Fork in the Road
Summary: A ghost is killing golfers, forcing Sam and Dean to pose as caddies... Post It's a Terrible Life
Just a little bit of brotherly turmoil to go with the golf... But we have a ghost to take out, so on we go!
Chapter Four
Dean strode into the motel room and set the fast food bags down on the table. Sam was sitting on his bed with his computer on his lap. He was stooped over, frowning in concentration with his hair falling into his eyes as he studied the screen.
"You know, you can change the text size to the big stuff if you're getting too old to see it," Dean commented.
Sam just kept typing. "Shut up. I'm working."
"Dude, if you haven't already figured out how to work while I'm talking, we're in serious trouble."
"I learned." Sam let out a directed puff of air to get some of the hair out of his face. "It's just easier if you don't talk."
"Yeah, I bet," Dean muttered. Sam was still pissed at him for throwing a fit. Maybe it hadn't been the best time and maybe he'd been overreacting, but the situation with Sam and his increasingly screwy behavior just kept getting worse and worse and Dean's admittedly crap coping techniques reared their ugly head at all the wrong times.
Sometimes, he wondered why he bothered at all. Sam wasn't really listening to a word he said, not anymore. Dean had gone from being the big brother who knew everything, to the damaged thing Sam had to haul around.
Dean clenched his hands into fists, then realized what he was doing and relaxed them. "You keep doin' what you're doin'. I'll just sit here in my corner and keep my trap shut."
Sam did look up then. "What was that?"
Dean shook his head. "Nothin'." Sam would probably like nothing better than for him to shut up, but Dean just kept at him. He knew it was straining their already strained relationship, but he couldn't help it. Letting it go just wasn't possible. Dean knew he had less than a snowball's chance, but Sam... Sam could still turn it around. It wasn't too late. Sam just had blinders on. He couldn't see what he was doing to himself. He was convinced that Ruby was on his side and if Dean knew anything, he knew that a demon could lie and lie and tell you everything you thought you wanted to hear, and then turn it all against you. They could get you so turned around you didn't care about right and wrong. Even if you did somehow manage to remember what you were doing was wrong, you forgot to be ashamed, at least until it was already too late.
Maybe if he told Sam some of what had happened to him? It wouldn't take much. Just a story or two and that would convince him what demons could do. All Dean had to do was open his mouth and tell him. That was it and maybe Sam would understand. He would stop all of this before it got any worse.
Dean's heart was pounding. He opened his mouth and immediately shut it again. Right. Simple. Just tell Sam.
Weak.
Holding me back.
Dean cleared his throat. "So you find anything?" He grabbed the fast food bag, sat down on the edge of the other bed, and dug out a couple of burgers.
"Maybe." Sam kept squinting at the screen.
Dean grunted impatiently. "And?"
"Well, we've got all these current deaths, but I can't find anything they have in common so I started looking for older ones to see if anything popped up. Turns out that hole has managed at least a death a year for about fourteen years."
"And no one noticed everybody had a heart attack on the exact same spot?"
"If they did, no one talked about it."
Dean frowned. "So do we have a patient zero, or what?"
"That's the thing." Sam set the laptop aside and threw his legs over the edge of the bed so he could face Dean. "Did that ghost look like a heart attack victim to you?"
"Not unless he had a heart attack and fell in the lake and no one ever found him."
"If he'd just had a heart attack, they would've come across the body. It's a golf course. There are people walking around that lake constantly and he'd have floated. According to the coroner, though, these guys didn't really have heart attacks. Their hearts were healthy, relatively speaking. They just stopped."
"So you're thinking he's in the lake, but somebody put him there where no one would see?"
"I gave up on all the deaths we know about and started looking for missing persons."
Dean could tell from the look on his brother's face he'd found something, so he just kept working his way through his burger and waited.
"The president of the club went missing fourteen years ago." Sam looked decidedly smug.
"That so?"
Sam turned the laptop toward Dean so he could see the article. Dean gave it a cursory glance, but just gestured for Sam to move it along.
"His wife told the police he left for the club that morning like he always did, but he never came home. They questioned the employees, and he was apparently there all morning, doing what he always did, then his secretary claimed he left for lunch, and never returned to the office. She wasn't concerned because he often played a round of golf with one of the members after lunch."
"Anyone in particular?" Dean asked curiously.
"Not that they mentioned in the article."
Dean sighed and threw his hamburger aside. "So now what?"
Sam shrugged. "We have to find the body."
"Oh, man." Dean patted his pockets. "I left the scuba gear in my other pants."
Sam gave him his patented you're-so-not-funny look. "It's a manmade lake. It isn't that deep."
"Deep enough to dump a body in." Dean frowned.
"Club policy forbids anyone from collecting balls from any of the water hazards. Wanna guess how old that rule is?"
"About fourteen years?"
"Yup."
"We know who put that rule in place, by any chance?"
"No way to tell," Sam answered. "Only reason I noticed it was because there was a letter to the editor complaining about it. Some guy supplemented his income by collecting balls and selling them. Something about the rich guys keeping the little man down."
Dean stood and sighed again. "I hate swimming."
"That's because you can't carry a gun in the water."
He snorted. "And here I thought it was because I nearly drowned when Dad took us on that trip to Minnesota."
"Land of a billion lakes," Sam said through a grin.
"Thanks for the sympathy," Dean replied wryly.
"You're the one who fell out of the boat."
"I fell?" Dean asked through gritted teeth.
Sam's brow furrowed in confusion. "Yeah."
"Dude, Dad was using me as bait. He didn't think the thing was that fast and it dragged me halfway across the lake before he killed it." It was one of the few times his father had ever actually apologized to him. He'd screwed up badly and nearly got his son killed. Of course, it hadn't stopped him from using Dean as bait the very next time the need arose.
Sam looked shocked. "You never told me. You came back to the motel looking like a drowned rat and said you fell out of the boat."
"Well, duh." Did Sam think he was an idiot? There were a lot of things that went on that Sam never had a clue about. Worked the other way too for that matter. Sam had a whole lot of normal things going on that Dad never knew about. "You already hated him. You think I was gonna give you ammunition like that?"
"But-"
"Whatever. Dad's dead and we've got a lake to search." As traitorous as the thought was, sometimes, Dean was grateful their dad was gone. What would he have thought of his sons? One had jumpstarted the apocalypse and the other was bosom buddies with a demon, getting strong enough to drop something like Alistair. Dean grabbed his keys and headed for the door. "Come on."
"So this guy…"
"Mitchell Wray."
"Mitch… We're sure he's in the lake here?" Dean asked.
"You got a better idea, I'm all ears. He went missing while he was golfing with somebody and everybody who gets whacked, gets it right here off the seventeenth."
Dean set his flashlight down on the ground, and gave the water lapping at his feet another glare for good measure. Freaking lakes. He didn't give a crap if it was a manmade golf version of a kiddy wading pool. This was barely a step above camping.
Dean toed off his boots and then pulled off his socks as well, stuffing them into his boots. Sam, he noted, was doing the same. Dean briefly considered stripping off his jeans, but there was no way he was going to get caught wandering around a golf course in the middle of the night in his skivvies. He'd just have to deal with a soggy pair of jeans.
Sam had apparently decided the same, because he was already wading out into the water without even bothering to roll up his pants. He almost immediately stepped on something and listed dangerously to the side before righting himself.
"Golf ball," he said in annoyance. "Gotta be a minefield out here."
"That and there's a corpse."
"That, too."
"Watch your toes."
Sam spared a moment to glare at him before turning back and heading out farther, shining his flashlight down into the murky water. "You gonna help me or just stand there and offer suggestions?"
Dean shrugged although Sam didn't see it. "I can do both. I multitask."
He waded out into the water, almost immediately encountering the same problem with golf balls that Sam had. The little suckers were determined to make sure he was soaked from head to foot before the night was over.
They quickly fell into an easy pattern to search the water as well as they could. As Sam had said, the lake was no more than waist to chest deep at any point. It was enough to make sure that they couldn't see much of anything, and that they were nice and wet while getting absolutely nowhere. Other than fourteen years' worth of lost balls, and the occasional club that had been tossed into the lake in a fit of rage, they hadn't found anything.
"You know this is useless, right?"
"You wanna give up, just go sit on the bank." Sam snapped the order, shades of their father's voice ringing in Dean's ears. His brother was still mad at him from before, and Dean could almost feel the derision. He'd just wanted to whine a bit and Sam had immediately told him he could sit it out and Sam would take care of it.
Weak.
I can take out demons you're too scared to go near.
Sometimes Dean thought that even in his siren-induced spouting, Sam had been pulling punches. Dean knew what Sam really would have said if he'd been laying it all on the line. He'd have called him a coward. It was the worst insult a Winchester could manage, and just the thought that Sam was thinking of him that way was enough to shred Dean's insides. It hurt more than almost anything he'd ever felt, and these days, that was saying something. Dean half-expected the water around him to turn red, Sam had so neatly twisted the knife.
Contempt. That was what it came down to. Before, Sam might have thought of Dean as his mindless, soldier brother who followed their father no matter where he led. Dean was loud and lewd and an embarrassment to his brother in many ways. One thing he'd never been, however, was a coward.
That was gone now. Hell had torn away that last pillar and the entire house had crumbled. Dean wasn't a help anymore. He was a burden. Sam thought he was on his own. He'd convinced himself of it while Dean was gone, and couldn't seem to snap himself out of thinking that way even when Dean was standing with him shoulder to shoulder.
"I've got this, Dean."
"And leave you to have all the fun? I wouldn't dream of it. You might get all pruny and require first aid."
Sam just rolled his eyes, but Dean saw a very tiny hint of a smirk appear. "I think I can handle it."
"Nah, gotta keep you hydrated. No one wants to see a pruny sasquatch. I'm here for you, man."
And he would be, whether Sam wanted it or not. Sam obviously thought that whatever he was up to was going to get him through the big end game, but Dean knew better. The demons hadn't shown all their cards yet. They never did, not until it was too late. Sam thought he was going to be ahead of the curve, that whatever he was doing to strengthen his powers would give him the edge to win, but Dean knew that wasn't how the game was played, and that certainly wasn't how the game was going to be won.
Dean turned toward his brother thinking maybe he'd heard something, although maybe it was more a feeling than anything else.
"Sam!"
Mitchell Wray was standing directly beside Sam. He set his hand on Sam's arm and almost immediately Sam sucked in a pained gasp. He brought his hand up and set it over his heart, fisting his fingers in his shirt. Eyes wide and panicked, he looked up at Dean.
"Sam, no!"
The ghost grasped Sam around his neck, almost like a lifeguard would, except the ghost smoothly pulled Sam backward, and disappeared beneath the rippling water.
The water smoothed out immediately, and if Dean hadn't known that his brother had been standing there only a second before, he never would have guessed.
Dean gripped his flashlight tight, and he dove.
More soon...