Ghoul Interrupted

  I glanced at it, only now realizing that it was throbbing like crazy. “Got any first aid in that pack of yours?”

  Gilley stood up, his shoes crunching on the bits of plastic from the smashed computers as he walked to his backpack. After rooting around, he came back with some antibacterial ointment and a cotton ball. He cleaned up the wound and I hissed, winced, and complained all the way through it. “You might want to get that looked at tomorrow,” he suggested. “I mean, for all we know, demons might carry some terrible disease, like . . . demon rabies.”

  I rolled my eyes and rotated my wrist to inspect the wound. “I’ve been slashed by a demon before,” I reminded him. “And I survived it just fine.”

  “M. J.,” Gilley said. “This wound is much deeper than the last time. I really think you need stitches.”

  I surveyed the cut, which did look pretty deep. “There’s not much I can do about it now, Gil.”

  He frowned and went over to the john to retrieve the roll of toilet paper, which he then proceeded to wrap round and round my arm. The end result was comical, but at least it was better than nothing. “Put your free hand over the wound to keep pressure on it,” he advised me. “First thing in the morning, after they let us out of here, we’re hitting the emergency room.”

  I yawned, got to my feet, and shuffled back over to my bunk. “Better get some sleep,” I told him. “I have a feeling tomorrow’s gonna be a long day.”

  “What if it comes back?” Gilley asked as I slid onto the plastic surface and rolled away from the light again.

  “I don’t think it will, Gil.”

  “Why don’t you think it will?”

  I sighed and sat up, looking pointedly around the room. “Because it came here to kill us, but it obviously can’t work its way past the bars. We’re in the safest place we can be.”

  “That’s not very comforting,” he said with a frown.

  I shrugged. “It’s all I got, buddy.” I then turned away again, hoping he’d eventually do the same. Before long, I was actually asleep.

  Six a.m. felt like it arrived about sixty seconds later and our wake-up call was a long stream of profanity that began with “What in the . . .” and several seconds later ended with “. . . here?!”

  My eyes flew open and I sat up sorely, my hand still clamped over the wound on my arm. The makeshift bandage of toilet paper was dark red with blood, but at least it seemed to have stanched the flow.

  Gilley was out of his bunk and over to the door of the cell in a flash. “Let us out of here!” he demanded in a deep tone completely uncharacteristic of him.

  Cruz, who was standing in the middle of the chaotic scene, stared at him with wide disbelieving eyes. “What’d you two . . . ?” he asked, pointing around at the mess.

  “We’ll explain after you let us out of here and M. J. gets some medical attention.”

  Cruz’s eyes drifted to me and more pointedly to my wounded arm. More expletives followed. Then he pulled out his cell and hit a button. “Sheriff?” he said. “You gotta come to the station right away. We got a situation on our hands.”

  Cruz made no move to let us out of the jail cell, even though Gilley was doing his level best to insist that he unlock the door immediately. “Cool your jets,” Cruz barked at him, sifting through the contacts on his phone to make another call.

  With a frustrated sigh I lay back down on the bunk. I was a little light-headed all of a sudden and even more exhausted than when I’d first turned in just a few hours earlier.

  I didn’t have a chance to recline for long. Within five minutes Sheriff Pena had entered the station and his reaction was identical to Cruz’s right down to the string of expletives. He then turned to his deputy and demanded to know what’d happened. “I got no idea, Nick,” Cruz said. “I locked those two up last night around eight and left ’em here for the night. When I walked in this morning, this place looked like a bomb went off.”

  Pena stepped carefully over the debris to the front of our cell, where Gilley and I were both sitting on our bunks staring moodily out at the two lawmen. “What happened?”

  Gilley and I exchanged a look and I nodded to him. He could take the lead. “We’ll tell you exactly what happened the moment you let us out of here and have someone look at M. J.’s wound.”

  “Did someone call for a doctor?” asked a voice from the hallway just as the figure of Ari’s husband, Brody, entered. “Whoa!” he said when he took in the condition of the station. “What the hell happened here?”

  “We know but we’re not talking till the sheriff lets us out,” Gil said, glaring at Pena and Cruz. I half expected him to stick his tongue out at them for good measure.

  “Hi, Brody,” I said, getting up from the bunk to come to the front of the cell. “Can you call Heath for me and let him know I’m here?”

  Brody blinked as if he didn’t quite know what to say. “Uh, sure,” he said. “But maybe I could take a look at that arm of yours first?”

  “She’s got a terrible cut,” Gil told him. “Might’ve hit an artery, but these guys won’t let us out so we can go to the hospital.”

  Brody stepped over a pile of files and asked Cruz to open the door. He did, but instead of letting us come out, the deputy motioned the doctor in. Gil glared harder at him, but Cruz wasn’t backing down. Instead he turned his attention to what was left of his desk and the demolished computer on the floor.

  “Let’s see what we’ve got here,” Brody said, coming over to kneel in front of me and gently tugging on the thick layer of toilet paper. “Whoa,” he said again when he caught sight of the mean-looking wound. “How’d you get this?”

  “Shark bite,” I deadpanned.

  Brody grinned but sobered quickly. “Really, M. J., how’d this happen?”

  My eyes drifted to Gilley; I knew that by answering Brody we’d be giving up the one bargaining chip we had to get us out of the cell. He nodded reluctantly. It wasn’t like Cruz and Pena were chomping at the bit to let us out anyway. “It was the same demon that got Heath’s aunt and uncle,” I told him. “The spirit of the black hawk.”

  Brody sat back on his heels. “The one Heath and his mom have been going on about?”

  I nodded, and swept my good arm around in an arc. “It did all this too.”

  Brody’s eyes followed my hand, but came back to meet those of Sheriff Pena. “I told you,” he said to him. “I told you when I checked on Ray at the hospital that he wasn’t delusional. This thing is real, Pena.”

  I focused on the lawmen. I’d had no idea that there were discussions going on between Pena, Brody, and other members of the tribe about the veracity of the demon hunting Heath’s family.

  Pena stepped forward and motioned to Cruz to open the cell door. He then came inside, bringing with him one of the only chairs left intact. He turned the chair around to straddle it and stared pointedly at me before speaking. I did my best not to wither under his glare. “Tell me what happened, exactly as it occurred.”

  “Starting from when?” I asked, wincing when Brody got back to work on my arm.

  “Starting from when you ignored the sign posted at the entrance to the Pueblo, and you and your friend here thought it was a good idea to trespass on sacred ground.”

  I swallowed. I’d sorta been hoping they’d forgotten about that. “Gil and I rented a car and decided to search for signs of this demon,” I said, making up relevant parts as I went along. “As it happened, our car died right at the entrance to the Pueblo.”

  “Spectral activity can have that effect,” Gilley said, helping my story along. “As the technician expert on all of the Ghoul Getters episodes, I can tell you that we’ve had many a camera, gadget, and car battery drained of power when we were out hunting ghosts.”

  Pena showed no sign of either believing or disbelieving Gilley. He just continued to level his cool gaze at me. So, after an awkward pause, I got on with it. “Anyway, we couldn’t get the car started again, so we decided to come here for help, but the pl
ace was deserted.”

  “What time was this?”

  “Yeee-ouch!” I cried, jumping when Brody put some antiseptic on my wound.

  “Sorry,” he said, swiveling his head to look at Pena. “She’s got a set of three marks just like the patterns we found all over Milton’s body, Nick. And I don’t think a mountain lion got in here and caused all this.”

  Pena said nothing; he just continued to eye Brody and me with his steely gaze. Finally, though, he asked me again what time Gilley and I had arrived at the Pueblo.

  “It was early evening,” Gilley said quickly. “Around seven p.m.”

  I thanked God he’d spoken first, because I was so fuzzy-headed that I’d been about to tell Pena the truth, which would then have required me to explain what Gilley and I had done between about five and seven. I couldn’t very well have mentioned the library. We’d never get out of here if I did.

  “Yeah, around seven,” I said, like I was just remembering the time. “But it took us a while to walk here from the entrance.”

  “I rolled on them a little after eight, Nick,” Cruz said from his place outside the cell.

  “Then what?” Pena asked.

  The rest of the story Gilley and I took turns telling, leaving out the part where Gil had managed to snag our packs and then raided Cruz’s e-mail with his wireless keyboard and track pad, of course.

  Pena seemed to notice the bags, however, because he pointed to Gilley’s backpack and said to his deputy, “You let them keep those?”

  Cruz’s brown eyes focused on the backpack and my messenger bag. “No,” he said, and there was an undercurrent of anger in his voice. “I left those on a chair next to my desk.”

  “The demon knocked them on the floor and we were able to reach through the bars and grab them,” Gil said. “And good thing too, because you didn’t come back to check on us and M. J. could have bled to death if I hadn’t had my first aid kit handy!”

  Pena and Cruz let the subject go after that, but I couldn’t help thinking that Pena was seriously pissed about something.

  By now, Brody had finished stitching up my arm (it’d taken over fifty to close the wounds!) and he got up to head to the sink and remove his gloves so he could wash his hands again. “I’ll call Heath,” he said from the sink. “He’ll confirm that he knows these two and that they weren’t trying to steal his car.”

  “They’re still guilty of trespassing,” Cruz was quick to say.

  Pena got up from his chair and swung it around in front of him to carry it back outside the cell. “They had car trouble, Jimmy,” he growled. “Let ’em go.”

  Cruz’s face flashed to anger for a moment and he pointed to the disaster all around him. “But what about this, Nick! You know they had something to do with it!”

  Pena was unfazed by Cruz’s outburst. “How’d they pull that off, Jimmy?” he asked calmly. “Locked inside a cell and all. How’d they tear this place to shreds and get a wound like that in the process?”

  “Oh, come on, Nick! You can’t actually believe this black hawk crap!”

  Pena rounded on the younger officer, and it was clear that to him Cruz had just spoken out of turn. “It’s not a question of what I believe, Jimmy. It’s a question of what I’ve seen. And I’ve seen enough to realize we’re dealing with some serious shit right now. I had my doubts about that coroner’s report on Milton when it came back as a mountain lion attack. You and I didn’t catch one track or paw print out at the cabin, and then there was the side of Bev’s minivan. Remember that?”

  I knew that Pena was referring to the talon marks on the side of Beverly’s vehicle, and there was a huge part of me that felt totally relieved that Pena at least was taking this seriously.

  His deputy, however, was a different story. “Well, I think it’s bullshit!” he snapped. “It’s some kind of hoax or something, and I think Heath and his mom and these guys are all in on it. I mean, who’s ever heard of a ghost murdering people or tearing up homes and public buildings?”

  Gilley and I both shot our hands in the air. “We’ve heard of it,” Gil said eagerly. “And we’ve encountered it firsthand. If you don’t believe me, I can e-mail you some footage from our last ghostbust that’ll curl your hair.”

  Cruz ignored him. “I say we hold these two until we get the truth out of ’em.”

  Pena moved to the cell door and pulled it open, motioning to Gil and me. “Get your gear. I’ll drive you to your car and see if we can’t get it started.”

  Gil moved with lightning speed, gathering up all our belongings and the few stakes we had left. As he was shoveling those into his backpack, however, Pena took notice of them. “Hold on,” he said, pointing to the spikes. “What’s that?”

  Gilley placed one of the spikes next to a bar on the cell, where it pulled free of Gilley’s fingers and clinked against the metal. “It’s magnetic,” he explained. “We use them to fight the nastier spooks.”

  Pena pulled the spike off the bar to examine it. “How?” he asked.

  I answered him. “Either by putting it close to the spook to drive it back, or by driving it into the spook’s portal—the gateway it uses to enter or exit our realm for one of the lower ones.”

  I expected Pena to ask me a few more questions about the spike and our methods. He didn’t. Instead, he surprised me by asking, “Can I keep this?”

  I looked at Gil and he shrugged. “Sure,” I said.

  Brody came back over to me then and handed me a slip of paper with some writing on it. “That’s a prescription for some antibiotics,” he explained. “And when was the last time you had a tetanus shot?”

  “Three years ago.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Positive.”

  Brody nodded. “Okay. Change that bandage once a day and keep your arm away from water for the next ten days. You can have the stitches removed by me or your own doctor after that.”

  I thanked Brody and got stiffly to my feet. The woozy feeling I’d been having became overwhelming then and I sank like a stone to my knees. “Whoa!” Brody said, barely catching me.

  “I’m a little dizzy,” I told him.

  “She hasn’t had anything to eat since yesterday morning except one small, cold, pathetic piece of pizza last night, which was all Deputy Cruz let us have,” Gil said, looking pointedly at the lawman, who had the decency to duck his chin when Pena glared at him.

  “We’ll take you back to your car so you can get something to eat,” the sheriff said kindly, coming into the cell to take me easily from both Brody and Gil—neither of whom were nearly as tall or brawny as the large, muscular Pena. Gilley left my side to root around in the wreckage outside the cell, coming up with our phones and ID. “We’ll be taking these back,” he said to Cruz, who merely glowered darkly at him.

  With the sheriff’s help I was soon loaded into his cruiser and we were headed down the long and winding road to our car. When we got to the entrance of the Pueblo, however, we discovered that our car was gone.

  “Where’d it go?!” Gilley practically screeched upon seeing that our rental was missing.

  “You’re sure you left it here?” Pena asked, parking the cruiser right next to the large sage bush where we’d left the rental.

  “Positive,” I moaned. Had I gotten the added insurance for the car if it was stolen? I couldn’t remember.

  Pena popped the locks and Gilley got out fast, running over to where our car had been parked to stare in astonishment at the ground as if he could blink it back into place. “Where’d you rent it from?”

  “The Enterprise on St. Michaels,” I said.

  “Seriously?” Gilley screeched. “Someone stole our friggin’ car?!”

  “Was it locked?” Pena asked, reaching for his clipboard.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Pena began scribbling on his clipboard. “Well then, someone either broke in and got it started, or they towed it.”

  “You think someone had it towed?” I asked hopefully, reme
mbering that I’d said no to the extra insurance.

  “No,” Pena said. “I’d have a report on it if they did.”

  I sank back in the seat. “Crap,” I said moodily. I was right. This was gonna be a long day.

  Two hours later Gilley and I were finally sitting down to a meal when Heath burst into the diner we’d found near our hotel. I slapped my forehead. In all the hassle of dealing with the rental car theft, I’d completely forgotten about my boyfriend.

  “I texted him,” Gil said, looking up when he heard my name called from the doorway.

  I set down the forkful of pancakes and got up just as Heath swept me into his arms. “Are you okay?” he asked, hugging me tight.

  “Fine,” I assured him.

  “The demon attacked her,” Gilley said, most unhelpfully.

  Heath stepped back but held me at arm’s length. “Brody told me.” He then looked down at my arm, lines of concern etched into his face. “He said he put fifty-two stitches into you.”

  “They were really little sutures,” I told him, holding my bandaged arm up so he could see I was okay.

  Heath hugged me again, but all I could think about was how hungry and light-headed I still was.

  “Heath,” Gilley said to him. “M. J.’s a little fuzzy from blood loss and low blood sugar. Let her sit down so she can eat, will ya?”

  Heath immediately let me go and helped me into my chair, then came around and sat down next to me. I took up the fork again, so happy to finally get to eat uninterrupted.

  “So what the hell were you two thinking, anyway?” Heath demanded.

  I sighed and set the fork back down. But Gilley held up his hand to Heath and said, “We’ll eat first, explain second, okay?”

  Once I’d plowed my way through nearly the entire stack of flapjacks, Gil and I confessed everything to Heath, including the part about the stolen volume of Pueblo histories, which Gilley had tucked back into the bottom of his backpack without anyone seeing it. To my surprise, Heath didn’t appear nearly as mad as I thought he’d be. He merely nodded and let us get on with the story.