But this time Joe caught me off guard. “That’s fine. You can’t really do anything about this until tomorrow anyway.”
“Huh?” I was so surprised I almost dropped my beer. But I am a professional, so I set it on the porch rail.
“The monster isn’t killing anyone, and it’ll take you several hours to get there anyway, so you may as well start out in the morning. Enjoy your night. I’ll email all the files in a few minutes.” Joe clicked off, and I stared at the phone until I remembered it was time to flip the steaks again.
Ten minutes later, I carried two of the finest pieces of dead cow flesh I’d ever prepared into the dining room, only to find Amy sitting at my computer. “You’ve got mail,” she said, moving my mouse.
“I don’t want mail. I want taters.” I plopped one steak down on her plate and the other on mine. I went over to the stove and reached inside, grabbing a couple of tinfoil-wrapped tubers and juggling them over to the table.
“I’ll be there in a second,” Amy said. “This is pretty interesting.”
“Don’t care,” I said. “Joe said nobody’s dead, so I ain’t in a hurry to do anything but eat and spend some time with my woman.” I grunted a little as I said it, trying to make light of my own caveman tendencies.
“Fine, but you’re eating some of my salad,” she said as she got up and came over to the table. She slid in beside me and I just stared at her for a minute. She was a dead knockout, tall, blonde, blue eyes and the kind of smile that looked like it belonged on a spokesmodel. Not a tiny woman at five-ten and maybe one-eighty, but she had curves in all the right places and legs that looked good running or standing still. She moved through my house with an easy grace, like she’d been there forever instead of less than a year. She still had her place in D.C. but stayed with me a fair amount on weekends and whenever she could get away. She was heading back to the city in the morning for some kind of necromancer’s trial, so I wouldn’t see her for a week or two until that mess wrapped up. I thought for a few seconds about how different my life was since she stepped into it, then shook my head and picked up my fork.
“Uh-uh, pal. You know the deal.” She wagged a finger at me and I put my utensil down. I bowed my head while she spoke. “Our father, thank you for this meal you have put before us, and thank you for this time we have had together. Please look after us as we go out into the world tomorrow to do our jobs, and keep us safe until we can be together again. Amen.”
“Amen,” I echoed. I wasn’t much into prayer before I met Amy, the product of seeing too many things that prayer didn’t have a good answer for. Even working for the Catholic Church, I wasn’t exactly one of their most devout followers. But that was another thing Amy had brought back into my life—a belief that there might be something out there that was good, instead of just all the bad things we fought all the time. And if I could ask a higher power to keep her safe until I could get back to looking out for her, I didn’t have a problem with that.
“So what did Joe send me?” I asked after the first few bites of steak had soaked into my system. The meat was pretty close to perfect, with a smoky flavor of my bourbon sauce brought out by some mesquite I laid under the grates of the grill.
“What makes you think I read the file?”
“‘Cause you spent too much time looking at my email. Either you’re suddenly interested in penis enlargement surgery or you were reading the case file. And let’s be honest, out of those two, the case file is the only one I’ve got any use for.”
Amy laughed and blushed a little bit. I loved that blush. This was a woman who had faced down vampires, elves, weres and God only knows what else, but one dick joke and she blushed to the roots. I almost got up right then and kissed her.
“The case is odd,” she said. “You’re right that no one has been killed, but there’s definitely something nasty running around in Memphis.”
“More than one something nasty,” I agreed. “There’s a transplanted selkie on the docks with a serious attitude and a rigged underground casino, there are a couple of major voodoo practitioners and at least one wizard that I know has a thing for young boys. But they all typically understand the rules and don’t shit in the local water supply.”
“I’m not going to ask what those rules are, but this thing is attacking children.”
I was almost out of my chair when I felt her hand on my arm. I settled down and motioned for her to go on. “We don’t have much, just a little bit of grainy ATM camera footage from across the street, but it looks like an elemental attacked a group of high school kids, then attacked the school itself a few days later.”
“A fire elemental?” That’s what people usually summon when they want to cause as much destruction as possible. An eight-foot tall fire-dude with a bad attitude usually gets your point across.
“That’s another odd thing—it seems to be an earth elemental, particularly a stone elemental.”
“I’ve never even seen one of those,” I said. I hate fighting things I’ve never seen. I never know where the next punch is coming from.
“Well, we’ve got some crappy video from the attack on the kids and some crappy video from the attack on the school.”
“And this is what Joe sent me tonight?”
“Yup. Wanna watch?”
“Not in a million years. Tonight we have a double feature—Cabin in the Woods and Hostel,” I said in my best innocent voice.
Amy laughed and finished her glass of wine. “Well, let’s get started on that first one. If you’re lucky, I’ll be so scared at the end of it that I’ll need to spend the whole next movie in your arms for protection.”
I said a silent prayer to Joss Whedon, God of the Nerds, asking him to look out for me in my hour of need.
*****
The next morning I fired up the laptop and opened my email as Amy was gearing up to head back to the nation’s capitol for another rough week of dealing with bureaucrats and politicians. If I ever had to choose between facing down soulless monsters from the lower reaches of hell or dealing with Capitol Hill, well, I think it’s kinda the same thing. Amy was looking fine in a pantsuit with a jacket custom-cut to hide her shoulder holster. I was still in cutoff sweats and a sleeveless Def Leppard t-shirt because I like to look good for when my woman wakes up. I had at least tied my hair back and run a comb through my beard, so I wasn’t in full Hillbilly Jim mode.
“So what’s the video look like?” Amy asked, grabbing a bagel off the counter. That was a new thing since she started spending time at my place—actual food in the house. Before, I kept beer, pretzels, tequila and microwave popcorn. Now there were green things in my fridge that were supposed to be green, not green because the pizza was three weeks old.
“Looks like crap, but as far as I can tell, you’re right. It’s either a rock elemental or Ben Grimm on a bad day.” I clicked the button to send the video to the big TV across the room, and we watched as a trio of teenagers did skateboard and bike stunts for a couple of minutes in the school playground. Nothing exceptional, just some kick-flips, some jumps and wheelies, the kind of crap kids do when they’re bored, but not really dedicated to trick riding or skating. Then a ten-foot pile of rocks lumbered into the frame and casually backhanded one of the kids off his bike. Then the elemental, or whatever it was, picked up the bike and hurled it into the path of the other kid on his bike. He went headfirst over the handlebars, landing in an awkward roll on his helmeted head and shoulders.
The kid with the skateboard helped his buddies to their feet and the first bike kid and the skateboard kid half-carried the second bike kid out of our line of sight. The rock monster stomped over to the abandoned bikes and proceeded to crush them into little balls of aluminum and rubber. I recognized the names on the tubes—Cannondale and Giant—not cheap bikes by any stretch. His vendetta against thousand-dollar bicycles complete, the big guy stomped off screen and the video went to black.
“We don’t have anything any better from the thing attacking the school
the next day,” I said, clicking a couple of buttons and closing the laptop lid. “I’m gonna ride out there today and stake out the school tonight. Then tomorrow I’ll start interviewing people at the school about the damage.”
“What was done to the school?” Amy asked.
“The trophy case at the school was thrashed, one of the science rooms was wrecked, a bunch of equipment and chemicals strewn all over the place, the floor of the gym took a beating just from the thing walking on it, the boys’ locker room was torn up, some other random damage,” I said.
“But nothing to the administrative offices? Nobody pooped on the principal’s desk or destroyed the teachers’ lounge or trashed the library? Those all seem like relatively standard targets in school vandalisms.”
“Maybe so, but you’re thinking like a human. Who knows what an elemental likes or doesn’t like about high school? Maybe he took exception to the trophies being brass instead of bronze, what do we know?”
“We know that elementals are usually directed and don’t just randomly attack buildings.”
Skeeter’s face popped up on the TV. “She’s right, Bubba.”
I jumped at the sight of my best friend’s face in 60” high definition. “That is not something I need to see before I’m done with breakfast, Skeeter!”
“That’s what she said,” he shot back, and we both giggled. Amy didn’t look amused. For some reason, that joke always falls a little flat around women. Course, so do most of my jokes, so it’s not like it was a surprise.
“How the hell are you on my TV?” I asked my technical expert, best friend, sidekick and sometimes backup.
“When you got the new TV, I put it on your network. Then I linked it to your Skype account. Then I linked your Skype to our Bluetooth connection, then I installed the webcam on top of the TV so I can see you, and voila! You’ve got Skeeter TV.”
“If my cable bill goes up because of anything you just said, I’m gonna hit you so hard I have to apologize to your mama.”
“This doesn’t—never mind,” Skeeter said. “This doesn’t sound like a rogue elemental, so I think Amy’s right. Something or someone is controlling this thing, so you need to find out who and stop them.”
“The finding out shouldn’t be too hard. I just go to the kids who got their bikes crunched and ask who hates their guts,” I said.
“Not too hard, he says,” Skeeter mocked. “This from the guy who everybody loved in high school. From the guy who was part of the Homecoming Court for three years in a row!”
“I didn’t win,” I protested. “I hated school as much as the next guy, and my big mouth got me in plenty of trouble, too.”
“Yeah, that your football juice got you out of just as fast.” Skeeter kept needling.
“Whatever,” I grumbled. “I’ll go take a look around, see what I can come up with.”
“Take some real artillery—Bertha is only so much use against a creature made of stone,” Amy said. I stood up and walked her to the door. I heard the familiar sound of a black helicopter setting down in my driveway, so it was time for her to go. I stopped her with the screen door still closed.
“Be careful,” I whispered to her.
“You too,” she whispered back, then threw her arms around my neck. I kissed her, eliciting a low whistle from Skeeter’s image on the TV screen, but when he started into “Bubba and Amy, sittin’ in a tree,” I pointed my Judge revolver at the screen. Skeeter shut up for once, and I had a very nice goodbye kiss with my girlfriend. That was a weird word for me—girlfriend. The last one of those I had my brother killed in front of my face. Sometimes when I dreamed about her, she had Amy’s face. Those were the nights I woke up sweating, with Bertha already in my hand. It was pure luck I hadn’t shot holes in my ceiling yet.
It was the middle of the afternoon when I rolled into Memphis, so I went straight to the school. Amy had hooked me up with more different badges than I used to have fake IDs, but they all involved me looking more like a cop and less like a biker, so I took a few minutes in the parking lot to smooth my hair down, tie it back into a ponytail and put on a sport coat. I got out of the truck and looked at myself in the side mirror. No, I don’t look like gorilla got into the Brylcreem, not at all. I slipped the appropriate badge into my pocket and walked up the steps of the high school.
The bell rang just as I reached for the door, and a couple thousand balls of teenage hormones came surging out at me in a wave. I turned sideways and grabbed onto the center post of the doors to keep from being carried away like a jon boat in a hurricane and pulled myself against the tide of almost-humanity into the hall. I followed the signs to the Main Office and walked in behind what was either an overdeveloped high school junior or a tragically underdressed high school teacher, I couldn’t tell which. The little girl in front of me smacked her gum all the way to the front desk, so I figured “student.” Good. I don’t want to think about most of my old high school teachers wearing tank tops. But there was that one drama teacher…
The authoritative throat clearing of the school secretary interrupted my trip down memory lane. I swear, it’s like they take a class in that or something. The woman who sat behind the main desk at my high school could, honest-to-god, stop traffic six blocks away by clearing her throat and looking over the top of her glasses at you.
“Can I help you?” she asked in a tone of voice that made it very clear she had no interest in helping me whatsoever and was having trouble believing that I had the sheer audacity to disturb her with my nonsense.
Suddenly thirteen again, I fumbled for my badge holder, flipped it open, realized I had it upside-down, corrected that, dropped the badge holder onto the desk, picked it up, then finally just handed it to her and grunted, “Principal.”
“Mr. Massey has bus duty until 3:45. Do you have an appointment?” She shifted from evil dominatrix to sweetness and light in about half a second, and I couldn’t keep up with her.
“Uhhh…no?” I stammered. I took a deep breath, stomped on my own big toe to help me focus, and then tried again. I picked up my badge and said, “I’m Agent Brabham from the Department of Homeland Security. I understand that there was an act of serious vandalism here the other night?”
People have one of two reactions when I mention “Homeland Security.” If they’re god-fearing, right wing, gun-toting Fox-News watching people who love their country, they snap to attention. If they’re NPR listeners, they get a suspicious look in their eyes. I took a chance with my secretary by the flag pin on her lapel and the “USMC MOM” sweatshirt she was wearing that she wasn’t going to screw around with national security, even if my story had more holes in it than a truckload of Swiss cheese. I was right, she snapped to.
“Well, agent, it wasn’t much, not enough to attract the attention of Homeland Security. I’m sure y’all have much more important things to be worrying about, don’t you?” She seemed awful flattered that I was there, even if she sounded like she was trying to run me off.
“Ma’am, we take attacks on our education system very seriously. And vandalism is a gateway crime. Hardened terrorists often get their start dropping cherry bombs down toilets in locker rooms.” If there’s a word of truth to that, then it’s a wonder I’m not friggin’ Osama bin Laden. I might have blown up the plumbing system in my school a time or three.
“Now, I understand Mr. Massey has bus duty, but is there any way that I could speak with him? I do have limited time to dedicate to this case, so I need to get right to work if I’m going to catch these terrorists.”
She sat up in her chair ramrod-straight and picked up a walkie-talkie from her desk. “Mr. Massey, please return to the main office.” She spoke into the walkie as she clicked the button on the side.
A tinny voice came back at her. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Ramsey, I still have six buses that I need to get loaded.”
“There’s a man from the government here about the attack the other night?” Mrs. Ramsey spoke softly into the walkie, as if it weren’t going
to go loud and clear to every walkie-talkie in a couple miles.
“I’ll be right there.” Mr. Massey didn’t sound too happy to see me. I reckon not everybody can be the kind of blindly loyal patriot Mrs. Ramsey was.
I wandered around the office looking at the various plaques and things displayed on the wall. After about five minutes, a slight African-American man in his fifties came in, walkie-talkie in one hand a cane in the other. He marched right up to me and held out his hand.
“Dub Massey, principal.”
“Robert Brabham, Homeland Security.”
“What brings you to Memphis, Mr. Brabham?” Massey moved around the desk and sat down.
“Well, we’re investigating a series of linked attacks in the region and we feel that the vandalism at your school may be connected somehow.”
He laughed, not a fake laugh of somebody who’s hiding something, but the honest laugh of a man who has nothing to hide. “Well, Mr. Brabham, I hate that you’ve wasted a trip, but I assure you that whoever wrecked our trophy case is not a threat to national security. Unless you’re worried about Olympic Village, which you shouldn’t be. I’m pretty sure we don’t have any future Olympians here, either.”
“Be that as it may, Mr. Massey, we take these types of potential threats very seriously. Could you take me to the crime scene?” I felt ridiculous even saying most of the things that were coming out of my mouth, and Massey clearly felt the same way.
“If you mean the lunchroom, then certainly. Or would you rather check out the science lab that was wrecked?”
Grits, Guns & Glory - Bubba the Monster Hunter Season 2 Page 26