Ultimate Supernatural Horror Box Set

Chapter 21

Sophie crossed Lake Washington and Mercer Island, blasting east on 90 toward the Cascades as she followed the white Lexus that Seymour was piloting twenty car lengths ahead.

It hummed along at a rock-solid sixty miles-per-hour.

Douglas-firs streamed past.

The cloud deck dropped.

Specks of mist starring the windshield.

She was sixty percent focused on the Lexus two hundred feet ahead, forty percent elsewhere.

More specifically: Grant.

My partner.

Are you lying to me? Just the thought of it hurt her more than she was comfortable admitting. Like it was a betrayal on some level beyond partner. Beyond friend.

A blinking right turn signal on Seymour’s Lexus snapped her back into the moment. He was already on the off-ramp.

Sophie pressed the accelerator into the floorboard and followed him off the exit.

# # #

Two minutes later, she was rattling over train tracks into downtown North Bend, a slice of Americana so well-preserved she felt her very presence threatened its legitimacy. She rarely left the city. So easy to forget that places like this existed just thirty minutes outside of Seattle proper.

The Lexus pulled into the near-desolate parking lot of Swartwood’s Diner.

Sophie turned into the alley that cut behind the building and pulled her TrailBlazer to a stop beside a mural on the white concrete of the back wall.

Through the driver’s side window, she watched Seymour climb out of his Lexus and walk toward the entrance to the diner.

She couldn’t explain it exactly, but she felt jittery, like she’d just downed a quad-shot espresso concoction. Everything about Seymour felt wrong. He was uncharted territory, and it made her feel like a rookie again—those first days on the street and coming to grips with the utter inadequacy of textbook knowledge.

Sophie reached into her jacket and pulled her G22, checked the load.

More nervous tic than necessity.

She put the SUV back into gear.

Drove down the alley and around the block.

She parked at a better location in front of the entrance.

Seymour had taken a booth by the window. His back was to her.

Good visibility, lucky break.

She killed the engine, reclined the seat.

# # #

It got boring in a hurry.

A waitress appeared at Seymour’s table.

Left.

Returned with coffee.

Seymour never glanced out the window beside his booth. Never brought the steaming cup to his lips. He had cleaned himself up since their encounter at the park—presumably in his car considering she hadn’t let him out of her sight. But other than an argyle sweater, fresh pair of jeans, and immaculate hair, he was the same old catatonic Seymour.

The rain fell so lightly it took almost forty-five minutes to blur her view through the windshield.

When she could no longer see through it, she opened the car door and climbed out.

The smell of fir trees was overpowering.

A mountain loomed on the far side of town, faceless and void of detail, nothing but an ominous profile through the mist.

Sophie crossed the sidewalk and opened the door as slowly as she could.

A cluster of bells hanging from the inner handle jingled anyway.

Seymour didn’t look back.

Aside from Seymour and an old man eating pie at a table against the opposite wall, the diner stood empty.

A jukebox in back played fifties rock-and-roll at an unobtrusive volume.

Two waitresses chatted at the counter, and one of them—a short blonde no more than twenty—glanced at Sophie and said, “Sit anywhere you like.”

She slid into an empty booth just two down from Seymour’s. Didn’t like having her back to the door, but there was no way around it without facing the man.

He could have been asleep he sat so still, but his posture was rigid, on alert, staring straight ahead into nothing.

Sophie peeled the menu from the table and opened it more out of habit than hunger.

The usual suspects: variations of eggs and fried meat, a few burgers, a suspicious Cobb salad.

She looked out the window.

The rain had picked up.

At the intersection, a traffic light flashed red to green, but the road was empty.

“Have you decided?”

Sophie turned to find the young waitress standing poised with pad and pencil. She wore her hair in an impossibly tight ponytail, the brown of her roots clinging for dear life.

“Just a coffee.”

“That’s it?” she grieved.

“That’s it.”

The waitress let her pad drop, cocked her head, and popped a smile so enormous it seemed to exceed the square footage of her face.

“Haven’t seen you here before. Your first time?”

Sophie’s eyes cut to Seymour two booths up.

“Just passing through. Needed a caffeine fix.”

“Oh? Where you headed?”

The question boomed in the silence of the diner as if it had been channeled through a PA system.

“Portland.”

“Business or—”

“Just visiting family.”

The waitress held her smile, as if Sophie’s explanation needed more explanation and she had all the time in the world to wait for the rest of the story.

Across the diner, the old man looked up from his pie.

This line of questioning needed to end. Now.

“You know what, Jenny?” Sophie said, squinting at her nametag, “I think I will have a slice of your pie.”

The waitress somehow squeezed out more smile.

“Good choice. Best in the state. Coffee and pie coming right up.”

As Jenny headed off toward the counter, Sophie kept thinking that at any moment Seymour would suddenly turn and make her.

The waitress returned with a steaming carafe, a mug, and a slice of cherry pie.

She set everything down in front of Sophie.

Poured.

“Anything else, ma’am?”

Ma’am?

“No thanks.”

“Enjoy.”

Jenny the waitress moved on to Seymour’s booth.

Sophie straightened in her seat.

The waitress smiled down at Seymour, but the speed at which it vanished indicated there was zero warmth returned from the customer.

“You haven’t touched your coffee, sir. Can I get you something else?”

Seymour lifted his coffee and polished it off in one uninterrupted tilting of the mug.

He set it down empty on the table and looked up at the waitress.

“The coffee is excellent.”

“Um, would you like some more?”

“Yes.”

She filled his mug from the carafe.

“Anything else?”

“No.”

Sophie pulled out her phone and tapped out three texts to Dobbs.

trailed BS to swartwoods diner in north bend

he’s just sitting here being creepy

still no sign of talbert?

# # #

Sophie watched a dreary afternoon unspool through the windows.

Customers came, left.

Three times she pulled out the receipt with Seymour’s sketch, drawn to it on some frequency she couldn’t name.

The weather cleared and rolled in again.

Still, she could count the number of cars that drove by on both hands.

In the beginning, the waitress had come by every ten minutes or so, pushing the menu, pushing more coffee, more pie. But after two hours, she was completely ignoring both Sophie and Seymour.

# # #

The sun dipped behind the mountains.

Darkness roused the streetlights, the empty intersection now washed in yellow light that made the wet pavement glisten.

A neon beer sign blinked to life in the window of a bar across the street.

Fifteen minutes crawled by.

Not a soul darkened its doorstep.

Happy hour on Friday night in North Bend.

And still, Seymour hadn’t moved. Not to use the restroom. Or stretch his legs. Not even to readjust his weight on the hard plastic bench that had kept one or both of Sophie’s legs in a perpetual state of pins and needles.

Out of sheer boredom, Sophie had blazed through four cups of coffee, a mistake she’d been paying the price for over the last hour as she watched customers enter the bathroom at the back of the diner and exit moments later with what she perceived to be orgasmic relief across their faces.

By 5:55 p.m., she couldn’t hold it anymore.

Rising, she walked unsteadily down the aisle of window-adjacent booths, passing Seymour without acknowledgment or glance, and made a beeline for the doors at the back of the restaurant.

It was the first time she’d used her legs in over three hours, and they felt like they belonged to someone else.

She gave one quick look back at Seymour before disappearing into the women’s restroom.

The desperation in her bladder crescendoed as she burst through the stall door and raced to unbuckle her belt.

Epic relief.

So intense it gave her chills.

She washed up quickly, uncomfortable with leaving Seymour out of sight, even for a minute.

She turned off the tap and looked around, hands dripping.

No paper towels.

No electric dryer.

Of course.

She shook them dry, finishing the job on the sides of her pants.

When she opened the door, her stomach clenched.

Three men now occupied Seymour’s booth.

Sophie rebooted, pushed through the shock, and walked right past them, digging the phone out of her purse as she eased back into her booth.

Fired off a new text to Dobbs.

still here ... two other men just showed up ... come now

She glanced out her window, saw a black van that hadn’t been there before she’d left for the bathroom.

possibly arrived in black GMC savana

Jenny the waitress sidled up to Seymour’s booth, all smiles again.

“Can I get you gentlemen something to drink?”

“Coffee.”

“Coffee.”

“More coffee.”

“Sure thing.”

Sophie slid across the bench seat to get a look at the faces of the new arrivals.

One she didn’t recognize—a man in his mid-fifties, ruggedly handsome, with wavy, graying curls that he kept swept back from his face.

The second was Barry Talbert, her other MIA.

Sophie’s pulse rate doubled.

Talbert was the youngest of the trio—early forties if she had to guess. He wore a crisp, pinstripe button-down, open at the collar. Hair pushed back and cemented in place with plenty of product. At least two days’ worth of stubble coming in.

Another text.

talbert just walked in with some other guy

Both Talbert and Rugged-Handsome exuded that same trance-like intensity.

No one spoke.

A minute into the silence, Talbert broke his thousand-yard stare, looked at Seymour, shook his head, and looked away again, as if he’d been offered something and were politely refusing it.

The waitress returned with two coffee mugs and a carafe.

“Anyone interested in dinner?”

Seymour seemed to speak for everyone. “No, we’re fine.”

When the waitress was out of earshot, Talbert said, “We have the van.”

Seymour nodded.

Talbert said, “Any word from him?”

“It hasn’t happened yet.”

Silence again.

Seymour looked at Talbert as if he’d spoken. He reached over and grabbed a plastic tub of creamer from a pile that filled a porcelain bowl beside the other condiments. Rolled it across the table to him.

Talbert tore off the seal and dumped the creamer into his coffee.

For a moment, he stared down into the cup, mesmerized, as if the swirls of cream were revealing the mysteries of the universe.

Rugged-Handsome said, “The children are there.”

“Full house,” Seymour said.

“He looks a lot like him.”

“So does she,” Talbert said without looking up.

The other two nodded in agreement.

“Won’t be long now,” Seymour said.

Silence descended on their booth again.

Sophie reeled.

On those rare occasions when she escaped the precinct for lunch hour, she liked to head downtown to Lola on Fourth and Virginia. She’d always take a book, intending to read, but inevitably she’d never even power it on. Instead, she’d sit alone, eating and soaking up fragments of conversation from the pleasant noise of the restaurant, reassembling them as best she could into a picture of the lives and stories of the people all around her. She was good at it too. Easy work for a detective and aspiring novelist.

But that particular aptitude was failing her at the moment.

It was different with Seymour, Talbert, and Rugged-Handsome.

Eavesdropping on their conversation was like trying to make sense of a dream. Like reading a code without the cipher. The words were plain enough, but they were fragments of a larger picture that she couldn’t even begin to guess at.

She dug out her phone and sent another text to Dobbs.

something about to happen ... how far?

Ten seconds later, her screen illuminated.

10 min

She set the phone on the table.

Seymour straightened.

So did Sophie.

His head ticked to the left, as imperceptibly as the twitch of the minute hand, but she caught it.

The other two men watched him, something like wonder and fear exploding in their eyes.

Sophie thumbed off the brass snap that secured her Glock in the holster.

“The fourth?” Talbert said.

Seymour nodded. “He just arrived.”