by Gregory Kay
Pete snorted derisively.
“That was probably just some stupid asshole trying to scare them. He’s lucky Johnny didn’t kill him, and I wouldn’t have blamed him!”
“I thought so too, and so did Johnny, at first. He says he threw it in reverse and punched the gas, and knocked whatever was up there off; it rolled down onto the hood and then off in front of him, and, what little he saw of it up until then, it looked like a man. Then he stopped and was on his way out of the car with a baseball bat in his hand, when it stood up in the headlights where they could see it.”
“Did they say what it was?”
“Yeah. They said it looked like a man all in black or dark gray, but it was about eight feet tall, with glowing red eyes and a head that seemed to grow right out of its shoulders – no visible neck. It had wings that both of them insist were about as wide as his Camaro is long. Johnny’s never run from anybody or anything in his life that I know of, but he had the good sense to run from this. He jumped back in the car and they got the hell out of there pretty quick. They say it followed them all the way to the town limits; Johnny swears he had the pedal to the floor, going better than a hundred, and it kept right up with them, flying overhead.”
“Good Lord! Were they drunk or hopped up on something? I can’t believe it! Yeah, Johnny drives a little too fast now and then and might drink a beer once in awhile, but I don’t know of him ever even getting drunk, let alone fooling around with dope. And I just can’t even picture Alison doing it. Damn it, those are good kids!”
“I know they are, and I checked them both. They agreed to take breathalyzer, urine, and blood tests – they volunteered for it, when I asked them that same question – and they both came up clean as a whistle: no trace of alcohol or drugs, and their eyes looked normal. Other than being scared shitless, there was nothing wrong with them; they definitely saw something.”
“Then what the hell was it?”
Luke shrugged and spread his hands helplessly.
“I have no idea, but whatever it was sure did a number on Johnny’s car. The top’s dented in, almost crushed in the middle, and it’s got scratches that look like claw marks on it and on the hood both, all the way down into the metal. He’s going to need some serious body work fix it. He was so scared he dropped his bat outside the car, and drove off and ran over it; snapped her clean in two. It was a maple Slugger and cost him better than a hundred dollars.” He tapped the desk once for emphasis. “That was the only evidence on the scene when I investigated, and the only evidence at all other than the car damage and their statements.”
“But what could it have been?”
Luke shrugged. He’d been hammering his brain all night trying to come up with an answer.
“Damned if I know.”
Pete bounced to his feet and grabbed the phone; he liked to walk when he talked, especially when he was nervous, and this was one of those times. Before he pressed ‘Speed Dial,’ he pointed at Luke.
“I don’t know either, but I’ll tell you one thing I do know; we’d better be finding out. If there really is something out there, even if it’s just some dumb-ass in a Halloween costume, it could be dangerous. And another thing; we need to keep this quiet until the County Commission can figure out what they want to do about it, or we could have a full-blown panic on our hands.”
“Just how do you plan to do that? You just told me half the town is already talking about it, and it’s not even daylight yet.” Shaking his head, he needlessly added, “I’d really hate to see the local internet gossip board once everyone is awake.”
Pete felt slightly nauseous; that local forum with all its anonymous slanders and wild accusations about even the most mundane topics was such a pain in the ass it was nearly enough to put him off the internet itself.
“Like you said a minute ago: I don’t know. For right now, though, go check your cruiser in and put it away. I’m getting ready to call the Commissioner, and I want you right here in case he wants to talk to you, because he probably will.”
Fiddle-farting around and putting on a dog and pony show to reassure the local politicians was the last thing Luke felt like doing, especially coming off the end of a midnight shift. Carefully keeping his face blank, he grabbed a white foam cup and filled it half-full from the fresh pot on his way out; he knew it was going to be a long few hours.
MONDAY
CHAPTER 3
New York, New York
It was almost noon, and Fiona sat at her desk in the narrow confines of her cramped office. She’d been staring at her keyboard since this morning, but her heart wasn’t in her work or anything else; her heart was spattered across Cliff’s apartment along with her chocolate cheesecake, and his whore of a girlfriend was probably still digging it out of her dyed blond hair.
Good!
Cliff had tried to call repeatedly, at least until she blocked his number; after that, she neither knew nor cared. She didn’t want to hear his voice or see his face or even remember that she knew his name, and she had emptied every text message from her phone unread, and every voice mail in her box unheard. No doubt there were some in there from other people too, but they’d just have to get over it. As for her, she didn’t know if she ever would; when she got up Sunday morning, her eyes were puffy with Alice Cooper-streaks of mascara striping her cheeks, and it felt like a big sinkhole had opened up somewhere deep inside, sucking her soul right out of her and leaving an empty space with nothing to fill it.
Today doesn’t feel any better! As if being Monday wasn’t enough...
So far today, she had yet to speak a word that required more than one syllable to anyone, in part because she didn’t trust herself not to say some really memorable ones. That wouldn’t do here; it would just hand Sidney the excuse he wanted to fire her. She needed this job, for her late uncle’s sake, as well as for her own.
Her great-uncle had started The Straight Arrow Weekly forty-five years ago and ran it for forty-one of those, until he’d died in his office, sitting in his editor’s chair when his heart gave out. Patrick O’Neill had traded in the Irish mobster’s pistol and brass knuckles of his youth for his dream of running a paper, as soon as his less-than-savory activities provided him with the money to start it, and he’d never looked back after that, only ahead. As a result, his tabloid graced practically every supermarket checkout line in America; it wasn’t quite The Enquirer, maybe, but it was close. His gangster attitude carried over into his business; he was always fair, but he took no prisoners and didn’t cut anyone any slack, including his favorite niece. He’d told her that her senior year of high school, when she asked if she could come and work for him.
“You know I love you, kiddo, but this is the way it is. You wanna work for me, I’ll give you the tools to do the job, and I’ll give you chance to do the job, but that’s all I’m giving you: a chance. I don’t play favorites, so if you don’t cut the mustard, you’re out on that skinny little butt of yours, family or not. Kapeesh?”
Fiona kapeeshed just fine, and her personal pride wouldn’t have had it any other way. So Uncle Pat paid for her college and her journalism degree, and she spent her summers working at the paper, moving from job to job there at her Uncle’s insistence.
“You gotta learn it all, kiddo,” he’d told her on her third summer there, “after all, someone’ll have to run this place after I retire. Keep your ears open, your mind sharp, and that big wop nose of yours clean,” He always said that last with a big smile, and inevitably tweaked the tip of the proboscis in question playfully when he did, “and it just might be you.”
To celebrate her graduation, he’d showed up at the ceremonies with his own pet vehicle, a black Hess & Eisenhardt Jaguar XJS convertible with a perfectly maintained V12 packed underneath its sleek hood. As soon as the ceremonies were over, he handed her the keys.
“You might as well take it, kiddo; old Uncle Pat can hardly get his fat ass under the steering wheel anymore anyway.”
That was the only time
she could remember she had cried from happiness: not because of the car, so much, but because she had succeeded in her uncle’s eyes. She’d loved him dearly. Not just for his blunt, often gruff Irish manner, but because he’d believed in her all the way. A youthful case of mumps had seen to it he'd have no children of his own, and, although the words were never spoken, both of them knew she filled that void in his eyes.
She still had the Jag, carefully stored in a secure commercial garage not too far away; she’d take it out on weekends, get out of the city, out on the turnpike or the back roads somewhere, and open it up, letting the powerful engine outrun her troubles. She had the troubles because she still had the job.
After her uncle’s death, the Board of Directors had replaced him with Sidney Goldman.
Fiona hadn’t expected to be put in Uncle Pat’s chair; she knew that she was still at least a decade short of the experience needed for that. What she hadn’t expected, however, was that the new editor would be such a complete and utter asshole.
Goldman was hired in from outside, after spending five years editing another, much lesser, tabloid newspaper, and he had his own vision as to how The Arrow should be run. Unfortunately, that vision included replacing almost the entire staff, getting rid of the ‘old dead wood,’ as he put it, and replacing it with ‘some new blood’ in a mixture of metaphors.
The Board wouldn’t let the new editor simply start firing people willy-nilly for no reason, of course – nobody likes a wrongful termination lawsuit – so he settled for searching for reasons in some cases, and making employees quit on their own in others.
His first step had been a series of departmental transfers, which was how Fiona went from being the primary candidate for political editor to ‘assistant paranormal editor,’ complete with a windowless postage-stamp-sized office made from a converted utility closet. Her fairly grandiose-sounding title was a cover for being little more than a gopher for one of Goldman’s new hirees, Joe Shapiro. The Arrow had always had a paranormal section – the middle-aged housewives who made up most of their customer base ate that topic up – but Shapiro got the good stuff, the interesting stuff, while Fiona was left with writing copy, astrology and investigating Elvis sightings. Shapiro was every bit as much a prick as Goldman, and she hadn’t had a raise since moving to his department due to his consistently bad reviews, but she still refused to quit her uncle’s company. Instead, she deliberately became such an acerbic, bitchy, totally unpleasant pain in the ass that both her bosses hated going near her at all, and left her alone more than they would have otherwise. She knew how to walk right on the edge of insubordination like a tightrope. Part of her knew it couldn’t last forever, that she would eventually fall, but she’d be damned if she’d quit.
She knew her bulldog attitude would have made Uncle Pat’s florid face beam with pride, and his red nose light up like a Christmas tree.
Then again, if Uncle Pat was alive and saw that was happening to his paper, he’d break Goldman's and Shapiro’s legs!
For right now, though, she needed to make her currently-assigned story sound serious: some lonely widow insisted her dead husband had been reincarnated as her cat, and was communicating with her from beyond the grave in a voice that spoke feline...which was difficult, particularly since Fiona had discovered that the woman had had the creature neutered. She couldn’t help but wonder if that was done before or after the crazy old bat decided the cat was her husband...
She paused to rub her temples.
God, give me strength!
Instead of strength, she got Sidney Goldman, who burst into her office without knocking, as usual. The space was so small, the sweep of the door barely cleared her cheap desk, and, if she’d been anywhere but behind it, it would have smashed into her with probably injurious force. She half-suspected that had been his intention.
“Hey, Fiona! I’ve got good news!”
She simply stared at him for a moment. She found the man’s personality to be even more repulsive than his physical appearance. Uncle Pat had been a fat man, true, but he was built like a beer barrel: big, burley and powerful, like a well-fed bear. Sidney, on the other hand, looked like a light bulb turned upside down, with all his lard carried in the space between his narrow, shallow chest and his knees like it had melted, sunk to his abdomen and ass, and pooled there. He kept his curly hair – what he had left of it – dyed jet black, making his bald dome look like an egg in a coal pile, but the icing on the cake, though, was his thick, 70’s-porn-star mustache, dyed to match the thinning remnants on his head.
Just to add insult to injury, his eyes were focused in the wrong place, as if he were addressing her tits, not her.
I may not have much, but they’ve got better things to do than talk to you, you dick-head!
He had made it clear without words on several occasions that she could not only secure her job and better her working conditions, but maybe even merit a promotion the way some of the other women in the office had. All she had to do was make the boss happy occasionally.
She almost threw up in her mouth at the thought. She’d rather go down to the Bowery and hump some random bum!
Oh well; what was that old Motörhead song? Time to play the game!
Cocking one neatly-trimmed eyebrow to match the slightest lifting of one corner of her upper lip in a sneer, she responded with, “What, you’re finally firing me? Great, just give me a minute to clean out my desk.”
“Ha, ha! You’re such a kidder!” he told her, hiding behind his false humor when both of them knew that nothing – short of her having sex with him – would make him happier.
“So who’s kidding?”
The phone rang and she glanced at the number. Cliff, you son of a bitch! How did you get my office phone?
Without a word she pressed the button to disconnect it.
“Who was that? That could have been important!”
Fiona could hear the first stages of triumph inflating his voice, and it gave her a small but distinct pleasure to pop it like a balloon.
“I recognized the number; it was some jerk who’s been harassing me.”
“You know you’re not supposed to take personal phone calls at work!”
“I didn’t,” she pointed out icily, “You saw me refuse it, and, if you have I.T. check my phone logs,” As I’m sure you will! “you’ll see that I’ve never taken a personal call at this number.”
Obviously disappointed but unable to argue with her logic, he sighed and, unasked, raised a chubby leg and propped one fat butt cheek on the corner of her desk. Fiona reminded herself to get some disinfectant and wipe it off after he left.
“Seriously, Fiona, I’ve got an assignment for you: some real breaking news in the paranormal field.”
“Oh really?” she asked in a voice dripping with skepticism, “Did the crazy cat lady’s reincarnated husband finally rip out her throat for cutting his balls off, or is Elvis working in that gas station in Queens again?”
Waving away her accusation with both soft, fat hands, he insisted, “No, no; this is real stuff. You’re going to West Virginia.”
Even though she could tell it pleased him immensely to finally shock her, it still took her a moment to find her voice.
“West Virginia?”
Sidney twisted his mouth to make it look like he had a plug of chewing tobacco in one side, and told her in an exaggerated imitation of a hillbilly voice, “That’s right, honey-child: West-by-Gawd Virginnie, like they call it down there.”
Fiona had never been sent out of the city on an assignment before, and had never even been out of state except for a couple of trips to Jersey and Connecticut, and she was intrigued despite herself, and momentarily lost a bit of her abrasiveness.
“Alright, I’ll bite; what’s in West Virginia?”
“There’s been a monster sighting in some little hick town called Point Pleasant.”
Her brow furrowed.
“Monster sighting? What are you talking about? Like Bigfoot or
the Loch Ness monster or something?” Now that could be interesting...
“Better than that!” he declared in sarcastic triumph, “Mothman!”
Suddenly she didn’t like the direction this was going at all.
“Mothman? What the hell is a Mothman?”
“It’s eight feet tall, and all black with glowing red eyes. And did I mention it has wings?” He fluttered both hands at the sides of his head to emphasize that final sentence.
“No, Sidney, you didn’t mention it has wings.”
“Well it does; furthermore, it can fly in excess of a hundred miles an hour. They know that because it chases cars. It happened there once before, decades ago. They even made a movie about it back in the nineties; Richard Gere starred in it.”
She sighed, “Look, I haven’t got time for jokes. I’ve got a deadline here...”
“Forget about it; Joe can deal with that. This is no joke; you need to get on your way while this story is still hot.”
“Story? What story?” she finally exploded, “A bunch of drunk hillbillies sucking moonshine and seeing pink elephants – oh, excuse me,” she raised both hands to wiggle her fingers on either side of her face, mimicking his earlier gesture, “flying monsters with glowing red eyes. Ooooh-ooh! Yeah, real story there, alright. No thanks.”
Sidney’s voice hardened until it was cold and businesslike, but he couldn’t quite keep the note of victory out of it that told her she had just been set up, and he had her right where he wanted her.
“Not ‘no thanks,’ but ‘yes, thanks.’ This is not an option, Fiona; you’re going. I’ve listened to you bitch and moan about not being allowed to be a real journalist since I took over here, and now’s your chance.”
“Real journalist? What the hell – “