“Nice troll . . .” I put on my best smile, and the nasty bastard just ran at me again. I put three rounds from Bertha in his upper chest, and that at least slowed him down so he more fell on me than tackled through me the second time, but five hundred pounds of troll hurts like hell no matter how it hits you. And that ain’t even saying nothing about the smell.
I reversed my grip on Bertha and brought all ten pounds of Israeli firearm down on the base of the troll’s skull, getting a satisfying crack in response. It slumped down and I managed to roll it off me onto the rocks. I emptied the rest of my clip into the back of the troll’s head, then gave it one more good kick for good measure. Then I cracked my back a couple of times to try and get everything back in the right place and turned back to the bridge. I limped the ten yards or so to the railing and pulled myself up.
Skeeter rang in just as I was about to throw my leg back over the rail. “Don’t worry about it, Skeeter. I took care of it. Turns out no matter how tough you are, a few rounds from a fifty-caliber pistol in the back of your head is gonna ruin your day. I don’t think I’m gonna have any more trouble out of that troll.”
“That’s good. How big was she?”
“What do you mean, she? This was a boy.”
“Are you sure?” Skeeter sounded nervous for some reason.
“The damn thing was almost ten feet tall and scratching its baseball-sized nuts, Skeeter. I’m pretty sure it was a dude! Why?”
“‘Cause the females are the big ones. And they’re protective of their mates.”
“Oh shit.”
“I think you better . . .”
I never heard what Skeeter thought I’d better do because that’s when a giant troll hand came down and palmed my head like Larry Bird palming a basketball. That thing picked me up by the head and flung me a good thirty yards into the middle of the river, which was colder than my first girlfriend’s black little heart. I hit the water and all the air went out of my lungs in a rush, only to be replaced by about half a gallon of freezing river water. Even in late March, the river was still running pretty chilly, and I knew I had to get out of the water and get warmed up if I was going to survive. Only problem was I had a twenty-foot troll-ess stomping after me, a lungful of water, and at least two broken ribs from when I finally hit bottom.
I managed somehow to get out of the deepest part of the water, which wasn’t anywhere near deep enough to blunt my impact on the rocks, and puke up a whole bunch of water and what felt like about three goldfish. There might have been a crawdaddy in there, too, but that coulda been breakfast. I heard the troll splashing toward me, and as big as it was, it only needed two big steps to cross the distance. Its huge hand wrapped around my legs this time, and I was hauled twenty feet straight up to hang upside down in front of a troll’s face.
If I thought the boy troll was ugly, it didn’t have anything on the female. Her head was the size of a boulder and had about the same color. Her whole body looked like nothing more than a huge pile of river rock, which I guess was how something the size of a small apartment building had stayed hidden in the middle of downtown Greenville for all this time. She stared at me with one basketball-sized eye, and her face split into an ugly, but very toothy, grin.
“Yum,” she growled, and the stench that floated out of her mouth was worse than my farts after a week in Tijuana living on refried beans and tequila. I reached behind my back, pulled my Judge revolver out of the waistband of my pants, and emptied five .410 shotgun shells worth of silver buckshot into her right eyeball. I didn’t know if it would kill her, but it sure as hell made her drop me.
Which wasn’t my best move, seeing as how I was twenty feet above a shallow river full of huge rocks. Or, for all I knew, full of other female trolls, but I tried not to think about that or I’d never go fishing again. If I can’t tell a rock from a man-eating two-story monster, it might be time to hang up my guns.
All that rushed through my head as I fell to the water, except I didn’t land in the water. The troll-ette had flung me ahead of her a little ways when I shot her in the eye, and a little ways in her scale was about ten feet in the real world. Which was just far enough for me to crash into the railing of the bridge, flip over backwards onto the relative stability of said bridge, and land facedown on the concrete walkway.
I lay there cataloguing everything that hurt, and when I ran out of places that didn’t hurt, which was a much shorter list, I got up and pulled myself to my feet with the railing. I kept low to the rail, hoping that I’d be indistinguishable from the white metal in my flannel and blue jeans. I know, sometimes my idea of camouflage leaves a lot to be desired. I looked over into the river, fully expecting to see either a dead troll-babe sprawled in the water, or the face of a live and angry troll-babe staring at me from not nearly far enough away. The last thing I expected to see was what I saw.
Nothing.
There was absolutely nothing down there, at least not that I could see. I even dug a keychain flashlight out of one soaked pocket and beat on it until it spit a weak beam of light down onto the rocks. Still a whole lot of nothing. I reckoned I’d killed them and they disintegrated, or I’d hurt them bad enough that they ran off to heal. Either way, it looked like I had enough time to make my getaway, so I leaned on the handrail and limped my dripping frozen carcass back across the bridge and hailed a bicycle cab to take me back to the Westin.
He looked at me a little funny when I told him I need a ride for two blocks, but I glared at him and waved two twenties in his general direction. “Not the stupidest thing I’ve ever done, mister. Let me tell you about the time me and two buddies raced around a block down here each carrying a load of drunken card players. That was even weirder than you.”
I only halfway listened to him, paying more attention to getting my guns secured and hidden away and confirming that I hadn’t broken any bones. I probably drifted off a little, too, since the next thing I knew he was shaking my shoulder and getting a face full of Bertha for his troubles.
“Hey man, chill! I was just trying to wake you up. Keep the fare, man. Hell, keep the bike!” He backed up a few steps, then turned and ran like hell. Or like somebody who’d just woken up a hillbilly the size of a brown bear and gotten a gun pointed at him in thanks. I dropped the twenties on the seat and went inside. A few minutes later, I was up the elevator and facedown in the softest beds in the Upstate.
“I think they just figured you were more trouble than you’re worth, an assessment I often share,” Skeeter said in my ear the next morning. I was alone in the hotel dining room eating the last remnants of the breakfast buffet and talking to thin air. Anybody that hadn’t run for the hills as soon as I got in went scrambling the second I pressed the button in my ear and started talking about trolls. I gotta give the hotel staff credit, though. They never batted an eye. One bartender told me they got a lot of entertainment types through, so that kinda thickened their skin.
“Really? I was pretty sure I killed the boy-troll,” I said around a mouthful of grits. If I’ve gotta give South Carolina credit for something, I’ll give ‘em credit for good grits. Everywhere I eat in South Carolina, the grits have just the right amount of pepper and butter, and just a hint of bacon. Perfect.
“If you’d killed her mate, she never would have let you live. She woulda just ripped you in half the first time she laid a hand on you. No, it sounds like they just wanted you away from their lair for some reason . . . holy shit.”
“Holy shit what?” I mumbled, still shoveling grits down my throat as fast as I could. I figured it was gonna be one of those carbo-loading kinda days. Not that every day isn’t a carbo-loading day, but it gave me an excuse for more grits.
“I think she was nesting. I think you stumbled on either a pregnant troll or one that had just given birth and was still protecting her young. Did she look pregnant?”
“Hell, Skeeter, I don’t know what a pregnant troll looks like! She looked like a cross between a skyscraper and a walking Zen rock gar
den!”
“Well, you don’t have to get huffy with me. I ain’t the one picked a fight with a momma troll.”
“Skeeter,” I said in my best “be calm so you don’t cuss out your best friend in front of the entire kitchen staff of the hotel” voice. “Do we know anything new about the L-E-P-R-E-. . . the thing we’re after?” My attempt to spell out leprechaun ended in miserable failure when I realized I couldn’t spell “leprechaun.”
“There was another attack last night. And underground poker game just outside of town. I’ll send the address to your phone.”
“Okay, I’ll head out there as soon as I finish breakfast.”
“You mean you ain’t finished? Damn, Bubba, even hobbits only eat two breakfasts. Save something for lunch.” I flipped off the air and pressed the button to hang up the phone, then headed back upstairs to shower and get dressed to face the day. Somewhere in Greenville, SC, there was an Irish mythical creature killing people and raiding poker games. I needed to find it and kill it. And maybe stick around for more grits tomorrow morning.
I pulled up to the doublewide trailer at the end of a dirt road. I winced a little at the cloud of rocks and dust I kicked up, hating what it was doing to the finish on my new F-250. I’d finally replaced my old truck, and I was kinda babying this one, at least until something threw me through the roof of this one. I stepped out into the cloud of dust and opened the back door. I pulled on a blazer to cover my shoulder holster and smoothed my hair down, making sure nothing had escaped my ponytail. I didn’t have a whole lot of chance of pulling this off, but I figured I oughta be able to BS my way past a couple of bumpkin deputies.
“What the greasy green hell are you doing here?”
As long as the bumpkin deputies weren’t bumpkin deputies I’d already met, which of course, the first officer on the scene was.
“Officer Silva.” I nodded at the lady cop from the night before and felt the grits in my gut sour just a bit.
“Mister, I don’t know who the hell you think you are, but this is a crime scene, so you better get your fat ass back in that truck and get the hell out of here.”
“I think we covered the question of my identity pretty well last night, didn’t we?” I put on my best “affronted douchebag cop” face, which is pretty well informed, given the number of douchebag cops that I’ve affronted in my time.
“Yeah, except for one problem. There ain’t no government agency called DEMON, and the number I called is registered to a William James MacIntyre Kwame Jones III in Georgia. And that don’t sound like no ‘Director Robinson’ to me.” She had her sidearm out, but it wasn’t pointed at me. Yet.
“Yeah, well, there might have been a couple of inaccuracies in my explanation to you yesterday, but trust me that what is going on here is something you do not want to be messin’ with. Now why don’t you just pretend that everything I told you yesterday was true and take your doughnut-humping partner somewhere safe for a couple hours. I oughta be able to get this wrapped up without too much trouble as long as I don’t have a lot of interference from well-meaning but hapless amateurs.”
Her eyes went wide, then her brows drew together in a scowl as I realized I’d gone too far. I used to be better at handling the local cops than that, but I had a family member try to gut me recently, and that screwed with my social graces a little.
“I don’t think so. I think I’m going to arrest you for assaulting an officer, for impersonating an officer of the law, and for impeding a murder investigation. Then I’m going to get you in my jail and figure out exactly who you are, what your deal is, and what all else I can charge your ass with. How does that sound, asshole?”
I heard the chuckle behind me, and that was the only hint I had that her partner was back there. That and the smell of cheap hair gel and Italian dressing. I turned around and Deputy Fatass had a shotgun leveled at my gut. I put my hands up and turned back to Officer Silva.
“Look, Officer. I’m sorry, I’ve had a rough couple of weeks and I shouldn’t have been so rude. Can we talk about this?”
“No. Cuff him, Russell. Then let’s see what happened in here.” Deputy Lardo slipped a pair of plastic zip cuffs on my wrists and pulled them a lot tighter than he really needed to. I guess that was his version of payback for me knocking him out last night. Didn’t matter, they weren’t staying on a second longer than I wanted them to. I let them lead me over to their squad car and settled into the back seat to wait.
I didn’t have to wait long. They went in, or at least Officer Silva went in. Her fat-ass partner made it as far as the threshold before he spun around to puke in the bushes. Silva got into the house, was out of sight for about a minute and a half, then came rushing out to deposit her breakfast in the bushes on the other side of the door. Those azaleas were having a bad day. I decided that sitting on my hands, literally, wasn’t getting me any closer to catching the leprechaun, so I flexed my shoulders and pulled against the plastic cuffs. I felt a little give, took a deep breath and really strained. The cuffs made a thin squeak in protest, then the plastic lock gave with a crack, and I was free. I flexed my hands to get the blood flowing back into them, then rolled over onto one side. I jammed my shoulders against the seat, reached over my head with my arms, and kicked the window out of the back door. It took a couple of good shots, but even after my run-in with the trolls the night before, the county budget wouldn’t buy anything strong enough to hold me. I squeezed my enormous frame through the hole and pulled my legs out after me. It wasn’t the prettiest dismount, but I was free.
I walked over to where the cops were wiping puke off their lips and stepped up behind Officer Silva. “You know, a real partner would have held your hair back while you puked.”
She whirled around, drawing her sidearm in a blur, but I was expecting exactly that move. I slapped the pistol out of her hand and stepped sideways to draw the taser off her partner’s belt. I jammed the cartridge into his fat gut and pulled the trigger, dropping him to the dirt in a twitching pile of sweat. I felt a little bad about him landing in the vomit, but not much.
I turned back to Officer Silva and tossed the spent taser at her. She instinctively reached up to bat the device out of the air, which gave me enough time to grab her right wrist in one hand and take her own taser away from her. I gave her a little push and twist, and she stumbled backward to land on her ass in the grass. At least she missed the puddle of puke.
“Now behave,” I growled at her. She froze and I peeked over at her partner. He was still laying there twitching, so I turned back to the more reasonable one. Although admittedly I hadn’t given Officer Ventimeglia much chance to be reasonable, knocking him out both times we’d met.
“I’m going to go inside now and have a look around. If I’m lucky, there’s something in there to tell me where to find the little bastard that made all the mess. Then I can find it, kill it, and be far enough from here by sunset that you can forget you ever met me. Does that sound like a good plan to you?”
“I - I’ve never seen anything like it. Maybe in a horror movie. But that stuff ain’t real. Is it?” Officer Silva looked up at me with big eyes, but I didn’t have the heart to lie to her.
“Officer, just about every monster story you’ve ever heard of is real. And for a lot of people, the only thing between the big bad and them, is me. Welcome to my world, I’m sorry you had to find out about it. Now I’m going to go do my job.” I nodded to her, and she stayed sitting there in the grass while I went into the house.
The smell of blood isn’t usually a big deal, but when there’s enough blood spilled in a small enough space, the acrid scent just gets into everything. It overpowers every other scent in the room, getting into the nooks and crannies of your sense of smell like a bad song gets stuck in your head. Well, there had been enough blood shed in that doublewide to make the air take on a pinkish tinge. The carpet squelched when I stepped into the living room, and I looked down to see nothing but red liquid pooling up around my boots. There was blood
everywhere, making puddles in the carpet and splashed on every wall. There were even long swaths of blood painted across the ceiling. It looked like a slaughterhouse, only not as sanitary.
The living room was dominated by four poker tables, two of them overturned to make rough shields. It didn’t look like they’d helped. I counted enough arms to make about eight people, but I only saw four heads. One bald guy, one fortyish looking guy with red hair turning to gray, one dude with perfect hair even after decapitation, and one dark-haired dude with expensive sunglasses on. I helped myself to the Gucci shades, figuring he didn’t need ‘em anymore. One guy looked like he’d put up a helluva fight before finally bleeding out. He was bald, looked to be in his early forties, and had the compact build of somebody who lifts a lot of weight several times a week. His Pokerstars.com t-shirt was stretched tight across his biceps, and his knuckles were bloody, so I figured he’d gotten a couple of shots in before the leprechaun gutted him.
“I hope you gave almost as good as you got, pal.” I reached down and closed his eyes.
“Well, ain’t that sweet o’ ya?” a voice said from behind me in a thick Irish brogue. I stood up and turned around slowly, every muscle coiled like a spring, ready to dive somewhere out of the way of claws, fangs, or whatever leprechauns used to kill people.
What I saw rocked me back on the heels of my size sixteen boots. It was a leprechaun all right, a little short dude with red hair and a green suit sitting cross-legged in the middle of one of the poker tables. He was cleaning his fingernails with a wicked curved knife, and as he grinned at me, I saw a glint of gold tooth.
“Why’d you kill these men?” I didn’t really care. I just needed time to think about how to draw Bertha before the little bugger opened my windpipe.
“They stole me gold, of course. They stole me gold, and I was bound to get it back. I got it all back.” I recognized that fevered look in his eyes, but from where?
Grits, Guns & Glory - Bubba the Monster Hunter Season 2 Page 7
