The Devil's Grip: The Curse of Stone Falls Read online

  “Calling a woman beautiful across a crowded restaurant is not very classy,” the mechanic said with a cold stare.

  “Drop it,” Alex said.

  Ben glared at the man in dirty blue work overalls. He sat at their table and picked up a menu.

  Alex sat with him. “You need to read the menu?”

  Ben put it back down in front of him. “Nah, I know it by heart.”

  The front door swung open and tinkled the small bell. A construction worker in a hoody walked in.

  “That construction guy is there,” Alex said.

  Ben swiveled in his chair, “Uh, what was his name? Tim?”

  “Todd,” Alex corrected.

  “Todd, that’s right.”

  The young man looked toward them. Alex quickly waved. He waved back. He walked to them after buying a few pastries.

  “What did you get us?” Ben asked with the intruder to his mood still only a few feet away from him.

  “I bought some muffins for the guys. They’re waiting outside. It’s a small tradition. We buy some goodies whenever we’re done with a job.”

  “Are you guys done with Alder Street?” Alex asked.

  “Yep, we are.”

  “What’s next?”

  “We need to do some patching up on Clover St.”

  “It never ends,” Ben said sitting deeper in his chair.

  “No, it never ends. Like you guys.”

  “You got that one right.”

  “Are those two causing more trouble?” Amanda asked with two mugs in hand.

  “Nah, we’re angels,” Ben said with a wink. “How did you even know we wanted coffee?”

  “Jeez, that’s a tough one. You’ve only been ordering coffee with your breakfast for the last two or three years. I caught on after a while.” She tapped Ben on the back and walked away.

  The bell rang again. The young construction worker looked toward the door by reflex. His eyes landed on Jessica Miller.

  “It was nice chatting with you, but I got to go. The guys are waiting for me.”

  “It was nice to see you again,” Ben said.

  “Say hi if you pass by the station, Todd.”

  “Will do.”

  The young man walked away with his brown paper bag. He gazed at the woman. There was something about her, a discreet charm. His eyes lingered on her as he walked past her.

  “Are you going to make a comment about the teen too, Medic? She is not bad either. I wouldn’t blame you. She’s a fine piece.”

  Ben took a deep breath. “I’m done.” He stood up and opened his wallet. He took out a few singles and put them under the salt shaker. “Coffee’s on me this morning.”

  “Are you leaving? We didn’t even order,” Alex looked up as if he was pleading.

  “I can’t eat next to this clown.”

  “Are you going to do something about it, Medic?” The mechanic said.

  Ben approached his table, “You better hope that I’ll never work on you my friend.”

  “That’s not very professional to threaten the public. Maybe I should have a talk with your boss about that one.”

  “Please, be my guest.”

  Alex grabbed his partner by the arm, “It’s not worth it. Let’s go get a donut, my treat.”

  Ben glared one last time at the man sitting in front of him. Every detail of his face was despicable, from the crooked brown teeth, to the greasy hair surrounding a bald skull.

  The medics left the diner with a goodbye to Amanda and a word of apology about leaving so suddenly.

  The mechanic, Jim Mackenzie, picked up his newspaper glancing at the teenage girl one more time.

  Sweet Bath

  Ben navigated the large modular ambulance through the old downtown. A steady January rain was falling onto the large windshield. Tim McGraw was playing on the radio for a homey feel in the front cabin.

  “I can’t believe we’re going to get donuts for breakfast,” Alex said. “If I wanted to eat donuts, I would have been a cop. Do I look like a cop? No, I don’t. I like people, and I want to help them. I don’t want to give them tickets. No tickets, no donuts. Medics and fire go to Dina’s. Cops go to the donut shop. We don’t mingle. Is that hard to understand?”

  “Are you done?”

  “Yeah, I think.”

  “Good,” Ben said while parking the ambulance along a red curb. “See, I even park like a cop.”

  “You always park like that.”

  “Engine 61, Medic 61, unknown medical, 725 Meadow Drive,” the female voice announced on the radio.

  “Medic 61 en route,” Ben answered. He released his index finger from the mic. “Looks like you won’t have your donut either.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me. I’m starving, and we’re getting a call. And it’s Gina on top of that.”

  Ben turned his red primary lights on and merged onto the traffic. “You have to be more respectful with your favorite patient.”

  “Gina? My favorite patient? Sure…”

  Three minutes later, Medic 61 pulled in front of Gina Hawkins’s house. A police cruiser was already on scene.

  A Stone Falls PD officer walked down the driveway in a relaxed pace, right hand on his belt. “She’s not answering the door.”

  “That’s a first. She always runs to the front door to ask us to take her to the hospital and save her from her crazy mother,” Ben said.

  “Well, not this time, boys.”

  “Let’s just take the trauma bag, and see what’s going on.” For the first time, Ben was concerned about Gina. This wasn’t like her. She was unstable to say the least, but she was predictable. After more than thirty calls to her house, she had always acted the same way. She was deeply depressed. She called for help. She waited at the door. Always.

  “The living room window is unlatched.” The officer said from the side of the house.

  Both paramedics trotted to him. The officer and the two medics entered the darkened living room.

  “Gina?” Ben called out, his voice hardly loud enough to penetrate the corridor.

  The officer shined his flashlight through the room. Family pictures on dusty frames were scattered on shelves and a buffet. There was a small round dining-room table and a sectional sofa against the wall on the right. A tall plant had dried up in its pot.

  Ben slowly walked past the officer.

  The cop grabbed his elbow, “Stop.”

  “Why?”

  “Those two are crazier than the other one, you never know.”

  Ben didn’t argue.

  The officer proceeded forward, right hand on his gun. “POLICE! Speak to me now!”

  No answer.

  “What’s going on in here?” Alex asked in a soft voice, as if he didn’t want to disturb a wild animal.

  “Why are you whispering?” Ben said hardly loud enough to cover the sound of heavy rain drumming on the roof. “Shouldn’t we be calling for her?”

  “You call.”

  “Why me?”

  “That was your idea.” Alex elbowed him, “You do it.”

  “Gina?” Ben said with the volume of a kitty hardly able to walk out of its basket.

  “She’s not going to hear you.”

  “Where is 61? What are they doing?”

  “They should be here any minute.”

  “Maybe we should wait for them.”

  “Why? We have a cop with a gun. Where did he go by the way?”

  Officer Jameson slithered halfway down the dark corridor, gun in hand. A faint whisper was coming from the last room. He turned around indicating the first two doors on his left, and raised a thumb up. He leaned against the wall and opened the next door.

  His powerful LED flashlight shone into a small bathroom, his 9 mm Beretta beneath it. A cloud of steam emerged from the small room. Jameson stepped out for a second and walked back inside. To his left, a small vanity mirror was fogged up. A cordless phone was on the floor with a battery cover next to it. He stepped on something. He lifte
d his foot. A nine-volt battery was on the floor.

  A shower curtain was drawn. Officer Jameson’s heart was beating like it never had before. He was a small-town cop, not a big-city gang fighter. This kind of situation only happened in the movies. A large drop of sweat formed on his forehead. It slid down his face and fell on the damp floor. The faint whine from the end of the corridor was still going, but it was irrelevant. The focal point was right in front of him. His gut feeling was never wrong. Officer Jameson grabbed the curtain and slowly pulled.

  Engine 61 parked in front of 725 Meadow Drive with a dying growler. A crew of three jumped out.

  “Gina’s in the tub. There’s blood all over the place,” the officer said, packing his gun in his holster.

  Both medics rushed in. “Jesus,” Ben gasped in surprise.

  Gina lay fully dressed in the bathtub, warm and pink water up to her chin, both wrists slashed multiple times. A butcher knife had sunk to the bottom of the tub.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” she gasped, turning her glassy eyes toward the medics.

  Ben went behind her and pulled her out of the water. Alex picked her feet up and settled her down on the cool tile. The routine took over. She wasn’t Gina anymore. She was a patient. They stopped the fairly light bleeding (wrists don’t bleed nearly as much as the legend says) and started an IV line with a 1000 ml bag of normal saline. They attached an oxygen mask and a cardiac monitor.

  Officer Jameson stepped out of the crammed bathroom while the medics and two firefighters worked on Gina. His job was done, almost. He could still hear the moaning at the end of the corridor in the middle of the commotion. He stopped an instant and walked to the bedroom. He pounded the door twice. “Stone Falls PD, Officer Jameson.”

  “Go die!” A voice blasted from inside.

  Nice woman, he thought. “I’m coming in.”

  “Yeah! Come in! I haven’t had a man in my room in a while!”

  He opened the door, hand against his gun. The flashlight beam landed on a queen-sized bed covered with dirty sheets. The pungent urine smell churned his stomach. He went closer to the bed.

  “We have electricity, you know.”

  Jameson nodded. A closer inspection of the bed revealed large yellow stains. Gina’s mother was lying in a disheveled white night gown.

  She opened one leg. “Do you like what you see?” She asked.

  The officer kept his hand on his gun.

  “You won’t need your toy, officer, at least not this one,” she smiled with brown teeth.

  “Do you need assistance?” The officer asked.

  “You can assist me all you want, honey.”

  He shook his head and walked out.

  Alex and Ben wheeled the yellow gurney out of the house. Another firefighter was behind them with their orange trauma box in hand. Nobody was talking. There was no need to. They loaded Gina in the back of the ambulance. Alex stepped in the back. Ben closed the door and drove them to the emergency room without lights or sirens.

  At a red light, Ben looked at passers-by shopping in the old down town. A mother was walking with a toddler, and an older couple was walking hand in hand. A few hearts were popping here and there even if Valentine’s Day was still over a month away.

  Something was different. This call was different. It was not the daily chest or abdominal pain, the occasional seizure, or minor car accident. It was a suicide attempt, obviously, which was fairly common in Stone Falls, like anywhere else in the country. It was not a daily occurrence, but it happened once in a while. This time it was Gina. Ben was used to seeing her with her typical ranting and crying, but this bathroom episode was way off the weird charts. It was completely atypical for her.

  Some people tried to commit suicide on a monthly basis, mostly as a call for help. Others meant it and went all the way on their first attempt. That one was rare, maybe two or three times a year.

  Gina wasn’t like that. She was a scaredy-cat completely unable to handle the situation with her mother. Social workers had tried to talk to her, but they hadn’t managed to improve the situation.

  The traffic light turned green. Ben couldn’t hear any activity in the back. He glanced through the small window between the front cabin and the patient area. Alex was sitting on the bench, scribbling on his clipboard. Ben couldn’t see Gina. He could only see some of her dark hair merging above the raised gurney seat.

  Ben drove another mile and pulled into the emergency-room bay. The paramedics did their routine without talking any more than necessary. They opened the back door, unloaded the gurney, and walked in. They briefed Tyron without a joke about his male nurse status, because it wouldn’t have been funny.

  Tyron listened to the complete medical report, particularly paying attention to what had just happened to her.

  “Well, thank you guys.” Tyron looked at Gina and gently rubbed her shoulder, “We’re going to take care of you, Gina, ok?”

  She didn’t say anything. Her gaze was lost a few feet in front of her, into an eye-level universe of legs going by and nearby emergency room beds.

  Tyron pulled a blue curtain hanging from the ceiling around Gina’s bed to give her some privacy. He looked at the paramedics and jerked his head in the direction of his new patient.

  “What’s happening to her?” he whispered.

  “You tell me,” Ben said, “you spend a lot more time with her than we do.”

  “Yeah, but you guys see her house, we don’t. How is it?”

  “It’s a filthy mess,” Alex said.

  “I can tell you one thing,” Tyron said. “It doesn’t take a PhD to see that she’s getting worse.”

  The two paramedics nodded in silence.

  “It’s one thing to call 911 because she is sad and depressed. It’s another to play with razor blades.”

  “Her injuries were fairly shallow,” Alex said.

  “Yeah, but it’s still a step way up.”

  A scream of deep rage came from Gina’s booth. The three turned at the same time. A surgical metal tray flew across the booth and hit the curtain before crashing onto the floor in a loud metallic sound.

  The nurses stood behind their counter in surprise. The three men ran to the booth. Tyron pulled the curtain hanging from the narrow rail on the ceiling.

  Gina was standing beside her bed, legs spread out in an attack stance, “I’m going to kill you, BASTARDS!”

  At the edge of fear, the three men, each one of them much heavier than she was, backed off in complete surprise.

  She lurched toward them with her hands thrown forward like opened claws.

  Alex grabbed her by the top of her shirt and tackled her in an improvised judo move. Using her kinetic energy, he brought her to the ground. Ben and Tyron fell on her to block her.

  It took the three men, two security guards, and another two nurses to wrestle Gina back on the bed and immobilize her.

  Even with four leather restraints, Gina was thrashing and contorting like an enraged animal. She opened her mouth and hissed, her eyes filled with raw hatred.

  Ben looked at Tyron, “So, you were saying that she’s getting worse?”

  Tyron didn’t answer.

  Gas Station

  “I can’t believe I have to stay there all night,” Tracy said driving the old Honda Civic down Adam Boulevard.

  “Mom is worried that Jeff Simons might do something.”

  “There’s going to be another fifty people in the room.”

  “I know,” the young girl said looking out the dirty car window.

  “…And Pastor Rich didn’t say anything when you called him?” Tracy asked.

  “He said that they’re going to watch him carefully, but that we should give him a chance to redeem himself.”

  “Well, if he doesn’t redeem himself, it’s your butt on the line, not his–oh great…” she rolled her eyes.

  “What?”

  “My gas light is on. I need to stop by the Chevron down the street. Mom could at least give me
some gas money to drive you around. I even have to pay for my own repairs on this piece of junk.”

  Jessica didn’t comment.

  “The guy’s a stalker. Did you tell him that?”

  “Well, when we talked about the high school episode, he said that Jeff went to apologize, and that there’s only one high school in Stone Falls. So it was not hard to figure out that I’m a student there.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s all nice, but I still don’t like it. That Simons is a creep.”

  The gray Civic jumped past the gutter into the gas station. Bright lights illuminated the service area and the pumps in the falling night.

  “I’ll be a minute.” Tracy stepped out of the car and entered the Food Mart. Two young men were in the back browsing through bags of chips. An older and overweight man in overalls with grizzling hair crowning his skull stood by himself in the beer section.

  She took a Twix candy bar by the counter and tossed it by the cash register. “I’ll need twenty-five bucks on number three,” she told the young pimply attendant.

  “Sure,” he said without looking at her.

  “Isn’t this a great surprise?” A familiar voice said right behind her.

  The Leader, the young punk from the factory, was standing a foot away from her, his two Dobermans beside him, laughing as if he had said something hilarious.

  In a survival reflex, Tracy glanced around the store to find anybody to back her up. The fat man was still checking out his beers. This wouldn’t be his problem anyway. Now behind her, the 120 pound cashier wouldn’t be able to fight a teenage girl, let alone wrestle these three idiots. The other two men were walking to their car without anything in their hands.

  She was alone.

  “Oh, come on, guys, the mill was fun but you need to get over it.”

  “Well, I’m not over it,” the Leader said.

  “So now what? Are you going to punch me in the face to make yourself feel better? Wow, you can beat up a girl with your two buddies, that’s brave.”

  “You surely have a big mouth–”

  “And I have big fists and boots big enough to kick your butt.”