Note: I know nothing about whether dog hair and wolf hair are similar. For the sake of this story, they aren’t. Hope everyone enjoys this next chapter.
Chapter 13
August 2; Roswell
“Well, the Crashdown has been sold.” Detective Redding tossed a file onto his partner’s desk.
“Unbelievable. The girl is a suspect in her parent’s murder, leaves Roswell and then sells her parent’s business.” Tracy Malone shook her head.
Redding shrugged his shoulder. “To be fair we’ve mostly cleared her.”
“Yes, but she didn’t know that.” She pointed out. “She left town nearly three weeks ago and we’ve only recently come up with new information. Miss Parker must have known how it would look and she didn’t give a shit.” She sighed. “Have you gotten anything on the identity of the figure that was lurking around outside that night?”
“Nothing except what we got two weeks ago. The guy who runs the store near the Crashdown doesn’t remember anything except a shadowy figure that looked like it was having trouble walking straight and upright. But we couldn’t find anything near that section of the building where he said the guy was. When he went out to check, the other guy was gone. That was about fifteen minutes before the Parker’s time of death.” Redding read over the information in the file.
“The lab is still trying to identify the hair found on Jeff Parker. It has characteristics of both dog and wolf hair but is neither. They’ve crossed checked it with all other dog like animals out there and they’ve come up with nothing.” Malone stated. “I really don’t want this to become another weird unsolved case.”
It was common knowledge that there were those kinds of cases that had no explanation, the kinds of cases where there were clues but they lead nowhere. This was shaping up to being one of those.
As the two detectives continued to look over the file hoping to find anything that they might have missed the previous hundred times they searched through it, their Captain came up to their desks. “We got a homicide at 2231 Elk Lane, head down there; it looks like a similar MO to the Parker case.”
“Right away, Captain.” Both detectives stood up and left the precinct.
August 4; Texas
Something was wrong.
Something that should never happen had happened.
Liz raised her gaze from the crystal clear glass in front of her. “Hey.” She called to the man behind the bar.
She saw, but didn’t care, that he breathed out a sigh of irritation. “What’s wrong with this picture?” She asked when he was in front of her. Although she was seeing two of him she focused on a spot somewhere in the middle of the two frustrated figures.
“I can think of a lot of things but what do you think is wrong?” He glared down at her slumped over body with distain.
Liz raised the glass and shook it in front of him. “Empty. Duh. Fill it up.” She slammed the shot glass back on the counter.
The bartender refilled her shot glass and left her alone with her eighth shot of the night. It was clear at this point that she didn’t have the same issue with alcohol as Max, and she assumed the other aliens, had. One sip didn’t get her loopy; however eight shots did the job nicely.
Swishing the liquid around the glass she thought back on the last three weeks out on the road. After her run in with Gordon she hadn’t stopped driving for five hours, until she was well out of Roswell and almost out of New Mexico, and the only reason she stopped then was to get gas and grab a few hundred dollars from her bank account.
Now she didn’t take any of the money from her Elizabeth Parker bank account or even her parent’s accounts. She took it from her Erica Winterbourne account. After finding out about the aliens two years ago she had made the decision to start covering her, and essentially the other’s, asses. The possibility of having to run at sometime in the future was a high one. And nobody, not even Maria or Alex, knew that she had saved money for just such an occasion.
So at first she started putting aside various amounts of money from each pay check and she’d put it in the tin at the back of her desk. By the time their Vegas trip came she had a little over two thousand dollars in that tin. After Vegas and after her fake ID name change, she put most of the money she had originally put in the tin into an account in Erica Winterbourne’s name. Then after Alex died and she emptied her savings account to by a ticket to Sweden and when she didn’t go she put that money into the Winterbourne account as well. By the time she ran out of Roswell after her run in with Gordon she had a nice chunk of change in that account.
These last three weeks on the road she’d been a constant bundle of paranoia. Gordon, in her brief and scary time with him, didn’t seem like the kind of guy to let a “freak” like her go. Although she had gotten away, that time, she didn’t think she’d get away for long.
So with that in mind she began, in her sober moments, to practice her alien powers. She’d gone through the freak out of having abilities, stopped on the side of the road a couple days into her journey because the green electrical charges under her skin got too visible for her to continue driving at night, the inside of her truck had started to look like—well, like an alien was in there. A soft green glow pulsated around her, its brightness growing quickly.
She had laid down flat on the front seats of the truck and screamed out her anguish. As she let out her anger at being alone, being afraid, being changed, and being so incredibly tired the glow emanating from her body began to fade. With the fear of being discovered as different receding she had rolled over and cried her heart out only to fall asleep where she lay.
After she woke up and started on her way again she worked on some of her alien powers. She tried to keep the mental powers she had exhibited, the flashes when touching someone, hearing people’s thoughts, things like that to a minimum though. Drinking kept all that from happening too often. However what she did practice on was manipulating structures.
So far all she managed to do was melt everything she tried to change but she vowed to get the hang of it so she could change her license plate whenever she needed too. The suspicious parts of her mind wouldn’t allow her to believe that Gordon didn’t have someone looking for her plates or anything connected to the name Elizabeth, Jeff, or Nancy Parker.
Along with learning her powers, she drank. A lot. At least five times a week she stopped into a bar ordered a few drinks, enough to not get flashes when she touched an object or person, and then stumbled her way back to either her truck or to a near by hotel room where she fell flat on a bed to sleep off her drunken stupor. The cycle was never ending. Drive a few hundred miles, stop at a bar, drink at the bar, make a fool out of herself, and then collapse somewhere, only to do the whole thing over again the next day.
Her lips curled down into a frown. Mom and Dad would be so disappointed in her. She wasn’t standing up strong; she wasn’t facing her problems like a Parker should. No, she wallowed, drank, and basically made a mockery of the Parker name.
Sniffing back tears she straightened on the bar stool. She raised the half empty glass in her hand and said to her reflection in the mirror behind the bar. “To the Parker’s.”
Liz lifted the glass and drank the rest down quickly. As she leaned back to get the last drop she lost her balance and fell back onto the hard wood floor beneath her. “Stupid chair.” She said to no one, the man behind the bar rolled his eyes and simply looked at her until she got up off the floor, crawling back onto the stool.
“Why don’t you go home?” He curtly asked her.
She snorted. “How mush for the,” nausea bubbled up from her stomach but, thankfully she didn’t lose the alcohol she consumed. “How mush for the shmots?” The words coming from her mouth were slurred but he seemed to understand what she said.
“Eight shots and two beers, sixty-eight bucks.” He tossed a bar rag over his shoulder and waited for her to fork over the money.
Slowly she counted out sixty-eight dollars. “Here. No tip for yous.” She weaved her way out of the bar. “Didn’t keep my glash full.” She chuckled and left, leaving a bunch of annoyed and thankful patrons behind. She had finally left and she hadn’t thrown up anywhere in the bar. Outside however was a different story. She couldn’t keep the booze down any longer and threw up between two parked cars.
Someone wasn’t going to like her later. With slow, wobbly steps she finally made it back to her motel room. Another night down. She couldn’t wait to do the same thing tomorrow.
TBC
Next Chapter: Liz gives some unwanted attention to a bar patron and gets into fight. And Liz might be meeting another character from the Supernatural world.
