Hard Day's Knight (9 page)

“I don’t care if we’re dead, that’s still gross.” I jumped, spilling cold OJ in my lap. Greg hadn’t moved, but I could see his shoulders shaking as he laughed at my frosty crotch.

“I might be gross, but you’re a dick.” I said, looking around for something to dry off with. I gave up on the idea of finding anything lying around the den when I remembered that Greg had been home alone all night yesterday, which always led to an almost neurotic level of cleaning. I went into my room and got some fresh boxers and the rest of my clothes.

Greg was sitting up on the floor when I made it back to the den, a look of smug superiority on his face. “What?” I asked.

“What, what?” He kept grinning at me like a hillbilly with a winning Powerball ticket.

“What has you sitting there grinning like the AV club president who just bugged the girls’ dressing room?”

“I
am
the AV club president who bugged the girls’ dressing room,” he reminded me without a hint of embarrassment.

“I remember, you perv. And you had that same stupid grin on your face then.”

“Well I think I may have found our link. Career Day.” He waved a piece of paper over his head like it was a checkered flag and he was an off-duty Daytona stripper. I snatched the paper from him and looked at it. There was a column of initials, a column of dates and a column of school names. The school names I recognized, and it didn’t take long to figure out that the initials and dates matched up with missing kids.

“Greg, there are only seven names here.” I pointed to the paper.

“Yeah?”

“There were eleven victims, dude.”

“Yeah, but seven of these schools had a Career Day the week before the kidnappings occurred. There’s no way that’s not statistically significant.”

He had a point. “I could see that.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I think it’s a good idea. We need to look into it further.” Greg looked so happy that I wasn’t dismissing his idea out of hand that you’d have thought I gave him an ice cream cone, or a puppy. Or a puppy with ice cream on it.

“Cool. So now what?” He asked. He headed to the coat closet and started gearing up – putting on his utility belt, boots, and other combat equipment. I stopped him before he got the cape completely fastened.

“Now we chill for a while. Wanna play
Halo
?” I put my feet up on the coffee table and watched his face bounce off his toenails.

“What? We gotta go! We’ve got a lead! A real one! And we need to be out there chasing it down, man!” He started fumbling with his cape again and I took a little pity on him. I went to the closet and led him back to the sofa.

We both sat down and I looked over at him. “You’re right. We do need to chase it down. But not at the risk of bursting into flames. I think that would get in the way of our progress.”

“Huh?” I love it when someone else sounds like the moron. It’s usually my shtick, and I’m good at it, but I don’t mind passing the baton from time to time.

“Dude. It’s like, noon. We go out there now and we’re flash-fried. So you wanna play
Halo
?” I turned on the Xbox and started killing aliens while Greg started to get out of his uniform. “And what the hell do you carry in that utility belt? Twinkies?”

“Shut up. If we can’t go thwart evil, I’m gonna take a nap.” My grumpy roommate then tromped off to his room for some shuteye while I valiantly tried to save the world. Again.

I finished off Season 2 of
Dexter
on Netflix before Greg woke up, not long after sunset. I heard the shower shut off and a few minutes later, my goofy partner emerged. He was dressed in all black, again, with his combat boots laced tight and his utility belt snug around his ballooning waist. I feel for Greg sometimes. I mean, who knew that turning into vampires wouldn’t change our bodies into perfect examples of studliness and we’d be trapped forever as the dorks we were on the last night of our lives?

“Really, man. Do you have to wear the utility belt?” I laced up my sneakers and grabbed my shoulder holster by the door. I hid the firepower under a leather jacket as we went up the steps and out into the cemetery. We opened a tool shed that was really a two-car garage and hopped in Greg’s car, a 1967
GTO
convertible, black of course. I always gave Greg a load of crap about his less-than-inconspicuous ride, but he’d had a man-crush on that car since we were alive, so no amount of teasing was going to get him to drive anything else.

“Where are we headed?” Greg asked as I got into the car. I pulled out the file folder with all his Career Day notes in it and started to flip through it. It had been easy to find when he went to bed, because he’d written “
CARREER
DAY
CLUES” on the outside of the folder in purple Sharpie. Sometimes I really thought my partner was secretly an illiterate twelve-year-old girl. I wouldn’t have been too surprised to find his notes in a Trapper Keeper covered in unicorn stickers.

“I looked through the Career Day files at each school, and there were three companies that had a table at every event: AmeriBank, Joe’s World of Tires and the Police Department. AmeriBank makes sense, since their corporate headquarters is here, the owner of Joe’s World of Tires is on the school board, and I think the cops were just looking for middle-school weed. But we should check them all out regardless.”

“Sounds good, but why do we need to check out the cops? They’re investigating the crimes, you don’t think a cop could have done it, do you?” My partner has a simple view of the world – police and firemen are good, and bad guys wear black hats. It’s charming, really.

“I don’t think it’s what happened, but it’s possible. Cops are people, so they’re suspects. We’ve got to look at everybody, bro.”

“Alright, but I don’t think it’s the cops.” I didn’t either, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I didn’t think we were going to find our kidnapper anywhere in this list of companies. It just didn’t feel right, if you know what I mean.

“So where to first?” Greg asked, gingerly backing the car out of the garage. It’s always amazed me how he can be so careful with his car but such a spaz on two feet.

“I think we start with the path of least resistance – Joe Arthur, owner of Joe’s World of Tires and school board member. We should be able to play the P.I. card and find out who was representing the World of Tires at the Career Days straight from the source.” I gave him the address and we headed out to meet the tire king. I looked out the window and watched the city roll by, thinking a lot more than I wanted to about ten missing children and the fact that we only had a couple of nights left to stop something from coming to town that even a fallen angel was scared of.

It took us about half an hour to get to Joe Arthur’s house, a modest ranch in one of the better, but not ridiculous, parts of town. I noted the bicycle laying beside the driveway, and guessed the owner to be no more than eight or nine years old. “Looks like Joe’s got a kid right in the target age range,” I whispered as we walked up to the front door.

“Yep. How do you want to play this? Good cop/bad cop? Two bad cops? Fangs out? Subtle?” He was bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet and shadowboxing his way up to the door. I grabbed the back of his utility belt and dragged him down the steps back to where I stood.

“I thought we’d ask him very nicely to invite us in, then see what he knows about the disappearances.” I spoke very low and very slowly, and held one hand on Greg’s shoulder to steady him while I tried to reign in his excitement. When you pair his enthusiasm with the fact that we haven’t aged in fifteen years, it’s pretty easy to forget that he remembers the Carter administration.

“Oh.” He deflated a little, and I shouldered my way past him up the steps and rang the bell. No one answered, so I rang again. A couple of minutes passed, and still nothing. I could hear people walking around inside, so I knocked on the door. After a couple more minutes, a light flipped on over my head, and the door cracked open.

“Can I help you?” A sliver of a middle-aged woman’s face appeared between the door and the jamb, as she looked at me through the security chain. The last time a woman was that unhappy to see me, it was my date for the senior prom.

“Is Mr. Arthur home?” I asked, reaching in my coat pocket for my investigator’s license.

“No, he’s not,” she said, and moved to close the door in my face. I’d already wedged one foot in the opening, though, so she met with limited success.

I held my credentials out where she could see them and said, “We’re investigating the disappearance of some children. Maybe you’ve heard about the situation?”

“Yes, yes, I’ve heard of that. Awful stuff. But I don’t see what that has to do with Joe. He’s never hurt anybody…” She looked around like she was afraid of somebody seeing her talk to us, and I began to doubt her assertions of Mr. Arthur’s harmlessness. Maybe Greg had found something after all.

“We understand that, ma’am. We’re just hoping that he could answer a few questions for us about the Career Day events that he attended at several of the schools prior to the disappearances. He may have seen something that could be useful in our investigation. Could we come in and wait for him?” She looked more and more nervous, and I suddenly became aware of another heartbeat in the house.

“Um…no, I’m sorry. I’m alone here you see and it wouldn’t be proper. You understand? You’re welcome to come back later, when my husband is home. Maybe tomorrow afternoon?” I could hear the heartbeat moving closer to the door and was trying hard to figure out how to get inside before whoever was in there with her did something seriously bad, when Greg pulled on my sleeve.

“Come on, James. We’ll come back and visit when Mr. Arthur is home. Thanks for your time, ma’am.” He led me down the steps by my elbow and steered me towards the car.

“Dude!” I whispered. “What the hell was that about? She might have been in trouble! I could tell something had her wound up – her pulse was up, her skin was flushed, and there was definitely somebody else in that house! I could hear a man’s pulse, and he was pretty excited, too.” I put my elbows on the roof of the car and looked over at where Greg stood by the driver’s door. “Why aren’t we doing everything we can to get her to let us in so we can help her?”

“Because I don’t think she would appreciate our help.” He said, with what I guess he meant to be a meaningful glance, but meant nothing to me.

“What are you talking about?” I demanded.

“Let’s see – skin flushed, heart racing, doesn’t want us in the house, husband not home, someone else in the house with her. Even the man with a thousand strikeouts like you should be able to put those clues together.” He smirked at me as realization dawned, and we got in the car.

“Okay. I get it.” I said as I closed the door. “She’s having an affair and her boyfriend was there. But where does that leave us with the tire king?”

“Headed to Lucky Strikes.” Greg put the car in gear and headed towards the big outlet mall north of town.

“Why do you have a sudden urge to go bowling in the middle of an investigation?” Greg didn’t really baffle me that often, but this time he had me flummoxed. Okay, he often baffled me, but it was usually with his staggering ineptitude with women. I can’t understand how anyone can be immortal, live through all these years looking like he’s in his twenties, and still have no more game than the dorky kids we were when we were turned. But that’s neither here nor there.

“I have no more interest in bowling than I’ve ever had. Which is none. But while you were trying to get the Real Housewife of Charlotte to let us interrupt Date Night, I was peeking through the kitchen window checking out the calendar on the fridge. Tonight is Joe Arthur’s league night, so he’ll be bowling for at least another couple of hours. So all we need to do is grab him when he heads for his car, interrogate him, maybe munch on him a little, and find out what he knows.”

Greg said all this very matter-of-factly, but I was completely blown away by the suggestion. “Munch? Did you, the closest thing to a vegan vampire I’ve ever met, just suggest that we actually eat a suspect? Who are you and what did you do with Greg Knightwood?”

“I just thought that since you were off the wagon, you might want another excuse to behave like an animal.” Okay, that made more sense. It wasn’t that he wanted to eat, he just wanted to make me feel like a monster again. Whatever, I
am
a monster. And monsters eat. It’s what we do.

“No, I think we can do without snacking on the suspects for tonight at least. Besides, I’m still full from yesterday.”

“Well, if you’re sure…”

“I’m sure.” I leaned back into my seat and contemplated staking my partner while he pulled into the mall’s gargantuan parking lot. I’ve never gotten the hang of navigating that place, it’s over a mile to walk the entire inside of it and the mere concept of trying to drive through the parking lot always gives me the heebie-jeebies. Greg pulled up in front of the bowling alley, and we headed in.

“So do you really want to grab him as he exits?” I asked.

“Nah, I thought we’d go for the impersonating a police officer and humiliate him in front of his friends shtick.” Greg didn’t like the nouveau riche of Charlotte, so I figured he’d want to make the tire king’s night as crappy as possible.

“Alright, but we don’t talk about his wife’s boy toy unless he’s really irritating.”

“Nah, if he’s really irritating we eat him. We ruin his marriage if he looks at me funny.”

“You’re wearing a utility belt. Everyone looks at you funny.”

“Point. Alright, we only ruin his marriage if we get something out of it.”

“Deal. I’ll lead.”

“Why do you always lead?”

“I’m taller.” By now we were most of the way across the bowling alley, and I recognized Joe Arthur from his commercials. The tire king was carrying a spare or two of his own, and I don’t mean the bowling kind. He was a sixty-something Italian guy with more hair coming out of his ears than he had left on his head. He was about 5’ 8”, which put me at a serious height advantage. I’m a couple inches over six feet, and even Greg had a couple inches on the Rubber Royalty. He and his league buddies had by far the least flattering bowling shirts I’d ever seen, since they were designed to look like the Michelin Man, only in turquoise. I’ve never met any guy over fifty (and over two-fifty) who can pull off horizontal stripes in turquoise, and these guys were no exception.