I got it. I was real grossed out, but I got it. “I get it.”
Amy looked a little green, too. “So seven of the deaths left significant tissue, and those are the graves that have been disturbed.”
“Yeah, but how does writing that on a little whiteboard help us figure out our next step?” McGraw said.
“Well, ideally we’d stake out a funeral, but since people in this county are unfortunately healthy, we need to do a little more work than that, Sheriff.” Amy sounded grumpy. It made me feel all warm and fuzzy to hear her be grumpy at somebody else for a change. She’s real hot, but she can whoop ass when she needs to, and she seems to feel like she needs to a lot around me.
A passing deputy stopped in his tracks. “Why don’t y’all just stake out the Wilson boy’s funeral this afternoon, then?”
Amy and I both turned our gaze on the sheriff, who looked at the table and squirmed.
“Sheriff,” Amy said, “would you care to enlighten us?”
“Andrew Wilson died in a car wreck Saturday night. He ain’t been buried yet because of the autopsy, but they released the body yesterday. Visitation was last night, and he’s supposed to be laid to rest at the Presbyterian church this afternoon at two.” He hadn’t looked up yet; instead, he was studying his fingernails like the cure for cancer was under there.
“And were you planning on telling us this any time before the funeral?” Amy asked. I shivered a little at the icicles dripping off her words.
“I hadn’t decided yet.” McGraw lifted his head and gave Amy a level stare. “Look, lady, you can be as pissed as you like, but I don’t care. This was my town before you got here, and it’ll be my town long after you get in your fancy-ass helicopters and fly away.”
“I drove,” I pointed out. Everybody ignored me. It was kinda neat ‘cause nobody ever ignores the giant redneck, but in this room I was barely super-sized.
McGraw went on. “I know you see freaks and monsters behind every tree, but I see a bunch of stupid kids stealing dead bodies for who knows what purpose, and I won’t have you disrupting the funeral of one of the town’s most beloved young men for no good reason.”
“But even if it is just a normal kid thing, wouldn’t you put people at the funeral to have a look around anyway?” Amy asked. “Isn’t that kind of protocol?”
“It would be protocol if this were a murder, but this kid wrecked his pickup driving home from a bonfire. He was drunk, the autopsy proved it, and now it’s not a crime, it’s just sad. So I’d appreciate it if you’d leave this one alone. A professional courtesy, and a personal favor.”
Amy started to speak, but I held up a hand to stop her. “Who was the kid, Sheriff?” I asked.
“He was my wife’s cousin. Her whole family is all messed up about it, and I’d never be able to forgive myself if anything happened to his body.”
“Then let us make sure it doesn’t,” I said. “We’ll be out of the way, in the back of the crowd. Nobody will ever know we’re there. Then after the ceremony, we’ll stake out the gravesite and make sure nobody does anything to your cousin’s body.”
“My wife’s cousin,” he corrected automatically, but I could tell this kid meant something to the sheriff. Probably a protégé of sorts, a big, tough kid, plays football in a small town, goes into the family business, law enforcement. Kinda like my story, except for the part where I didn’t die young and my family business is a lot creepier than babysitting speed traps and wrestling drunk farm boys on Friday nights.
I stood up and walked over to the big man. I put a hand on his shoulder and he looked me in the eye. I stared into his eyes for a minute, not quite long enough for the Brokeback Mountain jokes to start, but almost. “We’ll make sure nothing happens to him,” I said.
“Fine,” McGraw said. “Funeral’s in three hours. You think you two can look presentable for church by then?”
“We won’t have to, Sheriff,” Amy replied. “Nobody will know we’re there. Let’s roll, Bubba. I need a shower and a change of clothes. And so do you, you smell like a mix of dirty wet dog and drunk tank.”
I sniffed but couldn’t smell anything out of the ordinary. “Is that bad?” I asked, following Amy to the door. I was glad to see that somebody had moved my truck to the station but less glad to see that they’d moved the seat and mirrors. I got everything fixed the way I liked it and put the truck in gear.
“Where to?” I asked.
“There’s a Courtyard about three miles from here. I booked a room on the flight in,” Amy said.
“Do you have a bag or something with clothes in it? ‘Cause I ain’t got nothing with me but what I’m wearing and another pair of underwear. I didn’t expect to be going to church.”
“We’re not going to church. We’re going to stake out the cemetery. There’s a difference.” Amy turned around in her seat and grabbed a bag from my backseat.
“How’d you get that in there?” I asked.
“I unlocked your truck for her,” Skeeter said over the comm.
“You can do that? I don’t think I like that you can do that?”
“I hacked OnStar, Bubba. I can do all sorts of shit to your truck.”
“Don’t even joke about that, Skeeter. So where are we going to stake out the cemetery?” I asked Amy.
“Skeeter, what did you find out?” she asked the air.
“There’s a Big & Tall Men’s Shop two miles from where you are. I sent the coordinates to the truck’s GPS.” Sure enough, the screen in the dash blinked to life and showed us a map with a blinking arrow on it.
“I thought we weren’t going to the funeral?” I asked.
“We aren’t,” Amy replied. “You are. I’m going to set up on the roof of the church with a spotting scope. You’re going to stand around at the back of the crowd and watch for anything suspicious.”
“Like somebody picking their teeth with a femur?”
“That would do, but we might have to dig for more subtle clues.” If only she knew how not-subtle this case would become.
*****
Two and a half hours later, I gave Amy a boost and enjoyed the view as she pulled her long legs up onto the roof of the Presbyterian church. She walked the roof like a circus performer, only without the feathers, scaling the building to its highest point and pulling a spotting scope out of her backpack. Once she had that set, she unspooled part of a hundred-foot roll of paracord and lowered it to me. I took the little silver carabineer and ran it through the strap of the Remington 700 and sent the rifle up to her. She flipped out the bipod and peered through the scope.
“I’m good.” I heard through my comm. “I’ve got a clear field of fire on most of the cemetery. There are some areas under the canopy I can’t get to, but that’s what you’re there for,” Amy said.
The funeral home had a green canvas tent over the case and three rows of folding chairs. Judging by the crowd already filling up the church parking lot, they were going to either need more chairs or a shorter graveside service. I skipped the church portion of the service and moved straight across the cemetery to the tent. Sheriff McGraw and two of his deputies were already there, looking as inconspicuous as a giant can in a small town where everybody knows him on sight. He and his deputies all wore lightweight grey and black suits, and all three of them were sweating. March in East Tennessee means only one thing is certain weather-wise, nobody knows what it’s going to do. One day it could snow a foot, then hit sixty degrees the next day. This was one of those warm days, but the deputies did a good job of suffering in silence.
The sheriff not so much with the silence. “What the hell is going on here, Brabham? I thought your little girlfriend was going to be down here being all investigative and governmental, and now I see her up on the roof of the church with a friggin’ sniper rifle! What are y’all thinking?”
“We were thinking that if something does go to shit,” and it always does, I added silently, “that we want somebody on the roof with a clear view of things and the
ability to leverage some high power negotiations our way.”
“And she negotiates with a .30-06?” McGraw was right up in my face now, towering over me like I do to people all the time. I didn’t like it very much.
“Yeah, she’s pretty damn persuasive with it, too. Now let’s get back and wait to see what happens at the funeral.”
“What if nothing happens?”
“Then we spend tonight with your whole police force staking out every graveyard in this town. I’ll be over yonder.” I pointed to a monument a couple rows back. It was almost big enough to hide behind, and it would certainly mask some of my approach if anything did go down. We took up our positions, trying to blend in as best we could. One thing about the Presbyterians, they didn’t waste any time on the funeralizing. We probably weren’t out there thirty minutes before Amy clicked her comm twice, our signal that the service was over.
I motioned to the sheriff, who got out of his patrol car and took up a position near the gravesite. He’d had the good sense to park close, so he not only had someplace comfortable to wait, but he also looked like he belonged there with his lights flashing to slow down passing traffic. The funeral procession loaded up and rode around the half-mile loop surrounding the church and cemetery and pulled the hearse up close to the grave. The pallbearers, most of them high school boys themselves, did a good job of holding themselves together, but there was more than one tear rolling down their faces. The rest of the procession was in no better shape. A man in his early forties walked a woman up and sat her in the front row next to a couple that looked about sixty. I pegged them for grandparents, and the couple for the parents. The man had the red eyes of somebody who’d been up all night crying and drinking himself all the way back to sober, and the woman had that zoned-out look of the heavily medicated. They were surrounded by men and women who bore a family resemblance, all wearing the pain of the day on their sleeves.
There were probably a hundred teenagers there, most all getting their first grown-up look at death. A couple of girls were playing it to the hilt, weeping loud until nobody was looking at them, then checking their makeup discreetly in tiny compacts. Most of the boys just looked stunned and out of place, like they didn’t know what to do with themselves, but a couple were openly crying and patting each other on the shoulders in that way that teammates will band together in tough times.
The funeral director, a skinny man of well over six feet with enough rouge on his cheeks to join RuPaul’s production staff, stepped forward and passed out a couple of small packets of Kleenex to the weepier of the adults under the tent. Like I figured, only a few of the relatives sat. Most folks stood around in a big circle. I made sure I was on the side of the circle nearest the street, in case I had to cut off an escape. The funeral director stepped back to one side of the casket as the preacher ducked under the tent to deliver some final words.
“Brothers and sisters,” the preacher began “it is with the heaviest of hearts that we gather here today to lay our brother Andrew to rest. We understand that while his time on earth is done, his everlasting spirit is now and forever with our Savior, Jesus Christ. And as much as we miss our Andrew here, we know that even now he goes with Jesus to prepare for our coming to Heaven to be with him again.” Then he led the assembled mourners in the Lord’s Prayer. I kept scanning the crowd for anything out of the ordinary, but all I could see was small-town grief and the tragic loss that people always feel when a kid dies too soon. Nobody in the crowd looked at all supernatural, they just all looked sad.
His prayer finished, the preacher stepped aside and motioned to the pallbearers. The young men stepped forward and each took off their flower, placing it amongst the spray of flowers on the casket. They stepped back, and the front row stood up. The father took a step toward the casket, but his wife laid a hand on his arm, and he turned back to her. She slumped against him as if her legs wouldn’t support her own weight anymore, and he walked her back toward the waiting limos. A couple of the older relatives approached the casket, passing a hand over the wood and moving on, but nobody tried anything out of line, like taking a bite out of the corpse. All in all, it was just a very sad, very normal funeral for what looked like a popular kid.
Until it all went to hell. I could see the whole situation unfold, but I was too far away to stop any of it. A girl, maybe fourteen from the looks of her, broke away from a bigger boy that looked to be her brother and threw herself on the casket, knocking aside a couple of the cheap folding chairs, sending the flowers scattering into the open grave, and unsteadying the coffin just enough to send it teetering onto one edge, then over to crash to the ground.
As happens when large heavy boxes come crashing down on one side, the casket popped open, spilling its contents to the ground. As horrific as that would normally be, sending the retouched body of a car crash victim to the ground is one thing. It’s another thing entirely when the victim has no arms or legs, and the torso and head roll over three times before coming to rest face-up in the middle of the aisle at its own funeral.
“Holy shit, what happened to his body?” somebody yelled, then the screaming started. Two of the undertakers tried to wrestle the casket back onto the platform while a man, a relative from the look of him, took off his suit jacket and threw it over the limbless torso. The father deposited his wife into a folding chair and whirled on the funeral director, grabbing the gaunt man’s tie and pulling him close. I couldn’t hear anything over the teenage girls’ screaming, but I figured he was asking about the disposition of his son’s arms and legs.
Just about the time I saw the father pull his arm back for a big roundhouse, the makeup on the funeral director registered. I looked around, trying to find the rest of the undertakers. The two wrestling the casket were wearing heavy base and eyeliner, too, as were the two limo drivers. It all clicked into place the same time the father’s punch landed, knocking the funeral director’s dentures out and exposing two rows of razor-sharp teeth.
“The funeral home is run by ghouls!” I said into my comm, then drew my retractable baton from my belt. The sheriff had forbidden me from bringing Bertha or the spiked caestus that Amy had given me for Christmas, and he just glared at me when I suggested my kukri, so all I had on me was my baton and a Judge revolver. I snapped the baton out to its full length and started toward the fracas, just as the grieving father’s gaze locked onto the newly revealed dentistry of the funeral director.
“What the hell?” He got that far before the ghoul stepped forward and bit clean through his throat.
“That escalated quickly,” I said. “Skeeter, is there anything I need to know about ghouls?”
Skeeter’s voice came over the comm. “You mean like they can’t be killed without silver, or fire, or anything like that?”
“Yeah, exactly like that,” I grumbled.
“Nah, they’re hard to kill, but nothing special. Just crush its head and you’ll be okay.”
“You got that, Sheriff?” I asked.
McGraw’s voice came over the comm. “I got it, now let me get these people out of here.”
I looked over at him, and he was gesturing frantically at his deputies to clear the crowd. The funeral director was covered in blood, and about half the crowd was frozen in place while the other half had already started hauling ass toward their cars. Unfortunately, all their cars were parked bumper to bumper in a straight line tucked in behind the limos, so they couldn’t go anywhere, just get in the cars and lock the doors.
Still, that was better than under the tent where the other undertakers had tossed the casket aside and jumped on a pair of mourners, ripping out custom dentures to expose their fangs. Each ghoul was over six feet tall and scrawny, but when they buried their teeth into a man’s neck, he went down under a pile of jangly arms and spurting blood. I was closer to the feeding duo than the director, so I started there. I kicked a couple of folding chairs out of the way and laid into the back of one ghoul’s head with the asp. He didn’t budge.
; “Skeeter, I thought you said these things could be killed,” I said.
“All my research says they shouldn’t be that tough. You nail one good with that baton, and it oughta crack its skull wide open.”
I drew back and laid a hit on the ghoul that should have sent the contents of his head across two lanes of traffic. It barely moved, just grunted a little and kept on eating, ripping flesh from the heavyset mourner and swallowing like a tiger on a zebra’s ass. I tossed the asp aside and drew my Judge revolver. I pressed the barrel of the gun to the back of the ghoul’s head and pulled the trigger.
“That did the trick,” I said into the comm.
“I think a .45 long from a distance of three inches oughta take care of about anything,” McGraw said.
“I only wish,” I replied, repeating the process on the second ghoul. The monsters fell off the dead funeral-goer, and I turned my attention to the funeral director. Much to my disappointment, he wasn’t facedown in a two-legged happy meal. He stared at me for a couple of seconds, then sprinted for the nearest limo. I hauled ass after him, but he had a head start and a lot of motivation, namely the giant man chasing him with a gun. He dove into the limo and gestured wildly for the ghoul standing by the front of the car to put down the teenager he was chewing on and drive.
After a couple seconds, the other ghoul got in the car and peeled out of the cemetery driveway. Well, as much as you can peel out of anything with dozens of people crowded around your car and a shitload of other vehicles in your way. So the car hadn’t reached much in the way of speed when they turned right onto the street in front of the graveyard, and I jumped onto the hood at a dead run.
For the record, there are a lot of things about jumping onto a moving vehicle that differ from TV and the movies. For one thing, jumping onto a car and landing flat on your belly hurts. It also puts your nutsack right at the front of the hood, which might have resulted in my having a silver Lincoln hood ornament embedded in my taint at fifteen miles per hour. That might not sound too bad, but please take a moment to reflect on the words embedded in my taint before you judge me. Then there’s the problem of inertia and a freshly waxed limousine. Sir Isaac Newton said that a redneck in motion tends to stay in motion, so when I hit the gleaming surface of the polished hood of the limo, everything about me wanted to keep sliding right off the other side. I managed to stop this by grabbing onto the windshield wipers and holding on for dear life. Literally.
Grits, Guns & Glory - Bubba the Monster Hunter Season 2 Page 24