Door 325 of the Greenroof Motel opened to a tidy, one-bedroom unit. Whining immediately greeted Kellen as he entered the space. Wolf lay near one of the bedposts, her tail tucked forebodingly between her legs, a guilty, ear-flattened look on her face.
“What did you do?” Kellen asked simply. He dropped his bag on the floor and put his hands on his hips.
More whining. Wolf was making a point of looking anywhere in the world but at her person.
Kellen’s chest froze mid-inhale. The Febreze plug-in on the wall. Citrus-scented cleaner coming from the kitchenette. And something else. He took another whiff of the air and stepped around the bed. “Seriously, Wolf?” He glanced back at his dog, flattened pathetically on the floor. “Alright, okay. It’s the first night. This one time.” He glanced around the small unit, then started for the paper towels in the kitchenette.
Wolf’s tail began thumping hopefully against the hard floor.
“Professional help.” Kellen unwound a wad off the paper towel roll and tore it at the perforation. That was always Lila’s response. And he had done it for her the first time she asked him to. Right after he told her about the dreams.
“I want you to see a psychiatrist. I really think a psychiatrist could help you. And therapy.”
He had done both. “The dreams aren’t real,” the professionals had said. And that had helped. Being able to tell himself that had helped a lot.
But then there was more Lila wanted him to see a professional about. The truth about the Everglades when he finally told her. The disappearance. The day Lila presented her then-husband with a list of what she called “signs.”
“Had to be a turd,” Kellen muttered to himself, dropping the paper towel wad over the offense on the floor. “Couldn’t hold it in, could you?”
Wolf had set her head flat on the floor facing away, but her tail began thumping again.
There were two new messages on Kellen’s phone when he checked it. Both were from Marcus.
De’Angelo: Address for first meet. He said he would find you at the booths to the right from the entrance at 4AM. He’ll find you.
Kellen touched his thumb to the address in the second message until the “Copy” option appeared. While Google Maps loaded the location, he stepped around the nightstand and punched a six-digit code into the wall safe. The door opened with a click.
But Kellen was not looking at the holstered Glock 34 within as he set his wallet in the locker beside it. He was looking at his phone.
Neon signs, pictures of an elaborate bar, plush seating, glittering chandeliers, and polished silver poles fixed from tabletops to ceiling rafters.
Exotix, the name of the place read. A small grimace crept across Kellen’s face. “Novelty strip club,” were the first three words of Google’s description of it.
Kellen copied the six-letter name and opened Access on his phone. He pulled up Winchester Central Records and dropped “Exotix” into the search bar.
One car break-in report.
Two instances of vandalized patron property—undoubtedly also cars.
No other criminal activity reports in the last ten years.
That was unusual for a business located on the margins of the law.
“Let’s get you outside before another mess happens,” Kellen murmured to his dog. The phone screen went dark under the tap of his finger, and he shut the wall locker. He leaned down and dragged a worn duffel out from under the bed, then dropped it onto the mattress. “We’re in the city, Wolf,” he added as he drew out a braided leather leash and looped it around the dog’s neck.
“—Here in the Florida Everglades. The closest town to the settlement was Wickswitch, Florida, with a population of 2,050. Led by their so-called ‘Prophet,’ Michael Farrar, they called themselves the Lights of the World, or simply ‘Lights.’ Their neighbors knew them as a religious organization that cared deeply for the impoverished communities of Wickswitch and other neighboring towns. To outsiders, they were do-gooders, volunteers in the community, and evangelists.
“…But within the walls of their settlement, Lights hid a culture of practices truly sinister.”
It was always the same. The way he woke from one of those memory dreams. He wasn’t awake at all until he was upright on the bed, arms spread for support like he was drowning in the blankets, the whole room lifting and sinking like wind-blown ripples in brine water.
Hide me.
Kellen reached for the nightstand, and his trembling fingers found the chain on the bedside lamp. Gently, he pulled it.
Light flooded the space, immediately stabilizing the motion. And still, Kellen’s ears were left with dull ringing like there was water in them.
It had been on 60 Minutes. Kellen distinctly remembered the full paralysis that had seized his teenage body when he overheard his warehouse coworkers talking about the episode. How he had gone home to the room he rented, a knot the size of his own fist developing in the pit of his stomach, and looked up the story on his phone within the privacy of a dark closet.
How that knot had tightened, tightened, tightened. And still, he kept watching. Left breathless by everything that had been exposed. Yet more floored by how much would never be revealed.
A warm, furry lump settled on Kellen’s thigh, and he looked down to see Wolf’s head resting there, her eyes pinned questioningly up at him.
“It’s nothing you need to worry about,” Kellen whispered. His fingers touched her forehead, then lightly swept back into the white and black patchwork of her coat. “You sleep a while longer. I’m not tired anymore.”
The shower must have been cold, because the mirror was crystal clear. But he didn’t remember the temperature, Kellen dimly realized as he raised a bottle of cologne and sprayed a light mist into the air.
Dark eyes. Dark brows. Chin, jawline, cheekbones, and skin tone like some kind of cross between Asian, Latino, and white. Sharp where it mattered, smooth where it didn’t. “So god-damn handsome,” Lila used to call that face. The body toned for stamina. That knife scar at his collar bone. The one near his shoulder from the first time he had been shot. The other coincidentally two inches below where he had been shot the second time.
Lila had been in his life that second time, and she had begged him to stop taking jobs.
Suddenly feeling sick to the stomach, Kellen lifted a white button-up from the sink counter and put it on. He left the top three buttons open, then rolled up the sleeves to expose his forearms. He looked at himself in the mirror for a moment, then rolled up the sleeves a little farther. His fingers lifted to his hair, combed the loose locks out of his face, then secured them back in a short half-up ponytail behind his head. Another look in the mirror.
Some jewelry, maybe. Who exactly was he trying to be? Someone pretending to be rich, or someone actually rich?
Pretending to be rich is easier, Kellen decided as he chose a flashy gold chain bracelet from a cardboard box and slipped it around his wrist. He pressed a pair of diamond studs into infrequently used ear piercings, then rinsed the subsequent blood drops off his fingers in the sink. He added a gold chain around his neck.
And finally, he tucked the worn leather string already hanging from his neck farther back into the collar of his shirt.
“Jay,” he pronounced his own name, lifting a police-provided alternative ID into the light. Jay Sandler. Thirty-two years old. From San Diego, California. “I like yachts, but motorcycles are more within my means,” he murmured to the mirror.
For a second or two as his eyes met the glass, he thought he caught a glimpse of something under the Jay Sandler staring back at him. Something darker.
“Sinister.”