Rob Thurman - The Grimrose Path

The picture of Zeke playing nice made all the irritation instantly disappear. It was too ludicrous to imagine. Zeke being a good boy—I would’ve laughed, but in that moment I saw them . . . two men meandering down the sidewalk from Zeke’s end. They wore baseball hats and knee-length jackets bulky enough to hide a baseball bat. “Have to go, Griffin. I have two over here. Look for one on your side. It’s time to get off the bench and play for real.” I hoped that Zeke remembered we were here to help, but vengeance wasn’t ours this time. And it wasn’t Heaven’s. It belonged to these people.

I made a quick call, then put the cell phone away and waited. They kept coming, not trying to look inconspicuous by hunching their shoulders or keeping their heads down. They swaggered, predators on the prowl and proud as punch. Except they were more like poodles on the prowl, teacup ones, strolling into the open mouth of a lion. Pulling the hood of my raincoat over my hair, I did some hunching of my own. Hopeless, helpless, lost . . . victim. Put out what you want others to see and they’ll see it. Whether you’re a pretender to the throne or to the gutter, the ignorant rarely see the chameleon. And if the chameleon is actually less a tiny lizard and more of Godzilla waiting to swallow you whole . . . that truly was your bad luck. You should’ve looked closer. You should’ve paid attention.

They passed Zeke, still sitting with his gun now out of sight. They hesitated, but kept moving. Zeke would never a chameleon make. We all have different talents. Looking harmless wasn’t one of Zeke’s.

They might have swung a wide berth around Zeke, but the two of them came on, through shifting people, focusing . . . focusing. There . . . Look at that. There was a woman, hiding under her hood, so withdrawn from the world, so afraid , she’d balled herself up, hoping to disappear completely. Bullies loved fear. In seconds they stood in front of me, baseball bats now out and hanging by their legs, harsh grins showing as they gobbled up a fear that wasn’t there and saw a woman who didn’t exist.

“Hey, bitch.” A foot nudged my leg hard. “Look at me. I wanna see if you’re worth messing up or if you’re ugly as shit already.”

Ask and you shall receive.

I tilted my head back, hood falling, and gave them a flash of teeth far more predatory than anything Animal Planet had on it. “Boys, boys, boys. You wouldn’t know a ‘messing up’ . . . well . . . until I showed you one.” I put a bullet in the right kneecap of one of them. The other one I left to Zeke. Fair was fair. He put a round in the back of the second one’s thigh, throwing him face forward onto the concrete. They were both down, screaming in pain, and the cars on the street—they just kept moving. Just as they kept moving as I heard a muffled pop from across the street. Barely audible over the sound of the cars, but I’d been listening for it. Griffin had gotten the third. I didn’t expect that any mistaken Good Samaritan would stop driving and get out to investigate when justice stood up, and they did stand up, all around me—worn men and women with baseball bats and a chance to take back a bit of the peace that had been stolen from them.

“See you later, Sarge.” I squeezed his shoulder as he got to his feet with the help of a crutch on one side and a bat on the other. “Hit one out of the park for me.”

“I will, little missy. Damn straight I will,” he said grimly. “Thanks for this. It ain’t no honeysuckle nights, but it’s real damn close.”

By the time the bats were raised for a second time, Griffin, Zeke, and I were halfway to gone. Ghosts and shadows. In the distance I could hear the approaching sirens. By the time the cops arrived—thanks to my call to 911—justice would’ve already been served. Those men wouldn’t be dead, although they more than deserved it, but I doubt they’d see the outside of the hospital for a year—then straight to a cell for the murder of Jimmy Whitmore. Hopefully they’d get the death penalty, but even if they didn’t . . . no one lives forever, especially crippled murdering scum in a prison surrounded by predators who’d see in them what they had seen in the homeless. Then Hell could do the cleaning up. The demons had to get their groceries from somewhere. As God didn’t feed them his love and spirit anymore and Lucifer didn’t have it to give—at least not to hundreds of thousands of demons—they ate souls. Every soul in Hell was consumed sooner or later. For these bastards I hoped it was later. Let the demons play with their food first, as they usually did, only for much longer this time. It was the one time I did regret souls don’t have that eternity to suffer.

That checked off the first lesson of the night. It was time to see how the second was going.

Leo, as it turned out, accomplished his trickery as quickly as we had and didn’t need our help. It was too bad. I’d been looking forward to seeing that one in action. Some evolving serial killer or just plain psychopathic ass had been killing pets in a certain gated neighborhood that encompassed several streets. He would kill them, in horrible ways that were no pleasure to think about again, so I didn’t, and then would hang them in trees or, if no desert-loving tree was available, on mailboxes, the antennae of cars, whatever he could find. The majority of his victims were cats. Dogs tended to bark when approached in the middle of the night, but cats were quiet.

So was he. No one had caught so much as a glimpse of who’d killed their pets, their companions, sometimes, to the very lonely, their only friends.

Tonight though . . . Tonight the timing was right. I’d felt it for this psycho the same as I’d felt it for the ones Griffin, Zeke, and I had been waiting for. Tonight what was good for the goose was good for the gander. Or, better, what was good for the kitty killer was what was good for the kitty.

Leo had rented a U-Haul trailer and headed out of town on U.S. 95 to the Sheep Range that sits outside of Vegas. It makes up the eastern boundary of the Nellis Bombing Range adjacent to the Nevada Test Site with a wildlife preserve at the base of the mountains. Do you know a common fact about mountains and sheep? They attract those who like to live in the mountains and eat the sheep. Like a mountain lion or a cougar, whichever name you preferred.

One big pussycat was good enough for me.

Even though we were in our human bodies and had lost our trickster powers, animals still knew us by the lingering telepathic-empathic defense. They knew what people, and sometimes gods, didn’t know. To a wolf, a trickster would be an alpha. To a lone ranging mountain lion, we’d be its mommy, no matter how old it was. They knew us, and they obeyed us . . . most of the time. This time had turned out to be one of those times. Leo found a full-grown cougar who would’ve nursed on Leo’s leg if Leo had let it. But it was happy to ride in the well-ventilated U-Haul too, and then wait in the lovingly watered large silver-green sage bush of one house while Leo turned into Lenny, who could croak one very convincing imitation of a pet cat’s meow. And as the meows became more smug—because no one did smug as convincingly as Leo, someone decided to put another notch on the handle of his bloodstained knife.

Here’s another common fact—cats? The thing I love most about them . . . next to their curiosity? There is no such thing as a tame cat. You see the survival-challenged tourists in Africa at the rehabilitation preserves where young abandoned lions are being educated to be reintroduced into the wild. You see them sitting next to that “tame” lion to have their picture taken, all smiles, and the next thing they know they’re wondering how their neck managed to get in that good-natured lion’s mouth. How had that five-dollar souvenir photo gone so wrong?