Monster (7 page)

It sucked.

She held her breath and ventured into her apartment. It was in shambles. In the three minutes or so that the trolls had been trapped behind that door, they had gnawed and broken every stick of furniture. The carpet was torn to shreds, and chunks of drywall were missing. Translucent, slimy troll droppings covered the floors, walls, and ceilings. Judy stepped in something wet and sticky.

It was the remains of the apartment manager. There wasn’t much left. Just a few bones, a red stain, and some pieces of meat that had gone uneaten. She very deliberately forced herself to not take pleasure in that. It wasn’t easy. Even though he’d made her life hell for months, her moral side knew he didn’t deserve to die, but her emotional core wasn’t willing to cooperate. She compromised by feeling just a little good about it, then feeling guilty about feeling good.

She picked her way through the apartment to her bedroom. Along the way she had to take in a breath, and the stench nearly caused her to black out. She considered turning back, but she’d gone this far.

Her nightstand had been devoured, but by some gracious nicotine miracle, a pack of cigarettes had survived. They had some slime on them, but not enough to deter her. She exited the apartment and gasped for air.

“Hey, Jude,” said Paulie. “Since you’re up, maybe you wanna come over to my place and watch a movie?”

“No, thanks. I’m not really in the mood.”

“Cool.” He stuck his hands in his pockets and nodded. He stood there with a blank look on his face. He could stand like that for up to fifteen minutes at a time. She’d clocked him once.

The cops had arrived, but they weren’t regular cops. Their cars and uniforms were red. There were two squad cars and four officers. Two were questioning Monster. A third was surveying the parking lot. The fourth approached Judy.

“The Reds. Damn.” Paulie turned his back to the cop and whispered to Judy. “If they ask, you don’t know nothing about that mandrake root I got in my closet. And I was holding it for a friend anyway.”

“Yeah. Sure.” She shook the slime off a cigarette (arbitrarily and very consciously deciding it was merely drool and not one of the many other possible bodily fluids a troll might excrete), stuck it in her mouth, and fished around for a match.

The cop in red did some quick gestures with her hand, and a tongue of fire danced on her fingertip. Judy used it to light her cig.

“Thanks.”

“Those things will kill you, ma’am,” said the cop. “Thanks for the tip,” Judy replied absently.

If the cop recognized the sarcasm, she failed to acknowledge it. She was a dark-haired giant with a muscular swagger and a scar on her lip. She reminded Judy of a less pretty, more realistic version of Wonder Woman. Judy studied the badge, a seven-pointed star wrapped in a hexagon, on the Amazon’s chest. Her name tag read m. goodday. The cop put her hands on her hips and pulled her wraparound sunglasses down to the end of her nose. One of her eyes was ice blue. The other was a solid scarlet orb.

“Are you Miss Judy Hines?” Her voice was smooth and delicate.

Judy nodded.

Goodday flipped a notebook open. She wrote something down and wasn’t looking at Paulie as she asked, “And you are, sir?”

He held up his hands. “I’m nobody. I didn’t see nothing. I was in my apartment the whole time.” He jammed his hands deep into the pockets. “I think I left some rice on the stove. I gotta go check it. See you, Jude.” He skipped away. Goodday lowered her head and watched him go from under her hat brim.

“Would you please relate to me your recollection of the events, Miss Hines?” said Goodday.

Judy puffed on her cigarette. “Sure. There were these trolls and this… uh… big red thing. I think they called it a codger.”

“Kojin,” corrected Goodday. “So there were these things,” said Judy, “and they came out of my closet and ate the apartment manager. Guy was a dick, but that doesn’t really make it right.”

It was slipping away. She struggled to find her focus. “Shit, I can’t remember the rest.”

Goodday waved the fingers of her right hand in a small circle and poked Judy in the forehead. “Is that better, ma’am?”

The memories snapped back into sharp and perfect clarity. The details spilled from her lips in a steady stream, almost against her will. It was like recapping a movie she’d just seen that she wasn’t particularly interested in. It took a few minutes. Goodday wrote it down without a single note of personal interjection.

“In your opinion, ma’am,” asked the officer, “did Mr. Dionysus behave in a responsible manner?”

“Who?”

Goodday gestured over her shoulder at Monster. “Mr. Dionysus, the freelance cryptobiological rescue agent. Did he perform in a negligent manner?”

“You mean because of that guy getting eaten? I guess he’s not responsible for that. If the moron had listened, he’d probably be alive still.” Judy mulled it over. “No, it wasn’t Mr. Dionysus’s fault. Not really.”

Goodday snapped her notebook shut and marched away. Judy wasn’t sure if the interview was over, so she stuck around and smoked three more cigarettes while watching the Reds do their job. They talked to Monster for half an hour, then waved wands around the overturned van and parking lot.

Monster walked over and sat on the car beside her. “Thanks,” he said. “For telling them it wasn’t my fault. Can’t really afford more demerits on my license.”

“No problem.” She caught him staring at the pack of cigarettes on the car. “I’d offer you one, but I’ve only got eight left.”

“It’s all right. I quit.” He glanced at the ruins of her apartment. The Reds were inside, using a staff dangling with charms to do some forensic work. “Sorry about your place.”

She shrugged. “Sorry about your van.”

She rubbed her temples. “It’s the memory enhancement,” said Monster. “It’ll give you a helluva headache in another twenty minutes.”

Judy slouched and grumbled.

The Reds continued doing all that weird stuff that Judy didn’t understand. They walked around the parking lot swinging pendulums, drew more runes, and took reports. It took two hours for them to finish, and in the meantime, Judy and Monster had to wait.

They didn’t talk.

The Reds had Monster and Judy sign some papers and told them they could go.

“Is there somewhere we can reach you, ma’am?” asked Officer Goodday. “In case it’s decided this incident needs further investigation.”

Judy cast a look at her ruined apartment. Everything she owned in the world (admittedly, not much) was gone. Except for her car. She gave them her sister’s phone number, not because she would be staying there. It was just easier.

Since his van was ruined, Monster was going to call a cab. But Judy offered him a ride. She knew that as soon as this night was over, she’d forget it. She wanted to hold on to it as long as possible. And having a purple guy in her passenger seat and a talking piece of paper in the back helped to keep her focused.

“How long have you been doing this?” she asked. “Four years.”

“Do you like it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Sometimes. It’s okay.”

“How’d you get into it?” she asked.

Monster was beginning to regret not calling that cab. “A girl,” he said. “When I was getting my rune degree there was this chick in my Basics of Alchemy class. She was so fucking hot. I mean…”

His voice trailed off wistfully as he closed his eyes and chuckled to himself. After a minute, Judy forced a cough to bring him back.

“Sorry.” He grinned. “I mean, she had the sweetest tits you’ve ever seen. And talk about an ass. Oh, man. And she could do this thing with her hand that—”

“Yeah,” interrupted Judy. “That’s great, but I really don’t need to hear about it.”

“But it was this trick, see? She’d curl her fingers like this and—”

She threw a disinterested glance his way, and Monster got the hint.

“So she was hot,” he continued. “I mean, this girl was way out of my league. But she had this thing for cryptos. Wanted to become a vet. So I enrolled in some cryptobiology classes, trying to impress her.”

“Did it work?”

“We dated for about a year. Then she decided she wanted to be a corporate enchantress. Said I didn’t have any ambition other than to watch TV and drink beer. We broke up. I didn’t feel like starting a new major, so I stuck with it. And here I am.”

“Do you like it?”

“Pays for my beer and cable. Usually.”

His attitude annoyed her. She was stuck in a world of drudgery and more drudgery with a little slogging and grinding thrown in on occasion. Maybe the world he lived in was much the same, but at least it had dragons in it.

“Can anyone do it?” she asked. “Catch monsters?”

“Okay, first of all,” he said, “I am not a monster catcher. I’m a freelance cryptobiological rescue agent. And no, not everyone can do it. You have to have a license.”

“How does someone get one of those?”

“There’s a test. You’d never pass it.”

Judy frowned. “I’m pretty smart. How hard could it be?”

Monster tapped his temple. “In twenty minutes, you won’t even remember how to capture a kojin.”

“Sure I will.”

“Okay. How?”

Judy hadn’t the faintest idea. She wasn’t even sure what a kojin was. Something big, she thought. Red, maybe. Or black.

“It’s not your fault, Miss Hines,” said Chester from the backseat.

“What I want to know,” she said, “is how all those trolls got into my closet in the first place.”

“That’s for the commission to determine exactly,” said Chester. “But in cases such as this, it’s usually just a spatial fold.”

“Like a wormhole?” she asked.

Monster and Chester chuckled.

“What’s so funny?” she asked.

“Nothing,” replied Monster.

“No, really.

What’s so damn funny?”

“Nothing. Just, there’s no such thing as wormholes. Science-fiction bullshit.” Monster laughed. “Wormholes.”

They passed the rest of the ride in silence. She turned up the radio and took account of her life. Nearly everything she owned had been eaten and excreted by trolls. Tonight she’d be working at a job she didn’t care about with people she didn’t like doing things that really didn’t matter for barely enough money to pay her rent. Except now she didn’t have rent. Upside in everything.

She pulled the car in front of Monster’s house. “Thanks for the ride.” Monster, lugging the kojin stone, and Chester got out of the car and waited for her to pull away.

She started the car but sat there for a moment, still thinking.

Monster leaned in to the window. “Sorry about your apartment and your clothes and your furniture and… everything.”

Judy, lost in thought, stared absently out the windshield. Monster fumbled for some other polite phrase, finally settled on a halfhearted “Take care now,” and turned toward his house.

“Are you going monster hunting tonight?” she asked. “I mean, cryptobiological rescuing?”

He answered without turning back. “Not tonight.”

He took a step away from the car. “Why not?” she asked. “Because I’ve had a hell of a day, and I just want to go home, watch TV, drink some beer, have sex with my girlfriend, and call it a night.”

“Uh-huh. I was thinking maybe it was because you didn’t have a van anymore because the koja ate it.”

“Kojin,” he corrected. “Whatever. So do you have a car?”

There was always Liz’s car. He could borrow that if he had to. If he got so much as a ding in the fender, she’d probably rip out his soul and eat it. He’d seen her do that once to some guy who cut her off on the freeway, though really she didn’t eat the whole thing. Soul went straight to her hips, so she’d just taken a small bite out of it before giving it back. But Monster figured it would be better not to risk it.

“Because if you don’t have a car,” said Judy, “you can borrow mine. If you wanted to.”

Monster handed off the kojin stone to Chester. The paper gnome wrinkled under the weight.

“What’s the catch?” asked Monster. “No catch. You just have to take me along while you work. That’s all.”

“I can’t drag you around while I’m on the job. This is dangerous business. Every night I go out there, I’m taking my life into my hands. It’d be irresponsible. You wouldn’t last the night. You’d get eaten or petrified or dissolved, and I’d lose my license.” He shook his head and waved his arms to emphasize the point. “Thanks but no thanks.”

Judy jumped out of her car. “You owe me.”

“I owe you?” He barked a single, harsh laugh. “Lady, because of you my van was trashed, I nearly got devoured by trolls, and I almost lost my license.”

“Almost,” said Judy. “You
almost
lost your license, but you didn’t. And you didn’t because I told the Rubes—”

“Reds,” corrected Chester. “Yeah, those guys,” said Judy. “The guys who would’ve already taken away your license if I hadn’t lied and said you weren’t responsible for what happened.”

“She did kind of get you out of a jam,” said Chester.

“Okay, forget it,” she said. “Sorry I asked.”