Page 12 of Grave Danger

“I can,” Cody grumbled. “We busted our asses to stop Nicolae. You fucking offered yourself up to him as a goddamn sacrifice. The little shit should be thanking us he doesn’t howl at the moon with the rest of this ungrateful town.”

A heavy silence fell on them. It was crushing, like being trapped under a heavy tent canvas, and Cody squeezed the steering wheel so hard it squeaked under his sweaty palms. Before he could even consider what to say to try to fix things, Lucia had pulled the cruiser to the side of the narrow blacktop lane.

“Demmy…” Cody started as he put the truck in park.

“It’s okay,” Demmy said. “I get it. I do. Let’s see what’s going on out here, and we can discuss it later. Come on.”

Cody watched him get out of the truck. The sound of the door closing felt like some kind of symbolism, but Lucia and Zellmer were already waiting outside the cruiser, and he didn’t have time to follow that train of thought. He got out of the truck and approached the cruiser.

“What we’re about to show you goes no farther,” Lucia said. “Is that clear?”

“We know the routine,” Cody grumbled.

Zellmer didn’t say a word, his expression blank beneath the aviator sunglasses. When Lucia headed off across the grass, picking her way between headstones, Zellmer followed. Demmy fell in line behind Zellmer, and Cody brought up the rear. He looked at the back of Demmy’s head, noticed how thin his hair had gotten, and felt a strong swell of love.

Why couldn’t he just keep his fucking mouth shut and let Demmy lead the way on things like this?

Because at some point, things like this might finally take Demmy away from him for good, and Cody didn’t think he’d ever recover from something like that.

They topped a gentle rise, and Lucia and Zellmer stopped. Demmy stood a bit off to Lucia’s left, and Cody came up on Demmy’s left side. He found himself looking down on a picturesque scene, like something from one of those painters so many people had copies of in their living rooms. Large trees stood a good distance apart, branches green with fresh new leaves reaching toward the gray clouds laying heavy overhead. The smooth green of the grass was dotted with headstones and benches, and even though it was a goddamn cemetery, Cody thought it all looked peaceful and serene.

All of it, that was, except for the black dirt that marked a fresh grave several yards away. There was no headstone, so he assumed it was the mayor’s grave. As he looked, he realized a good portion of the dirt appeared to have been pushed aside, as if something, or someone, had dug up and out of the grave.

“Oh my God,” Demmy said in a whisper. “Is that the mayor’s grave?”

“It is,” Lucia replied. “And when you look down into that hole, you can see straight into the casket.” She looked at them. “His empty casket.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Demetrius stared out the window as Cody took a right outside the cemetery gates and headed into town. Neither of them had anything to say. The fields were green blurs, mostly corn, the tassels not yet removed and waving in the breeze. Soybeans were the second favorite crop in their area, and the plants were lower to the ground as if crouching there ready to spring up at any moment.

Kind of like George Clarke, who had died about ten days ago, and been buried three days after that. Coroner pronounced it a heart attack while he’d been home alone.

Apparently the mayor had unfinished business, since he hadn’t stayed buried.

Demetrius shook his head. What the hell was going on? Could the mayor have really dug his way out of his own grave? If that was what had happened, how had it come to be? He’d been embalmed, hadn’t he? Wasn’t that a legal requirement or some kind of standard practice or something? And if it had been him, which Demetrius was pretty sure it had been, where the hell had he gone?

He frowned, and his reflection in the glass made him look like a ghost.

“When’s our next job?” Cody’s voice seemed loud as it broke the silence between them.

Demetrius blinked a few times, clearing his thoughts, then checked the calendar on his phone. “We have one job this afternoon. Jugs handled the two jobs we had this morning.”

“Feel like an early lunch at Margie’s?”

Before Demetrius could reply, his phone buzzed with an incoming call. “It’s Amelia.” He accepted the call and put it on speaker. “Hi, Aunt Amelia. I’m in the truck with Cody, so I have you on speaker.”

“Hello, you two handsome men.” Amelia’s perky voice helped chase some of the dread from Demetrius’s mind.

“Gotta love a greeting like that,” Cody said, and Demetrius was happy to see at least a half smile on his full, soft lips.

“Well, it’s a spring day, and I just got back from having my hair done,” Amelia said. Demetrius could just picture her primping her silver hair cut in a bob.

“You must look ravishing,” Cody said. “Otis probably has to fend the suitors off with a golf club.”

Amelia giggled. “Oh, coconut trees, Cody Bower, how you talk.”

The statement made Demetrius smile. Amelia used the names of trees as expressions of surprise or replacements for curses, and her selections were always unique.