Stanley smiled slyly. “I give the old gal a compliment. She is a woman, after all.”
Grayson’s cheek dimpled. “What’d you say to her?”
Stanley grinned. “I said, ‘Hey, you gots a nice glow about you.’”
Grayson nodded. “Well played.”
Stanley picked up the tiny voodoo bag. “Yeah. But next morning, I went and got me this here amulet anyway. Women can be a tricky folk. It don’t hurt to have a little something extra backing you up. You know what I mean?”
I nudged Stanley on the arm. “What did Mildred do when you complimented her?”
“She showed me her teeth. What she had left, anyway.” Stanley chewed his lip. “Pretty sure it was a smile.”
“Then what happened?” Grayson asked. “Did she dematerialize?”
“Nope. She turned around and headed the other way. That’s when I seen the poor woman was a jorobada.”
I nearly spewed my mouthful of iced tea. “A chupacabra?”
“No,” Stanley said. “Jorobada. What you call it? A lump-back. You know. Like the whale.”
“Humpback?” Grayson asked. “Did you see her flukes?”
“I think he means hunchback,” I said.
“That’s it!” Stanley said. “Hunchback.”
“I see,” Grayson said. “Tell me. Was Mildred more the Quasimodo type, or the Igor type?”
Stanley shot Grayson a sideways glance, then stared at me. I was powerless to help him. It was taking all the strength I had not to flee the scene myself.
“I get the feeling you two gots some strange business going on,” Stanley said finally. “You ain’t really here to put your old pop-pop in a home, are you?”
Grayson shook his head. “No. We’re more interested in your friend Mildred.”
Stanley’s mouth twitched. “What you want with Old Mildred? She’s a harmless old soul.”
Grayson’s eyebrow flat-lined. “I thought you said she was out for blood.”
Stanley shrugged. “Well, it might be blood. I can’t say for sure. The men’s been disappearing. And Old Mildred’s definitely looking for something. Could be they gots something to do with each other, or maybe not.”
“Could Old Mildred be draining their vital juices?” Grayson asked.
Vital juices?
“All right,” I said, clearing my throat. “Could we get serious here? Vets could be being kidnapped. We need to figure out who—or what’s—responsible.”
Stanley nodded. “Yeah. But how you gonna do that?”
“Via surreptitious surveillance, tracking, and evidence collection,” Grayson said.
Translation: Lure them in Grayson’s bedroom and collect samples of their scat.
“Hold up a minute,” Stanley said, his back straightening. “Are you guys cops? FBI?”
“No,” Grayson said. “Private investigators. We specialize in the unexplained.”
“Unexplained?” Stanley asked.
“Yes, unexplained,” I said sourly, shooting Grayson a smirk. “You know. Zombies. Vampires. Mothmen. That sort of thing.”
Stanley’s mouth fell open. “No shit.”
“No shit,” Grayson said, wagging his bushy eyebrows.
“Well, in that case, I got a story for you,” Stanley said. “But you got to promise not to tell no police.”
Chapter Eighteen
“LAST NIGHT, I WAS MINDING my own business. You know, rearranging the supply closet,” Stanley said, then crammed his mouth full of mango-tofu cheesecake.
“So, you were smoking a number,” Grayson said, then slurped his coffee.
“Huh?” I grunted during the pregnant pause between the men’s mouthfuls.
I was supposed to be typing notes on Grayson’s laptop while he interviewed Stanley. But the two may as well have been man’splainin rocket science to a chimpanzee. Either that, or I was way less cool than I liked to think I was.
“How do you get ‘smoking pot’ out of ‘rearranging the supply closet’?” I asked.
Grayson shot me a sideways glance, then locked eyes with Stanley. “Guess she’s never worked retail.”
Stanley laughed and gave me one of his shy, gleaming-white smiles. “Not much else to do at two in the mornin’.”
Grayson nodded. “Go on.”
Stanley licked cheesecake from his bottom lip. “Anyway, I just took my third toke when I started hearing voices.”
“That must’ve been some good stuff,” I said, trying to sound hip.
Grayson shut me down with a glance, then turned to Stanley. “Continue.”
Stanley’s eyebrows inched nearer to each other. “That’s when I overheard two people talking out in the hall. Somebody said, ‘We need another one.’”
“Another what?” I asked.
Grayson locked eyes with me and shook his head. I scowled and looked down at the keyboard.
“Go on,” he said to Stanley. “What did they say next?”
Stanley chewed his lip. “Something like, ‘I can’t take another one so soon. It’d be too suspicious.’”
“Were the voices men or women?” Grayson asked.
Stanley frowned. “Couldn’t say for sure. It was mostly whispering.”
Grayson nodded. “What else?”
Stanley sighed. “I slipped my roach back in my pocket and cracked the door open. You know, to get a peek—”
“Wait,” I said. “Don’t they drug test you guys?”
Stanley shrugged. “Sure. But grass don’t count no more. If it did, they couldn’t find nobody to work nowhere.”
“Go on,” Grayson said. “You were opening the door.”
“Oh, yeah.” Stanley exhaled. “But first, I waited until the smoke cleared—”
“Nice pun,” I said.
“Pun?” Stanley asked.
Grayson stared me down, then ran a finger across his throat. I shut the hell up.
“What did you see?” Grayson asked.
“I thought I saw the shadow of Old Mildred on the wall, man. But then that damned roach started burning a hole my leg. Thought it was out.”
I stopped typing and looked up at Grayson. He chewed his lip, then said, “Anything else?”
Stanley shook his head. Then, suddenly, he sat up straight in his chair. “Wait. I just remembered. I heard this strange sound. Scree. Scree. You know, like a squeaky wheel.”
Grayson rubbed his chin. “Hmmm. A squeaky wheel gathers no moss.”
Stanley nodded slowly. “Exactly, man.”
I typed the words, Really, God? then backspaced over them.
“So then what happened?” Grayson asked.
“I snuck down the hall, following that freaky sound, man. Then I heard another noise. Sounded like the click the metal bars on the exit doors make. I peeked around the corner, but wasn’t nobody there. Only an empty wheelchair sitting beside the glass doors.”
“Hmm,” Grayson said. “Is that unusual?”
“Kind of. Most guys at Banner Hill don’t go nowhere without their chairs.”
“Did you see anyone milling around outside? Staff members? Strangers?”
“No. But it was dark, so I didn’t want to open the door, you know? But the wheelchair belonged to Charlie Perkins in 3F.”
“How’d you know it was Charlie’s chair?” Grayson asked.
“Because of that weird sound it made. I think one of the bearings is froze up on it.”
Grayson nodded. “Proceed.”
“Well, I wheeled Charlie’s chair back to his room to check on him. He was gone. Like the others. Just vanished.”
“Did you tell anyone?” I asked.
Stanley shook his head. “No. Not right away. I took the chair back to the exit doors. I figured I’d wait a bit. See if Charlie had just slipped out for a smoke or something.”
My nose crinkled. “How could Charlie leave if he didn’t have his wheelchair?”
“Not everybody in a wheelchair can’t walk,” Stanley said. “Some’s just pure lazybones.
”
“Did you see anything else suspicious that night?” Grayson asked.
Stanley nodded. “Yeah. One thing.”
My fingers poised with anticipation over the laptop keyboard.
“What?” Grayson asked.
Stanley chewed his lip thoughtfully. “Old man Windham’s mole on his left cheek. I think that thing’s turning color, you know?”
My fingers went limp.
“Did you report the incident the following morning?” Grayson asked.
Stanley shook his head. “No. I thought I’d monitor it for changes, first. See if it gets any bigger.”
A tendon appeared in Grayson’s neck. “I meant the disappearance of Charlie Perkins.”
Stanley grimaced. “No way, man. You know how it is. Whoever smelt it dealt it. Am I right?”
Grayson sighed. “The law of the land.”
My brow furrowed. “What?”
Grayson stared at me as if I were clueless, which, at that moment, I totally was.
“People who report crimes to the police often end up on the top of the suspect list,” Grayson said.
“Exactly.” Stanley bobbed his headful of dreadlocks. “That’s why you got to promise you never heard any of this from me, okay?”
“If you’re innocent, what does it matter?” I asked.
“Can’t take the chance, man. I can’t go back to Haiti.”
My eyes grew wide. “Why? Are you a fugitive?”
Stanley’s brown eyes stared at me pleadingly. “No, man. I just can’t stand the sound of steel drums no more.”
“Totally understandable,” Grayson said, nodding thoughtfully. “Besides the abandoned wheelchair, did you see any strange lights, odd footprints, or whatnot?”
Stanley’s left eyebrow rose. “You know, now that you mention it, I saw a strange, purple glow outside the door. The same kind I seen around Old Mildred.”
“Interesting,” Grayson said.
“Hold up,” Stanley said. His eyes doubled in size. “You don’t think these guys are gettin’ beamed up by purple aliens or something, do you?”
Grayson pursed his lips. “Well, Stanley, that’s what we’re here to find out. So, any chance you know where we could rent a grandpa for the night?”
“You serious?” Stanley eyed Grayson and me. “What kind a kink you two into, man?”
“No kink,” Grayson said. “We need gramps for bait.”
Chapter Nineteen
“SO, EXACTLY HOW DO you spell Balsijet?” Grayson asked the derelict gumming grits across the booth from us at a local diner called, quite aptly, Johnny Grits.
About a half an hour ago, we’d dropped Stanley off at his apartment. Then, following our new operative’s advice, we’d headed straight for the nearest plasma donation center in search of “grandpa bait” for our Banner Hill stakeout scheme.
After sizing up the unseemly selection of pale, toothless, ne’er-do-wells milling about the place, Grayson had lured an old man into his RV with a Jim Beam miniature and the promise of “more where that came from, mister.”
I, in turn, had been assigned the lovely task of keeping gramps from escaping out the back of the RV while Grayson drove around searching for a good spot to conduct an interview to ascertain the old guy’s mental capacity for the job.
Under my watch, the nearly toothless geezer had sat on the couch across from the banquette and downed three miniature whiskeys in under three minutes.
I was down to the last one and about to panic when Grayson pulled into a parking spot. Instead of handing the tiny whiskey bottle to guzzling Gus, I’d pocketed it. I’d had a sneaking suspicion I was going to need it myself.
With phase one of our scheme complete—procure “old guy”—we’d moved on to phase two. This involved getting “old guy” inside Johnny Grits and sitting upright in a booth without him puking on my shoes or feeling me up. Mission accomplished, phase three had commenced—interview and assess “old guy” to see if he was fit for duty.
We’d ordered breakfast for our new companion, and a bottomless pot of coffee for ourselves. Thankfully, the heavenly aroma of dark-roasted java was masking most of the un-heavenly aroma emanating from our new dining companion.
Wedged in the booth beside me, Grayson was attempting to elicit enough information out of the half-coherent old goat to fill in the blanks on the admissions paperwork for Banner Hill. So far, so good, as we’d yet been asked to leave the premises, despite the fact that the old guy was gassier than the Hindenburg.
“What?” the old man yammered, slinging a mouthful of hominy grits back onto his plateful of congealing fried eggs.
“How do you spell your last name, Mr. Ballsijet?” Grayson repeated.
While Grayson wheedled the details out of gasman, I was to fill out the application and try to keep the grease stains off the paperwork. Easier said than done when the interviewee was a toothless stutterer with a mouthful of grits.
“B-A-L-L-S-ijet,” the old man slobbered.
“What was that last part again?” Grayson asked.
Hunched over, covering the admissions application with my arm like the class nerd during a pop quiz, the answer suddenly came to me. I looked up and smirked.
“I got it, Grayson.”
B-A-L-L-S, idiot.
“Do you have any identification on you, Mr. Balls?” I asked with utmost cordiality.
Balls grinned, proudly displaying his one remaining tooth. “Right ‘cheer.” He reached into the breast pocket of his threadbare Hawaiian shirt and produced a pink wallet covered in tiny unicorns jumping over rainbows.
Right. As if this isn’t surreal enough already.
Unicorn man opened a flap in his wallet and handed me a laminated card with his picture on it. It was the kind of ID card Florida required of residents in order to claim Social Security checks, food stamps, and/or avoid being picked up for vagrancy. Based on the wear around the edges, Mr. Balls had put the card to good use on all counts.
“Albert Balls,” I read aloud, then glanced around for some hand sanitizer.
“That’s me,” Balls said, and stuck a boney thumb at his boney chest.
“Were you ever in the military, Mr. Balls?” Grayson asked.
“Yep. Army. Gulf War.”
Grayson’s left eyebrow formed an angular arch. “Pardon me, but you look rather old to have participated in that particular skirmish.”
“According to his ID, he’s only forty-nine,” I said.
“Hmm,” Grayson said. “So, Mr. Balls, what precipitated your accelerated physical deterioration? Radioactive fallout?”
“Huh?” Balls’ eyes narrowed. “This ain’t another one a them government experiment gigs, is it?”
“No, sir,” I said cheerfully. “We simply want you to spend the night somewhere and report back to us what happened.”
Balls eyed me suspiciously. “I ain’t fallin’ for that one again.”
“What do you mean?” Grayson asked.
I kicked him under the table. “This is nothing like the last time,” I said, smiling sweetly at Balls. “I think you’ll like this gig. It comes with free Jell-O and Netflix.”
“Humph,” Balls said, licking grits from his livery lips. “What flavor Jell-O?”
Chapter Twenty
GRAYSON HAD BEEN GONE so long our waitress had left—without even saying goodbye. The woman who took over her shift was giving me and Mr. Balls the evil eye for the umpteenth time.
I could barely blame her.
Not only had we gone through over a gallon of free coffee refills, the body odor emanating from Balls had caused a no-fly zone that now encompassed the poor waitress’s entire combat station. Every customer she tried to seat within twenty feet of us had waived a white napkin of surrender and fled.
I, however, had no such option. I’d been assigned KBFE duty—Keep Balls From Escaping—until Grayson got back.
I drummed my nails on the table and watched a glistening string of drool drip from Balls�
� lips onto his plate.
Come on, Grayson. How long does it take to find a place to fax a damned application?
My pinkie landed in something gooey. I glanced down.
Grits shrapnel. Ugh.
I reached for a napkin and cringed in pity for our replacement waitress. Our table looked like a herd of grits-shitting mole-rats had plowed through it after a drunken orgy in a mud pit.
I glanced around, then slunk lower into the booth. What else could I do? I couldn’t take Balls out to the parking lot. That would’ve required me waking him up. As it currently stood, Balls was unconscious, face-down in a slice of apple pie á la mode. Monitoring his breathing seemed a hell of a lot easier than holding him hostage—or, heaven forbid—carrying on a conversation with him.
I shot the Johnny Grits waitress a sympathetic smile and waved a twenty-dollar bill at her. She took a deep breath and sidled over to the booth.
“He ain’t dead, is he?” she asked, pocketing the twenty.
I glanced at Balls. He made a few more bubbles in his melted ice cream.
“Sorry about all this,” I said. “Poor gramps is on his last legs.” I glanced at her nametag. “We’re waiting on the paperwork to get him into a nursing home, Wanda.”
“Oh,” Wanda said, trying not to inhale. “How much longer you gonna be here? I think my boss is getting ready to call the cops.”
She nodded to her left. I glanced over at a red-faced man in a dirty apron. He was glaring at me as if I’d brought a herd of drunken, grits-shitting mole-rats into his fine establishment.
“I ... uh ...,” I stuttered. Then I caught sight of Grayson coming through the front door. I nearly fainted with relief. “Oh! Wait! Here’s my brother now!”
Grayson came strolling up to the booth in his all-black attire. He tipped his fedora at Wanda and me.
“He ain’t dead yet,” Wanda said.
“Dead?” Grayson asked.
Wanda nodded. “Ain’t you the undertaker?”
“I assure you, Miss, I’m not taking anyone ‘under’ any time soon.” Grayson flopped into the booth. “Could you warm up my coffee, please?”
Wanda scowled and wandered off behind the waitress station. I hoped for Grayson’s sake she didn’t keep a stash of arsenic on hand.
Freaky Florida Mystery Adventures Box Set Page 50