God of the Dead (Seasons of Blood #1): A dark paranormal crime thriller novel (2 page)

“N-no, we’ll wait out front,” Clover said.

“Are you both okay?” Fenster asked. “An ambulance is on the way—”

“We’re fine, man, do what you gotta do,” AJ said.

The cop nodded. “Again, straight out front. You run off, it’s my ass.”

“Right out front, we got it,” Clover said.

Fenster nodded again and turned, trotting back toward the front of the store. AJ stared after him a moment.

“Come on,” Clover said, tugging the sleeve of his hoodie.

They walked in silence toward the rear corner of the gas station, closely together, their shoulders brushing up against one another. They hit the corner and turned toward the parking lot, the alternating red-and-blue wash of the lights from the police cruiser jarring them out of their silence.

“The fuck?” AJ said.

“Right? I can’t stop shaking,” Clover said. Before he could take one of her hands, she stuffed them both deep into the pockets of her puffy, grey coat and huddled in on herself.

They stood on the walk in front of the store, next to a trash can with an ashtray built into the top, smoking and watching the police inside. Fenster was speaking into his shoulder-mic, watching his partner, who was kneeling on the floor, checking their attacker’s neck for a pulse.

AJ stared at the kneeling cop, willing him to find a pulse. Clover huddled up closer to him and AJ wanted to put his arm around her, but he didn’t and he didn’t know why. Fenster switched places with his partner, kneeling on the floor while his partner started speaking into
his
shoulder-mic. AJ could hear the rising warble of the coming ambulance, the scream of it swelling in the empty night.

Find it, AJ thought. Fucking find it. Fenster kept checking it, putting his two fingers on the guy’s neck, pausing, moving them, pausing, trying the wrist. Fenster looked up to his partner and shook his head. His partner spoke into the mic and started to remove the handcuffs he’d placed on the guy, and two minutes later, when the ambulance arrived, its siren was no longer wailing.

CHAPTER TWO

In the parking lot sat Clover’s Mazda, a squad car, an ambulance, and a rusted, green Ford. The Ford belonged to a plainclothes dick that made AJ nervous, that and the lump the paramedics had carried out of the store on a stretcher. Clover would tell the police what happened, and the security cameras inside would prove it had been in self-defense, but couldn’t you do time for involuntary manslaughter or something?

The plainclothes dick thanked Clover and led her to the squad car and AJ’s pulse picked up a little. She wasn’t cuffed and the detective didn’t put her in the car, just asked to her stay put. The paramedics had wrapped her in a thick blanket, which she had put up over her head, swaddling herself up like an old squaw in a John Wayne movie. They made eye contact over the detective’s shoulder and, though she didn’t smile—looked too wiped out to smile—she gave AJ a slow nod of the head that let him roll his shoulders and unclench his jaw and take a deep breath.

AJ took in the detective approaching him; he was a heavyset but not in a soft or flabby way, more like a chunk of rock jutting up out of the earth. He wore a drab, brown trench coat and scuffed shoes. His name was John Lubbock.

“Those things’ll kill ya, kid,” John said as AJ lit up. The last three inches of a cigar were clamped in the detective’s teeth.

“Yeah, well...”

“What’s your name again?”

“AJ.”

“Got a last name?”

“Oh, uh, yeah, sorry. Lancaster.” He blew out a cloud of smoke, watching it dissipate in the eerie yellow of the parking lot lights. The detective nodded and AJ shivered, zipping his hoodie up the last couple inches.

“Okay, kid,” Lubbock said. “Why don’t you tell me what went down in there?”

AJ took a deep drag off his smoke and started recounting the tale.

“...so I told her to whack the bastard if he moved and I called 911.”

Lubbock thoughtfully chewed his cigar. “An’ he didn’t say nothin’ to you?”

“Like I told you, he read my name tag, then he freaked.”

“You get the impression he was there to rob you?”

“I mean, I guess he must been, right? He didn’t say like, ‘gimme the money’ or anything, just…freaked.”

“An’ you don’t know him?” the detective asked, narrowing his eyes a little. “Maybe he’s some regular customer comes in, has some kind a beef with you? Nothing?”

AJ shook his head. “I never seen him before in my life.”

John took off his hat long enough to scratch the back of his head. The ambulance left and hadn’t even been using their lights.

“So...” A lump formed in AJ’s throat, stopping him from asking a question he already had the answer to.

John stared at him for a second. “Yeah?”

“Is, uh, is that guy, you know...dead?” AJ’s voice cracked, just a little, on that last syllable.

The detective’s hard features softened for a moment and he looked away while AJ wiped his eyes under the guise of scratching an itch. AJ sniffed and took another drag, huddling his arms into his sides for warmth.

Lubbock placed a blocky hand on AJ’s shoulder and tossed his cigar into the gutter. “Yeah, kid. He was dead when we got here.”

“I didn’t, I mean, I never meant...”

The detective leaned in, giving AJ’s shoulder a squeeze.

“Listen, you got no problem here. I mean, you did what
had
to be done,” Lubbock said, speaking in a low, calming voice you wouldn’t think the man possessed just by looking at him. He seemed to AJ to be the type of guy that would either yell or yell really loud.

“But...I, I fuckin’
killed
him, right?”

“From what you said and from what your girl told me, he’d a gacked you for sure, her too. You’re the hero in this, junior. You ain’t the bad guy.”

“Yeah, well, I feel like I’m gonna puke,” AJ said, taking a final drag and flicking the butt into the parking lot. “Big damn heroes, right? Why didn’t he drop the first time I hit him?”

“PCP’s my guess, but we know jack ’til the boys run a couple tests on him. I don’t see how else he coulda stood up to that. You clubbed him pretty good, yeah?”

“Thought I was gonna knock his head off.”

“Well, he’s probably all junked up on some brand of shit or the other.”

AJ nodded and looked at his watch. It was now a quarter after four. His replacement, a twenty-three-year-old coke hound, hadn’t even made an appearance.

“So can I go home now or what?” AJ was suddenly very tired.

“Naw. You and girlie there gotta come down and make a statement. But I’ll see what I can do to speed things up for you. We contacted your boss and--”

“There he is now.”

Vito’s mint condition 1973 Coupe de Ville pulled into the parking lot. He got out, a squat caricature of a Hollywood mobster, cheap suit and all. Vito knew how he looked and relished it, worked hard at the image. When
The Soprano
s came out, Vito had started wearing track suits and gold chains, the whole thing.

“My boy!” Vito grinned and slapped AJ on the back. “Johnny Law gave me a rough idea. You gonna give me some details?”

“Man, it was
fucked
,” AJ said, tilting his head back and tapping the hand-shaped bruises on his throat.

Vito flinched. “Jesus, kid, he got you good.”

“Yeah, I cracked him with that Louie, though,” AJ said.

“Ain’t you glad now I kept it there?” Vito asked. “I
told
you that bat would come in handy.”

“Hey, kid? That paperwork ain’t doin’ itself,” John called over.

AJ turned to Vito. “I gotta go. I’ll be here tomorrow night, I’ll tell you then.”

Vito nodded. “Hey, don’t take any shit off no pig, you hear? You need one, we can get you a lawyer.”

“Really?” AJ asked, relief washing through him. Despite what Lubbock had said, the idea of filed charged had been circling his head since the ambulance had left without using their siren.

“Of
course
,” Vito said, slapping him on the back. “You got nothing to worry about, understand? Look, I’ll see ya tomorrow. I’m goin’ back to bed.”

“Who’s gonna watch the store?”

“What, Billy ain’t here yet?”

“Nope.”

Vito got red in the face. “It’s four-fucking-thirty! That little cocksucker don’t work here no more!”

“I’m sorry man, I was gonna call you, but—”

“Go on, get outta here,” Vito said, a vein standing up on his forehead. He pulled AJ in for a quick, one-armed hug and then slapped him on the back, sending him back toward John and digging out a phone from his pocket.

By the time AJ got back to where the detective stood, Vito was unloading a string of profanities into Billy’s voicemail.

“What’s his name again?” John asked, watching with a cocked eyebrow as Vito gesticulated his fury, letting loose a verbal tapestry of bastardized Italian and gutter English.

“He’s a good guy,” AJ said. “He helps me out a lot.”

The detective gave Vito another slow look over, those X-ray cop eyes taking in everything, and AJ bet himself that John was making an internal note to run a check on him, just to see.

AJ knew it’d be a waste of time; he knew full well the impression Vito liked to give, and he was good at it, but the whole mobster image was for his own amusement more than anything. Sure, he owned a couple shitty little gas stations, but he also owned a few fast-food franchises, had a half-stake at a couple Starbucks, and owned a number of nice little dry cleaning business. The only thing he laundered was other people’s clothing.

Fuck it, though, AJ thought. Let him look.

AJ took a few steps toward the patrol car Clover was now climbing into.

“Come on, kid, you ride with me,” John said. AJ sighed and got in the detective’s beat-down, old sedan, and they rode to the police station to give their statements.

For AJ, the next few hours were a long blur of bad coffee and the same couple questions asked a few different ways. It was filling out paperwork and handing people his ID, and it was waiting. Mostly waiting.

He was sitting in a row of chairs bolted to the floor, like the kind you would find at a bus station, but somehow less comfortable. His eyes were grainy and his stomach was sour from the dump of adrenaline and from not having eaten anything in a while and from the endless cups of awful Joe they for some reason kept bringing him. His jaw was sore from clenching and unclenching it, and he really wanted a cigarette.

He was too exhausted to feel much of anything, he thought. He’d agonized for the first ninety minutes or so over the man he’d killed: did he have a family, did he have kids that were going to wake up this morning and start the long process of being orphans? With his mind spinning from the first cup of that supercharged coffee, he’d thought about the legality of it, and then the morality of it, and then the reality of it: living the rest of his life knowing that, justified or not, he’d beaten a man to death with a Louisville Slugger.

That had been forever ago it seemed, and sitting there now, shifting constantly in his hard, plastic chair so his ass wouldn’t fall asleep and his back wouldn’t cramp up, he thought—his mind shot straight through with a dark humor as long as he could remember—that he’d beat the fucker to death twice just for ten minutes laying down on his own bed. He felt bad for thinking it, and his stomach rolled again, but the thought was not without its humor, and if he could make himself laugh after all this—

“What’s so funny?” Clover asked, sitting down next to him and making him jump.

“Where’d you come from?”

She leaned her head back against the wall with her eyes closed and pointed in one direction, then another. “I, hmmm, fuck it. Wherever, man. I don’t know. You’re next, though.”

“I swear to god if they ask me if I know that guy one more time, I’m hanging myself in the bathroom with my belt.”

She held up a hand, pinkie extended. “Suicide pact?”

“Done and done,” AJ said, twisting his pinkie into hers. She smiled, and he was free to take that smile in, as her eyes were still closed.

“I can see you staring at me, psycho,” Clover said, smiling a little.

AJ was too tired to be embarrassed or self-conscious and instead laughed. “Don’t be a dick.”

“Holy shit this is the
worst
chair I’ve ever sat in,” Clover said, sitting up and opening her eyes.

She sighed heavily, which turned to a yawn. She closed her eyes and leaned her head on his shoulder, and it was the best part of his day. His week, maybe.

“They called my parents,” Clover said. “This night is going to get so much worse for me.”

“Why’d they call your parents?”

“I’m a minor.”

“Oh, uh, huh. A minor.”

“Yeah. Well, only
technically
a minor. I’ll be eighteen in like, only four years.”

“Get the fuck outta here,” AJ said, laughing.

“I had you going, though, right?”

“What? No.”

“
Oh, uh, huh, a minor,
” she said, dropping her voice a couple octaves and mocking him. “No, apparently my roommate woke up and kinda flipped I wasn’t home, and then
that
bitch called my parents, who have been looking for me ever since. My dad has been certain since the day I left home I was going to be murdered in an alley or something, so of
course
he’s losing his natural mind. It’s a whole thing.”

“We could always go on the lam,” AJ said, looking out the corner of his eyes at the top of her head, still leaning against his shoulder, and ten minutes ago he would have given anything to be back home but now felt like he could sit there forever.

“Let’s do it,” she said. “We can hitch back to my car and just drive.”

“We’ll have to dump it eventually, steal something else.”

“Oh, definitely. We could get a couple miles, though, switch the plates.”

They sat in silence for a long moment and then she spoke again.

“AJ?”

“Yeah?”

“Will you call me tomorrow?”

“Yeah,” AJ said, smiling. “I’d really like that.”

“Me too,” Clover said.

She sat up long enough to give him her number and had just settled down against him when a uniformed officer came to tell her that her parents were there and that AJ was needed one last time.

She squeezed his hand when she stood up and walked off in the direction the uni had pointed her, toward a set of giant double doors, looking back at him and smiling before she went through them. AJ stood, stretching his back, which didn’t really bother him as much anymore.

“Sorry for the holdup,” the uni said.

“No worries,” AJ said, looking once more to toward the double doors she had walked through. “It’s good. All good.”