The Pale: Volume One by Jacob Long (red novels TXT) 📖

We need to make . . . like an animal report.”

Dr. Harrington was right behind Lamont. “You’re off duty, Sergeant.”

Lamont was quick with his response. “Ahh, but I can file a report with the best of them.” He said to the couple, “There’s a desk open right back here. I can get this finished for you.” He expedited them toward the desk with a guiding hand.

“You can’t avoid me forever,” Dr. Harrington said in passing.

Lamont laughed heartily and then muttered under his breath. “That’s not true.”

Upon parting ways, Danny Lacey caught the good doctor’s eyes lingering on his body. She smiled, and he returned it slyly.

Sergeant Fisher pulled his chair out at the desk and opened the report form on the computer in front of him. “Okay. What would you like to report? Something with an animal?”

The male Lacey was hesitant. “Uh, yeah . . . sort of. I didn’t really see it, so I’m gonna have to let Christina tell the story.”

The group was quiet while Christina tried to gather her thoughts in a way that would make sense to the officer. “I . . . I saw a monster.”

“A monster?” Lamont asked, his tone engaged and unpatronizing.

“I know that probably sounds crazy,” Christina said.

Lamont chuckled amiably. “Nah. I think I’m exactly who you need. I’ve seen some things in my time too.”

Christina bit her lip. “Okay. It was outside our home last night. It was raining. I really couldn’t see much at first, but I did get a good look at it. It was back by the shed. I know it was there. It hit it.”

Her husband chimed in. “Yeah. I looked at it this morning, and the shed looked like it had been struck by . . . something.”

The keyboard clicked rapidly as Lamont filled in the details. “All right, what did it look like? Was it big? Did it have fur?”

Christina shook her head. “I didn’t really see any fur, but it was definitely big. It was bent over next to the shed, and it looked bigger.”

“Maybe eight or nine feet tall, standing up as far as we could figure,” Danny said. Lamont showed a clear reaction to the number.

“So it stood on its hind legs?” Lamont asked.

Christina nodded. “Yes.”

“Did it have any defining features? Maybe a long snout or like a color you could pick out?”

“Yeah, it was spiny,” Christina said. “All along its back.”

Lamont looked incredulously at her. “Like a porcupine?”

“No, they weren’t like quills, and there wasn’t that many. They more came right out of its back, and they were sturdy and curved. Like bone, maybe.”

Lamont betrayed some disbelief with his manner. “So you saw something that stood on its hind legs, taller than a man, with sharp bonelike spines coming out of its back?”

“Yes.” Christina sighed heavily. “I know it sounds crazy, but I know what I saw. It looked like . . . well, I think it was the chupacabra.”

“Sweetheart,” Danny said.

“Wow,” Lamont rehydrated his eyes with a slow blink. “A chupacabra sighting. We haven’t had one of those in years.”

“Someone else saw this?” Christina asked.

Lamont sat back in the office chair. “Well, no, now that you ask. Not really. People just sort of attributed those disappearances with it a while back.”

“I know I must sound more than a little superstitious right now,” Christina said, “but I swear to you, I saw it. I saw it clear as day, and it saw me too. It looked right at me with these yellow eyes. I thought it would come after me, but it just went away.”

“Where were you when you saw this?” Lamont asked.

“I was in our bedroom,” Christina explained. “I was looking out the window. Danny was taking a shower downstairs, so he didn’t see it.”

Lamont filled in more of the report. “Okay. Were you able to make out a color?”

“Well, it was dark,” Christina said, “but there was lightning, so I don’t know for sure, but it didn’t look like it had fur. It was more like skin. Kind of like a fleshy color.”

The report was interrupted by Scott returning from the lab with the forensic packet. “Here you go, Sergeant,” he said, dropping the sheets onto the desk. It was the same drawing Lamont helped create with the sketch artist, but Scott had added the fingerprint underneath. The rest of the pages were all Scott could report.

“Oh, thanks, man,” Lamont said before Scott disappeared back into the crowd. Unable to stall his curiosity, he lifted the top page and quickly skimmed the report for anything interesting.

Christina was treated to an upside-down view of the sketch and furrowed her brow in reluctant familiarity. A somber “Oh,” escaped her lips.

“What?” Danny asked.

“Kind of looks like Adam, doesn’t it?”

Lamont looked up from the report. “What?”

“I don’t know, I guess,” Danny answered his wife.

Lamont quickly turned the packet around so Christina could get a good look. “You know this man?”

Christina smiled disarmingly. “Oh, no. I don’t know that man,” she said. “I was just saying that it looks like someone we used to know. His name was Adam Rodriguez, but he couldn’t be your guy. He . . . died . . . a long time ago.” Her tone grew more somber and regretful as her sentence choked in her throat near the end.

“Really?” Lamont considered the face on the paper, immediately deciding that death wasn’t a deal breaker by any means. “What happened, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Well . . . Adam was a soldier . . .”

Lamont’s heart swelled. He could hardly keep his surprise and excitement from showing.

“He got shot while he was overseas,” Christina explained. “He didn’t come back.”

Lamont felt sorry for the young woman, but that breakthrough was just too big. Maybe the soldier had come back.

Lamont was nearly speechless, and the quiet moment was unsettling for the bereaved. Christina manufactured a smile that pushed up her flushed dimples. “He was a good boy.” She looked at her husband expectantly.

“Uh, yeah,” Danny offered. “I mean, he could be a pain in my ass sometimes, but he was a good guy all the way through.”

“I see,” Lamont said, tucking away the paper. “Did he leave a lot of people behind, like you? He have a positive effect on a lot of people?”

Danny was reticent about the discussion, but Christina was quick to answer. “I guess. Adam could be kind of a—”

“Jerk.”

“Loner,” Christina finished.

“So not a big circle of friends?” Lamont asked.

Christina shrugged and shook her head.

“He leave behind any parents? Wife? Girlfriends that you know of?”

“What’s the point of this questioning?” Danny asked. “We said this guy was already dead, but if you want to find him, we can point you to his burial plot.”

Christina’s skin flushed with embarrassment. She held her hand up to stall her husband. “Ignore him. He and Adam didn’t get along. Also . . . I was his girlfriend when he died.”

“Oh, I see,” Lamont deflated. “I can understand why it might be a sore subject, and I apologize for pressing you, honestly. Okay?”

Danny gave a curt reconciliatory nod.

“Okay,” Lamont backed out of his seat and stood. The couple followed suit. “Well, I think we have everything we need for your report.” Lamont shook Danny’s hand. “Even if we don’t find this creature, if other people see it, we might be able to establish a pattern. If you see it again, don’t be afraid to dial 911, okay?”

Christina shook Lamont’s hand as well, smiling. “Okay. Thank you.”

The young couple said their goodbyes, and the moment Lamont was alone, he jumped back onto the computer. The first search result for Adam Rodriguez was on a Fallen Warriors memorial page. In fact, the only information the public internet had for Adam concerned his death and memory. Lamont clicked on the first link, and his breath caught in his throat. A picture was provided alongside a brief description of his life and service. Lamont had never seen the supposedly deceased soldier in his dress uniform and couldn’t tell if Adam was proud or irritated, but it was definitely his perp. The Army maintained that Specialist Rodriguez had been killed by small arms fire in Afghanistan, yet Lamont knew he’d stared right into this young man’s halting eyes just the other night, only they were green and glowing unnaturally.

Sergeant Fisher leaned all the way back in in the tall office chair. He almost couldn’t believe it was real. It was all real. His phantom criminal with the burning eyes, the fake fingerprints, and the twisted ability to draw . . . something out of human bodies, was real. Lamont had begun to think he really was losing it, but he finally had something tangible, something to follow. He just had to find him. People follow patterns. They need shelter, food, support. At least, normal people do. When Fisher and Gray happened upon Rodriguez, he’d stolen clothes. For some reason, he was desperate enough for clothing that he stole some, leaving nothing behind. This suggested that Adam was naked. He’d smashed his way into the boutique with a piece of pavement he carelessly dropped by the door. Even after besting the police, Adam ran at full speed in dress shoes to get away. Adam Rodriguez seemed very desperate that night, very in need of support.

Lamont dug into whatever history he could find on Adam Rodriguez. His parents were the most obvious answer to who he would go to for support. It wasn’t beyond any parent to hide their children. His mother was still alive. The father had died some years ago from heart complications due to stress. Apparently, he’d been involved in some sort of incredible heroism during an attack on his workplace, and he couldn’t take it. The mother was definitely viable, but . . . apparently, they’d taken great pains and spent a great deal of money to have their son’s body delivered to the United States to be buried on the family lot.

That would mean his mother would have had to identify his body. How could she just accept his coming back from the dead?

The burial arrangements intrigued Sergeant Fisher. Typically, the Army would have paid for a fallen soldier’s funeral. He followed that thread and discovered that Lena and Ernesto Rodriguez were set financially. The father was a well-respected doctor, and the mother used to be a bit of a hotshot in Farol Verde real estate. She was still living comfortably in the impressive family home despite the fact that she wasn’t working anymore. Instead she raised money for local and national charities with very little overhead. The Farol Verde Gazette mentioned her frequently and even had an editorial.

Adam came from a rich family, and yet he had broken into an inner city boutique, on the clear other side of town from where he used to live, and stolen clothes. It was like he just fell out of the sky. That clouded the circumstances of Adam’s return even further. Being naked sort of ruled out the killer Army robot idea as well. Unless he was a time-traveling robot from the future who couldn’t wear any clothing because time travel doesn’t allow anything inorganic to pass through, and the cyborg’s face was just modeled after Adam’s. That could always happen.

Lamont moved to police records. The kid had only minor brushes with the law and nothing that led to anything more than a short detainment just to scare him onto a narrow path. The other kids mentioned in his report had all gotten jobs in other cities or otherwise moved away. That was a quick dead end. His ex-girlfriend had outed Adam to the police seemingly unwittingly, so it was also unlikely that she was somehow hiding Adam’s continued existence, especially with that surly husband of hers. No.

After some time, Lamont was fatigued from his search on the web. The trail was pretty cold. All he could do was question the mother. It looked like Adam didn’t have any other ties in Farol Verde.

19

Téa was tossed into the back seat of a big black SUV between two thugs that made her look and feel like a child. Their wide frames nearly crowded her space completely, and she spent the entire ride quiet and miserable. A combination of tinted windows and inky night ensured she didn’t even know where she was going. The small convoy arrived at an expensive white single-floor house that overlooked the rest of the city from high