“Our people didn’t see anyone up there when they arrived.”
“What?” Simon lurched forward to the edge of his seat. “But they couldn’t have gotten off the mountain so quickly. Not after we- I mean, they seemed like they’d be indisposed for a while. At least until someone got there.”
Maybe Simon wasn’t as adept at slashing tires as he thought. Or maybe those two had found a quick way to patch them. You could make glue out of pine pitch, after all.
The gurgling of a coffee pot had started up, the aroma filling the air. I wasn’t a huge fan of black coffee, but I could make an exception if I was using it as an all-night study aid. Or, in this case, a remain-alert-so-as-not-to-incriminate-oneself-to-the-police aid.
“We did see motorcycle tracks, as well of those of your van, but that was it,” Gutierrez said.
“Dang,” Simon said. “There was only the one road up there. I thought…”
Yes, and it had been a long drive. It did seem like the police or sheriffs or whoever had responded first would have been going up by the time Eleriss and Jakatra had been coming down. Even if the cops passed those two on the road without stopping them, someone should have remembered it, especially since they’d been sent to investigate the reporting of a body. But then, nobody had seemed to notice the two riders cruise into the campground that night either, nobody except for me. If we’d been alone, I might have asked Simon if Vulcans had any special abilities to remain unnoticed. Probably not if they needed to wear ear-covering caps when they came to Earth.
The sludge officer brought over two steaming cups of coffee, one for the detective and one for me. He pointed a finger at Simon and raised his eyebrows.
“No, thanks,” Simon said. “Not unless you’ve got a Mountain Dew back there.” He didn’t have many vices that I’d noticed, but I had seen him suck down an entire twelve-pack of soda during a long day of gaming. It beat cigarettes and alcohol, I supposed. From a few of his comments, I’d gathered that those had been rampant among his kin when he’d been growing up.
“I’ll check.”
When the other man had left, Gutierrez draped an arm across the back of his chair and gave us a stern look. I tried not to squirm with guilt. We hadn’t done anything wrong, after all.
“I know chasing storms is all the rage in some parts of the country, but you kids are going to get in trouble-or get killed-chasing this storm. Or whatever the hell it is. I wish it’d skipped Prescott. We’ve had enough tragedy in this town; we don’t need this.”
I forgot about squirming with guilt because I was too busy trying to figure out what he was talking about. Storm chasing? Huh?
“I looked you up online and saw your website,” Gutierrez said, throwing me further by switching topics again. “And your most recent blog post.” His lips flattened as he pinned Simon with his gaze.
I glared at Simon too. He could have waited to post that until we were out of the police station.
“I’m sure to a couple of kids your age, this all seems like adventure, but I urge you to let it go. Focus on your business and forget the ‘monster hunt.’” Something about the way Gutierrez said the last two words-and the way Simon avoided his eyes-made me think he was quoting that blog post.
Thomas returned with a can of Mountain Dew and a dusty but otherwise undamaged Dirt Viper. Simon leaped to his feet and threw open his arms like a man ready to hug a beloved child he hadn’t seen all year.
Gutierrez must have decided I was the more responsible of our duo for he turned his attention to me and said, “I’m serious about my warning. If the guys in L.A. couldn’t stop this… thing, I don’t know what we’ll do besides hope it moves on quickly. I don’t want to see your bodies come into the Yavapai County Morgue.”
L.A.? I was dying to get on my phone and start running searches, but not with him watching. “Yes, sir. I don’t want to see the morgue either.”
By now, Simon was running some kind of diagnostics check on his metal detector while Thomas watched on in bemusement.
“You’re free to go,” Gutierrez told me.
“Thank you.”
Less concerned with the welfare of the Dirt Viper, I grabbed Simon by the back of his arm and propelled him toward the door. I didn’t yet know why the police had thought we were chasing after this creature, but Gutierrez had dropped enough clues that I ought to be able to find out.
CHAPTER 9
I’d never had trouble getting up in the mornings-living in the desert where the sun is blazing in the window at dawn helps with that-but at 10 a.m. at the Raven Cafe, I was waiting for my triple-shot mocha to kick in. I didn’t know when I’d gotten to sleep, but it hadn’t been until late. After finishing at the police station, Simon and I hadn’t had any interest in returning to the campground, so we’d roamed around looking for a likely place to stay. We’d finally parked the van at Walmart next to the boondocking RVs. I’d surfed around on my phone, looking up news articles from L.A. among other things, until I’d fallen asleep with it on my pillow. The need for a faster Internet connection had brought us here.
“I’ve got to take Zelda to the repair shop,” Simon said after he slurped up the milk in his bowl of granola. He’d informed me that a mocha wasn’t an appropriate breakfast, but I wasn’t sure his option was any healthier, given the amount of brown sugar he’d dumped on the top. “You staying here?” He waved to my open laptop.
“Yes. We’ve got a spot by an outlet. I can go for hours.” Our pub table stood against the wall by a piano with my laptop cord snaking down to the outlet. On previous days when we’d visited the Raven, we’d had to settle for tables in non-outlet-serviced locales. Today, the cafe was quiet, with only one other person sharing the dining area, a bleary-eyed, laptop-toting kid wearing a Yavapai Community College sweatshirt. I hadn’t seen a television yet, but the dearth of people in here and on the streets suggested that the White Spar incident had hit the news. Temi’s three early-morning text messages asking where we were and demanding to know if we were all right provided further evidence for that hypothesis.
“You can go for hours? All by yourself, eh?” Simon smirked, but it was a tired gesture. His eyes were bloodshot too. He’d probably take a nap in the waiting room while the headlights were being replaced. He never had trouble sacking out on a random chair, bench, or gum-decorated sidewalk in public.
“I’ve warned you about my introvert tendencies,” I said. “Did you send me that picture of the thing from the hotel room yet?”
“Yeah, but I’m more interested in where that monster’s going next than in antiques, albeit glow-in-the-dark antiques are intriguing. You’re going to find out more about that, right? Instead of wasting hours trying to look up foreign words you think you heard last night.” He gave me a pointed look.
Yes, I’d meant to spend more time researching the L.A. connection, and I had pulled up a few stories, but those words I’d heard Jakatra and Eleriss speak had kept repeating in my mind. I’d played with countless spelling possibilities, plugging each into the search engine, but I hadn’t found anything useful. Not all that surprising if the language wasn’t based off the Latin alphabet.
“I promise I’ll research your monster,” I said, “but we’re not tracking down anything that can rip our heads off, no matter what I find on it.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Simon said. “But the riders are a different matter, right?”
“What do you mean?”
“You want to know about them and their language.”
“Yes…”
“So, you’d want a sample if you could get it?” he asked.