Free The Darkness to Come by Brandon Massey Page B

upholstery was ripped as if a pack of feral cats had been trapped inside, the heater coughed like an old man with emphysema, and the exterior passenger door was riddled with what appeared to be bullet holes, but the eight-cylinder engine was in good working condition. For his purposes, he didn’t want an eye-catching car. The old Chevy Caprice, long associated with police officers, ironically, was so obsolete and plain it was all but invisible on the streets.
     Navigating the slushy roads, Dexter left the city and took I-94 West. Pre-incarceration, he had sped around town in a Mercedes convertible, driving fast and recklessly. Now, he was careful to keep the Chevy under the speed limit. With his expired license and duffel bag full of cash and deadly cutlery, he couldn’t afford a run-in with the law.
    Around ten o’clock in the morning, he arrived in the city of Zion.
    Although Dexter had grown up in Chicago, forty-five minutes south, until he’d met his wife he’d never visited Zion. There was little there worth seeing, in his opinion—it was one of those dull Chicago suburbs that restless teenagers fantasized about escaping as soon as they graduated. The so-called downtown was a miserable mess of mom-and-pop stores and mainstream establishments. Ugly, split-level homes and featureless ranches dominated the neighborhoods. There was a church on almost every corner, and most of the streets had Biblical names: Enoch, Bethel, Ezekiel, Gabriel, and the like.
    His wife had told him that, until a few years ago, they hadn’t even allowed the sale of alcohol within city limits. It was no wonder that she had left this shit hole for Chi-town, where he’d met her and they had lived in a glitzy downtown high-rise.
    But Dexter believed that she had returned to Zion. She had grown up there, and her aunt, her closest surviving relative, still lived in the town. While he was incarcerated, and the letters that he mailed to her at their condo came back as undeliverable, and his attempts to call her revealed a disconnected number, he was positive that she had moved back here to be near her family.
    Several times, he had attempted to collect call her aunt from prison, to learn his wife’s whereabouts. The old bitch had refused to accept the calls, an insult he never forgot.
    Her aunt lived on the west side of town, in a quaint neighborhood of brick ranches with large yards, winter-stripped elms, and towering, ice-mantled pines. Dexter slowly cruised past her house.
    Like the other homes in the neighborhood, hers was a brick ranch, accessible via a long, snow-covered walkway flanked by naked elms. A Christmas tree stood in the front window, merry lights twinkling.
    Briefly, he wondered if the old bitch might have moved—perhaps into a nursing home or a grave. Then he saw the wooden plate on the mailbox that stated The Leonards in scrolling script, and he knew she still lived there.
    There were no newspapers piled on the porch. He remembered she’d been a stickler for following the daily news. The lack of a paper outside meant that she’d already plucked it off the ground, which meant that she was probably home at that moment.
    He parked a couple of doors down, shut off the engine, and waited. He wanted to stake-out the house for a while. Prison had taught him many things, and chief of all them was patience.
    Occasionally, a car grumbled past, tires spitting up snow. A few houses down, a kid came outdoors with a golden Retriever, and child and dog tumbled through the snow until a woman yelled at them to come back inside.
    Two hours later, no one had emerged from the house. It was another freezing day, however, and old folks tended to stay indoors in such weather, their brittle bones unable to withstand the low temperatures.
    He pulled his hat low over his head.
    He already had a knife clipped inside his jacket.
    He climbed out of the Chevy and crunched through the slush. A white delivery van rumbled down the road, and he waited for it