Chapter 38
Inside Creo’s Mitsubishi Montero, Sharon’s eardrums felt numb. Everyone’s voices sounded muffled.
She stuck her fingers inside her ears to try getting them to work right. The impairment must be just temporary damage to the fine sensory hairs inside her inner ear canal. Or was it long term?
Creo directed, “Give me something they have touched before. Something intimate.”
Laif looked at her.
At first she didn’t know why he was looking at her. When she figured it out, she felt nauseated.
He kept staring.
Her stomached turned, but she unbuttoned her jacket pocket and reached inside. Something cold and wet touched her fingers as she pulled out the forgotten, atrocious underwear. The smell of urine and feces rose.
Everyone’s noses crinkled in retaliation. The fumes permeated the limited air inside the SUV. The briefs were of a man. This was definitely something intimate from Joe Brewster.
“You want them, you got them.” Holding the underwear with only the tips of two fingers, Sharon dropped them onto Creo’s open hands and quickly wiped her fingers on the carpeted floor of his car. She would have preferred antibacterial soap.
Eyes wide, Creo exclaimed, “My God, Laif. Couldn’t you have picked up an undershirt, sock, towel, brush, strand of hair, or anything besides this?”
“I didn’t want to fail. This is a strong essence of the man.”
“Yes, but my God.” He threw the underwear to the floor on the other side of the car by a screwdriver, opened his window, coughed, and spat outside.
The rhythmic bass of Trance music could be heard through the warehouse walls.
To her relief, Laif cracked his window. A draft of fresh air now traveled through the SUV. She tried the windows in the back, but they were shut off.
She wished they were inside her car rather than Creo’s Montero. Sitting in the back, combined with the stench and the heavily tinted windows made her feel claustrophobic. “Let’s just get this over with.”
Creo spat outside again, pulled his fiery head back inside, and Laif picked up the underwear, grimacing. Creo tentatively reached for briefs with his left hand. When both of them were touching the material, they held each other’s free hands and closed their eyes.
Now this looked weird—two grown men, one forty-six and the other thirty, holding hands and touching a man’s dirty briefs.
Despite the heavily tinted windows, Sharon was glad Creo had parked far from the club entrance.
Creo and Laif started to hum lowly. Or was that the damage from the rave music in Sharon’s ears? She couldn’t tell. It rose slowly in tone and began to sound like part of the bass music from the warehouse, rising one moment, lowering the next. If it was them, they somehow matched each other’s pitch perfectly, as if they had been singing their whole lives.
It was a song, but like none Sharon had heard before, part Gregorian chant and part completely foreign. She gently banged on her ears to make sure she wasn’t hearing things because the sound seemed to emanate from the very structure of the car. It reverberated with itself, escalating in volume, competing with the muffled bass from the warehouse, then the bass joined in again, as though they were one and the same.
The sound came from everywhere, the pavement outside, the warehouse building, the car, the trees. She poked her fingers in her ears. She swore that she would never go into another rave again without earplugs.
Suddenly it stopped, leaving only the bass from the warehouse thudding in the distance. Both of the men opened their eyes.
“Do you have it?” asked Creo, shivering, eyes full of anxiety.
“I think so.”
“What do you mean, you think so? We shouldn’t have stopped if you aren’t certain.”
“I believe so.”
“Don’t just believe, be certain, man! I don’t want to have to go through that again.”
Laif turned to Sharon. He looked funny, like something was coming to him as he spoke. “The answer … it’s … in your pants.”
She asked, “What?”
“In your pants …”
“Okay, look, let’s not get perverted here. Focus on the goal, not me.”
“I am … it’s … in your pants.” He became increasingly excited, alarming her but also giving her a warm feeling of embarrassed pleasure.
“No one is going in my pants right here.” She scooted back in her seat.
“Empty your pockets, Sharon,” Creo said, irritated. “He means inside your pockets.”
“Oh,” she chuffed. “Yes, I can do that.” She chuckled softly and pulled out her keys and the newsletter she had taken from the Brewsters' house. Laif was still looking at her pants in that trance-excitement like stare. She felt embarrassed for what she had assumed he was thinking.
Laif’s eyebrows rose. “Open to the second to last page.”
She did as he instructed.
His finger shot out from the front seat and landed on it. “Yes. Right here. Here.” He was pointing at the advertisement for the spanking camp in the Santa Ana Mountains.
“You’re sure?”
Laif was out of his trance state now. He looked exhausted and spent, as though the psychic connection had been draining. “I believe so.”
“It’s about an hour and a half drive from here.” Creo paused and then said, “I felt something else in the connection. Terribly evil and powerful.” He shivered. “There hasn’t been such energy for a long time.”
“You’re only forty-six, right?” she countered.
“It’s as though the scales that balance good and evil have dipped toward evil.”
“What does that mean?” asked Laif.
“I don’t know.” Creo threw the dirty underwear out the window and rolled it all the way up.
“Will you come with us?”
He didn’t answer. Instead, he sat with his back bowed, looking at the entrance to the rave, watching some partiers trickling out. It was just as Sharon figured. He wasn’t going to help.
“If what you saw is true,” Laif pressed, “I can’t fight this alone.”
Creo kept watching the entrance to the rave, his temple, his sanctuary.
“I know you’re good, Creo.”