by Ward Parker
Despite the heavy rainfall during summer, several species of cacti flourished in this part of Florida. One common species grew in tall, vertical shafts bristling with thorns.
The owner was sitting on one. Really sitting on it. A better way to describe it was that the cactus had become intimate with its owner. The police, who would never in a million years suspect gnomes were behind this, would conclude that the owner had been caught short by intestinal problems, and while he was relieving himself lost his balance and landed on the cactus in a truly unfortunate and improbable way.
It was about as improbable as Mr. Vansetti accidentally getting a mango lodged in his mouth.
Missy cringed. What horrible ways to go. The gnomes were cruel and clever.
She didn’t want to stick around with the dead body, and assumed the police officer had already seen it, so she continued onward, hoping to find Matt. She decided not to call out to him. She couldn’t bring herself to break this eerie silence.
The path emerged into an open field with irrigated plots covered in dark-gray plastic and topped with rows of potted tomato plants. Next was a greenhouse. She looked inside. Tables of orchids and lilies filled the room. She followed the path to another greenhouse. This one contained rows of large pots holding young citrus trees, each tied to a supporting stake.
Except for one pot. Instead of a trunk protruding from the potting soil, there was an upside-down human torso and legs. The supporting stake ran under the waistband of his shorts and out one leg. The skinny man almost looked at home among the trees, except that he wore the same khaki uniform as the owner.
His head was buried up to his shoulders in the pot.
It was a stretch to say this looked like an accident, but if someone wanted to believe that, they could.
These gnomes had been brutal. To say they must have been angry was an understatement.
Missy quickly exited the greenhouse. So, these were the two fatalities reported on the police radio. Where were Matt and the police officer?
There was no sign of them in the field or the other greenhouses. She found another path leading into the wooded, jungle-like part of the property. Somewhere in here was a building with the office and cashier. She hoped they were hanging out there.
A rattling and crunching of gravel came from ahead of her and grew louder. It was a golf cart, thundering toward her at top speed. She jumped out of the way just in time, landing among a cluster of banana trees.
Her mind was reeling from what she saw in the cart: A gnome perched on the steering wheel. How it kept its balance, she had no idea. And on the floor below, a gnome was wedged atop the accelerator.
The gnomes were driving the golf cart. She didn’t bother trying to guess what their destination was. It freaked her out too much just to have seen them doing it.
The gnomes had become remarkably brazen. Instead of doing their dirty deeds only at night, now they were cavorting in the daylight.
They have no more fear of us, Missy realized.
She worried now about Matt and the police officer. They could be in danger or hurt. There was no more time to tiptoe around.
“Matt!” She shouted. “Are you here?”
Silence. Nothing but the buzzing of insects and chirping of birds.
Until those sounds stopped.
Missy’s heart raced.
The cart was coming back toward her. She ran along the pathway, hoping to find the building, or at least a place to hide that the golf cart couldn’t reach. The path continued to wind. And as she ran past the palms, frangipani, and other trees, as well as the lanterns, benches, pottery, and other human touches, she realized something was missing.
The gnomes. When she first arrived here, she had passed some still displayed in their proper places. Now, she didn’t see any at all. Where had they gone?
She rounded a corner and slammed into something with a loud oomph. It was a body, wrapped in a vine like a mummy, hanging from a large limb of an oak tree.
The body wasn’t dead. It was Matt. He twisted in a vain attempt to free himself.
“Help me,” he said in a constrained voice.
“This reminds me of the time you were hanging from my front-porch ceiling in a magical web,” Missy said.
“Cut me down. Please.”
“I don’t have a knife,” Missy said.
“Keep going up this path. I saw an open shed with some tools. Get a machete or clippers or anything, please.”
“There’s a golf cart coming that will smash into us,” she said. “I have to stop it somehow.”
She forced herself out of the panic mode. Instead of flight, it was time for fight.
The golf cart barreled around a bend and was only yards away. The gnome on the steering wheel looked like a stunt-person balancing atop a wing of a biplane.
A protection spell for Matt and herself would take too long. A better solution popped in her head.
She pointed her hands at the golf cart and released a bolt of energy. The battery fried, the brakes locked, and the cart jolted to a stop. The gnome on the steering wheel catapulted at her. She ducked, and it hit Matt with a thud. It instantly disappeared into the thick foliage, making a chittering sound. The other gnome remained wedged in the cart’s footwell.
“I’ll be right back,” she said as he went around Matt and jogged up the path, looking for the shed.
A few minutes later she found it. It was small, not much bigger than an outhouse, and obviously wasn’t the main toolshed. Inside, she found only a shovel, some rakes, pruning shears, and two machetes. She grabbed the shears and machetes and ran back to Matt.
He was hanging too high for her to reach the vine above him with a machete, but she stood on tiptoes and worked at the vine with the pruning shears.
“Don’t cut me,” Matt said.
“A minor cut would be much better than what happened to the guys who worked here.”
“I guess they didn’t kill me because I’m an innocent civilian, a non-combatant, in this war,” he said.
“They might change their minds.”
She severed the vine in one place, then worked at it in another place to free one of his arms. As she severed it again, suddenly the entire thing unraveled. Matt spun like a drill bit and landed on his butt on the path.
“Thank you,” he said. “I was hoping for a softer landing, but I won’t complain.”
“Where is the police officer?”
“I never saw him or her. I wandered around looking and found the poor guy with the cactus.” He shuddered. “Then, the next thing I knew, I was wrapped in that vine and hanging in the air. I never even saw the gnomes do it.”
“They shouldn’t be active during the day,” Missy said. “This is worrying me. There was also a giant crowd of them at my house yesterday morning. I figured my mother knows I’ve tracked her down and is trying to intimidate me. But seeing what’s happening here, I’m afraid the demon is taking this to the next level.”
“Or the gnomes are taking it, riding the demon’s power.”
Missy handed him the machete. “Let’s find the cop. Shouldn’t the other first responders be here by now?”
“True.”
She called 911 on her cell. She explained the situation, leaving out the gnomes. The operator said the other vehicles should have arrived by now.
“The gnomes must have done something to the gate,” Matt said. “But I’m not going to check. We need to find the cop now before it’s too late.”
They jogged down the path and finally came upon a wood building hidden in the trees. Empty garden carts sat out front. They climbed the stairs and went inside the door that hung open. To the left was a crowded office with two desks and several filing cabinets. To the right was a cashier’s counter and a small shop filled with gifts and knickknacks.
A tall glass case had a sign that said, “garden gnomes.” The case was empty, the glass doors shattered. There were no gnomes to be found. And no cop, either.
There
was a door in the back of the building. They went through it, descended stairs, and followed a wide path that led to a much larger building with aluminum walls and garage doors. Those doors were closed, but the door at the end of the path was unlocked. Matt followed Missy inside, each brandishing a machete. Missy had a sinking feeling their search was about to end.
The interior was a single giant space with a tall ceiling and light coming through dirty windows high in the walls. Along one wall, golf carts were parked at charging stations. Another wall had a workbench, storage shelves and dozens of landscaping tools hanging from pegs. The rest of the space was a warehouse filled with stacked bags of fertilizers and mulch, piles of plastic pots, and hundreds of boxes.
“Hello?” Missy called. “Anyone here?”
She looked around as her eyes gradually adjusted to the dim lighting. There were still too many shadows in here. She glanced toward the door and noticed a bank of switches. She switched them all on.
The cavernous space filled with harsh fluorescent light.
“I don’t see anyone,” Matt said.
“Oh, my. Over there.” Missy pointed to the far end of the room and ran over.
An enormous pile of cow manure bags lay on the floor, looking as if one of the orderly stacks had toppled over.
A hand protruded from beneath them. And the sleeve of a police uniform.
Missy knelt and felt the veins in the man’s wrist,
“No pulse,” she said.
Matt began picking the forty-pound bags off the body and tossing them aside. Missy joined him.
“He was just doing his job,” Missy said. “He wasn’t a gnome abuser. Like you, he was a non-combatant.”
“He didn’t deserve this at all. But the gnomes probably saw him as the protector of property owners, the enforcer of the status quo.”
“I don’t believe anymore they have criteria for whom they kill,” Missy said.
They kept moving the bags off him, as if trying to take the load off their minds as well. But when they were halfway done, movement caught her eye.
Something passed by just outside the door they had come through. Something small.
She was about to return to the task when a gnome appeared inside the doorway. In the blink of an eye, a half dozen more.
“Matt,” she said in a terse voice.
Now there were about twenty gnomes, and the group had somehow made it halfway across the floor.
“They’ve got us cornered,” Matt said.
“I hope these machetes are sharp,” Missy said. “We’ll just have to chop these punks to pieces.”
In another blink, there were more gnomes, and they had moved closer and started to spread out, forming a half-circle around Matt and Missy.
“Can’t your magick do anything?” Matt asked.
“I’m forming a protection barrier around us if you’ll only shut up and let me concentrate.”
More gnomes appeared in the group's rear. These were covered in dirt and moss, the oldest ones on the property. The ones that had been mostly forgotten, hidden by foliage and caked with the deposits of time. The painted eyes of these, though faded by age and weather, seemed to glow yellow with evil.
But suddenly, all the gnomes vanished with no sign of movement.
Another cop, a woman, appeared in the doorway.
“Officer down,” Matt said.
The cop said something into her radio handset and ran over to help them remove the bags. Seconds later, two paramedics wheeling a stretcher arrived and four firemen followed.
“What took you guys so long?” Matt asked.
“The gate was locked,” said an annoyed firefighter. “After we cut the lock we were blocked by a barricade of concrete blocks. Next, there was a barricade of coconuts.”
“How did you ever get past the coconuts?” Matt asked, but his sarcastic grin faded when he saw the deadly look the firefighter gave him.
“He’s unresponsive,” Missy said to the paramedics. “I don’t know how long he’s been under here.”
When the cop was finally freed, and soon after declared dead at the scene, the mood was somber. Missy told the team where to find the other two bodies.
“Did you guys see anyone else around here?” The woman cop asked Matt and Missy.
Matt explained that he arrived shortly after the fallen cop and had looked for him in vain. Missy said she arrived after that and came across the two dead employees but saw no one else.
“I can’t believe it,” the cop said, her face red from grief. “Three unrelated accidental deaths at the same time? I wonder what the medical examiner will think.”
The cop’s death looked more like an accident than the other two, Missy thought to herself. The medical examiner will assume some person was behind the other two. And he’ll be wrong.
She wanted so badly to blurt out the truth. But being part of the supernatural world means you are obligated to keep it secret from normal humans. If humans got ahold of the slightest thread of truth, the entire shroud of protective secrecy could be unwoven with dire consequences for innocent supernatural creatures. For her, too. Even when evil was involved, it had to be kept secret.
Which put even more pressure on her to make things right again. To stop the killing and the sorceress behind it all.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Missy said to the woman cop. It was the right thing to say, but it didn’t seem like enough.
Matt placed his hand on Missy’s shoulder. It was an awkward attempt to comfort her, but she was grateful. She put a hand on top of his.
19
How to Hunt a Human
The problem with The Boat, Josie thought, was that it was totally conspicuous. Even elderly people didn’t drive 1977 Lincoln Continentals anymore. Certain retro pimps might. Josie glanced at herself in the rearview mirror. She didn’t think she looked like a pimp.
She was parked on the street across from the Jellyfish Beach Police Department’s rear parking lot, waiting for Detective Affird to come out. She wanted to see what car he drove so she could follow him.
What did she hope to accomplish by following him? She wasn’t quite sure. All she knew was that he was a vigilante of sorts, taking on the self-bestowed role of judge, jury, and executioner of supernaturals—werewolves in particular. She felt strongly that it was he who shot Mary Beth and Teresa. She felt it in her bones. And now they had Kevin as a witness.
So what was she going to do about it? Play detective and find evidence that proves he did it, give it to the police, and expect they would do the right thing? Forget it. Besides, that would be admitting she and her friends were werewolves. No, we’re not werewolves, we’re just human seniors who like to run through the woods at night and Affird hates old ladies who run? Surely that would fly.
So Josie decided she didn’t want to see Affird kicked off the force and prosecuted.
She wanted to kill him.
She felt she had several good justifications. First, there was the eye-for-an-eye law of the wilderness. Second, the pack demanded revenge, and, as its alpha, she had to deliver. Third, eliminating him was crucial for the safety of all the area’s werewolves and other supernatural creatures.
Exactly how she would kill him was the nagging question. The easiest way would be in werewolf form with the strength to overpower him. She doubted he had silver bullets in his regular service weapon. The problem with this approach was that the members of the police force who knew werewolves existed would assume a wild animal hadn’t killed Affird. They would come after the Werewolf Women’s Club in full force.
No, the better way would be to use her little-old-lady persona, so he would let his guard down, and she could shoot him. She still had her ex-husband’s pistol. Too bad she had never fired it before.
Affird, exiting the rear of the police department, caught her attention. The tall, lanky man was wearing shades and a short-sleeve white shirt with a maroon tie. She turned on the ignition. The detective’s personal vehicle was a blac
k American muscle car. She watched it pull out of the police lot, then shifted The Boat into Drive and followed him at a distance.
She decided she’d answer the question of how to kill him another time. First, she needed to learn his movements.
He stopped suddenly. She slammed on her brakes, almost hitting him. Did he already know he was being followed? They’d only gone two blocks.
Affird started moving again. He had stopped to avoid hitting an egret strutting across the street.
So, before she learned about Affird’s routine, she needed to learn how to tail someone. Killing him would take a little longer than she thought.
It turns out that Affird was only out to pick up lunch at a nearby hamburger stand before returning to the police station. Josie then drove to a gun shop that had been recommended to her by one of Missy’s patients, a vampire who was really into firearms. The owner of the gun shop was known as an amateur ballistics expert. She left the silver bullet and shell casing with him to see what information he could glean from them.
Then it was back to the police station. She hoped Affird wasn’t working a late shift. Fortunately, he strolled out of the building at 5:30 p.m. and she followed him home.
When he turned into an older residential neighborhood, it suddenly occurred to Josie that he probably had a wife and kids. The moral weight of taking him away from them pressed down upon her shoulders. It wasn’t their fault that Affird was evil.
He parked in the driveway of a small, older ranch house. It didn’t have much personality. There wasn’t another car in view and the lawn was free of kids’ toys or sports equipment. She hoped he was single. Writing down the address, she planned to return early the next day.
And she did. The Boat followed him on his way to work, when he stopped for coffee, when he arrived at the station. The Boat trailed him to a barber shop at midday and to the same burger joint as the previous day. After he left work, she learned which grocery store he used and where he did his dry cleaning.
Now she had to decide where and when to attack.