it very interesting to me . . . although shady company dealings would not necessarily help Miranda Jekyll get a good divorce settlement.
Nevertheless, I wanted to find out what he’d been doing. Since I had no particular desire to wade through the mounds of piled garbage, I went to the man who might have some idea what Jekyll was up to.
The dump manager lived in his own single-wide house trailer parked in the foothills of the ever-changing debris landscape. The trailer had plywood for windows, sheet metal for an awning, and two old and bent folding lawn chairs so that he could sit outside and watch the rot.
After parking in the dirt clearing in front of the trailer, I climbed out of the Maverick and slammed the creaky car door. Three large flakes of rust broke off the driver’s side door and fell to the ground; rust was basically the only thing holding Robin’s car together. I knew what Sheyenne would have said: If Robin didn’t do so much work for free, Chambeaux & Deyer would be able to afford a decent company car. Maybe our cut from the Ricketts art auction would be enough to upgrade.
I called out, “Hey, Mel, you in there?” I heard movement inside the trailer, and the door swung wide open with a bang because one of the hinges was loose and the air-piston door stop had broken off.
A hulking zombie—one of the putrefying kind—stepped onto the front step, swayed, caught his balance, then got his other foot on solid ground. “Dan Chambeaux! How are you, bud?”
“Just great, Mel.” I don’t know how he could be so cheery with his body falling apart like that. “How’s life treating you?”
“Just as good the second time around as it was the first. Let’s see where karma takes me this time.”
I’ve mentioned Mel before: He was one of my very first cases, when his family hired me to find him, but then decided they didn’t want him back after all. Mrs. Saldana had helped Mel get his job as landfill manager, and he loved the work. I had stopped by to see him often over the years.
Sometimes on my visits he’d invite me inside, and we would sit, holding highball glasses filled with ginger ale—not because Mel couldn’t afford real booze, but because in life he’d been a recovering alcoholic. Even though dead, he didn’t want to fall off the wagon, just on general principles. On a bowed shelf above his sofa, sandwiched between two wooden bookends, was an array of old used paperbacks, self-help books that he read with great interest.
Now that I’d also come back from the grave, Mel and I had more in common. Seeing me, he reached out and pumped my hand. I cringed at his strength. “Careful, Mel! Don’t do any damage—it’s hard to fix.”
“Sorry, bud. I just like to have visitors. We zombies gotta stick together. We’re blood brothers—or we would be, if anything was still pumping.”
“I guess we’re embalming-fluid brothers.” He grinned at that. “I’ve got a few questions to ask you about a case. Maybe you could help me?”
“Feel free to ask anything, bud,” Mel said. “You already helped me out so much. It’s what friends do for each other.”
Before I could inquire about Harvey Jekyll, I heard a loud rustling from the garbage embankment. Bloated black plastic bags were nudged aside, and I saw a huge rodent with bright beady eyes tunneling its way out of the pile like a gigantic mole—a rat the size of a German shepherd.
“Holy crap, Mel! What is that thing?”
Mel whistled to the emerging rat and slapped the thighs of his stained pants. “Here, boy! Come on.” He was grinning. “That one’s Spot, I think. Or it could be Fido. The third one’s Rover. I haven’t named the other ones yet.”
“Other ones? How many are there?”
“It’s a dump, bud. There’s bound to be rats. And it’s a big dump, so why wouldn’t we expect big rats?”
The gargantuan rat waddled forward, enormously fat, no doubt because of all the garbage available to eat. Mel patted the brown bristly fur on its head, scratched behind the pink ears. The rat turned to regard me, snuffling, its whiskers twitching.
Two other enormous rodents followed the first out of the trash tunnel. Mel laughed and patted all three. “No, no treats for you today.”
I didn’t think monstrous mutated rats were an aftereffect of the Big Uneasy, but I couldn’t be sure. “This is . . . unsettling, Mel. Why