DevilMayRide

1
When she walked in, Sadie expected the sickening stench of ammonia that proclaimed the outwardly tidy bungalow a clandestine meth lab. She did not expect to be confronted by a vicious Rottweiler preparing to rip her to shreds. A step backward and Sadie found herself pinned against the screen door that had snapped shut behind her.
“Easy, boy,” Sadie said, although it was doubtful the dog could hear her muffled voice behind her respirator.
The dog snarled, snapped, and inched forward. Thick ropes of saliva dangled from his yellow teeth.
Sadie’s knees shook as she grappled behind her back for the door handle, but the sleeve of her disposable hazmat suit snagged and caught on the splintered doorframe. Damn! She tugged hard and stumbled when her arm came free. The dog lunged.
Sadie shielded her face with her arms and braced for the pain of teeth sinking into her flesh but felt only a mild shudder of revulsion. She looked around and realized the dog had sailed right through her and dropped to the ground outside the door.
With a hand to her pounding heart, Sadie blew out a relieved breath and stepped outside. She pulled off her respirator and watched the confused mutt as he attempted to right himself. Sadie now noticed the other side of his body. A large strip of flesh hung from his rear flank. Through the fatal wound, she could see the knee-high grass and weeds that covered the acreage behind the house.
“Hey, Fido, you’re dead.” Sadie chuckled, and wiped droplets of sweat from her upper lip. The sun was rising in the sky, and the temperature promised to reach ninety by noon.
When the mutilated canine charged again, snapping and snarling, Sadie merely closed her eyes and prepared for the skin-crawling disgust that flooded through her whenever the spirits of the dead touched her body.
“Talking to ghosts again?” Zack asked as he came around the corner of the house, carrying a stack of rubber medical waste bins.
“A dog,” she replied, rubbing her hand over her short-cropped hair.
“A ghost dog?” Zack grinned, put down the bins, and straightened to his near six feet.
“Yeah. He scared the hell out of me.”
“R-i-i-i-ght. The lady who mops blood, guts, and meth while talking to ghosts is afraid of a dead puppy.”
“He’s a big Rotty, not a cuddly puppy.” She fanned her face with her hand.
“Dogs scare you, but dealing with human spirits is, apparently, a walk in the park.” The lines around his dark eyes crinkled with amusement.
“I wasn’t prepared. I forgot the cops had to shoot a guard dog when they raided this place.”
“It happens. The dog was probably trained to protect the house,” Zack commented.
“Guess you can’t fault a businessman for protecting his assets,” Sadie said.
“You can if that business is crystal meth.” He combed his fingers through his dark hair, which was already damp with sweat. “Man, it’s hotter than hell.”
“Just wait until you’re suited up. Nothing like wearing extra layers when it’s almost ninety.”
She tugged her hazmat coveralls from her chest and blew some air down into her cleavage. She glanced up to see him watching. Months ago he would’ve had some embarrassing remark to make about her sweaty breasts, but now Zack just looked away.
Sadie stepped closer and reached to grab a couple of the containers at his feet. Zack went for them at the same time and their hands touched. Simultaneously they jerked their fingers away like they’d been singed. With an awkward smile, Zack hurriedly picked up some bins and walked past her to the back door.
Like awkward teens after a breakup, Sadie thought, rolling her eyes.
The silence stretched taut between them as they walked toward the back door. Sadie watched as the Rottweiler leapt in the air in a desperate attempt to tackle Zack.
“Oh, give it up,” Sadie muttered.
The Rottweiler skidded to a halt. He tilted his head at Sadie in a look of comical bewilderment. The poor thing had no idea why his attempts to ward them off were futile. Sadie was at a loss about how to explain to a dead dog that he was, in fact, dead.
Zack and Sadie walked up the back steps together. Pausing while Zack got out his disposable hazmat suit, Sadie broke the discomfiting silence to chat about the estimated time involved in cleaning the meth lab.
Suddenly, they both glanced across the grassy field toward the sound of a vehicle kicking up gravel.
“There’s a dirt road beyond that tree line.” Zack pointed across the scrub of grass and the tall cedars that edged the back of the property. “I almost took that turn myself, but there’s nothing else down that road. It’s a dead end. Somebody must’ve made a wrong turn.”
“Could be someone who’s disappointed their meth supplier is out of business.”
The city of Kenmore was a Seattle bedroom community, just up the I-5, in the northern part of King County on Lake Washington. It was quaint and picturesque. Not exactly where you’d expect a large methamphetamine lab. However, where you had acreage separating a home from nosy neighbors, anything could happen. With Seattle police cracking down on crack and messing up the meth, cookers didn’t mind whipping up their brand of brain poison in a quiet community where they hoped to remain undetected.
“What is it?” Zack asked.
She strained to listen, then shook her head.
“Nothing.” She prepared to slip on her headgear again. “I think I’ll stop by the other scene later today to see how Jackie’s doing.” At his look she added, “I’m not checking up on her.”
“Yes, you are.” He held up his hands in a stopping motion. “That’s all right. Scene-2-Clean is your company. You have the right to make sure your employee’s doing a decent job on the first scene she’s worked alone.”
“It’s not that I want her thinking I don’t trust her, but—” She stopped again.
“But you don’t.”
This time she was sure she heard it. Turning, Sadie stared a couple dozen feet away, across the weed-choked yard, at an old wooden garden shed. A warm wind fingered the tall grass and a crow cawed from the top of a fifty-foot monkey puzzle tree.
“That’s funny. I keep thinking I hear a—” She broke off and turned to Zack.
The look on his face said he heard it too.
When the sound came again, Sadie knew it was the muffled, keening cry of a newborn baby. A sound totally out of sync in the middle of nowhere around a closed meth lab.
“There’s a baby in that shed,” Sadie said, already down the steps and traipsing toward the building.
Zack caught up quickly. With a firm hand on her elbow he stopped her and turned Sadie toward him.
“Look, before the cops released this property to us for cleaning, they would’ve cleared the outbuildings,” Zack said, his voice tight. “Whoever’s in there showed up since then. Hell, they could’ve been dropped off by the car we just heard.”
“You’re right. Some methhead could be holed up with her baby waiting for this place to reopen for business.” Sadie shrugged. “Then we’d better go tell her to do her shopping elsewhere.”
Again, Zack grabbed her.
“We?”
Sadie nodded. “Yeah. We.”
Determinedly, she shrugged off his hand and walked toward the shed. Zack joined her and they stamped down the tall dry grass as they angled across the yard. Grasshoppers jumped knee-high as the grass was disturbed. Sadie and Zack stopped walking a couple of feet away. Sadie blinked perspiration from her eyes.
“Okay, now get back,” Zack hissed in her ear, and pulled something from the waistband of his jeans.
Sadie’s eyes grew wide.
“Since when do you carry a gun when we work a scene?”
“Since you decided to let Scene-2-Clean mop up meth labs instead of just trauma cleans.”
“Helping out Scour Power is temporary. Just until David Egan gets back in town.”
“Then this is temporary too.” He indicated his gun.
The infant’s cries cut into their discussion.
“Just step aside, Sadie, and let me do my job.”
She stiffened and spoke between clenched teeth.
“Hey, Zack Bowman.” She waved a hand in front of his face as if waking him from daydreaming. “You’re not a cop anymore and I shouldn’t have to remind you that you work for me.”
He rolled his eyes.
“Are we going to have a pissing contest right here? Right now?”
“Well, no, that would be silly because, um, you have better equipment for that.”
“Fine. You’re the boss. You go ahead,” he whispered, stepping aside and indicating the door with his hand. “The person with that baby is probably a paranoid tweaker out of her mind from withdrawal. She’s beyond caring about her kid and hoping to trade her baby for a dot of crystal. She’s desperate and not above attacking whoever gets in her way.”
Sadie cringed.
“Okay, I guess you do have more training in this sort of thing.”
“You think?”
The baby’s cries sounded frantic.
“Don’t just stand there, Mr. Macho.” Sadie waved her hand toward the shed door. “Do your thing.”
“Stay outside until I tell you it’s safe.” His jaw tightened and his dark eyes hardened to bullets.
“Just hurry up.”
Plastering his back to the wall of the windowless building, Zack slipped into cop mode like it hadn’t been a couple years since he’d turned in his badge. Gun in both hands and in the ready position, he called out, “I’m armed! Throw down your weapons and come out with your hands up or I’ll come in shooting!”
“That’s a little extreme, don’tcha think?” Sadie whispered to his back.
“Shaddup.”
There was no answering shuffle of movement or voices from within. The only sound was the continued muted wail of a baby. Sadie had a chilling visual of a drug-crazed freak holding a poor defenseless newborn. She nudged Zack’s back with her finger.
“Go already.”
In one quick movement, Zack booted open the thin door. Splinters of tinder-dry wood fluttered in the air. He disappeared inside and Sadie heard him suck in a gasp and blow out a loud curse. A beam of sunlight entered the doorway and lit the specks of dust in the air around Zack, but he blocked her view to what was beyond his frame.
Sadie hurried into the building, elbowing Zack aside. Her eyes took a few seconds to adjust to the dim interior. The smell hit her first. A peculiar and pungent barnyard scent. Her bewildered gaze went first to Zack’s face, then zoomed in on what had captured his look of horror and disgust. On the opposite side of the ten-by-ten space was a makeshift workbench and on it lay the body of a goat. The animal had been eviscerated. It lay on its side, its thick, pale tongue protruding between lifeless lips.
Sadie’s mind had a hard time coupling the sight of the slaughtered animal with the infant’s cries cutting the air. Then she noticed a tiny fist rise from behind the carcass and she stepped forward.
“Stop!” Zack shouted in warning. “Don’t go closer. We need to call this in. The carcass could be booby-trapped.”
Sure, they knew from their training it was common for crankheads to protect their labs with trip wires and hidden pongee sticks (wood boards with large nails or spikes protruding upward), but they’d yet to encounter any tricky barnyard animals.
“A booby-trapped goat?” Sadie raised her eyebrows at him.
“Hey, it’s a baby beside a mutilated goat.” He threw his hands in the air. “You explain it.”
Sadie could only shake her head. There was no explaining it, but she knew what had to be done. She crossed the dirt floor, swallowed nervously, then grabbed the coarse-haired animal and shoved it aside to get at a tiny naked infant wedged snugly between the goat and the wall. With rapid movement, Sadie scooped the baby boy from his dismal hiding place, noting that the infant’s umbilical cord had been tied with twine. She unzipped her hazmat suit and pulled the sobbing child to her chest. He instantly curled against the hard buttons of her shirt, and his vulnerable body, tacky with blood and vernix, vibrated against her.
“Poor little guy,” Sadie cooed, her voice thick with emotion as her heart tightened in her chest. “God, my own sister will be giving birth to a little human being like this pretty soon herself.” She blinked back tears. “What kind of freak does something like this?”
Zack looked from the baby in her arms to the goat. He tunneled his fingers through his dark hair, shook his head slowly, and could only mutter under his breath, “Jesus . . .”
“Not quite,” stated a female voice in the doorway.
Sadie whirled to see a robust woman with waist-length jet hair leaning nonchalantly in the doorway. Her emerald eyes were unnaturally bright and she wore a pale blue ankle-length sundress that was drenched in blood from the waist down.
“Is this your baby?”
“Not anymore,” she said in a mockingly sweet singsong voice.
“Who are you talking to?” Zack demanded, looking around.
Sadie shushed him as she instinctively bounced from one foot to the other, rocking the baby, whose cries had grown to stifled sobs.
“Who are you?” Sadie demanded.
The woman only smiled.
“All r-i-i-i-ght, I’ll leave you to your ghosts,” Zack growled. “I’m going to make the call.”
“First, give me your shirt,” Sadie said, her eyes never leaving the woman barricading the door.
Zack stripped to the waist and Sadie’s eyes skidded uncomfortably away from his hard, muscled chest. He tossed her his T-shirt and left, walking right through the spirit of the woman still blocking the doorway.
Sadie’s eyes narrowed as she scrutinized the woman’s reaction. She neither flinched nor looked surprised when Zack passed through. She knew she was dead and was apparently quite fine with it.
Swaddling the infant in Zack’s shirt, Sadie kept her eyes on her guest. The woman didn’t look like a drug addict. Then again, she wouldn’t be the first person who had meth steal her life the first go-round.
“This baby looks like he was just born. Did you die in childbirth? What happened and what the hell is up with the goat?”
“I gave my son willingly,” she replied with a simple shrug.
“Oh really? So you’re dead and stoned out of your mind. That’s just great. Well, party on,” Sadie shot back. “But first, where’s your body?”
“I don’t need my physical self anymore. Soon all the power of the dead will go to the Alliance and that child will help. Besides,” the woman replied, flicking her wrist as if it were no big deal, “I’ve gone to be with he who called me.”
“No. No, you haven’t.” Sadie shook her head. She took a deep breath and slowly let it out before she attempted to reason with the spirit. “You haven’t gone over. In fact, you seem to be stuck. I see it quite often. If you had gone to heaven, I wouldn’t be able to see you.”
“Who said anything about heaven?” She laughed roughly.
When the woman focused her gaze back on Sadie, her green eyes flickered and momentarily blazed, glowing bright bloodred.
The hair on the back of Sadie’s neck prickled with fear.
“Okay, I’m out of here,” Sadie announced with false bravado.
Fear tasted acrid in her mouth as she made to exit, the baby gripped tightly against her chest. Since the womanly apparition made no motion to step aside, Sadie took a breath and walked through.
She prepared herself for the grotesque nails-on-blackboard feeling she experienced at the touch of the dead. Instead, the moment her body contacted the spirit’s, an agonizing scream left her throat. Sadie felt like she was being bathed in acid. As if her skin were melting from her bones.