Howard Patrick unlocked the door to his realty office on Main Street, stepped inside, and flipped on the switches that not only illuminated the overhead fluorescent fixtures but also the Christmas tree, animated Grinch, and electric menorah he kept in the front window from December first to January fifth every year. If he could have found an electrical Kwanzaa display, he would have put that in too, particularly since he and his wife and two kids had taken to celebrating Kwanzaa four years before, in addition to Christmas, wanting to instill in the kids a firm sense of their African heritage—but mainly because he wanted his business, Kaibab Realty, to be all-inclusive. Everyone needed a place to live, and he wanted to be the guy who helped everybody buy or sell theirs.
On the way to his desk he stopped and turned on the radio, to a satellite station that played nothing but holiday tunes. Johnny Mathis came on singing “The Christmas Song,” and Howard smiled. He liked comfortable things; the comforts of a well built home, a fat bank account, family, and the comfort of a familiar song. He tapped the thermostat’s Up arrow and the furnace kicked on.
His desk was made of oak, blond and polished, and it was a good thing it had sides because he hadn’t seen the top of it in years. Paper completely obscured it: listings printed from online, flyers, notes, a couple of contract packages waiting for people to drop by the office to sign, folded newspaper classifieds, and more; once, he found a commission check that had worked its way to the bottom of a pile and stayed there for two months. The only place there wasn’t paper was under his phone.
After hanging his coat on a hook, he sat down and put his briefcase on the floor by his feet. From it, he drew a laptop, which he set on the desk on top of several random paper objects. He opened it up and turned it on. Another day at the office.
The first thing he did was to check his e-mail account. More and more business was done online every day. He hadn’t yet reached the point where he could show and sell a house without ever leaving his desk, but that day was coming, he believed. Already online listings replaced the miles and miles of driving to every possible home that had once characterized the job. Clients often came to him with specific properties in mind that they had found on the Web and wanted to see in person once before making the offer they’d already decided on—sometimes with the help of online mortgage calculators.
Today he had nineteen e-mails in his in-box. Three were spam, which he deleted. Four were personal. The rest were related, in one way or another, to his business. Reading those and trying to respond—growing increasingly frustrated that everything he sent out bounced right back, and when he tried to call tech support he found that call wouldn’t go through either—took an hour and eleven minutes. He closed the window, looked at the clock, leaned back in his desk chair, and stretched his legs out.
Eight fifty-six. At nine he usually liked to walk around the block, stop in at the Wagon Wheel for a cup of joe and once in a while a doughnut or a slice of apple pie. He’d greet friends and neighbors, leaving them with the impression that good old Howard Patrick was a great guy with whom they should do business whenever they found themselves in the market.
Time for one quick phone call before he went. He had tried yesterday to get through to Juliet Monroe, because he had a party coming in from California on Monday who was interested in a ranch property like hers. She hadn’t answered her phone, which was unusual for her. He’d left a message on her voice mail but gotten no call back, which was even more unusual. He’d tried Stu, her ranch hand, at his place in town, again with no response. Finally, he dropped her an e-mail, but there had been no reply in his in-box.
She could have gone out of town, although ordinarily she would tell him if she had any such plans. But even when she did, she usually checked her voice mail. And she was anxious to sell the place, so she’d jump at a chance to show it.
He had a key, of course, and could show it without her there, but he always liked to have express permission before going into someone else’s home.
He checked her number and dialed it. Four rings, then voice mail picked up. He listened to the outgoing message, then the beep, and said, “Juliet, this is Howard again. It’s Saturday morning, and this fellow will be here on Monday morning to look at ranch properties. I’ve shown him your listing and he’s very interested, so please get back to me and let me know if it’s okay to bring him around on Monday. Thanks, and have a terrific weekend.”
People in town sometimes called him “Mr. Terrific,” because he tended to use that word when anyone asked him how he was or how business was or how the family was or how did he like the weather. “Terrific,” he’d say, “just terrific!” He didn’t mind the nickname. It helped instill a positive impression of him, and success in life was about positive impressions. That good old Howard Patrick, good old Mr. Terrific, he’s got a good business going there. He could probably sell my house for me.
Maybe Juliet had simply forgotten to tell him that she was going away for the weekend. No harm, no foul.
But then again, something sour was going on in Cedar Wells. Everybody was talking about it, and the whispers had become full-blown exclamations since early yesterday. People were being killed, but nobody knew by whom, or why. And Juliet, living alone on that ranch, would be as vulnerable as anyone. Then there was the trouble with the e-mail and phones.
Instead of going to the Wheel, he would take his half hour and run over to Juliet’s. Just to put his mind at ease.
Verify. Never mind trust, just verify. That had been Dad’s advice, Dean argued, and Sam remembered the lessons, too. In a hushed conference, with Harmon Baird waiting outside the motel room door—even there he carried his rifle, but coming through town they had seen other people bearing visible weapons, so no one was likely to pay much attention to that—they had discussed what he’d told them, finally agreeing that they needed to see if he was just blowing smoke or if he knew what he was talking about.
He seemed pretty certain of his statements. And he had been at multiple scenes, which indicated a better understanding of the attackers than most people had. But they had to make sure.
So they were standing in the woods. Tall pines blocked the morning sun, which was only now beginning to burn through the clouds. A breeze from the north carried a chill and the threat of more bad weather. Dean carried the pump-action Remington, Sam the sawed-off. Both wore sidearms as well, and had stuffed their pockets with rock salt shells and extra bullets.
With the sawed-off tucked under his left arm, Sam held an infrared thermal scanner. He trained the double green laserlike beams this way and that, and they spiked off on separate paths into the trees. As he moved it around, he watched the device’s small screen for any indication of paranormal activity.
“Anything?” Dean asked.
“Nothing.” They might as well have been hunting deer, except if they had, they probably would have found something by now. As it was, Sam couldn’t shake the feeling that they were wasting time. Baird said they came out of the woods, but there were a lot of woods around here, so even if he was right, they might simply have been in the wrong spot. Then again, Baird was also ninety-one years old, and the fact that he sounded mostly coherent didn’t mean that he wasn’t suffering dementia of some kind. “Maybe there’s somewhere else we should try, Mr. Baird?” he asked. People could be dying while they froze their asses off in the forest.
“Plenty of places, yeah, boy,” Baird said, that weird spaced-out smile he sometimes wore flashing across his face. “But one’s as good as the next. Can’t know where they’re comin’, or when, so you just have to guess. Guess and hope, that’s what it is. Guess and hope.”
“I’m getting a little tired of hoping,” Dean said. “I want to shoot something.”
“You’ll get your chance, young one. Believe that, yessir. You’ll get your chance, ’fore too much longer.”
How can you be so sure, Sam wanted to ask, if you don’t know where or when they’ll show up? He had already learned that it was hard to get straight answers out of Baird most of the time, so he didn’t bother asking. Baird knew what he knew, it seemed, and didn’t worry about the rest of it. Same could be said of anyone, Sam supposed. Maybe Baird’s conviction was something like religious faith. Sam believed in a higher power, and Dean didn’t. Sam didn’t have any special knowledge that Dean lacked, hadn’t seen or heard or met God. He just felt like there had to be something more than science could describe, because so many of the things they had seen and fought also seemed to exist outside of scientific understanding. So, without Dad’s much-vaunted verification, he believed.
As Baird seemed to believe that killing spirits would materialize in these woods.
Sam was about to switch off the ITS device when one of the green beams flickered, becoming as jagged as a bolt of lightning for a second. The machine gave a soft beeping sound. He couldn’t see anything that would have disrupted the beam, but disrupted it was. “Dean.”
“Gotcha,” Dean said softly. He raised his shotgun. Sam clicked off the device, shoved it into a deep coat pocket, and readied the sawed-off.
Harmon Baird grinned like a loon.
Where the beam had flickered, a deer stood, looking at them with its big, empty brown eyes.
It hadn’t been there a second ago. Then it was. Then it bounded away, like a deer would.
They followed. Sam lost it behind a tree for a second, and when he had it in sight again—
—well, what might have been it—
—it was a rangy coyote, shaggy coated, with ferocious looking fangs it showed when it snarled at them.
“Shapeshifter,” Dean said.
Baird raised his rifle to his shoulder, eyeing down its length at the coyote. “Hold on,” Dean told him. “Give it a minute.”
Baird looked confused, but moved his finger away from the trigger.
The coyote blinked from sight, flashed black, reappeared. Repeated the sequence. Like a TV set just before you get up off the couch and smack it one, Sam thought.
It stared at them, still snarling, like it might lunge. All three put their fingers inside their trigger guards, ready to fire.
Instead of attacking, it turned and sprinted away.
The three men gave chase. Dean let out a whoop as he hurtled a bush, following the coyote’s course. Baird cackled like a madman.
The animal went around a pine and disappeared behind an outcropping of big granite boulders, green and orange lichen coating their shadowed lower surfaces like corrosion on an old battery. Sam cut left, pushing ahead of Dean, and went behind the rocks. Up ahead he saw a flash of the coyote’s dun pelt and switching tail, cutting through the brush.
But he didn’t see where it went, because a man reared up from the rocks and swung a downed tree limb right into his face. Sam saw flashing lights, and went down among the rocks.