Excerpt: Black Dog

Black Dog Ch 15 <2.1k>

I felt like I was in a growing tempest of questions.

Anne’s taunting me hinted at Agnes possibly being still alive. If Agnes was alive then whose bones had the gargoyles found? Was there another missing teenager?

Did Agnes know this other teenager? Were they connected from school or the park? Had Constable Steward arrested this other teenager? Were the problems of this teenager at all related to the problems of Agnes?

I still had no idea on how the creature that had reduced the teenager to a vomited pellet of bones might be related to the mass death of squid. I was not even sure they were connected at all.

The gargoyles were the guardians of the city but they were busy trying to keep the city breaking out in chaos from the loss in man power of police. I doubted the police would be able to give much help if they were stuck having to watch their every step do to this Operation Sledgehammer.

It was a miss mash snarl of tangled bits of story and I lacked Alexander’s sword. Instead, I was the fool trying to stick his finger in a dam and finding it springing more and more leaks.

I let these thoughts tumble through my head trying to find any sort of order for this jumble when I reached the dark way leading to Filthytoes shop. His cousins were going over the stall making sure everything was clean with their tongues.

Stubbelbeeguts and Krackeliron might be family but that didn’t mean that they were going to escape punishment. It was just that it needed to be family punishment and not some outsiders.

I made a personal promise to wash anything in future that I purchased from Filthytoes.

Stubbelbeeguts and Krackeliron gave me a thumbs up as I passed by. Hookeyleft waved me in while he pushed the button to trigger the cuckoo.

This time, Filthytoes turned on his stool as I walked in. I noticed the pile of mould under his stool was gone except for a fresh dusting. I wondered which of his cousins had gotten the honour of licking up the pile.

“Isaac,” he greeted with a nod. He didn’t bother to flip up his lenses giving his eyes a distorted appearance.

“Have you got the cell phone tracker?”

He nodded.

“I just need you to tell me the number to finish calibrating it.”

I gave him the number and he fiddled with the device for a second.

“Alright,” he said holding up the device that looked vaguely like a compass attached to a necklace. “You just hold it flat and look at the blue end of the needle. The blue end of the needle will point in the direction of the cell phone.”

I looked at the device he was holding being careful where I stepped. I didn’t want to have to wash my back paws in bleach after getting too close to Filthytoes. I noted the compass was currently slowly spinning as if it was looking for magnetic north.

“Once you get back to the human world, it will settle down and work fine.”

I nodded in understanding.

I then pulled out and handed over the Casu Marzu making sure to rattle the plastic container to prove the maggots were still fresh and full of bounce.

Filthytoes salivated at the receipt of payment.

He then took the cell phone tracker and dumped it into the chest cavity of a penguin carcase.

“Filthy, don’t you have any plastic bags?”

“Hmph, get with the times Isaac. I now use only environmentally friendly packaging. Bird carcases you can eat when you are done with them while no one would want to eat a plastic bag.”

I am pretty sure that a goblin’s sense of environmentally friendly was not going to catch on in the near future with humans.

I tucked the penguin under my arm and headed back to the city. I would have left the penguin behind but didn’t want to attract attention by wearing the tracker around my neck. In Goblin Town, a penguin carcase under the arm was less conspicuous then a spinning thing of a majig around the neck.

It was early afternoon when I returned to the city by my hearth in the Spotted Dick. I looked at the pictures of the Dalmatians racing along on the walls. The owner’s father-in-law owned a pub in England by the same name and had decided to copy the concept when he moved to the city.

I left the penguin in my locker and rinsed off the cell phone tracker. I put the necklace around my neck and headed outside.

The weather had closed in with a slight wind pushing the dampness below the skin. His fur soon became drenched as if he had been standing in a shower. There was little an umbrella would have done to prevent this creeping dampness.

Glancing at the blue needle which now held a steady point, he set off. He used the streets and alleyways as guides but the needle kept him on track.

He was halfway there when he began to get an idea of where he was headed. Instead of explaining things, it just made for more of a puzzle. It might be coincidence but a century of experience didn’t leave much belief in random coincidence.

From that point forward, his every step became further assurance of his original guess. He tried to very his path a bit instead of following a straight line path along indicated by the blue needle. Varying his path allowed him to get a fresh bearing to think on where the two lines might meet.

It was then that he was certain. He was headed back to the police headquarters. Agnes’s cell phone was at the station.

I jogged up to the entrance of the station. I couldn’t help but wonder if she had been arrested. Maybe she was already inside lying on some slab in the morgue. I looked down at the blue needle but it was not pointing into the station. It was pointing to a fenced off area behind the station house where the garage building was located.

I moved to the gate of the impound lot and flashed my private investigator’s badge.

“Looking for your car?” the attendant asked.

The attendant was in a small booth with a Plexiglas window. Several small monitors showed in black and white the cars on the lot. There were various clipboards hung on the walls with stacks of sheets. The attendant’s overalls had a clip on badge giving the name of Leroy LeDuke.

“No, I think that I might be looking for something in one of the vehicles,” I said.

“Do you have a make and a licence plate?”

“No, but I have,” I quickly thought of how to explain my compass’s dowsing to find the cell phone. I remembered what Garg1 had said. “I have a GPS fix on the location.”

“Oh, is it some sort of cell phone then?”

“Yeah, how’d you know?”

“I got my kids’s phones rigged that way. I know the second they step outside of the boundaries that I have set. I get an email of the violation and can then call and check to see if they’re okay.

“It’s a dangerous world and a parent has to keep their eyes on their kid all the time these days.”

I nodded at the man’s wisdom. I remembered a time when a kid leaving the neighbourhood boundary zone was called a call to your mother by the neighbour down the lane.

“So, is the cell phone yours or a client’s?” he asked.

“Possibly a missing girl’s cell phone,” I answered.

“Well, I haven’t seen any girls around here today. If you figure out which vehicle the phone might be in then come back and get me. I’ll open it up and enter it in the evidence locker.”

“I won’t be able to take it?”

“Sorry, the owner of the cell phone will have to give proof to claim it. The police will notify the owner if you don’t.”

“And if the girl is missing?”

“The police will get your statement and start with the cell phone to go looking for the girl.”

I nodded. The days of evidence going missing for a few days or not being recorded when found were long gone. Computers tracked everything.

I headed deeper into the impound yard. Remote surveillance cameras tracked me while the attendant turned to talk to an upset woman on why her car had a boot attached.

I let my glamour cover my usage of the cell phone tracker which led me towards the police garage. Near the garage, I found a Ford Taurus. The car was a wreck. The front end of the car was crumpled and front window was smashed in. The deployed airbags hung limply down. The car had either hit something or something had hit the car.

Fluids still leaked from the front and under body of the vehicle. Some sort of absorbent material had been tossed underneath the vehicle to soak up some of the fluids but the smell of leaking fluids and gasoline was something that I couldn’t miss.

The front doors of the vehicle looked warped from the impact. The front passenger door was not fully closed and hung at a slight downward angle. Yellow police tape had been attached to the door to hold it closed.

I moved around to the passenger side to see if I could glance inside and spot the cell phone. A red evidence sticker had been placed on the slightly open passenger car as a reminder to not open it.

I could smell alcohol coming from the interior of the vehicle. I was pretty sure the smell was vodka. It might be one of the cheaper brands that were not as heavily filtered to remove discernable odour to humans.

I could also smell the scent of Agnes. She had been in the car in the last twelve hours. It was mixed with the smell of blood. Not very much but she had been injured. I was also pretty sure that someone had been recently smoking marijuana.
I couldn’t see the cell phone but by walking around the vehicle, I was sure that it was coming from the driver’s seat.

I walked back to the attendant booth and waited for him to be free.

“Did you find the vehicle?” he asked as the woman stomped away swearing at the city and everyone in it.

“I think it is in that Taurus,” I said pointing to the dark blue vehicle.

“Ah, they brought that one in this morning. They have the owners in the station right now for questioning?”

“Questioning? How do you know?”

“They brought the couple here first to identify the vehicle. They then took them inside to find out how the car, smelling of alcohol, ended up in the front room of a person’s home.”

“I see. And there was no girl at the crash?”

“Not from what the police were asking the couple. The police seemed to be focusing on the couple to find out which of them might have been driving the car when it crashed.

“Now, let’s see what we can find when we open up that car. The police already pulled most of the stuff out of it and locked it up as evidence.”

The attendant continued to talk as he led the way to the car with a different clipboard then he had recorded Isaac’s name. The attendant went to the passenger side of the door and cut the evidence seal and undid the police tape. He made a note on his clip board.

“Got an idea on where to start searching?” the attendant asked.

“The driver’s seat.”

The attendant grunted and moved into the vehicle. He pushed the deployed airbags limp forms out of his way. He started the search around the edges of the driver’s cushion. Not finding anything but some old Kleenex, he then started to search the floor. He looked under the mat and looked under the seat.

“Found it!” he said. He then wriggled back out of the vehicle. He carefully picked up the cell phone and dropped it into and evidence bag that he pulled from a back pocket. The cell phone was black in colour with several small heavy metal band stickers attached.

The attendant then pulled out a pen and made markings on the bag recording the find. He made additional markings on his clip board. Last, he closed the door on the Taurus as best he could and put on a new evidence sticker that he initialled and noted on his clip board.

“Alright, let’s get this back to the booth and call a constable. They’ll take your statement and start the process to figuring out what the girl’s cell phone was doing on the floor of the Taurus.”