by SM Reine
“She has access to a good lab; if there’s anything interesting on the tip, she should be able to tell us what it is.”
“Ah.”
An interior door opened, and a lieutenant clutching a coffee mug walked out. He didn’t appear much more alert than the fellow at the desk. I gathered this wasn’t the usual nightshift crew. Monster attacks probably justified summoning on-call people.
The lieutenant thumped the other man’s desk on the way by. “Brew up another pot of your sludge, Thomas. We’re going to be a lot busier here soon.”
“Yes, sir.”
The lieutenant approached us and sat in one of the chairs. “I’m Detective Gutierrez. We’ll have coffee ready in a minute, and there’s water if you want it.”
“I’m fine,” Simon said.
Gutierrez had an accent, and I thought about trying my mediocre Spanish on him. He might think I was trying to butter him up. Enh, it couldn’t hurt. “Gracias. Cafés, por favor.”
He smiled at me—that was promising. “You heard the lady, Thomas.”
“Yeah, yeah, the sludge patrol is on it.”
“Get that metal detector out of the evidence locker too, will you?” Gutierrez pointed at Simon. “You were the one talking to Webster over at the Sheriff’s Office this afternoon, right?”
Simon perked up. “Yes. Did you find my Dirt Viper?”
“Fanciest metal detector I’ve ever seen. I can see why you’d want it back. Looks like it wasn’t stolen. You misplaced it. Some of their guys were called up there. They found it leaning against a tree.”
So, our pretty-eyed friends had been telling the truth. Though they’d still broken into our van and taken it. And why had they needed it anyway? According to Eleriss, they were tracking that creature. It wouldn’t have anything metal in it, would it?
“I left it in my van,” Simon said, “with the doors locked.”
“Hm,” Gutierrez murmured into his mug. He didn’t believe us, I could tell. Simon could, too, for his scowl was petulant. He had the sense not to argue though.
“Did you question the two guys on the Harleys?” I asked. “We thought they were the ones who took the tool.” I decided not to mention that we’d since chatted with them and they were the ones who’d taken it. “And we thought they might have something to do with... the body.”
“Our people didn’t see anyone up there when they arrived.”
“What?” Simon lurched forward to the edge of his seat. “But they couldn’t have gotten off the mountain so quickly. Not after we— I mean, they seemed like they’d be indisposed for a while. At least until someone got there.”
Maybe Simon wasn’t as adept at slashing tires as he thought. Or maybe those two had found a quick way to patch them. You could make glue out of pine pitch, after all.
The gurgling of a coffee pot had started up, the aroma filling the air. I wasn’t a huge fan of black coffee, but I could make an exception if I was using it as an all-night study aid. Or, in this case, a remain-alert-so-as-not-to-incriminate-oneself-to-the-police aid.
“We did see motorcycle tracks, as well of those of your van, but that was it,” Gutierrez said.
“Dang,” Simon said. “There was only the one road up there. I thought...”
Yes, and it had been a long drive. It did seem like the police or sheriffs or whoever had responded first would have been going up by the time Eleriss and Jakatra had been coming down. Even if the cops passed those two on the road without stopping them, someone should have remembered it, especially since they’d been sent to investigate the reporting of a body. But then, nobody had seemed to notice the two riders cruise into the campground that night either, nobody except for me. If we’d been alone, I might have asked Simon if Vulcans had any special abilities to remain unnoticed. Probably not if they needed to wear ear-covering caps when they came to Earth.
The sludge officer brought over two steaming cups of coffee, one for the detective and one for me. He pointed a finger at Simon and raised his eyebrows.
“No, thanks,” Simon said. “Not unless you’ve got a Mountain Dew back there.” He didn’t have many vices that I’d noticed, but I had seen him suck down an entire twelve-pack of soda during a long day of gaming. It beat cigarettes and alcohol, I supposed. From a few of his comments, I’d gathered that those had been rampant among his kin when he’d been growing up.
“I’ll check.”
When the other man had left, Gutierrez draped an arm across the back of his chair and gave us a stern look. I tried not to squirm with guilt. We hadn’t done anything wrong, after all.
“I know chasing storms is all the rage in some parts of the country, but you kids are going to get in trouble—or get killed—chasing this storm. Or whatever the hell it is. I wish it’d skipped Prescott. We’ve had enough tragedy in this town; we don’t need this.”
I forgot about squirming with guilt because I was too busy trying to figure out what he was talking about. Storm chasing? Huh?
“I looked you up online and saw your website,” Gutierrez said, throwing me further by switching topics again. “And your most recent blog post.” His lips flattened as he pinned Simon with his gaze.
I glared at Simon too. He could have waited to post that until we were out of the police station.
“I’m sure to a couple of kids your age, this all seems like adventure, but I urge you to let it go. Focus on your business and forget the ‘monster hunt.’” Something about the way Gutierrez said the last two words—and the way Simon avoided his eyes—made me think he was quoting that blog post.
Thomas returned with a can of Mountain Dew and a dusty but otherwise undamaged Dirt Viper. Simon leaped to his feet and threw open his arms like a man ready to hug a beloved child he hadn’t seen all year.
Gutierrez must have decided I was the more responsible of our duo for he turned his attention to me and said, “I’m serious about my warning. If the guys in L.A. couldn’t stop this... thing, I don’t know what we’ll do besides hope it moves on quickly. I don’t want to see your bodies come into the Yavapai County Morgue.”
L.A.? I was dying to get on my phone and start running searches, but not with him watching. “Yes, sir. I don’t want to see the morgue either.”
By now, Simon was running some kind of diagnostics check on his metal detector while Thomas watched on in bemusement.
“You’re free to go,” Gutierrez told me.
“Thank you.”
Less concerned with the welfare of the Dirt Viper, I grabbed Simon by the back of his arm and propelled him toward the door. I didn’t yet know why the police had thought we were chasing after this creature, but Gutierrez had dropped enough clues that I ought to be able to find out.
CHAPTER 9
I’d never had trouble getting up in the mornings—living in the desert where the sun is blazing in the window at dawn helps with that—but at 10 a.m. at the Raven Cafe, I was waiting for my triple-shot mocha to kick in. I didn’t know when I’d gotten to sleep, but it hadn’t been until late. After finishing at the police station, Simon and I hadn’t had any interest in returning to the campground, so we’d roamed around looking for a likely place to stay. We’d finally parked the van at Walmart next to the boondocking RVs. I’d surfed around on my phone, looking up news articles from L.A. among other things, until I’d fallen asleep with it on my pillow. The need for a faster Internet connection had brought us here.
“I’ve got to take Zelda to the repair shop,” Simon said after he slurped up the milk in his bowl of granola. He’d informed me that a mocha wasn’t an appropriate breakfast, but I wasn’t sure his option was any healthier, given the amount of brown sugar he’d dumped on the top. “You staying here?” He waved to my open laptop.
“Yes. We’ve got a spot by an outlet. I can go for hours.” Our pub table stood against the wall by a piano with my laptop cord snaking down to the outlet. On previous days when we’d visited the Raven, we’d had to settle for tables in non-outlet-serviced locales.
Today, the cafe was quiet, with only one other person sharing the dining area, a bleary-eyed, laptop-toting kid wearing a Yavapai Community College sweatshirt. I hadn’t seen a television yet, but the dearth of people in here and on the streets suggested that the White Spar incident had hit the news. Temi’s three early-morning text messages asking where we were and demanding to know if we were all right provided further evidence for that hypothesis.
“You can go for hours? All by yourself, eh?” Simon smirked, but it was a tired gesture. His eyes were bloodshot too. He’d probably take a nap in the waiting room while the headlights were being replaced. He never had trouble sacking out on a random chair, bench, or gum-decorated sidewalk in public.
“I’ve warned you about my introvert tendencies,” I said. “Did you send me that picture of the thing from the hotel room yet?”
“Yeah, but I’m more interested in where that monster’s going next than in antiques, albeit glow-in-the-dark antiques are intriguing. You’re going to find out more about that, right? Instead of wasting hours trying to look up foreign words you think you heard last night.” He gave me a pointed look.
Yes, I’d meant to spend more time researching the L.A. connection, and I had pulled up a few stories, but those words I’d heard Jakatra and Eleriss speak had kept repeating in my mind. I’d played with countless spelling possibilities, plugging each into the search engine, but I hadn’t found anything useful. Not all that surprising if the language wasn’t based off the Latin alphabet.
“I promise I’ll research your monster,” I said, “but we’re not tracking down anything that can rip our heads off, no matter what I find on it.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Simon said. “But the riders are a different matter, right?”
“What do you mean?”
“You want to know about them and their language.”
“Yes...”
“So, you’d want a sample if you could get it?” he asked.
“If I could figure out what language they were speaking, I’d have a better shot at finding information on that object in their room.”
“That was a yes, right?”
“Yes.” I wondered why he was pursuing this so relentlessly.
“You get all the details on L.A., and I’ll see if I can figure out a way to get you that sample.” Simon smiled and strolled away.
I had a feeling I should find his parting words, or perhaps his motivations, suspicious.
A busboy cleared his plate, and I set to work, digging deeper into the California incidents. I was so engrossed in the research that I didn’t notice Temi until she tapped me on the shoulder sometime later.
“I’m here for my introduction to estate sales,” she said, though her raised eyebrows implied she doubted we’d be doing that today.
“I’m guessing most of those will be canceled.”
Temi sat down, placing a number on the edge of the table. “The streets are empty of pedestrians, and even the auto traffic is scarce. Are you going to tell me what’s going on from your side of things? I’ve seen the CNN and local news version.”
“Simon and I were up in the mountains yesterday morning, treasure hunting, basically. He’s working on a program that uses 3D mapping technology, some historical databases I pointed out to him, and a bunch of stuff I don’t understand very well to create a geographic information system. It helps you hunt for long-forgotten and sometimes buried ‘rusty gold’ as they say in the biz. It’s similar to the technology people are using to find old shipwrecks on the bottom of the ocean. I go along to dig up what we find, I point out if it has any historic or financial value, and, if so, we drag it out and sell it. My job is also to choose likely spots for his software to search by rummaging through historical records and old maps to find out where there used to be settlements, permanent or temporary. We’ve only been doing this for a few months, but we’ve already found some fascinating sites, including previously undiscovered Anasazi ruins.”
At some point during my ramble, the server had brought over an omelet and orange juice for Temi, and she was digging in. I was taking the roundabout way to answer her question, but she didn’t look bored. “I knew this would be more interesting than working at a fast food place,” she said between bites.
“Hah, more interesting, but not exactly more lucrative, at least not yet. That’s why I’m working the estate sales too.”
“You didn’t find anything valuable at the Anasazi site?”
“Oh, there’s probably some good stuff there, but we didn’t do much digging before I called an archaeologist at the Department of Natural Resources. That was a mistake, because the bastard took all the credit for finding the site. They ran a multi-page article on it and him in Archaeology Magazine.” I waved a hand. “Not that I’m bitter or anything.”
“Why’d you tell him about it to start with?” Temi asked.
“The site was on state land.”
Her brow furrowed. “Isn’t all of the land you’d search on either state or privately owned?”
“Essentially, yes. To be honest, this part of our enterprise is a little... morally ambiguous. We’ve argued over whether Simon should make the software available to anyone or just sell it to universities when we’ve worked out the bugs. We might be assisting... the wrong sorts of people if we made it publicly available.”
The crinkle in Temi’s brow hadn’t smoothed.
“You see,” I went on, “archaeologists frown upon people who make money by finding things and selling them on the antiquities black market. Ideally, historically significant sites should be carefully researched for what they can tell us about past peoples, and artifacts should be turned over to museums. That’s why Simon and I stay away from Native American ruins for the most part. It’s awesome to be the first to find something, but we’re not going to make money on any of it because we’ll always feel obligated to inform the authorities about the finds. Though I’ll be damned before I call that guy at the DNR again.” I grumbled under my breath.
“So what are you making money on?” Temi asked.
“As it turns out, people get less huffy about proclaiming the historical significance of stuff white people left lying around a hundred years ago. A lot of what we locate falls into the category of most people’s junk and one man’s treasure. Lately we’ve been finding and selling old mining equipment. I kid you not, we recently auctioned a big claw bucket from a steam shovel for over a thousand bucks on eBay. Fortunately, the highest bidder was someone who lived in the state, and we didn’t have to figure out how to ship it.”
Temi’s eyebrows drew together. “Who would want such a thing?”
“I don’t know if we can thank the steampunk movement or what, but a lot of people are decorating with relics from the Industrial Revolution era these days. Some of these items do look pretty cool.” Though I’d been surprised when the bucket sold. Simon had argued for that one. I’d been ready to leave it, thanks to its massive weight, but he’d engineered a system to get it onto a trailer, and we’d hauled it off the abandoned mining claim. “They’re not all big items. We sold some old gold pans and pick heads to a bar owner over on Whiskey Row—” I waved in the direction of the street, “—right when we got into town. He thought they’d make good wall decorations.”
Temi had finished her omelet and pushed the plate away. “All right, now I get what your business does, but I don’t get why you were up on the mountainside hunting monsters.”
“Monsters? Is that what the newspaper is saying?”
“The television news. A boy from the White Spar campground was filmed saying monsters had eaten his parents.”
“Oh, man, I can’t believe the reporters pestered that poor kid,” I said.
“The police and reporters are calling it a bear attack, but the survivors they interviewed all said that what they glimpsed wasn’t any bear. Someone said it had to be the same creature that killed all those people in L.A.”
I nodded, having caught up with the news
from over there now. Neither Simon nor I was the type to watch much television or spend a lot of time perusing headlines on the web, so we’d missed the excitement. The first mauled body had appeared at El Matador Beach outside of L.A. ten days earlier. There’d been several more deaths in the city, with each cluster of attacks occurring farther east, until the last two had shown up in San Bernardino. After that, things had quieted down, until five days ago when there’d been two more groups of slayings near La Paz County Park. In all of the cases, nobody had managed to get a picture of the culprit, because it always attacked at night. The official reports had blamed bears, though some of the deaths had been as grisly as the decapitated man in that mine shaft. Our tunnel incident seemed to be the only killing that hadn’t happened at night, though a dark mine probably didn’t qualify as a daylight attack.
“As for what we were doing up there hunting monsters... we weren’t. We were looking for some more valuable mining goodies. We heard a scream ahead of us, checked it out, and found the dead guy.” I wondered if I should confess to fleeing the mine, certain something was about to leap out of the dark and eat us. Nah, it was bad enough Simon had already witnessed me being treed by my imagination.
“You heard screams and you checked it out?” Temi asked. “Isn’t that how all those pretty girls get killed in horror movies?”
“I’m not that pretty, so I didn’t think that paradigm would apply to me.”
Temi didn’t call me stupid—in fact, all she said was, “Hm”—but the notion seemed to hang in the air.
“We thought it was some fellow explorer who’d managed to fall and hurt himself. Which I suppose technically happened. You do tend to fall after your head has been ripped off.”
Temi frowned. “Is joking really appropriate here?”
“Oh, I’m sure it’s not, but searching for sarcastic things to say is a great way to avoid thinking too much about the horror of what actually happened. That leads to weeping, hysterics, and group hugs. I find all of those activities counterproductive.” I’d never been good at sharing my emotions with others. I wasn’t sure if it came from having a pile of older brothers who’d teased and tormented me as a kid, or if it was some genetic quirk. The rest of the family went the other way—my older sister had a knack for sharing emotions with theatric intensity... and volume. Me? I’d always found sarcasm and jokes safer things to share. People have a hard time seeing through them and can’t pick on you effectively if you don’t have obvious buttons to push.
