Monster Hunter Memoirs: Grunge - eARC (35 page)

Even they couldn’t get through to us. We didn’t have to worry about nightmares for the rest of our lives. We had an abundance. We were walking in them.

* * *

It was two and a half days after Jesse died when I woke up in a woman’s boudoir.

It wasn’t the first time in my life I’d woken up in a woman’s bedroom by any stretch. And what with some occasional over-indulgences in the demon drink it wasn’t even the first time I’d woken up in one not remembering how I got there. But it was the first time after an op. And I was still covered in dried spider goop which was messing up the sheets.

I looked around trying to ascertain some clue about where I was, how I’d gotten there. There was a picture on the bedside table. A tall man was standing next to a red-headed girl of about nine at a guess. She was holding up a salmon and grinning ear to ear. The man was holding a rod and also grinning.

“My dad,” Lieutenant Shaw said from the doorway.

“Looks like you had a better relationship with him than I did with mine. Mine never took me fishing. He did take me to a strip club when I was about that age. He used me as a prop to pick up a stripper.”

“Yours still alive?” Shaw asked. “That was the summer I was ten. The following fall he was coming home late from work one night and a junkie killed him for five dollars.”

“I’m sorry. Back-story of why you’re such a dedicated policewoman explained. Mind if I use your shower?”

“Please,” she said. “That spider crap’s starting to rot. It’s going to be hell to get the smell out of the bed.”

She climbed into the shower while I was soaping my hair.

“I have shampoo you know.”

She really did have a spectacular body.

“Marine habit,” I said, rinsing out the soap. “Saves time and effort.”

“You do my back, I’ll do yours,” she said.

“Why? I’m good with any answer including sympathy.”

“That,” she said. “And I don’t know a better way to help with mourning. And…I don’t have any relationships ’cause I don’t want them. Workaholic. Relationships get in the way. So having somebody on the side who feels the same way is doable.”

“Well, I’m all about doable.”

“And you promised to let me play with your Barrett,” she said.

“If you play your cards right.”

* * *

And that’s the last of the Seattle stories. It’s not that there weren’t other hunts or other stories. I was in Seattle for five months after the Portland Shelob. But it was the last spectacular or unusual or important one.

So now on to the assignment that put the Portland Shelob in perspective.

* * *

One last note. I later had to leave Seattle courtesy of Cheyenne the trailer park elf girl. Long story for the next memoir. But shortly before that little issue came up I was in Saury, per usual. I filled out my form and handed it to the server. A new guy.

“You want California Roll?” he asked in broken Engrish. “We got riff avocado!”

For all the good I have done in my life as a hunter, I still feel deep and abiding guilt for two things: I infected Seattle with California Rolls and ValSpeak and that bitch later met a down-and-out guitar player called Kurt who’d spent months living in the company of gnolls.

Remember my comment “Smells like teen urine”? The record company balked at the word “urine.”

Yeah. I’m ultimately responsible for Grunge. I sincerely apologize.