by Lynn Red
Bottom denture replaced, everything back in order, the two sneaking sleuths finished their examination with a lot of questions and zero answers. “Well, what now?” West asked as soon as he had climbed in the car to find Elena already sitting there. “That’s always going to surprise me, isn’t it?”
She gave him an innocent look. “It’s habit,” she said. “Fun too. You should try it sometime.”
West laughed out loud. “Yeah, I’m sure you’d like to see that. Hell, I would like to see that.”
For a moment, they watched each other, each studying the other’s face. When Elena finally broke her gaze, she grabbed his hand.
“You okay?” he asked.
She shrugged. “It’s weird, this whole thing. How, apparently, no one believes this strange little person is doing anything. It’s almost like she’s going on these rampages for a reason, but God only knows what it is.”
“I think you just said it,” West said, looking especially thoughtful. “Think about it. You said it yourself, she’s a strange little person, and no one believes she’s capable of much. What would feel worse that just being a... well, a nothing?”
Elena sat in silence for a long moment. “Still doesn’t make it right to go on a mission to, apparently, eradicate carrots.”
“If it works, think of the beta carotene deficiencies we’re going to see.”
“Is that a concern?” Elena asked, scrunching her nose. “I was thinking more the huge monetary loss for farmers and the cannery if there’s no carrots to sell.”
“Beta carotene, yeah, it’s a pretty serious thing. I mean, how else are you going to give some little kid six pounds of carrots and challenge him to turn himself orange?”
“Hold on,” Elena said. “Is that real? I thought that was some bullshit that moms told their kids to keep them from eating all the carrots.”
“Scouts’ honor,” West said. “I did it. I turned orange when I was a kid. I loved carrots so much that one day I guess my mom left my sister’s baby food out on the counter, not thinking that the six year old would, you know, break into it and eat like twenty jars of strained carrots. I was as orange as the day is... whatever.”
Elena was shaking her head. “You seriously ate so much baby food that you turned orange? That’s,” she trailed off.
West shrugged nonchalantly. “Bears get hungry, whatcha gonna do?”
She realized, right then, that she was still holding his hand, and he wasn’t making any move to get it away from her. “This feels good,” she said.
“Feels right,” West added. “Feels like this is how it should have been all along. Feels like I wish I woulda found you a thousand years ago instead of floating through life alone, convinced I’d stay that way.”
“That’s,” Elena trailed off momentarily. “That’s beautiful, and that’s exactly how I feel. I couldn’t possibly say it better.”
In the center console of the Buick, Elena’s phone buzzed, jiggling amidst the coins and odd collection of paperclips and rubber bands. She grabbed it, hoping that either the text would solve her problem, or it was a wrong number.
“I hate phones,” she grumbled. “It’s never the news you want. Especially when they ring at times you wish they wouldn’t.”
“That’d be why I don’t bother,” West said. “I don’t have any of those ideas about radio waves cooking my brain, or satellite signals polluting my skull and making me want a Big Mac. I just don’t like being tied down. When I’m digging around in the dirt, or taking care of my animals, that’s what I’m doing. Not answering a wrong number call for someone I don’t know’s Walgreen’s prescription. Which, by the way, I can’t get rid of. They won’t stop, but at least that’s the landline.”
“That was oddly specific,” Elena said, smiling despite her irritation. The phone buzzed again, she let out a long sigh and picked it up. “It’s from Ralph.”
“And?”
“Looks like our friend has struck again, only this time she’s upping her game. That industrial field the cannery uses? Not only did she wreck it, she’s apparently poisoned jars of carrots.”
“The cannery does that anyway,” West said with a wry grin.
“Right, thanks crusader of organics, what I meant is, before she wrecked the field, she apparently got some kind of herbicide into the actual cans and jars going out of the place. They were all caught in time, but still.”
She remembered he was still holding her hand, and found comfort in the warmth of West’s palm for a moment. When she looked back to his face, there was something sinister behind his eyes – something darker and almost... dangerous?
“What is it?” she asked. “Are you okay?”
West clenched and relaxed his jaws. “This is what happens when people go unnoticed. When no one cares.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Elena said. “This rabbit is poisoning the town’s food supply, and you’re getting all touchy-feely about her childhood?”
West shook his head, dispelling the strange, irritating trance that had fallen over him. “Sorry. It’s just that she isn’t the only one, that’s all. Nothing, it’s nothing. Don’t worry about it.”
Yeah, I’ll say it’s nothing, Elena thought as she filed this away for later. I’m going to get through this maze of a man if it’s the last thing I do.
“She’s active,” another text messaged buzzed through. “She’s dangerous, too. She got pulled over for erratic driving and when the hyena went to her car, she bit him with some weird dentures.”
She read the message aloud, while West listened, squeezing and releasing the wheel. “What did she do afterward?”
“I dunno, but,” Elena trailed off, waiting for the next message. “Oh, here we go.”
“Last seen heading west on the interstate, but I have to tell you – don’t chase her. Just don’t. This one is unhinged, and I don’t want to see you hurt.”
She shook her head. “I just don’t know about all this,” she said. “There’s too much going on for me to be sure what is happening or why. But I do know that no one’s going to stop her, unless...”
Elena fumbled to respond to the text message, but just gave up a moment later and went for the old fashioned method. “Hey, Ralph?” she asked as soon as he picked up. “If she bit a cop, why isn’t the department after her? I got nothing on the scanner.”
“You know you’re not supposed to have one of those. Strictly for—”
“Yeah, yeah, police business. But what’s the story?”
On the other end of the line, there was a long, heavy sigh and then the sound of scratching. “Something’s up,” he said. “But I ain’t sure what, exactly. The department has been weird lately, with the ignoring things, and feeding fake stories to the news, and—”
“Shut the front door,” Elena said, using her favorite fake swear. “Are you telling me this is some kind of departmental conspiracy? To cover up a pissed off bunny? Why the hell would they do that?”
Ralph scratched again, and then sighed in relief. “Allergies are horrible this year, what with the ragweed and the dogwoods. Just drives me crazy. What were you saying?”
“I was asking why you were revealing a nefariously evil ploy by the Jamesburg Police to... to what? What’s the point?”
“That’s the wild part,” he said. “I got no clue. I agree there must be someone on the take, someone who stands to gain, but I gotta be honest with you. I got no clue. There’s something I ain’t seeing, but it’s because I’m just a poor, old beat cop. I don’t have anything to do with the smoky room, closed-door stuff, but I know it happens. All I can think is there’s some other food company wanting to make waves, and so they’re either hiring, or letting, this rogue bunny make a fuckin’ mess of the Cannery.”
He paused for a second. “Excuse my language.”
Elena snorted a laugh. “That’s the least of my worries. Well, listen, I – we – got some stuff from her house.”
“I can’t sanction break-ins, Elena, you know that
. And did you say ‘we’? Who is we?”
“Oh, my, uh,” I paused. “I guess he’s my friend, now. West.”
“West? Like Thomas?”
My heart sank into my stomach. I’d totally forgotten, somehow. Maybe it was the excitement, maybe it was something else. Or maybe I was just an idiot.
“He’s a good man. One of the best. But if you’re around him, you already know that.” He didn’t say anything else for a moment. “But about the breaking-in business, I didn’t hear that from you.”
“You didn’t. In fact, you don’t even know I did it. But what you can do is give me about three hours in the PD’s lab.”
The way Ralph said “what” reminded Elena of a kid who just got told he was going to Disney World, except in an irritated way instead of elated. “How do you expect me to do that?”
“I don’t need much time, and it doesn’t need to be any particular time of day. Just, let me know when the techs are gone. No one will ever know. But I’ve got some samples that I need to analyze. Saliva, fingerprints, that kind of thing.”
“Why,” Ralph began, “do I feel like this is the beginning of a long and completely ridiculous relationship that’s going to cause me way more trouble than it’s worth about ninety percent of the time, but then that other ten percent will make it all worth it?”
Elena’s answer was a laugh. “So, you’ll do it for me?”
“Jesus,” he said. “They book it about seven most nights. Janitorial staff comes through around eleven or midnight, or later if they’re hanging out shooting the shit with the off-duty hyenas, which happens more than you’d think.”
“Great! I’ll pay you back at some point. I’ll think of something.”
“Yeah, sure, kid,” Ralph said. “Just do me one favor?”
“What’s that?”
“Don’t tell your partner I’m doing this, all right? I don’t want him getting all excited.”
“Deal,” Elena said, grinning wide.
-12-
“All it takes is a degree in astrophysics. That ain’t so hard, is it?”
-Elena
“Using stuff is about a million times better than the do-it-yourself spy kit I put together when I started.”
Elena clipped off the end of her long-stored Q-tip and dropped it in the saliva sample on the centrifuge. She added her distilled water, capped it, and jammed the whole works into what appeared to West to be a cousin to the vibrating bed he’d slept in once at a cheap motel. She extracted part of the resulting mixture, placed it in a tube, sealed the tube, and slid the thing into a very official looking envelope.
He stopped paying attention when she began the process on the second sample – the one from the teeth – but about fifteen minutes later, she was done with that one, too.
“So you just mail them off and hope there’s a match?” West asked, still not entirely sure why he’d been dragged along to play CSI. “And also hope the department doesn’t realize what you’re doing?”
“Yep!” Elena said. “I think of myself as a public servant. I pursue the greater good and it just so happens people pay me for my service. I’d do it anyway, whether or not I could eat, just to know I was doing a good turn for my fellow man.”
Somehow, she recited all that without taking her eyes off the centrifuge. When more strands appeared, she collected those, sealed them on a slide, and put it in a second envelope.
“You’ve practiced that. A lot, I’m guessing. And I thought you said you were a cheating mate chaser.”
“Uh-huh, and? I can’t think of a better public service than chasing down assholes.”
She went to work on the fingerprint. West watched in something approaching awe as Elena’s tiny, deft fingers moved the fingerprint to a scanner, and she busied herself fiddling with the knobs.
“Fair enough,” he said. “But... how do you know how to do all this shit?”
“What, this? The machines and all?” she asked. “Easy. They’re all automatic. I just push the buttons and screw around with the knobs to make it look like I’m doing something more complicated than I really am. Everything I need to know I learned from YouTube videos.”
As the machine whirred, a half smile quirked across Elena’s face. West, watching her, felt his heart skip a beat. When she acted like this, moving with a purpose, in a way he’d never been able to move, not even in his best days, he couldn’t stop looking at her.
“Besides,” she finally said, “there are instructions on the side.”
Snapped out of his longing daydream, West spoke up. “I learned how to use one of those paint sprayers with a video. And how to fix my washing machine. I might be able to grow anything from a seed to a massive vegetable, but I didn’t know anything about sump filters and how to clean them until I saw ToolMan251 fix a washer like mine.”
“Crazy, isn’t it?” she asked. “What the hell did we do ten years ago?”
“Well,” West said, “I usually blacked out and beat people half to death. What about you?”
“Ran from every problem I ever had,” Elena answered. It was easy to talk about serious things when her hands were busy and she had an excuse not to look her mate in the face. She didn’t have to see the way his expression changed and hope she wasn’t saying anything that was going to ruin things.
He didn’t respond, he just rested his hand on the small of Elena’s stooped back. She took it to mean “go on, talk if you want” which is exactly what she needed to hear.
“I had a lot of chances when I was a kit,” she said. “I fucked all of them up. I’d get started on something – one thing I remember in particular. When I was in college, there was a project, for my history class. The class was about Ancient Greeks. Taught by the funniest little hedgehog. Anyway, we had a project.”
The scanner made a beeping noise. Elena opened the cover, moved the fingerprint to the next part of the device – which West then realized was labeled “2” and had a dotted image of a slide to match up – then shut the door and continued the scan.
He smiled to himself, but didn’t want to interrupt.
“This project, we were supposed to write a lesson about whatever, and then give it using the Socratic Method. You know, where you ask people questions and argue with them until they arrive at the right answer?”
“Yeah,” West said, though he didn’t actually. Gently, he kept stroking the small of her back, though somehow her shirt had crept up a bit, so his fingertips brushed her bare skin.
Something on the scanner beeped again, though it started back on its own. To West, this was all a bunch of voodoo that didn’t make any sense, but Elena was pretty clearly unimpressed with even the highest tech boops and bleeps.
“So I had this assignment, and I started on it, and then a few days later, Duggan – that’s the professor – he told us that because of time constraints, we were doing them as group projects. Six groups of five each. No big deal, right?”
Getting a little more of skin-on-skin with each pass of his hand, West shrugged and grunted in a way that said “no big deal.” He thought about leaning down and kissing the tiny hairs on her bare skin, but decided maybe this wasn’t the time or the place for a make out session that would probably get a lot hotter than just some casual necking.
“It crushed me like a bulldozer. I couldn’t handle it. I mean, what if I said something stupid and the group got a lower grade? What if I, I dunno, completely screwed up some important fact or point of our presentation? I’d let all those people down.”
“What was the project about?”
“That’s the best part. I got no clue. Not a single idea. The only thing I remember is the anxiety. The way every day I went to class, or the little group meetings, how I felt like I was drowning. And that’s not some bullshit comparison – I’ve drowned before. I was sixteen, knocked myself out on a diving board, and came to in the middle of fighting for air. I had no idea which way was up, where I was, and then I just felt like my lungs were burning. Then someone
pulled me out, sucked on my face for a second and I threw up.”
West had to laugh at that, and good thing, because she did too. “That’s a shockingly accurate way to describe receiving CPR,” he said. He dared to dip his finger a bit further down Elena’s back.
“There was that, and then there was this project,” she continued. “It felt exactly the same way. Finally, I just let it get the best of me. I quit going to class, stopped answering calls, and eventually,” she paused, and then stopped talking.
“Yeah?”
“You’re going to think I’m the world’s biggest basket case,” she said.
“Nah,” West said, in that delicious drawl. “Ally Sheedy, she’s the basket case. I’ve seen the movie.”
“Oh my God, he isn’t an alien,” Elena said, smiling playfully. The scanner blooped, and she adjusted it. “This might change your mind. I felt – shit, feel – so stupid. So this was one project, right? One simple project. Even if it sucked, who cares? And looking back, I understand that. But in the moment? I couldn’t face those people, or the vague, improbable possibility of ever letting them down. I just quit.”
“Like, school?”
“Yup. But I was too scared even to go to the registrar and actually quit. So I just stopped going. Flunked three classes, and somehow got an “A” and a “B” in the other two. Never did quite figure that one out.”
The scanner beeped, prompting Elena to move the slide to the “3a” position. She pressed the button and sighed as it started whirring, and ran her hand through her hair. This was the first time since they’d met that West saw her without something holding her hair up, at least when she was clothed. The white frosting in her copper-colored hair sparkled under the florescent light.
“You’re incredible,” he said flatly. “All this stuff you know, it’s—”
“I’m nothing incredible,” she shot back. “All I do is watch videos and fake it until I make it. Although in my life? I’ve mostly never made it.”