And Crawling Things Lurk

Don stopped his patrol car at the curb in front of Gramma’s house and sat with his foot on the brake. When Jackie didn’t move, he slipped the transmission into park and took his foot off the brake. Still Jackie made no move to open the door. It occurred to Don that his passenger might not be aware that he could actually open the door. In every other instance when he had ridden in a patrol car, he had been a prisoner in the back seat, often handcuffed. And, of course, the back doors had no handles on the inside.

“Go ahead, Jackie. You’re free to go.”

Jackie sat there and looked out the windshield for a moment, then he turned and looked at Don. “Sarge was a good person. Just like Josie. They shouldn’t have died.”

Don wasn’t sure if Jackie was still on a blame kick, but he didn’t feel like getting into it with him. “You’re right, man. They were both good folks. Tell Gramma I said hi.”

“We gotta find it and stop it.”

“We don’t know what – I mean who it is. You said it’s an old woman, but she has to have help. An old woman couldn’t have handled either Josie or Sarge, and certainly not Be-Be. Even if they were unconscious, just the weight would be too much for an old woman like that.”

“I didn’t say it was an old woman. I said it looked like an old woman. I don’t think it’s even a person. I don’t know what it is.”

“Oh, come on, Jackie, be reasonable. You’ve been sober for days now, so you’ve got no excuse for talking about what comes crawling out of your bottle.”

“It didn’t crawl out of no bottle. I don’t know where it came from, but it’s here, and you gotta stop it. If you ain’t gonna look for it, I’ll do it myself. I’m gonna find it, and I’m gonna kill it.”

“Whoa, now. Don’t you go talking about killing anyone or you’ll be right back up there in county jail. And I won’t be coming up there again to drive you home. You leave the police work to me, okay? I didn’t say I wouldn’t look, but I’m not going to go looking for some big-toothed monster. There’s a real killer or killers in Cedar City, and they are who I’m going to find. Don’t go poking around and messing things up.”

Jackie looked into Don’s eyes, and for that moment Don had the feeling he was being measured, judged. Without another word, Jackie opened the door and got out. He was still standing with one hand on the picket fence gate and watching the patrol car as Don drove away.

Even in the pleasant company on Laura’s patio some hours later, Don kept flashing back to the grizzly find in the alley the day before followed by Jackie’s words from that afternoon, insisting that it was some thing rather than a person that he should be looking for. With Be-Be and Josie added in, he couldn’t get away from how well those pieces of the bizarre puzzle fit together when he didn’t hold them apart.

Laura picked up his hand and wrapped it around a stem glass half filled with red wine. “Here, try this. It’s that new petit syrah I told you about. It’s really luscious. And instead of plain old cheeseburgers, how do blue-cheese burgers sound? Piled high with wine-caramelized onions? It’s something I found in a magazine.”

He tipped the glass to his lips and sipped. The velvety liquid swirled around his tongue while he imagined blueberries, currents, coffee and at least one other flavor he couldn’t identify…maybe hickory smoke. Blended, they did create an elixir that the word ‘luscious’ described very well.

“Should go well,” he said with a nod.

He had only really got into wine after he and Laura found each other a little over a year ago, and the two made pleasant additions to a life that had seemed to have bottomed out. The thing he almost had with Michelle never really got going; they just couldn’t seem to get on the same track in their goals and pursuit of life. He could see Michelle moving well in the wild and wooly world of politics, a place he had no desire to venture into, even in a peripheral role. Jolene, his ex-wife, had been gone with their son for eight years by the time he and Laura meshed. At times like this, when he was feeling low and ineffective, he found himself wondering how he had ever found an attraction for someone like Jolene, a person who had such a dislike for the career field and most of the people in it that was so important to him. He regretted never having a prospect of seeing the boy again, though. But he had agreed with her at the time that it would be less disruptive for the little guy if he were allowed to believe his father was forever gone, whether he believed him dead or whatever. God, he’d be a high school freshman when school started again in the fall.

After sipping her own glass, Laura asked, “How’s Carolyn doing?”

He blinked a couple of times to bring himself back to the present. He looked into Laura’s eyes and saw concern, but he wasn’t sure if it was for Carolyn or for him since he had been so moody from the time he walked into her house an hour earlier. He worked a smile into his eyes. “Besides the bump on her head, she cracked a rib and broke her wrist. She’ll be okay, though. Her sister’s coming up from San Rafael to help out in the shop.”

“That must have been horrible.”

He was pretty sure she didn’t mean her sister coming to help. “Yeah, it was quite a shock, I guess. She said she didn’t recognize him, or didn’t take the time to, when she looked in the dumpster, and only realized who it was afterwards because of the chair.”

“Who in the world would attack Sarge?”

“Appears to have been the same one that got Josie...and Be-Be, too.”

“But, that’s insane. Who would do such a thing? And why?”

Don got up at her beckon and sat at the table. She scooped up the burger patties and slid them onto prepared buns already on plates. Setting Don’s in front of him, she took a seat across the table from him. She spooned a heap of limp, browned, blackened, and glistening onion rings onto his plate and a similar one on hers. They both concentrated in getting just the right amount of onions atop the runny cheese before topping the whole thing with the other bun halves.

As he picked up his burger for the first bite, he looked at it just long enough to say, “Who or what. But the first question we need to answer, I think, is how. With that, the rest may follow.”

“What do you mean, ‘who or what?’ How could it be a what?”

He washed down his first bite with a bit of wine, nodded, held up his glass to her and said, “Hmm, good. I’m going to have to buy you some more magazines. Makes the wine taste sorta smoky, doesn’t it?”

“That’s one of the things it said in the magazine. What did you mean, ‘who or what?’ What kind of what?”

He toyed with another bite of his burger then took great care to savor the mixture of salty cheese-flavored burger with the wine.

“You think some kind of animal got them?”

He still played with his wine glass, swirling it and watching the legs on the inside of it as the dark liquid showed its assets.

“Don? What’d you mean?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Just something Jackie said to me that I can’t put away.”

She reached across the table and stroked his hand where it rested beside his plate. “What did he say?”

Don shrugged and waved his hand, as though to dismiss the whole topic of conversation. He picked up the wine bottle and topped off both of their glasses.

“What did he say?”

He took a sip from the full glass then set it back on the table. Looking up into her eyes, he started to speak and stopped.

“What did he say?”

He tried to put on a lighter face, to grin away the idea that he might be taken seriously. “He pointed out that when he told me how Josie was attacked, he had said that the attacker looked like an old woman, not that it was an old woman.”

Laura paused between bites while she digested the words. “But, isn’t it the same? Did he mean maybe it was a man in disguise?”

“No. He said he didn’t think it was a person at all. He said we have to find it and kill it.”

“You mean an animal dressed up like a person? That’s silly.”

“I didn’t say he made sense. We’re talking about Jackie, remember? A good portion of his observations come out of a bottle.”

She paused while she gazed at his down-turned face. “But you don’t think this one did, do you?”

He shrugged again and delayed making eye contact. “I don’t know. When I talked to Sarge yesterday, he told me I should be more open to believing things, to be willing to accept unlikely possibilities. I think he believed Jackie’s description of Josie’s killer with the big teeth.” He shrugged again and looked up into her eyes before adding, “And this morning I attended his autopsy.”

As the meal progressed, Laura coaxed Don back away from the gruesome details of the mystifying case haunting their town and more towards the light, relaxing evening he needed. By the time he finished the hamburger and opened a second bottle of wine, she had managed to distract him enough so he no longer had to remind himself that he was off duty.

A rain of red sparks fell upward from the barbecue when Laura stirred the coals. “You ready to try something that I saw in another magazine?”

“Gee, I didn’t know you read that kind of stuff.”

“Now, you see?” she said as she turned back to face him in her brief denim shorts and sleeveless chambray shirt with its front tails tied in a knot above her waist that left a strip of bare skin. “You’ve got lots, yet, to learn about me. But in this case, I was still talking about the Food & Wine magazine, just a different issue than where I got the blue-cheese burgers. You put a bit of blue cheese in the hollow of a pear half, and grill it. Sound good?”

He raised his glass, but instead of sipping, he stuck his nose over the rim and into the air space above the liquid, inhaling long and deep. Then, smiling, he took a sip. “Sounds luscious. You’re getting pretty adventurous these days.”

Her eyes gleamed in the light of the nearby fire-pit as they gazed over the top of her own glass at him. With her voice dropping into a husky contralto, she said, “Hmmm. A bit of adventure does sound exciting. I do hope you don’t shock too easily.”

After she sidled over and sat beside him on the bench swing, leaning into him, he draped his arm around her shoulder and drew her closer. He leaned over and nibbled on her earlobe, then whispered, “So shock me.”

She let him continue for a bit before twisting away from him and standing up, fanning her face with her hand. “Careful, buddy, or we’ll find out how easily the neighbors are shocked.”

When she walked back over to the grill, she gave her rear a little extra sashay and glanced back over her shoulder to make sure he was watching. Satisfied, she chuckled and did it again. She turned over two pear halves on the grill and then centered a small cube of blue-veined cheese in the indention of each one and lowered the lid. “There, should only take a minute to be ready.”

“You talking about the cheese or me?”

“Ooh, the cheese, of course. You’re desert.”