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  Then his car was speeding off, leaving me feeling empty inside.

  This was going to take more work than I’d thought.

  chapter 7

  * * *

  The Big Chump

  I was in my room when Heffa came in. I heard her heavy tread on the stairs and her bedroom door bang shut. Probably the neighbors did, too. My daughter Heffa has many fine qualities, but daintiness ain’t one of them. The clock on the bedside table read 7:00 a.m., so either she’d been serious about working a newspaper route, or she’d been out all night. I figured the latter, and I’d damn sure quiz her about it later, but I wasn’t rattled, yet. Heffa was a sensible kid, and Spatula was mostly a pretty safe town. Mostly.

  Where ‘mostly’ leaves off, that’s where I come in. Chump Lump at your service – Spatula’s premier (and only) private detective. Now, I know that parents in books like this usually get shoved into the background, where we ‘watch the game’ and occasionally interrupt to fret about our kids, but we do have day jobs, and mine’s not a pretty one. Heffa’s so wrapped up in Teddy, she hasn’t spotted that there’s a lot more going down in Spatula than the rain.

  Stephfordy and I figured I could show you another side of our fair town. If you’re mainly into the pining and across-the-grave romance, you’d better watch out. It’s about to get pretty hard-boiled around here; you might not be able to take the pace. Don’t say I didn’t warn you …

  The familiar smell of the woods greeted me as I left the house. Usually, the odor of damp mulch was as welcome as an old friend with a six-pack, but this morning the hairs on the back of my neck prickled. I felt like something was wrong, like it wasn’t just the leaves and bark that were decaying, like maybe Spatula itself had gone rotten overnight. I tried to shrug the feeling off as I climbed into the cab of my 4x4, but it was no good.

  I drove slowly through the center of town towards the diner, trying to reassure myself that everything was as it should be. Main Street was just waking up, and here and there people were ambling towards the start of their day. Joseph Kelledy was hosing the sidewalk in front of his butcher’s shop; and in the lot of the Economart a clerk was drowsily rounding up the stray shopping carts. But then, just as I was starting to relax, something out of place on the wall of the hardware store up ahead caught my eye.

  I slammed on the brakes and sprinted across the street to investigate, hardly able to credit what I was seeing. No doubt about it, though: it was graffiti. A ghoulish, blue-green face stared out at me, teeth bared and eyes bulging hungrily. Below this gruesome noggin, emaciated arms with claw-like hands seemed to reach out towards me, and below them was a scrawled slogan, which declared: ‘Zombies Will Rule.’

  My guts twisted tighter, and I hoped they were just telling me to skip breakfast. I stepped forward to get a closer look, and my boot sent something hollow and metallic rattling across the alley. I bent down to pick it up. A spray can, ‘pustulant green’, still warm. The paint on the wall was still wet, too – I must have just missed the scum that did this, dammit.

  I looked again at the zombie’s twisted visage. Sure, it was crudely painted, and that bugged my sense of aesthetics. It was also a crime, and that made my trigger finger twitch. There was something else beyond the obvious, too. That message: ‘Zombies Will Rule.’ In my experience, graffiti tends to be in the present tense, and declarative – ‘Metallica Rule’, ‘Go Panthers’, ‘Piper is a Slut’, that kind of thing – but this was in the future tense. It stank, but there was nothing else to learn from gawking at it.

  I drove to my office, trying to make sense of the morning’s events. Business had been slow recently; people in Spatula tended to be law-abiding and faithful to their spouses, which made it tough to earn a living as a private dick. As I feared, there was no post and no messages on the machine. Sometimes, I regretted leaving the force, but at least I didn’t have that pencil-necked twerp of a D. A. bawling me out every time a suspect mysteriously showed up full of holes and floating face down in the river.

  I flicked idly through the Gundersen file on my desk; that ought to be worth a few clams while I worked the angles, and hell, I might even be able to find the kid. Robert Gundersen was an honors student who’d got mixed up with drugs. He hadn’t been seen for two weeks. He was probably five states away by now, but at least Mrs. G was paying my expenses while I went through the motions. I tossed the file back on the desk. It was too early to start visiting the kind of places where I might pick up his trail, and the graffiti was still bugging me. Zombies Will Rule?

  I spent the rest of the day making phone calls, tapping up old contacts for info, twisting the arms of reluctant public-relations people and generally making a nuisance of myself. Reverend Jones, Pastor Zennfor and Monsignor D’Agnello all claimed that their respective graveyards were as full as ever. The army categorically denied testing any experimental nerve gases in Spatula this week. NASA reported that none of their satellites had returned to Earth covered in alien diseases: ‘All safely in orbit and accounted for.’ The Institute of Pointlessly Hazardous Research was as cagey as always, but finally admitted that the Nutcase virus was tucked up safe and sound in a rhesus monkey. I even called Colin Blunstone in London, England, but apparently it wasn’t the time of the season to answer stupid questions.

  There it was: no zombies, nor any meddlesome human activity likely to lead to their creation. I had nothing, but sometimes nothing was the hand life dealt you, and when that happened, you just had to punch the dealer in the face and go get another drink. Time to forget about the graffiti and go out and earn my pay. I grabbed the Gundersen file and my hat, and headed out the door, on my way to Skanktown to find me some scum.

  If there’s one thing Skanktown wasn’t short of, it was alleys and dark corners. Two hours in, all I’d encountered was Joseph Kelledy out for a midnight stroll and several courting couples whose coitus I’d well and truly interrupted. I was passing by the Film-O-Rama, about to call it a night, when a kid stumbled out of the alleyway in front of me.

  I put out a hand to steady him, but the ungrateful scumbag barely seemed to register my presence – just sneered and weaved onwards, humming some dirge of a tune. I wasn’t sure what he was on, but I figured it wasn’t anything you’d get from a registered pharmacist.

  The alley was dark, and not exactly inviting, but I’d been in my share of dark places before now. I checked my gun had a round in the chamber, and headed in. A silhouetted figure separated itself from the shadows up ahead, but before I could get close enough for a decent look, I heard a noise behind me.

  I spun round, just in time to see a length of lead pipe coming at my face. I stepped to the side and lashed out with my fist, feeling the satisfying crunch of teeth rearranging themselves in my assailant’s mouth. The scream of pain suggested that he’d reconsidered his bushwhacking career and wouldn’t be pursuing it in the immediate future. So I turned back towards the silhouetted figure, drawing my gun and holding it by my side as I approached.

  The figure took a step back into the small pool of light that trickled down from a second-storey window. He was a youngish guy, early twenties I guessed, and dressed totally in black. Black hair, too – a dye job – and black eyeliner. Not my style, but it nicely emphasized the terror in his eyes as I shoved the gun in his face.

  ‘Sh-sh-shit, man, you killed Donny,’ he exclaimed, somewhat unnecessarily.

  I moved the conversation on. ‘You’ve got precisely five seconds to tell me everything you know about Robert Gundersen. Start talking or I’ll hurt you so bad it’ll make what Donny got look like a trip to Disneyland.’

  He paused for long enough that I started thinking about which finger to bust first, then blurted out: ‘I just sold him the stuff, man, the shit was right, he just couldn’t take it. Little fuckin’ crybaby. I told him, in a few weeks’ time, none of it’s going to mean a thing, after The Reshuffle we …’

  He stopped, clasping his hand to his mouth, which I took as a clear sign that there was mo
re to say. I gave him a close-up of my .44.

  ‘What’s your name, kid?’

  ‘B-Boz. Boz Pogue. Please, man, don’t kill me. I was just doing what The Mistress told me!’

  Figured a dame would be mixed up in it somewhere. ‘I don’t like you, Boz, and I don’t like your business. What kind of muck are you peddling, huh?’

  ‘P-pills, in my pocket. I swear, it’s nothing bad.’

  I’d be the judge of that. I reached into his pocket. The baggie was slightly sticky, and filled with pills that were embossed with some kind of symbol; looked like a jar. It wasn’t anything I recognized, and I wasn’t about to try them out.

  ‘Spill,’ I snarled.

  ‘It’s just something to take the edge off,’ the low-life whined. ‘Ya know, when you just wanna stop caring so much …’

  He stopped talking as I shoved him against the wall. I knew what he meant now, and I was pissed. Port D’Angerous had been buzzing with talk of this new narcotic; I’d never guessed it had reached Spatula. Guess you learn something new every day, even when the news is bad – and, given the number of pills in my hand, the news was about as bad as it got.

  I was holding roughly a grand’s worth of pure, pharmaceutical-grade Emo. Very heavy shit. It wasn’t the same as other drugs; it didn’t mellow you out or ‘take the pain away’ – not yours, anyway. Instead, it took everyone else’s pain away, made you feel like you were the center of the universe, the only person whose emotions had any meaning. At the same time, there was this amazing, transcendental sense of self-importance. I couldn’t guess why anyone would want to feel that way, but I’d never understood the appeal of heroin, soccer or Abba either, so maybe I just wasn’t the experimenting type.

  ‘Where’d you get the stuff, huh? Who’s your supplier?’

  ‘I dunno, I never met him! The Mistress set it up. They call him The Bear, that’s all I know.’

  ‘And where might I find this Bear character?’

  ‘Duh, man, where do you think bears keep their shit?’

  I didn’t much like his tone, but at that point he rabbited, taking off at speed down the alley. Damned if I was going to let my only lead get away. I fired twice and he fell. Believe me, I didn’t like to ice the guy, but it was that or chase him, and I wasn’t wearing my running shoes. He was lying face up, still breathing, but from the look of it not for much longer.

  ‘Don’t … matter …’ he gasped out. ‘Death won’t … keep me down … for ever.’

  I waited for any more backchat, but he was gone. I pocketed the baggie, and walked quickly back to the car, pondering his penultimate words. Where do bears keep their shit? Then it dawned on me. Where else? Time to check out the woods.

  They must have been following me from the moment I’d left the alley. I had one hand on the door handle when I heard the footsteps coming up behind. Then there was a blinding pain behind my left ear, and I felt the pressing need to become better acquainted with the sidewalk. The gloom turned to black as I passed out.

  *

  I could hear a faint voice calling to me as if from a great distance. Its tone was demanding and far from friendly, so I decided to stay down in the dark where I was. A slap in the face changed my mind, and I hesitantly opened my eyes.

  I was in what looked like a wooden cabin, with a fire burning in the hearth and an oil lamp flickering on the desk. My eyes didn’t respond well to the light, and I closed them again. The bump on the back of my head began to throb in sympathy. I heard a strange voice then, like that of a gruff, angry child.

  ‘So you’re awake, finally? You caused me plenty trouble, Mister Lump.’

  I aimed my head where I thought the voice was coming from, and opened my eyes again. On the corner of the desk sat a small yellow bear, his muzzle contorted into an expression that was not at all cheerful. He was wearing a red shirt that rode up over his somewhat ample belly, and his short legs dangled halfway to the floor. Either Mrs. Lump raised dumb kids, or this was The Bear.

  I took a moment to assess the situation before responding. One wall of the cabin was covered with shelving, and the shelves were filled with row upon row of honey jars. I couldn’t see any doors – they must be behind me. As for yours truly, I was tied to a wooden chair with my hands behind my back, so I was going to have to talk my way out of this one. Here goes nothing.

  ‘Well, Mr. Bear, I can only apologize, I’m sure I never meant to—’

  ‘Stow it, you lousy shamus. I’m all set up with a sweet deal, see? I’m getting the Emo for next to nuthin’, and selling it for more honey than you ever saw in your life. The kids want it, and I got it. All I got to do is make sure they stay hooked for a few more weeks. And no stupid flatfoot is going to put the kibosh on it, see? We took care of Gundersen, Mr. Lump, so don’t you bother about him.’

  ‘Well, in that case my investigation is as good as over – I’ll just go and tell Mrs. Gundersen that her son skipped town, and we’ll say no more about it. How about that?’

  He waved his paw in my face angrily. ‘You think I’m stupid or something, you sneaky punk? It ain’t that simple no more, see? You killed my dealers, and you took my stuff. The Mistress didn’t like that one bit. She didn’t like that, and she doesn’t like you.’

  He leaned closer, and his jaws parted in a conspiratorial grin. ‘In fact, she told me to ice ya, waddaya think about that, shamus?’

  I thought that sounded mighty unpleasant, but I didn’t count myself out of the running just yet. If I was going to go, I was going to have my say first. I leaned back in the chair to meet The Bear’s gaze head on.

  ‘I think that you and your boss can cram it up your ass, short-stuff. I know all about your drugs and how they mess up the lives of innocent kids who just wanted to spend a little time wallowing in their misery. Sure, you’re making plenty of dough, but how much honey can one bear eat? You’re plenty tubby already, if you ask me. Go ahead and ice me if you gotta, I’d die a hundred times to protect kids like my daughter Heffa from twisted little freaks like you.’

  That seemed to hit him where it hurt. He recoiled in shock as if I’d actually socked him one.

  ‘Heffa? Heffa Lump?’ He leaped up onto the desk and screamed at the top of his strange little voice. ‘I told them, I told them she was real, but they didn’t believe me!’

  He started to laugh in triumph, and I saw my opportunity. I raised my legs to brace myself against the desk. With my right foot I kicked out at The Bear, sending him and the oil lamp tumbling from the desk. At the same time, I pushed back with my left leg, and my chair crashed backwards to the floor. The thing must have been fifty years old if it was a day, and it broke apart just like I’d figured it would.

  I could feel heat on my face. The oil lamp had smashed and set the cabin’s musty rug on fire. The flames cut the room in two, and I could see The Bear on the other side, waddling over to the shelves that contained his precious honey jars. He lifted one, but then didn’t seem to know what to do with it. He looked around for an exit, and finding none, hefted the jar at me.

  ‘Damn you, Chump Lump, you couldn’t let a bear make a little honey, could ya? It ain’t fair, all I ever wanted to be was a grown-up character!’

  ‘Well, congratulations, then,’ I shouted back. ‘You made it. This is what happens to the bad guys in adult fiction!’

  The flames were forcing me back towards the door. If I was going to get out of here, it had to be now. The Bear’s fur was starting to singe and smolder, but before I lost sight of him in the smoke and flames, I swear I saw a hint of a contented smile spread across his yellow muzzle.

  Safely outside, I slumped to the ground to catch my breath, and stayed to watch the cabin burn until the roof caved in. No one was coming out of there. As far away from town as we were, the smoke had surely alerted the authorities, so best if I wasn’t around when they showed up. Looked like Lady Luck had smiled on me just this once – my car was parked at the edge of the clearing, and I dragged myself into the driver’s s
eat.

  The clock in the car told me it was late afternoon now; I’d been unconscious for most of the day. I drove back into town, not sure of the route, but following whichever trails led downhill until eventually I hit the highway.

  It had been a long and mostly baffling thirty-six hours, and I was looking forward to some well-earned downtime. I might not be any richer than I was yesterday, but at least the Emo ring was broken up for now, and no other kids would be ending up like little Bobby G.

  That made me think about Heffa. I was proud that I’d made Spatula a bit safer for her – and proud of her, too. She was a good kid, bright and sensible and just as pretty as her faithless mother. After cheating death a few times since I last saw her, I figured I should take the opportunity to tell her how I felt – while I still could.

  I pulled up outside the house and rushed inside, my heart brimming over with love for my only daughter. She was in the hall when I came in.

  ‘Heffa …’ I began, my voice on the edge of tears.

  ‘Oh, hi Dad!’ she said from the foot of the stairs. ‘There’s a casserole on the stove and the game’s just about to start on TV. I’ve got trigonometry homework to do in my room, see you tomorrow, bye!’

  I stood alone in the hallway. Dames.

  chapter 8

  * * *

  going deeper

  After the magical night when Teddy had exposed himself to me completely, I had expected everything to change. I slept cheerily through the whole day and night following, my dreams full of slow-motion kisses, eye contact, and contact of other, more tangible things. Yet the day afterwards, Teddy didn’t show up to see me once! It was most perplexing, and not at all what I’d expected from someone who was totally my boyf now. By the evening I was disconsolate, and rather confused about why two days had passed in the space of a paragraph. Didn’t Stephfordy usually go into more detail about my inner pain?