Molly had just turned twenty-seven years old.
She pulled herself from THE SCENE and looked out the window again. The kid was there, right there in front of the monster trailer. She should warn him or something.
She pounded on the window and the kid looked up, not startled, but with a dreamy expression on his face. Molly gestured for him to move away. The window she was looking out of didn’t open. (Trailers built in those days were designed so people would burn up in case of a fire. The manufacturers thought it would keep the lawsuits down.)
The kid just stood there, his fist poised before the door as if he were frozen in the middle of knocking.
As Molly watched, the door began to open. Not on the hinges, but vertically, like a garage door. Molly pounded furiously on the window with the hilt of her sword. The kid smiled. A huge red tongue snaked out of the door, wrapped around the kid, and slurped him in, Rollerblades, paper satchel, and all. Molly screamed. The door slammed shut.
Molly watched, stunned, not knowing what to do. A few seconds later the mouth opened and expectorated a soccer-ball-sized wad of newspaper.
Theo
The hours of Theo’s day had moved like slugs crawling on razor wire. By four in the afternoon, he felt as if he’d been awake for a week and the cups of French roast he’d been drinking had turned to foaming acid in his stomach. Mercifully, there hadn’t been a single call for a bar fight or do-mestic dispute, so he had spent the entire day at the scene of the fuel truck explosion, talking to firemen, representatives from Texaco Oil, and an arson investigator sent up from the San Junipero Fire Department. Much to his surprise, going all day without a hit from his Sneaky Pete pot pipe had not sent him into fits of anxiety as it usually did. He was a little paranoid, but he wasn’t sure that that wasn’t just an informed response to the world anyway.
At a quarter past four, the arson investigator crossed the charred parking lot to where Theo was leaning on the hood of his Volvo. The investigator was in his late twenties, clean-cut, and carried himself like an athlete, even in the orange toxic waste suit. He carried a plastic space helmet under his arm like a tumorous football.
“Constable Crowe, I think that’s about all I can do today. It’ll be dark soon, and as long as we keep the area closed off, I’m sure everything will still be here in the morning.”
“What’s your call so far?
“Well, we generally look for evidence of accelerants, gas, kerosene, paint thinner—and I’d say there were definitely some flammable liquids involved here.” He smiled a weary smile.
“So you don’t know what happened?”
“Offhand, I’d say a fuel truck blew up, but without further investigation I’d hate to make a commitment at this time.” Again the smile.
Theo smiled back. “So no cause?”
“The driver probably didn’t seal the hose correctly and a cloud of fumes got set off. There wasn’t much wind last night, so the fumes would have just clung to the ground and built up. Anything could have set it off: the driver could have been smoking, the pilot lights at the hamburger place, a spark in the truck exhaust. Right now I’d say it was totally accidental. It was a company-owned store, and it was turning a profit, so there really isn’t a financial motive for arson. Texaco will definitely be building your town a new burger stand and probably paying off some nuisance settlements from people claiming trauma, duress, and irritation.”
“I have the information on the driver,” Theo said. “I’ll check to see if he was a smoker.”
“I asked him. He’s keeping quiet” came a voice from a few yards away.
Theo and the arson investigator looked up to see Vance McNally coming toward them holding up a Ziploc bag full of white and gray powder. “I’ve got him right here,” the EMT said. “You want to interrogate him?”
“Very funny, Vance,” Theo said.
“They’re going to have to do the autopsy with a flour sifter,” Vance said.
The investigator took the Ziploc from Vance and examined it. “You find any remains of a cigarette lighter? Anything like that?”
“Not my job,” Vance said. “The fire was so hot it turned the seat springs to liquid. Even incinerated the bones, except for those little bits of calcium in there. Honestly, this might not all be our boy. We might be giving his wife a bag full of burnt-up truck parts to put in an urn on the mantel.”
The investigator shrugged and handed the bag back to Vance. Then to Theo he said, “I’m going home. I’ll come back tomorrow and look around some more. As soon as I give the okay, the oil company will send in a crew to drain the ground tanks.”
“Thanks,” Theo said. The investigator left in a county car.
Vance McNally turned the Ziploc bag of truck driver in the air. “Theo, this ever happens to me, I want you to get all my friends together, have a big party, and snort me, okay?”
“You have friends, Vance?”
“Okay, it was just an idea,” Vance said. He turned and carried his bag to the waiting ambulance.
Theo sipped his coffee and noticed something moving in the charred brush beyond the Texaco. It looked as if someone was holding up a TV antenna and getting altogether too close to the yellow tape he had run around the perimeter. Jeez, was he going to have to stay here all night guarding the scene? He pried himself off the Volvo and headed for the offender.
“Hey there!” Theo called.
Gabe Fenton, the biologist, emerged from the brush, indeed holding up some kind of antenna, followed by his Labrador retriever, Skinner. The dog ran to meet Theo and greeted him with two muddy paw prints on the chest.
Theo rubbed Skinner’s ears to hold him at bay, the classic slobbering Labrador control move. “Gabe, what in the hell are you doing down here?”
The biologist was covered with burrs and foxtails, his face striped with soot from the charred brush. He looked exhausted, yet there was a note of excitement bordering on ecstasy in his voice. “You won’t believe this, Theo. My rats moved en masse this morning.”
Theo tried, but couldn’t match Gabe’s enthusiasm. “That’s swell, Gabe. Texaco blew up last night.”
Gabe Fenton looked around at the surrounding area as if seeing the destruction for the first time. “What time?”
“About four in the morning.”
“Hmmm, maybe they sensed it.”
“They?”
“The rats. Around 2 A.M. they all started moving west. I can’t figure out what caused it. Here, look at the screen.” Gabe had a laptop computer strapped into a harness around his waist. He turned it so Theo could see the screen. “Each of these dots represents an animal I have implanted with a tracking chip. Here’s their location at 1 A.M.” He clicked a key and the screen drew a topographical map of the area. Green dots were scattered pretty much evenly along the creek bed and the business district of Pine Cove.
Gabe hit another key. “Now here they are at two.” All but a few of the dots had moved into the ranchland east of Pine Cove.
“Uh-huh,” Theo said. Gabe was a nice guy. Spent too much time with vermin, but he was a nice guy. Gabe needs to talk to humans occasionally, Theo thought.
“Well, don’t you see? They all moved at once, except for these ten over here that moved to the shore.”
“Uh-huh,” Theo said. “Gabe, the Texaco blew up. A guy was killed. I was talking to firemen in space suits all day. Every paper in the county has called me. The battery is almost out on my cell phone. I haven’t eaten since yesterday and I only slept an hour last night. Help me find the significance in rat migration, okay?”
Gabe looked crestfallen. “Well, I don’t know the significance yet. I’m tracking the ten that didn’t move east, hoping the anomalies will give a clue to the behavior of the larger group. Strange thing is, four of the ten disappeared off my screen a little after two. Even if they were killed, the chips should still transmit. I need to find them.”
“And I wish you the best of luck, but this area may still be dangerous. You can’t be here, buddy.”
“Maybe there were fumes,” Gabe said. “But that doesn’t explain why they all moved in the same direction. Some even came through this area from the shore.”
Theo couldn’t bear to express to Gabe how little he cared. “You had any dinner, Gabe?”
“No, I’ve been doing this since last night.”
“Pizza, Gabe. We need pizza and beer. I’ll buy.”
“But I need to…”
“You’re a single guy, Gabe. You need pizza every eighteen hours or you can’t function properly. And I have a question to ask you about footprints, but I want you to watch me drink a few beers before I ask so I can claim diminished capacity. Come, Gabe, let me take you to the land of pizza and beer.” Theo gestured to his Volvo. “You can stick the antenna out the sunroof.”
“I guess I could take a break.”
Theo opened the passenger door and Skinner leapt into the car, leaving sooty paw prints on the seat. “Your dog needs pizza. It’s the humane thing to do.”
“Okay,” Gabe said.
“I want to show you something over by the creek bed.”
“What.”