Mongrels Read online

  Libby opened her mouth like to say something but it was just that yawn kind of feeling you get behind the jaws when you want to breathe but can’t.

  It’s a feeling particular to werewolves, I think.

  If we really are what we are because we caught something from the bats, then that hollow feeling under our bottom row of teeth, it’s probably an old sonar instinct. It’s what you use when you want to send a quiet little sound out, find somebody with it.

  It’s what you do when you’re alone, but don’t want to be.

  I took Libby by the wrist, guided her into the car, and because Grace-Ellen didn’t know this pedal, and because the El Camino was parked on smooth concrete, and because Red had bolted 427 heads onto this 396 block, the El Camino chirped the tires when we pulled out, the nose jerking up, Grace-Ellen clamping the brakes down, stopping us in the harsh morning light.

  “This isn’t happening,” Libby finally said.

  It was, though. It had been happening already for ten years.

  3.

  When the receipts Grace-Ellen needed were in Rayford’s office, I elbowed in the window part of his door.

  “He’s going to know we’ve been here now,” Grace-Ellen said.

  “Not if I see him first, he won’t,” Libby said.

  Grace-Ellen considered this, considered it some more, then she reached through, careful of the glass, unlocked the door.

  We followed her in, sat in Rayford’s client chairs while she peeled through years of receipts.

  “Thought you just needed last week,” Libby said.

  Grace-Ellen didn’t answer, had some complicated organization going on all over the floor.

  “So?” Libby said, thirty minutes into it.

  “Shh,” Grace-Ellen said.

  Libby hissed through her teeth, pushed up from the chair, walked back out to the waiting room. The watercooler in there gurgled deep, then gurgled again.

  “You’re supposed to drink as much water as you can before you shift,” Grace-Ellen said, not looking up from the invoices and receipts. “If you don’t, your skin—you can start to get old before your time, like.”

  I leaned back in the client chair, studied the tile ceiling, knew that I didn’t even know how much there was to know.

  “I met a werewolf who made fake silver bullets,” I told her, like trying to go toe-to-toe in the lightning round, double or nothing.

  “That’s just a legend,” she said, not remotely interested, still digging.

  “But I did.”

  She was sorting by color, it looked like, but double-checking by shape, then stacking by date, carefully, like one wrong breath could ruin what she thought she was seeing.

  “This can’t be happening,” she said.

  Her fingers were trembling.

  “What did your husband do about sheep?” I said, a touch quieter. Because Libby was still close, but more because I still wasn’t sure what she’d done up in Augusta had been right.

  “Sheep are for eating,” Grace-Ellen said, only half listening.

  “I’m talking sheep-sheep,” I said.

  “Something’s wrong,” she said then, laying down the last receipt like the worst tarot card then pushing back from the whole spread, for the bigger picture, the better vantage.

  “Hey,” I said into the other room when Grace-Ellen wasn’t saying anything out loud. Just, I could tell, in her head. Like double-checking. Like trying to talk herself out of something.

  Libby appeared in the doorway, wiping her mouth with the back of her forearm.

  “This can’t be right,” Grace-Ellen said.

  “Explain,” Libby said.

  Grace-Ellen touched a pile of pale green invoices. “They must have found a different vendor,” she said, her eyes watering up. She turned her face from me to Libby, like we could tell her this wasn’t true, whatever this was.

  “This the restaurant they went to?” Libby said, stepping in.

  Grace-Ellen scooted around, held her hand up to stop Libby from messing the papers all up again.

  “Where—where they get their chemicals,” Grace-Ellen said. “Their pesticides, applications, all of it.”

  “And if they didn’t change suppliers?” I said, standing now too. Just from the tension in the room. From everything about to be said.

  I could see it in Grace-Ellen’s eyes.

  She set the guilty invoice back down with the rest of its color, its shape. “If they didn’t change vendors,” she said, “then what have they been spraying the last two weeks?”

  “What do you mean what have they—?” Libby said, but cut herself off, her eyes heating up. “No,” she said.

  Grace-Ellen was breathing hard, about to cry. Shaking her head no. But it meant the opposite.

  “They used to want Trigo to work for them . . .” she said, looking up like one of us could shake our heads no about whatever she was thinking.

  “What?” I said.

  “Trigo, he—he was a big show-off,” she said, barking out a little laugh on accident. One that made her eyes shiny.

  “We know the type,” Libby said, urging her on.

  “He was always—he was always, when he’d be out drinking beer at the . . . where they stuff deer heads.”

  “Taxidermist,” I filled in.

  “Trigo, he could, if he peed into a storm drain, all the alligators would crawl out.”

  “And snakes too,” Libby added.

  I was nodding, remembering rats scampering out from under all our trailers once Darren started peeing around the skirts.

  “That’s why they wanted him?” Grace-Ellen said, looking from Libby to me and back again. “For his pee?”

  “They figured out what Darren was,” I said. Somebody had to.

  “He would have to be on-site, then, right?” Libby said, and when Grace-Ellen just hitched her shoulders up with a sob, Libby stepped forward, through the receipts and invoices. She hauled Grace-Ellen up, and, when Grace-Ellen was still just crying, Libby slammed the heel of her hand into the wall by Grace-Ellen’s head, Rayford’s business certificates and licenses and fishing photographs and carnival caricatures all dislodging, falling to the floor in awkward stages.

  “Where are the keys?” Libby growled.

  Grace-Ellen nodded to the waiting room, her tears flowing freely now.

  Libby pushed her ahead of her, and like that they were gone.

  I started to follow, but went back to the receipts and invoices first. To the pile that had convinced Grace-Ellen.

  That stack went back three years.

  I flipped through, learning the size the orders usually were, and compared that to the most recent order. The difference was night and day. The prices hadn’t gone down even close to enough to account for the change. As near I could tell, the prices had gone up, really.

  And then, because I could, because Grace-Ellen had, I went back three years, worked invoice by invoice up a year.

  There it was again, for three months: orders that had been cut by eighty, ninety percent. By two then three thousand dollars.

  Like there had been another vendor. Like there had been another source.

  “Trigo,” I said, and looked up to the doorway Libby had pushed her through.

  I let that invoice flutter down, walked through it to the noise they were already making up front.

  The bulk of NMV was a warehouse, as it turned out. The front, the waiting room and Rayford’s office, that was just a small portion of the floor space that had been walled off for the public. The real NMV was huge, a skating rink with chemical-wash stations at every pillar, posters and calendars on the walls, flytraps hanging where they could, two beetle-vans parked crooked just inside the line of tall garage doors that opened onto some different backstreet.

  Libby lifted her nose to taste every particle of the air.

  “Wouldn’t they need him close?” she said to Grace-Ellen. “He would have to be here somewhere.”

  “They’ll lose their
license for doing this,” Grace-Ellen said, wiping her nose hard, like mad at herself for crying.

  “They’ll lose more than that,” Libby said. “Check the trucks,” she said to me, lifting her chin to the two vans.

  The interiors were thick with chemicals even I could smell, and the keys of one were in the ignition. My weight made the bug-feelers shift and spring, their shadows writhing on the concrete. But there was nothing, even when Libby ducked her head in, took a deep smell.

  “Then we’ll just wait until he comes home from his hunting trip,” Libby said, and walked around the edges of the warehouse again, double-checking, double-smelling. I sat at the out-of-place picnic table with Grace-Ellen, just out in the middle of everything.

  “Sorry about your husband,” I said.

  She touched the top of my hand with her fingertips, then looked up to the only other sound in this big empty place: Libby, falling down to her knees, her hand on the doorknob. Her shoulders were shaking. She was the last of her litter, now.

  “Don’t look at her,” I said, and Grace-Ellen did look for a moment more, then turned around, studied the big key ring instead.

  “Hunh,” she said.

  I looked over to what she was talking about. The keys?

  She worked one set off, held them out to me, said, “They go to that one.”

  The van. The one without keys in the ignition.

  “So?” I said.

  “So . . . so they don’t go here,” she said. “They go on the wall, over there. On that third hook. And they would have come looking for them.”

  I took the keys, studied them as well. They were just keys.

  “Mind?” I said, holding them out to the van, and walked them across.

  Libby looked up. Grace-Ellen was following me.

  I climbed into the driver’s seat, pushed the square key into the ignition, turned it ahead a quarter turn. Not enough to engage the starter, just enough for the bells and beeps to ding, the lights to come on.

  None did.

  “It’s dead,” Grace-Ellen said, obviously. Like that explained why she’d found the keys in such a wrong place. Hiding with all the other keys. Hidden with all the other keys.

  “It’s a stick,” I said, working the four-speed. On a van, where you sat right on top of everything, that stick was bent in eighty places, about.

  “Rayford says manual’s better for gas,” Grace-Ellen said.

  I left the transmission in neutral, and, just to see, reached down, pulled the emergency brake off.

  The van eased forward maybe two inches, from its own weight.

  I nodded, not sure yet what I was thinking.

  Libby was standing right in front of the van now.

  “What?” she said, a giveaway line of blood seeping down from her nose.

  “Was this place always a warehouse or whatever?” I said to Grace-Ellen.

  Grace-Ellen narrowed her eyes, thinking, trying to figure how this mattered. Finally she said, “Used to be a lube place when I was in junior high. For semis. Then they changed the highway.”

  “Shit,” I said, and stepped down, dropped to my stomach to look under the van.

  Libby met me. The smell coming off her was all about change.

  Dead center under the van was a square hole in the concrete. A pit. A shaft angling down to the pit.

  “There used to be bays all along here,” I said, my voice loud under the van. “For oil changes.”

  Libby peeled her lips away from her teeth.

  Together we pushed the van forward, let it just keep rolling. Its front bumper tapped into a wall on the far side of the warehouse and none of us even looked over to it.

  The square hole in the concrete was like pictures I’d seen in magazines, of going down into Egyptian tombs for the first time in thousands of years. The hole opened onto a metal staircase with rubbed-smooth handrails.

  “I didn’t know this was—” Grace-Ellen said, but Libby raised her palm, shut her up.

  “They put lids on everything,” I said, looking up and down at the gradations of discoloration in the concrete that were obvious now, the shades of difference that lined up with the garage doors. They’d put lids on the bays, but they’d left this one staircase, for access. So the bays could be used for storage. So they wouldn’t be completely gone.

  “If he’s down there . . .” Libby said, and stepped onto the top metal step without needing to finish the threat.

  I followed, and Grace-Ellen followed me, her bracelets rattling on the handrail.

  It was pitch-black, except way at the other end, under what had to be the front office. Libby ran ahead, her arms crossed in front of her face in case of pipes, and we followed, and the worst was true.

  The worst is always true for werewolves.

  It was Darren.

  “Is he alive?” I said to Libby.

  He was in what had to be a shark tank, since this was Florida. And shark tanks, they’re made to be lowered down into the water. Meaning there’s an industrial-strength eyehole welded to the top. There was a thick chain threaded through that hole, running to hooks set in the ceiling ten feet to either side, those chains anchored to the floor.

  It left Darren dangling six feet off the concrete floor.

  “Crowbait,” I would have said—those old medieval cages hanging at crossroads, always moldering with skeletons and scavenger birds—except no bird would ever come down into this warren, this labyrinth, this deathtrap.

  That’s exactly what it was.

  Suspended from straps above the cage were five-gallon jugs of water, with tubes running down from them into the cage, a little stopcock valve at the end of each.

  Under the cage were four kiddie pools laid out edge to edge. Because they were round, it left some concrete in the middle, right under the cage.

  As far as Darren could pee in any direction, the kiddie pools, they would catch his pee.

  It was the best pesticide ever.

  Against the far wall, by the only plug, was a chest freezer. Either stocked with clearance beef and pork or with roadkill, probably. To keep their golden goose alive.

  It had worked, so far. Barely.

  Werewolf or not, there was no getting through a cage a shark couldn’t.

  But Darren had tried.

  His mouth, it was scabbed over, his whole lower face dark with it. It was from shifting, I knew. From biting the bars.

  And one of his arms was broken too. The left one. Probably from when he had man-arms, told the bars it was him or them.

  It had been him.

  Libby was just shaking her head no.

  I stepped forward, between the pools, and reached my hand through the bars, gave Darren the back of my hand to smell, if he could.

  “Darren,” I said. “Please.”

  Behind us, all around us, Libby, always the quiet one, screamed. At herself. Because she’d been ten vertical feet away and never known. Because Darren was all that was left of her dad, all that was left of the mom she’d never known. Because they had a deal, not to die on each other. To always be there, no matter. She screamed because he was her brother.

  But he was my uncle.

  “Dare,” I said—what I’d never called him.

  The wolf in him rose to this. The wolf in him heard the challenge.

  His nose woke first. Then one of his eyes.

  It was yellow still. It meant he’d passed out as a wolf.

  As I watched, it shot through with tendrils of brown, clouded like a tea bag in water.

  He reached his good arm out to scruff my hair.

  “Nephew,” he said, the word taking him longer than it should have.

  Not that I wouldn’t have waited however long. I closed my eyes in thanks, his stub-fingered hand on my head, and I flinched when Grace-Ellen made the noise she made, not really in her throat and not really in her chest.

  It came from her soul.

  She was at the freezer.

  There was meat in there, but it had
been there a while.

  Her husband, frozen between man and wolf. Stashed here after his usefulness had run out. Stashed here when he wasn’t saving NMV money anymore.

  Libby was already there, hugging Grace-Ellen away, keeping her from thrashing, keeping her from kicking.

  They fell down together and Libby held on, her face sideways against Grace-Ellen’s back.

  Her eyes weren’t wet like I’d have expected, though.

  Crying, that’s for humans.

  Libby was a long way from that.

  4.

  The story we got from Darren that afternoon—he was in and out, and Grace-Ellen had no remedy other than to hold his head in her lap in the backseat of our boat of a Catalina—was that . . . but he would always start laughing. Because he loved it: He’d been shanghaied.

  He’d always told us he had the makings of a real ninja, a natural-born killer, deadliest assassin in the world. It turned out he had a lot more pirate in him.

  Grace-Ellen threaded his greasy bangs away from his eyes.

  His chin and jaw and cheek were baby-smooth, brand-new. He’d shifted so much that he was starved down to skin and bones. His body had probably even plundered his marrow, scooped it out to rebuild him again and again, from less and less.

  Grace-Ellen had his forearm splinted in two magazines she’d bought with her own cash at a gas station. The straps were her hair bands. It left her red hair trailing down over both of them.

  “I knew my piss—” Darren said, then started over: “If I knew my piss was worth that much, I’d have been selling it the whole time, right? We’d be Beverly Hills werewolves. We’d be . . .” but he lost it, turned his face to cough into Grace-Ellen’s hollow stomach.

  Libby had one hand at the top of the steering wheel, the other grabbed on to the side mirror, like to keep the world steady with brute force.

  Rayford’s wife hadn’t known where his blind was—he didn’t trust her that much—but she did know he usually parked in that turnout just past the taxidermy place. That, coupled with the overalls Libby had taken from the van he drove, would be enough.

  When we found his pickup, Libby stood from the car already shedding Grace-Ellen’s clothes.

  I followed behind, shaking the seed heads from her shirt and pants, folding them as best I could, which wasn’t very.