The Flinkwater Factor (9 page)

2
2

Plan A

My future husband, Billy George, lived in the old part of town—not far from Addy Gumm, but in a much nicer, much bigger house. In fact, he lived in the grandest house in town, a fortresslike three-story brick edifice built in the middle of the last century by a paranoid corn baron named Wilhelm Krause.

If anybody could figure out how to get that collar off, it would be Billy. I asked Myke if I could use his bathroom and, to keep our communication secure, contacted Billy over the Poopnet. Billy told me to bring Redge to the corner of Bates Avenue and Twelfth Street.

Myke and I set off with Redge in tow, keeping a sharp eye out for black SUVs. We made it to Bates and Twelfth without incident, but Billy was nowhere to be seen.

“Are you sure we have the right place?” Myke asked.

Redge started barking furiously.

“Shut up, Redge,” I said.

“Look!” said Myke.

I looked. At first I didn't understand what I was seeing. A black stick, or wand, or feeler—or
something
— was poking out of the hole at the center of a manhole cover. It had a small crook at the end. As I watched, the wand slowly rotated.

Redge wanted to eat it. Or at least bite it. Myke, with both hands on the leash, struggled to hold him back.

The thing finally fixed upon us and remained still. I saw the glint of a lens and deduced that we were being observed by a fiber-optic periscope. I waved, hoping it was Billy.

The periscope withdrew into the sewer. A moment later the edge of the manhole cover tipped up. A hand appeared and slid the cover aside. Billy's head popped out.

Redge wagged his tail uncertainly.

“Come on!” Billy said. “Hurry, before somebody sees you.” He lowered himself back into the sewer.

I peered down into the hole. Billy was climbing down a series of steel rungs into the darkness.

“Are you sure?” I said doubtfully.

“Yes!” His voice echoed up from below.

Redge came up beside me, looked down the hole, growled, and backed away.

“I think that means no,” Myke said. “Dogs aren't good with ladders.”

I stuck my head down the hole and yelled, “Hey, Billy!” I could see his flashlight bobbing around twenty feet below.

“Come on!” he yelled back.

“The dog won't go! We need to go to plan B!”

A few seconds later the light was shining straight up at me.

“What's plan B?” he asked.

“You don't have a plan B?”

He didn't say anything for a few seconds.

Then he said, “Give me a minute.”

“Hurry up! I'm in the middle of the street with my head down a manhole!”

“Okay! Here's what we do . . . .”

23

Plan B

Plan B wasn't much better than plan A. According to Billy, there was a large culvert underneath Highway 18 where it crossed the Raccoona River. The opening was covered with a steel grate, but Billy said he could open it.

“How?” I asked.

“You'll see,” Billy said. “You guys take the dog over to Flinkwater Park and down to the bike trail along the river. Follow the trail up to the overpass. I'll take the sewer route and meet you there . . . . What's wrong?”

“What about the
Sasquatch?
” Myke said.

I laughed.

Myke glared at me.

Maybe you've never heard of the Flinkwater Sasquatch. Ever since I was a kid, there have
been stories about a wild, shaggy, manlike creature haunting the park. Flinkwater Park is not your ordinary park—it's a state park, more than six miles long, covering three thousand acres of steep, wooded coulees and bottomland on the north side of the Raccoona River. Every now and then, some terrified hiker reports seeing a big hairy humanoid creature. A few wildlife enthusiasts have set up heat-sensing cameras in the woods, but all they've caught on film have been coyotes, deer, raccoons, and bobcats. Most intelligent people don't take the Sasquatch thing seriously.

Myke, however, did.

“The Flinkwater Sasquatch is an urban myth,” I said.

“It's not! Lots of people have seen it.”

“Like who?”

“Like Billy's brother,” Myke said, looking down into the sewer.

“J.G. makes stuff up to scare people,” Billy said.

“Addy Gumm saw it once.”

“She's just a crazy old lady,” Billy said from the sewer.

“She is not! Besides, even the police were out looking for it.”

I said, “Myke, they got a report from some picnickers and searched every inch of the park. No
Sasquatch. It was just some people who got freaked out by a big dog or something. Besides, we'll have Redge with us. He eats Sasquatch for breakfast.”

Myke wasn't convinced, but if I was willing to risk a Sasquatch event, he had to go along with it.

I was startled by the blast of a car horn. I had forgotten that I was kneeling in the middle of the street looking into a storm sewer.

“What was
that
?” Billy asked.

“We gotta go.” I jumped up and waved to Gerald Ruff, who was pounding impatiently on the horn of his pickup truck. I pointed at the open manhole. Gerald Ruff got out of his truck.

“What in the tarnation of hailstorm are you kids doing playing in the middle of the ding-dang street?” Gerald Ruff was the owner of Ruff Roofs, a roofing contractor headquartered in nearby Halibut. I knew him because he'd replaced the shingles on our house the previous summer.

“Ruff! Roof!”
said Redge. I thought for a second that his collar had been activated—but it was just him barking.

“That's one smart dog you got there,” said Gerald Ruff.

“We saw this manhole cover was off,” I said quickly. “I was trying to get it back over the hole.”

“I can help with that,” he said. In a few seconds he had dragged the cover back in place. “There ya go.”

“Thanks, Mr. Ruff,” I said.

“Ruff!”
said Redge.

Gerald Ruff said, “That old hound would make a great mascot for my business.”

“Yeah  . . . um  . . . we have to get going,” I said. “See you later.”

24

Sasquatch

We followed the main trail through the park down to the bike path. Myke kept an eye out for Sasquatch, while Redge ranged back and forth at the end of his terry-cloth leash, sniffing everything. We reached the bike path without incident and followed it along the river to the Highway 18 overpass. Billy was waiting inside the six-foot-tall culvert, looking through the heavy steel grate, wearing a pair of welder's goggles and holding a device that looked like a cross between a power drill and a machine gun.

“Better stand back,” he said.

We backed off a few feet.

“Way back,” he said.

The bars that were supposed to keep people out of the storm sewers looked formidable, but they were no match for the thing in Billy's hands.
He pulled the trigger, and an intensely bright beam of greenish-blue light shot out, melting the steel bars like a hot knife cutting through butter, sending out a spatter of bright orange globules of molten steel.

It took him about thirty seconds to completely destroy the grate. The ends of the bars glowed orange. Curls of smoke rose up from the ground where the spatters had landed. Billy stepped out of the culvert, placing his feet carefully so as not to get a hotfoot. He pushed the goggles up onto his forehead and grinned at us.

Blinking away afterimages, I said, “What was
that
?”

“Acetylene laser,” Billy said—as if a handheld acetylene laser was a perfectly normal accessory for a thirteen-year-old to be carrying around.

Myke said, “Where  . . . how  . . .”

Billy said, “I made it.”

Have I mentioned that Billy George is a mad genius?

“I thought it might come in handy some day,” Billy said.

“Hey, guys  . . . ,” Myke said.

I ignored him, looking into the dark and exceedingly spooky sewer.

“Um  . . . I'm not sure Redge wants to go in there,” I said.

“Guys  . . .”

“Redge will go anyplace we do,” Billy said. “You're the one that's scared.”

“I'm not scared,” I said. But I was.

“Guys!”

I turned to see Myke pointing a shaking finger at something in the woods. At first I couldn't see what he was pointing at.

And then I did. It looked like a man—an extremely tall man—with a body made out of leaves and the head of a Rastafarian Wookiee, standing not thirty feet from us in the shadow of a cedar grove.

“Sasquatch!” I screamed. I grabbed Redge and dove through the sewer grate into the culvert. Myke was right behind me.

Billy said, “Hey!” Then he saw what we had seen, and he was running too. We turned left, then right, then left again, and didn't stop until we were all gasping for breath.

“I  . . . think  . . . we  . . . lost him,” Billy said.

We listened for the sound of Sasquatch footsteps.

Dead silence.

“Maybe Sasquatches don't like sewers,” Myke said hopefully.

“
Nobody
likes sewers,” I said.

I heard a whispery, scurrying sound.

“What's
that
?”

“Nothing,” Billy said. “Just some rats.”