Footprints of a Dancer (Detective Elliot Mystery) (25 page)

“He thought it might be fun if you could come over this weekend, maybe grill some hamburgers. He wanted me to ask you about it.”

A smile spread across Elliot’s face. “I can’t think of anything I’d rather do.”

“There’s something you’re not telling me, Kenny. What is it?”

Hearing Carmen’s voice settled Elliot’s nerves, though his troubles did not slip completely into the background. “It’s the case,” he said. “I’ve never run across anything quite like it before.”

“I spoke with Captain Dombrowski.”

Elliot’s hold of the phone went slack, and though Carmen’s words raced through his head, he could not come up with a logical response.

As if sensing the question, Carmen said, “He called.”

“I didn’t know he had your number.”

“He’s worried about you. So am I. He wants you to come back to work. Maybe you should, Kenny. Maybe you should come home.”

Elliot squeezed the phone. He wasn’t sure what Carmen meant exactly when she used the word
home
. It sounded inviting, though in his tired and confused state, he could be reading more into it than was actually there.

Before Elliot could complete the thought, something slammed into the passenger side of the truck.

Elliot dropped the phone onto the seat, pulled the Glock, and stepped outside. The streets were empty and the only sound he heard was Carmen calling his name over the phone, asking him what was wrong.

Keeping the weapon in front of him, Elliot used his free hand to fish the flashlight from his jacket pocket. He swept the beam across the area.

Nothing.

He made his way around the vehicle, and when the light fell across the passenger door, it revealed a concaved area about the size of a basketball. Holding the weapon and the flashlight together at arm’s length, Elliot walked around the front of the vehicle and when he reached the driver’s side he climbed in.

Carmen was still on the line.

“Sorry about dropping the phone, like that. I thought I heard something outside the truck.
Things are happening that I don’t understand.”

“Maybe you should leave it alone for a while.”

Elliot started the truck and pulled onto the roadway, then turned onto Highway 59 and headed north. Carmen knew him well enough to understand he couldn’t walk away from this. “It’s something I have to see through.”

“I will pray for you.”

An empty stretch of road unfolded in front of the truck, and as Elliot drove into the darkness outside the town, he said, “I love you, Carmen.”

Through the static, Elliot could not make out Carmen’s reply, but he knew it would do no good to ask her to repeat it. The phone had gone silent. That’d never happened before. Sure, he’d had dropped calls but this was different. It was as if the phone had experienced an instantaneous power drain.

The cab of the truck grew cold as the headlights revealed a car parked alongside the road, about fifty feet ahead. When Elliot’s truck drew near the car, a man stepped from behind the vehicle and ran into the road. He stopped directly in the pathway of the truck and waved his arms.

Elliot crammed his foot against the brake pedal.

Displaying an eerie confidence, the man did not move but kept his ground, and as he basked in the beam of the truck’s headlights, a smile spread across his familiar face. Standing on the roadway was Elliot’s old friend, Nick Brazleton.

Elliot backed off the roadway, jumped out of the truck, and pulled Nick back to safety alongside his vehicle, a red 1957 Thunderbird. Nick had always talked of owning one.

“What do you say, Bulldog?”

Elliot stared at the man in front of him. No one called him that anymore. It was Nick all right, though nothing about the encounter made sense. “What are you doing out here?”

“Thought you might need my help,” Nick said. “I guess it turned out to be the other way around, though.”

Elliot glanced at Nick’s car.

A flat tire on the front caused the vintage ride to lean toward the driver’s side.

“You still carry the heavy artillery around with you?”

“Yeah,” Elliot said, “I got it.” He kept a floor jack in the bed of the truck when he travelled, but he hadn’t been aware that Nick knew about it. And why would a trained mechanic not have a jack of his own?

Elliot retrieved the jack from the truck and carried it to the Thunderbird where he positioned it beneath the vehicle. As he pumped the handle, it occurred to him he’d seen no other vehicles on the roadway, not an impossible situation but unlikely to be sure. He wondered if he was actually in the company of his old friend, or if he was, in fact, alone. He raised the car until the damaged tire was just touching the ground then went back to the truck for the lug wrench.

He didn’t see Nick. He grabbed the four-way lug wrench from behind the truck seat and started back toward the Thunderbird. As he neared the vehicle, he heard shoes crunching in the sand and gravel, but distant and hollow, as if echoing through a tunnel.

He turned as Nick’s dark form approached.

“Nick?”

“Hey, old buddy.”

A bead of perspiration trickled down Elliot’s back. “What’s going on, Nick?”

“More than you’ll ever understand.” Nick reached into his coat and pulled out a knife. “You remember that old bloodhound Clarence Moore kept down the street from us? Well, you’re a lot like that. Once you catch the scent of something out of kilter, you just can’t let it go. I’m sorry it had to come down like this.”

He raised the knife and lunged forward, swiping the blade in a downward arc.

Elliot stumbled to his left, the knife blade ripping through his jacket on his right shoulder.

Nick swirled the knife in a tight circular motion. “You’ve always hated me, haven’t you, old buddy?”

“You know that’s not true.”

“You blame me for all that went wrong in your life.”

“You’re talking crazy.”

“Am I? If you won’t be truthful, allow me the luxury.”

“Nick, don’t do this.”

“I could have made Carmen happy, but you were always in the way, always hurting her. Now look at her. You gave her a kid, but you didn’t stick around to help her raise him. I won’t be like that. I’ll treat her right.”

Elliot clinched his hands but fought off the urge. “If Carmen feels the same way about you, I won’t stand in the way.”

A grin spread across Nick’s face. “That’s good to hear, because I intend to take her tonight whether she wants it or not.”

From somewhere inside, a portal opened and darkness pumped into Elliot’s veins. He didn’t like hearing Carmen threatened that way. But still, the feelings seemed foreign, as if he wasn’t thinking them. They were just there. He balled his hand into a fist and busted Nick square on the chin.

Nick wiped blood from his lip and smiled.

Elliot stepped back. He outweighed Nick by fifty pounds. That shot should have taken him off his feet.

Even if it didn’t knock him down, it did something to him. Nick’s eyes looked as distant as those of an animal. Cool now, he cradled the weapon in his hands and held it out.

Elliot recognized it now. It was the obsidian knife, the artifact that had destroyed Gerald’s family.

“Take it,” Nick said. “Release me. Free me from this evil.”

Elliot stared into Nick’s eyes and he began to understand the source of his dark logic. It was the knife.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Nick Brazleton ran his hand across the fender of the Chevy Malibu sitting in the garage bay. Wasn’t much he could do until the fuel pump came in from Tulsa.

He walked out of the garage, turning off the lights as he left, and plopped down in the office chair. He propped his feet on the desk, worked his phone out of his pocket and scrolled down the list until he found Linda Cook. She and Tom had busted up a few months ago, and lately she’d been coming by the shop, wanting to talk, doing everything but flat out asking Nick to call her sometime.

His thumb hovered over the call button, but he couldn’t go through with it. He laid the phone on the desk.

Through the plate glass window, Nick saw the old Ford in the parking lot. With the dim glow of the garage sign softening the car’s reality, it was easy to imagine how it might have looked off the assembly line decades ago. It was no ’57 Bird, but that didn’t bother him much anymore. He’d grown used to falling short of his desires.

He grabbed the phone from the desk. Spending time with Tom Cook’s ex wasn’t exactly his idea of a peaceful way of avoiding loneliness, but it was better than going home to an empty house. Staying at the garage until he was exhausted so he could go home to sleep only to get up and do it all over again was a strategy he’d grown tired of.

He found the number and pressed the button, but something he saw outside the shop caused him to end the call prematurely.

Carmen Garcia had come out of the darkness and now stood at the door, pressing her face against the glass.

Nick wondered if Carmen could’ve had a change of heart. Maybe she’d begun to love him as he’d always loved her. She could keep it hidden no longer, and had come to tell him this.

Carmen folded her hand into a fist and pounded on the door.

Nick scrambled from the chair, unlocked the door, and swung it open. “What a pleasant surprise.”

Carmen Garcia stepped inside. “I hoped I would find you here. I went to your house but there was no answer.”

Nick wished he could tell Carmen how he felt, but she’d made it clear they were just friends. “Sorry. Just finishing up some work. I’m glad you came by, though.”

A guarded look made its way across Carmen’s face. “I need to ask a favor.”

“Sure. Anything.”

“It’s Kenny.”

Nick turned away and went back to the chair and sat down. Kenny. It was always Kenny. But he didn’t hold it against him. On the contrary, if there was anyone he cared about as much as Carmen, it was Kenny Elliot. “What’s he gotten himself into this time?”

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Elliot was in darkness, and something was out there, moving toward him. That’s all he knew.

He tried to focus on his surroundings but could grasp only emptiness and an overpowering sense of being in a place—though it seemed to have no real sense of place—where he did not belong.

From inside his pocket, Elliot’s phone vibrated against his skin, and a streak of light cut through the darkness.

He brought his hand up to shield his eyes from the brightness, and with dead-on accuracy, his sense of place returned to him. The interior of his pickup wrapped around him, and through the windshield he saw the front of another vehicle and the fear-twisted face of its driver. He’d drifted across the road and into the path of the oncoming traffic.

Elliot grabbed the wheel of the truck and steered hard right. The old truck lurched to the right, slamming Elliot’s shoulder into the driver’s side door.

Turning back left, into the slide, Elliot brought the truck back in line.

Moments later, he leaned his head against the steering wheel, still reeling from the near-collision. Somehow he’d made it off the road and onto the shoulder where he’d shut off the engine.

His phone was still going off.

He fished it from his pocket and brought it near his face, and through the speaker of the phone, he heard the voice of Nick Brazleton.

“Hey, old buddy.”

Elliot checked his watch. Twenty minutes had passed since he’d talked with Carmen. He wondered if he’d come to his senses, or if this was merely an extension of the nightmare. “Nick?”

“Carmen’s worried about you, sport, asked me to call. What’s up, old buddy?”

Elliot stared into the night. He was parked alongside the highway, the vehicle he’d nearly taken out miles away by now, but the uneasiness he’d sensed, the unnerving suspicion that something was out there waiting in the darkness lingered. He strained his eyes, looking for Nick, or the old Thunderbird. “Where are you, Nick?”

“You remember when Coach Sims told us we didn’t need to leave town to find whatever it was we were looking for? I think he was just trying to make us feel better. Don’t guess I’ll ever know anyway. Doesn’t look like I’m going anywhere. I’m at the garage. Where else would I be?”

“I was thinking maybe just outside of Sallisaw on Highway 59.”

“Yeah, well, I hope that makes sense to you, old buddy, ‘cause it sure don’t to me. I don’t know what you’re up to, but it’s got Carmen all upset.”

Elliot leaned back in the seat. If Nick was telling the truth, there was no way he could have made it from Porter to Sallisaw and back again. “Is she there?”

“No. She had to get home to Wayne. Maybe you should give whatever’s going on a rest, come on back here and take care of things. You’re never going to find anyone else like her, Kenny. Don’t mess it up this time.”

Elliot reached inside his jacket and ran his fingers along the handle of the Glock, holding on, in a manner of speaking, to something real. Had he seen Nick earlier, helped him fix a tire alongside the road, then been slashed at by his old friend, or had Nick’s call saved his life? He checked his coat but there were no rips in it.

“How’s the bird running? Nice looking car, by the way.”

After a pause, Nick said, “We always understood each other pretty well. No secrets, remember? You can talk to me, Kenny. Hell, you know that.”

A synopsis of his and Nick’s troubled childhood played through his mind. Nick was right. If a couple of outsiders like them couldn’t trust each other, what chance did they have?

“Kenny, are you drinking again?”

Elliot squeezed the phone, a fair question from an old friend. He almost wished he had been. “No, Nick, it’s not that, but something’s going on for sure.”

Once again, the call had been dropped. “Nick, are you there?”

Elliot tried recalling, but it was as before, as if the phone had become a useless piece of plastic. He reached for the ignition switch. He was not completely alone, like before, but in between the sporadic pockets of traffic, and the uneasiness he’d sensed, the unnerving suspicion that something was out there, waiting in the darkness, lingered. It had happened again, his mind taken… somewhere. And what had happened while he was away? Had he driven the truck in a trance-like state, or had his reality been altered? He dropped the phone onto the seat, and as the interior of the cab seemed to grow smaller, he lowered his defenses and allowed himself to entertain the idea that he was in over his head this time. He closed his eyes and began to pray. He prayed for forgiveness and for strength. He asked that if the visions and clairvoyant thoughts were not from God that they stop. If his abilities were from God, he begged for the wisdom to use them wisely.