The Moonlight Monsters Detective Agency Volume One (9 page)

‘And the headlines again,’ the broadcaster spoke, ‘what has been called the heist of the century has taken place in a downtown bank today…’

‘What?’ Tina muttered, ‘no shit?’

‘Reports are still coming in, but an estimated half a billion dollars has been seized. In other news a series of bizarre attacks have taken place at Shopping Malls around the city, the disturbances having been cited as a reason for the poor police response to the earlier bank robbery…’

‘Jesus,’ Tina muttered. Was it a coincidence? Or had the
Krampus
attacks all just been some kind of elaborate large-scale diversion for the real crime? If that was the case then
whoever’d
gotten away with all that money had some serious sway in the Supernatural world. Transporting a gang of
Krampi
to the states was no small deal. But the real question was whether or not Parker knew. Once again Tina found herself wishing she hadn’t let the vampire slip through her fingers so easily.

The newscast ended and the deluge of Christmas classics began again. Well, Tina reflected, she still had Parker’s money so chances were she’d get to ask him in person soon enough.

As Frank Sinatra sang “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” she reflected for a moment that she still hadn’t gotten a chance to do her Christmas shopping yet. It was the same every year – never enough time. She pulled the car off the interstate and rejoined the interminable traffic of Moonlight City. Oh well, she sighed as she looked out at the bright lights overhead, there wasn’t much else to do now but just sit back and try to enjoy the music.

# # #

Sand Wedged

The boardwalks of Moonlight City were swarmed with revelers and party-goers – hardly surprising since it
was
new years’ eve – and Tina Peterson pushed her way past them as she followed the wooden sidewalk down along the line of casinos, hotels and restaurants that overlooked the Atlantic Ocean.

It was a clean, crisp night and the sea was calm beneath the sparse black sky. The calm before the storm perhaps, Tina reflected and she didn’t mean the midnight blowout that would cause a furor amongst the partiers in an hour or two.

Tina Peterson was a detective, but not with the regular police force. She worked for the Moonlight City SDA – the Supernatural Detective Agency, also known as the Moonlight Monsters Detective Agency to those familiar with the more unconventional citizens of the city – and tonight she wasn’t on the Boardwalk for pleasure. (Hardly, she snorted as some drunken frat boy barged past her on his way to the ocean-side of the boardwalk and threw up a deluge of sick over the railings.)

No, tonight she was here on a case – just like she had been every night for the past half-week.
Because something strange was happening along the beaches and coastlines of Moonlight City.
Though just what exactly, she still wasn’t sure.

It had all started a few days earlier – just after Christmas in fact, since fate had a way of making sure Tina never seemed to have any time off at all – when reports of a minor-earthquake on the coast began to emerge.
Strange?
Certainly, since Moonlight City was fairly far away from any fault lines, but supernatural?
Hardly.

Or so she’d thought. But within two hours of catching the first report of the tremors on the news Tina got a call from Ernie the Egghead, the local agency’s lab technician and IT guy (and stranded extra-terrestrial alien, as he just so happened to be). Ernie said he had a problem and needed her back at the office as soon as possible. And no, it couldn’t wait.

So Tina had had to bid farewell to her family early and leave her parents’ house upstate to return to Moonlight City and the grind of Supernatural Detection. Oh well, at least some day she’d be retired and could then do all the things a normal person gets to do – if she made it that long, that was.

When she arrived back at HQ her partner Boris Rachmaninoff was already there, looking even more irate than she was about getting called back in on a case. Boris was a werebear – a man who can turn into a bear at will – who’d emigrated from Russia after the Berlin Wall fell twenty years previously. His wife had died a couple of years back and now he juggled looking after his huge clan of offspring with his career with the SDA. When he was off on the job his sister looked after the kids.

Not long after that Ernie scuttled in on his little mechanical walker (Ernie, as an alien
greyling
, was no more than three feet tall and used a machine to compensate). He had a wad of documents in his hand, which was never a good sign, and proceeded to tell the detectives that whatever it was that was happening underneath the beaches of Moonlight City, a natural occurrence it most certainly was not.

So it wasn’t an earthquake, Tina could accept that easily enough (she’d seen far too much weirdness in her time with the Detective Agency to maintain anything but the most open of minds), but as for what it actually
was
, Ernie could only guess.

‘Hey,’ he shrugged, scrunching his wrinkly little gray shoulders, ‘you guys are meant to be the detectives – you figure it out…’

So here she was walking up and down the crowded boardwalk, trying not to get drink spilled on her or hit on or, hell, even puked on. And she still had no idea what she was dealing with. But she could feel something…

There hadn’t been anymore rumblings since the first day, but the reason Tina and Boris kept coming back was because she
was
picking up on something.
Something very strange, far beneath the wooden boardwalks.
As a human-demon hybrid (she was an eight demon on her mother’s side) Tina was gifted with certain extrasensory abilities – the most pronounced of which was telepathy. And she could feel something, every night they’d come down to the shore she’d felt something, something
alive
.

But what, she hadn’t a clue. Whatever it was it seemed to be asleep or unconscious – or at the very least so dumb that it couldn’t even form its thoughts into basic needs and desires. But it was there. And if it was big enough to show up on the Richter scale as a minor earthquake then sooner or later there was going to be trouble.

‘Anything down your end?’ she spoke into her walky-talky.

‘
bzzzt
... Nada, nothing yet
,’ Boris replied.

Boris was down at the other end of the beach at a vantage point out on the fairground pier from which he could get a view on the entirety of the ocean vista.
Lucky for him.

‘It’s all safe so far up here,’ Tina said. She glanced warily at a pair of
drunk
youngsters sizing up to each other for a fight. ‘Comparatively at least…’

She affixed the radio-transmitter back to her belt and continued walking up the wooden avenue.

Out across the still black ocean, fireworks exploded against the sky in a kaleidoscope of shapes and colors. Tina inched down a stairwell onto the beach to get away from the noise as a thousand liquored-up citizens congratulated each other on surviving yet another year. She passed by a couple making out by the pillars and stepped down onto the cool sand.

‘Well Happy new year then Boris…’

‘
Ha…
’ the Russian replied, ‘
what’s happy about it?
’

Tina smiled. ‘Well for one thing, whatever’s lying dormant underneath us managed to sleep through the commotion, so if it can wait a couple of hours than we might avoid a large-scale disaster.’

‘
The only disaster is working on New Years Eve.
’

‘So far,’ Tina shrugged, ‘anyway, I’m going to give it a minute and then start walking back down towards you. Hopefully things will quiet down a bit now. See you soon…’

She clicked off the mike and looked out across the dark ocean. She glanced over her shoulder at the young couple on the steps. The guy raised his hand and waved.

‘Happy new years,’ he said.

‘Happy new years,’ Tina smiled and looked back out to sea.

As the revelers dispersed from the boardwalk and went off to their after-parties and nightclubs and jail-cells (probably), Tina strolled off the main avenue and onto the pier. The shapes of the carnival rides were a black silhouette against the sky – they’d shut down shortly after midnight – and a few stragglers were still hanging around, most likely up to no good. Somewhere behind them, the hulking figure of Boris Rachmaninoff waited in the darkness. At six feet and seven inches of towering Russian muscle, the werebear was enough to scare away even the toughest of delinquents from the pier.

Tina walked towards him at the end of the stretch.

‘Still nothing,’ she called, ‘thank God. But it’s definitely down there somewhere, whatever it is…’

Boris threw up his hands in frustration. ‘Ah!’ he sighed, ‘I wish it would just attack already so we could get it over with and not have to come to this stinking salty hell-hole anymore!’

Boris did not like the pier. In fact he’d grown to hate it over the last few cold, eventless nights.

‘Hey, who said anything about attack?’ Tina shrugged, ‘Who knows, maybe we’ll get lucky this time and close the case without any violence or destruction…’

Boris just stared. ‘
Ya
?’ he said, ‘and how often does that happen again?’

Tina smiled. ‘Uh never… But maybe
this
time…’

Boris looked back out at the water, muttering a slew of Russian curse-words under his breath.

Since it was getting cold and the beaches were now almost empty they decided to walk back to their company Mercedes and park it up an alleyway close to the boardwalk. That way they’d be close enough to hear it if anything went down but still warm and comfortable enough not to give up on life entirely.

‘Hey,’ Tina said, ‘we can even get coffee and donuts in that little all night food-stand by the plaza. See Boris; it’s turning out to be a good new years’ after all…’

‘Hah!’ Boris snorted, but at least he was smiling now.

They purchased some coffee and pastries and drove the car back towards the beach. Boris parked around the corner from the pier and they settled down for a long night of waiting.

‘So you get a chance to call Svetlana and the kids to wish them happy New Year?’ Tina asked as she sipped her coffee.

‘Na,’ Boris shrugged, ‘I tried but the cell-phone lines were all jammed up. They’re probably all in bed now…’

‘They better be,’ Tina grinned, ‘right?’

‘Damn right,’ Boris
grunted,
his face the picture of a proud patriarch.

Tina took a bite of her jelly donut and chewed thoughtfully. ‘Funny how things turn out,’ she said, ‘a week ago I thought I’d still be up at the folks’ place ringing in the New Year with my family. Now look at us… Couldn’t be further away…’

‘
Ya
,’ Boris sighed sadly, ‘that is how it goes when the world crumbles beneath you – you never see it coming until it’s already gone…’

‘Oh shit Boris, I didn’t mean to remind you of – ’

‘Is alright,’ the Russian waved away, ‘at this time of year Arianna is never far from my thoughts anyway.’

‘She’d have been proud of you Boris,’ Tina said, ‘proud of how you’ve coped. Proud of all of you…’

At that moment there was a knock on the window and the detectives turned to face their accoster. Outside the window, the roguishly-handsome face of Sam Parker grinned at them. In his hand he held up a bottle of Jack Daniels as he rapped on the window.

‘No way…’ Tina whispered.

Sam Parker was a vampire, but Tina didn’t hold that against him. No, not that – since there was more than enough bad in Sam Parker’s character to focus on without her having to resort to supernatural discrimination. Parker was a huckster and a conman who’d moved to Moonlight City from London a month or two earlier to try to set himself up as a private-detective. Naturally he’d skipped the proper legal channels completely – stuff like registering with the Byron Shelly Institute, (the loose-organization that governed paranormal matters around the globe), or applying for an actual license to preform private detection – and gone straight to conducting investigations governed solely by his own whim. That was when the detectives had first crossed paths with him.

But nothing with Parker was ever simple. It was impossible to tell when he was telling the truth – if he ever was. (Tina had first-rate psychic abilities but Parker, like many paranormal citizens, had built up internal defenses against such intrusions). Since then, the British vampire had moved in and out of their lives, first leading them to a drugs bust containing stolen money (the money turned out to be his, but he didn’t tell them that at first) and later helping Tina fight off a coven of chaotic winter demons who’d overrun the city in the build-up to Christmas. So yeah, she owed him for that one, but then that was why Parker was still a free man (or vampire) and not locked up in a cell right now for giving false information to law enforcement and practicing detection without a license. And there were other loose-ends too that Tina still hadn’t cleared up with the vampire…