Lethal Control, page 12
part #3 of The DuPage Parish Mysteries Series
“You already said snarky.” He caught my hand and tugged me up. “Let’s go talk to those girls.”
“I’m going to borrow your mother’s wooden spoon. I’m going to spank your ass until you can’t sit down.”
“She has a million wooden spoons, so you’ll have to be more specific, and anyway, my parents would love that.”
“I’m the bitchy one. I’m the mean one. I’m the one who gets to undermine our relationship and be passive-aggressive and be—” I barely caught it in time.
“Snarky?” he asked as he led me out into the hall.
“Gloria,” I shouted toward the kitchen, “where do you keep the wooden spoons?”
“The ones for spanking Dagobert?” she called back. “Or for cooking?”
“She has two sets?” I whispered.
“Eli,” Hubert bellowed, “if you’re interested in a discipline kink, I printed off a very informative article. Apparently, the gays love discipline.”
“We do?” I whispered.
“We can compare notes!”
“You deserve that,” Dag told me. “You really do.”
After a quick stop to wash my face and check for any incipient monster changes, I joined Dag outside the guest room. I could hear Hubert asking Gloria where he’d put that printout.
“Hurry,” I said under my breath.
It might have been my imagination, but it seemed like Dag took extra long to knock on the door.
“Come in,” one of the girls said.
It was a small room, barely big enough for a queen-sized bed, a trestle table that had been pressed into service as a desk, and a hard-backed chair. The girls sat on their bed. It was clear that they’d showered, and both of them wore borrowed clothes. Lurnice, the younger, was rawboned, her skin tight and pink, and she had long, strawberry-blond hair that was straight and fine. She wore a sweatshirt that said simply SAUSAGE STUFFERS, INC. with a picture of an enormous, phallic sausage. Dutch, the older, had the same gossamer hair as her sister—er, daughter, maybe?—and the same prominent cheekbones and jaw. She had gotten a sweatshirt that showed a naked man’s behind, dusted with what I seriously hoped was powdered sugar but might have been cocaine, and the words SWEET CHEEKS—ALL NIGHT LONG.
“Good God,” I said.
“Please be nice to me,” Dag said.
“If your parents had been any less supportive, I honestly think you might have died from neglect.”
“I said be nice.”
The two women shared a look and then turned identical stares back on us.
“Mind if I sit?” I asked. Neither responded, so I sat in the hard-backed chair. Dag stood behind me, his hand warm and heavy on my shoulder. “We need to talk about Reb,” I said. “Where do you want to start?”
They shared another look. Dutch had a deep voice for a woman, but there was an unsteadiness in it as she asked, “What you said about pack, how did you—why did you say that?”
“Well, I don’t know. You were there, hiding. And it was obvious Reb chose that spot for a reason.”
“He chose it because he was sentimental,” Lurnice said. Dutch threw her a look, but Lurnice didn’t seem to notice. “It made him easy to track.”
Dutch turned her attention to me again. “What else?”
“I mean, you look like you could be related to Reb,” I said. “Your features, and the way you’re built. Although you don’t look like siblings, so maybe cousins? And there’s something about how you move.” I hesitated. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but it made me think of him, the way he moved. It’s not quite…human.”
Dutch and Lurnice shared another long look.
“He was trying to protect us,” Lurnice finally said quietly. She looked down, one hand playing with the stitching around the sausage on her shirt.
“Protect you from what?” Dag asked.
The silence stretched out—ten seconds, then twenty. Lurnice shifted on the bed, color seeping into her cheeks, while Dutch set her jaw and stared at a spot on the wall. As a connoisseur of lying, guilt, and shame, I could see that I was dealing with a couple of amateurs.
“You feel bad because he was trying to keep you safe from Nelda Pie and Joey Jaws, and instead, he got himself taken, is that it?” I made my voice as gentle as I could. “He saved all of us, you know, leading them away like that. That’s why we’re all alive right now.”
Dag’s fingers tightened on my shoulder. He bent, his mouth to my ear, and in his cop voice whispered, “Don’t answer the questions for them.”
“I’ve got this,” I whispered back.
“Why don’t you tell us what’s going on?” Dag asked as he straightened.
Dutch’s head swiveled toward us, her eyes glittering like a bird of prey’s. “You’re the ones who killed the hashok.”
I didn’t say anything, and neither did Dag.
“They’re supposed to live in the bayous,” she said. “In swamps and marshlands and wetlands. Did you know that?”
“We know,” Dag said. “These were different.”
“But didn’t you ever wonder why they were different?”
Lurnice looked up, surprise etched on her face before her features smoothed out again.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Why they changed their behavior? Did you ever ask yourself why?”
“Animals change their behavior for all sorts of reasons,” Dag said slowly. “Changes to the environment, usually. A disruption of their food source, climate change—” He stopped. In a different voice, he said, “Pressure from a new predator.”
Dutch held his gaze.
“Oh my God,” Dag said.
“What?” I asked. “What am I missing?”
“For creatures like us,” Dutch said, drawing a circle on the quilt, “the world is changing. And we have to change with it, or we will die.”
“The hashok was, like—what would you call it, Dag? An apex predator? Trust me, it didn’t have to change.”
“Apex predators do change their behavior,” Dag said, squeezing my shoulder in excitement. “Not often, but they do. Almost always, the behavioral modifications are because of human expansion and compromised ecosystems. Pressure from humans triggers a cascade of changes, starting with apex predators. You see it with wolves, for example, the way humans hunted them almost to extinction. And here, you’ve got hunters, right?”
“I don’t think—” I tried.
“Like Fen,” Dag said in a rush. “Apex predators are rare, relatively speaking, and their populations aren’t controlled by other predators. That means, on the one hand, they’ve got fewer antipredator adaptations than other species. And on the other hand, it means when humans start putting pressure on apex predators—either because they’re hunting them or because they’re disrupting their environment, destroying their habitats, etcetera—those predators start exhibiting prey-like responses. They adapt. The hashok, for example, started disguising themselves as people and hiding in human communities, which they’d never done before. In fact—” He stopped so quickly that in a cartoon, he would have gulped.
“In fact what?” I asked, twisting to look up at him.
He didn’t quite meet my eyes. “Those changes would have trickled throughout the entire ecosystem. So, you wouldn’t only see changes in the apex predators, like the hashok. You’d see changes in mesopredators and in prey species too.”
“Like the fifolet,” I said. “So, what? Humans have been living in Louisiana for hundreds of years. Why the change now?”
“There are more people now,” Dutch said.
“And weapons are better,” Dag said, “technology is better. There are fewer places to hide. But if I had to guess, I’d say it’s about Nelda Pie and Fen and people like them—people actively applying pressure to supernatural creatures. Nelda Pie wants to control them and use them. Fen wants to kill them. It amounts to the same thing: more direct, focused pressure from people with really powerful tools.”
I turned back to Lurnice and Dutch. Lurnice was staring at her sister/mom, and Dutch’s cheeks were pink as she studied the quilt.
“You still haven’t answered Dag,” I said. “What’s going on?”
Lurnice made a soft noise and pulled on her sweatshirt. Dutch grimaced.
“I asked you a question.” I sat forward. “Don’t sit there and ignore me.”
“We don’t know,” Lurnice said.
“Bullshit.”
“We don’t!” Dutch barked. Her head came up, and for a moment, an afterimage ghosted behind her: an impression of snapping jaws, a blood-flecked muzzle. It wasn’t like anything I’d seen around Reb, but then, I’d only been around Reb a couple of times, and then only briefly. A day before, I might have convinced myself it was my imagination, but now I wasn’t so sure. Her expression tightened, as though she were locking something down, and in a quieter voice, she said, “We don’t know what’s going on.”
“You don’t know why people are looking for Reb?” Dag asked.
They shook their heads.
“Do you know where he is?” Dag asked.
They shook their heads again.
“You’ve got to do better than that,” I said.
Dag squeezed my shoulder, and when I glanced back at him, he nodded to the hall.
“You can stay in your room and think about your choices, young ladies,” I said as Dag hustled me into the hall. “And you can come out when you’re ready to tell us the truth.” When Dag pulled the door shut, I said, “And you’re in trouble too. Spankings all around.”
“Eli.”
“They’re lying. Or they’re hiding something. Or both. They’re not even very good at it—you can tell they haven’t had time to make up a coherent story.”
“They’re scared. The person who was keeping them safe is gone, and they don’t know where he is or if he’s alive or who we are. We’re lucky they didn’t pop the screen out of the window and bolt.”
“Did you see when she just about attacked us? Even in the fight, Reb didn’t get like that; she must have been about to lose her mind.”
“I didn’t see anything except a couple of scared girls, Eli.” He hesitated. “When you say you saw something—”
“Don’t change the subject. What didn’t you want to tell me in there? Why did I practically hear brakes squealing as you tried to stop whatever was about to come out of your mouth?”
“It’s nothing. It’s something I read, and it doesn’t apply—”
“Dagobert, do not make me march you into that kitchen, sit you down in front of your parents, and describe to them, in excruciating detail, how considerate and gentle and tender you are as a lover.”
“You threaten that all the time.”
“I’m going to tell them about that time you stopped in the middle of riding me so you could fix the pillows.”
“Oh my God.”
“You were worried I was getting a crick in my neck.”
“You were getting a crick in your neck! And you cannot tell my parents that.”
“They’ll be so proud.”
He dry-washed his face and let out a long breath. When he dropped his hands, he had a line between his eyebrows. “Historically,” he said, “in a few, limited cases that I’ve read—”
“Spit it out, cowboy. That’s a line from the Western porno your mom and I are scripting, by the way.”
“I wasn’t kidding about running away. You’d never find me.”
“Dag!”
“One of the prey-behavior adaptations researchers have seen? In apex predators, I mean, in human-dominated areas? Hybridization.”
“Half-breeds,” I said. “Chimeras. Like me.”
“This is why I didn’t say anything. There are only a few examples—wolves and dogs are one—and that’s not necessarily applicable here. In fact, it’s actually a positive sign that non-lethal control methods—”
He stopped at whatever he saw on my face. Outside, a car with a blown muffler drove past, breaking the evening’s stillness. Dag rubbed my arm. I let him for a few minutes until I couldn’t stand it anymore and pulled away.
“What are we going to do now?”
“We’re going to rest,” Dag said. “We’re exhausted, and we’re not thinking clearly. We’ll spend the night, and in the morning, we’ll figure out what to do next.”
“What to do with the crazy monster hunter who’s after us? Or the crazy mobster? Or the crazy witch? Or the crazy wolfman? Wolfmen? Wolfpeople? What’s the non-sexist way of talking about wolfpeople?”
He held my eyes, and I broke first.
“I’m scared too,” he said, the words so low they barely reached me.
I nodded.
Instead of his bedroom, though, we headed toward the kitchen; I don’t think either of us was ready to try to sleep, and Dag’s parents would provide a welcome distraction. We found them both seated at the table, Gloria playing Candy Crush on her phone, Hubert on Prowler—after two years of this kind of thing, I barely even thought about the fact that it was a gay hookup app.
“What’s going on with those girls?” Hubert asked without looking up from the phone.
“They’re in trouble,” Dag said, taking ice cream from the freezer. “We’ll be out of here tomorrow.”
“Did Eli get one of them pregnant?” Gloria asked. Her phone chimed with some sort of victory, and she glanced up.
The ice cream thunked onto the counter. “Eli? Did Eli get one of them pregnant?”
“Twinks can be very assertive tops, son,” Hubert said. “Although Eli’s really more of a twunk these days.”
“Thank you, Hubert.”
“What about me?” Dag asked. “You’re not worried I got them pregnant?”
Hubert snorted. “That’d be the day.”
“Excuse me?”
Laying a hand on Hubert’s arm, Gloria wore a look of parental indulgence. “All right, dear. Did you or Eli—” She stressed you. “—get those girls pregnant?” Then she sat back, a hint of a smile on her lips at this triumphant moment in parenting history.
I pulled my sweatshirt over my face and tried not to die in my boyfriend’s parents’ kitchen.
That was when my phone buzzed. I worked it out of Dag’s giant-assed sweats, saw Kennedy’s name on it, and answered.
“We need to talk,” she said over my hello. “I think I know why he wanted the rougarou.”
DAG (6)
I’d grown up walking to the Fogmile branch of the DuPage Parish Library; it was half a mile from my parents’ house, and the neighborhood had always been quiet and residential and safe. We decided to walk tonight. Night had snuffed out the last bit of dusk, and the darkness was broken only by the streetlamps and the humidity-ringed smears of amber porch lights. The air had cooled, and even with my arm around him, Eli hugged himself and shivered. I could smell rain coming and the chill of the old concrete sidewalk and fresh-fallen leaves.
The library had been built sometime in the ’70s, with brick walls and skinny, floor-to-ceiling windows that made the inside bright and warm during the day. It was built into the side of a hill, and instead of the main entrance, we made our way down to the lower parking lot and entered there. This section of the library held classrooms and multipurpose rooms and the behind-the-scenes rooms where librarians did all the work that went into maintaining a library. We’d come here once on a field trip in third grade, and Patrick Westerman had pushed Marquel Hodge into a book truck and knocked it over because Marquel said Patrick had a pizza face, on account of all his freckles. Then we’d had to go back to school early.
“You don’t have to make that face,” Eli said. “I’m not going to get in trouble again.”
“No, I was thinking about—wait, when did you get in trouble?”
“I didn’t tell you? Remember last year, when Lanny attacked me in the parking lot? Well, before that, I’d been trying to get someone to help me find a book, only everyone was too busy, and I only needed a tiny bit of help, like five seconds—”
“Oh my God, you were the code 090.1167?”
“You heard about that? And you remember that dumbass code and number and everything?”
“Eli, they put it in the library newsletter—in the next four library newsletters, as a matter of fact. It’s all they could talk about. It was above the fold.”
“Why do you look so disappointed? It was a misunderstanding, and I think it was totally reasonable for me to want someone to help me—hey, hold on. You read the library newsletter?”
“My parents read the library newsletter,” I said. “Religiously. My mom called me when she read about the code 090.1167.”
“Why are you two still out here playing grab-ass?” Kennedy Sainte-Marie stood at the end of the hall, arms folded, offering a masterful example of the Pissed-Off Librarian. She was black, younger than I was but older than Eli, and stunning in a copper-colored blouse and dark jeans. “I told you to meet me in the bookbinding room.”
“Sorry—” Eli began.
“Are you sorry that you aren’t in the bookbinding room?” she asked. “Or are you sorry that you can’t read a sign that tells you this is the bookbinding room? Or are you sorry that you are once again fucking up my life in ways that go beyond the usual, day-to-day fuckups you create in both of my jobs?”
“Since I can’t tell if those were really questions—it got a bit shouty at the end—I’m going to go with, ‘Yes.’ No, wait, I changed my answer to ‘Maybe.’ No, sorry, I’ve got to stick with ‘Yes.’”
She did this little scream thing in her throat, which I’d gotten to hear a lot of times in the context of: a) books Eli had forgotten to return; b) books Eli had damaged (the most innocent reason was keeping them folded open to his favorite part, but there were others); and c) pretty much everything to do with the cemetery tours where Kennedy and Eli worked together. Then she stepped into the bookbinding room and shut the door.
“It’s a little-known fact that librarians are genetically incapable of slamming a door,” Eli said. “That gene got replaced by the gene that loves stamping things like date due cards. But you’ve got to give her credit for trying her best. She did manage to shut it very firmly.”
