Wanted: Undead or Alive

Just A Little Snack

I rode in silence in the passenger seat of Moose's car and worked on my plan. Step one: I'd go home and sit crisscross on the middle cushion of my new sofa and I'd eat moosetracks ice cream from the carton and stare into space and wait for my instincts to kick in—for my gut to speak.

If I ate enough ice cream, it wouldn't take long.

My phone dinged, and I pulled it from my pocket to read a message from Mx. Landry.

Got a file for a low-level skip. Come in and get it.

I opened my mouth to complain to Moose when his phone dinged. He tapped a button on the dash controls and a robotic female voice read the message to him.

Balkan demigod missed his hearing. Come get the file.

I threw up my hands. "Oh, what the hell?"

"What's your problem?"

"I get a low-level skip—what's that even mean? Probably a poltergeist or something—and you get a Balkan demigod? What's that all about?"

He took his eyes off the road just long enough to shoot me a significant look.

"Okay, so maybe you have more experience—"

"You think?"

"But..." There was really nothing to end that sentence with that would make any sense at all. He'd been doing the job for decades and had hundreds, maybe thousands, of successful apprehensions under his belt. Six months ago, I didn't even know demigods were real, despite the fact that I was occasionally responding to a booty call from one—sort of. To be fair, most of the skips I caught were low-level, and I struggled mightily to catch them. With a sigh, I changed tactic. "Don't you think we ought to be focused on getting Nick out of that place?"

"You think Nick wants to get out of that place and learn he went bankrupt in the third quarter because we didn't do our jobs?"

We pulled into The Recovery Agency parking garage beneath Walmart and rode the elevator down to the lobby. As we descended, I couldn't help but ask, "You think he's going to be okay in there?"

"I think he's survived a thousand worse things. He'll survive this, too." The doors opened. Before he stepped out, he said, "Let's work fast, though."

Mx. Landry passed our files to us through the drawer beneath their window. There was also a key fob for a company car. I'd been given strict instructions never to transport a skip in my personal vehicle.

Moose took his info and left without a word.

I opened mine and scanned the pages.

Tobar Pesgrel—arrested for public indecency. The mugshot showed a bearded old man with enormous eyebrows and a veritable shrubbery of hair on his head. Pretty much the only part of his face that was visible were his dark brown eyes. An address, phone number, and other relevant statistics filled the pages. "He's a garden gnome."

"That a problem for you?" Mx. Landry asked.

I rubbed my forehead with my fingertips, tempted to say something about weird coincidences but certain it would earn me a lecture about patterns in the universe and how only fools chalk up patterns as coincidence. I changed the subject. "This is a terrible neighborhood. My grandparents live there."

"Are they terrible people?" Mx. Landry asked.

"They're literally the best people I know."

"Neighborhood can't be that bad, then."

Yet again, I found myself at a loss. I worried just driving down the street that I'd get shot for wearing the wrong color and yet I knew that the same boys who'd shoot a person as soon as look at them would sit on my Busia's steps and eat the cookies Jaja bought for them at the corner bakery next to the barbershop downtown. Busia shared her fresh tomatoes with them and gave them tips for tending their marijuana plants. They hauled bags of mulch and wielded garden claws on her behalf. From my grandparents' perspective, it had been a perfectly lovely suburb to grow up in, and seventy years later, it continued to be just fine.