Support Your Local Monster Hunter

by Dennis Liggio

  "Do you like cold showers?" he asked.

  "Absolutely fucking not!" I said.

  "Sucks for you," he responded, then he sprayed me down with water from the hose.

  It was cold, which felt even colder at night when I was already feeling shock on a now-empty stomach. And since he was trying to get blood off me, it wasn't a quick rinse. He kept it on me for a while, making me feel like an abused inmate in a prison movie. At least my clothes blocked some of the sting of the water. He had me turn around a few times to get everything, making sure I was completely drenched.

  "That looks good," Paulie said finally. "Now strip."

  "Come on, man, you don't need to see me naked."

  "I don't want to see you naked, kid," he said. "But those clothes are compromised and we need to make sure all the blood is off you. And I need to wash all the blood here down into the creek. I'm not having this place linked."

  Reluctantly, I did as he asked, using my hands to cover up my junk. And though he had already hosed me down with a bunch of cold water, it felt even colder when I was naked. Luckily he only had to get what my clothing and the previous spraying had missed, so this was quick. Then he put the hose down and walked over to me with a trash bag. He collected all my drenched clothes and all the towels. He gave me a clean towel and told me to pick out some clothes from the garage.

  I walked naked and shivering to the garage and looked for something to wear. All of it was crap, both because these were spare clothes and because Paulie had no taste. Luckily, his build wasn't too far off mine, and I was able to find enough to wear that I felt warm and clothed again, reducing my shivering. These temporary clothes just needed to last me until I got back to town.

  "Your shit's on the ground, what I could save," said Paulie.

  I walked out to find that the contents of my pockets, which I had left in the truck bed, were tossed on the ground next to the gear of his own Paulie had in the back of the truck. My wallet was fine, my phone was good, so was my lead pipe. Some of my business cards were gone, probably soaked in blood. But all in all, since my valuables were in my pockets, they were okay.

  Paulie was now was standing in the truck bed, plastic bags over his shoes, and hosing down the truck. I shivered and watched as he finished. Then he climbed down and sprayed all the maroon water off into the grass far away from the garages.

  "There's a creek near here," he said. "The blood will get into that and be washed away. Grass should soak up some, now that it's been thinned with water. The dirt was the bigger concern, but I think we got it. Glad I rent this place under an assumed name."

  We put his gear back into his truck bed, leaving half of it in the garage so he could examine it later for contamination he hadn't noticed. Then we put all the trash bags in the back of the truck, so we could stop somewhere else and toss them all in a dumpster with no connection to this place, the barbecue place, or where we lived. Only then could we go back home.

  "Y'know, if you ever wanted to murder someone I bet you could get away with it," I said as I climbed into the truck and he started the engine.

  Before he put the truck into gear, Paulie looked over to me for just a moment. "That's kind of the point of why I know, kid."

  No other explanation followed.

  As Long As There Is Whiskey in the World

  After the night I had, I just wanted to go home. Normally after a job, I feel rather celebratory, and would typically close out the night at our bar Twin Eagles, getting cheap whiskey or even cheaper beer on my ever growing tab. But this was not a night for celebration. I was still shivering from getting hosed down and there was still some shock from the initial head explosion running through my veins. So I went straight home.

  At home I stripped off Paulie's crappy clothes. I looked at myself in the mirror, seeing if he had missed any blood. As far as I could tell, he had actually gotten it all. So instead I just saw a drowned rat in the mirror's reflection. I looked drained and tired. For my twenty-one years, I felt I looked too old in the mirror. Dark circles hung beneath my eyes. My short brown hair was all messed up, sticking up in ways I did not approve of. I had a short beard I was trying to grow, but it seemed to be lingering closer to very thick stubble. Still, it was dark stubble and accentuated the sharp cut to my features which I usually liked, though now it also accentuated how tired I looked.

  What I needed was a nice hot bath. This was a good call - the shivers seem to melt away from just the steam even before I got into the tub. I poured some epsom salts in for help with aches and pains - when you run, fight, crawl, and jump as often as we do, knowing cheap pain relief methods is essential. But in case you might question my masculinity in having a bath, I grabbed a bottle of whiskey from the kitchen. I needed that as much as the bath. And I didn't go with the cheap stuff. I grabbed the bottle of Bushmill I had gotten for my birthday which I had been rationing over the months. Tonight I didn't care. I was saying Fuck It to the whole damn world, so if I killed the bottle tonight there would be no regrets[4]. Once in the tub, I lit a cigarette and was in at least some lower heaven. I leaned back in the bath, a cigarette in one hand, a bottle of good whiskey in another, staring at the ceiling. For my life, this might have been as good as it got.

  I don't know how long I actually was in the bath, but despite its comfort and the whiskey's miraculous power to make everything better, I didn't get to finish the bath before being interrupted. I got a text message. Since I am a child of the age of mobile data, I hadn't done the wise thing and left my phone in another room. Nope, I had brought it into the bathroom with me, placed within reach. I don't know why I brought it - maybe in case I needed to Google something I thought of in the bath? We don't think about these things, we just feel comforted having the phone near us.

  I thought again at the possible people who could be texting me and came up with the usual suspects - my brother, Dickie, or Yasmin. At least the collections agency wouldn't be texting me. I mean, they could but I don't imagine they would; collecting via text seemed like it would be really ineffective. I would imagine most of their responses from customers would be along the lines of LOL.

  I picked up my phone. The text was from Yasmin. how was your expedition?

  She never knew exactly what to call our jobs. Expedition was her newest attempt at finding a word for it. it was okay, I replied. I really didn't want to bring up the exploding head or our efforts to avoid police investigation. I didn't want to type it and I didn't want her to know it.

  haha, well, they can't all be great. whatcha doin now?

  just taking a bath

  I must be rubbing off on you! she replied. Yasmin was a big fan of baths, though she went all out with scented bath salts, bath bombs, scrub bars, and tons of other stuff that sounded like alchemy to me.

  I didn't respond, and there was a minute or two of silence in our conversation. Then she texted again. so maybe we should talk

  My body immediately tensed, despite the ease and relaxation I was starting to feel in the bath. I gently tossed the phone away from me, trying to get it far enough that I couldn't reach it from the tub if I came down with a manic fit of giving a damn.

  So, I guess I should talk about Yasmin. Once The Girl Who Got Away, she was now the Off Again On Again Argument Slash Girlfriend. But I should start at the beginning. Yasmin and I used to be coworkers back when I worked at the Helping Hands call center. We had always flirted and talked, even if we had some difficulties, like her not believing in monsters and thinking I was mentally disturbed for hunting them. While we seemed to get over that hump back then, we had never gotten together. Then I was fired. When I finally had gotten the courage to stalk my ex-work to try to connect with her, I discovered she had already found a job elsewhere. And so, that connection was lost.

  But hope was not lost! In some weird Christmas-in-July event[5] I bumped into her. I found her in a store that was more uptown than I usually shop. Our new meeting was full of smiles and flirting. It wasn't just me that had seen it as a
missed opportunity full of regret, so neither of us were about to let this new one get away. And so our relationship started torrid and hot, having not just attraction and newness behind it, but also the force of all the times we had both wished we hadn't messed up. And it was good - for a week or two. Then came the inevitable first argument. Fiery passion in our attraction translated to fiery passion in our arguing. This short time together was the model for what came after, as we fell into a comfortable uncomfortable cycle of good and bad, on and off again.

  I think it's always my mouth that screws things up. That's my theory, and Yasmin agrees. The cycle of our defeat works like this: I say something stupid, she bristles at the comment or insinuation. Then I say something even more stupid trying to defend myself or explain what I meant. Then she gets mad, then I get mad back. This part goes on for a while, back and forth, even when the fight isn't about anything that matters and neither of us wants to be in it. Eventually I am so deep in the fight that when I realize just how I had fucked it all up, the endless amount of sorries that pour from my mouth are worthless, because she tells me my apology is not honest. What I'm supposed to do at that point is something else to apologize, something she never names - only that unknown thing will show that I'm really sorry. And once I'm at this point, I'm already pissed - pissed off at her, pissed off at myself, pissed off I can't solve the situation, and pissed that I'm trapped in a neverending merry-go-round when I just want to get off and throw up. And since I have a tendency to lash out when cornered[6], I then do the emotional equivalent of flipping a table and storm out of the apartment, the restaurant, or just whatever conversation we had been in. Then follows a chill in our relationship where we don't talk or barely talk until we both realize how stupid we both were. Then in this newfound peace, we start snuggling up to each other again, quickly finding our way back into new relationship paradise. But it soon becomes an uneasy paradise, as we're always leery about the next fight, the next stupid thing I say. And that always happens, without fail. Then we go through this same cycle all over again, just quicker.

  And then recently, in the good part of the cycle, Yasmin tried to say the L-word. I cut her off before she could actually say it, but just that she tried definitely made the fight come quicker. Why was she trying to say it? We weren't there yet... I wasn't there yet. Her trying to say it got me cagey, tense, and sort of pissed, as some voice in the back of my head was saying, Bitch, back the fuck up, it's only been two months!

  Yasmin and I were currently in the latter part of the cold chill period following a fight, and her texts were probably the invitation to smooth things over. While I appreciated her being the better person, which she generally was, I wasn't going deal with it right now. Not today, not tonight, not after everything that had happened. I swigged some more whiskey and stared defiantly at the tiled wall and the grout that needed cleaning, trying to ignore that my bath had already gone cold.

  Then there was a knock on my front door.

  "Oh, for fuck's sake!" I yelled.

  If this was Yasmin, we were going to start this new cycle back in an argument and skip the sex and relationship stuff, which would be a damn shame. I got out of the tub and reached for the towel, trying not to drip on my phone, which had ended up under the towel rack. I gave myself far too quick a dry off, and then grabbed the robe Yasmin brought over for herself when she stayed over. It was light green and covered with tiny pandas in various cute poses. I pulled on the robe, feeling it stick to my still somewhat wet skin, and I ignored the pandas as I walked past the mirror.

  I opened the front door, ready to yell at whoever disturbed my bath. I choked back on my anger when I found it was my brother Mikkel, standing there with a smile. If there was one person in the world I could count on and who would be there for me, it was him. A few inches taller than me, my brother was lanky. While I was wiry and tense, he was wiry and tall, his attitude generally more laid back. He had long dark brown hair, which he usually kept down to hide a scar on the side of his forehead. He was my elder brother at two years older than me. Mikkel said nothing at first, he simply held a bottle of bourbon up and smiled more goofily, like a game show host. I decided that this was an acceptable interruption.

  "Oh, little pandas!" he said, remarking on my robe. "How sweet of you to dress up for me!"

  I growled something indistinct at the joke while rolling my eyes. I let him in and he poured himself a drink while I went to put some real clothes on. When I returned to the living room, he had taken up my armchair, so I lay down on my loveseat, barely fitting into it. Money had been short, so I had to downgrade my living space. I was now living back in South Egan in a tiny apartment. Rent was cheap and since it was our old neighborhood, I had a little more of a leeway with the landlord. I could scrape by here as long as he didn't sell the building, but the feeding frenzy on property adjacent to North Egan had seemed to die with the delay of the construction project, so I was okay for now.

  I had poured myself some bourbon from Mikkel's bottle, so as I lay down, we clinked glasses.

  "To your first job back," said Mikkel. We drank and lit cigarettes.

  "I'm surprised you're not home with Carly," I said.

  Carly was Mikkel's girlfriend. She had come home from France in the Spring and they started dating again. She had basically moved into his apartment. Supposedly she had an apartment she could be living in with her sister, but she decided that she'd rather live at Mikkel's. Supposedly she has some beef with her sister. The sister's like a detective, or not a detective but thinks she is; I'm not sure, it's not really clear. I haven't met the sister, and nothing Carly or Mikkel has said has made me want to.

  Carly historically had disapproved of Mikkel's hunting, sort of like Yasmin. It was why they broke up long ago. But supposedly there'd been some resolution to that and she was now okay with it, or at least more okay with it than before. Perhaps I should have had her talk to Yasmin. On the other hand, since Carly has never been a fan of me, perhaps that would be a terrible idea.

  "Nah, I get a night off here and there," said Mikkel somewhat sarcastically before his tone turned more earnest. "I really just wanted to see how you were doing."

  "Why? Was that in question?" I said suspiciously. We both knew this was my first night back hunting. Was I being evaluated?

  "Not really," said Mikkel. "But is there a reason to question it? How'd it go?"

  I gave him a quick rundown of what the whole day was like, trying to downplay my shock which was still a little embarrassing, and deciding to play up the fact that Paulie seemed like he could cover up crimes very easily.

  "That's a shitty first time out," said Mikkel. "Why the hell did that guy's head explode? I have never even heard of that crap before. It's like Scanners! That's some fucked up shit." He drank some bourbon.

  "And I know what you're going to say, so let me guess it before you say it," I said. "You're going to say this is a sign that I'm not ready yet. That I need more rest before getting back into it. But dammit, Mikkel, I'm already in the minors, following people around as a sidekick rather than working jobs. There's not much lower I can go. From here the only step down I could take is getting benched. I can't do that. I want to get back into it. I need to get back into it. Let me do this."

  When I finished, Mikkel held his glass in front of his face, looking down into it as he swished the whiskey around. "You done?"

  "With hunting?"

  "With your rant," he said.

  I thought for a second. "Yeah."

  "Good, because I wasn't going to say any of that," he said. "Honestly, as fucked up as your day was, it doesn't sound like you did anything wrong."

  "So Paulie or someone didn't call you up, tell me how I blew it, and that you should come over and revoke... I don't know, my Nowak Brother Monster Killin' License?"

  "You know how ridiculous that sounds, right?"

  "Well, yeah, that's why I've prepared like five outraged responses to it in my head already," I said with a smile, taking a
sip of bourbon. Played off like a joke, but otherwise true.

  "I haven't heard from Paulie, though I will admit that if I heard that from him, I would have come to check on you," said Mikkel. "Not to... uh, 'revoke your license', but because that's some fucked up shit and you're my brother."

  "No shit, man. So why did you come?"

  "Can't a brother come to hang out with family?" he said.

  "In my postage stamp size apartment?" I said, waving my arm dramatically at the apartment and accidentally scraping my hand against the cheap wallpaper. "Sure, I guess. But you usually either catch me at Twin Eagles or invite me over. And you often call first."

  "Maybe I just wanted to see in person how you did," he said.

  "And?" I said. "Did I do well enough? What's this about?"

  He smiled, swishing his bourbon in the glass. "I love how defensive you get over nothing."

  "I get defensive about nothing because in that past, lots of public Nothings were secretly Somethings."

  "Don't look at me," he said. "You have your own official person to argue with these days. If you want to pin misleading subtext on someone, look somewhere besides me."

  "Would you just tell me already? Can you at least give me the credit that I know you haven't said something yet, and I'm already bristling and getting ready for bad news."

  "It's not bad news," said Mikkel.

  "And yet you're holding off on telling me," I pointed out.

  He sighed. "I wanted it to be a happy surprise, assuming you were up to it. We have a job, Szandor. Tomorrow. Are you ready to kill some bad guys?"

  I Love It Loud

  "So how much are we getting paid for this one?" I asked as Mikkel tried to find a parking spot for our van, which he calls the Porkchop Express. Brown with a red stripe, I know it's modeled after not what it's called, but instead different reference to the Eighties - though supposedly that van was black. Mikkel and his movie addiction strikes again. Then again, I wasn't free from nostalgia focused on a time from before I was born. I had convinced him to let me play KISS on the stereo, the volume turned up as high as he would let me.