Ghoul Interrupted (24 page)

“Are you sure?” he demanded, staring at me with an expression full of
what-the-freak?
“I feel a little tingly.”

I sat back on my heels. “You’re fine,” I assured him. “And thanks to you, so am I.”

“I don’t know what came over me!” he exclaimed. “Normally I leave the hero stuff up to you fools.”

I wrapped an arm around him. “That thing was going to fillet me like a tomato against a set of Ginsu knives, so whatever moved you, buddy, I for one am really grateful.”

“Don’t get used to it,” Gilley warned. “That thing could scare the gay right out of me.”

I giggled, then I started to laugh, and then I couldn’t stop. I was just so relieved to have survived the demon attack that Gil’s humorous remark was like someone turning a relief valve in me. He chuckled along too, and before long we were lying on the ground, giggling and slapping each other on the shoulders.

After a bit we settled down, but neither one of us moved off the floor back to our bunks. “What do we do now?” Gil asked.

I shrugged. “Wait for the sheriff or Deputy Cruz to come back, I guess.”

Gil propped himself up on his elbows and stared at the room. “How’re we going to explain
that
?”

I propped myself up too and took in the mess. The lamp was still giving off some light from where it’d landed on the floor, and as I took in all the damage done, I could hardly believe it myself, and I’d witnessed the rampage.

“We’ll tell Pena and Cruz the truth,” I said.

“They’ll never believe it.”

“Well,
we
couldn’t have done all this, now, could we, Gil?”

Gilley sat all the way up. “You have a point.” He then seemed to notice something on my arm and lifted it up to inspect. “You’re bleeding, sugar.”

I glanced at it, only now realizing that it was throbbing like crazy. “Got any first aid in that pack of yours?”

Gilley stood up, his shoes crunching on the bits of plastic from the smashed computers as he walked to his backpack. After rooting around, he came back with some antibacterial ointment and a cotton ball. He cleaned up the wound and I hissed, winced, and complained all the way through it. “You might want to get that looked at tomorrow,” he suggested. “I mean, for all we know, demons might carry some terrible disease, like . . . demon
rabies
.”

I rolled my eyes and rotated my wrist to inspect the wound. “I’ve been slashed by a demon before,” I reminded him. “And I survived it just fine.”

“M. J.,” Gilley said. “This wound is much deeper than the last time. I really think you need stitches.”

I surveyed the cut, which did look pretty deep. “There’s not much I can do about it now, Gil.”

He frowned and went over to the john to retrieve the roll of toilet paper, which he then proceeded to wrap round and round my arm. The end result was comical, but at least it was better than nothing. “Put your free hand over the wound to keep pressure on it,” he advised me. “First thing in the morning, after they let us out of here, we’re hitting the emergency room.”

I yawned, got to my feet, and shuffled back over to my bunk. “Better get some sleep,” I told him. “I have a feeling tomorrow’s gonna be a long day.”

“What if it comes back?” Gilley asked as I slid onto the plastic surface and rolled away from the light again.

“I don’t think it will, Gil.”

“Why don’t you think it will?”

I sighed and sat up, looking pointedly around the room. “Because it came here to kill us, but it obviously can’t work its way past the bars. We’re in the safest place we can be.”

“That’s not very comforting,” he said with a frown.

I shrugged. “It’s all I got, buddy.” I then turned away again, hoping he’d eventually do the same. Before long, I was actually asleep.

 

Six a.m. felt like it arrived about sixty seconds later and our wake-up call was a long stream of profanity that began with “What in the . . .” and several seconds later ended with “. . . here?!”

My eyes flew open and I sat up sorely, my hand still clamped over the wound on my arm. The makeshift bandage of toilet paper was dark red with blood, but at least it seemed to have stanched the flow.

Gilley was out of his bunk and over to the door of the cell in a flash. “Let us out of here!” he demanded in a deep tone completely uncharacteristic of him.

Cruz, who was standing in the middle of the chaotic scene, stared at him with wide disbelieving eyes. “What’d you two . . . ?” he asked, pointing around at the mess.

“We’ll explain after you let us out of here and M. J. gets some medical attention.”

Cruz’s eyes drifted to me and more pointedly to my wounded arm. More expletives followed. Then he pulled out his cell and hit a button. “Sheriff?” he said. “You gotta come to the station right away. We got a situation on our hands.”

Cruz made no move to let us out of the jail cell, even though Gilley was doing his level best to insist that he unlock the door immediately. “Cool your jets,” Cruz barked at him, sifting through the contacts on his phone to make another call.

With a frustrated sigh I lay back down on the bunk. I was a little light-headed all of a sudden and even more exhausted than when I’d first turned in just a few hours earlier.

I didn’t have a chance to recline for long. Within five minutes Sheriff Pena had entered the station and his reaction was identical to Cruz’s right down to the string of expletives. He then turned to his deputy and demanded to know what’d happened. “I got no idea, Nick,” Cruz said. “I locked those two up last night around eight and left ’em here for the night. When I walked in this morning, this place looked like a bomb went off.”

Pena stepped carefully over the debris to the front of our cell, where Gilley and I were both sitting on our bunks staring moodily out at the two lawmen. “What happened?”

Gilley and I exchanged a look and I nodded to him. He could take the lead. “We’ll tell you exactly what happened the moment you let us out of here and have someone look at M. J.’s wound.”

“Did someone call for a doctor?” asked a voice from the hallway just as the figure of Ari’s husband, Brody, entered. “Whoa!” he said when he took in the condition of the station. “What the hell happened here?”

“We know but we’re not talking till the sheriff lets us out,” Gil said, glaring at Pena and Cruz. I half expected him to stick his tongue out at them for good measure.

“Hi, Brody,” I said, getting up from the bunk to come to the front of the cell. “Can you call Heath for me and let him know I’m here?”

Brody blinked as if he didn’t quite know what to say. “Uh, sure,” he said. “But maybe I could take a look at that arm of yours first?”

“She’s got a terrible cut,” Gil told him. “Might’ve hit an artery, but these guys won’t let us out so we can go to the hospital.”

Brody stepped over a pile of files and asked Cruz to open the door. He did, but instead of letting us come out, the deputy motioned the doctor in. Gil glared harder at him, but Cruz wasn’t backing down. Instead he turned his attention to what was left of his desk and the demolished computer on the floor.

“Let’s see what we’ve got here,” Brody said, coming over to kneel in front of me and gently tugging on the thick layer of toilet paper. “Whoa,” he said again when he caught sight of the mean-looking wound. “How’d you get this?”

“Shark bite,” I deadpanned.

Brody grinned but sobered quickly. “Really, M. J., how’d this happen?”

My eyes drifted to Gilley; I knew that by answering Brody we’d be giving up the one bargaining chip we had to get us out of the cell. He nodded reluctantly. It wasn’t like Cruz and Pena were chomping at the bit to let us out anyway. “It was the same demon that got Heath’s aunt and uncle,” I told him. “The spirit of the black hawk.”

Brody sat back on his heels. “The one Heath and his mom have been going on about?”

I nodded, and swept my good arm around in an arc. “It did all this too.”

Brody’s eyes followed my hand, but came back to meet those of Sheriff Pena. “I told you,” he said to him. “I told you when I checked on Ray at the hospital that he wasn’t delusional. This thing is real, Pena.”

I focused on the lawmen. I’d had no idea that there were discussions going on between Pena, Brody, and other members of the tribe about the veracity of the demon hunting Heath’s family.

Pena stepped forward and motioned to Cruz to open the cell door. He then came inside, bringing with him one of the only chairs left intact. He turned the chair around to straddle it and stared pointedly at me before speaking. I did my best not to wither under his glare. “Tell me what happened,
exactly
as it occurred.”

“Starting from when?” I asked, wincing when Brody got back to work on my arm.

“Starting from when you ignored the sign posted at the entrance to the Pueblo, and you and your friend here thought it was a good idea to trespass on sacred ground.”

I swallowed. I’d sorta been hoping they’d forgotten about that. “Gil and I rented a car and decided to search for signs of this demon,” I said, making up relevant parts as I went along. “As it happened, our car died right at the entrance to the Pueblo.”

“Spectral activity can have that effect,” Gilley said, helping my story along. “As the technician expert on all of the
Ghoul Getters
episodes, I can tell you that we’ve had many a camera, gadget, and car battery drained of power when we were out hunting ghosts.”

Pena showed no sign of either believing or disbelieving Gilley. He just continued to level his cool gaze at me. So, after an awkward pause, I got on with it. “
Any
way, we couldn’t get the car started again, so we decided to come here for help, but the place was deserted.”

“What time was this?”

“Yeee-ouch!” I cried, jumping when Brody put some antiseptic on my wound.

“Sorry,” he said, swiveling his head to look at Pena. “She’s got a set of three marks just like the patterns we found all over Milton’s body, Nick. And I don’t think a mountain lion got in here and caused all this.”

Pena said nothing; he just continued to eye Brody and me with his steely gaze. Finally, though, he asked me again what time Gilley and I had arrived at the Pueblo.

“It was early evening,” Gilley said quickly. “Around seven p.m.”

I thanked God he’d spoken first, because I was so fuzzy-headed that I’d been about to tell Pena the truth, which would then have required me to explain what Gilley and I had done between about five and seven. I couldn’t very well have mentioned the library. We’d never get out of here if I did.

“Yeah, around seven,” I said, like I was just remembering the time. “But it took us a while to walk here from the entrance.”

“I rolled on them a little after eight, Nick,” Cruz said from his place outside the cell.

“Then what?” Pena asked.

The rest of the story Gilley and I took turns telling, leaving out the part where Gil had managed to snag our packs and then raided Cruz’s e-mail with his wireless keyboard and track pad, of course.

Pena seemed to notice the bags, however, because he pointed to Gilley’s backpack and said to his deputy, “You let them keep those?”

Cruz’s brown eyes focused on the backpack and my messenger bag. “No,” he said, and there was an undercurrent of anger in his voice. “I left those on a chair next to my desk.”

“The demon knocked them on the floor and we were able to reach through the bars and grab them,” Gil said. “And good thing too, because you didn’t come back to check on us and M. J. could have bled to death if I hadn’t had my first aid kit handy!”

Pena and Cruz let the subject go after that, but I couldn’t help thinking that Pena was seriously pissed about something.

By now, Brody had finished stitching up my arm (it’d taken over fifty to close the wounds!) and he got up to head to the sink and remove his gloves so he could wash his hands again. “I’ll call Heath,” he said from the sink. “He’ll confirm that he knows these two and that they weren’t trying to steal his car.”

“They’re still guilty of trespassing,” Cruz was quick to say.

Pena got up from his chair and swung it around in front of him to carry it back outside the cell. “They had car trouble, Jimmy,” he growled. “Let ’em go.”

Cruz’s face flashed to anger for a moment and he pointed to the disaster all around him. “But what about
this
, Nick! You
know
they had something to do with it!”

Pena was unfazed by Cruz’s outburst. “How’d they pull that off, Jimmy?” he asked calmly. “Locked inside a cell and all. How’d they tear this place to shreds and get a wound like that in the process?”

“Oh, come on, Nick! You can’t actually
believe
this black hawk crap!”

Pena rounded on the younger officer, and it was clear that to him Cruz had just spoken out of turn. “It’s not a question of what I believe, Jimmy. It’s a question of what I’ve
seen
. And I’ve seen enough to realize we’re dealing with some serious shit right now. I had my doubts about that coroner’s report on Milton when it came back as a mountain lion attack. You and I didn’t catch one track or paw print out at the cabin, and then there was the side of Bev’s minivan. Remember
that
?”

I knew that Pena was referring to the talon marks on the side of Beverly’s vehicle, and there was a huge part of me that felt totally relieved that Pena at least was taking this seriously.

His deputy, however, was a different story. “Well, I think it’s bullshit!” he snapped. “It’s some kind of hoax or something, and I think Heath and his mom and these guys are all in on it. I mean, who’s ever heard of a ghost murdering people or tearing up homes and public buildings?”

Gilley and I both shot our hands in the air. “We’ve heard of it,” Gil said eagerly. “And we’ve encountered it firsthand. If you don’t believe me, I can e-mail you some footage from our last ghostbust that’ll curl your hair.”