Page 1 of Final Inning

Prologue

Hagan Lindhour—the most ignored and despised deputy to have ever existed with the Helery County, Oklahoma Sheriff’s Department—was the one who took the call. She was the one who drove out to the old ball fields four miles south of town, hoping it was a prank call. Kids had found something.

The woman who had called had sworn up and down it was blood.

Human.

And that something about that place was cursed by the darkest of demons, or something. That the entire ball field complex, consisting of four rundown fields that were more the worse for the wear than they should be, was haunted. Cursed.

People had died there before. Many of them. Maybe even thousands of them.

Thousands, in a town that had never had more than five hundred people living in it at one time. Hmmm.

Most definitely cursed, the woman had said.

Hagan wasn’t so certain she disagreed. Helery County…sometimes she’d swear there was real evil in this little county. She just couldn’t prove it.

Hagan wasn’t superstitious. She also seriously doubted it was blood. And if it was, it probably wasn’t human—which the old woman was insisting it was. Hagan had to consider the source of the report, after all. The caller had a reputation. She’d lived at the old trailer park for more than forty years, she had told Hagan more than once.

The woman was a nuisance citizen. She regularly called in crank paranormal calls. Sometimes, once a week. Hagan was the only one who ever responded.

No one wanted to deal with Ruth, but a call about blood required a deputy’s response. And the trailer park was in Hagan’s part of the county. Buckbert—well, Hagan patrolled the tiny town exclusively. She had a relief deputy on weekends, that she could sometimes call in if she needed backup. But that was all the help she had.

She worked the smallest county in Oklahoma. She was the only woman deputy to have ever been hired by the county—and that was under protest. The men she worked with barely tolerated her presence. They all made that clear every chance they could.

She understood exactly what her role was now. She was the token woman on the force. There for pretty photo ops, parade duty, running errands—and dealing with what Sheriff Ted Johnson didn’t want to mess with. That was it.

Hagan fought against their antiquated, ridiculous sexism every single day.

She strongly suspected the call she was on was just another one of that woman’s delusions—and she’d roped in a few kids from the trailer park in on it.

It wouldn’t be the first time that had happened. Hagan suspected Ruth was just lonely, and she called in oddball things so Hagan would visit with her on a regular basis. There were a few shut-ins in the Buckbert area who had done similar things—until Hagan had made daily patrol stops at each of their houses a part of her routine.

Hagan pulled in by the main office, then took the last turn on the left—the River View Estates Trailer Park was in reasonably good shape. A large real estate company had tried to buy it out a few years ago, but the residents had protested and fought back. They kept it reasonably clean; drugs and domestic violence calls were much less frequent than people would have expected, and it wasn’t a half-bad trailer park. At least not compared to the ones on the southern side of the county.

Those were…terrifying.

Hagan had spent far too many years living in one of those units to ever forget. Her next-door neighbor had been a registered sex offender when Hagan had been eleven. He was the best of the neighborhood. Talk about…bad memories. She’d barely left the trailer, back then.

She never answered a call out there without backup. Ever.

Now, she pulled into 9434 West Garden Way. It was an older single-wide, maybe fifty years old, brown and tan, but Ruth kept it clean.

There were a few things that made Hagan wince—like the old signs that Ruth had posted everywhere, proclaiming Ruth’s particular spiritual beliefs, complete with what Hagan thought was the eye of Osiris or something. A concrete statue of three women in robes dominated, with a tacky bird fountain on top. The women were new.

Probably in response to Ruth’s neighbor’s latest signs of the cross, and what was left from his Easter display.

Bill Holmes took his faith very, very seriously.

Ruth Holmes took her pagan beliefs just as seriously.

It was war. Spiritual warfare, anyone who knew them knew that.

They were involved in a deep spiritual war that had lasted…decades. It was existential, even.

They had reports about these two going back longer than Hagan had even been alive.

Probably one reason they had divorced six months into their marriage forty-six years ago, as Ruth had told Hagan on more than one occasion. The man was just too damned delusional about what she called Dumbass Bill’s sky god, or something.