“Even if you think I did it, aren’t I also the guy who brought her back? So what’s the charge there, we took a little girl to visit Mine’s Eye then brought her back home eight hours later? For what? We didn’t even get paid for the work.”
“And then we found out there was another victim. At least one.”
I said, “You think I did both? At the same time, across town? And never got spotted? It’s weird how you switch between having a really high opinion of me and a really low one.”
He shrugged. “Well, somebody did it.”
“Yeah, but it wasn’t a person. Which you know damned well.”
“Do I know that?”
John said, “So, now if we go and find the other kid, that just casts more suspicion on us? Well, guess what—we’re going to go find him anyway. I’m sure you understand, at this point heroism is just a reflex for us.”
I said, “And just to be clear, the only way to prove to you that we weren’t behind this would be to successfully find the guy who did it, and for it to turn out to be an actual human being you can book and prosecute. Right?”
“Actually, Wong, if I see you anywhere near any of the victims’ families again, or see you talking to witnesses, or otherwise doing amateur cop stuff, I will haul all three of you in for interfering with a police investigation. And I’m using the word ‘haul’ here to describe tying you to the rear bumper of a squad car and dragging you across town. You’re going to stay home, you’re not going to leave town, you’re going to wait for me to tell you what to do. Understand?”
I said, “Of course. What you say goes. After all, you’re the police.”
He turned and opened the door and was aaaallllmost all the way out, when there was a thump from another room.
We all turned, including Detective Bowman.
Another thump, like someone kicking a door.
Coming from inside my junk room.
The detective said, “Who else is here?”
Simultaneously:
Amy said, “It was the wind.”
John said, “It’s the dog.”
I said, “I don’t hear anything.”
The detective pulled his gun and said, “Get back. All three of you, go to the other side of the room.”
We did.
Thump
I said, “I don’t want you to take this as a threat, but the last cop to come into my house and yank open doors to investigate strange sounds, well, he kind of wound up with a monster in his face. And I don’t mean it was near his face, I mean it was literally inside his face.”
“Shut the fuck up.”
Still, he approached the closed junk room door like he thought a velociraptor would come crashing through it at any moment. He positioned himself outside the door and, with his gun held close to his body where an assailant couldn’t grab it, he reached out with his left hand and pushed the door open.
He jumped back from the door to create distance, then trained his gun on whatever horror was in the room. From where I was standing, I couldn’t see inside but I mentally prepared myself to go running out the front door if he got yanked into the room by jaws, paws, tentacles, or a beak.
The detective looked inside, took in what he was seeing, then spun and aimed his gun right at me.
“Get down! Get on the floor! All three of you!”
“What is it?”
“GET DOWN!”
We obeyed, the three of us exchanging looks. I had already pretty much guessed what he had found in there. Amy seemed quite sure she knew.
The detective grabbed his walkie-talkie and called in a squad car and an ambulance.
He had a young child, he said.
Alive, but unconscious.
* * *
We were handcuffed in the back of Detective Bowman’s SUV—Amy’s right hand cuffed to a belt loop—and had been sitting there long enough to see the sun go down. Red and blue lights flashed across the beads of water on the windshield. The employees of the Venus Flytrap had all gathered up front, muttering to each other, covering their mouths in shock. I watched as Chastity pulled up in an old but impeccably maintained Range Rover. She jumped out and ran toward the stairs, then was restrained by a pair of street cops, reassuring her that her little boy would be right down.
Then a paramedic carried Michael Payton’s tiny body down the stairs, the boy wrapped in a blanket. Chastity easily shoved the two cops aside and flew up to snatch her baby from the paramedic and clutch him to her chest. A Channel 5 news team was there to get it all on camera, as were most of our neighbors—word travels fast anytime there are cop cars at the Wong residence. The child and Chastity were loaded into an ambulance and soon after, a crime scene team started filing up and down the stairs, all of them about to be very confused by the shit they would find in my apartment. Will somebody in the evidence room be in charge of figuring out what that clown painting is saying?
Detective Bowman’s partner, the square-jawed dude with the fancy hair, climbed into the passenger seat of the SUV. Bowman was standing under the awning of the dildo store, talking to one of the crime scene techs, hopefully warning them about grabbing anything in the apartment with their bare hands.
To Bowman’s partner, John said, “The only thing that bothers me about this bullshit is that I’m pretty sure the real bad guy is still out there. You know we didn’t do this, and you know you need us. So what good does booking us do, other than let you cover your ass by closing the case?”
He said, “Shut your trap. I’ve got no patience for this bullshit.”
Bowman slid into the driver’s seat. As we pulled out of the parking lot, I said to him, “Will you just listen to us? You know this isn’t going to trial. This stuff never goes to trial. The prosecutor probably looks these cases over, shakes her head, and pours herself a stiff drink while figuring out how to explain to the press why she dropped the charges. Every time.”
Amy said, “Guys, he’s not taking us to the police station.”
Bowman glanced back at us and said, “She’s right. Got a new procedure these days.”
He drove us south, past some cornfields and around the scrap-yard, where we’d seen the guy hunting the BATMANTIS??? on Chastity’s video. We turned into the lot of a large building that had been a farm supply store years ago, but had apparently been renovated and reopened under new management. The only marking was a nondescript sign at the entrance of the parking lot declaring it the IAEEAI LAB AND WELLNESS CENTER.
Sitting in the parking lot were several trucks, the kind of flat-black military vehicles that you see around Undisclosed now and again, and that you generally pretend you didn’t see.
I’m not sure how many members of this shadowy organization John and I have killed over the years. This is partly because I’m not sure which of their employees were ever actually alive and partly because I’m never clear if it’s the same organization from one time to the next. Do you have that one corner in your town that’s a different restaurant every two years—a burrito shop, then a Chinese place, then a Pop-Tart buffet—because nobody can ever make it work but they keep trying anyway? Well, it’s kind of like that, only instead of trying to squeeze a profit from a shitty location with no parking, they’re trying to control vast, dark energies they barely understand. And, instead of skipping town once the lease runs out, they suffer screaming, spurting deaths that are but a warm-up for the unending frenzy of ravenous jaws that await them beyond the veil. But, hey, maybe it’ll work next time, guys!
John and I had once dedicated ourselves to investigating the origins and power structure of this group, a task that we diligently pursued for more than twenty minutes while waiting for a pizza delivery to arrive. A Google search found sites full of animated GIFs tracing it all back to either an occult-obsessed nineteenth-century billionaire, a 1961 Soviet military teleportation experiment, the Illuminati, or “The International Jew” (the pizza arrived before we could find out his name).