Depths: Southern Watch #2 by Robert J. Crane Read Free Book Online

She could smell the gun oil off the Glock, even at this range. She kept it pretty well maintained.
    As she looked through the peephole, she breathed a sigh of relief when she saw the cowboy hat. Hendricks.
    She pulled back from the peephole and frowned. What was Hendricks doing here?
    She opened the door cautiously, peeking her head out. He looked up, raising the wide brim of the hat, and her caution was forgotten. “Jesus Christ!”
    “No, I’m an atheist, remember?” Hendricks said, and he had a little hint of a smile on his beat-up face.
    “What happened to you?” Erin felt herself sputtered, almost screaming.
    “Oh, this?” He gestured to his lips, which were split. One of his eyes was blacked and swollen. “Apparently I got into a bar fight.”
    “Well, what the hell did you go and do that for?” She wanted to reach out to him, but she could almost feel her breath catching in her chest. He looked worse than that drunk that had smashed his car into a down by the square tree a couple months ago. Guy lost three teeth on his steering wheel, and his eye had popped out of the socket. By the time they brought him in to booking, the hospital had fixed some of it, but he still looked like a shit sandwich on crap bread. Hendricks maybe looked worse, she decided. His jaw line was bruised up, and he looked like he’d done some half-assed collagen injections, too.
    “Can I come in?” Hendricks asked, slurring a little. “Arch was worried I might have a concussion, so he dropped me off here—”
    “Why didn’t he take you to a hospital?” In her horror it took her a moment to fully interpret what he’d said. “Wait, Arch saw you like this?”
    “Well, yeah,” Hendricks said.
    “And he left you in this condition without taking you to the hospital?” She felt a mad-on building.
    “I told him no,” Hendricks said, shaking his head. “I’m fine, I just need a day or so to recover. I wanted to do it at the motel, but he said—”
    She held out her free hand for him to stop, then put it on her head, which was now swirling with about a thousand thoughts. Her first instinct was to drive him to the hospital herself, but he’d already apparently put the kibosh on that. It took her a moment to realize he’d never actually been to her place, that this was something new, and a moment later that gave her a funny feeling of alarm. Which she would have thought would have taken a backseat to her concern for this human being all beaten to hell, standing on her doorstep.
    Oddly, it didn’t.
    “I … cannot believe this,” she said finally, and it was all she could do to get that out. “You got in a bar fight.”
    “They started it,” Hendricks said, almost plaintive. “Otherwise, Arch would have arrested me, you know that.”
    Well, that much was true. She put her hand over her face and peered at him through the split in the fingers. It didn’t make him look any better, but at least one of her eyes was covered, so it made him look a little less worse. If that was a thing. He was a pretty handsome guy most of the time, and in good shape. Walked with a little swagger in his step.
    Now he was hunched over, looking like an old man the way he was standing, and his face was swollen like he’d just gotten out of the ring with Manny Pacquiáo. “Jesus,” she whispered.
    “Can I come in?” Hendricks asked again. She felt sorry for him now; he looked like hell.
    “Yeah, okay,” she said, and stepped aside. The crescendo in her stomach grew, though, more than just nerves, and she let him in.
     
    * * *
     
    Gideon had felt the Tul’rore start on their meal. He’d felt the ones before that, too, and they’d been sweet. He’d savored every moment. He could taste the flesh and the terror as the Tul’rore went to work, could hear the screams echo in his ears as the victims began to die. He’d felt the last few that the Tul’rore had devoured, all of them since he’d gotten into town just a couple days ago, and they