Meter Maids Eat Their Young (2 page)

I turned and glanced over at the Dazzler Donut shop. I wasn't interested in buying anything, not that they'd be open this early anyway. I had my Peet's coffee in a metal thermos clipped to my belt, so life was good. My interest was the donut shop doorway, which was the preferred nighttime refuge of a young, homeless woman I'd met on my first day back in town. If she wasn't too tweaked, she may have seen something. I headed in that direction.

No sign of her. The doorway smelled of donuts and stale sweat and was lined with a layer of cardboard boxes, grease-stained and picked at; ragged pieces littered about. I felt my heart fall through an old trapdoor when I spotted a pint bottle of Jack Daniels sitting in the corner. Need scratched at my insides. You'd think after two years that need would disappear, or at least diminish. Fat chance. Buster Booze, as I've named my little craving, is always somewhere about, hiding in the shadows, turning up at unexpected times to whisper in my ear or give me a swift kick in the ass.

I started going through the other stuff Skeeter left behind. A stained, dog-eared paperback, its cover missing, lay next to the door alongside an empty book of matches. I picked it up, looked at the spine.
Homeboy
, by Seth Morgan. I felt a prick of envy. He'd had his book published. I'd been working on mine for the better part of ten years and all I'd managed was a stack of rejection letters thick as a New York phone book. Published, yeah. And then he'd gone off and splatted himself against a wall on his Harley. That would be my kind of luck.

Beneath a corner of the cardboard I found a crumpled Marlboro pack with three twisted cigarettes and half a dozen butts inside. I considered this. She must have left in a hurry to leave the booze and cigarettes behind. And the book.  Skeeter was a voracious reader and books cost money.

Peering back over my shoulder at the flickering lights of the patrol cars down in the lot, I wondered if she had been busted. No. Had she been, her sleeping bag and that huge backpack she lived out of would still be here. Reluctantly, I picked up the whiskey and the cigarettes and slipped them into the pocket of my coat, along with the book. I had a good idea where she might be.

As I stepped out the doorway, I spotted a figure walking along the edge of the grass, heading toward the scene in the parking lot. It was Jasmine, or Jaz as she preferred to be called. Seeing her made me vaguely uncomfortable. Jaz makes my heart do things I don't want it to do.

Like beat faster.

Generally I'm attracted to a woman for about as long as it takes to play out our entire relationship in my head. About fifteen seconds from heady beginning to crash-and-burn end is the usual time it takes. I've known Jaz now since I returned to town four months ago and still my insides turn to jelly whenever she's around. Her being my boarder complicates the matter. Her being a lesbian complicates it more, though it's probably the key to why I'm still attracted to her. It's safe being drawn to what you can't have.

When I called out to her, she jumped like a rabbit hearing the screech of an owl. As she turned, I noticed how pale she was, saw the dark circles beneath her eyes.

“You okay, Jaz?” I said as she drew near.

“Okay? Uh, yeah, I guess. Late night, you know. Early call this morning.” She turned and looked back over her shoulder. “I, uh, had no idea I'd be walking into a murder scene.”

“You've heard, then?” I said. “Who they found?”

“Yeah. The department called, told me about the meters, needed me to come and check out the damage. They didn't say anything about this.”

I flinched as I heard the reporter in me ask the next question. “How did you find out who was killed?”

“Who? What do you mean? On the radio, I guess. On the way over here.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Do? My job, Teller. I'm going to do my job. Check out the damage. Report back. Get a crew down here to fix things. Why don't you get out of my face and go do yours? Go gather up the usual suspects and find out what's going on.”

She turned and walked off. I watched her walk away, the sway of her hips, the way her hair swept across her back. Just like someone else I knew long ago; another woman, another look, another flash of temper. A shiver ran up my back. Too many ghosts in this town.

And it was scary how much Jaz reminded me of Robyn, the number one ghost of all.

Despite the quarters I had fed the meter, despite the press card that lay on the dash, despite the presence of twenty uniformed police in an area that was – to anyone with a functioning brain – a crime scene, there was a parking ticket tucked beneath the wiper when I returned to the Altima. That there was a ticket fluttering beneath the wiper of the cop car parked in front of mine did not in any way diminish my anger.

I considered ripping the ticket to tiny shreds and scattering it to the wind but the image of my car booted and towed stayed my hand. I crumpled it up instead and tossed it on the floor, knowing I'd pay the thing before the week was out no matter how much it pained me to do so. Moments later, Amy Lee wailing from the Bose speakers, I was cruising up Pine Street, past the oldest construction site in town.

I pulled the Altima over to the curb and killed Amy mid breath. No more, indeed. I sat there a moment, thumbing through my notes, trying to decide the best way to approach Skeeter. A rumble of exhaust made me look up. An SUV, its right front fender crumpled, cruised slowly up the street, nearly stopping when it pulled alongside. The windows were darkened, reflecting a distorted image of me staring back at myself. I was about to roll down my window when it sped off with a squeal of tires.

Stepping from my car, I watched the SUV turn the corner and disappear.  Tourist, I thought and dismissed it. With a doubtful sigh, I noted the parking sign indicated that feeding the meter was not necessary on Sunday. I keyed the alarm on the car and walked across the street. It took me several minutes to find a loose board in the rickety fence that surrounded the site. Squeezing past it, I managed to slide down a steep slope of hard-packed earth and stone without killing myself. No mean feat at my age.

Over the years the site had become a combination pissoir and dumping ground. Night Train, Thunderbird and Wild Irish Rose bottles littered the ground alongside empty Sterno cans. An old mattress floated in a pool of algae-coated water. Bald tires, several battered washing machines and the back end of an ancient pickup truck were scattered about. The place smelled like an overripe septic tank.

Brushing the dirt from my pants and jacket, I made my way to the old construction shack. Weather-beaten, the unpainted wood the color of moths' wings, the windows boarded over and shards of glass glittering on the ground beneath them. I began banging on the door.

“C'mon, Skeeter,” I shouted. “I know you're in there.”

“Teller?” came a tiny voice.

“Yeah, it's me. Open up the door, will ya? We need to talk.” I heard her fumbling around, heard the sound of coins being scooped up and then the door swung inward. I stepped into the gloom.

“What do you want?” she said. “Got a cigarette?”

 I pulled the book, whiskey, and crumpled Marlboro pack, from the pocket of my coat and handed it to her. Her eyes lit up as she grabbed them from my hand.

“You're sweet, Teller,” she said. She cocked her head and gave me a look that tried hard for schoolgirl coy. “You wanna mess around a little?”

“I don't think so,” I answered. “You're, uh, a little too young for me. I just wanted to ask you about what happened out by the monorail this morning.”

“What makes you think I was there?” she said, the coyness replaced with caution.

Incredulous, I looked at her, first staring at the whiskey bottle, then the cigarette in her hand and finally at the bulges in her coat pockets. “Duh!” I said.

“Oh.” She blushed. “Yeah. I guess I was there, huh?”

“Either that or you robbed someone's piggy bank,” I said.

“I didn't rob nuthin',” she said, anger replacing the caution. This was one volatile little lady.

“I didn't say that, Skeeter,” I said, holding up my hand to fend off the tirade I saw leap into her eyes. “I don't care about the money or how you got it. I just want to know if you saw anything.”

Anger damped down into sullen, jittery drunk again. “Saw a car in the lot and then those meters went
poof
,” she said.

“A car?”

“Yeah, one of those big ones that families think are so safe.”

“An SUV?”

“Whatever. Circled the lot once, stopped and then took off again like a bat out of hell. I only noticed cuz no one ever drives in there at night. The train station is closed so why would you? And cuz one light was dimmer than the other and pointed down at the ground.”

“Dimmer?”

“Yeah. The fender was all smashed up.”

I thought about the SUV that had pulled up alongside me just moments before.  Coincidence?  Never had much love for coincidences.

“After that's when the vampire showed up,” she said, pulling me out from my thoughts.

“Pardon me?”

“A vampire, Teller. You know: Cloaks. Fangs. Sucks blood.”

“A vampire showed up?”

“Yeah,” she said, her excitement evident. “It was like something out of one of those Wes Craven movies. You've seen those, right? It was all misty and formless, shimmering in the dark, a Vamp on a bike.”

“A bicycle?”

“Yeah. Bet you never saw anything like that before, huh? She parked her bike and walked down to the meters, touching each one as she passed. Then I heard her shriek and she took off. Right after that, the meters went up in flames and all those coins started dropping.”

“She?”

“Yeah. It was a girl vampire.”

“How would you know that?” I said.

 This time she gave me the ‘duh!' look.

I decided not to pursue it. She was hitting the Jack pretty hard now and her eyes were beginning to droop. I made a mental note to check back with her later.

Despite the pocketful of change she had, I gave her twenty dollars for the information and bid her good-bye. She halfheartedly tried to seduce me again and I wholeheartedly let her down gently. Fifteen minutes and a long, slippery climb later, I was breathing fresh air and heading back to the park.

The park was beginning to fill: Joggers, early morning couples out for a stroll, a few tourists getting an early start on the day. It was hard to imagine a death had happened here just hours before. My heart did a little bump and grind at the thought. It was going to be hard maintaining an emotional distance on this one.

A group of parking enforcement protesters had gathered near the Monorail Station. I noticed their numbers were growing. There were three times as many now as there had been a month ago. Several of them were handing out leaflets and I grabbed one, looking it over as I walked. Unlike the previous ones, which had been hand scrawled, these were professionally printed. Someone had worked very hard this morning.

‘Viva La Mangler!' was emblazoned across the top in bold, red letters. Below that, in slightly smaller though no less impressive letters, was ‘No Meters for the Monorail!' A short diatribe on why parking meters should be banned followed and, at the bottom of the page, in a much smaller font, the acronym, CARPE. No phone number, no address, no identifying marks. I almost threw it away. I could feel my focus shifting from the Mangler to the murder but a little voice was asking if they might be part and parcel?

The logical assumption would be that Harrison had caught the Mangler and the Mangler had killed him. But you know what they say about assumptions, and every reporter's instinct I had questioned that one. I folded the flyer and stuck it in my pocket. I had tried to follow up on this group before with no success.  With the growing strength of this movement, it seemed like a good time to try again.