Pop the Clutch

by Eric J. Guignard

  “Why’d she call you and not me?” Foley asked.

  “She says you’re always grumpy on the phone.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ll be bright and cheerful when I retire.”

  He saw something flicker in Katie’s face. Sadness? She said, “Two more months, right?”

  “Counting the days.”

  She studied him a moment. “What’ll you do, when you leave?”

  “Where’ll I go, you mean? The Caribbean. White beaches and blue lagoons.”

  “Seriously?”

  Foley pushed back his hat and scratched his forehead. “There’s something I been meaning to tell you.” He paused, then said, “You know the name Sywell Burdette?”

  “Sure. Oil tycoon. Houston, right?”

  “He was my mother’s brother. Her only sibling. She died when I was born.”

  Katie blinked. “Your uncle’s a billionaire . . . and you never mentioned it to me?”

  “Never told anybody. Dad and me moved here from Texas when I was two years old—he and Uncle Sy didn’t get along. I don’t even remember him.” He shrugged. “Sy never married, never had kids, never contacted us here. Then, when he died last year, his lawyers called me.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Are you telling me you inherited the Burdette fortune?”

  Foley chuckled. “No. Almost everything went to charities. But he left me his beach house and a passel of land in Jamaica.”

  Her mouth dropped open. “My God, Billy. And you’re really moving there?”

  “Yep. That’s where I was this summer, on vacation.”

  “You told me you went to New Orleans.”

  “I did, to catch the plane.”

  She gave him an odd look. “You sly devil. You have a sweetie down there?”

  “No, I’ll need to find one of those to take with me,” he said. “I’m accepting applications.”

  For several seconds both of them stayed quiet, their eyes locked.

  Katie’s cell buzzed again. She fumbled the phone from her pocket, took the call, listened for a beat, and replied, “Okay. We’re on our way.” When she disconnected she said, “The coroner again. She wants to talk to us.”

  Foley squared his hat and nodded, all business again. “Let’s go. Nothing more to see here.”

  “Good.” Katie, looking preoccupied, paused at the splintered door and took a final glance at the gloomy room, at the stacked reels of film. “This place gives me the creeps.”

  They were outside and headed for the car when Foley stopped in his tracks. In fact he was looking down at his tracks. “Well, I be damn,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “The guy with the binoculars. Where was it he said he saw them two men, this morning?”

  “Right here,” she said. “Walking across the lot toward this building.”

  Foley looked up at her. He didn’t say more. He didn’t need to.

  The only footprints leading to or from the building—or anywhere—were his and Katie’s.

  ***

  AN HOUR LATER they were back at the office, Bill Foley with the same mixed feelings that had plagued him for three days. On the one hand, he felt he should do something—shoot somebody, catch somebody, something—to stop all this. On the other hand, he knew he had to keep thinking straight or they would accomplish nothing. There were just too many unknowns. And their visit to the coroner half an hour ago had added yet another.

  “Fang marks?” Foley had repeated, when Dr. Green told him what she’d found.

  “That’s right. Like a snake would make, though these were bigger. As I said, most of the wounds indicate an animal attack, or feeding on a corpse that was already dead. The other damage was so extensive my assistant must’ve missed those two punctures.”

  “So what are you saying, Sally?”

  Dr. Green shrugged. “I’m saying something with long teeth bit him. Bit him in the neck.”

  Now, alone in the sheriff’s office, Foley and Katie dropped into their desk chairs. This was getting weirder and weirder; visions of Transylvania and Boris Karloff were dancing in his head. After five minutes or more, Foley blinked, looked around, and said, “Where’s Greg?”

  “Gone home, probably. He’s not one for staying late.”

  “No, but he does when I ask him to. He agreed to work tonight.”

  Katie stood, crossed the room, and sat down in front of Deputy Waszewski’s computer.

  “What are you doing?” Foley asked.

  “Checking the call log. If he went someplace, he’d note it on here.”

  “We actually do that?”

  “Greg and I do. If you ever learn anything about technology, you can too.” She clicked a few keys, studied the screen, and added, “Here it is. He’s gone to see Ethel Boggins. The lady whose dog was killed.”

  “Why’d he go out there again?”

  “She called at 5:40, it says here, about the time you and I were headed to the coroner’s. Greg says Ethel told him she saw something in the field behind her house. Said she couldn’t tell much about its size because of the distance, but that it was big, and gray, and looked like . . . ”

  Katie stopped, staring at the report.

  “Looked like what?”

  “A lizard. She told him it looked like a big lizard, walking on its hind legs.”

  They turned to each other. Foley could hear the clock ticking on the office wall.

  And suddenly Katie’s eyes widened.

  She focused again on Greg Waszewski’s computer, typed something in, waited, studied the result, and fell backward in her chair as if slapped. “Michael Landon,” she murmured. “I thought I remembered that.”

  “What?”

  “Michael Landon. From Bonanza. And he was Charles Ingalls, in Little House on—”

  “I know, Katie. I’m even older than you are. What about him?”

  She turned to face him. She still looked stunned.

  “The bite marks in Darryl Goodman’s neck,” she said. “The giant ape. The fact that we saw no footprints anywhere around the bodies—or where those two strangers were sighted. The big lizard, walking upright. The guy in a long black overcoat, flapping in the wind.” She leaned forward, holding his gaze. “Think about it, Billy.”

  Foley shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re—”

  “Internet Movie Data Base.” She pointed to the computer. “I Was a Teenage Werewolf.”

  “You were what?”

  She swiveled the monitor around so Foley could see it. “Not me,” she said. “Him.”

  On the screen was a movie poster of a young Michael Landon, wearing a grin and an old-fashioned high-school varsity jacket. Also shown was a hairy monster in the same coat: dark, with white stripes along the bottom, and around the cuffs and collar. At the top of the poster were the words I Was a Teenage Werewolf.

  Sheriff Foley felt his mouth go dry. “The football jacket. The one the old man saw.”

  For a long time neither of them said a word. Finally he looked at her.

  “It wasn’t a black overcoat, on the other guy,” he mumbled. “It was a cape. Wasn’t it.”

  “I bet it was,” she said.

  A silence passed.

  “This is insane,” Foley said. “A werewolf and a vampire? Even thinking it is insane.”

  “I know.” Her voice was barely a whisper. “But it adds up. All those things people are seeing. Put that together with the unsolved murders you told me about from years ago, and what folks said they saw then—and the fact that the killings stopped when the drive-in closed—and those reels of film in that room . . . ”

  Foley could hear himself breathing.

  “Creatures from old horror movies,” he said. “But—how can that be?”

  Her eyes drifted back to him. He’d never seen her so pale.

  “What if they’re going in and out of there?” she said. “That construction work—the moving in of all the heavy machinery next door to the drive-in—what if that woke ’
em up? I can’t believe I’m saying this, but—maybe these things have been locked in that room all these years, and it’s like a pressure building up. In those reels.” She paused. “And then, when whoever it was—the Merrillton people, I guess—pried the lock off the door, it . . . ”

  “It freed them,” Foley said.

  She nodded.

  He fell backward in his chair, mirroring Katie, and gazed sightlessly out the window. He felt weak, as if gut-punched. “We could be wrong. This could all be as ridiculous as it sounds.”

  “I hope it is. But I don’t think so.”

  “So what do we do?” he asked. “Tell somebody?”

  “Tell somebody what? Tell the state cops we’ve decided Little Joe Cartwright is out there killing people? That King Kong and Godzilla and things that don’t leave footprints because they aren’t real are sneaking through people’s yards, and Count Dracula’s drinking their blood?”

  “Isn’t that exactly what you’re saying happened?” he said. “My God, Katie, if what we’re talking about is true—”

  He stopped, feeling his stomach turn over as a thought hit him.

  Greg Waszewski.

  “Greg’s out there,” Foley said. “Get him on the radio. Hurry. I’ll try his cell phone.”

  Katie dashed for the dispatch room while he phoned Waszewski’s cell. He got no answer. “He’s not in his car,” Katie said, coming back. She looked on the log to find the home number of the lady who’d called, punched it in, and hit the speakerphone button.

  “Ms. Boggins?” she blurted. “This is the Sheriff’s office. Is Deputy Waszewski there?”

  He wasn’t, Ethel said. He’d left there thirty minutes ago. No, she didn’t know where he’d gone. But he’d asked her a strange question, just before he left. Something about that huge reptile-looking thing she’d seen, in the field behind her house.

  “What question?” Katie said.

  “He asked if I saw where it went.”

  “Did you?”

  “Sure did,” Ethel said. “And I told him.”

  Foley saw Katie go rigid, and felt his insides turn to ice. Because both of them knew what bordered the cotton field behind Ethel Boggins’s house.

  “It headed toward the Starlite, didn’t it?” Katie said to her. “The old drive-in theater.”

  “Yes. How did you kn—”

  Katie hung up. For a moment she and Foley sat motionless in their seats.

  “Greg wouldn’t go poking around there,” she said. “Not alone, without telling us. Would he?”

  Foley swallowed. “He might. If he thought I wanted him to.”

  Both of them jumped to their feet and headed for the door.

  ***

  AS SOON AS FOLEY’S PATROL CAR turned off the highway into the darkened lot of the drive-in, its headlights found what he’d feared he would see. Deputy Waszewski’s cruiser was parked beside the shoebox-looking building, nosed in at a slant. The deputy himself was nowhere in sight. A round object about the size of a volleyball lay in the mud between the car and the open front door; otherwise there was nothing else besides the rows of short speaker-poles and the wooden rectangle of the movie screen standing dirty-white in the light of the rising moon. The place was as silent as a tomb.

  Foley stopped the car sixty feet away, leaving his headlights on and aimed at the scene. Quietly he and Katie climbed out, guns drawn. As an afterthought he holstered his pistol, walked to the rear of his car, opened the trunk, pushed aside the box of boating gear, and took out a twelve-gauge pump shotgun. He eased the trunk-lid down without slamming it. Then they crept toward the long building, their shadows stretching eerily out in front of them.

  The only sound was their footsteps. The long rows of fuel drums under the open-fronted shed gleamed red in the car’s headlights. They were still twenty feet from the building when they recognized the round object in the mud beside the deputy’s cruiser.

  It was Greg Waszewski’s head.

  Foley froze. Katie, her trembling left hand clapped over her mouth, was already backing up. But the raised pistol in her other hand looked steady enough, and he felt an odd surge of pride for her. Stay focused, he told himself. Together they backed up, inching toward the safety of their patrol car. He knew he’d have to check the building later—but with Greg’s death and what else they suspected, he wanted some reinforcements first.

  Slowly they retreated, trying to watch everything at once. Foley’s hands were sweaty; his heart hammered in his ears. Thirty feet to their waiting cruiser. Twenty feet. Ten. Five . . .

  Then he heard a sound behind them. Together they whirled, guns pointed, to squint into the headlights. Suddenly their vehicle jolted back and forth on its shocks, and something woofed and grunted in the darkness.

  Whatever these creatures were, they were here. Now.

  Foley felt his knees go weak. He glimpsed something, a shape of some kind, several yards away on his left, and fired a blast into it from the shotgun. It had no effect. Katie did the same at a shape in the other direction, aiming and firing twice.

  “I hit something,” she hissed, her breath rasping in her throat, “but it’s still standing.”

  “I did too.”

  She sidestepped toward him. “We know they’re not real, right? If they don’t leave footprints, and if our shots don’t hurt ’em—maybe they can’t hurt us.”

  Something sure hurt Willis and Goodman and Waszewski, Foley thought, but before he could reply, fingerlike claws two feet long slammed onto the top of the cruiser from behind it, and then clenched to shatter the windshield and crumple the roof in a screaming of metal. The front of the car tilted backward onto its end and was raised clear of the ground. It hung suspended above them, the contents of the unlatched trunk spilling out onto the dirt at their feet. The headlights, still on, stabbed up into the sky for an instant, illuminating a horned, oblong head as big as a Volkswagen, with giant yellow eyes and rows of ragged teeth—and then the police car was flung aside. It sailed ten yards or more and landed with a crunching thud in a tangle of speaker-posts. The lights winked out.

  “Okay, so maybe they can hurt us,” Katie whispered.

  She and Foley stood back-to-back, leaning against each other. He could hear more wheezing and growling, getting louder. But his vision was adjusting to the absence of the headlights, and, true to its name, the drive-in was bathed in the glow of the stars and the rising moon. Whatever had destroyed his car had turned away for the moment, but a dozen other shapes were weaving and advancing, each of them horribly disfigured or of unnatural size. He fired another blast into one of the monsters—Reptilicus?—and it accomplished nothing. They were closing in.

  It occurred to Foley that he could run and try to distract them long enough for Katie to reach Greg’s cruiser. But it was too far away, and he doubted she’d leave him anyway.

  Off to his right, something roared. Something else howled. He saw Wasp Woman, her eyes bulging and her razor-sharp appendages reaching and scraping; the Fly, with its paper-thin wings and monstrous eyes; and several sickly pale creatures with oversized hands that had to be the Mole People. Towering above them all was the scaly, dinosaur-like sea monster Gorgo. Foley could smell their zoo-like stench, could hear them muttering and snarling.

  Then he saw it.

  Right there on the ground beside him, in the moonlit clutter that had poured out of the open trunk when his patrol car was lifted . . . And he knew what he had to do.

  “Quick,” he said. He handed Katie the shotgun. “When I tell you to, start firing—first your pistol, then this. I’ll be kneeling, so shoot in all directions. Understand?”

  “What’re you gonna do?”

  “Just trust me. I only need ten seconds.”

  The creatures were very close now, on all sides. From the corner of his eye, Foley saw the snapping, doglike snout of a Killer Shrew, and ducked just as the huge stinger of the Black Scorpion scythed past his ear. Behind him he heard Katie curse and use the shotgun to club
away the nearest of the Giant Leeches.

  With a murmured prayer Foley drew his revolver, aimed it carefully at one end of the low building fifty feet away, and shouted, “Now!”

  As she started shooting, he fired six times, pow-pow-pow-pow-pow-pow, then dropped to his knees and grabbed a black plastic case from the items he’d seen on the ground beside him. He opened it, fitted its contents together, and looked up again at the building. He saw that the fuel drums at the end of the open shed were now leaking gasoline through the six holes he’d shot into them a moment ago. As Katie blazed away behind him, Foley aimed again, past the surrounding creatures, and this time what he fired was a magnesium flare that traced a bright orange arc through the night and into the shed.

  He saw it hit home, shouted for Katie to get down, and threw himself over her in the dirt and wrapped her in his arms and squeezed his eyes shut while the world turned red and the air caught fire and the ground heaved underneath them.

  ***

  FOLEY LOOKED AROUND at the rising water, at the circling sharks. The tide was coming in, and the rock he was standing on would soon be submerged. He’d tied his orange T-shirt to one end of a long, jagged board from his sunken boat’s hull and planted the board upright in a crevice of his tiny rock-island. The shirt flapped gaily in the morning wind. Having done all he could, he sat down, pulled his feet in close and away from the water, shut his eyes, and waited.

  And the impossible happened. Twenty minutes later he heard someone calling. A boat was headed toward him, two men rowing, another standing in the bow. A long white yacht sat at anchor a hundred yards away. When the boat bumped against his rock, and the standing man helped him aboard, Foley almost asked, How could you see my signal when I couldn’t see your ship? Instead he just said, “You saved me.”

  “It was you who saved me,” the man replied. But it was a female voice.

  Foley opened his eyes and saw Katie. She was sitting at his bedside. Smiling.

  He tried to turn his head to look around—then winced and raised a hand to touch the bandage above his ear.