Contents
Title
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
About the Author
Copyright
Also by John G. Hartness
Falstaff Books
Of Lips and Tongue
Changeling's Fall
This Giant Leap
Midsummer
A
Bubba the Monster Hunter
novella
John G. Hartness
Falstaff Books
Charlotte, NC
2016
Disappearance - July 25th, Midnight - 48:00:00
Chapter 1 - July 25th, 6PM - 30:00:00
“I ever tell you I hate neckties?” I said, pulling at the offending garment around my neck. I’m a big dude, with about a 22-inch neck, so ties are not part of my normal attire. Hell, shirts with collars are usually only something I put up with when somebody I care about dies or gets married. And given recent history, there’s a lot more dying in my kin and friends than there is marrying.
The last time I remember wearing a necktie was at Aunt Marian’s funeral. There was a lot of dead bodies lying around after my last big fight with Jason, but most of them weren’t in any condition to bury. Besides, my brother was dead to me long before I finally killed his sorry shape-changing, murdering ass, so I didn’t bother throwing him a funeral. I burned his body, pissed on the ashes, and went to the bar with Amy and Skeeter. That’s how I celebrated my brother’s life.
But anyway, all that to say that neckties are damned uncomfortable when you’re normal sized, much less when you’re built like a defensive lineman, which I am, and have a beard like the fourth member of ZZ Top, which I’m not. My neck’s just too damn big to wear one of the things without it drawing up so much it looks more like a bowtie than anything else, and I tend to get the end of my beard caught in the knot. But none of that was any concern to my partner.
“Shut up, Bubba,” was the response from my loving girlfriend and partner, Agent Amy Hall. She works for DEMON, the Department of Extra-dimensional, Mystical and Occult Nuisances, which always felt to me like somebody really wanted the letters to spell “demon,” to paraphrase the movie.
“I know you’re uncomfortable, but I can’t do anything about that right now. If we’re going to convince these people that you‘re legit, you have to look legit.”
“And looking legit means wearing this ugly cheap suit and a damn necktie?” I asked.
“We’re pretending to be FBI agents, Bubba. Cheap suits and neckties are pretty much the uniform. Now shut up and let me get us past the front desk.”
We walked through the front doors of the Nashville Police Department headquarters, and Amy strode to the front desk like she owned the place. I reckon entitlement and arrogance are just another part of the FBI agent costume.
“Agents Hall and Brabham here to see whoever is in charge of the Sanders case,” Amy said, flashing her credentials. They were pretty good-looking fake FBI badges. I was impressed. I was more impressed when Amy opened a bag in the back of her black Suburban and pulled out one for me, complete with my driver’s license picture. I looked like a cross between a Hell’s Angel and Bigfoot in my license photo, but terrible pictures just made it look more realistic.
I snuck a peek in the bag before she closed the door and saw at least a dozen other badges and credential wallets. She probably had badges for us for every alphabet agency in DC, plus every major police department in the South. Yeah, DEMON covered their bases, even for their “adjunct agents” like me.
“That would be Sergeant Yates,” the bored-looking desk cop said. He barely looked up from his Sports Illustrated to reply. He kept his balding head tilted toward us while Amy stood there, silently steaming.
After a long minute, he looked up. “Can I tell him what this is regarding?” His head went back to the magazine before he even finished speaking.
Amy’s eyes got big as she put on her affronted face. “No, you can not, you officious little peckerwood. You can get his ass out here and show me the damn professional courtesy befitting a fellow officer standing in front of your desk asking nicely instead of me just making a phone call and the FBI taking over this whole damned investigation in the first place!”
The cop’s head snapped up, and he blushed, crimson creeping up his neck and face, all the way to the tips of his ears. “I don’t—”
“I don’t give a damn what you do or don’t,” Amy cut him off. “There are children missing, and the first forty-eight hours are critical. Enough time’s been wasted before we even got here, and if we don’t get that kid back in the next...” she looked at her watch, “thirty hours, the odds of finding her alive drop to less than twenty-five percent. Do you want to be responsible for a little girl’s death, or do you want to help me?” Amy tweaked her voice at the end of the diatribe, going from ranting drill sergeant to concerned, wheedling little girl.
I don’t know which tactic worked best, her masquerading as a douchebag FBI agent, or her masquerading as a helpless woman. Neither one was anything close to her personality, and they were both pretty hilarious if you actually knew her. But the poor guy behind the desk didn’t know her, so he didn’t know whether to scratch his watch or wind his ass. Finally, he decided to just do what she asked—it would be less painful for everyone. I coulda told him that. He got up and walked back into the station, shaking his head and muttering about “feds” and “mouthy women.” I looked over at Amy, who was pretending not to have heard anything.
“That wasn’t very nice,” I said.
“It was better than your plan,” she replied.
“How do you know what my plan was?”
“Because you only ever have one plan, Bubba. You hit things until they do what you want.”
“You’re not wrong,” I admitted. I guess after dating somebody for a couple years, they start to figure out a few things about you. Then I started to wonder when I’d figure out anything about Amy.
My brief bout of self-examination was interrupted by the return of the desk cop, who I now saw wore a nametag pronouncing him “Brown,” and a large African-American man in a suit, who I assumed was Sergeant Yates. I looked him over and knew him immediately. He was like me, an ex-jock, probably football, but smaller. I’d guess running back or tight end, maybe a safety if he played defense. Linebacker at a stretch, but he wasn’t quite bulky enough for that. He looked about forty, without too much of a gut. His suit was better than mine, but that wasn’t saying much.
“I’m Sergeant Yates,” he said, holding out his hand to Amy, then to me. We all shook, and Amy handed him a business card.
“Special Agent Amanda Hall,” she said. “This is my partner, Agent Brabham. We’re here to help.”
He smiled, but it was the smile of a man who just stepped in shit and had somebody telling him to his face that it was chocolate syrup. “I’m sure that’s how you see it, but I reckon I’m the one who’s supposed to call you folks if I need your very special brand of ‘help.’ Or have the rules of jurisdiction changed?”
“They change all the time, Sergeant. But this one hasn’t. Kidnapping is an FBI affair, and that’s why we’re here. I don’t care who gets the credit, but I do care a
bout getting Tamara Sanders back to her family alive and intact.”
I watched the big man bristle and held up a hand before he started to respond. “Look, man,” I started. “I know the deal. I’ve been a local guy and had the feebs come in and take over my investigation. And I’ve been the fed coming in taking over an investigation from incompetent local cops.”
Amy gave me a “what the hell are you doing, that’s not helping” look. I ignored her, which I decided a long time ago was the best way to avoid some fights.
I went on. “But right now, I want to be the guy that helps you do your job, and we just want to stay out of the way and give you access to our resources, our crime lab, and our tech experts. Not to mention another couple of feet on the street and eyeballs on the crime scene. So what do you say? Can we just work together, or is Agent Hall gonna have to get all official up in here?”
I could almost hear the thoughts running through the big detective’s mind as he mulled over his options. His shoulders sagged a little bit, and he looked at Amy. “If I fight this, you just take over the whole show and kick me to the curb, don’t you?”
“Probably.”
“And now I have your word that you’ll keep me apprised of anything you find?”
“I’ll go one better. You lead any press conferences about the abductions, talk to all the press, and all we do is get named as ‘assistance from federal agencies.’”
He laughed, a short bark that sounded not at all amused. “I get to talk to the press, huh? Thanks a lot. If there was one part of this shit-show that I’d want to hand over to the feds, that’s the one.”
I grinned right back at him. “Little assholes, aren’t they? It’s the same all over.”
“It’s worse when you’re on the force in a town you grew up in. The asshole covering the crime beat nowadays is the same scrawny little shithead that hated me in high school.”
I didn’t bother mentioning that the reason most “scrawny shitheads” hate us jocks is because we treat them like crap. When my best friend Skeeter and I first met, he was about to be run up the flagpole out front of our middle school by his underpants at the hands of a few of my fellow football players. But I put that aside for now in the spirit of getting along with the locals.
“Fine, y’all come on back and take a look at what we’ve got. It’s not much, but if you’ve got some super-tech out there that can help us find this girl, I’m all in favor.” He grabbed us a couple of visitor badges from the desk guard and waved for us to follow him into the back.
He led us to a small conference room with a large table covered in takeout coffee cups, photos, file folders, and a few napkins scattered with pizza crusts on them. He gave Amy a chagrined look and started picking up the scraps of what looked like the whole investigative team’s dinner.
“Don’t clean up on my account, Sergeant. I’ve been in these rooms too many times to be bothered by the smell of stale pizza and staler coffee. Are these photos from the crime scene?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said a young woman in a polo shirt and khakis. “I’m Jessica Clark, CSU.”
Amy and I shook hands with the tech, and Amy said, “What did you find?”
“A whole lot of nothing, if I’m being honest. We’ve got video of her with her friends all along Broadway, then entering Riverfront Park. The park is closed at dusk, but that’s never stopped teenagers. We have a few cameras in the park, but they’re mostly clustered around entrances and attractions, like the dock or the amphitheater.”
“Is there a chance that she slipped and fell into the river?” I asked. “I hate to ask, but...”
“We know,” Yates said. “There’s a chance, and we have divers working the river now, but we’re coming up on dusk, and they’ll have to come up soon.”
“Plus, we don’t think she fell in the water,” the tech interjected.
“Why not?” I asked. Yates shot her a dark look, but the slender redhead ignored him and bulldozed right ahead.
“We have video from the entrance to Fort Nashborough. We’re not sure what it shows, exactly, but it’s definitely something.”
“We don’t know that, Jess. It might just be a camera malfunction. None of the other kids saw anything.”
“Those little shitheads were so buried in their phones they wouldn’t see shit if they stepped in it,” Clark shot back. She looked at me and Amy with a start. “Sorry about that.”
“Don’t worry about offending me; I played college ball. If there’s a cuss word I haven’t heard before, then it was invented since I left college in 2002,” I said with a grin. I hoped it put her at ease. Sometimes my grins have the opposite effect, like people are scared I’m gonna eat them or something.
“Where did you play?” Yates asked.
“UGA.”
“Defense?”
“Yeah, I wasn’t pretty enough to play offense.” I smiled when I said it so he’d know I was joking. I wasn’t, really.
“I think I remember you,” the sergeant said. “They called you Bubba, didn’t they?”
“Still do,” I said. I was really hoping I didn’t put him out of a game, or a season. I left a few bodies in my wake on the rare occasion I got onto the field.
“I remember you!” He broke out into a huge grin. I played for the Commodores 2001-2004. Y’all beat us like a drum my first couple years. I only got in for the fourth quarter, but I caught a pass over the middle in one game and you made me regret ever putting on pads. Man, you could put a lick on a brother.” He shook his head and rubbed his chest like his ribs still hurt. I understood that completely. My knee still twinges every time it’s gonna rain.
“Yeah, I remember playing Vandy. Y’all weren’t real good those years.”
“We sucked, man. I was third-string on the Commodores and wouldn’t even make the cut on a top-tier SEC team.”
“Heh, which means you coulda been a starter for the ACC.” We both laughed. If there’s anything that’ll bring old ball players together, it’s making fun of a rival conference. “Sorry about the beating. I was just so damned excited about getting to play finally that I felt like I had to make every hit a highlight reel.”
“I understand that. So, how did you end up working for the government? I thought you were gonna go pro for sure, even with Pollard playing in front of you.”
“I blew out my knee, then went home and got into the family business. But speaking of...”
“Yeah, I know. Clock’s ticking. We can take a trip down memory lane later. Follow me. We’ll take a look at the video in our Nerd Room.”
“Nerd Room?” Amy asked, one eyebrow climbing.
Yates held up both hands. “Not me, I swear. Our techs named it themselves. Put a sign over the door and everything. They’ve got this place wired up like it’s Microsoft headquarters or something. Come on, I’ll show you.” He turned and walked out of the conference room, and we followed him, off to see the nerd wizards.
Chapter 2 - July 25th, 7PM - 29:00:00
He wasn’t really wrong to call it the Nerd Room. It was a lot like Skeeter’s office downstairs, to be honest, just with more geeks in it and no fridge full of Red Bull and Mountain Dew. The overhead lights were either disconnected, or just out, so the whole room was lit by small task lights and huge monitors. The walls were ringed with half a dozen workstations, each with a pair of huge monitors on the desk, and one even bigger one mounted on the wall. The big monitor was about the size of my TV, and at least one of them was running a four-way split-screen program that let the tech scan a bunch of video sources at one time.
Yates led us to one workstation, then waved CSU Clark forward. “Okay, Jess. You’re in charge.”
“Been waiting a year for you to realize that, Sergeant,” the young tech said with a grin. She pulled an elastic tie from her waist, yanked her red hair back into a ponytail, and sat down at the desk. A couple minutes later, the big monitor split into four displays, each with a grainy black and white image on it.
“Thes
e are the video feeds from the security cameras around the park. You can see Tamara Sanders enter the park here,” she pointed to the display in the lower left, “at ten-thirty. Then she heads over near the Fort Nashborough historical site.” She pointed to the screen at the top left.
I held up a finger. “Hang on a second. I’d like to have my tech take a look at this as well. Is there any way we can get this to him?”
“The files are pretty huge, but we do have a secure login that other agencies can utilize. Just have him call in to the—” We were interrupted by a phone ringing at her elbow and every cell phone in the room going off simultaneously.
“That’ll be Skeeter,” I said, shaking my head a little. Sometimes Skeeter feels the need to out-nerd everybody in the room. It’s usually not even a close race, but this Clark kid looked like she might be able to give my little buddy a run for his money.
She answered the phone. “Clark,” she said, keeping any hint of being impressed out of her voice. “You must be Skeeter. Yes, we have a secure line that I can give you...okay, yeah, that’s pretty good. Okay, then you’ll need to...oh, okay. That’s also pretty good. So if you just...oh.” This time she couldn’t keep the “oh shit” out of her voice or off her face.
Clark turned to us, her eyes a little wide. “Um...he says he...”
“Is already in your system and you can just sit back and let him drive?” I added. She nodded. “He’s just showing off. Ignore him, and he’ll stop being a little douche soon.”
“I heard that!” Skeeter’s shrill voice rang through the speakers on the desk in front of Clark. “Ms. Clark, Sergeant Yates, I’m Agent Jones. Pleasure to meet you both. Ms. Clark, if you’ll narrate the action, I’ll run the video. This way everything copies to our servers here as it runs, and we have a copy in case anything happens.”
Or in case there’s something on that footage that DEMON doesn’t want civilians to know exists outside of Halloween stores and Hollywood, I thought. But for once I kept my mouth shut. Clark reached over to press a button on her keyboard, but the video started to roll before she touched it. Skeeter was showing off again.
Midsummer - A Bubba the Monster Hunter Novella Page 1