Grits, Guns & Glory - Bubba the Monster Hunter Season 2

by John G. Hartness

  I thanked the confused lady, tossed another five on the counter for the waitress, and followed Amy out the door. I pressed TALK on my Bluetooth. “Skeeter, you there?”

  “Yeah, Bubba. I just talked to you two minutes ago. What’s up?”

  “Jason was in the restaurant.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  “No, we didn’t even see him.”

  “How did you miss him? He’s a six foot tall psychotic werewolf.”

  “I don’t know. That’s what I need you to figure out. I need you to get into the computer system at the restaurant and scan their security footage, then tell me if Jason was really in there or not.”

  There was a long pause on the line. “Bubba, let me get this straight. You want me to assume that a Shoney’s on the side of I-20 in Shreveport, Louisiana not only has security camera, but has a networked security camera system that I can hack into and get an image of your psycho brother off the hard drive?”

  “I reckon that’s what I mean. I just want you to do some of your computer bullshit and get me a picture of who paid my tab at the breakfast bar so I know if Jason can disguise himself from me or not.”

  “All right, then. I’ll get right on it. You want me to part the Red Sea when I’m done?”

  I hate it when he gets all pissy and sarcastic. I knew it wouldn’t be as hard as all that because I’d seen the cameras all over the restaurant while we were there, and the monitor and hard drive for the security system were sitting right behind the counter where the manager could watch the busboys scarfing tips and the waitresses taking extra smoke breaks and re-serving used desserts. But since he was being all pissy, I wasn’t going to tell Skeeter about all that. Just let him figure it out on his own. So I decided the best way to fight his sarcasm was with feigned ignorance. “Nope, the Red Sea’s fine, as far as I can tell. But if it needs parting, Skeeter, I’m sure you’re the dude to part it.”

  He didn’t even say goodbye, just grumbled something I couldn’t understand into my headset and clicked off. I grinned at Amy, said, “Skeeter’s on it,” and we headed to the bank.

  *****

  People naturally get a little nervous when I walk into a bank. I’m six-five, weigh about three-fifty, and look like the “mean guy” off a Sons of Anarchy rerun. So it didn’t surprise me when the guard immediately wandered over to see what was going on when Amy and I walked into the First National Bank a little bit after ten in the morning and asked to speak to the manager. It did surprise me when he went ahead and drew his sidearm.

  “Calm down, there, Junior. I ain’t gonna hurt nobody. I don’t think.” I glared at him and he holstered his weapon. Of course, maybe Amy flashing her badge at him helped, too. We waited for about ten minutes before the fat little bank manager came out of his office and offered me his sweaty hand. I shook the dead-fish hand and let Amy do the talking.

  “Mr. Drum, we need to look at the footage from the robbery last week,” Amy said.

  “Well, the FBI took all that.”

  “They left you a copy on your hard drives. That will be fine.”

  Mr. Drum looked a little disappointed that she knew about that. Maybe he was planning to leak it to TMZ for a pile of money. Joke was on him, everybody quit paying for Elvis sightings years ago.

  We walked back into the office, and I sat down in the guest chair. Amy didn’t bother; she just went around behind Drum’s desk and sat down. She clicked a few keys on his computer, then slid the keyboard to the side where Drum stood looking flustered. “Password, please,” she said.

  Drum leaned over and typed a few characters, then hit “Enter.”

  He straightened up and Amy gave him a big smile. “Thank you, Mr. Drum. That will be all for now. I’m sure you have plenty of work to do. We’ll let you know when we leave.”

  The little fat man looked a little affronted and opened his mouth to say something. I cleared my throat, and he looked over to where I was overflowing his side chair. He thought better about protesting and left us to it. Amy pressed some more keys, and I flipped through a brochure on mortgage rates. I didn’t know anything about mortgages—my house and property had been in my family for hundreds of years—so I was lucky in that regard.

  “That’s interesting,” she said after a few minutes. I started awake, having nodded off after perusing the pamphlets on Drum’s desk.

  “What you got?” I got up and moved around behind the desk. I took the chair with me, which made for a tight fit, but with a little shoving, I made it work.

  “This guy is on the video three times in the week leading up to the robbery. He had one meeting with a loan officer, then two meetings with Mr. Drum. Take a look at the second one.”

  The video didn’t have any sound, but it was pretty easy to see what was going on. The guy in the video was an average working-class-looking dude, like the guy you’d expect to see working in a machine shop or replacing a transmission. Medium size, with brown hair to his collar and a couple days’ worth of stubble. He had permanent hat hair and wore the same pair of khakis in all three meetings, probably the only pair he owned. Same tie, too, but different dress shirts. In other words, he was my people. His meeting with the loan officer took about half an hour by the time stamp on the video, but we watched it in fast forward.

  “Looks like he comes in to get a loan and doesn’t get the answer he wants,” I said.

  “Yeah, I’ve seen that look a lot,” Amy replied.

  I cocked an eyebrow at her. “My dad wasn’t the best with money. I sat out in the bank lobby and watched him plead with loan officers a lot. It usually looked pretty much like this.” She gestured at the video where the guy was walking out of the loan officer’s glass cubicle with his head down.

  The next day was a repeat of the process, except this time he met with Drum. That meeting only took about five minutes and mostly consisted of Drum looking at papers and shaking his head. I couldn’t tell if he was faking sadness or really gave a shit, but given the dead-fish handshake, I knew what my money was on.

  “So he came back the next day and got the same answer,” I said.

  “Looks that way. But now we have a real lead.”

  “Yeah, I figure Drum will remember this guy.”

  “Especially after this.” Amy rolled the video forward to just two days before the robbery. Same guy, same khakis, same necktie. Same Drum, but this time the result was a little different. After two minutes of Drum sitting there shaking his head, our guy got up and slammed his fists down onto the desk, then started yelling and tossing shit around. He didn’t pitch the computer monitor, but he cleared Drum’s desk otherwise. Security got there in a few seconds and hauled the guy out. I watched on the monitor as he was bodily taken out of the bank and dumped on the sidewalk outside. The image that stayed with me was his face, the tears pouring down his cheeks as he thrashed and screamed.

  I pushed the “Page All” button on the phone and said, “Send Mr. Drum to his office, please.”

  Drum appeared at the door to his office and said, “You called for me, agents?”

  “I’m the agent,” Amy replied. “Mr. Marbury is merely assisting in my investigation. What can you tell us about this man?” She pointed to the image frozen on the screen. It was a shot of the man’s face as he was dragged from the building.

  Drum entered the room like a small man in a big job, all self-important swagger and high opinions of himself. He stepped around his desk and sat as Amy vacated his chair. “Mr. McCalla? He’s been a customer of the bank for years but recently fell on some hard times. His farm hasn’t produced like it did in years past, and he is several months in arrears on his note.” He gave Amy one of those sideways smiles, like he wanted to tell her everything but his hands were tied, the kind of look that said he didn’t really want to tell us shit and would use every little rule to keep from being helpful.

  “This looks like he came in looking to borrow more,” I said.

  “I can’t really discuss personal banking matte
rs—” His voice cut off as I stood. I walked over to his office door and closed it, then turned the knob to lock it.

  I turned back to face the sweaty little turd. Something about him irritated me the second I met him, and every word that came out of his mouth cemented my low opinion of him. “Look, you officious little prick. If McCalla is our dude, then he has been robbing about a bank a day since he left here, and if we are going to have any chance of catching his ass, we need to do it in the next forty-eight hours, before he either gets enough money to buy an island, or just decides to fade away into the ether. So far he hasn’t hurt anybody, but robbing banks is serious business, and if somebody gets killed because you’re dicking us around, I will take it very personally.”

  “I don’t think you’d enjoy that, Mr. Drum,” Amy said.

  “I might enjoy it a whole lot, though,” I replied. “So what’s the deal, Drum? Why did McCalla want the money? What was he so upset about that he trashed your office and might have started robbing banks all along I-20?”

  Drum looked paler than ever as I leaned over his desk at him. “Talk,” I said through gritted teeth.

  “It’s his son.”

  “Shit,” I said. “I hate it when there are kids. What about his son?”

  “His son has a rare form of leukemia, and the treatments are very expensive. His son was scheduled to start a new experimental treatment in Atlanta this week, but his insurance refused to cover it. His son is very ill and is probably going to die. Even with the treatment, they were only hoping to prolong his life for five to seven years.”

  “Shit,” I said again. “How old is the kid now?”

  “Seven.” Drum looked down at his desk, finding something very interesting in the surface of the wood. I didn’t blame him. I wouldn’t have wanted to look me in the eye, either.

  “So you’re telling me that this man came to you with a story about a seven-year-old boy, who would likely die without a stem cell transplant, and even though this man has been a customer of this bank for years, and even though he had collateral to back up the loan in the form of his house and farm, you refused to lend him the money. Is that what you’re telling me?”

  Drum sputtered for a few seconds before he took deep breath, stood up, and looked me in the eye. “Yes, that’s what I’m telling you. I’ll say it to you just like I said it to Mr. McCalla. I wish I could help, but I can’t. There are rules that must be followed and after all of the economic mess we’re finally dragging ourselves out of, those rules are more ironclad than ever. I cannot lend money to a man who already owes more than he can possibly ever earn, and I cannot use a farm as security against a loan for more money than the farm will ever sell for. If that makes me the villain, so be it.”

  “I don’t know that it makes you a villain, Mr. Drum,” Amy said. “I understand that you were just doing your job. But can you tell me anything about Mr. McCalla’s state of mind when he left your office the last time?”

  “He was distraught. And I felt horrible for him, I still do. Nobody wants to see a child suffer. But I am not the final authority. Even if I tried to write a loan to Mr. McCalla, it wouldn’t make it through our underwriting department. My hands were tied.”

  “What about insurance?” I asked.

  “Apparently they were denying the procedure because it is experimental. Mr. McCalla had the necessary paperwork completed by his doctor, but the insurance company refused to pay for it. He needed somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty thousand dollars or the hospital would not perform the operation.”

  “Between banks, insurance companies, and hospitals, we’re getting all my favorite things wrapped up in one case,” I grumbled.

  “Yeah, can we go back to being chased by werewolves and getting in fistfights with Bigfoot?” Skeeter said in my ear.

  “I forgot you were there,” I whispered.

  “I wasn’t, but you were gone so long there had to be something interesting going on, so I switched on the speaker from here.”

  “You can do that?”

  “Yeah, fool. You think I’m going to depend on your technologically illiterate ass to keep me wired into the world? Hell, no.” Skeeter laughed, then went on. “But I been all up in this mofo’s computer since you started talking to him. He ain’t lyin’. McCalla is six months behind on his mortgage, got medical bills piled up to his nut sack, and hasn’t worked in almost a year on account of taking care of his sick kid.”

  “That’s fucked,” I said under my breath.

  “You ain’t just whistling’ Dixie, sugartits. And please don’t whistle, you’re tone deaf. Here’s something interesting, though.”

  “What is it Skeeter?”

  Amy’s head whipped around to me.

  “Looks like McCalla’s kid Andrew was checked into Grady Memorial this morning, and he’s scheduled to have a stem cell transplant at four o’clock.” I repeated this to Amy, who nodded and started heading for the door.

  “What does that mean?” Drum asked. “Did his insurance company give in?”

  “I think it means he found a private carrier to deal with his medical bills,” I said. “Sorry for being up your ass, Drum. It just sucks.”

  “It does, Mr. Marbury. It sucks a lot. There are people I want to help, and the rules won’t let me. And there are people that don’t need any help at all, and those are the people with big-ass lawyers that manipulate every loophole and screw the little guy. I’m just glad Andy is going to get his treatment.”

  I shook his hand. It was still damp, but there was a little more firmness to it this time. “I’m glad of that, too, Mr. Drum. Now I reckon we’re gonna go make sure nobody dies to make that little boy better.”

  We got into the truck, and I pushed the button to send Skeeter’s face to the screen in the dash and his voice through the speaker system. If you ever want the definition of irritating, run the voice of an African-American homosexual tech nerd from North Georgia through car speakers. It sounds kind like somebody’s torturing a cat, except with an occasional “bless his heart” thrown in there. I’ve never known a cat that would bless anyone’s heart.

  “Plot me the best route to Grady, Skeeter,” I said as Amy clicked her seatbelt. I looked over and gave a long look at the way the seatbelt cut in between her boobs and made them look bigger. I offered up a silent thanks to the god of shoulder restraints before Amy caught me looking and slapped my shoulder.

  “Pay attention, we’ve got a monster to catch.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I mumbled.

  “What’s wrong?” Amy asked. Skeeter looked up from whatever he was doing and stared out from the screen at me.

  “Is this dude really worth catching? I mean, yeah, he robbed some banks. Let’s face it, it’s not like he hurt anybody. Banks are all full of assholes, and they’re insured by the federal government, which is full of even more assholes.”

  “Watch it, pal,” Amy said, but there was no heat in her voice.

  “Present company excluded, or whatever I’m supposed to say so you don’t think I’m calling you an asshole. But you know I’m right. This dude just wanted to get his kid an operation, and he couldn’t pay for it. So he did what any father would do—he started kicking ass until he got his kid taken care of. I don’t want to hunt this dude down, I kinda want to give him a medal,” I said. I still hadn’t put the truck in gear. I still wasn’t sure if I was going to.

  “If we catch him and put him away, he’ll go to jail. If some redneck cop catches him, he’s liable to get shot. And then where would his kid be?” Skeeter’s image said.

  “Even if we apprehend him, he may not spend any time in prison. DEMON may decide that he has value as an operative and offer him a field position. So we might be doing him a favor,” Amy said.

  “Yeah, we’re from the government, we’re here to help,” I muttered.

  “For once, that might be true. But how will we find him? He can look like anyone?” Amy asked.

  “He’ll be the one that won’t leave tha
t little boy’s side for anything,” I said. “Skeeter, how long to Grady?”

  “Nine hours with no stops.”

  “So ten and half accounting for Amy’s bladder,” I said, putting the truck in gear and pulling out of the parking lot. “That means McCalla’s boy ought be long since done with surgery and recovery before we show up to put his daddy away.”

  “That’s good, right?” Skeeter asked.

  “Not most days. Once the kid is safe, McCalla is free to use his powers as hard and fast as he wants to protect him, protect himself, or just get out of Dodge. But I think no matter what, he’s gonna feel a lot better about putting up a fight than he did this morning. And that ain’t good for nobody.”

  *****

  It was closer to eleven hours with a couple of pit stops, one refueling stop, and a decent lunch, so it was almost nine at night when we rolled into downtown Atlanta. Which is about the end of rush hour in that godforsaken town, so traffic was only moderately miserable. Parking my F-250 was worse, but I finally just took up three spots in the hospital parking garage and gave up. A man can only circle a friggin’ parking deck so many times before he starts to get dizzy.

  I opened the back door of the truck and flipped up the bench seat. I opened the top drawer and put Bertha into her slot in the foam, then stripped off my shoulder holster and laid it in the top of the weapons chest.

  “What are you doing?” Amy asked from the other side of the truck. She had her back door open and the passenger side weapons compartment open, but she was adding magazines to her shoulder holster, not taking it off.

  “This dude isn’t a monster. He’s a dad scared he’s gonna lose his kid. I ain’t gonna shoot him.” I didn’t go in empty, though. I popped open the bottom drawer and pulled out an asp baton, a pair of custom silver-plated knuckle-dusters, and a small can of pepper spray. I figured that was all the less-lethal stuff I needed, plus it would be a little much to walk through the halls of a hospital toting a Mossberg 500, even if it was loaded with beanbag rounds.