“My cousin Ross,” Lita said.
“Glad to meet you.” He grinned. “I won’t make you shake hands. Knowing the work I do, not many people want to anyway.”
“So, did you come across anything else?” Dave asked.
“Lotta small stuff. Nothing major like that. But yesterday, something kind of weird happened. I’d cleaned out three systems and headed over to the leech field to empty the truck. Only after I hooked up the line and reversed the pump flow to drain it out…there was nothing there. My tank was empty. Somewhere between that last house and the leech field, all that effluent just…disappeared. I don’t know how, don’t know where, but it was gone. All of it.”
“So you heard Jackass’ story,” Lita said. “How much are you going to charge us?”
“A flat one hundred if there’s nothing unusual. Any weird shit—pardon the pun—and it’s double.”
Lita and Dave looked at one another, a nod passing between them.
“All right,” Dave said. “Do it.”
Ross stayed around to watch. He really should have been working on his project for the floor mat company—he didn’t want to start off by making a bad impression, not after being unemployed for so long—but he thought about the bright green string that came out of the kitchen sink when McDaniels cleared the drain, and the tiny pink creatures in his shower water, and wanted to see what would come out of the septic tank.
It was a nearly hour-long process, and for a long while, they knew nothing. Some gray-black sludge leaked out around the edge of the thick pump line inserted into the top of the buried septic tank, and when Fred shone a light into the tank itself, the sewage inside looked the same, but it was not until the tank was drained, and Fred climbed up on his truck to examine the contents from above, that he determined there was nothing out of the ordinary.
“A hundred bucks,” he announced.
Dave wrote out a check, and they watched him drive off, as though waiting for that triangle-headed snake or some other impossible creature to fly out of the truck on its way down the drive. It wasn’t until he had driven past the palo verde tree and disappeared that they all turned away.
“Finally!” Lita said, the relief audible in her voice as she hurried into the house. “Now I can go to the bathroom.”
TWENTY FIVE
It was after midnight, but Cameron was wide awake, sitting in his locked bedroom on the edge of the bed and drinking Jim Beam out of the bottle. Every few minutes, he would get up, walk nervously over to the door and press an ear against the wood, listening.
Something was out there.
Something big.
Something slimy.
He had not seen it yet, but he’d heard it, making a wet slurping sound as it moved down the hall, and it was what kept him from falling asleep. He had no idea what it was, but he could imagine it eating through the door to his bedroom, slinking across the floor and killing him in his bed in an agonizing and unnatural way.
Cameron sidled over to the closed window, parting the curtain just enough to peek through the glass and see the yard below. The smokehouse was still locked—and that thing inside it was dead anyway—but he had no doubt whatsoever that it was the source of this horror. It was the source of everything that had been happening since New Year’s Eve, and when morning came and the sun was up, he was going to go out there, set fire to that bullet-ridden body and put a stop to it all. He didn’t care what anyone else said; this was his property and his decision. Fuck the superstitious assholes around here. This wasn’t one of those church fairy tales. This was real, and he needed to put a stop to it before things got even worse.
He saw movement out of the corner of his eye and flattened against the wall, away from the window, afraid of being seen. From somewhere outside came a sound that could have been the cry of a woman. It rose in pitch and volume, as though about to turn into a scream, then lowered into laughter that became a terrifying guttural chuckle. He waited until the noise had subsided, then hurried into the center of the room and back to the bed, finishing off the last of the bottle and letting it fall from his hand onto the floor.
Despite Jorge’s iron hand, several of Cameron’s men had run away, back to Mexico, maybe, and even some of the wetbacks who’d defected to his place from other ranches had changed their minds and left. The place was noticeably shorthanded, and if half of his cattle hadn’t died, there wouldn’t be enough workers here to take care of the herd. As it was, he was not sure how much work the remaining hands were doing. Jorge seemed to have them busy with other projects, mostly in and around the smokehouse, and Cameron knew the reason why.