Chapter
2
T
wenty minutes after Marsha left, Enid Garriques walked through the door. It was turning out to be a busy day after all.
“I've been expecting you,” I told her as I watched her calibrate her smile to the requisite degree of social correctness.
“Well, it is that time again.” For the past three years she'd come in to buy her husband a birthday present. “Any suggestions?” she asked after we'd exchanged pleasantries.
“He's been admiring the retic.” And I pointed to the back where Monty, our reticulated python, was living.
Enid pursed her lips. The movement made her chin look even smaller. She was one of those short, dark women who have a brief moment of beauty and then quickly balloon into a fat, plain middle age. “I was thinking more along the lines of a salt water tank. He's been talking about starting one up.”
I did diplomatic. “Either would make a nice present. How many gallons were you thinking about?”
“Fifty.”
“That will run you some money.” Not that she couldn't afford it.
“I don't mind.” In the three years Enid had been coming in, she always bought her husband something big and expensive. I'd heard she'd bought her husband as well. “Why don't you show me what you have?” she asked while I wondered if the rumor was true.
I spent the next half an hour helping Enid put together an attractive package. We had just finished pricing the items when Tim came in. He'd been with the shop ever since Murphy had opened it and knew everything about reptiles there was to know.
“Mrs. Garriques is thinking about getting her husband a salt water tank,” I told him.
“Nice choice,” Tim said and moved off to the other side of the store.
It was better that way. Although Enid had never said it, she'd let it be known that she preferred doing business with me. I don't think she approved of Tim's shaved head, earrings, and tattoo.
Enid tapped her fingers on her expensive brown leather clutch. “Let me think about this for a while.”
“Go right ahead.” If past experience was any indication, she'd come back three or four more times before she bought anything.
“Think she'll get him the snake?” Tim asked after Enid left.
I shook my head. “She doesn't like snakes. I'm putting my money on the fish.”
Tim reached down and scratched Pickles, the store cat, under his chin. “You know my mother never got me what I wanted when she bought me a present. She always got me the things she thought I should have.”
“Mine, too.”
“I wonder why people do that?”
“I don't know.”
We were still discussing the subject when Manuel barged in. The kid's breath was coming out in ragged gasps. Drops of rain ran down his cheeks and off his chin. His shirt was plastered to his body. It looked as if he'd run all the way here. As he hurried toward me I noticed that he was wearing two different sneakers.
“The police chasing you?” Tim said.
Manuel shot him a dirty look. “You got no call to say that. None at all.”
“So what's the matter?” I asked, intervening before an argument got started. The constant rain had made everyone cranky and out of sorts.
“The matter is there's a bat in my bedroom. I woke up and picked up my pants off the floor, and this thing flew out and started flapping around the room.”
“So you ran?” Tim said.
Manuel flushed. “Hey. I could have been bit. It could have sucked out all my blood when I was asleep.”
Tim pulled in his cheeks and did a bad Bela Lugosi imitation. “Come into my castle,” he intoned, “and let me suck your blood. Give me a break.”
Manuel gave Tim a venomous look. “They can do that. I seen it on a TV show.”
“The bats you're talking about live in South America and attack farm animals,” I gently informed him. “The ones we have here eat bugs.”
Manuel scratched the tuft under his chin he called a goatee and looked down at the floor. “I don't care,” he muttered. “I don't like them anyway. Can I hang out here till it goes away?”
“How about I get rid of it for you instead?”
Manuel brightened. “Will you?” he asked me.
“Yeah, sure,” I replied. “Why not?”
Taking twenty minutes to catch the bat seemed infinitely preferable to having Tim and Manuel at each other's throats for the rest of the day.
Tim rubbed the top of his head. “This is the third bat sighting we've had this week.”
“I know.” When you run a pet shop people figure that you know everything there is to know about anything that crawls, slithers, trots, or flies. Both of the other calls had been equally panicky. Most people don't like bats, especially bats that are flying around their houses. I'd removed the bats from the other places as well. I'd done it partially as a favor to the people, who were my customers, but mostly because I'd felt sorry for the bats.
“Don't you think that's odd?”
“Yes I do.”
“I wonder what's going on?”
“Why don't you call the zoo and see if they know something?” I suggested as I took my butterfly net out from underneath the counter and reached for my work gloves. They were made out of four layers of heavy cotton. Over the past week I'd become extremely fond of them. Bats are mild creatures, but any animal will bite if they're under enough stress; and since being pursued by a large-net-bearing human constitutes stress it seemed wise to take precautions, especially since there was a rabies alert in effect in Onondaga County. If I did get bitten, I'd have to take shots as a precautionary measure, and even though the series now consisted of seven shots in the arm instead of twenty-one in the belly, it was something I'd definitely like to avoid if at all possible.
“I'll be back soon,” I told Tim as Manuel and I headed for the door.
The rain was still falling and Manuel and I dashed to the car. Another week or so of this and I'd get to see if my store, Noah's Ark, would live up to its name and float, I thought as I stepped in a puddle and cursed. Manuel stopped in front of my Checker cab. Murphy had found it when he was visiting a friend down in Brooklyn. It was one of the few nice things he'd ever done for me. When he'd bought it it had 50,000 miles on it. Now it had over 150,000. I loved it even though it was hard to start when the temperature got down below twenty, and the left signal light had a permanent short that no one could find, and the heater didn't always work. Oh, well. I guess the things we adore are never perfect.
Manuel sneezed. “This weather really sucks.”
“Tell me about it,” I replied as I opened the door and slid behind the wheel.
Manuel got in on the other side and closed his door. It didn't shut all the way.
“You have to slam it hard,” I reminded him. “It sticks.”
“I forgot.” I heard a whomp. The car shook.
“Not that hard,” I snapped as I turned the ignition key.
The motor grumbled and caught. I turned on the headlights and the windshield wipers and eased out of the lot. Ash was deserted. So were Pine and Oak. The only person I saw was a wino leaning against the wall of a scabby-looking liquor store called The House of Fine Wines, fine in this case meaning Thunderbird or Ripple.
A couple of minutes later we pulled up in front of Manuel's mom's place. It was a yellow, nondescript, run-down two-story colonial that housed the always changing parade of people that constituted Manuel's family. The porch sagged and the postage-size front yard was filled with discarded Big Wheels, jump ropes, balls, and crumpled up Big Mac bags. Surprisingly no one was home. Usually the house was full of playing children and chattering adults.
“Where is everyone?” I asked Manuel as he hurriedly led me through a hallway cluttered with bikes and basketballs and sneakers.
“They went to Rochester to visit my great aunt,” he explained as we stopped in front of what had once been the den and now served as a bedroom for Manuel and his two cousins.
“You mean they left you alone for the holiday?”
He shrugged. “I didn't want to go. I hate it there. Especially at Easter. There are all these little kids running around all over the place and we got to go to church and then we hafta to sit at this table and eat all this food.”
“Sounds horrible. When do they bring out the bamboo splinters?”
Manuel narrowed his eyes. “Yeah, well, maybe you wouldn't like it so much if you were sitting there and everyone kept asking you what you were doing with your life.”
“No, you're right I wouldn't,” I replied softly, remembering a few of those meals myself. It was tough being in that position, especially when you didn't have an answer to give them.
“Okay then.” Manuel swallowed and pointed to the door. “It's in there.”
When I opened the door Manuel jumped back. Nothing flew out. I poked my head in. I didn't see anything flying around.
“The bat probably went to sleep,” I told Manuel as I stepped inside.
I looked around. The room was so cluttered it was hard to move. Each wall had a bed pushed against it. The walls themselves were covered with posters of heavy metal groups. Piles of clothes and towels carpeted the floor. The room smelled of incense and pizza and socks that needed to be washed.
“Have you got him?” Manuel called out from the hallway two seconds later.
“I don't even see him.” I put my net down on the floor and took a more careful look around the room.
“Where is he?”
I started poking around. “Probably burrowing in one of the dirty piles of clothes.” This could take a while. The bats most commonly found around Syracuse are small enough to work their way into tiny cracks and crevices in the walls or along the baseboards. Fortunately this one hadn't been that ambitious. I found him in the first pile of laundry I looked through.
“Now, aren't you embarrassed?” I asked Manuel as I walked out of his room, bat in hand. I'd wrapped the animal up in a grungy Metallica T-shirt. I hadn't even needed my net. I'd just dropped the T-shirt over the animal and scooped him up.
“Not really.”
“He's tiny. You want to see?” I asked, holding the bat out toward him.
“No.” Manuel backed away from me. “What are you going to do with it?” he demanded once we were outside. The rain had gone down to a drizzle. “Kill it?”
“Hardly.” I put the T-shirt under a scraggly laurel bush by the house and stood back. “I'm going to let it go.” In a little while the bat would fly away. “Bats eat lots of insects. Some species eat as many as six hundred mosquitos an hour. So you can see why they're good to have around.”
Manuel did not look impressed. “That's not what that guy says.” He indicated a blue van parked down the street.
“Naturally that guy wouldn't.” I'd seen the van around the neighborhood a fair amount in the last couple of months. Its sign, M & M Exterminators, painted on the side in big, white block letters and outlined in yellow was hard to miss. “Look at what he does for a living.”
Manuel hitched up his shorts. “He said bats carry rabies.”
I stepped around a puddle. “A few do. Most don't. “A gust of wind blew rain drops down from the tree I was standing under. I wiped a few off my nose.
“He told my mother he could set up some kind of sound system in the attic of our house to make sure we never got any.”
This was sounding more and more as if this guy was running a scam. “And how much did he want for this service?”
Manuel shrugged. “I don't know. Six, seven hundred, a thousand dollars.”
I whistled. “That's a hell of a lot of money. I hope your mother didn't give him any.”
“No, but Mrs. Chan did.”
“Jesus,” I growled. “That's ridiculous.”
Manuel hitched up his pants. “Hey, the thing works. Mrs. Chan don't have no bats now.”
“Did she have them before?” I demanded.
“Uh.” Manuel started fidgeting. “I don't think so.”
I began tapping my foot on the sidewalk. Stuff like this really made me angry. Not only was this guy killing things he had no business killing, but he was taking money from people who didn't have any to do it. I knew Mrs. Chan. She was a sweet forty-year-old woman with a husband on disability and a mildly retarded twelve-year-old daughter. The woman needed every cent she could get her hands on.
I was trying to decide whether I should get involved or just forget about it when the door on the driver's side of the M & M Exterminator's van opened and a skeletal-looking man dressed in black stepped out and strode up the path to the house in front. He had spiked platinum hair and dead white skin. With a scythe and a hooded cloak he could have done a perfect stand-in for the Grim Reaper. Maybe the man just scared the bats to death. As I watched he knocked on the door. A beach-ball-shaped woman dressed in purple answered. She listened for a minute, shook her head, and slammed the door in Grim Reaper's face. He was marching back toward his van as I got in my car.
I guess even Dr. Death can't win all the time.