“If it doesn’t happen on camera, it didn’t happen at all,” Cavcey said smugly. The sweat dripped from his face freely, spotting his shirt.
What the hell is wrong with this guy? Joe wondered.
Cavcey shimmied around, grinding his buttocks on the chair. The mayor either didn’t notice or chose to ignore it. Judging by the way he was kowtowing to these TV dweebs, they had doubtless laid a sizable chunk of change on him. They could probably set fire to the place and the mayor wouldn’t care.
The waitress brought the tray of drinks and a cup of coffee. Colgate happily piled into his bottles of beer, slurping on his Bloody Mary between burps. Ramón watched him with amusement and sipped his coffee.
After she had gone, Joe sat forward and addressed Cavcey. It was nut-cutting time. “How much are you willing to pay us to track?”
Cavcey was ready for that one. “We can pay you the other half of your original fee as per the agreement with the mayor.”
“In case your arithmetic is slow,” Sexton interjected, “that’s a total of ten thousand dollars.”
“Won’t do it for less than twenty,” Joe said. “That’s double it, in case your math isn’t so hot.”
Cavcey wriggled, but nodded his head quickly in agreement. Joe looked around the table and then smiled his best fake smile.
“I want it all in writing. Standard business agreement. Fully binding legal contract. I want it notarized, all the formalities, all that. And I’ll have a cashier’s check in my hand before my team lifts a finger.”
“Absolutely,” agreed Sexton.
Just then the waitress brought the food. As Joe tucked into his eggs and bacon, the tinny sounds of “Dixie” filled the room. The mayor groped in his suit coat and came out with a cell phone, which he clapped to his ear. “Hello, yes?”
Cavcey fidgeted while Joe ate his breakfast and Colgate drank his beers and Bloody Mary. Ramón sipped coffee, munching toast, all of them waiting in silence until the mayor had finished.
Sexton’s eyebrows danced across his forehead. “Alright, yes. Yes, I understand.”
He clicked his phone shut and looked at the rest of them grimly. “I am afraid the dastardly creatures have struck again.”
“What? Where? Who?” asked Colgate, suddenly interested. An old pro, he’d just covered three of the five “W’s” of journalism.
The mayor began to wrestle his bulk out from his chair, pushing the table away to gain more room. The dishes and cutlery rattled as he waddled to his feet, huffing with exertion.
“Charlie Leonard, the town’s factotum, has been set upon and cut down in a bloody ambush.”
Joe and the others remained seated. Sexton and Cavcey lingered. The mayor cleared his throat. “Don’t you want to come along?”
Joe didn’t take his eyes from his plate. Shoveling a forkful of eggs into his mouth, he held up his hand to show it was still empty.
“When I have that check in my hand, Mayor,” he said around a mouthful of food. “I mean what I say. Perhaps you’d better get that figured out, first thing.”
Colgate downed the last of his Bloody Mary and clapped his hat to his head and stood up. “I better tag along, I’m on the clock.”
He bid his goodbyes and followed the mayor and Cavcey out of the room. Ramon watched them go, smiling.
“Old Toothpaste is a hoot,” he said, gesturing at Colgate’s retreating figure. “Remember Louisiana? The pictures of that seaweed monster he showed us? It looked like Spanish moss and alligator shit had been smeared on his camera lens.”
“At least he believes in chupacabras,” Joe grunted.
One of their biggest obstacles was in simply persuading people that the creatures existed at all. People didn’t want to think about monsters on the prowl eating people’s eyes like jelly beans.
“You’d think he’d learn by now,” Ramón mused. “People don’t want the truth. They don’t care. They don’t want to be bothered.”
Joe suddenly narrowed his eyes, and grumbled viciously under his breath.
Ramón drew back. “What’s the matter?”
Joe indicated the empty seats where the mayor and Cavcey and Colgate had been sitting. “I just realized they ducked out and stiffed us for the bill. Those dirty bastards.”
“Baldy probably went to get more tweak,” Ramón said from the side of his mouth.
“No way,” Joe said. “You think?”
“Hell yeah,” sneered Ramón. “Didn’t you see the way he couldn’t sit still? And he was sweating like a whore in church. The guy was wired.”
Ramón hated tweakers. Not for any moral reasons. He had been a cocaine dealer, and the rise of methamphetamines had forced him to stop cutting his product in order to compete. Consequently, he’d lost money. Finally he moved out of the drug business altogether. Now he hunted monsters for a tenth of the pay. What the hell was he doing?
««—»»
On the other side of town, Colgate, Cavcey, and the mayor stood looking at the wrecked station wagon sitting in the ditch. The car door was across the street in some bushes, as if it had been flung away after being wrenched from its hinges. A trail of blood led from the driver’s side to the corpse near the front fender. Charlie Leonard’s face was a bloody horror with empty eye sockets crusted with gore and running with ants and blowflies. His arms and legs, mangled and twisted, jutted accusingly at the sky. His torso had been gnawed down to the bone in places, with white ribs showing starkly through the chunks of tattered flesh.
The sheriff and his wife, Gladys, a busty brunette with granny glasses in a yellow dress, had found the body on their way back from the hospital in Delmore Beach. When they saw the station wagon, they pulled over and found Charlie—at least what was left of him.
Colgate circled the body and snapped a few pics. “They don’t leave much for the buzzards, do they?”
Cavcey shifted from foot to foot, still antsy. “I can’t look at this,” he choked and stumbled off. They heard him retching behind the welcome sign.
Mayor Sexton wiped his face with a handkerchief. “Undeniably a mess.” He shook his head sadly and mopped his brow again. “Who gonna clean it up? It would have been poor Charlie’s job to do it.”
The gritty sound of tires on gravel made them turn. A battered pick-up truck screeched to a halt behind the sheriff’s truck and a skinny man in greasy coveralls jumped out and ran toward them.
“Oh lord,” groaned Sexton. “Here comes Charlie’s little brother Elroy.”
“Is it true?” the man called as he came up to them. His still-boyish face was framed by greasy black hair. He was rail thin, sharp-featured, quite the opposite of his rotund brother.
The sheriff made a move to restrain him, but the stitches in his arms and chest made him suddenly wince in pain and he stopped. Colgate and the mayor interceded and held the man back.
“You don’t want to see,” the mayor sputtered. “Trust us, Elroy. We know it’s your brother by the clothes and his car. But you don’t want to remember him this way.”
Elroy’s face contorted and he sagged. Colgate and the mayor backed off. The man sank to his knees. He looked at them desolately, craning his head in a semi-circle. “What am I gonna tell our mama?” he sobbed.
The mayor and the sheriff knew that the Leonard brothers lived with their elderly mother in a dilapidated old farmhouse on the north side of town and she relied on both boys for pretty much everything. Elroy worked at the local gas station to bring in extra money.
Gladys came forward, shooing the others away. She knelt down and draped her arms lightly over Elroy’s shoulders. Colgate couldn’t resist taking a photo. His camera whirred and clicked.
“Come on, son,” soothed Gladys. “Let me take you away from here. These men have work to do.”
His voice dropped to a hoarse whisper. “I gotta make...uh, you know, arrangements for my…” His face screwed up again and he burst into a fresh round of sobbing.
“It can wait, Elroy.” She pulled h
im gently to his feet and walked him to his truck, throwing a look over her shoulder that her husband acknowledged with a slight nod. It was unspoken but understood: he would swing by the Leonards’ place and pick her up when he was finished here.
Cavcey came out from around the sign, wiping his mouth. “Someone is coming.”
Shading his eyes from the sun, he pointed down the street. Another truck appeared at the end of the road, heading toward them through the wavering heat haze. When it got closer the state seal was plainly visible on the side.
“Oh dear,” grumbled Sexton. “The Fish and Game Department is here. This just gets better and better.”
They waited as the truck pulled to the side of the road, and a woman in the brown and green uniform of the Fish and Game Department climbed out.
Colgate whistled when she got close. She looked to be in her early thirties, tall, five-eight, maybe five-nine, with broad shoulders, solid hips, and the natural grace of an athlete. Her face was square, with sharp cheekbones, wide blue eyes, and thick red hair spilling out from under her cap.
“Howdy folks,” she called as she approached. “I am here about the—oh, Jesus!” She recoiled at the sight of Charlie Leonard’s ravaged corpse. No one had bothered to cover him up yet.
“Yes,” the mayor said sadly. He indicated the pile of gore. “Charlie Leonard, the town’s factotum, has met an unfortunate end.”
Regaining her composure, she stepped back a few feet and swung her eyes to the sheriff. “Hello, Sheriff Walters.”
Sexton’s eyes bugged. “You two know each other?”
“She was at the hospital,” Walters explained. “I tried to tell her it weren’t no gator…”
“And that’s why I am here,” she announced. Waving at the cloud of flies crawling over the corpse, she said, “I can see you’ve got a problem.”
Sexton pressed his flabby hands together in an attitude of supplication. “That is why we have hired—at considerable expense to the city—a formidable team of professionals to track and eliminate whatever has been preying upon our blameless citizenry.”
“If it’s not an alligator, do you have any idea what it is?”
“Well,” sighed Sexton, stalling for time. “There seem to be more than one of the creatures…”
“Creatures?” she said skeptically.
“Let’s just call them, ah, previously unclassified…ah…animals, I guess you would say.”
“As a representative of the state wildlife service, I am going to have to be here for this so-called hunt of yours,” she said severely, taking them all by surprise with the sudden steel in her voice. “I don’t want any lynch mobs running wild through my woods.”
The mayor made a sound with his mouth like a tire deflating. “Lynch mobs? Really, that is an offensive imputation, Miss, uh?”
“Singer,” she replied crisply. “And I am ‘Ranger’ to you, Mayor. It’s the law. I have to be here.”
“This is no different than a wild boar hunt,” Sexton protested, throwing a look at Walters and Colgate and Cavcey, seeking some kind of support. Cavcey, sweat pouring down his face like a waterfall, looked at the ground and shuffled from foot to foot. Colgate watched and listened, but said nothing; he was here to get the story, nothing more. The sheriff remained quiet too. This wasn’t his fight. As a matter of fact, he’d had a lot of the fight taken out of him last night. He just wanted to go home and sit on his porch and have a drink of bourbon and water.
Ranger Singer cocked her head. “If you’re tracking some killer animals that no one has ever seen, then it’s a lot different than a wild boar hunt, or even a bear hunt,” she pointed out primly. She enjoyed wielding her petty bureaucratic power over these rednecks. Writing citations was one of her only pleasures in life these days.
The mayor sagged and shrugged his shoulders good-naturedly, suddenly deciding to try the smooth approach. After all, one caught more flies with honey than vinegar.
“Very well, Ranger. You had better follow us into town, and we will introduce you to our cast of characters. I am sure you will find all of our team members very interesting—if a bit eccentric. But hell, honey, you in the panhandle, you know?”
He punctuated his bromide with a hearty chuckle and Cavcey—alone among the others—joined in and cackled with false cheer.
She didn’t crack a smile. “I know.”
Melissa Singer hailed from Portland, Oregon, originally, and had only been at her new job in Florida for six months. She wasn’t sure if she hadn’t made a huge mistake taking this position. She wasn’t too fond of the South. She didn’t care for the climate—she was Swedish by blood, a cold-weather people—and the oppressive heat and crippling humidity made her sweaty, tired, and cranky most of the time. She had broken out in a heat rash the moment she’d crossed the Mason-Dixon Line and it hadn’t gone away; a constant irritation.
She spun around haughtily and marched back to her truck. Over her shoulder she snapped, “Let’s get this dog and pony show on the road.”
««—»»
Joe and Ramón returned to the motel and informed Lupita of their new situation. She digested the news without comment, and then announced she was going to take Duke and Panocha for a walk and look around the town.
“Do you have your phone?” asked Joe.
He had very particular rules regarding cell phones. Everyone had one and was required to keep it with them at all times. But when they were on a job, when they began a hunt, all of the phones were collected and placed in an empty ice chest in the trunk of the Impala. It was because of Pepé.
««—»»
Pepé was a twenty-six-year-old anthropology student from the University of Mexico who had joined up for the adventure. He was quite dashing and handsome, fancied himself a ladies’ man. When he wasn’t killing chupacabras, he was dining at fine restaurants, and dancing till dawn with a string of gorgeous women on his arm.
Then, one day, he and Ramón and Joe were on a job, creeping through an abandoned warehouse in the “Free Trade Zone” in Tijuana.
Ramón had just moved to the left of Pepé and Joe to the right, fanning out in a tight semi-circle, forming a moving wedge. They were inching forward, the sound of their footsteps amplified in the cavernous room, eyes peering into the gloom, the barrels of their shotguns poking in front of them, when—
Riiiiiiiii—iiiing!
They all jumped about a foot in the air. Joe hissed, “Turn off that damned thing!”
Riiiiiiiii—iiiing!
Pepé, embarrassed, slung his shotgun over his shoulder, and patted his pockets, searching for his phone. He whispered, “Sorry, Boss, I thought I turned it—”
That was as far as he got before a flying fiend came slavering down on him. A long tail coiled around his neck like a hangman’s noose and Pepé shrieked, both hands going reflexively to his throat. His shotgun slipped from his shoulder and clattered on the floor as he was jerked up into the darkness, legs pedaling the empty air. Pepé’s screams rose in pitch—gaining an edge of true hysteria—before cutting off abruptly. Blood pattered down softly like warm rain.
And that’s why they no longer carried phones while on a job.
««—»»
Now Joe’s phone rang. “Gifford’s Morgue, you stab them and we slab them,” he answered.
“I am at the bank,” Colgate told him. “The mayor is getting your check. He wants to know if you can meet him and the TV crew over at the junior high school.”
“Sure,” Joe said. He held up his hand and snapped his fingers to get Lupita and the dogs to wait as they were halfway out the door. “We’ll be there in ten minutes.”
He hung up and looked at his team. “Freeze on the sight-seeing, Lupita. It’s show time.”
««—»»
The mayor didn’t have a contract with him, but he had the cashier’s check—and that was good enough for Joe.
Sexton was waiting with it in the parking lot across from the derelict school, next to a gigantic tour bu
s that probably belonged to Jet Ryder and his crew. Next to the bus sat a green truck with a state seal on the door.
Joe and Ramón walked over to see the mayor while Lupita popped the trunk of the Impala and began to unload gear. Her dogs sat in the backseat, doors open, drowsing. It was hot, but the sky had clouded over and it looked like it might rain.
As the mayor handed over the check, the doors of the big bus slammed open and a man in faded jeans, cowboy boots, and a denim vest barely concealing a shirtless chest emerged. He had Karl Colgate in tow.
The mayor pointed to him and waved him over. “Jet Ryder,” said the mayor. “Meet your new trackers. Joe Gifford and…?”
“Ramón Esparza,” said Ramón, reaching out to shake Ryder’s hand. Ryder pumped it and then shook hands with Joe.
Jet Ryder was a rangy six-footer with a long patrician nose, beady eyes, a small, pointed Van Dyke beard, and shoulder length gray hair spilling out from under his straw cowboy hat.
Wow, Joe thought. He is my dad’s age, or would be, if my dad wasn’t dead.
“And now gentlemen, if you will excuse me, I have other business to attend to,” Sexton said hurriedly. They watched him waddle off.
Ryder could not take his eyes from Lupita across the street. “Is she with you guys?”
Joe followed his gaze. “Yeah, she’s our dog handler.”
“She can handle my dog anytime,” Ryder asserted. “Oh, hell yes. Scratch my belly and my leg will shake.” He stared at her with something close to awe. “Talk about squeal appeal. I’d like to walk through a mile of those boobies barefoot.” He chewed his fingers. “I surely would.” He moved in and draped his arms around Joe and Ramón. “Which one of you boys is tearing off a piece of that?”
“Not me.” Joe shook his head.
“Me neither,” Ramón assured him.
“Why?” Ryder was all schoolboy eagerness. “Is she married?” They said nothing. Misinterpreting the wry smiles they exchanged, he all but shouted, “Hell, being married don’t plug no holes!”
Fury of the Chupacabras Page 11