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

by John G. Hartness

  “Bubba, he’s more ordinary than eggs for breakfast,” Skeeter said. “There is absolutely nothing supernatural about Sanford Blinn.”

  “All right, then I reckon there ain’t nothin’ for me to do but fill this hole back in and let the poor man get some rest. I’m out.” I clicked off the comm again and climbed out of the hole.

  I had only got about four shovelfuls of dirt thrown back into the hole when a pair of headlights came over the small hill between me and the front gate of the cemetery. I turned to run but saw a pair of flashlights approaching on foot from where I’d left my truck. Shit, I thought.

  “Freeze!” hollered the cop behind one of the flashlights. I turned toward the voice and put both my hands up, thumbing the comm back on as I did.

  “We got a problem, Skeeter,” I said under my breath as the cops approached. The tiny headlights belonged to a golf cart that carried a withered old dude and a fat man in a sheriff’s department uniform. I reckoned the skinny old fart in brown everything and work boots was the caretaker ‘cause he stood back as the fat deputy waddled toward me, one hand on his gun belt and the other twirling his nightstick. I figured it would take me about three seconds to break that nightstick over his head, disarm him and shoot the other two behind me, but my New Year’s resolution had been to beat up fewer police officers, so I just kept my hands up and my mouth shut for once.

  “What in the hell are you doing, son?” the fat deputy asked as he reached me. He stood about five foot eight and probably weighed about the same as I did, so he was almost five-eight in every direction. I felt like I was talking to a khaki basketball with a bad rug and too much Just for Men in his mustache.

  “I’m filling in a grave, Deputy. I came along to pay my respects to my uncle Sanford and saw three men digging in his grave. They ran off before I could get to ‘em, but I couldn’t let Uncle Sandy be defiled like that.” I heard Skeeter groan through the comm, but I thought I’d done pretty well for myself, at least as far as thinking on the fly.

  “Boy, I’m not even gonna bother asking you again. I’m just gonna let you finish filling this grave back in, then I’m gonna cuff your ass and take you in for obstruction of justice. And that’s for lying to me. If I find out you had anything to do with robbing these graves, I’ll probably just make up some shit to make sure you go away for a long time.”

  “What are you saying, Deputy? Are you calling me a liar?” I bowed up a little at the round man, but he just stood there.

  “First off, it’s Sheriff, not Deputy. And second, Sanford Blinn was no more your uncle than I’m Will Smith. I think I might have known if the only Samoan man in the Tri-Cities had a lily-white nephew, wouldn’t I?”

  I didn’t say anything, just filled in the rest of the grave and hoped Skeeter had a plan to get me out of this pile of shit.

  *****

  I’ll give the constabulary of Washington County, Tennessee, credit for one thing — they keep a clean jail with cloth pillowcases. I’ve been in my fair share of Southern drunk tanks, and I’ll tell you that rubber mattresses are about the best that I’ve come to hope for. But the deputies that ushered me into the cell must have thought I was nuts when I started telling them how nice the accommodations were. I didn’t bother stretching out on the cot. I knew either my head or my ankles would hang over the end, so I was sitting up leaning against the far wall when a mountain of humanity filled the door to my cell.

  The giant wearing a badge actually had to stoop down to make it through the cell door, and he had to kinda go sideways to get in, his shoulders were so wide. He stomped across the room and sat on the cot against the opposite wall. I watched him warily, wondering what the hell was in the water at his mama’s house, or if he was just half-ogre.

  When he spoke, it wasn’t the growl I expected. His voice was deep, yeah, but it was more a Paul Robeson kinda thing, all silky smooth and rich. “I’m Sheriff McGraw. Who are you and what were you doing in that cemetery?”

  “I reckon you ain’t gonna believe that Uncle Sanford story either?” I asked.

  “Not any more than I’d think you were my long-lost twin brother.” He held out a giant hand, then rubbed the dark brown skin on the back of it. “Nope, still don’t rub off. Now, since I know from your wallet that you’re Robert Brabham from Dalton, Georgia, we’re left with the why of you being in the United Methodist Church Cemetery with a shovel at two in the morning.”

  I chuckled and said, “Would you believe I was filling the grave back in?”

  “I might do that, but that begs the question of who started emptying it in the first place and where they were when you were filling the hole back in. Not to mention the bigger question — why was anybody digging up the assistant high school football coach in the first place?”

  “I wish I could help you, Sheriff. I really do. But you see —” I snapped my jaw shut as I heard a commotion coming from the office part of the jail. “I think you’re wanted up front, Sheriff.”

  “What are you talking about, son? I promise you, I am not in the mood for any foolishness. I’ve got —”

  “Six grave robberies in the past month and one brand-new attempt tonight, no leads, and no real idea what the hell is going on in your sleepy little mountain town, if I can stretch the truth and call it that.” I stood up and motioned toward the door. “There’s a nice young lady out there with a shiny badge. She’s my ride. We’re from the government. We’re here to help.”

  About the time the sheriff decided he was tired of my smart mouth and stood up to administer a little mountain justice, the deputy that found me in the graveyard ran back into the jail. “Sheriff!” He was almost quivering he was so excited. Amy must have busted out the black helicopters again.

  Deputy Dawg went on. “There’s a smokin’ hot blonde out here from some federal agency I ain’t never heard of before. She landed a black helicopter right on the courthouse lawn! I didn’t even know we had those.”

  “We don’t, Beaufort. The government does.” Sheriff McGraw opened the cell door and motioned for me. “I suppose I could save time by taking you out with me?”

  “It sure would speed things up,” I agreed. “Deputy, why don’t you ask my smokin’ hot girlfriend and federal agent if she’ll meet us in your interrogation room? Sheriff?” I extended an arm for him to take the lead. Might as well, I didn’t know where the damn interrogation room was.

  The deputy stared at me, then looked at the sheriff with a question on his face. The sheriff nodded, and the little deputy almost broke into a run.

  “Hey, Deputy?” I called after him.

  He stopped at the door and looked back at me. “Yes, sir?”

  “Bring my guns and gear with you, please. And maybe a couple of beers. I think we’re gonna be in there a little while.” I followed the sheriff down a short hallway and into a typical interrogation room. The “perp chair” was a basic straight chair with one leg a little shorter than the other three. I didn’t sit. There was no way that little thing would hold my big ass. McGraw sat in the “cop chair,” which was super-sized to fit him, and I leaned against a wall. It only took a couple minutes for the deputy to materialize with Agent Amy and a duffel bag containing all my gear. I plopped the bag on the table and started strapping guns and knives into their proper places. Amy looked at the wobbly chair, then looked back at the deputy. She never said a word, just exuded disapproval all over the poor boy until he ran out again and came back with two solid chairs.

  Amy sat down across from the sheriff and motioned me into the other chair. I sat, like a good boy. This was her party, and I was willing to dance to just about any tune that got me out of jail and back on the case of the grave robbers.

  Amy leaned forward and unplugged the tape recorder in the center of the table. “We won’t be needing this. Now, I’m sure you have some questions, and I assure you they all will be answered, but first I want to be clear that we are not here to step on your toes. We’re not here to steal an arrest or make headlines. As a ma
tter of fact, the fewer people that know we were ever here, the better.”

  “Especially if any of them are Tennessee fans from the early 2000s. Some of those old boys hold a grudge,” I interjected. Amy shot me a “shut up” look, so I zipped my lips and leaned back in my chair.

  “Well, I reckon my first question is who the hell are you people and what was this fella doing messing around in the cemetery in the middle of the night?” Sheriff McGraw asked.

  “I am Special Agent Amy Hall, and I work for a very select branch of the government that deals with out-of-the-ordinary law enforcement issues. Your grave robbing popped up on our radar, and Mr. Brabham came to investigate.”

  “So you’re Scully and he’s like an oversized Mulder,” The sheriff mused.

  “If it helps to think of us that way, yes,” Amy replied.

  “I can live with that. So what are y’all here chasing?”

  “That’s what we don’t know,” Amy said. “So far, we have no evidence that there is anything supernatural about the grave robberies.”

  “Except that there’s been a bunch of them and they just started in the past month,” McGraw chimed in.

  “What else has happened in the last month? Has there been a rash of suspicious deaths in the area? Anybody move into an old house that’s supposed to be haunted? Anyone start a construction project on a Native American burial ground?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” McGraw replied. “As a matter of fact, it’s been even more boring than usual. We’ve hardly had anybody die at all. I mean, there was the old Skinner lady who had a stroke and died in her living room a couple weeks ago, and then there was Junior Peabody who fell into the chipper down at the pulpwood mill, but other than that I don’t think we’ve had a death in the community in six weeks.”

  I looked at Amy, who shrugged. “I can’t think of anything significant about that, Sheriff, but it’s something to keep in mind. Is there anything you can tell me about the victims of the grave robberies? Other than living here, did they have anything in common?”

  McGraw stood up and stepped to the door. He opened it, and the weedy little deputy jumped about twelve feet into the air. I reckon he knew he’d been busted ‘cause he scurried off and came back in about eight seconds with a stack of manila file folders. McGraw came back into the room and dropped them on the table.

  “Here’s the case files. They’re pretty thin ‘cause we ain’t got shit. Pardon my language.” He blushed a little and nodded at Amy.

  “I work with this assclown, Sheriff. I don’t think you could possibly offend me.” Amy replied, pointing in my direction.

  “Hey! You’re also dating this assclown, so what does that say about you?” I grabbed a couple of the file folders and started flipping through them.

  “It says I had a moment of weakness, Bubba,” Amy said, taking a couple of files for herself. “Do you have these digitized?” she asked McGraw.

  “No, just hard copies. We ain’t exactly Silicon Valley out here, Agent Hall.”

  “That’s fine. Once we’ve given these a look-see, I’ll have you fax everything to our tech expert. He can run things through some computer simulations and do some deep background checks to make sure there aren’t any connections we’ve missed.” She fell silent as we poured through the files.

  We spent the better part of two hours reading files and passing them back and forth. McGraw was right — they didn’t have shit. In each case, the grave had been dug up, the lid to the vault removed, and the coffin opened. The bodies were all removed with no trace left behind, and the empty caskets and burial vaults were left standing empty. The first one had been found by a jogger on her morning run and the rest by caretakers. They were buried in seven different cemeteries, counting the digging I’d interrupted the night before, and all of the bodies were recently buried, within the last few months.

  “What wants to eat dead people?” I asked, shoving a folder away from me. A couple pieces of paper flapped to the ground, and Amy picked them up.

  “Well, let’s see,” she said. “There are fewer than you’d think. Zombies, obviously, will eat dead flesh, but they can’t handle tools. Aswang are cannibalistic, but they’re only native to the Philippines. Harpies have been known to snack on human flesh, but that’s mostly as a punitive measure, not a consistent source of nourishment. Various types of lycanthropes will eat human flesh, but I’ve never heard of one going for anything months old, and I’ve never heard of a werewolf eating anything it didn’t kill.”

  “So what does that leave us? Ghouls? Wendigo? Scylla?” I asked.

  “Scylla’s still under surveillance in Athens,” Amy replied. “She’s a travel agent now. I wouldn’t think it was a wendigo; they tend to be solitary and very destructive. You saw three men or creatures working together, and they ran from you. A wendigo would have attacked and probably killed you.”

  “So ghouls? They’re usually good for grave robbing,” I asked.

  “It’s either ghouls or a fledgling vamp that can’t control himself.”

  “Vamps got no use for dead folks. My money’s on ghouls,” I said.

  “Now we just have to find them,” Amy said, closing the file in her hands.

  “Now wait a minute, y’all. Are you telling me you really believe in all this shit?” Sheriff McGraw stood up and started gathering his files, looking at Amy and me like we’d grown two heads all of a sudden.

  “It didn’t seem so farfetched when you were dropping X-Files references earlier, Sheriff. What’s changed?” Amy asked.

  “That was before you said with a straight face that there was a pack of ghouls robbing graves in East Tennessee. Do you know how ridiculous that sounds?”

  “About like a werewolf attack in North Georgia? Or a pack of vampires masquerading as a ballet troupe in Charlotte? Or a chupacabra attack in Florida?” I said, standing up. “Well, we’ve had all those, Sheriff, and a lot more besides. So do you want to help us figure out who the ghouls are in your town, or do you just want to think we’re crazy?”

  The big man stopped fiddling around with the files and stood still for a moment, head down, hands on the table. I could almost hear the thoughts running through his head because I’d had them myself once in a while when I stood back and tried to look at my life objectively. It’s a hard thing, having your worldview forcibly shifted in a matter of minutes, and the sheriff struck me as a man who wasn’t accustomed to anything contradicting his opinions. Finally, he let out a long breath, squared his shoulders, and looked up at Amy and me.

  “Let’s catch these bastards. This would be a real good time for y’all to be wrong and it turn out to be a couple of stupid high school kids playing Frankenstein in the back yard,” he said, pulling all the files into a stack.

  “I wish I thought that would happen, Sheriff,” Amy said.

  “Well, where do we start?” McGraw asked.

  “I’d reckon we look at the graves,” I said. “If there are clues, that’s where they’ll be.”

  “We’ve gone over the graves with a crime scene team out of Johnson City, Bubba. There was nothing there,” McGraw said.

  “Nothing you were looking for,” Amy said. We might have some different criteria.”

  “I reckon that could be so,” McGraw replied. “Where do you want to start? With the newest grave or the newest robbery?”

  “They ain’t the same thing?” I asked.

  “No, they go in the opposite direction, actually. The most recently deceased was the first victim of the grave robbing, and the grave you were in last night was the oldest of the lot.”

  “Hmmm… that could be significant. Do you have a whiteboard?” Amy asked.

  “Out in the bullpen. Let’s go out there. I could use some coffee, too. You need anything?” McGraw asked, opening the door.

  “Is it typical police station coffee?” I asked. I’ve had more than my fair share of cop coffee in my life, which might say something about the number of times I’ve woken up in a jail cell with
a hangover the size of Stone Mountain, but that’s neither here nor there.

  “Hell no,” McGraw said. “We can’t make coffee for shit. I get a deputy lives over in Jonesborough to bring in some from Dunkin Donuts every morning. There oughta be a couple cups left.”

  My estimation of this backwoods cop went up several notches. He was a smart hillbilly, and the coffee was good. We settled in around the whiteboard with the case files on an empty desk. Amy took up a post in front of the board, so I figured she was gonna do all the scribblin’. Good thing, too. My handwriting sucks.

  I put my comm back in my ear and clicked it on. “Morning, Skeeter.”

  “How was your night in jail?” Skeeter asked.

  “Uneventful, so that was good. I didn’t have to break nobody or nothin’. I can’t complain. They even got good coffee here.”

  “Cops that can make good coffee? Remind me to get arrested in East Tennessee next time.”

  “They ship the coffee in, Skeet, and you ain’t never been arrested anywhere.”

  “Well, that’s true enough. Now, what are we working with?”

  McGraw gave me a sideways look as I talked to the air, and I said, “Sheriff, I’ve got my tech expert Skeeter on the line. He’ll research stuff for us as we go along. So what have we got so far?”

  Amy took up a dry erase marker. “We’ve got nine deaths in the county in the last six months and seven disturbed graves. What was different about the other two?”

  “Well, if that old boy fell in a chipper, there wasn’t enough of him left to bury, so there wasn’t nothing in his box for a ghoul to eat. And you said the other one was an old lady who had a stroke?” I looked at McGraw.

  “Yeah, she . . . she had cats,” he said, turning a little green.

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “She lived alone. And she had cats,” McGraw said again. z

  There was still something I was missing. “I still don’t get it.”

  “She lived alone. She had a stroke. It was a while before anybody noticed she was missing. And she had cats.”