“The rats. Around 2 A.M. they all started moving west. I can’t figure out what caused it. Here, look at the screen.” Gabe had a laptop computer strapped into a harness around his waist. He turned it so Theo could see the screen. “Each of these dots represents an animal I have implanted with a tracking chip. Here’s their location at 1 A.M.” He clicked a key and the screen drew a topographical map of the area. Green dots were scattered pretty much evenly along the creek bed and the business district of Pine Cove.
Gabe hit another key. “Now here they are at two.” All but a few of the dots had moved into the ranchland east of Pine Cove.
“Uh-huh,” Theo said. Gabe was a nice guy. Spent too much time with vermin, but he was a nice guy. Gabe needs to talk to humans occasionally, Theo thought.
“Well, don’t you see? They all moved at once, except for these ten over here that moved to the shore.”
“Uh-huh,” Theo said. “Gabe, the Texaco blew up. A guy was killed. I was talking to firemen in space suits all day. Every paper in the county has called me. The battery is almost out on my cell phone. I haven’t eaten since yesterday and I only slept an hour last night. Help me find the significance in rat migration, okay?”
Gabe looked crestfallen. “Well, I don’t know the significance yet. I’m tracking the ten that didn’t move east, hoping the anomalies will give a clue to the behavior of the larger group. Strange thing is, four of the ten disappeared off my screen a little after two. Even if they were killed, the chips should still transmit. I need to find them.”
“And I wish you the best of luck, but this area may still be dangerous. You can’t be here, buddy.”
“Maybe there were fumes,” Gabe said. “But that doesn’t explain why they all moved in the same direction. Some even came through this area from the shore.”
Theo couldn’t bear to express to Gabe how little he cared. “You had any dinner, Gabe?”
“No, I’ve been doing this since last night.”
“Pizza, Gabe. We need pizza and beer. I’ll buy.”
“But I need to…”
“You’re a single guy, Gabe. You need pizza every eighteen hours or you can’t function properly. And I have a question to ask you about footprints, but I want you to watch me drink a few beers before I ask so I can claim diminished capacity. Come, Gabe, let me take you to the land of pizza and beer.” Theo gestured to his Volvo. “You can stick the antenna out the sunroof.”
“I guess I could take a break.”
Theo opened the passenger door and Skinner leapt into the car, leaving sooty paw prints on the seat. “Your dog needs pizza. It’s the humane thing to do.”
“Okay,” Gabe said.
“I want to show you something over by the creek bed.”
“What.”
“A footprint. Or what’s left of one.”
Ten minutes later they sat over frosty mugs of beer at Pizza in the Pines, Pine Cove’s only pizza parlor. They’d taken a window table so Gabe could keep an eye on Skinner, who was bouncing up and down outside, giving them an ever-changing view of the street, then the street with dog face (ears akimbo), then the street, then the street with dog face again. Other than to order a beer, Gabe Fenton hadn’t said a word since they’d gone to the creek bed.
“Will he just keep doing that?” Theo asked.
“Until we take him a slice of pizza, yes.”
“Amazing.”
Gabe shrugged. “He’s a dog.”
“Always the biologist.”
“One needs to keep the mind limber.”
“Well, what do you think?”
“I think that you obliterated most of what you thought was a footprint.”
“Gabe, it was a footprint. A talon or something.”
“There are a thousand explanations for a depression in the mud like that, Theo, but one of them is not an animal track.”
“Why not?”
“Well, for one, there hasn’t been anything that large on this continent for about sixty million years, and for another, animals tend to leave more than one track, unless it’s a creature especially adapted for hopping.” Gabe grinned.
The flying dog head pogoed by the windowsill.
“There were a lot of people and vehicles around there, the other tracks might have been wiped out.”
“Theo, don’t let your imagination run away with you. You’ve had a long day and…”
“And I’m a pothead.”
“I wasn’t going to say that.”
“I know, I’m saying it. Tell me about your rats. What will you do when you find them?”
“Well, first I’m going to keep searching for the stimulus of their behavior, then I’ll catch a few of the group that migrated and compare their brain chemistry to those that headed toward the shore.”
“Does that hurt them?”
“You have to blend up their brains and run the liquid in a centrifuge.”
“I guess so then.”
The waitress brought their pizza and Gabe was severing cables of cheese from his first slice when Theo’s cell phone rang. The constable listened for a second, then stood and dug into his pocket for money. “I’ve got to go, Gabe.”
“What’s up?”
“The Plotznik kid is missing. No one’s seen him since he left on his paper route this morning.”
“Probably hiding. That kid is evil. He rigged up something with his remote control car that affected the chips in my rats once. I spent three weeks trying to figure out why they were running figure eights in the parking lot outside the grocery story before I found him lurking in the weeds with the controller.”
“I know,” Theo said. “Mikey told me that if he wired ten of your rats together, he could pick up the Discovery Channel. I still have to find him. He has parents.”
“Skinner is a pretty good tracker. Want to take him?”
“Thanks, but I doubt that the kid had a pizza in his pocket.”
Theo folded his phone, snagged a slice of pizza for the road, and headed out the door.
Ten
Val Riordan leaned against her office door, trying to catch her breath and maintain her temper. Nothing in her clinical experience compared to the sessions she held on the day after the Texaco exploded. She had seen twenty patients in ten hours, and every one of them had wanted to talk about sex. And not abstract sex either, not issues or attitudes about sex, just squishy, thumping sex itself. It was unnerving.
She’d anticipated a spike in libido among her patients (it was a common symptom of withdrawal from antidepressants), but the books said not more than five to fifteen percent would have a reaction—about the same number that experienced a loss of libido upon taking the drugs. But today she’d hit one hundred percent. It was as if she were running a kennel for hopeless horndogs rather than a psychiatric practice.
After the last patient, she’d come out of her office to find her new receptionist, Chloe, furiously masturbating, her feet hooked into the edge of the desk, her steno chair squeaking like a tortured squirrel. Val had excused herself, turned on her heel, walked back into her office, and shut the door.
Chloe, twenty-one, had maroon hair, an entire wardrobe rendered in black, and a sapphire nose ring. Val had begun treating the girl in her teens for bulimia, then hired her when the volume of appointments skyrocketed after the placebo went into effect. Chloe worked in exchange for therapy; Val had thought it would be a good financial move. Frankly, she’d liked her better when she just threw up a lot.
Val was still trying to figure out exactly what to do when there was a soft knock on the door.
“Yes?”
“Sorry,” Chloe said through the door.
“Uh, Chloe, that is not appropriate office behavior.”
“Well, your last appointment had left. I thought that you would be working on your notes or something for a while. I’m really sorry.”
“That’s it? My last appointment leaves, so let the wild rumpus begin?”
“Am I fired?”<
br />
Val thought for a second. There were twenty more patients to see tomorrow and twenty the day after that. If the weirdness didn’t kill her, the workload would. She couldn’t afford to lose Chloe now. “No, you’re not fired. But please, no more of that in the office.”
“Do you have time to talk? I know my next session isn’t until next week, but I really need to talk to you.”
“Wouldn’t you prefer to go home and, uh, think about things?”
“You mean finish? No, I’m finished for now. That’s what I want to talk to you about. That wasn’t the first time today.”
Val gulped. It was highly unprofessional to talk to a patient through a door. She steeled herself and opened it. “Come in.” She returned to her desk without looking at the girl. Chloe took a seat across from her.
“So this wasn’t the first time today?” Val was the psychotherapist now, not the boss. If she’d been the boss, she would have come over the desk and strangled the little slut.
“No, I can’t seem to get enough. I, well, it started about two in the morning, and I went straight though until time to get ready for work. Then once or twice while each patient was in session.”
Val’s jaw dropped. Sixteen hours of intermittent masturbation? The other patients she had seen had cited two in the morning as when their sexual adventures had started too. She said, “And how do you feel about that?”
“I feel okay. My wrist hurts a little. Do you think I could have carpal tunnel?”
“Chloe, if you think that you’re going to file a workmen’s compensation claim for this…”
“No no no, I just want to stop.”
“Did something happen to set this off? Something at two in the morning? A dream perhaps?” Her other patients had described various sexual dreams. Winston Krauss, the pharmacist with the sexual obsession for marine mammals, confessed to dreaming of having sex with a blue whale, riding it through the depths like Ahab with a hard-on. Upon awakening, he’d abused his inflatable Flipper until it would no longer hold air.
Chloe shifted uncomfortably in her chair. Her long maroon hair hid her face. “I dreamed I was having sex with a tank truck, and it blew up.”
“A tank truck?”
“I came.”
“Sexual dreams are completely normal, Chloe.” Right, a tank truck? That’s normal. “Tell me, was there fire in your dream?” Pyromaniacs derived sexual pleasure from setting and watching fires. That’s how they caught them, look in the crowd for a grinning guy with a woody and gas stains on his shoes.
“No, no fire. I woke up at the explosion. Val, what’s wrong with me? All I want to do is, you know, do it.”
“And you feel that you might do something impulsive?”
Chloe put on her cynical Goth-girl face. “If you mean something like buffing the muffin while I’m at work, yes, Dr. Riordan, I’m a little worried. Can’t you adjust my medication or something?”
There it was. In the past, that would have been the answer. Increase the Prozac to eighty milligrams, about four times the dose for the average depressed patient, and let the side effect of reduced libido do the work. Val had used the method to treat a nymphomaniac when she was an intern and it had worked marvelously. But what now? Duct tape oven mitts to her receptionist’s hands? Although her typing probably wouldn’t suffer much, it might make the patients nervous.
Val said. “Chloe, masturbation is a natural thing. Everyone does it. But obviously there are appropriate times and places. Perhaps you should just cut back. Allow yourself to masturbate as a reward for controlling your urges.”
Chloe’s face went slack. “Cut down? I’m worried about driving home safely. I have a stick shift. I need both hands to drive, but I don’t think I’m going to have them. Do you have a patch you can prescribe, like they do for smoking?”
“A patch?” Val suppressed a laugh. She imagined a twitching, moaning line of people around the block at the pharmacy, there to pick up their prescriptions for the orgasm patch. It would make heroin look like Gummi Bears. “No, there’s no patch, Chloe. You’re just going to have to try to control yourself. I have a feeling that this is a side effect of your medication. It should pass in a day or two. I want to hear more about this dream of yours. We’ll talk tomorrow, okay?”
Chloe stood, obviously not satisfied with the help her therapist was offering, which was none. “I’ll try.” She left the office, closing the door behind her.
Val let her head fall to the desk. Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, why didn’t I go into pathology? she thought. It would be so peaceful sitting around, boiling up beakers of urine and culturing bugs. No wackos. No stress. Okay, occasionally you’d be exposed to some deadly anthrax spores, but at least other people’s sex lives stay in the bedroom and the tabloids where they belong.
Her appointment with Martin and Lisbeth Luder rose in her head. They were in their seventies, had been in counseling because they hadn’t had a decent conversation since 1958, and today they had come in and dumped a half hour of explicit sexual narrative on her, an account of perversions they’d indulged in the night before, starting at around 2 A.M. The visual conjured in Val’s mind—all that parched, wrinkled flesh in furious friction—culminated in flames, as if some giant cosmic Boy Scout had decided to rub two old people together to make a fire. The worst of it, the absolute worst of it, is that she’d found herself getting turned on while listening. She’d had to change her panties between appointments four times today.
She considered pouring herself a hefty tumbler of brandy and settling down in front of the television, but that wasn’t going to do it. Batteries; she needed four C-cell batteries and she needed them now. Then it was time to dig through her lingerie drawers and find a long-forgotten friend—and hope that it still worked.
Molly
Long past dark and Molly was still staring though the gap in the curtains at the trailer that ate the kid. The problem with being nuts, she thought, is that you don’t always feel as if you’re nuts. Sometimes, in fact, you feel perfectly sane, and there just happens to be a trailer-shaped dragon crouching in the lot next door. Not that she was ready to go out and proclaim that fact to anyone, because no matter how sane you feel, some stuff just sounds too crazy. So she watched, still wearing her Warrior Babe outfit, hoping someone else would come along and notice. Around eight, someone did.
She saw Theophilus Crowe going from door to door in the park. He came into view two trailers down at the Morales home, spoke briefly with Mr. Morales at the door, then headed for the dragon trailer.
Molly was torn. She liked Theo. Yes, he’d taken her to County once or twice, but he’d always been kind to her—warned her about the guy in the day room who cheated at Parcheesi by eating the marbles. And he never spoke to her like she was a crazy woman. Theo was a fan.
As Theo was raising his black Mag lite to tap on the dragon trailer’s door, Molly saw the two windows on the end slowly open, revealing the cat’seye pupils. Theo obviously didn’t see them. He was looking at his shoes.
She threw up the aluminum sash and shouted, “They’re not home!”
The constable turned toward Molly. “Just a second,” she said.
She bolted out the door of her trailer and stopped by the street where Theo could see her. “They aren’t home. Come here a second,” she repeated.
Theo tucked his Mag lite into his belt. “Molly, how are you?”
“Fine, fine, fine. I need to talk to you, okay? Over here, okay?” She didn’t want to tell him why. What if the eyes weren’t there? What if it was just a trailer? She’d be on her way to County in a heartbeat.
“They’re not home then?” Theo said, pointing over his shoulder to the dragon trailer. He was staring at her now, at the same time trying not to stare. He had a goofy grin on his face, the same sort Molly had seen on the kid right before he got slurped.
“Nope, gone all day.”
“What’s with the sword?
Oh shit! She forgot she’d grabbed the sword on the w
ay out. “I was just making some stir-fry. Chopping up some veggies.”
“That ought to do it.”
“Broccoli stems,” she said, as if that explained everything. He was looking at the leather bikini, and she watched his eyes stop on the scar above her breast, then look away. She covered the scar with her hand. “One of my old Kendra costumes. Everything else is in the dryer.”
“Sure. Hey, you don’t get the Times, do you?”
“Nope. Why?”
“The kid that delivers it, Mikey Plotznik, left for his route this morning and no one has seen him since. Looks like the last paper he delivered was a few doors down. You didn’t happen to see him, did you?”
“About ten, blond kid, Rollerblades? Kinda evil?”
“That’s him.”
“Nope, haven’t seen him.” She watched the eyes of the dragon trailer close behind Theo and took a deep breath.
“You seem a little tense, Molly. You okay?”
“Fine, fine, just wanted to get back to my stir-fry. You hungry?”
“Did Val Riordan get hold of you?”
“Yep, she called. I’m not nuts.”
“Of course not. I’d like you to keep an eye out for this kid, Molly. One of his buddies fessed up that Mikey had a little bit of an obsession with you.”
“Me? No kidding?”
“He might be creeping around your trailer.”
“Really?”
“If you see him, give me a call, would you? His folks are worried about him.”
“I’ll do that.”
“Thanks. And ask your neighbors when they get home, would you?”
“You betcha.” Molly realized he was stalling. Just staring at her with that goofy grin on his face. “They just moved in. I don’t know them very well, but I’ll ask.”
“Thanks.” He said, still just standing there, like a twelve-year-old ready to make an assault on the wall-flowers at his first dance.
“I’d better go, Theo. I have broccoli in the dryer.” No, she had wanted to say she had to get back to dinner, or to her laundry, not both.
“Okay. See ya.”
She ran into her trailer, slammed the door, and leaned against it. Through the window she could see the dragon trailer open an eye and close it quickly. She could have sworn it was winking at her.
The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove pc-2 Page 8