Stray Fears - Gregory Ashe Page 0,28
her age was twenty-four. After all the shit with . . . with Mason, I couldn’t sleep. I found the 1930 census. I did the math. She was fucking twenty-three years old, Kade. They just got it wrong on the report.”
Kade let out a groan. “Why would someone want to kidnap and possibly kill twenty-three-year-old women?”
I shook my head. “Hey, where’s the stuff on Elien?”
Kade was off someplace else.
“Kade, hey. The stuff on Elien Martel?”
“There isn’t any stuff on Elien Martel.”
I shook my head again. “He’s twenty-two, maybe twenty-three, lives in DuPage Parish. Boyfriend’s name is Richard. He drives a Lexus.”
“You want to know how many Elien Martel’s I found in the state of Louisiana?”
“I know there’s at least one.”
“Three. One of them is ninety years old in a nursing home in Baton Rouge. One of them is forty-six and is currently fighting the good fight to get his workman’s comp claim processed in Lake Charles. The other is sixty-three, gayer than Cher, and operates the Purple Love Rhino Personal Pleasure Palace in a suburb of Alexandria.”
“That’s probably him,” I said.
Kade rolled his eyes.
“I need that stuff on him, Kade.”
“Ok, well, he doesn’t exist. Get me another name, and I’ll dig up whatever I can.”
“Yeah,” I said, slumping down in the vinyl banquette. “Ok.”
“Sorry, man.”
“No problem,” I said. “I guess you’ll just have to get the check.”
ELIEN (5)
New Orleans and La Louisiane: Chorography, Ethnology, and the Native Episteme was not the page turner that its title promised it would be. After my fourth attempt to get through a chapter on a myth about a great flood that sounded real shades-of-Noah’s-Ark, I switched over to Sneaky, Scary, Bump in the Night, which had cool illustrations and a kickass chapter on mummies and canopic jars, but didn’t give me any clues about a blue firefly monster native to Louisiana.
When I finished Sneaky, Scary, Bump in the Night, I looked around for Kennedy. She’d gotten me this far—maybe I could hire her as a research assistant or something, with assistant being my very loose term for the person who did all the work and then gave me a nice, one-paragraph summary. But Kennedy was reading to a group of preschoolers, and when I tried to catch her attention by holding New Orleans and La Louisiane: Chorography, Ethnology, and the Native Episteme over my head, she gave me a dismissive wave and went back to reading.
I picked up the gay vampire book—vampires were already kind of gay, but this one was uber gay—and read for a while. My brain kept going back to the monster. A part of my brain registered the way that sounded and pointed out, kindly, that there was no such thing as monsters and, even more kindly, I probably just needed Zahra to write me another scrip. But part of me wasn’t ready to let go. I had seen that blue light in Mason’s eyes. I had seen it drift out of his mouth after he had died. I had seen it in Ray’s apartment, and I had seen it in Ray’s eyes too. I had dreamed it in Gard’s eyes, and now I wondered if the dream was more than a dream. So much of what I remembered from that night was fractured. Classic symptom of PTSD: the inability to integrate sensory input, especially from the traumatic event. I remembered the creak of the boards. I remembered the smell of fried catfish. I remembered the cold air against my legs. But blue fire in Gard’s dead eyes? Christ, I didn’t know. It was in the dream, wasn’t it?
What I needed was a specialist. Like somebody who specialized in monsters, the way some scientists specialized in bugs or birds or whatever the hell else you could imagine. Even better, I needed someone who could get rid of this damn thing. Kind of like the ghostbusters. Combined with a pest exterminator.
Actually, that wasn’t a bad idea.
Setting aside the gay vampire book—the lucky bloodsucker was currently getting ferociously mounted by his vampire sire, along with getting a few languid poundings and masterly invasions, which might have been the title of a sci-fi special on TV—I pulled out my phone and searched for monster hunters. I mostly got books and a few cuckoo websites. Then I searched again for monster hunters real. That didn’t turn up much except for a few blogs praising a company called Critter Catchers. I found their website, and they actually looked legit. They sounded great, in fact, except