Bovicide, Zombie Diaries, and the Legend of the Brothers Brown

by Stephen Bills

  Chapter Seven: The Beast and the Pit

  Paddington woke to a crackly voice beside his ear. It wasn’t Lisa’s, not that she’d woken up beside him much lately anyway. And crackly… Why was it crackly? Almost tinny… What did that—

  The police radio!

  Paddington grabbed it off the bedside table. “Yes, Quentin, come in. Did you capture it?”

  “Nope. Nothing all night.” Quentin sounded groggy, probably because from all the grog he’d drunk. “Weren’t even any little foxies.”

  Paddington sighed. No sightings, no Mainland help. The beast had slipped away again.

  “Thanks, Quentin. I’ll see you at the station.”

  “Maybe tomorrow, yeah?” Quentin hiccoughed.

  “Sure.” Paddington placed the radio back on the nightstand and wiped the lethargy off his face. It was a little past eight a.m., which meant he’d had four hours of sleep. Last night was a haze of people saying they hadn’t seen Lisa for days and sounding happy about it.

  Where the hell was she?

  He tried her phone again, but there was no answer. What if she was hurt? Lying in a ditch, calling out to him for help? Foul play was the only other alternative, and the Three-God help anyone who had laid a finger on her…

  With nowhere to direct his rage, Paddington focussed on the day’s menial tasks. He climbed out of bed, washed, dressed, called Conall in the vain hope of news, then went to work. As always, his mother was already there. “Message on your desk, dear.”

  “Thanks,” Paddington said as he hurried past. Had Conall found something? Found Lisa? No, but this was almost as good:

  Richard Brown says he caught your monster, if you’re interested.

  Paddington rushed back past his mother’s desk. “I’m going to Richard’s. Radio if you hear anything about Lisa.” Andrea asked something about waiting for Quentin, but he was already out the door.

  Half an hour later, Paddington stepped onto Richard’s land. The day was pleasant: cool but still, bright, birds chirping. Things were looking up. Richard sat on a wicker rocker, resting a shining firearm across his knees. “’Ello Jim. No Quentin?”

  “He had a long night trying to catch this beast. I hear you had better luck.”

  Richard stood as straight as his crook-shaped spine allowed. “What did you say this thing was?”

  “The Beast of Gévaudan.”

  “Only I took some polonecks.” Richard extended a set of dark photos, obviously the result of a cheap flash on an old camera, but the white beast was clear enough. It was more wolfish than Paddington had imagined. Very wolfish, actually. Rather… entirely… wolfish.

  In fact, Paddington suspected that Richard had caught a completely innocent timber wolf. It was still mysterious: a single wolf wouldn’t take on a cow, but surely a pack would have to kill more than once a month?

  Well, he wasn’t going to find the answers standing around here. “I’d like to have a look at it myself,” he said. He couldn’t see a cooking spit, which was a step in the right direction.

  “I thought you might,” said Richard. “Even kept it alive for yeh. But after this I’m killin’ it. Fair’s fair.” Richard ignited his tractor, Paddington grabbed on, and Richard yelled back at him over its roar, “I set the trap away from the house so the lights didn’t scare it away.”

  “What trap?” Paddington asked.

  “I dug a hole.”

  Paddington waited for the rest of the plan, but there didn’t seem to be any. “And, what, hoped it would fall in?”

  “Which it did,” said Richard proudly.

  Success notwithstanding, Richard’s plan offended Paddington’s sensibilities. It shouldn’t have worked! Surely a wolf was smart enough to avoid a hole in the ground. Surely even the dimmest mongrel dog could outwit a Brown.

  “I used Delores as bait,” Richard said, “but it were more interested in me.” He shrugged his plaid – and, Paddington had never noticed before, very thick – shoulders and stopped the tractor. Beside them, the land dropped away steeply into a pit with a mouth six feet wide. Paddington couldn’t see how deep it was without getting closer, which he didn’t really want to do.

  What if this was the beast, and Richard had caught it? What did that say about Paddington as a policeman? Or what if it was just someone’s dog and it was dead? He’d have to deliver the bad news. And if it was a wolf, what then? He couldn’t exactly question it, or even release it and follow it to its pack. All he could do was stand aside as Richard shot it.

  Was that how he wanted his first case as detective to end? An accomplice to execution?

  Richard’s stare was unsettling, so Paddington climbed off the tractor and approached the hole. The thought that he was approaching a killer nearly made him stop, but he forced himself on. He was a detective; this was his job.

  Paddington leaned over the edge…