“Yes we do, Norman, that’s why it’s called Interrogation Room One.”
“Okay, let’s go see him.”
She led me upstairs, pausing for a few moments at the coffee maker so that I could pour myself a cup and seal it with a lid.
The coffee maker was at one end of a large room where all the action was. Two rows of four desks made up the center of the room. Only one desk was occupied.
Pat and I walked straight through to the interrogation room at the back of the building. We entered the adjacent observation room where we could see the fella through the one way mirror, just like them cop shows on television.
The guy sat cuffed to a table that had been bolted to the floor in the center of the room. He wore an orange jump suit and his hair looked as if he’d just finished kissing a light socket. He sat facing the window; though from his side it would look like a mirror. His eyes darted about like a frightened animal. They made me nervous. His left hand lay flat on the table, palm down. His right hand was clenched into a fist.
On the other side of the table, her back to us, sat a uniformed officer of the Eudora Police Department. She had black hair that had been pulled back into a tight bun on the back of her head. She had a file folder opened up on the table in front of her and though we couldn’t hear her, I could see that she was talking to the man.
“That the new officer?” I asked.
“That’s Officer King,” Pat sat. “Transferred in from out of state.”
Officer King sat up a bit straighter, as if she could hear Pat talking about her.
“Okay, so who is this guy?” I asked. “What’s he said?”
“He’s been babbling nonsense for almost an hour. He gave us a name,” she consulted the file, “Maggie Keaton. He referred to her as his fiancé and said she’d been taken by little green men.”
“Who is he?”
“We don’t know. Officer King found him behind the Happy Hamburger an hour ago. He was lying on the pavement trying to eat his own toes. Oh, and he was naked. No clothes anywhere.”
“Naked?” I said. “Fun.”
“We’re running his prints now, but with all the alien talk, I thought you might want to see him.”
I waved my hand dismissively. “There’s no such thing as aliens. Who’s Maggie Keaton?”
She flipped through the file in her hand.
“Maggie Keaton, twenty-three, night manager at the Happy Hamburger, and student currently attending KU. Lives on her own in Cedarwood. I checked her place out myself. Knocked on the door. No one home.”
“That doesn’t mean anything. She could be clubbing in Lawrence or Kansas City. Or visiting her parents. She could be in Florida for all we know. Good Lord, Pat, there’s all manner of places this girl could be, and ain’t nothing so far is pointing to anything nefarious other than Nature Boy in there knowing her name. He could be a drugged up stalker for all we know.”
“I know that, Norman,” Pat scowled at me. “But I try not to dismiss possible abductions in my town until I feel all bases are covered. There’s such a thing in my job called due diligence. Ever hear of it?”
“I just think you’re wasting your time.”
Just then Officer John Singer stepped into the room. He’d been on the force almost as long as Pat, though it didn’t show anywhere but for a few wrinkles under his eyes and the cap of pure white that was his hair.
“We may have found the girl’s phone,” he said, holding up a large smart phone in a plastic bag.
“Where?” Pat said, taking the bag from him.
“I made one last sweep of the Happy Hamburger and found it lying by the back fence. Well, under the back fence actually. I only found it because it had started vibrating. Made an awful racket against the wooden fence.”
“How do we know it’s hers?” Pat asked.
“We don’t,” John said. “Won’t know for sure without getting into it.”
Pat pulled the phone from the bag and pushed the power button. The screen glowed and showed an image of a smiling young girl with brown, shoulder length hair. She looked to be in her twenties and wore shorts and a t-shirt. Standing next to her, his arm around her shoulders and smiling with her at whoever had taken the picture, was the man currently sitting in Interrogation Room One. Granted, the version from the phone looked sane, but it was the same guy.
“It could be his phone,” I said, gesturing to the fella on the other side of the glass.
“The phone’s locked,” Pat said. Then she swiped her finger across the screen and a list of icons popped up over the background image. “Good, no password.”
“That’s not very secure,” I said.
“You can set up your phone so that it can be accessed without a password,” John said as Pat swiped and tapped at the screen. “People do it so that if there’s an accident, emergency responders can have access to your emergency contact info and such.”
“This is Maggie Keaton’s phone alright,” Pat said. “I found her information.” She powered the phone down and slipped it back into the plastic bag.
“So that means this guy is on the level?” John said. “Aliens took Maggie Keaton?”
I sighed. “There’s no such thing as aliens.”
“Regardless,” Pat said. “You have to admit now that there’s something strange going on.”
As if one, the three of us turned to the window and watched Officer King with Maggie Keaton’s apparent fiancé.
Though we couldn’t hear into the room—there was a speaker next to Pat, but the switch was currently resting in the off position—we could see that Officer King was speaking. The man, however, he just sat in the same way he’d been sitting since I walked in. Left hand flat on the table, right hand clenched into a fist.
“What’s in his hand?” I asked.
“His hand?” Pat said.
“His right hand. He has it wrapped around something. That’s not a threatening gesture.”
“We don’t know,” John said. “We tried to pry his fingers open earlier, but they wouldn’t budge.”
We watched again in silence until the man began to speak, pat flipped a switch under a small speaker to the right of the window and a raspy voice crackled through.
“...when the men in tights run the engineering program.”
He sounded like someone who hadn’t spoken for a while, someone who had forgotten how to speak, but could still do so due to muscle memory, someone who also seemed more than a bit surprised to hear the sound of their own voice.
“The moon weeps,” he said. “Did you see it? The moon cries for all the children who have gone to bed without brushing. But no one understands that the kids would brush if the hamburger stand would just simply stop screaming. But that’s how things are nowadays, right? That’s what people do, people see, people hear and say and think and paint. Did you know that just last Thursday a penguin tried to sell me a house on Mars? Can you believe that?”
“Sir,” Officer King tried to inject but the guy was on a roll.
“I mean, Mars? Come on, everyone who’s anyone knows that the only houses worth buying these days are on Venus. I mean, think of the women.”
“Sir,” Officer King tried again.
“Hercules is a homeless man, he roams the streets with little thought for anything above the intellectual realm, and no one knows he’s even there. Why would they? After all, the Nine Realms seek their champion still. They need not look far, however. They only need to look to the grease and fat. That is where heroes dwell. But I know the secret. Only me. Only I and only me. Me and I. I and me. A, E, I, O, U. What about you? Sometimes why? But why sometimes? STOP FLUSHING THE TOILET!”
Silence. I thought that maybe I could hear a cricket. No one breathed.
Until.
“Wow,” John said.
Pat and I could only nod.
“Well, I better get this phone dusted for prints,” John said. “Of course now yours will be all over it, Chief,” he smiled.
�
��Couldn’t be helped, John,” she said. “Thanks.”
And with that, John left.
Officer King stood, turned, and walked over to the mirror. She was tall, almost as tall as me at six feet. She had a crooked little smile plastered on her face like she knew the punch line to a joke that the rest of the world wasn’t aware of. She also had a streak of white, about an inch thick, in her black hair. It started just above her right eyebrow and swept back to be engulfed by her bun.
For a moment, as she was looking into the mirror, our eyes met. It lasted for just an instant, but in that moment I felt as if she could actually see me there through the mirror. I’m sure she was aware that someone was there, watching, but to think that she could see me was probably due to not being fully awake quite yet.
I took a sip of the coffee and nearly moaned with pleasure.
“Let’s start with your name again,” Officer King said. Then she turned back to the man.
The man did not respond.
“Your name?” Officer King said. “What is your name?”
“The snakes are everywhere,” he said. “Elephants wearing trousers and spinning records on the sun.”
“Tell me again about your girlfriend,” Officer King said, ignoring the man’s ramblings.
“Maggie?” The man said. “Maggie Keaton. They came from the earth and took her. Little green men. Red mist. They took her down with them!”
“Little green men?” I said.
Pat switched off the speaker.
“Aliens,” she said.
“No, he said ‘little green men’. Has he mentioned aliens at all, or has it always been little green men?”
Pat flipped through the file folder.
“From Officer King’s original statement it says: ‘They came from the earth and took her. Little green men. Red mist. They took her down with them’.”
“The same thing he just said. The exact words,” I said.
“Yeah,” Pat said. “Aliens.”
“No, not aliens, Pat. Not aliens at all.”
She turned to me, a quizzical look on her face.
“It makes sense,” I said. “His behavior, the red mist, little green men coming out of the earth.”
“What?”
“But why?” I said. “Why take a woman?”
“What? What took her?”
“Oh no,” I said as it really fell atop me. I put my hands on my head. “I can’t go back down there. Not again.”
“What, Norman? What the hell are you talking about?”
“I know what took Maggie Keaton.”
“What?”
“Goblins.”
24
CREATURES OF THE NIGHT
THOMAS HAD BEEN A vampire for nearly two centuries. Long enough now so that he no longer remembered what it had been like to be a human. Which suited him just fine. The human race, in his opinion, were nothing more that cattle.
To him, humans were unclean. His skin practically crawled any time he was required to feed from one of their kind. If it wasn’t for the thirst that came over him every three days, he would never so much as touch one of the filthy humans. But their blood was needed for his survival, so he would always choke back his revulsion, and do what needed to be done.
Though his hatred of the human race was absolute, there was one among them that he loathed above the rest.
Norman Oklahoma.
The man had made him, along with his brother, look like a fool. In front of another human, no less.
Thomas detested Abner Lemonzeo as well. Not just for the crime of being another stinking cow, but he had been the human who had borne witness to Thomas’s humiliation. For that alone, there could be no forgiveness.
Norman Oklahoma would need to die.
Abner Lemonzeo’s time would come as well. But for now the man would live.
It was bad enough that Brone had gone into business with this Lemonzeo, but Thomas had been forced to interact with the thug once already, and would be face to face with the man again later today once the sun was up.
It was during that first meeting yesterday when Norman Oklahoma brought him low. It was at the local drinking establishment the humans had named The Pub, showcasing their lack of imagination.
Despite what the stories say, vampires can go out in the daylight. Sunlight does not affect them any more than it does the vile human race. So the morning meeting was no big deal. It was supposed to be quite simple, actually. Lemonzeo had agreed to use his resources to kill Norman Oklahoma. In return the vampires would pay him an exorbitant amount of money. Yesterday’s meeting was scheduled simply for Thomas and his brother to deliver Lemonzeo’s payment.
But Lemonzeo had failed. Or at least the freak he’d hired had failed. Norman had walked right into The Pub, alive as ever. Thomas fumed at the memory. The way Oklahoma had strolled into The Pub in a cocky, self-sure manner. The way he had spoken to Thomas. And most demeaning of all, the way he had shot Thomas down with his six shooters, over and over.
He’d lived, Oklahoma had not had the forethought to load his guns with silver bullets, but his suit had been ruined, and his pride had been obliterated.
So now, in a small house across Main from the Eudora Police Station, he watched, and he waited.
The occupants of the home were away. For the night or longer, Thomas did not know. Nor did he care. If they were to come home while he remained in the house, he would take care of them. Quickly, so as to minimize the amount of time he would come into contact with them.
Thomas sat in a wooden chair taken from the table in the kitchen. He’d dragged it over to a window that faced east. The window looked out onto Main and provided him with a perfect view of the two front entrances to the police station. His brother, Alexander, would be somewhere in the back, watching the rear entrance.
They had both been in position since Oklahoma had been brought in earlier in the day. Thomas had gone out to where Oklahoma lived, to do what the Walrus could not. But he’d arrived to find the police in full force, and they had taken Oklahoma away.
So now he sat alone in the dark with nothing but his thirst for vengeance against Norman Oklahoma. He imagined the various ways in which he could kill the man. Regardless of his aversion to the human race, Thomas thought he might want to take his time with Oklahoma.
He held his hand up before his face and willed the fingernails there to grow. They snapped forth from his fingertips like the claws of a hunting cat. Razor sharp and tough as steel. He smiled as he pictured using those claws to skin the human alive. He almost laughed when he imagined the way the man would scream.
Then his phone vibrated in the inner breast pocket of his suit. He moved from the window before checking the display. It was Alexander.
“Do you have him?” Thomas said into the phone.
“No,” Alexander replied. “He has not left the building.”
“Then why are you bothering me?” Thomas said. “I should be watching.”
“Brone called,” Alexander said.
“So?”
“Watch your tone, brother,” Alexander said. “You may not like him, but Brone is in charge. So says the Elder.”
The Elder. While Thomas detested Brone, he had nothing but respect for the Elder. Anyone who did not fear and respect the Elder was not long for this world. And though Thomas thought Brone a fool, the Elder must have had a reason for putting him in charge of this operation.
“What did he want?” Thomas said. His tone did not change.
“The girl you took this morning was the wrong age.”
“Yes, I know,” Thomas said. “I told you the same after I took her, if you would care to remember. But Brone wanted her and now he has her. If she is too old then that is a problem he will have to deal with.”
“He wants us to take another, and soon.”
“He will have to wait,” Thomas said. “Oklahoma comes first.”
“Yes,” Alexander said. “He has ordered us not to touch the human, Oklahoma
.”
“What?” Thomas practically yelled. “He was the one who wanted the man dead in the first place. We can do what his human pet has failed to do.”
“Brone still wants Oklahoma dead, but he does not want the human’s attention on us. Should we fail—”
“Fail!?” Thomas interrupted him. “We will not fail. If he wants Oklahoma dead, we will see it done.”
“He has given his command,” Alexander said. “And we must obey.”
Thomas did not reply. Instead he moved back to the window, not caring that the light from the phone would make him stand out against the dark.
“Thomas,” Alexander said in his ear. “We have our orders.”
Again, Thomas did not reply. He studied the building across the street. At this hour there wouldn’t be many humans inside. He could cut the power, and then cut the humans down in the dark. Vampires could see just as well in complete dark as they could under the midday sun. Oklahoma could be dead within twenty minutes.
“Thomas,” Alexander said quietly. “Cross Brone if you choose. But know that by doing so, you cross the Elder as well.”
That brought Thomas up short. His desire to see Oklahoma dead was nothing compared to his desire to avoid upsetting the Elder. It had been the Elder who had turned Thomas and his brother. In many respects, the Elder was their father.
“Okay,” Thomas said finally. “I will obey. What does he want us to do?”
25
MY NAME IS MUD
“I WANT DIANA ON this with you,” Pat said.
We stood before a window surrounded by thick, wire mesh. At the bottom of the window was a counter top and Officer John Singer stood on the other side. Behind him were lockers of various sizes where the Eudora Police Department stored the belongings of anyone in lockup.
“Diana?” I asked.
“Officer King.”
“Come on, Pat,” I said, signing the paperwork required to get my stuff back. “This will all go much faster if I do it alone.”
“Look, I’m not above just standing back and letting you do your thing, especially when it comes with your kinds of cases. But this was a police matter first, and we’ll see it finished.”
The Adventures of Norman Oklahoma Volume One Page 13
