He was getting weak from blood loss, going into shock. “She spent the whole time at the house talking to you! And the whole rest of the night talking about how cool you were. You were four years younger than I was but every time a girl came around it was all about Chad! Chad! Chad! ‘Chad’s so dreamy.’ ‘Thornton, your brother is really cute.’ You got all the girls, you little fucker! I had to work for it! You just smiled and they all came running! Why do you think I fucking hate them so much!”
What the fuck?
“That’s…That’s…You blame me for kidnapping girls, young girls, killing their families, human fucking sacrifice!” I shouted. “How much for virgins, Thornton? And what did you do with the girls who weren’t virgins? Rape them?”
“Of course,” Thornton said as if any of this made sense. “And sacrifice them. Non-virgin sacrifices work for most things. Sell them to vamps. Twenty thousand for a virgin. Five thousand for a non-virgin. Even I wasn’t willing to rape the virgins for that much cash.”
“Twenty thousand dollars for a virgin?” I said. “That’s a lot of money.”
“Any idea how hard it is to find a virgin these days?” Thornton said.
Then he died.
And surprisingly enough didn’t rise. I took his head off just to be on the safe side.
* * *
While I’d been interrogating my psychotic scumbag brother, Sam had checked the trailer and discovered a couple more girls tied up inside, kidnapped hitchhikers Thornton had found on the way. He got them out before the whole thing burned down.
After we’d hacked up the revenants and tossed the still-moving pieces into the truck fire, Sam joined me back at Honeybear.
“So I take it that pork-cracklin’-looking fat-ass was your brother?”
I didn’t really want to talk about it. “Yeah.”
“Seems kinda messed up. Funny though, all that long-ass drive here and you never once mentioned to me we might be chasing your own blood relative.”
“Does it matter?”
“Beats me.” Sam shrugged. “My brothers are pretty cool. I can’t really see any of them taking up necromancy as a hobby. Well, maybe Scott. But he joined the Coast Guard, so he’s a little touched.”
“You don’t seem surprised it was my brother.”
“That weird red-headed kid…Milo, I think it is. He gave me a heads-up who might be behind this. He wanted me to keep an eye on you. I think he was worried you’d go off the deep end batshit revenge crazy and ‘damage your immortal soul’ or some such.”
“That was nice of him to worry,” I said. “What are you going to tell Milo?”
“Eh, I’ll say it went great. All you did was yank out his guts like a garden hose. Seems like a rational, proportionate response to me…Uh…But you did kill your own brother. You want to talk about it?”
“Not at all.”
“Good. I really ain’t the guy to talk to about feelings and shit, so how about we finish cleaning up this mess, find the nearest bar, and get stinking drunk?”
Sam Haven was going to make a great Monster Hunter.
* * *
Oh, boy, was this a lot of excitement in a small town. Especially when we explained, politely, to the nice sheriff’s deputy that we had to burn the headless bodies that were still flopping around. He kept shooting them but they wouldn’t stop flopping! They just won’t stop moving! How can they keep moving? Given that the house was filled with kerosene and the family was outside in their nightgowns trying to explain the unexplainable…
Then there was the explosion of the LAW to account for.
And did I mention the burning truck? Which got more spectacular when it got to the fuel tanks and I’m really glad we got the girls out first.
Oh, boy, this was a lot of excitement in a small town.
I cut through some of the Gordian knots and walked into the house to use the phone. I pulled out my little black book of numbers and ignored MCB.
“Go,” the sleepy male voice said.
You had better have a damned good reason or balls of steel to call an FBI agent at home in the middle of the night.
“Hey, Special Agent Grant. This is Chad Gardenier from MHI. Remember me? I solved your case. Six human perpetrators dead. Various undead perps deader as soon as we can convince the local authorities to let us burn the bodies. Wights and revenants just keep moving until you burn them. Oh, by the way, you’re welcome.”
“I heard you raised hell with a certain subcommittee that doesn’t exist,” Don said, no longer half asleep.
“For good reason,” I said. “MCB totally screwed the pooch on this one. Which is why I’m calling you guys first. Can I go get the local yokel deputy and have him talk to you? I think the only reason he hasn’t drawn down on us is we’re better armed.”
Don sighed. “Put him on.”
CHAPTER 10
After we got back from Oklahoma, I requested another meeting with the Select Committee. No answer. Too bad. I wanted to rub their faces in my succeeding where the MCB had failed.
For a little while life returned to “normal.”
* * *
A few days later I was back in the team room when Sam Haven fielded a call from the SIU.
“Giant pissed-off crocodile…” he said in a confused tone, looking at the note.
“In the 17th Street Canal,” I finished, sighing. “Bring a Barrett and some LAWs just in case.”
Why sobeks always chose the 17th Street Canal was one of those mysteries of life. They turned up every few months and were major pains in the ass. I hadn’t dealt with one since the new breed MCB had arrived and was sooo looking forward to it.
We didn’t know where they came from, how they got here, what they were doing here, or why a few times a year one tried to wander down the 17th Street Canal, but as per usual, the bipedal-Egyptian-crocodile-god thing had gotten itself stuck on the main pumping station and was trying to climb the levee. Their bipedal form made it hard for them to do anything, really. They weren’t pathetic, by any stretch of the imagination. They were seriously dangerous up close or if they got into the neighborhoods, but they fricking always got stuck at the pumping station.
When we arrived at the pumping station on Lake Avenue, there were some bystanders in the area watching the latest in New Orleans hoodoo. There weren’t very many because it was late and the rain was keeping most people indoors. MCB was trying to chase off the witnesses, and Agent Robinson was in a heated discussion with an old woman up on the railroad tracks. It was clear that MCB was trying to get the crowd to disperse but short of opening fire on them that was unlikely to happen. And SIU was being passive-aggressive about helping them out.
“Afternoon, Agent Robinson,” I said, sauntering up.
“You will go back to your home,” Robinson snarled at the old lady. “Or I will place you under arrest!”
“This is a free country, young man!” She shook her umbrella at him. “And I will go wherever I damned well please! Are you going to arrest all of us?”
“From what I’ve seen, they’re more likely to just machine-gun the civilians and be done with it,” Sam muttered to me.
“Lieutenant Wade,” Robinson shouted. “Place this woman under arrest!”
“What do I charge her with, Agent?” Wade said in a slow, somewhat dumb-sounding, Cajun drawl. Local law enforcement missed Special Agent Castro’s brand of leadership as much as I did. “I really need a solid charge, Agent. The DOJ is all over our ass lately for all sorts of violations of civil rights. I mean there’s a whole task force—”
“We are the DOJ! Just do it!”
“Well, I’d really like to see that in writing…”
I interrupted the shouting fest and addressed the old lady. “Mrs. Thevenet. How are you doing today?”
“These G-men don’t have no respect,” she said with a sniff. “Act as if you can pretend voodoo don’t exist in New Orleans! Sell that to the tourists, young man!”
“New brooms,” I said, s
hrugging. “You know they lost all their good people at Mardi Gras.”
“That is classified!” Robinson shrieked.
“He’ll figure out how it works sooner or later,” I said, ignoring him. “Right now, we really need to just play along. Figure you can get these people to sort of wander away? Nothing new here to see, anyway.”
“Well, if they’re going to do something, they should be finding out who keeps sending this hoodoo down here,” Mrs. Thevenet said angrily. “This is the fifth time in a year and a half!”
“I told you to place her under arrest!”
“And I said I’d need something in writing,” Wade said, crossing her arms. “Me and my department ain’t gonna get sued ’cause you’re all hot and bothered.”
“I totally agree, ma’am,” I said. “But in the meantime, do me a favor, okay? Try to get people to clear the area. Right now, we’ve gotta get started on clearing this up.”
“I’ll do it this once as a favor, young man,” Mrs. Thevenet said. “But I’m definitely going to call Congressman Bouvrier. I pay my taxes!”
“Any communication about this incident is a violation of federal law!” Robinson snapped. “If you so much as pick up the phone to call your congressman, I will, I guarantee you, arrest you. And you will spend the rest of your natural life in prison.”
She was so old that probably wasn’t that much of a threat. “You ain’t from around here, are you?” Mrs. Thevenet said, walking away. But she started chivvying her people to clear the area.
“Just an FYI, Agent Robinson, Congressman Bouvrier is the second most senior majority member of the Select Committee. And her third cousin. She grew up with the congressman’s mother. Might want to reconsider that threat.”
“Just stay out of this, Gardenier! And you can just go back to your shack! We’re going to clear this incident!”
“Excuse me? Since when does MCB clear incidents?”
“Orders of Special Agent Campbell. We’re taking responsibility for all yellow-level threats from now on. You cowboys make too much of a scene when you deal with something like this!”
“Well,” I said thoughtfully. “Since we are read in, mind if we stay and watch?”
“Feel free,” Robinson said. “We’ll show you how a professional deals with this sort of thing.”
* * *
“Oh, this is gonna be fun,” I said as we walked back to my car.
“That agent is the easily agitated sort, ain’t he? Now I’m wondering if he meant cowboys as a personal insult.” Sam thumped his knuckles against his ridiculous rodeo champion belt buckle. “I’m wounded.” He went to retrieve his gear bag.
“First off, no point to the armor. With a sobek, if you’re close enough for the gear to matter, it don’t matter. Thing will rip right through it or kill you by impact with its tail. So you get all hot for nothing.”
“So how do you kill it?”
“We’ve done it enough times we’ve got a system. There’s a kill spot on the back of the head that’s about a foot across,” I said, holding my hands up a foot wide. “You shoot it through there, with something big, at a certain angle. Angle’s important, too. What you do is get waaaay back and shoot it there. If you hit it at the wrong angle, or miss the spot, or hit it anywhere else on the body, it just pisses it off. If you hit it near the spot or at the wrong angle, you can cause it to thrash. As you can see, it’s already damaging the levee. Enough levee damage and New Orleans floods. So getting it right the first time is sort of important.”
“Only that jittery rabbit-ass agent won’t let us. Boy really needs to switch to decaf before he strokes out.”
“We make too much noise or something,” I said, disgusted. “So they get to kill it.”
“Isn’t that sort of stealing our PUFF money?” Sam asked.
“I’m just hoping they get the shot right.”
* * *
The crowd had been duly shuffled off by SIU, NOPD, and Mrs. Thevenet, and now the agent who’d been trailing Robinson was up on the railroad bridge with some sort of super-duper sniper rifle. The thing looked as if it had some sort of suppressor on the end. So, you know, they could pretend they weren’t shooting a fifty-foot bipedal crocodile.
The real problem, though…
“No, no, no, no,” I muttered.
“What’s wrong?” Sam asked.
We were standing under the shade of a live oak, watching the proceedings, arms crossed.
“I’m pretty sure that’s a .308,” I said. “Something along the lines.”
“It is,” Sam said. “That’s an Accuracy International. It might be chambered in .300 Win Mag. Good rifle.”
“Whatever. Very much the wrong caliber. There’s no such thing as too large with a sobek. There is such a thing as too small. Fifty-caliber’s the way to go with one. Too small if anything. And I’m pretty sure they’re going to fire at—”
The sniper took the shot as I was saying that and the round hit the kill spot. But it was at the wrong angle, or maybe just didn’t penetrate enough, and the sobek began to thrash and bellow, tearing at the bank of the levee.
The local supervisor for Army Corps of Engineers ran onto the train bridge and started haranguing Agent Robinson as the sniper fired again. Having previously dealt with the guy, I knew he was understandably protective of his levee. Because much of New Orleans was below the water line and if the levee ever broke, most of the city would be flooded a story deep. He really liked to keep water out of the city. What he did not like was sobeks tearing up his dams. He was really definite on that subject. Which was what MCB was giving him.
This time the round bounced off the armored skull and the sobek got even angrier. It spun around in place looking for what was hurting it and decided that it must have something to do with the train bridge. Giant jaws clamped on one of the trestles and it tried to death roll.
The MCB sniper leaned over, rapidly working the bolt, and kept firing, bullets bouncing every which way. And from the looks of things, the bridge was probably going to have to be temporarily closed and surveyed to assess the damage. Assuming the pissed-off crocodilian didn’t pull it down.
I’d never seen someone as red in the face as the Corps guy. And from Robinson’s attitude, he was giving a senior member of the Army Corps of Engineers the MCB “if you don’t shut up I’ll arrest you” line.
That was going to go over just dandy. MCB might think it was powerful but you didn’t comprehend powerful until you dealt with Army Corps of Engineers.
“I’ve seen enough,” I said, shaking my head. “Let’s roll back to the team shack. I do not want to be here when this incident finally gets cleared and MCB is looking for someone to blame.”
* * *
We were about halfway back to headquarters when the phone rang.
“Gardenier,” I said.
“Who the hell did you call, Gardenier?” the voice on the other end snarled.
“No one. Lately. Who may I ask is calling?”
“This is Special Agent Campbell. So you’re not responsible for calls from the Army Corps of Engineers and half the Select Committee?”
“Nope. We rolled to the sobek. Robinson told us you guys were handling it. We watched the beginning of said handling, then left. Didn’t need to call anyone. Your guys did all the work.”
“Turn around, go back, kill the sobek,” Campbell said as calmly as he could manage.
“No.”
“What?” Campbell shouted.
“The sobek is currently pissed off, agitated and very dangerous. It has been repeatedly wounded by your agents. MCB took responsibility for it, so you kill it. You want some advice on that, I can give it. But I already called Franklin and MHI is not going to be blamed for another Class Five incident.”
I got a click for my troubles.
“I hear those things are worth a really nice PUFF,” Sam pointed out.
“There’ll be another one in a few months. And they really would have used this to make us lo
ok bad. Campbell is a manipulative conniving bastard and his report would make us out to be ‘incompetent’ or at least ‘very indiscreet.’ There’s no clean way to kill that sobek now that it’s enraged.”
We were nearly back to the shack when the phone rang again.
“Gardenier,” I said as politely as I could. I figured it was Campbell again or someone else yelling at me.
“Chad! Congressman Bouvrier! How are you, young man?”
“Fine, sir, fine,” I said, sliding smoothly into Southern mode. “And how is Bambi?”
“Curvy and beautiful as always.” Nobody could ever remember the names of the various paramours and trophy wives of the seventy-year-old congressman so he insisted everyone just call them Bambi. Saves time. “Are you taking another sabbatical, son?”
“I earned the one after Mardi Gras, but if you’re referring to the sobek, no. Just not taking that one.”
“Is there a reason?” the congressman asked.
“MCB took responsibility for clearing it, sir. They are taking all large incidents from now on according to the agent on site. I wouldn’t wish to steal their thunder.”
“They bungled it,” the congressman said. “Mrs. Thevenet was watching the whole thing. I’m not sure if you heard but they missed the shot. It’s now out of the canal and rampaging through her neighborhood. She is rather unhappy. And since there is now a fifty-foot crocodile wandering through New Orleans, I can’t think of anyone who is happy.”
I hit the brakes, did a U-turn and hit the siren and lights.
“On it, Congressman. Mrs. Thevenet’s on the west side of the canal?”
“Yes, she is,” Congressman Bouvrier said. “I take it you’re on your way back?”
“Congressman, I really need a favor,” I said.
“If it involves getting MCB off your back, consider it done. When I’m done with this new special agent, his hide won’t be missing a single spot that hasn’t been scored.”
“There is no way, if the sobek is out, we’re going to be able to do it quietly. This is heavy-weapons time and no joke. Campbell has to be made fully aware of that. Through the chain of command. He won’t take it from you. And what we’re going to have to do at this point will piss him off royally.”
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