He left Syder there, grim and tired under the midday sun, and headed back to the rental. It still smelled odd, like someone else's car and gasoline. Ledger sat there, his hands on the wheel, and watched Syder watch him back. The sheriff took a long drink of his coffee and then tossed the dregs onto the cracked asphalt and the cup into the trash. He pulled the candy out of his pocket and ate it on the way back to the patrol car.
Did he know Ledger had been lying?
Ledger supposed it didn’t matter as long as Syder couldn’t prove it. He started the rental’s engine and pulled forward around the pump.
It wasn’t as if the truth would bring anyone any comfort. Bell hadn’t killed those people because he had some misfire in his brain, and it hadn’t been some sick compulsion.
It had been a life hack.
A demon traded a boon—good luck at poker, an iron stomach, what could pass for love, for a while, from an object of affection—for an eye, or a liver, or a hand. It was a better rate of return if it was your own hand—or liver, or eye—but if all they’d specified was “an eye,” then you got a good-enough deal as long as you were the one currently in possession of the item.
It was like buying a designer bag from Michael Kors directly or going through AliExpress. Either way, it was a bag, but it was how it performed that made the difference.
Ledger pulled onto the road out of town. Syder followed two car lengths behind for a while until he finally turned off onto a side road and headed back toward town.
The gas cans lined up behind Ledger in the back of the car sloshed as he drove.
* * *
Someone had padlocked the doors.
Ledger stood on the porch and glared at the heavy-duty brackets screwed into the wooden frame. There were flakes of cracked paint still lined up along the sill of the door, caught in the cracks and old divots. A breeze caught a few flakes and carried them away as Ledger stood there. It had been recent.
A property notice was stapled to the door, right in the middle of the half-scrubbed-off cross. Ledger scowled and ripped it off, a tag of paper left pinned to the door. He pulled the sheet taut between his hands and scanned the text. His gaze flicked along the breadcrumb trail of bolted words to the scrawled signature at the bottom.
He knew the name.
Hark.
Ledger crumpled the notice up into a tight ball and tossed it down on the welcome mat. He stepped on it, petty but satisfying, as he stalked off the porch. It didn’t matter. Ledger had felt strangely obligated to salvage some keepsake from his childhood. He’d been going to pick through what was left to find something… a collection of old birthday cards or dog-eared photos… but what was the point?
Sure, there had been times Ledger had been happy as a child. None of them had been real, though. There had always been blood grimed under Dad’s fingernails and something that whispered under the bottom of the bedroom door at night.
Evil smelled like salt. Blessings—although Ledger didn’t have much of a market for that—like milk fresh from the cow. Sentiment smelled like nothing because it didn’t matter.
Hark had done Ledger a favor. It wasn’t like he needed to get into the house to burn it down.
Ledger yanked the back door of the rental open and pulled out one of the cans. The lid hadn’t been put on properly, and gas sloshed over his cuffs as he hauled it out. It smelled sharp and sweet and dried quickly as it sucked into the cotton. Ledger hefted the can up, one hand under the base, and splashed it over the scrubby grass in a long, splattered arc.
He had just started toward the porch when Hark drove up the road and onto the property in his dirty white van. The faint strains of local public radio filtered through the cracked driver’s window— “…that was Cody Carnes with an uplifting take on forgiveness. Something that’s on everyone’s minds with the death of local murderer Bell Conroy and the return of his prodigal son…”—until Hark killed the engine.
“I swear, you hit the county line and all you can get is gospel and Evanescence,” Hark said as he got out of the van. He wore a khaki suit that didn’t fit him very well, the cuffs an inch short and the shoulders baggy, and a pair of aviator sunglasses. There was a smudged thumbprint on the right lens, just slightly off-center. Hark took them off with a sigh and polished them on his dark brown tie. The creases around his eyes deepened as he squinted at Ledger. “Did I pick up a new curse, or did Taylor Swift pass you people by?”
Ledger ignored the question. He knew the answer—the whole county had taken a turn for the religious in the decade after Bell’s arrest—but Hark didn’t need any more reasons to be interested in the estate.
“What do you want?” Ledger asked flatly.
Hark put his glasses back on. The smudge had migrated to the left lens, just by the hinge of the arm. Hark hesitated, glasses still gripped in his fingers, but must have decided he could live with it. He let the frame settle on the bridge of his nose.
“What we all want,” he said. “Relics from a dead monster to sell to the small, but extremely lucrative, market for that sort of thing.”
Ledger set the can down between his feet and crossed his arms. “You know that’s my father you’re talking about?”
“That’s right,” Hark said. “You kept that quiet, didn’t you? Son of serial killer Bell Conroy. Hisonlyson. Not his only child, though.”
Shit.
Ledger clenched his jaw so hard his teeth hurt. His obvious reaction got a smirk from Hark.
