“Fuckyouasshole.”
“No, seriously. What’s your name again?”
“Mandy.” The disgusted glare shut off as the eyes closed again, followed by another long snore.
“Huh. Mandy. Okay then.” Dallas swung his legs out of the bed and dropped his feet to the beer-soaked bedroom carpet. Unfazed by the squishing between his toes, he wobbled upright, staggered toward the bathroom, and started another day.
Mornings were usually like this. In the month or so since he’d killed his best friend, Dallas had done an excellent job of pickling his liver. It wasn’t like he’d planned to party and drink all the time. He just didn’t want to think about that night. As it turned out, sex and alcohol made that very reasonable goal much more attainable. Shaking his head to clear away the memories, Dallas made his way downstairs.
Time heals all wounds, he reminded himself. Although in his case, ‘time’ had been replaced with whiskey and beer. Speaking of which, it was time for breakfast. A glance at the clock reminded him he needed to be quick about it. Jerry’s furnace was on the fritz, and Dallas had to save the day.
When he finally arrived at Jerry’s house, Dallas was feeling fine. Jerry seemed a little sick though. He kept covering his nose and turning his head away.
“Whassa problem, Jimmy? Flu?” he asked.
“Ah, it’s Jerry, actually…”
“Whatever. You said the fan’s broke?”
“No. I think it’s the thermostat. Seems like it doesn’t kick on until the temp gets about eight or ten degrees below what we set it at.”
“Thermostat? Bullshit. Blower fan. Guaran-frickin-tee.”
“But the fan works fine. It’s just that,”
“Who’s the goddamn furnace guy here?” Dallas snapped. His good mood was slowly giving way to a grinding headache. When Jerry didn’t respond, he nodded. “Thought so. Now where’s that furnace?”
A few hours later, Dallas had replaced the thermostat, blower fan, filter, electric pilot, and vacuumed out the vent stack. At least, he thought so. While he’d been working, he’d also emptied the flask he kept in his toolbox. Looking to Jerry for confirmation, he shrugged. “Guess I got a little carried away, huh? So I guess, I mean. Well, ya know. I’ll only charge you for the…”
“Thermostat.”
“Right. That, and the…”
“Thermostat,” Jerry stated flatly. “I didn’t want the other stuff and told you repeatedly not to do it, so I’m not paying. Pam would kill me.”
Dallas’s blood pressure pushed up a few points, causing a vein to pulse in his forehead. He really needed a drink. “Shit. Well, you know.” Dallas shrugged in resignation. “Tell your friends I did a damn good job, and we’ll call it even.”
Jerry nodded and turned to find his checkbook. After working his way through the office, bedroom, and kitchen, he returned, looking perplexed.
“Huh. I know it’s around here somewhere.”
Patting down the pockets of a couple of coats hanging on the wall, Jerry noticed his briefcase sitting innocently on the bench by the door. Leaning over, he flipped the latches and popped it open. After pushing a few miscellaneous brochures out of the way, his hand emerged victorious with a checkbook.
As the two men dickered again over the price of a thermostat with additional free services, neither noticed the small tick climb out of the case, fall to the floor, and wriggle toward its next unsuspecting meal.
Chapter 2
Mandy was gone by the time Dallas got back from Jerry’s. Unfortunately, so was his buzz, and some right unpleasant thoughts were starting to creep in. Pulling open the fridge, he popped the tab on his last Milwaukee’s Best and drained it in one long pull, throat working industriously to move the beer from the can to his stomach. With a loud sigh, he eyed the empty can with disappointment. He didn’t have any other service calls for the day and figured a trip to Steinknocker’s was in order for a real lunch.
Pushing his way inside the local bar, Dallas shouldered past the regulars, nodding in response to the usual greetings but doing his best to get to the bar without actually engaging anyone.
“That’s him!” he heard an unfamiliar voice say in a loud whisper. “Says he killed a vampire.”
Muted laughter followed the comment which Dallas pointedly ignored, along with the visions that followed closely on its heels. He didn’t want to see the inside of Bay City Bowler’s karaoke bar, didn’t want to see Herb’s face as he realized there was a two-foot length of lacquered wood extending from his chest, and he definitely didn’t want to see the slow fire burning his best friend from the inside out as Herb turned to ash.
Shifting his gaze to look for Stein, owner and proprietor of Steinknockers Bar, Dallas’s eyes couldn’t avoid the framed picture of Helen up on the wall. A decorative vase filled with plastic flowers rested serenely beneath it, surrounded by sympathy cards for Stein. Former waitress at Steinknockers and stripper at Nekked’s, Helen had been one of Herb’s victims. The full sequence of events was never quite unraveled, but Dallas figured that Herb seduced her, turned her into a vampire, and then torched her in the strip club’s tanning booth in a vindictive rage when she interfered with his frat-boy dinner. It was so completely not Herb that Dallas had to choke back a harsh laugh. Hell, seemed like the whole summer Herb had been not Herb. It made Dallas wonder how well he’d ever known the man he’d considered his best friend since their school days. He missed his friend terribly, but the thing he’d stabbed at Bay City Bowlers, that wasn’t Herb. He stopped being Herb when someone, some thing turned him into a goddamn monster. Dallas wished he knew who, so he could bust another pool cue and stab that vampire, too.
Stein made his way over and offered a, “Howdy, Dallas.” Noticing the direction of Dallas’s gaze, he wiped at an involuntary tear.
“Yeah, she was a gem. A right gem, taken a’fore her time. Never late. Always cashed out even at the end of her shift. Great rack, too,” Stein observed with a shaky sigh.
Dallas just nodded as Stein poured two whiskeys and raised one up.
“To Helen,” he toasted, eyes moist.
“Helen,” Dallas agreed, whiskey burning away his self-doubts. He’d killed a goddamn monster. Too late to save Helen, but he’d saved Lois and saved the whole town. He was a hero. A goddamn hero.
Chapter 3
“You’re needed.”
The nasally voice cut through the whiskey fog, rousing Dallas from his stupor. Before he could put meaning to the words, turn his head, and identify the speaker, the person was gone.
“Haven’t seen him b-before,” Stanley commented.
“Stanwee?” Dallas slurred. “Whend’choo get here?” Stanley had hung around with Dallas and Herb for years. Wiry, fidgety, and a terrible bowler, he had rounded out their backwoods version of the Three Musketeers, or more like Two Musketeers and That Stuttering Guy Who Claimed He Was Abducted by Aliens. Since Herb’s death, he’d been Dallas’s near-constant drinking companion.
“J-just now,” Stanley replied. “Saw you talking to that guy,” he said, pointing toward the door.
Dallas’s bleary gaze followed Stanley’s finger, and he locked eyes with a stranger across the bar. The two considered each other for a moment before the man nodded and walked outside.
With a shrug and a short belch, Dallas returned his attention to Stanley. His friend was scrutinizing a business card, a perplexed look layered on top of the usually perplexed look he wore as a matter of course, making him look especially… Dallas groped for the right word… perplexed.
“Crap on a cracker, Stanley. You looking for the cure for cancer on that thing? Give’er here and let me help you with the big words.” Swiping the card, he read out loud.
“Find us. You’re needed.”
Dallas borrowed Stanley’s perplexed look and tried it on for a moment. He’d heard that before. Recent like. A nasally voice. For some reason, the face of the man he’d just been trading looks with popped back into his mind. The voice he r
ecalled seemed like it would fit the man’s face. Gaunt, squinty eyes, straight brown hair slicked back from a dark widow’s peak, scraggly hairs making a go at becoming a goatee. Yeah, it could’ve been that guy, but why was he talking to Dallas? What did they talk about? Why leave the card? A closer look popped the tab on a deeper mystery. Why leave a card telling him to find someone but not leave an address or a number? It was a mystery, pure and simple, and there were few things Dallas hated more than mysteries.
“Guy must have a busted furnace,” Dallas reasoned out loud, causing Stanley’s head to bob in assent. “Jackass didn’t leave a number though. How the hell am I supposed to help if he didn’t leave me a number?”
“Something’s on the b-back,” Stanley offered, a touch of drama coloring his tone. Unlike Dallas, Stanley liked mysteries. He had every season of Murder, She Wrote, Columbo, and Veronica Mars, and took great pleasure in rewatching them and solving the crimes before Angela Lansbury, Peter Falk, or Kristen Bell.
Dallas turned the card over, and sure enough, there was more.
TURN 2 2 AT 2 2 2
Dallas read the line once, then twice, trying to make it make sense. Sometimes, the right amount of alcohol allowed for just the kind of out-of-the-box thinking a riddle like this might need to solve. Sadly, this wasn’t one of those times. This time, the amount of alcohol Dallas had imbibed didn’t help him to think around corners, so to speak. It just helped him get more upset in less time. A win from an efficiency standpoint perhaps, but otherwise a complete loss.
“The hell does that mean? Well, I guess the jackass will just have to freeze.” With a grumbled curse, Dallas crumpled the card and dropped it on the bar. Slapping Stanley on the back, he stumbled toward the door and into the gathering night, the strange man and even stranger card already forgotten.
Chapter 4
It was the same dream. Usually with enough whiskey, say, the amount needed to fill a small aquarium, Dallas could keep it at bay. Tonight though, his blood alcohol level must’ve dropped below point-one-two because here he was, stuck in the dream… no, the nightmare again.
He bounced along on a sea of shoulders while faces beamed up at him, eyes wide and grins stretching ear to ear. The bouncing had a cadence to it, a rhythm. As Dallas bobbed like a ducky in an endless tub, the crowd marched in step and chanted in time.
Ding-dong the vamp is dead. Mean old vamp, wicked vamp. Ding-dong the wicked vamp is dead!
Dallas laughed, whooped, rolled to and fro across the sea of uplifted hands. He closed his eyes and opened them again and now was inside a bathroom. A quick glance around and he recognized it as the school bathroom from eighth grade. Sure as shit, there was Joey O’Connell. The little punk was always bullying the weirdos in school. He had some red-headed kid by the undies, a textbook-perfect wedgie in progress. Dallas knew this day. It was the day he first met Herb and started their life-long friendship. He also knew that for it to be an accurate memory, he should be in a stall making out with Denise Landry, not outside watching events unfold.
That’s the thing with nightmares, Dallas thought. Always getting things mixed up. Scarier that way.
True enough, the fear was building. Having had this same dream countless times in the past few weeks, he knew full well what happened next but remained powerless to stop it.
Joey laughed, the sound a high-pitched, manic warble that pattered on Dallas’s eardrums like BB’s on a metal roof. Dallas laughed as well, unable to stop himself. Joey kicked open the door of a bathroom stall, and Dallas sprang out like a jack-in-the-box, busted pool cue in hand. The jagged end slid into Herb’s chest, a slight tug the only indication that the chunk of wood was driving through skin, bone, and heart.
Lois screamed, and he pressed his hands to his ears, shouting back in response.
Ding-dong the vamp is dead! Wicked vamp, no good vamp!
He was still screaming as the crowd pulled him limb from limb while Lois wailed and Herb cried, “I love her. I love her. I love her.”
Dallas woke with a start, cheek pressed into scratchy shag carpet, and bed sheet wrapped hood-like over his head. Shuddering breaths pulled the sheet into his mouth and blew it out again. Contorting, he managed to bring his feet off the bed and down to the floor where the rest of him had ended up. Wrestling himself clear of the sheet, he gasped and swallowed as his heart rate slowed. The room was mostly dark, lit only by the red numbers of his alarm clock. Squinting, the lines came together well enough to convey that it was one forty-three a.m. As the adrenaline from the nightmare drained away, so did the details. Soon, all that was left was a lingering unease. Shaking his head, he pushed himself back up to the mattress and sat with his elbows on his knees, forehead in his hands. The sudden ring of the phone scared the hell out of him, causing him to jolt upright so quickly that he slid off the edge of the mattress and thunked heavily back to the floor.
“Better be a booty call,” he groused.
Another insistent ring was followed by a third before Dallas was able to get to the receiver. He’d barely picked up when Stanley started talking. It must’ve been something really important, to Stanley at least, because he was talking so fast and stuttering so much that his first few sentences were completely incomprehensible.
“Slow the hell down Stanley! Just… no, you have to slow down.” Dallas pulled the phone away from his ear, flipped it upside down, and spoke loudly into the handset.
“I don’t know what, ‘Burn woo-tu-tu tuh-tu-tu-tu’ means. If you want me to understand, talk like a normal person.”
Dallas counted to three, flipped the phone back over, and returned it to his ear. Stanley still sputtered and stuttered, but it was a little better than before. Even so, Dallas needed a drink. Whatever had crawled up Stan’s butt and injected him with crazy was of lesser concern. Still holding the phone with his shoulder, Dallas fumbled around, looking for one of his many flasks.
“Right. Uh, sure. Okay, a T.V. show. On in a couple of minutes. Yeah, yeah. Channel two at one-fifty-eight. Okey doke, Stan. G’night.”
With a long sigh of satisfaction, Dallas slid a still-full flask from the back pocket of a nearby pair of jeans. A quick swig accompanied his hanging up on Stanley.
“I either gotta find a not-crazy friend or change my number,” he mumbled to the flask. The flask was an excellent listener as always, but this time it had something to say back. Incredulous, Dallas glared at the back-talking little flask.
“You, too? Well eff’off, flasky. I don’t know what he was babbling about, but I gotta say, I’m a little surprised you’d immediately take his side.”
Dallas cocked his head as if listening to an informed response. Nodding, he returned the flask to his lips and took a long drink.
“Okay. You convinced me. I got nothin’ else to do. Might as well watch the tube.”
Dallas grabbed the remote and flipped on the bedroom television. The good shit was usually on Showtime or Cinemax this time of night, but he knew Stanley was going to call back right after two o’clock. If he didn’t at least pay a little attention to channel two first, Stan would be crushed. Dallas was well-aware of being a little rough around the edges but tried not to be a jerk all of the time.
Punching the remote’s buttons, he landed on the local public broadcast channel. What looked like a televised garage sale being hosted by a wiry dude in a Gilligan hat filled the screen. For a passing moment, Dallas wondered if he knew the guy. His gaunt face and squinty eyes looked familiar, but no recollection sparked in his alcohol soaked brain. A glance at the clock told him it was one fifty-seven a.m. Another minute and he could flip to some boobies.
Dallas watched the clock hit one fifty-eight. The guy on the T.V. was talking about a life-sized, silk-lined casket bookshelf, and if you called right away with a major credit card, he’d include a collection of horror novels. Suddenly, mid-sentence, the rambling hick looked up from caressing the casket to stare straight into the camera.
“If you have turned to channel two at t
wo minutes to two a.m., you’ve cracked the first code. That means you’re a very sharp cookie, which makes you even more important to us. World’s got enough morons. We need special people. People like you. We’ll be in touch, but you have to prove that you cracked the first code. I’m going to say something. Write it down, memorize it, and then burn the paper.”
Dallas stared at the screen, trying to get the game. Why did Stanley want him to watch this crap? He figured it would be a rerun of Jeopardy or something so Stan could prove he knew the answers. Instead, he was suffering through some kook’s cable access show. Stan was going to catch hell for this.
“Things only get as bad as you’re willing to let them,” the man on the T.V. said, staring straight at the camera, at Dallas himself.
Suddenly, his eyes lost their laser-blaster intensity and dropped back to the creepy bookcase. “…yours for only sixty bucks. You gotta admit, this would make a great conversation piece in your living room, even if you had crappy books on it...”
Dallas hmphed and flipped the channel, the stupid cable-access show already tossed into a mental dustbin.
When the phone rang a moment later, Dallas had just landed on Porky’s on Cinemax. It was the shower scene, his favorite, and he was in no mood to miss the good stuff. However, he also knew that Stan would just call back again and again until he did.
“Stanley,” he barked, picking up the phone. “That was some really interesting television, buddy. Pretty awesome. Thanks for the tip. Now if you don’t mind, I’m gonna watch a little softcore and call it a night.”
Dallas took another pull from the flask, reclining on the floor with his back resting against the foot of the bed. The whiskey and classic cinema boobage were starting to work their magic when something Stan said snagged his attention.
“Wait a sec. Back up. I was chosen? By who? For what? Well shit, Stan. If you don’t know that, then why did you call? Uh huh. Yup. Yeah, I remember the weirdy guy at Stein’s. Yeah. Yup. Wait…” Dallas leaned forward, suddenly tracking Stanley’s rambling. Standing, he cast around the room until he found the previous day’s clothes. As he fished through the jean pockets, he growled at Stanley.
Monsters in the Midwest (Book 2): Northwoods Wolfman Page 2