Then we got the call about something terrorizing Christmas carolers all around the Atlanta suburbs. There was a group in Athens that went out a couple of weeks before Christmas, and they came back struck dumb with their hair bleached white from fright. The next weekend in Lilburn, half a dozen senior citizens from the Methodist church went out to spread a little holiday cheer, but only three came back. One of them blew his brains out with a shotgun the next morning, and the other two, a married couple in their seventies, took a bottle of Grandpa’s epilepsy pills and never woke up. Uncle Father Joe got the call from the Methodist preacher and went up to take a look at things, strictly on the D.L., since the Methodists don’t really admit to believing in any of the shit that we shoot on a regular basis.
Well, technically the stuff that Bubba shoots on a regular basis. I don’t usually shoot things, unless it’s on an Xbox. But with Bubba laid up in a hospital bed and Agent Amy called back to Washington to answer a bunch of unpleasant questions about werewolves and Bubba’s family, I was the only one without a priest’s collar that we had to send out in the field. And while Uncle Father Joe was more than willing to get his hands dirty, the couple of weeks right before Christmas were pretty busy for him, what with all the feeding the poor and Midnight Mass stuff going on.
So I ended up dispatched to Atlanta, wandering through Buckhead with a bunch of white people singing off-key Christmas carols and standing out like a banana in a smokehouse. We’d been walking up and down the sidewalks in the richest neighborhood in Georgia for three hours, and I was about ready to shoot the next person who suggested “O Holy Night.”
Then I heard the scream. And all hell broke loose.
It sounded like the noise a cat makes when you run over its back legs with a lawnmower. You don’t want to know how I know what that sounds like. The noise was coming from the glary little old lady, who was now staring down at the sidewalk and screaming fit to bust a hearing aid. I pushed my way to the front of the pack to see what she was hollering about and almost tripped over the body of the head caroler. He was a fat white guy (they were all white guys, blowing my idea of blending in right out of the water), and he was deader than Vanilla Ice’s music career. His tongue was lolled out of his face, and it hung down over his three or four chins like a big pink slug. His eyes were rolled back in his head, and his hair had bleached completely white.
I knelt beside him and felt around his throat for a pulse. I found nothing, no matter how many chins I dug through. I pressed a finger to the Bluetooth and clicked open my comm line. “Bubba, you there? We got another one.”
“Put on your glasses, Skeeter. I can’t see shit here without ‘em.”
I pulled on the pair of bulky glasses and plugged them into the Bluetooth. The world went away, replaced by glowing green and red globs as my vision switched into the infrared spectrum.
“That’s better. Look around so I can see if there’s anything warm or cold around you,” Bubba said in my ear.
“It’s the eighteenth of December, dumbass. Everything around me is cold,” I whispered, scanning the surroundings for heat sources. The carolers bloomed orange and red in my goggles, but everything else was a uniform green or blue. I glanced back at the dead guy, but couldn’t tell him from the sidewalk.
“Something’s screwy here, Bubba. This guy looks cold.”
“I thought you said everything was cold,” Bubba replied.
“Everything is cold, asshole, but he just dropped dead in the middle of ‘Joy to the World,’ so he should be a lot warmer than the ground. But he’s not. What causes that?”
“I got no idea, Skeeter. And why were y’all singing Three Dog Night songs?”
“Not that ‘Joy to the World,’ you idiot. The other one. But anyhow, what sucks all the life out of somebody fast enough to make the body go ice-cold in seconds?” I asked. I kept my head on a swivel, but nothing looked out of place. I took the goggles off. The carolers were crying, and several of them had phones pressed to their ears.
“I need a distraction, Bubba. The cops are on the way and I’d rather not be the one gay black man hovering over the body of a dead cracker in Georgia.”
“I think Atlanta’s got a black mayor, Skeeter. It’s been a long time since they lynched anybody down there.”
“Well I’d rather they not get a hankering to bring tradition back right now, so would you please send a fake dispatch call reporting a bomb at Lenox Mall so I can get the hell out of here?” I heard him typing, then heard tires squeal and the siren rapidly start to head away from me.
I leaned over the body and took another look at the dead guy. A little old woman leaned over next to me and tsk-tsked at the corpse. “Such a shame,” she murmured, shaking her head.
“Were you friends with him?” I asked.
“Couldn’t stand the S.O.B., bless his heart,” she said without looking at me. There was no malice in her voice, just that old-money Southern disdain that can’t be taught, but comes naturally to bitchy old women who sip moonshine out of ornate flasks and look down on anyone who’s never served on the board of deacons of the local Baptist church.
“Why didn’t you like him?” I asked carefully. I didn’t look at her either. I figured everything would go more smoothly if neither of us noticed that she was talking to a black man in public. Much less a gay black man. Not to mention standing over a dead white guy’s body talking to a gay black man. In public.
“He was an asshole, but he couldn’t help it. Bless his heart, his mama died when he wasn’t nothing but a little feller and his daddy didn’t have no more sense than God gave a goose. But he had a lovely tenor, so we let him come a’caroling with us every year.”
“Oh shut the hell up, Bernice.” The new voice came from another old white woman, this one with lavender hair instead of snow-white like the first one. That was the only way I could tell them apart. White people all look alike, you know.
I turned to the new old woman. “Ma’am?”
“Ignore my bitchy sister,” the new woman said. “She’s been pissed off at Franklin ever since he ditched her for the substitute mail carrier over in Roswell. He was the heart and soul of this choir. Now we don’t have a tenor. We might as well go back to the home now.” The new sister seemed genuinely upset at the fact that someone had died not ten minutes ago, or at least upset that she was going to have to stop the caroling for the night.
“Well, maybe it’s all for the best,” the first old woman, who I now knew to be Bernice, said. She was working at that “old wise woman” tone, but she was trying a little too hard and still sounded bitchy.
“What do you mean?” I asked the question she was dying for somebody to ask. I hated to give her the satisfaction, but I needed to find out all I could about the dead guy if I was going to find out what killed him. And maybe stop it from killing anyone else before Christmas.
“Well, he was pretty depressed after getting booted out of the Singing Christmas Tree, and he’d been talking about suicide. Maybe he just willed himself to die.”
“Bernice, you are the biggest bitch in the free world,” her sister said.
“Mary Alice Everhart, you shut your filthy mouth,” Bernice said, putting on an affronted look so fast I knew she had it in her back pocket for emergencies. Some old women carried Kleenex; Bernice carried offended looks.
“I will not shut up, Bernice. Jacob was just fine about not directing the Singing Christmas Tree this year, especially when the director they hired gave him a solo. He wasn’t depressed, he wasn’t upset, he was happy. You just can’t stand to think about anybody being happy without your approval, that’s what your problem is.”
Bernice stared at her sister with her mouth hanging open for a long moment, then snapped it shut and turned away with a hmmmph. I took a couple pictures of the dead guy with the camera in my glasses, then turned and started walking up the sidewalk.
“Hey, where you going? We got to talk to the police!” Mary Alice yelled after me.
I ju
st waved at her over my shoulder and called out “Can’t stay. Too many parking tickets at The Vortex.” I kept walking, retracing our route until I got back to my Mini parked at the Methodist church. I got into the car and flipped down the sun visor. I pressed a little button and a blue LED lit up, signaling that I had a good sync with my glasses. The glasses transmitted all the photos I’d taken of the body to the car’s computer and to my servers back home, as well as to Bubba’s iPad. I scrolled through the pictures on the touchscreen in the car, but I got nothing new out of them.
“Bubba, you see anything good in those pictures?” I spoke to the air, but the Bluetooth link was still active.
“Nah, nothing. You didn’t even get a good down-blouse of the GILF with the purple hair.”
“You’re terrifying and a little disgusting, Bubba.”
“Thanks. But there’s nothing here to see. There’s no reason that dude should be dead. I mean, he was old, but that don’t mean nothing. There’s lots of old farts still running around out there.”
“I bow once again to the breadth and depth of your uselessness. I am continually amazed.”
“Thanks.”
“Sarcasm is lost on you, isn’t it, Bubba?”
“Yep.”
“Are you near a computer?”
“Yeah, Skeeter, I’m near a computer. They’ve got about seventeen of the damn things hooked up and monitoring every drop of anything that goes into me or comes out of me. And I got this iPad you gave me, too.”
“Well hop on the internet and see what you can come up with on Singing Christmas Trees in Georgia.”
“I don’t need the internet for that one. Let’s start with they suck, there’s a lot of gay-ass music, and they suck. What more do you need to know?”
“I need to know if there was a Singing Christmas Tree in each of the towns where we’ve had deaths.” I sat back in the car and listened to the tap-tap of the detachable keyboard I’d given Bubba along with his iPad. Something about an ex-defensive lineman’s hands and a touchscreen seemed like a bad idea to me.
More seconds than I thought it could ever take to Google “Singing Christmas Tree” passed, and then finally Bubba’s voice came back on the line.
“I got it!” He sounded like a kid at Christmas.
“It took that long?” I asked.
“No, I had the information in like ten seconds, but I kept you waiting forever because I figured that’s what I was supposed to do. Since I never get anything useful out of you until about fifteen seconds after somebody’s started shooting at me, I thought dragging things out was part of my new job description.”
“I hate you sometimes, you know that, right?”
“Yeah, but what would you do for fun without me?” I could hear the big dumb bastard grinning and couldn’t help but smile myself.
“What do we know?” I asked.
“There was a Singing Christmas Tree production within two nights of every murder, including the one tonight. The Lilburn Singing Christmas Tree was last night, and it’s scheduled to be in Atlanta next weekend. That finishes out the tour.”
“Do you have anything on the director?”
“The what?”
I smacked myself in the forehead, then did it again as I heard Bubba chuckle over the Bluetooth.
“I know what a director is, Skeeter. Remember, I took that theatre appreciation class in college.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t know you actually went to the class.”
“Twice, but it was enough to know what a director is. The director of the tour is Alexander Gregory Morehouse IV, and he looks like a real piece of work. I just sent the link to your car.”
“Thanks.” I clicked off and swung the touchscreen over. When we fixed my car after Bubba’s dad trashed it, I installed a jazzed-up Mac and a movable touchscreen that I could operate from either the driver’s or passenger’s seat. I will admit to playing Angry Birds Star Wars edition while stuck in traffic, but only a couple of times.
I clicked on the link that Bubba sent and delved into the world of Alexander Gregory Morehouse IV, affectionately called A.G. by those closest to him. A.G. had been a world-class choir director at one point, but the advent of auto tune and the success of the TV show Glee drove up the budgets on his productions past any reasonable point, and he was relegated to directing community theatre Singing Christmas Trees to make ends meet. He had a modicum of success until his wife suffered a tragic accident while decorating the set for their Christmas Eve production last year. Apparently she lost her footing while putting the finishing touches on the top level of the tree and the imported Bolivian scaffolding toppled to the stage from a height of thirty feet or so. Mrs. Morehouse tried to break her fall by hanging from the Star of Bethlehem, but the rigging failed and she came crashing through the roof of the nativity scene, impaling herself and the Betsy Wetsy doll they were using for the Baby Jesus on the fallen star. From that point on, “Away in a Manger” was removed from the set list of any production A.G. was involved with.
I typed a few other commands into the computer, and a map of Georgia flashed onto the screen. A blue line with yellow dots sprang to life showing the performance towns and dates of A.G.’s tour, then I overlaid a red line with green dots to show the string of mysterious deaths. The blinking circles on the screen told the story—A.G. had been in every town with a strange death within 24 hours of the incident. Looked like I needed to go see a man about a tenor.
Alexander Gregory Morehouse IV lived in an architectural cliché. I pulled my Mini up to the front of the single most Gothic building I’d ever seen on American soil. The place was huge, with a gray stone facade looming over the surrounding suburban homes. The house stood at least four stories high, a stark contrast to the plain ranch homes that surrounded it. I couldn’t figure out for the life of me why someone hadn’t just hung a neon sign out by the mailbox that said, “Evil Genius Inside.” There were even gargoyles, of all ridiculous things!
“I’d feel a whole lot better about this if I had Bertha,” I muttered into my Bluetooth.
“Skeeter, Bertha is a fifty-caliber hand cannon that weighs more than your head. There is no way on God’s green earth that I am letting you carry her into battle with the forces of evil. There’s no guarantee that either one of you would make it back in good working order,” Bubba’s voice growled in my ear.
“Yeah, and I just bet I know which one you’re more worried about,” I grumbled back.
“Skeeter, you are my best friend in the whole world, but Bertha is my gun. And the bond between a man and his firearm is something sacred. Do not pretend to understand that bond, and do not presume to supplant it.” His voice had a reverent tone to it, like he was discussing something holy. I let it drop, having a pretty good idea who Bubba would shed more tears over, me or Bertha. I took out my Ruger P95 from the glove box, checked that there was a round in the chamber, and slid it into a holster at the small of my back. I strapped a Judge revolver in an ankle holster around my right ankle, and slid a butterfly knife into my back pocket.
“Where did you get all that hardware? And what the hell do you think you’re going to do with that knife? Anybody gets close enough to your skinny ass to cut with a knife, they’ve already killed you,” Bubba said.
“Ain’t you the one always saying a fella can’t ever too well-armed or too well-hung?”
“Well, I reckon now you got one out of two, little buddy,” Bubba shot back. I pressed the mute button on my earpiece and got out of the car. I climbed the twenty-seven steps to the eighteen-foot oak front doors and grabbed the knocker, which of course looked like Marley’s face from A Christmas Carol. I expected the damn thing to talk to me when I grabbed the ring, but it kept mercifully silent. The door did swing open without being touched, which did nothing at all for my blood pressure, but I didn’t scream and manfully strode into the foyer.
Okay, maybe I yelped a little and jumped back about eight feet, then slunk in through the open door like Gollum following
Frodo, but I went in. And my jaw dropped at what I found in there.
Instead of the stereotypical gloomy, cobweb-laden grand entryway I was expecting, I walked into something out of a friggin’ Martha Stewart Christmas special. There were as many lights blazing in that house as in some whole trailer parks I’d visited, unless you count bug zappers as lights, which I don’t. They don’t give off enough illumination, especially after they’ve been frying June bugs for a few hours. But anyway, this place was lit up like the proverbial Christmas tree.
And that’s not even to talk about the non-proverbial Christmas tree that was standing in front of me, stretching all the way up until the star brushed the top of what had to be an eighteen-foot ceiling. And every decoration on there was top-notch. I saw stuff from Tiffany, the Disney store, and Sarabella, and you know none of that stuff comes cheap. But right in the middle, just a little bit below eye level on me, was what looked like a homemade ornament. It was just a plain white ball, and in black Sharpie someone had written “A&N,” with “1995” under it. Nothing else, just a white ball with a pair of letters and a year on it, but it was the only personal touch on a tree that was otherwise yanked straight out of a magazine.
I pushed the button on my earpiece. “Hey Bubba, you got a location on this Morehouse feller yet? I’m thinking there’s more to this than meets the eye.”
“Heh heh, like a Transformer?” my redneck sidekick chuckled in my ear.
“No jackass, like the inside of this place doesn’t match the outside. I don’t know what’s going on, but something doesn’t feel right.”
“Doesn’t feel right like the bad guy’s standing behind you and about to whack you on the head not right, or doesn’t feel right like your underwear’s bunching up and you’re starting to chafe not right?” The sad part is I knew exactly what he meant.
Grits, Guns & Glory - Bubba the Monster Hunter Season 2 Page 4
