Ghoul Interrupted (30 page)

I nodded again, encouraging her to keep talking.

With a sigh, she finally gave us what we came to find out. “Wyatt lives in the apartments behind the Wal-Mart. I don’t know what unit, but maybe someone over there’ll know. If you see Daryl, you tell him to get his ass home before I throw his stuff into the street. And he better come home with some rent money!”

I pumped my head up and down enthusiastically. “Yes ma’am,” I said. “You got it. If we see him, we’ll tell him exactly what you said.”

I turned to Heath and took his hand, ready to go back to the car, but he resisted. I looked at him then and was surprised to find his eyes unfocused. I knew that expression, well. I’d seen it reflected on his face during several ghost hunts before. “You okay?” I whispered.

“She’s in trouble,” he said, motioning with his chin to the old lady, who was still eyeing us warily.

I hesitated and gave him my full attention. “Who’s talking?” I knew he was communicating with someone on the other side just by his expression and the cast to his eyes.

“I . . . I think it’s Daryl,” he whispered.

That surprised me. “Has he crossed?”

“No,” Heath said, and pointed to a withered and dying tree. “He’s over there.”

I swiveled my head and detected the faintest disturbance in the ether near the trunk.

“Is he talking?” I asked.

“What are you two whispering about?” snapped the old woman.

“That’s his grandmother,” Heath said softly, still unwilling to have the woman overhear. “She’s his only living relative and he’s convinced someone’s out to kill her.”

“Who?”

“Don’t know,” he said, closing his eyes so he could concentrate.

I turned my attention back to Daryl’s grandmother. I’d so wanted to leave without being the one to tell her Daryl was dead. “You say you haven’t seen Daryl for a week?”

“Yeah. Maybe a little longer.”

I swallowed hard. “Should we tell her what we know?” I whispered to Heath.

He frowned and opened his eyes. “No. She won’t believe us and she might think we had something to do with it. We should send her to Sheriff Pena, though. I don’t know what’s taking them so long to notify next of kin.”

“Has anyone from the Zanto Pueblo been out here to see you?” Heath suddenly asked her.

The elderly woman—clearly not Native American—actually laughed. “Why would anyone from a Pueblo come to see me?”

Heath didn’t answer; instead he pressed his point. “Has anyone from the sheriff’s department come to see you . . . Trudy?”

Her eyes narrowed again suspiciously. “Why don’t you cut the crap and let me know what this is about?”

Heath turned back to his Durango and rooted around inside his glove compartment. Finally, he came up with a pen and a piece of paper and he scribbled down something on it before walking up to her. Handing the paper to her, he said, “That’s the number to the sheriff’s department on the Zanto Pueblo. Ask to speak to Sheriff Pena. You need to call him, Trudy. Tell him you’re Daryl’s next of kin. Then, if there’s anyone you can stay with for a couple of days, you’ll need to do that too, okay?”

Trudy looked at the paper in her hands and then back at Heath as if he were talking crazy. “Are you high?” she asked him, quite seriously.

Heath didn’t answer her. Instead he turned and walked purposefully back to me. “Let’s go,” he said, taking my hand.

Before he got into the car, I noticed that he gave the tree one more long look while Daryl’s grandmother remained on the top step of her crappy trailer, still moodily eyeing us.

When we’d cleared the exit of the trailer park, I said, “Feel like talking?”

“She wasn’t going to listen,” he said—a bit defensively, I thought.

“You’re probably right.”

“And Daryl wasn’t giving me much to go on,” Heath added, as if I hadn’t already agreed with him. “I mean, you could see how suspicious she was. I start talking about her grandson who’s speaking to me from beyond the grave and she doesn’t even know he’s dead yet? She would’ve laughed us off the property.”

“Hey,” I said, laying a hand on his arm. “You’re preaching to the choir here, darlin’. I would’ve done the same thing.”

Heath sighed and leaned back from the hunched-over position he’d assumed when he started driving. “Daryl’s in a really bad state,” he said. “He thinks he got away from whatever attacked him, but he was insisting that it was right behind him. I’m thinking that the deathblow came from behind while he was trying to run.”

“The black hawk demon spirit,” I said knowingly.

“Had to be,” Heath said. “Daryl wouldn’t tell me much about what happened. He was too busy trying to convince me to help get his grandma out of the house. He kept saying that they knew where he lived.”

“Yeah, weird, huh?”

“Did he say anything about Wyatt?”

“I asked and that’s when Daryl disappeared. It was like he’d just remembered he was with Wyatt when he was attacked. He said something about needing to warn him too, and poof! He was gone.”

“So, Wyatt’s still alive?”

Heath shrugged. “If he is, then we have to assume either he or this professor guy has been taken over by the demon. It just depends on who opened the urn.”

I thought about where we were heading. “Do you think Wyatt’s at his place?”

“Only one way to find out,” Heath said, then pointed to his backpack, which was tucked next to my messenger bag by my left foot. “We’d better be ready for anything. Make sure you’ve got a few spikes handy, okay?”

I considered the attack that Gilley and I had sustained while we’d been locked in the jail cell. The magnetic spikes had finally proved to be too much for the demon, but it’d taken a whole lot of stabs on Gil’s part to get it to back off.

“I think we should’ve brought a few more,” I told him.

 

We cruised into the parking lot of a low-budget apartment complex, which had three floors and a catwalk that spanned the perimeter of each level. It looked like an old hotel that’d been converted to cheap apartments and likely had paper-thin walls and residents who paid their rent in cash . . .
when
they paid.

“Homey,” I said after Heath cut the engine.

“Can’t be any worse than Trudy’s trailer,” he reasoned.

“True dat,” I told him, and dug into my messenger bag to get out as many spikes as I could carry. Still, it wasn’t a lot, only five apiece for me and Heath.

He looked at the spikes with disappointment. “Man, I feel so unprepared for this, you know, Em?”

I stuffed all my spikes into the inside pockets of my jacket. “I do.”

We got out and surveyed the front of the apartments. It wasn’t a very big complex, only eighteen units in total by my count. “How do we find Wyatt?” I asked when we began walking toward the front.

“We can check the mailboxes,” Heath proposed. I thought that a very good idea.

When we approached the mailboxes, a woman with a bag of groceries hanging on her arm was just sticking her key into the keyhole. “Hi,” Heath said to her, offering a smile too.

The woman turned her attention to him, and her whole face lit up. I wondered if I beamed like that when he looked at me. Probably.

“Hi,” she said shyly, a blush coloring her cheeks.

“Can I ask you for some help?” he said.

“Sure!” she replied, a bit rushed. She must have realized it too, because her blush deepened. “You lost or something?”

“A little,” he said. “We’re looking for a buddy of mine who lives here, but I can’t remember which apartment he’s in. Do you know a guy named Wyatt?”

“Wyatt Benoit?”

“Yeah!” he said. “You know him?”

Her smile widened. “He lives in three F. It’s up those stairs and to the left. But I don’t think he’s home,” she added. “I live two doors down from him, and I haven’t seen him the last couple of days.”

“Oh, yeah?” he asked. “But you saw him this week, right?”

She considered that. “I think I saw him Sunday night,” she said.

Heath eyed me discreetly to see if I’d caught that. We knew that Daryl’s remains had been discovered ten days previous, which was likely the last time his grandmother had seen him alive. I nodded to Heath and let him continue. “Okay, I’ll try him anyway and leave him a note,” he told the girl. “But if he’s not home, would you happen to know another friend of his—”

“Daryl?” she interrupted.

Heath tripped over that a little. “Uh . . . actually, I was referring to his buddy the professor.”

“The professor?” she laughed, like Heath had just said something really funny. “No. I don’t think Wyatt knows anybody called that.”

Heath shrugged and thanked her for the help, letting her get back to her mail. I noticed as we walked away that she didn’t hurry to open her mailbox—she was too busy watching his ass as we climbed the stairs.

“Having a hot boyfriend has its perks,” I chuckled.

Heath flashed me that brilliant smile and I found my own heart racing. It felt like I hadn’t seen him do that in forever, but really, it’d only been since his uncle died. “There’s the face I miss,” I told him, leaning in for a kiss.

For an instant, he seemed surprised, but he went with it and pulled me closer. His lips were soft and hungry and for a minute, I forgot completely where we were and what we were supposed to be doing until someone nearby called, “Get a room!”

I backed away from him, but he caught the side of my face and leaned in again to whisper, “Remind me later to get us back to that room, okay?”

“Will do,” I told him.

We continued our way up the stairs and paused at the landing. The catwalk had some dingy carpet on it that had definitely seen brighter days . . . with far less wear, tear, and duct tape. Probably it had smelled better too. “Sweet Jesus,” I whispered, covering my nose. “It smells like a urinal up here.”

Heath covered his nose too. “That’s one way to attract tenants,” he said. “Come on, let’s see if Wyatt’s home.”

We approached apartment 3F cautiously. I let Heath knock while I got out a few spikes, gripping them tightly, and ready to plunge them into whatever horror show might appear.

The seconds passed with nary a sound coming from inside the apartment, and after several more seconds, Heath knocked again, but this time he called Wyatt’s name.

I could feel my pulse pounding in my ears, and sweat broke out at the small of my back, but nothing happened. Heath leaned in and put his ear to the door, listening intently. After a few moments he pulled his ear away and said, “It’s quiet inside. No TV or radio on that I can hear.”

“He’s not home,” I concluded, tucking the spikes back into my leather jacket.

“Nope.”

“So now what?”

“Well,” he said, “we’ve got a last name at least. We can give that to Gilley and see if he can come up with something on Wyatt Benoit.”

“Maybe he can find Wyatt’s place of employment and we can go there to see if he’s around?” I suggested.

Heath wrapped an arm around my shoulders. “Great idea,” he said.

As we were walking down the steps, we encountered the same helpful neighbor. “He wasn’t home, huh?” she asked.

Heath shook his head. “No. We thought maybe we could run by his work, though.”

Again the woman laughed like he’d said something funny. “Wyatt’s not working much, these days. Not after he dropped that statue.”

Heath cocked his head. “He dropped a statue?”

The lady nodded. “Yeah. I guess it was crazy expensive too. Like, twenty thousand bucks or something. Can you believe anybody would pay twenty thousand for a statue?”

“How big was the statue?” Heath asked, fishing for details.

The woman said, “Wyatt said it was only like eighteen inches tall!”

“How could an eighteen-inch-tall statue be worth twenty thousand bucks?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I guess it was some old Native American antique or something. Wyatt said it came from one of the Anasazi caves and this guy bought it for twenty grand. Wyatt was the guy who was supposed to deliver it, but he admitted to me that he got high before he went and tripped on the way up the stairs. He said he couldn’t even glue it back together ’cause it got smashed, even though it was packed in Bubble Wrap.”

“Wyatt just can’t catch a break, can he?” Heath said with a laugh.

The girl laughed too. “I know, right? Anyway, his boss was crazy mad, and stopped scheduling him except for when he’s really hard up for some help.”

“I remember Wyatt said his boss was a real prick,” Heath said, to keep her talking. “What was his name again?”

The woman shrugged, shifting the bag of groceries from one arm to the other. “Brad, I think,” she said. “He came here once looking for Wyatt ’cause he’d overslept, and the guy tore him a new one right on these stairs! I’d never work for a guy like that!”

“Brad,” Heath said, as if he were just remembering it. “Yeah, that was it. . . . What was his last name again?”

That seemed to be just one question too many, because the woman’s whole demeanor suddenly changed and she cocked her head at Heath and said, “You know, I’ve never seen you around here before. How do you know Wyatt?”

“He used to work for my brother before he went to work for Brad,” I said quickly, trying to take the heat off Heath a little. “That’s why we’re here, actually. My brother’s looking for some hired hands and wants to try and get Wyatt to come back.”

I didn’t think the woman believed me, but she didn’t question us further. Instead she hugged her bag of groceries and said that she had to go.

When we got back to the car, I called Gilley and told him what we’d learned about Wyatt. “His last name is Benoit, and he used to work for a guy named Brad something, but we have no idea who Brad is or where he works.”

“Why is it important that we find out?” Gil asked me.