Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea by J. L. Murray Read Free Book Online Page A

dad,” said Gage. “Sorry, sis, but I’m not going to take his word as gold. ‘Specially since I don’t trust him. And you shouldn’t either.”
    “I agree with you there,” I said. “But why would he lie about that?”
    “Was he particularly fond of the truth before?”
    “No.”
    “Add to that he might be in on this. What was the deal with his personal guard?”
    “I don’t know, I’ve never seen anything like him,” I said. “It was like he was big and small at the same time, and itching to be both. And then the badges didn’t work on him.”
    “That don’t mean nothing,” said Gage. “Badges only give people a sense of who we’re working for, for what we’re doing. Somewhere in their minds, somewhere they can’t quite reach, they know exactly who we are, but in their conscious mind they just know that they should cooperate. If someone’s bad, they don’t care one way or another. Some of them, they get a little sentimental, scared about the afterlife, if you know what I mean. It’ll put the fear of God in them. But the really evil bastards don’t see any upside to cooperating. ” He looked at me. “The psychos, the sociopaths and whatnot, they love chaos. Crave it, even. They don’t care what form it takes. And we’re just the guys that are trying to put an end to their fun.”
    “I really needed to take a class before I started this job,” I said.
    “If it makes you feel any better,” said Gage, “all this is new to me, too. I’ve never dealt with a Dark and I’ve only read about Summoners. You’re better at the detecting stuff than I am.”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “I think you might be a natural.”
    “Here’s lookin’ at you, kid,” he said.
    “We should head back to the car,” I said. I nodded at the young officer as we passed him, but then remembered something he said. I turned to the kid. “What was that about a mass murder?”
    “I said there was a mass murder,” said the kid.
    “Did it happen nearby?”
    “Yeah. That’s why my partner went. It was so close. Just a few blocks that way,” he said, pointing to his right.
    “Got someone in custody?” I said.
    “They took him in,” he said. “I heard it on the radio.”
    I looked at Gage. “You were right,” I said. “It is all happening much sooner than Sasha said. You can’t trust a con.”
    “Hey, ” said the kid, “if you see Officer Singh tell him I been trying to reach him on the radio.”
    “Will do,” grunted Gage.

Chapter Seven
    The old townhouse had once been a nice place. The tiny front garden, though frozen like everything else, looked tidy, the iced-over rose bushes clipped and packed around with fall’s decomposing leaves. It was the nicest house on the block, even after they added more lanes, widening the highway right up to the front of the once prosperous-looking row of brick dwellings. The roar of cars and trucks and Jake brakes was not so good for the real estate business. One of the neighboring properties had a For Rent sign staked at a jaunty angle in the hard ground with a phone number scrawled in permanent marker at the bottom. Another had frosted weeds crumpled over the faded plastic children’s ride-on toys left there.
    I walked past a couple of ghosts, but pretended I didn’t see them. I had a job to do, after all. Living trumped the dead. Again with the yellow tape. Gage and I flashed our badges to the officer, and he let us proceed to the house.
    Most of the cops had already gone home. There was a serious-looking woman with black-framed glasses and spiky hair dusting for fingerprints. A man in a puffy coat was taking photographs. But the thing that drew our attention was the blood. There was so much of it. It splattered the living room walls and the pale carpet looked like a Jackson Pollack painting. A pool of it lay just at the bottom of a set of stairs.
    “Good God,” said Gage, covering his nose with his jacket against the warm, coppery smell of