Chương 121: CDM 2, Chapter 57: Procrastination

I spent the day and the following night in a holding cell by myself. I was given a cup of water, a bag of potato chips, and a ham sandwich with stale bread. The one toilet was completely out in the open, and yeah, I could see the appeal of a Pittsburgh toilet as I sat there with no walls boxing me in. I vowed never to admit that to Nathan when I got out of this. If I got out of this. Having that much time alone in my head wasn't good for me. I tried to meditate. I tried to sleep.

I tried to play out dungeon crawls in my head. Anything to get my mind off of the fact that I was suspected of murder and could face the death penalty. Sometimes when I tell this story, people ask, "Why were you worried if you knew you were innocent?" Because when you're getting yanked out of your bed and smashed into the back of a cop car in the middle of the night, it's abundantly clear how little objective innocence matters.

Hearing them stack up of "evidence" that sounds bad on paper–like extensive internet searches about poison and explosives–makes that even more obvious. I didn't have to be guilty. I just had to look guilty. I could easily become one of those people who spends 2 decades in prison insisting that he was innocent before finally being set free. Or not ever getting set free. And I only sat there for a day and a half. I could imagine how desperate and cornered I might feel if I spent weeks waiting for a court date.

The death penalty? Will they go after Beth next? What other shit would they dig up that they could twist and use against me? An officer appeared at the door to my cell and unlocked it, sliding it open.

"You're free to go," he said begrudgingly, like he had already decided I didn't deserve to be released.

"Really?"

"Yes." He led me out to the lobby. Lisa, Beth, and Enforcer McDouglas waited for me. He wore a purple polo, the color of grape soda, beneath a black winter jacket. Beth jumped up and hugged me. She squeezed like she believed I could have been gone for good. That was true, in a way. Outside, it was snowing again.

"Thank you," I said to Lisa and then to McDouglas. Lisa smiled proudly.

"It's what I do. We've already secured Beth's alibi, by the way. You don't have to worry about that either."

"And I put you up to poking at the Kielars in the first place," McDouglas added.

"In a messed-up way, it's almost a compliment that they thought you could pull that off."

"Why did they let me go?"

"The stomp sisters said they saw you at your building," Beth answered.

"Really? They vouched for me?" She nodded.

"Are you hungry?" McDouglas asked.

"I think I just want to go bed." Lisa excused herself, and McDouglas drove us home. Beth and I sat in the back, and she held my hand the whole way.

"You've had a tough stretch," McDouglas said after a while.

"This misunderstanding won't affect your career. I'll make sure of that, alright?" I nodded.

"Thank you for sending Lisa to help me."

"Like I said, I feel partially responsible, and Lisa's whole job is to protect our assets."

"I'm still grateful. Things didn't look great there for a minute."

"They wanted an easy win on this, and they thought Brennan Kielar served one up for them. You're a talented guy, but sorry, no way you make that shot even if you wanted to."

"What do you mean?"

"The trajectory of the arrow puts the shooter two buildings away. As in, he used the voidwood bow to shoot through them, two full structures. The distance. The precision. The complexity. Like I said, you've got skills, but that was a serious fucking marksman to pull that off."

"How many people in the world are capable of that?" I asked.

"Very, very few, but you don't have to worry about it anymore."

"Did I miss anything else interesting?"

"Bugbear attacks in West Virginia," Beth said.

"Not far from mom and dad's."

"And a major goblin outbreak in Los Angeles," McDouglas added.

"How major?"

"The goblin count was around 300 last I heard," he answered.

"Wow."

"You sure I can't get you some food?" McDouglas asked as he parked in front of my building.

"Yes, but thank you."

"Alright. Get some rest. I'll connect with you in the next day or two." Beth walked me up the stairs. I thought about going up another flight to thank the stomp sisters, but I couldn't muster the grit necessary to pull that off. Maybe I'd send them flowers and stop by in person when things settled down. Sleeping in a cell was difficult, so I didn't really sleep at all. The couch, at this exact moment halfway up the stairs, seemed like the most comfortable option.

In my mind, I had pictured coming back to my little Southside oasis. Maybe I'd get a beer out of the fridge and lie on the couch, watching dumb television as I tried to come down from everything I had just experienced. At some point, hopefully relatively soon, I would fall asleep. But that was naive of me. The door to my apartment hung loosely in its broken frame. Kicking it in was excessive, I thought. My landlord was cheap. A solid palm strike would have been enough to bust through that door.

Inside the apartment, every cabinet, bookshelf, and drawer had been dumped out on the floor. I found Nathan sweeping up broken bowls and plates in the kitchen.

"Welcome home, dude," he said, forcing a smile.

"I wanted to have this cleaned up before you got back, but they didn't let me in until a few hours ago."

"I'm so sorry."

"You didn't do this."

"Still." Lil' Dorion lay on the table, broken off its mount and its side cut open. They must have checked inside of the dire guinea pig as part of their search.

"Don't worry about Lil' D," Nathan said.

"He's a tough son of a bitch. We'll stitch him up, and he'll have a cool scar to tell the ladies about." The mess was so big I didn't know where to start. I stared at the destruction, dumbfounded. Beth got a garbage bag from under the sink and started to pick up anything that was obviously broken. Yeah, that was the right approach. Start somewhere, anywhere, to begin chipping away at the problem. Nathan tried to take the bag out of my hand.

"Bro, get some sleep. You look haggard as fuck."

"I'll sleep when we're done. You're not doing this alone." He gave me a sad, defeated look but didn't argue. For the next few hours, the three of us barely spoke. The only sounds in our apartment were the clinks of broken glass and the scratch of brooms and dustpans. Despite how tired I was, I couldn't sleep. My bed didn't feel like my own, and if i did manage to doze, I jerked back awake thinking someone was grabbing me. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent.

Report it. The next morning, Nathan looked worse than I did.

"Top of the morning," he said, sitting at the kitchen table.

"The kettle's still hot if you want some." Our couch cushions had been sliced open and the stuffing removed, so our mismatched set of dining chairs was the only real usable furniture left. I poured a cup of tea and joined Nathan.

"How does this work?" he asked.

"What do you mean?"

"Do they replace all the shit they broke, or do we get the privilege of eating that shit too?"

"I don't know. I'll try to find out."

"I'm just bitching."

"You're good," I assured him.

"I'm not sure I've got a grip on this reality yet. I'll have lots to figure out when that happens, I think."

"I'm right there with you. What a fucking trip." I looked around. We still had a lot of cleaning up to do, but we had gotten the apartment to a place where we could walk around barefoot again. I noticed, however, that both Nathan and I still chose to wear flip-flops despite us both insisting we for sure got all the glass.

"What's the earliest we could move into the guildhouse?" I asked.

"Dude, there's so much work to do. We're a long ways from picking out furniture."

"I'm not worried about it being finished. There's a working toilet and shower stall, right?" Nathan nodded.

"You don't have to go for this, because I get how much it could suck, but I'd rather sleep there than here."

"Even if it's cold, dusty, and raw?"

"Yeah."

"You know what, I'm in," he said after a pause.

"My guys are working the second and third floors, so we could slum it on the first. Grab ourselves a Craigslist special for a couch, and we'd be set."

"I don't want to force you to do this. It's okay if you're not into it." He shook his head.

"Bro, I haven't slept a fucking wink since you got dragged away. I don't want to be here either. Can we take the day to chill, though? I don't have it in me to get back to dealing with this." He gestured at the apartment.

"Me neither. I was thinking about going for a drive."

"Yeah? Where to?"

"I was thinking out to Tim's. Get away from the city. Do something we enjoy."

"You're on your first day out of the clink, and you want to go back to work?"

"Yeah, I do."

"I've got a key for Meg's apartment. We can swing by and grab some of the camera gear?"

"Hell yeah." We called Tim before we left, and he confirmed the trail cam hadn't caught anything new, so we didn't go to his farm directly. Instead, we stopped in Fairchance, which was south of Uniontown and roughly north from Tim's farm. It was pretty far from where the mystery wolf was likely to be, but it was the closest cluster of civilization. Fairchance felt like every other Mon Valley town I had visited: Even though people lived here, it didn't really look like it.

Most of Main Street was boarded over, the big red brick buildings in the middle of town had collapsed roofs and condemned signs on the doors. The only thing open was a drugstore attached to a small cafe, a hole-in-the-wall type restaurant with two tables, six chairs, and novelty signs on the walls that said things like, "Opposum Crossing," "Freedom isn't Free," and "No Dancing on Wednesdays." The same woman who sat behind the cash register in the drugstore stepped into the cafe to pour us tea.

She had a curly bob and thick glasses.

"If you want weird stories, you'll find plenty of them around here," she said.

"Wendigos, chupacabras, skinwalkers–folks spin yarns just for the fun of it. Always been like that."

"Always?" Nathan asked.

"Since I was a kid. I'm guessing the same is true of any mountain town. Lots of drunks and addicts surrounded by wilderness? People think they see all kinds of stuff."

"So if a farmer said that monsters were eating his cows, you'd be skeptical?"

"Didn't say that," she replied.

"We had a goblin nest a few months back. Year or so before that, had a troll problem that took the EPA forever to make right. You learn real fast not to fuss about at night in the mountains." After that, we wondered up and down Main Street. We stopped in a hardware store, and the man there gave us a similar spiel about drunks and drug addicts saying crazy things. Nathan suggested we stop in the church, but I declined. Just looking at the building made me ill, and he quickly picked up on that and dropped the idea.

No one had seen or heard anything about a monstrous wolf hunting in the area. So we went south toward Tim's. Finding the trailer park we saw with the drone the last time we were here was more challenging than we expected. The "road" leading to it looked like a washed out access path, something that a game warden would use twice a year at most. We drove by it three times before either of us guessed it might be the drive to the trailer court. Nathan amended his request for a Dungeon Diva van to an SUV.

My crap car bottomed out twice on our way down, and he was worried a van wouldn't have done much better. A collapsing privacy fence wrapped the ten-trailer court. Based on the trash surrounding the perimeter, many of the residents walked out their back doors and dumped their garbage over that fence. One car and two pickups looked like they might be able to start, but the other three cars we saw had sat so long that weeds had grown inside of them. They had been raided for parts a long time ago, it seemed.

Most of the seats were missing, even. The trailers themselves were rusted and discolored, and most had ramps instead of stairs. Not all of the ramps were intact, but most were. As soon as we pulled in, doily curtains spread and faces peaked out. Visitors were probably a rarity. A woman in her late 40s with a gaunt face, sun-worn skin, and a cigarette stepped out of the trailer nearest to the trailercourt entrance. She had a tiny barking mutt under her arm.

"Think you fellas are lost," she shouted from her door.

"We're investigating monsters in the area," I said.

"We just want to ask a few questions."

"We don't want none of what you're selling."

"Not selling anything. A farmer across the way has been losing cattle. We're trying to figure out why."

"Tim the cocksucker sent you?"

"We hunt monsters. That's all we care about."

"I ain't doing anything to help that man. Unless you got booze or annie, you can fuck off." Nathan whispered to me.

"Annie is slang for meth."

"Don't have either of those," I admitted.

"I have a case of Nad-Nade in my trunk. That's not-""Good enough," she said and went back inside. A few minutes later, we stepped into what was more like a small camper than a housetrailer. An elderly woman hooked up to an oxygen tank sat in a recliner.

"Ma, we got visitors." The older woman didn't look away from the television. The first woman set her dog down to take the energy drinks. The dog stood at my feet, looking up, yipping and growling incessantly.

"What do you want?" the first woman asked, lighting another cigarette.

"We're looking for signs of a wolf-like monster," I said, turning my phone to show her a picture of a print we found at Tim's.

"Have you seen anything? Heard anything? Maybe a neighbor mentioned something like that?" She laughed.

"Hun, we see television shows and Food Stamp Fred out here. That's it."

"Food Stamp Fred?"

"Comes in once a month and trades food for stamps since we get 'em but can't get anywhere to spend 'em. I'm the youngest person around, you see. Everyone else is like my mom there. Old as shit and passing the time until they die. Hardly any of them ever step outside, and that's a good thing because these dementia fuckers get mean as all hell."

"See anything that might match that print?" I asked as she handed my phone back.

"We got a black bear that comes around to rip into shit sometimes, but never seen a wolf. Haven't heard nothin' either." Nathan glanced out the window.

"Anyone else here you think might talk to us?"

"Freddy up the way is a vet. He tells stories about runnin' gates. He'll talk to you about anything. A few others would talk to you, but they've lost their minds. It's all nonsense."

"Food Stamp Fred?"

"No relation." We thanked her and walked up a gentle hill to Freddy's trailer. Signs posted in his yard said things like, "No Trespassing" and "I shoot first, ask questions later." Freddy opened his door with a shotgun in his hands. His back was hunched, his white hair was a tangled mess, and he wore a white tank top and boxer shorts. Roughly healed scars ran up and down his arms and legs. To my eye, they looked like the work of monster teeth and claws.

"I ain't buyin' nothing."

"We're not selling anything," I said.

"We're investigating a monster sighting, and we hear you've got some monster experience."

"Level 14. Used to make good money beating the brains out of goblins and all sorta other monsters." I showed him the print.

"Know of anything that might have left this?" He squinted.

"Nope. You two feds? EPA?"

"We help people with monsters when no one else will."

"Far as I'm concerned, the monsters can have the whole damn country. My daddy was in the Pacific Theater, then when they shipped home he went from fighting Japs to fighting monsters. He always said the Japs were worse. He taught me how to hunt. Took me in the gates. They called folks like us the backbone of America, now fucking look at us. We got nothing to show for it."

"That sounds pretty frustrating."

"Can't trust anyone. Anyone is liable to leave you to die if it puts money in their pocket."

"Are you aware of any monster activity around here?" I asked, attempting to steer the conversation back to the reason we came.

"You fellas feds or something?"

"No, we're not."

"Well, I ain't buying nothing." Nathan put a hand on my shoulder. Freddy was clearly confused if we were repeating this conversation already, and a confused person with a shotgun should be handled with care.

"Thank you for your time," I said.

"Get fucked," Freddy replied, slamming his door. Nathan turned to me.

"Well, this was fun." We visited the abandoned mine site next and flew Kimmy around. We saw signs of squatters, but nothing looked like the work of a monster wolf. Oh well. I got out of the apartment, at least.