Chapter Ten – Faith

 

“You shot him?” I hissed as we headed back down the little alleyway to the morgue. His telling me that he’d shot one the perpetrators had pushed through all my concern about the one who’d gotten away with the remains, or my curiosity about who the runner actually was.

“Yeah,” he replied, not even breaking stride. “They were breaking in, weren’t they? This is Texas, isn’t it?”

“You can’t just go around shooting people, Sam! Even in Texas!”

“I wasn’t just going around shooting people,” he said. “I gave them fair warning, didn’t I?”

“You’re not a cop, though,” I said. “You’re a newspaper reporter!”

“And we’re not allowed to be armed?” he asked, not missing a beat as we stopped in front of the morgue’s loading entrance. “This whole, “the pen is mightier” thing?”

I’m not anti-gun, or anything. I didn’t exactly grow up around them, or anything, but I did have a healthy respect for the second amendment. It’s hard to live in Texas and not. But, I’d never been involved in a real shooting before. Or anywhere close to it. That was the kind of thing that happened in TV dramas, or action films, not in my real life. Realization of the situation began to set in.

“Oh no,” I whispered. “I’m going to get fired. Dr. Lawrence is going to fire me as soon as he hears about this. They’re going to have to call him to come in and look at the crime scene, and he’s going to know I was here when I wasn’t supposed to be here, and he’s going to fire me.”

Sam gave me a look, as if he was calculating something behind his eyes, trying to think through matters. “Shit.”

I closed my eyes, pictured a bloody corpse on the floor. Blood splatters on the wall, on the ceiling. Maybe the burglar had gotten up, stumbled around, spread it everywhere. It was going to be a mess, and Sam was going to get blamed for killing whoever it was that was trying to steal the pig’s remains, and I was going to be the one named responsible for even letting him in.

“Okay,” Sam said to me while I stood there, my eyes still closed. “Okay, I know what we can do.”

“What?” I asked, opening my eyes again and looking at him.

“We’re going to move the body.”

“Move the body?” I asked, my voice cracking at the end. “Are you serious?”

“Look,” he said, “I’ll still take responsibility for it. But, I’ll just say he tried to carjack me or something. Your name won’t even come into things.”

I ran a hand back through my damp hair. The cool air had already begun to dry it, but my panic over this whole thing was making me sweat all over again. “Jesus Christ,” I whispered. “This isn’t happening.”

“Hey,” he said, grabbing me by both shoulders, forcing me to look into his eyes, “you’re all right. Okay?”

I looked up into those blue eyes of his, at the confidence in them. I don’t know why, but I wanted to trust him, even though I’d only met him earlier that day. But, I couldn’t let him take responsibility for all of it. This was as much my problem as his. But, the fact that he was willing to do that for me, I didn’t even know how to react.

“I don’t want you involved in this thing any more than you want to be involved in it, okay? I shot him; it’s my problem.”

“Sam, I can’t let you do that,” I replied, shaking my head. “When you call the cops, where do you think they’re going to take the body? It’s going to be right back in on that table, and then I’m going to have to start lying again. Where’s it going to stop?”

He sucked in a sharp breath, nodding as he released me from his grip. “Okay, then. Let’s go do this.” He pulled open the door and led the way inside the pitch darkness with me right on his heels. Just inside, though, he stopped dead in his tracks.

“What’s going on?” I asked, coming out from behind him. “Is it that bad?”

“No,” he said. “That’s the weird thing. It’s not.”

“How can you even tell?” I replied, fumbling for the little flashlight he’d given me earlier and clicking on the beam. I shone the beam around the room, settling in on where the body had fallen during the earlier fighting before I’d stupidly sprinted from the room after the other person.

But, there was no body. I crossed over to the spot, looked over the floor and the wall.

“See what I mean?” he asked.

There wasn’t even any blood. It was spotless. Perfectly spotless. “Maybe you didn’t actually hit him?” I asked as I shifted the beam around, desperately searching for some kind of evidence. I mean, if he’d hit the guy, there would have been something. Some kind of blood splatter, something to show it.

Instead, there were only the two bullet casings from Sam’s gun.

“No, I hit him.”

I turned the beam back to him as he came over, crouching down where the corpse should have been. “Well,” I started, uncertainly, “clearly you didn’t, Sam. Otherwise we’d see something, right?”

Still on his haunches, he looked up at me, lips pressed into a thin line as he seemed to watch me for a moment. He didn’t respond at first, just reached down and picked up the two bullet casings from the tiled floor. Finally he spoke, saying, “You’re probably right.” He stood up and moved away from the spot, turning his back to me. “Yeah, I probably just knocked him unconscious, and then he got up and left while we were outside chasing the other one. That’s it. Probably just went out the front or something while we were out back talking about what to do with him.”

“Well, of course that’s it,” I said, laughing a little. “Even better, now we don’t have to go to the cops, right?”

“Unless you want to tell them about the pig going missing.”

“Well, from what you were telling me, Dr. Lawrence doesn’t seem to even want to admit that it was ever here to begin with. So why get them involved at all? It’s not like they can help with your story, right?”

“Right,” he said. “Still leaves me without any evidence, though.”

His words, for whatever reason, were like a stab in the gut. Did the lack of evidence mean he wasn’t going to write the story? And, if he wasn’t going to write the story, that meant he was probably going to be leaving town soon.

“Well, you still have my word, don’t you?” I asked, leaning back against the wall. “I mean, I was here when they first brought it in. You could use me as your source, couldn’t you?”

He seemed to carefully weigh my words. “Yeah,” he said, slowly, the word leaving his mouth as slowly as molasses, “I guess I could maybe do that. I’ll have to, um, talk to my editor first. See if using an unnamed source like that would be acceptable.”

“If not?” I asked, my mind reaching, grasping for some way to keep him here. I didn’t exactly know why it was so important to keep him around. I mean, other than the fact that he was hot. And, now that I’d seen him pull a gun, kind of dangerous.

For whatever stupid reason, the danger aspect even worked in his favor. I don’t know why, either. I was a good girl, wasn’t I? I mean, I didn’t want a guy like that, did I?

“If not,” he said, “I might have to look for some other sources of information. Some other kind of evidence.”

As he spoke, my brain was working overtime. It was suddenly beginning to strike me how bizarre all of this was. Mutilated pigs, Dr. Lawrence acting so strange in his office, weird people in hoods breaking into the morgue to steal evidence. I hugged myself tightly as I leaned back against the wall.

Mental images of black helicopters, of UFOs and Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, flashed before my eyes. My God, I wasn’t in an action film or a cop show. I was in an episode of The X-Files. What was next? Little gray men performing abductions and probing?

“Sam?” I asked. “Who the hell were those guys?”

“I don’t know, to be honest.”

“Could they have been part of some…cover-up? Like a conspiracy?”

He stopped, looked at me. Cocked his head to the side.

“To, you know,” I continued, “hide the truth?”

A strange look came over his face, like he was holding back tears. Shoulders shaking, he turned away from me.

Was he having a seizure or something? “Sam…?” I asked, taking a step towards him, my hand outstretched. “Are you okay?”

His shoulders shook a little harder for a moment, and then I heard it.

The laughter.

I felt the blood rise to my face, could feel the heat down my neck and across my chest. “Oh, shut up,” I said. “Stop laughing at me.”

His chuckle finally faded away, and he turned back to me. “Sorry. UFOs? Come on, that’s almost as silly as it being a cult or something.”

“Well,” I asked, my voice rising a little, “what else could it be? Huh? You got any better idea?”

“Oh, it’s probably just whoever it was that killed that poor pig in the first place,” he said, giving me a broad smile that was somehow soothing. “Hell, maybe it was even just a coincidence? Not everything is a conspiracy, you know.”

“Think so?” I asked, the warmth fading from my cheeks.

He shrugged again. “Not going to know for sure until I look into it further. But, yeah, I wouldn’t worry yourself too much about it. But, hey, we should probably get out of here. Someone might have heard the gunshot and reported it.”

Now it was my turn to chuckle.

“What’s so funny?”

“People shoot guns all the time out here, Sam. No one’s going to report a couple pistol shots. Probably just think it’s some drunk field hand celebrating getting laid or something. Besides, this time of night there’s probably not anyone around to have heard it.”

“Well, better safe than sorry. If they do come by, for whatever reason, we probably shouldn’t be in here.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right. What should I do about the back door?”

“Leave it the way we found it,” he said. “That way your boss will find it and know there was a break-in. If he asks if you were here last night, tell him the truth. Just don’t offer any information. I mean, you don’t know who stole the pig, right?”

I sighed. It made a weird kind of sense. “Well, no.”

“And you didn’t get a good look at them, right?”

I shook my head.

“See? Just don’t offer anything, and they’ll never even know you were here.”

“Jesus, Sam. I thought you were a reporter, not some criminal.”

He chuckled, gave me that little half-smile of his. “Now why is that criminal?”

I grinned back at him. “Well, maybe not criminal.”

“Now, come on,” he said, heading for the door. “Let’s get out of here.”

Together, we left the examination room and went back out to the parking lot. As we left, we remained silent. Something was eating away at the back of my mind, though. A little bit of worry.

“Sam?” I asked as I began to lock up the front door. “Do you think they, um, know who I am?”

“Why would you ask that?”

“Well, whoever it was that was here, they knew the pig was here. I mean, they clearly came for it.” I gripped my keys tightly. “So, do you think they somehow might, I dunno, come for me?”

He clenched his jaw a little and furrowed his brow. “Why would they do that?” he asked. “I mean, they got what they came for, right? Even if you hadn’t seen them take it, you would still have known it was stolen.”

I inhaled sharply through my nose, nodded a little. Despite his assurances, I was still worried. I mean, what if they did follow me home? Or they somehow knew who I was? What then?

Sam must have sensed that. “Want me to follow you home? Make sure everything’s okay?”

“You don’t mind?” I asked, brushing a lock of stray hair back behind my ear. “You sure?”

“Nah,” he said, waving me off. “Just, pull out here and turn left. I parked my car down the road.”

I headed over to my car, saying, “Thanks again. My roommate’s out at some bar for the night, so I’m just a little nervous, that’s all.”

“Don’t mention it,” he said, then turned to leave.

Just as I opened the driver’s side door, I had another momentary pang of worry. “Hey, Sam?” I called to his back.

“Yeah.”

“You sure they weren’t part of some crazy conspiracy? Or like…a devil’s cult or something? A bunch of Satan worshipers?”

He just chuckled and gave me a grin. “Remember, I’m down here on the left.”

And then he was gone, already headed for his own vehicle.

I climbed into my car, started it up, and reversed out of my parking spot. Moments later, I drove by his parked Camaro, with its headlights already on, and it rumbled up into my rear view mirror. With him on my tail, and his promise to check out my house, I felt safer than I had since before our run-in with the intruders.