The Devil You Know Read Online Free Page B

be fifty-four teams, two per every hundred feet. We were going to fan out, heading north to Cherry Hill, the next big town over. He hadn’t known who to buddy me up with, so I was going with Deputy Dog. Oh joy. Still better than getting one of the members of the Legion of Doom, I suppose. He’d likely shoot me in the woods and claim I looked like a deer.
    “Are those the grieving parents?” I said, nodding discreetly toward the back of the house. A couple stood there, talking to a reporter from Mountaintop Radio, our local talk station. I recognized the reporter, Shelley Preston, the shining, young face of modern daytime talk radio. She had that perky palomino beach bunny look you normally associate with Venice Beach gurus and reruns of Baywatch , her skin carefully spray-tanned four shades darker than her long golden tresses.
    Four years ago, while Shelley was working for a minor local paper, she visited Curiosities and interviewed me for their Halloween edition, hoping to gain insight on the local pagan establishments. At least, that’s what she told me. While we were alone in the Loft, she nearly bit my dick off. She reacted badly to me throwing her out. The following day, Shelley’s paper ran a piece debunking everything that Curiosities did. Morgana was livid. She cast a spell on Shelley and the girl lost all her hair for a month. That was the day I learned an abiding respect for Morgana’s power.
    So I had Brad King on one side and Shelley Preston on the other. I was starting to feel like Odysseus trying to navigate between Scylla and Charybdis.
    “That’s the Bergers, yeah,” Ben said, not looking at them. His attention kept coming back around to Shelley, as any red-blooded American man’s would. I wasn’t about to judge him; I just didn’t agree with his tastes in women. Shelley had that perfected Hollywood beauty that I personally find rather bland. She looked like any of a hundred popular leading actresses. Not to mention she didn’t have the natural curves I favor. Not that I’m stuck on curves. Really.
    The Bergers, on the other hand, were very much natives of the northeast Pennsylvanian mountains, with ancestry dating back generations, at least. The husband, Thom Berger, was tall and stoop-shouldered and perfectly bald like someone had greased his head and shaved it clean. He wore glasses. His wife was only half as tall and had plump, baby doll arms poking out of a sleeveless white halter top that she was just a hair too old to be wearing. She too wore glasses, and her limp, standard-issue dark blond hair was tied up in a ponytail. She looked in her mid-twenties. Her husband looked closer to fifty. Not that I’m one to judge. I mean, as far as I’m concerned, as long as its legal and consensual, do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. But there’s something creepy about cradle-robbers, and as an itch started between my shoulder blades, I realized I immediately disliked Thom Berger.
    I watched him gesture wildly to Shelley as he spoke, though his wife looked zonked, a blonde zombie in a halter top. I hoped the Xanax trip was being good to her.
    “Can I talk to the couple?” I asked Ben rather suddenly. I was getting the same feeling off the couple as with Vivian, only inverted. Instead of empowered, I was feeling slightly weakened.
    Ben looked surprised, but not really put off. If I was just a citizen, I knew he wouldn’t have allowed it. But I was a cop—ex-cop—and I was here doing him a favor. He sort of had to let me. He directed his two deputies to start assembling the search teams, then turned back to me. “Is this about going with Branson?” he asked.
    I assumed Branson was Deputy Dog. “No,” I said, looking away back toward the Bergers. “I just want to talk to them, satisfy a curiosity.”
    “You gonna do mojo on them?”
    I smiled. Mojo wasn’t what I had in mind, and even if it was, I wasn’t sure what kind of mojo would help me find a lost child, but if Ben wanted