Edward Lee: Ghouls

a werewolf in the closet,

and ghouls in the hall.

—from “The Babysitter” by PHILIP STRAKER

— | — | —

CHAPTER ONE

“Yeah, Chief. This is Kurt.”

“Hot damn. I’d never have fucking guessed.”

“The dispatcher just radioed me. Told me to give you a landline.”

“Uh huh. That was a half hour ago.”

“It’s not my fault they wait a half hour to relay their calls.”

Bard’s words were suddenly garbled, smacking. He was often known to engage in conversation with his mouth full. In fact, he was often known to have his mouth full on any occasion. “I’m not saying it’s your fault. That’s the price we pay for being on the county commo band. What good’s a police department without its own communications system, will you tell me that? Maybe one day this tight-fisted pockmark of a town’ll cough up the funds for our own dispatcher and frequency. Fucking county acts like our business isn’t important.”

“Okay. So what’s so important?”

“On your way back to the station, I need to you to pick me up a box of doughnuts. The chocolate-covered kind, the big ones.”

“Now that’s what I call important police business, yes, sir.”

“Well, it is. I’m hungry. I haven’t eaten all day.”

“But you’re eating now. I can hear you.”

“Just shut up and get the doughnuts. And grab this month’s Hustler while you’re at it.”

“I’m not going to buy a skin magazine in uniform.”

“You will unless you’d like to wear the uniform of some other department. Baltimore City’s hiring, if you don’t mind the lowest starting pay in the state and the highest murder statistics. Or, hell, I’m sure a guy with your experience could walk right into a nice cushy foot beat in Southeast D.C.”

“I hear you, Chief.”

“Good. If they don’t have Hustler, get High Society.”

Kurt wished he had the—testicular fortitude?—to tell Bard exactly where he could put the doughnuts and magazine. Three months in the police academy for this? Dad would be proud. “That’s all I am, Chief? An armed errand boy?”

“Yeah, but before you do any of that, I’ll let you go play police officer for a change. I’ve got a resident complaint for you, possible signal 7P. That’s trespassers on private property, in case you’ve forgotten your code sheet.”

“I know what a 7P is, Chief. I’m the only one around here who bothers to answer them. So what’s the 20 for these trespassers?”

“Belleau Wood. The prop-owner’s wife made the complaint. Glen doesn’t come in for a couple of hours, so she phoned us.”

“That’s the rich guy’s land, right? Dr. Willard? I didn’t know he was married.”

“Well now you do. She said somebody popped the chain on one of their entrance gates. Probably a bunch of kids back there cornholing or something.”

“You want me to bust them?”

“I don’t give a fuck, use your police officer’s discretion. You can kick their dicks off for all I care. Just get a move on.”

“Okay, Chief. I’m on my way.”

“And don’t forget. The chocolate-covered kind, the big ones.”

PFC Kurt Morris hung up the Liquor Mart pay phone and went back to the town car, a dulling, white Dodge Diplomat with a banged-in rear bumper and one of the high lights missing from the visibar. The car looked like it hadn’t been washed since the day it rolled off the assembly line, which may well have been true; it wore a sheen of dirt. Recently, Glen Rodz had asked him, “Don’t you think it’s about time you washed the cruiser?” and Kurt had replied, quite logically, “Why? I don’t ride on the outside.”

Kurt squealed out of the lot, not because he was in a hurry, but because the cruiser’s bald tires made more noise than purchase. The call to Belleau Wood was no great event; he’d answered many such calls over the years, when the property’s security guard, Glen Rodz, was not on duty. Belleau Wood seemed to attract Tylersville’s youth “like flies to a shit-bucket,” Chief Bard was fond of saying. Lots of teenage beer drinking, but mostly kids making out. Kurt had witnessed many flesh shows thanks to signal 7P’s. What he’d seen in the backseats of some of those cars would make John C. Holmes himself keel over.

April was bowing out now. For the first time this season, Kurt noticed that everything around him pulsated in life and vibrancy. The unsightly black-flecked snow had melted away, leaving the winding asphalt of Route 154 a cleansed, black shimmer. Trees, barren a month ago, stood straight and heavy in prominent greens. To the left, the vast square of Merkel’s cornfield glowed coppery, fecund brown, showing newly turned soil, and would soon glow green as a scape of hardy man-tall corn rows. Colors seemed sharper, more intense, the air rich with the scents of life. It was more than just the shift of nature; it was an overhaul of his soul—spring fever, and the nearing of long days, endless skies, and the warmth he feared might never come. The end of another gray Maryland winter.

Backward and hard-minded, Tylersville wasn’t a town at all, really; it was a road—State Route 154—and all on either side of that road was called Tylersville. Route 154 cut a twisting dozen-mile path through the worst of Maryland’s woods and hills and swamps, and joined the city of Bowie to the south with an extremity of Annapolis to the north. The small, sparse homes and trailers which stretched along the Route, as it was called, did not total more than one hundred, and were it not for the shopping center and the apartment complexes at the south end, there wouldn’t be population enough to even constitute a town. Tylersville had its own police force only because it happened to exist along this sensitive access as a municipality between two sizable cities. The department itself was small, yet crime was barely evident at all save for the drunks and the rednecks and the motorheads who liked to think of Route 154 as a testing track for their hot rods.

Kurt worked the four-to-midnight shift, and he assumed he’d continue to do so for the rest of his life. The work was tedious, the environment less than edifying, and the pay had never been known to urge him to jump up and down; but he supposed that the job suited him. Beyond his boredom, he found a redeeming function, slight but there. It was a job that had to be done, a job that even offered the chance to help people, and that at least seemed favorable to standing in line at the unemployment office.

Sometimes it felt as though whole shifts were spent driving the Route back and forth, from one end to the other. He had done this hundreds or perhaps thousands of times, traveling the same miles and looking at the same unremarkable scenery over and over. The bulk of police work in Tylersville wound down mainly to traffic. Speeders ran rampant along the Route, its snake-twisted turns and clean, long straightaways a pronounced challenge for the droves of fast cars which inhabited Prince George’s County; running radar was Kurt’s favorite recreational therapy. The only nontraffic-oriented crimes to occur with any regularity were the weekly weekend fights which erupted at the Anvil (a topless roadside bar) and an occasional domestic flare-up, drunk husbands beating the piss out of drunk wives, though Kurt had known it to be the other way around once or twice.

I wonder which access? he thought. He scratched absently at the back of his neck, smoothed down dark-blond hair, and then frowned because he knew Chief Bard would soon be yammering at him about a haircut. “The Soul Talk Center’s that’a way,” and “When are you going in for the rest of the sex change?” were two of Bard’s more amusing hints. “Cut your fucking hair or I’ll fucking fire you” was one not so amusing. The sideburns, too, were longer than they should be, but Kurt would put the blade to those without needing to be told; wild, bushing sideburns were consistent traits of all Tylersville’s redneck klan. The very last thing he wanted to look like off duty was a rube.