“I’m just way happy to see you, ” he said.
Then he held up a serious handgun.
“Smith & Wesson Model 29.”
“This is definitely not a barn raising.”
“Exactly what is it? ”
“Somebody took Lilly Wing’s boy.”
“Who? ”
“Some abb, ” I said, meaning an abnormal type, a sleazeball.
“Woofy, ” he said, which is Australian surfer lingo for waves
contaminated by a sewage spill, but which has evolved other, related
meanings, none positive.
I said, “Boosted Jimmy right out of his bedroom, through a window.”
“So Lilly called you? ”
“I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, biking by right after
the abb did the deed.”
“How’d you get from there to here? ”
“Orson’s nose.” I told him about the abb, the kidnapper, whom I’d
encountered under the warehouse.
He frowned. “You said yellow eyes? ”
“Yellow-brown, I guess.”
“Shine-in-the-dark yellow? ”
“No. Brownish yellow, burnt amber, but the natural color.”
Recently, we’d encountered a couple of men in whom radical genetic
changes had occurred, guys in the process of becoming something more or
less than human, who appeared for the most part normal but whose
otherness was betrayed by brief but detectable flashes of animal
eye shine. These people are driven by strange, hateful needs, and they
are capable of extreme violence. If Jimmy was in the hands of one of
these, then the list of outrages to which he might be subjected was even
longer than the savageries that a standard-issue sociopath might have in
mind.
“You recognize this abb? ” I asked Bobby.
“You say about thirty, black hair, yellow eyes, built like a fireplug?”
“Neat little baby teeth.”
“Not my type.”
“I never saw him before, either, ” I said.
“Twelve thousand people in town.”
“And this isn’t a dude who’s a beachhead, ” I said, meaning we wouldn’t
have seen him hanging out with surfers. “So he could still be local and
we wouldn’t know.” For the first time all night, a breeze sprang up, a
gentle onshore flow that brought to us a faint but bracing scent of the
sea. In the park across the street, the oaks became conspiratorial,
plotting together in whispers.
Bobby said, “Why did this abb bring Jimmy here of all places? ”
“Maybe privacy. To do his thing.”
“I’d like to do my thing, Cuisinart the creep.”
“Plus the weirdness of this place probably feeds his dementia.”
“Unless it’s more directly connected to Wyvern.”
“Unless. And Lilly’s worried about the guy on the news.”
“What guy?”
“Kidnaps kids, locks them away. When he gets three or five or whatever
from one community, then he burns them all at once.”
“Stuff like this is why I don’t listen to news these days.”
“You’ve never listened to news.”
“I know. But I used to have different reasons.” Looking around at the
night, Bobby said, “So where would they be now?”
“Anywhere.”
“Maybe this is more anywhere’ than we can handle.” He hadn’t looked at
the rearview mirror recently, so I turned in my seat to check things out
behind us.
Bobby said casually, “Saw a monkey on the way in.” Taking the air
freshener off my ear and looping its string over the mirror again, I
said, “Just one? I didn’t know they traveled alone.”
“Me neither. I turned a corner in Dead Town, and there it was, run rung
across the street, caught in the headlights. This little freakin’ dude.
Not your ordinary evolutionary link, missing or otherwise.”
“Different? ”
“Maybe four feet tall.” Apparently, there were refrigeration coils in my
spine.
All the rhesuses we had seen thus far had been about two feet tall.
They were trouble enough. At four feet, they would constitute a
different magnitude of threat.
“Major head, ” Bobby said.
“What? ”
“Four feet tall, big head.”
“How big? ”
“I didn’t try to measure it for a hat.”
“Give me a guess.”
“Maybe as big as yours or mine.”
“On a four-foot body.”
“Top-heavy. And misshapen.”
“Grisly, ” I said.
“Hard-core grisly.” Bobby leaned forward over the steering wheel,
squinting through the windshield.
About a block away, something was moving. About the size of a monkey.