“I dunno, mister. Who are you looking for, and what’s he wanted for?”
“What do you mean?” The whole “wanted for” thing had me honestly confused, and that don’t happen nearly as often as Skeeter lets on.
“Well, take a look at yourself in a mirror sometime. If I’ve ever seen a bounty hunter, you’re it. So what is it? Skipped bail? Unpaid child support? Cheating husband run off with the savings account?” Her eyes were bright and her blonde ponytail was almost quivering with excitement.
I thought about it for a minute, then figured that since leprechaun are mystical creatures, they probably don’t feel the same way we do about wedlock and taking care of your responsibilities, so I went for the most obvious choice. It also happened to be the choice most likely to irritate a young American woman.
“Yep, you got it. He skipped out on child support. For three kids. His mom used her life savings to pay me to chase his ass down and bring him back to face justice. I’m just trying to make sure little Ben, Ralphie, and Monique get to eat.”
“Bastard. Why are all you guys such assholes?”
“Hey, I’m the good guy!” I protested, putting on the best innocent look I could muster. It still sucked. “I’m the one trying to track down the asshole, remember?”
“For money. It’s not like you’re doing this crap out of the goodness of your heart.”
“Well, that’s true, but I’ve got people of my own to support.” I didn’t bother to tell her that the people I supported were mostly single moms who danced on poles. It just didn’t seem germane to the discussion.
“All right, fair enough. Who’re you looking for?” She whisked away my empty pint glass and brought me another Harp. I figured if she brought me another refill without my asking, that was grounds for marriage.
“He’s a little Irish fella, pretty grumpy. Probably bitching about money somebody stole from him.”
“This little Irishman got a name?”
I was stuck. Sure, I knew leprechauns had names, but most of ‘em are in Gaelic, which ain’t one of my two languages. I’m fluent in redneck and pretty decent in English. And I had no idea what this leprechaun was going by, and from what I was hearing from Skeeter, it sounded like nobody who heard it lived long enough to repeat it.
“Well . . . I don’t really know his name,” I admitted. I have got to get my crap together. I’ve been rusty ever since Jase skewered me. Admittedly, having your kid brother/werewolf shove three feet of steel through your guts was guaranteed to put anybody off their game, in my business, that was good way to end up dead.
“Well if you don’t know his name, how you expect to find him? You just gonna go through every bar in Greenville that serves Guinness and harass every short guy with red hair ’til yours shows up?”
“That was kinda Plan A.” I finished off my second Harp, but a third wasn’t coming on its heels. I reckoned the engagement was off.
“Well, I hope your Plan B works better, but you better work it somewhere else. Gimme ten bucks for the beers and get the hell outta here, mister. I don’t know what part of your story’s crap and what part’s truth, but I ain’t gonna have you in here botherin’ my customers on no out-of-town bounty hunter bullshit.”
“You don’t sound so Irish anymore, honey.”
“Why are you still here?”
I dropped a twenty on the bar and headed out to the street.
I turned left and walked uphill back towards the hotel, tapping on my Bluetooth earpiece as I went. “That didn’t go so well.”
“Yeah, I noticed,” Skeeter replied.
“How? I didn’t even turn on the ear-thingy?”
“I hacked the bar’s security cameras when I tracked you there. And don’t ask how I tracked you there, I ain’t tellin’.”
“Fine, Skeeter, be that way. You got anything from Uncle Father Joe?” Skeeter’s Uncle was a Catholic priest and our liaison with the church. I never knew “liaison” meant “dude that pays for strippers and beer,” but that’s what Joe amounted to most days.
“Joe says you should still be down here in bed and I should be on this case, but that’s beside the point.”
“That it is,” I agreed.
“He also says there was a reported sighting of something unusual in Falls Park a couple nights ago. Nobody died, but a couple of kids from the art school were smokin’ a little wacky weed around midnight and said they saw a monster. They got away, but it might be worth checking out.”
“Yeah, I figure in a town where I’m chasing a monster, I oughta check out any reported monster sightings. They taught me that in Monster Huntin’ 101.”
“Don’t be a smartass, Bubba. Nobody likes a smartass.” He clicked off before I could make some remark about bein’ better than a dumbass, and I chuckled a little under my breath as I turned left at the top of the hill and headed to Falls Park. The walk was only a couple of blocks, but I was drenched in sweat by the time I got there. Take late spring in the Upstate, add me being out of shape and the fact that when I’m in shape I’m way north of 300 pounds, and you get one sweaty redneck. It got so bad Bertha even felt heavy, and her holster was custom-built to distribute weight across my shoulders. A Desert Eagle is a hefty pistol, but when I’m in top shape, I don’t even notice she’s there.
I sat on a bench at the entrance to the park, catching my breath and looking out at the bridge that spans the falls. I mighta dropped out of the one engineering class I ever took at UGA, but even I know that a curved suspension bridge is something impressive. The sound of the falls beneath me soothed me, and I might have drifted off for a second or two.
Until a jab in my ribs rudely awakened me. “Ow,” I said, not opening my eyes.
“Get up, shithead, you can’t sleep here.”
“I was just resting my eyes, Officer. I wasn’t hurting anybody. I’m a guest in your fine city. See?” I held up my room key. Unfortunately, when I reached into my back pocket to get the key, my over-shirt gapped open and Deputy Dawg got a glimpse of Bertha under my arm. My night took a turn for the spectacularly crappy when I heard the pistol cock.
“Get up slowly, put your hands on top of your head, and turn around.” I opened my eyes, and sure enough, there was a fat cop with about eight chins, greasy black hair, and a uniform shirt stretched way past the tensile strength of cotton pointing a Glock 19 at my head.
“I have a concealed carry permit. Can I get my wallet and show it to you?”
“You can do what I say or I can put a bullet in you!” His hands were shaking like a dandelion in a hurricane, so I put my hands on top of my head.
He fumbled at his belt for a radio, snatched it up to his mouth and said, “This is Unit 219 requesting backup at Falls Park. I have a suspect in the Shredder killings in custody.”
I sighed, thinking about the time about to be wasted, then what he said registered. “Hey, dingleberry! I didn’t kill nobody!” Nobody here, and nobody human in a long time. And I had a good reason for all of them, so we won’t talk about that.
“Did you just call an officer of the law a dingleberry, you raving jackass?” He stepped closer and pressed the gun into my face, hard. I closed one eye, but kept the other one trained on his trigger finger. I was pretty interested in how much force he was putting out right then.
His radio squawked and Deputy Dingleberry’s eyes flicked away from me for a second. That was all I needed. The second his finger went slack on the trigger, I stepped to the side and wrapped my left hand around his right, gun and all. With my right I laid an uppercut onto Dingleberry’s jaw that shut his mouth with a loud thwack. His eyes rolled back into his head, and he slumped to the ground. I steered him toward the bench, so he didn’t hurt himself, and took advantage of the moment to relieve him of his sidearm, taser, and radio. I used his handcuffs to fasten him to the bench, then put his uniform hat down over his eyes so it looked like he was just sleeping.
“Sorry about that, Deputy . . .Ventimeglia,” I read off his badge. “But I�
��ve got work to do and being hauled in as a murder suspect would just slow me down.”
“And what exactly do you think going to jail for assaulting a police officer is going to do to your ‘work’?” A woman’s voice came from behind me. She sounded like a well-armed woman that wasn’t used to hearing the word “no.” In other words, she sounded hot.
I turned around and was right. She was a woman. Not spectacularly hot, but not bad. Probably just middle-of-the-road hot, except for the gun she was pointing at me. Leave me alone. Well-armed women are a turn-on.
“You must be Deputy Ventimeglia’s partner.” I put my hands back on top of my head, thumbing on the Bluetooth transmitter in my ear while I did so.
“Officer Ventimeglia, and yes, I am his partner. Officer Silva. I see you know the position.”
“It may come as a surprise to you, Officer Silva, but I have irritated a police officer or two in my time. “
“Somehow I’ll keep my surprise to myself. Now what did you do to Russell? He’s an idiot, and little bit of a blowhard, but he’s not a bad cop.”
“He saw the gun under my arm and flipped out. I’ve got a permit, but he wouldn’t let me show him.”
“Okay, using one hand, very slowly, remove the weapon from the holster and place it on the ground.” I did as I was told. “Are you carrying anything else?”
“I have a backup piece in an ankle holster.”
“Put it beside the cannon.”
I reached down and pulled my Judge revolver from its home on my left ankle and deposited it next to Bertha, then stood back up slowly.
“Anything else?”
I shook my head. This was not the time to be splitting hairs over the Ka-Bar strapped to my other ankle, or the push dagger tucked behind my belt buckle, not to mention the silver brass knuckles I had in one back pocket.
“All right, then. Very slowly take out your concealed carry permit and pass it over here.”
Once again, I did what I was told. I don’t usually attack cops, but her partner jammed his gun into my face, and frankly I didn’t trust him not to shoot me by accident. Officer Silva was calm, collected, and ten feet away. Too close for her to miss shooting my giant ass, but too far away for me to bum-rush her.
She looked over my permit, then said, “This is from Georgia. We’re in South Carolina.”
“South Carolina and Georgia have a reciprocal agreement for concealed-carry.”
“No, they don’t. We have reciprocity with a bunch of states, but Georgia ain’t one of them. So unless you’re military or a federal agent, you’ve got a couple of big problems.” Crap. Usually I can bluff them with the reciprocity thing, because most folks assume Georgia and South Carolina would have one, being neighbors and all. And full of rednecks. Not so much.
“Okay, but don’t shoot me while I pull out my other ID.” I reached into my back pocket and took out a small badge holder that Agent Amy had bestowed upon me on her last visit. After the run-in with my brother and her appropriation of a few black helicopter-types to save me from bleeding to death, she’d gotten me duly deputized in DEMON, the Department of Extradimensional, Mystical and Occult Nuisances. I gave Officer Silva my badge and waited for the standard response.
“What kind of crap is this? I’ve never heard of any government agency called DEMON. Who the hell do you think you’re dealing with, Mister?” Yep, that was exactly the response I was used to.
“Call the number.”
“What number?”
“There a number on the other side of the wallet. Call it. They’ll explain more than you want to hear, and you’ll give me my crap back.”
She handled her tech way better than her partner, who was starting to come around by that point. She pulled out a cell phone, dialed one-handed, and never left me uncovered for a second. This chick was a total pro. She gave her name and rank into the phone, told the folks on the other end what had gone down, and then her eyes got big. She listened to the voice on the other end of the phone for a couple more seconds, nodded a few times, then lowered her weapon and put her phone away.
She was ghost-white when she walked over to my guns, picked them up, and handed them back to me. “Mister, I don’t know who or what you are, but those people knew shit about me that my husband don’t know, and they said to give you back your gear and send you on about your business, so here you go. I apologize for any inconvenience.” She backed away, then remembered her partner and got him unfastened from the bench and led him away.
“Thank you, Officer Silva, and your country thanks you,” I said to her back. I heard Skeeter snicker in my earpiece, then he and I both cracked up. I laughed so hard I had to sit down on the bench again to catch my breath.
“What the holy hell did you do the that poor woman, Skeeter?”
“Don’t you mean Director Robinson?” Skeeter affected a much deeper, less rednecky and significantly less gay tone.
“Of course, Director. Sorry about that.”
“Officer Silva has a few indiscretions in her past that she thinks are safely walled off in her private blog, but what she doesn’t know if that even if you make something private on a blog, it’s still living on the internet. And if it’s on the ‘net…”
“You can find it, I know. What did she do?”
“Nothing major. A little weed, coke once or twice, but that was all back in college. Nobody would care, but sleeping with the watch commander in her rookie year on the force . . .”
“That might be the kind of thing someone should never, ever write down.”
“Ya think?” Skeeter agreed. “When I mentioned a few things that the government would never want to make public about her, she agreed that those things should remain private, and decided that your rather minor indiscretions weren’t worth her career.”
“So you blackmailed her?” I tried to sound disapproving, but it was damned effective.
“You beat up her partner, and I don’t see you crying any tears over it.”
“True enough.” I had to give him that one. “Now what?”
“Now we continue what you were supposed to be doing before you stopped for naptime—check out the park.”
I did as Skeeter instructed for once and made my way into the park. I started on the bridge, which was a truly impressive bit of construction. It was a huge suspension footbridge, curving out over the waterfalls to make a nice viewing platform. It was still too cold out for anyone to be playing in the water, but I could see the place turning into a happening hangout once summer rolled around. My nap and my subsequent disagreement with the local constabulary had taken me through dusk all the way into full night, so my vision was pretty limited, and I couldn’t hear anything out of the ordinary over the noise of the falls. Until I neared the other end of the bridge, that is. Then I heard a scratching sound that was bore absolutely no resemblance to the sounds of teenagers making out under a bridge at night. Unless those teenagers weighed a quarter ton and had claws strong enough to chip stone.
“Skeeter, you hear that?” I whispered into the air. Sometimes I think my job has made me crazy. Other times I’m completely sure of it.
“Yeah, sounds like something big under the bridge.”
“I think I’m gonna go check it out.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean, why?” I froze with one leg already over the railing. Skeeter has said some weird crap to me over the years, but that one word hung me up more than anything that had ever come out of his mouth. And that’s saying something.
“I mean that you are chasing a leprechaun. And whatever is under that bridge is big. Like pick you up and beat you to death with yourself big. So it ain’t a leprechaun. So why are you going to mess with it?”
“They don’t call me Bubba the Monster Conversationalist. I hunt monsters. Then I shoot them. Sometimes for a change of pace I stab them, or maybe even just beat ‘em to death. But hunting monsters is what I do. So if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go do it.” I clicked off the Blueto
oth, then swung my other leg over the rail and jumped the few feet to the bank where the bridge ended.
I couldn’t see crap under there, but I heard a surprised grunt. It sounded like it was about ten feet away, and I drew Bertha and pointed her in the general direction of the noise. The grunt turned into a growl, then a full-blown roar, and something huge and kinda slimy exploded out of the darkness, catching me right below my floating ribs. The air went out of me and whatever it was slammed me into the bank like a deflated tackling dummy. I got kind of a glimpse of a big slimy back and big naked ass, then the critter backed up off me, and I got as good a look at it as I could in the sparse streetlights. It woulda been about nine feet tall if it stood straight up, but it slouched to a much more manageable seven and a half feet. It had a mop of long stringy hair hanging over a face that looked like ten miles of bad road. A bulbous nose stuck out between a pair of beady eyes, and the lower jaw jutted forward to show off fangs the length of my thumb. It had long arms covered in ropy muscle and dripping with river muck. It was buck naked and absently scratched its balls as it looked at me, tilting its head one way or another like it was trying to figure out where to start eating.
I pushed the button on my Bluetooth and Skeeter picked right up. “Did you come to your senses and now you called to apologize, or . . .”
“It’s a rock troll. Can I kill it?”
“Can you get away?”
“I don’t think so. I can’t really see and it’s between me and the bridge, so I’m on his turf.”
“You know you’re an idiot, right? Don’t you remember what happened the last time you messed with a troll?”
“Yeah, I got dropped through the roof of my truck. Not one of my favorite memories. Now how do I kill it?”
“Fire.”
“I’m standing on a waterfall, Skeeter.”
“This is gonna be a problem. I’ll call you back. Try to stay alive ’til then.” He clicked off and I looked back at the troll.
Grits, Guns & Glory - Bubba the Monster Hunter Season 2 Page 6
