The Thing in the Alley (Anomaly Hunters, Book 3)
Page 17
17
The phone woke Calvin at ten to eight the next morning, wrenching him from an odd little dream in which a zombified Siamese cat had been leading him down a secret corridor that he had discovered behind the east wall of the wine cellar in the basement, a dream no doubt influenced, at least in part, by Lauren’s spooky history story yesterday.
He cracked his eyes just enough to see the phone jangling and vibrating on the bedside table, then shut them again with an unhappy grunt. What was it with people calling him so damn early the last few days? He’d been so keyed up over the impending leucrota hunt and Tiffany’s visit that he hadn’t gotten to sleep until well after two. If he had known he might get another unscheduled wake-up call, he would’ve turned off his phone.
Then it dawned on him that the caller might be Tiffany, and he shot upright and snapped up the phone a moment before it would have gone to voicemail.
“Hello?” he said.
“Calvin, hi. It’s me.”
It wasn’t Tiffany. For a moment he wasn’t sure who it was, despite the voice’s maddening familiarity. Then he realized the problem: It was indeed a voice he knew well, but not one he had ever heard over the phone before.
“Lauren?” he said.
“Yeah. I know I probably woke you up, but you’d better check the news.”
He realized he could hear a radio on in the background of wherever she was calling from, and then, briefly, the roar of an engine accelerating. She must be on her way to work. For her to call him at this hour and under those circumstances meant it must be something serious. He got out of bed and stood there in his Chewbacca boxers, all vestiges of sleep now gone from his mind.
“What happened?” he said.
“There’s been another murder. I think it’s gonna change our plans. I’d tell you more, but I’m just pulling into the library’s parking lot, and I’m already running late. Just watch the news, or listen to it, or whatever, and we can all discuss it at the meeting later.”
After she hung up, Calvin hurried downstairs to the parlor, switched on the radio, and tuned it to WODE, which was currently airing Good Morning Kingwood, a morning drive-time talk/news show.
Good Morning Kingwood was hosted by William Kingsley, Jr., a local radio personality whose shtick and slogan was “Truth with a Capital T!” His idea of truth was always very contentious and ultra-conservative. His co-host, who handled the news, weather, and traffic reports, was Lisa Quimby, whose high, perky voice provided a perfect counterpoint to Kingsley’s growl. Calvin considered Kingsley a bombastic buffoon of the highest order but had always liked Quimby, and not just because she was the younger sister of his high school chemistry teacher, in whose class he and Cynthia had begun to forge their friendship all those years ago. As DJ Lisa Q, Quimby had hosted WODEs Totally 80s show, which Calvin had listened to a lot when he was in high school, and her irrepressibly chipper attitude had always managed to cheer him up no matter how cruddy his day. Two years ago she had been assigned to join Kingsley on Good Morning Kingwood after his former co-host quit in disgust over one of Kingsley’s liberal-baiting stunts. Calvin still wasn’t sure whether Quimby’s reassignment counted as a promotion or a demotion.
When Calvin turned it on, Kingsley was in mid-rant: “—ivory-towered liberals, trying to rewrite the English language just because someone’s precious little feelings might get hurt. I can’t even call my waitress a waitress anymore. She’s a server now, which I thought had something to do with computers, but whatever.”
“They’re all communists, pure and simple, Will,” said the current caller, a man with a nasal voice who phoned the show nearly every day. “They’re trying to undermine America by destroying our God-given language.”
“I’m not even sure what I’m supposed to call a midget nowadays,” Kingsley said, not really addressing the caller’s comment. Probably wisely, since the comment had been complete and utter nonsense. “A little person? A dwarf? Vertically challenged? An individual of lower altitude? I have no idea, and I don’t think anyone else does either.
“The truth is, the liberal whiners want to strip our language of the very words we the people chose to use and retain over the course of centuries. Good words. Traditional words. And they’re replacing them with a bunch of Orwellian bureaucraspeak devoid of any heritage, poetry, or intelligence.
“Is there anything else you need to say before we do the news? I’ve got ten seconds.”
“Nosiree. You said it all, Will. Bye now.”
“Goodbye.”
The station’s call music started up low in the background.
“That was kind of harsh,” Lisa Quimby said.
“I might sound harsh,” Kingsley said with a sort of rhythmic incantatory intonation. He repeated some variation of this spiel every day. “I might sound like a bad person. But I’m only speaking the truth with a capital T.”
Calvin rolled his eyes.
“Come on, come on,” he said. “Just do the news already.”
As if in response to Calvin’s demand, the station music swelled and the national news started. This was not read by Lisa Quimby. It was instead a pre-recorded segment read by a guy named Jim Ziffle who spoke in deep urgent tones as if he were auditioning to replace Wolf Blitzer.
Fidgeting with impatience, Calvin waited through the seemingly endless string of Middle Eastern bombings, presidential and congressional blather, celebrity idiocies, supposed human-interest pieces (none of which were of interest to Calvin or any other human beings he knew), and over a dozen commercials for products and services he never used and couldn’t care less about.
Finally, seven-and-a-half minutes after the news began, Lisa Quimby took over with the local report.
“A badly mutilated body was found early this morning in a parking lot on Gramercy Road in Kingwood. The body has not yet been identified, but police have confirmed that it appears to be the work of the same person or persons responsible for the deaths of two other Kingwood residents in the last week. Chief of Police Dowdie has scheduled a press conference for noon, and we will bring you full coverage of that event, as well as any further details of the case as they emerge. Meanwhile, in other news, a fire gutted the Towner Street Tavern overnight…”
Calvin switched off the radio with a troubled frown. He wasn’t entirely sure where Gramercy Road was, but if it was where he thought it was…
“That can’t be right,” he muttered. He snatched up the Kingwood street atlas from the coffee table where he had tossed it after getting home last night, and looked up Gramercy in the index. Page 23, section B3.
“Shit!”
Yes, Gramercy Road was exactly where he had thought it was—namely, six blocks west of Pentz Road, half a mile outside the parameters of yesterday’s foot search. The area was a continuation of the sprawling industrial zone whose eastern edge was where the Mad Hatter warehouse stood.
He scanned the map more closely. There didn’t appear to be a single park or cemetery or ravine in the area; Gramercy Road and the entire industrial zone of which it was a part was a place of factories, warehouses, and parking lots. In other words, acres and acres of concrete, with no green spaces in which an outdoorsy monster might build a cozy little nest.
Could Calvin have been wrong to assume the leucrota would settle down in one spot? Could the leucrota be roaming, with no fixed abode? Perhaps. Brad Vallance’s death had occurred toward the eastern edge of yesterday’s search area and Terrell Quinn’s had occurred in the center. The two missing spray-painters had been last seen in the northwest corner of the search area, but given that nobody knew where they had gone after that, they could have been killed anywhere. For that matter, their disappearance might be unrelated to the leucrota attacks.
Which meant the only definite attacks occurred in a rough east-to-west line. First Vallance, then Quinn, now this unidentified victim.
If the leucrota was constantly on the move their chances of finding it shrank to nearly nil, especially if it kept heading west: Given
its current approximate location, it could easily reach the western edge of Kingwood within another day or two. Beyond the city limits, it would be back in suburbia where it had started two years ago, free to feed on family pets once more and further unjustly blacken the reputation of those rangy, mangy coyotes.
Calvin slapped the map book shut and tossed it carelessly onto the coffee table, where it knocked against a plastic coaster and sent it shooting to the carpet like a hockey puck. He left the coaster on the floor and flung himself onto the leather couch.
“Shit,” he said again.