shadow-filled alley in back of the building designed for discreet stealth.

Marie’s heart skipped when she heard a soft breath behind her, like a gunshot in the quiet air. Every muscle clenched as she whirled to stare into the shadow’s face. With a choked cry, she spun to race for the security of the Jeep. The pursuer made no sound as he flew along behind her, a long blade dangling from his right hand.

She
slammed, sobbing, into the side of the truck and ripped open her pack to dig for keys.

A black-gloved hand swung her body around to smash her against the door. She couldn’t find her voice because of the
vise-like fingers around her throat. Silent, her mouth gaped, desperate to scream.

The night hid the sight of the rise and fall of the steel blade. Marie crumpled to the ground, where she lay helpless and drowning in her own blood.

Her killer knelt and placed a gloved hand on her cheek in an almost comforting manner for a moment. Then he cut her jacket, her shirt and her new baby blue satin teddy away from her body. The cold sliced into her bare chest the same moment he cut out her heart. She made another gurgling effort to scream before succumbing to the spreading blackness.

Holding the heart in one hand, the killer’s sleek black head bent to feed at the fountain he created. Beneath, the snow turned black.

Chapter Two

Cripple Creek, Colorado

January 1, present

3:00 AM

Rhi was the last dealer to leave the Silver Pearl Casino.

After counting down the blackjack pit, Rhi waded through the night’s piles of used cards for an hour. In spite of her earlier misgivings, she left without an escort to her truck, knowing Stephen would be going over paperwork for another hour.

“
What the hell was I thinking, moving here from nice warm Mississippi?”

She asked the question aloud as she stared at her breath turn to crystals in the air. Towards the west end of Bennett Avenue, her SUV stood parked in the driveway of one the last private homes that remained on the town’s main street.

She felt like a Popsicle. Thank God Stephen, a Cripple Creek native who inherited his period home, shared his driveway with her on nights like this.

The overgrown holly bushes to her left softly rustled. Rhi stared into the mass of greenery, straining to see.

Nothing.

She paused to check out her surroundings five times on her trip this evening. She shook her head, disgusted with herself. Casino life included a certain amount of negative energy, and some of negativity must have escaped to follow her imagination home.

There were days when dealing blackjack in Cripple Creek was what the job was supposed to be – harmless fun. But too often a true gambling addict materialized to play at Rhi’s table. Eyes alight with The Fever, the fanatic’s hands shook with desperation as he watched the cards fall. Rhi often left work with their greed following her like a dark, oily fog.

Whatever followed her tonight didn’t feel greedy, though. It felt hungry.

Rhi stopped beside the truck, dug for her keys, unlocked and climbed up into the vehicle. She started the engine and sat for a few moments, allowing the block to warm up. When the snow on the windows began to melt, she hopped out armed with a small broom she kept in the back. She swept as much snow as possible off of the windows and hood, working fast, one eye on the street.

Finished, Rhi jumped into the toasty vehicle and locked the doors. After backing out of the driveway, she turned up the street. A sudden giant-nails-against-a-chalkboard scraping followed by a whooshing thump caused her to almost jam the brake pedal through the floorboard.

Crap.

She skidded to a stop in the center of the empty street to check her rearview mirror. Seeing nothing, she pulled up a bit and cracked open the door to lean out and check behind her. A pile of snow lay in the street. The cap of frozen snow on the truck’s roof had slid off.

She slammed the door shut and goosed the gas pedal.

Behind the SUV, a small, winged creature burst from the pile of snow. The truck headed out of town and the demon took to the air to fly just above the SUV.

Clouds of snow crystals blew across the frozen dirt road as Rhi passed Mt Pisgah Cemetery. The interior of the vehicle reeked of the cigarette smoke clinging to Rhi’s hair. A stale spicy scent joined the mix, rising from the to-go box containing a burrito she left under the seat the night before.

Driving past several Victorian wood frame houses, the evergreens in the yards humped over with the weight of the new snowfall, Rhi ignored the hulking gray and white menace of the cemetery’s forty-acre hill to her left. But the road took a turn, forcing her to face the massive burial ground, sole proof that the tiny town of Cripple Creek had once been a thriving metropolis, considered as a potential location for the state capitol in its heyday. The thousands of snow-covered gravestones and mausoleums resembled a malevolent crowd gathered on the hill.

A sudden gust forced the truck towards the side of the road. Startled, Rhi managed to avoid slamming on the brakes again.

“
Oh, hell!” she gasped.

When the truck skidded into a sluggish slide on the ice, she composed herself enough to remember to gently pump the brake pedal. After a long skid, the truck stopped in the center of the ice-covered road, cockeyed. She sat for a moment, taking a few deep, calming breaths, while she waited for the muscles in her neck to loosen up.

A thought scurried across her mind. Did she check the cargo space before she got in the truck?

“
Yeah right, an axe murderer is crouched down behind the back seat,” she muttered.

Rhi’s pit supervisor once informed her in a superior male manner that “only women worry about those urban legends.” But for Rhi, it seemed like a reasonable fear for a woman alone in the night. And this, for some unknown reason, seemed like a good night to embrace a few of her more exotic paranoias.

Over the last few weeks, a series of nightmares plagued Rhi, made up of flashing scenes of Cripple Creek during the Gold Rush era. The nightmares brought back lost memories of childhood nightmares, populated by the same faces as the more recent dreams, one face in particular distinct and disturbing. A man, the weathered planes of his face marked by sorrow and loss, stared out at her in every vision.

Dark, anxious thoughts on an icy road were dangerous. The glow of the cell phone in the cup holder caught her eye. “Time for some company.”

She flipped the phone open, punching redial and the speaker function, while keeping the SUV from sliding off the road with one hand and a kneecap.

“
What the hell are you still doing out this time of the night, little girl?” A booming female voice filled the confines of the truck. The sheer decibel level of the woman could probably set off an avalanche or two in the high country. Pam Douglas, Rhi’s self-appointed best friend and landlord, seemed to be in fine form for a woman who just finished a 10-hour shift. The single mother held down two jobs, alternating between the Long Branch and the Silver Pearl, working a 60 to 80 hour workweek and then taking off a week every month to spend quality time with her young daughter. Her ten-year plan was to retire with a comfortable nest egg. And Pam was well on her way.

Rhi grinned, envisioning the tall, gawky woman with frizzy blonde hair on the other end of the line, dressed in her favorite pajamas: an old fashioned red union suit with an honest-to-god button flap on the rear end.

“
You didn’t see anything when you drove home tonight?”

Rhi hesitated before she answered. How could she tell her friend about sensing something wicked in the wind? “No, I didn’t see squat. Wait, I saw snowflakes. Yeah, thousands and thousands of snowflakes. Billions and billions…”

“
Well, if you see
anyone
stranded on the side of the road, don’t stop. Just run them down and come home,” Pam advised her soberly. “Houston called to check on me. We had a murder downtown - the whole place went nuts about fifteen minutes ago. Lock up tight and take the big goofy dog to bed with you. I told you to get a gun - a girl can’t have too much firepower these days.”

Rhi stared at the white road unfolding outside the windshield, trying to absorb Pam’s words. “Murder? Here?”

She would have expected bloodshed in Tunica, Mississippi - the gambling town in which she began her casino career. The damp heat made people mean. But Cripple Creek? The weird feelings of earlier in the evening aside, a murder in Rhi’s new hometown was unthinkable. It was like a slime-covered monster had popped up in Mayberry, albeit a gambling and eccentric-filled Mayberry.

The bizarre town had the occasional alien sightings, Bigfoot encounters and hauntings. A week earlier a frantic gambler on her table swore he’d seen a dragon on one of the town’s back roads. But other than those occasional hiccups, Cripple Creek was a peaceful, weird little town most of the time.

“
A murder?” she repeated. “Did somebody piss off a boyfriend?”

“
No, sweetie, this was the real thing. Jack the Ripper would think of this guy as a model student. A girl got hacked to death in the employee lot on the far end of Myers.”

Rhi’s blood turned to ice. She stuttered before asking the question. “Who?”

“
We both work with her and though my maw maw taught me not to speak poorly of the dead, neither of us can stand her. Marie Collier.”

“
Oh God.” Rhi clutched the steering wheel, swallowing the bile rising in her throat. Marie. She gritted her teeth against the unbearable urge to pull over and vomit. “Pam, I told her to go home early … I let her go.”

“
Rhi,
everybody
let her go home early. She was a pest. But a good dealer.” Several metallic clicks sounded in the background as Pam spoke. Clicks corresponding with the sound of a large caliber gun being loaded and checked.

“
What are you loading?”

Pam replied with an evil laugh, “My boyfriends, Smith, Wesson and Mr. Remington. This idiot from town shows up here and I might leave enough of his DNA on the floor to ID’em … if I’m in a good mood. And we know how cranky I get when I don’t get enough sleep.”

Heaven help the slasher who decided to invade
that
particular isolated home.

Squinting through the windshield at the slender beams of light put out by the headlights, Rhi resisted the urge to floor the gas pedal. If a lone stranger popped out of a snow bank on the side of the road, she
would
run him over. Right after peeing in her pants.

“
I suppose they haven’t caught the guy yet.” Rhi tried not to sob as slow tears ran down her face.

“
Of course not. Our cops handle liquored up military retirees from Colorado Springs, bikers and tourists. They’re more freaked out by this than we are. But freaky towns attract freaky people,” Pam pointed out, pausing for dramatic effect before continuing. “Houston said whoever did this took her heart with him.”