Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
The attic space was dusty and as hot as Satan’s taint. Cody removed his safety glasses—lenses smeared all to shit—and wiped his face with his already wet bandana. He pressed the material into the corners of his eyes and blew out a breath.
“You stopped moving. Did it eat you?”
Jugs’s voice, still scratchy from when he’d been choked by the mummy at Dave and Ollie’s wedding, came to him from the attic’s opening.
Cody put the glasses on again and glanced over his shoulder.
The top quarter of Jugs’s body stuck up through the entrance, the cervical brace gleaming in the glow of the bare bulb hanging nearby.
“You look like an injured Muppet.”
“You look like a hundred miles of bad road.” Jugs shifted on the narrow step of the pull-down ladder. “Did you find it?”
“Considering we don’t know what ‘it’ is yet, I’m going to have to go with no.
” Cody resumed crawling along the dust-coated plywood laid over ceiling joists and blown insulation.
The insulation was most likely fiberglass, and he figured he should probably be wearing a mask.
But it was so damn hot in the attic, just the thought of it left him a bit lightheaded.
Then he heard Demmy’s voice in his head calmly telling him a mask was a lot less trouble to deal with than a lung condition.
He groaned and sat back on his heels. Reaching into a pocket of his coveralls—drenched with sweat the entire length of his body—he extracted an N95 mask. Removing the glasses, Cody put the mask on and settled the glasses in place once again.
“I’m going to need five gallons of water once I get out of here,” he said.
“Yeah, you are pretty ripe. I can smell you from here.”
Cody resumed crawling, the knee-pads helping keep most of the ache at bay.
He wore a headlamp he could activate and shut off with a wave of his hand, and he aimed the light along the base of the wall, searching for a nest or a hole gnawed in the soffit.
Or even a furry face staring at him. Their client, Gerald Dorchester, a man in his sixties with hair like Doc Brown from Back to The Future, had told them he’d been hearing something running around in the attic, he just didn’t know what it was.
The dust he stirred up mixed with the sweat on his face and the back of his neck to form a disgusting paste.
Every time he reached out a hand, the scratches across his chest pulled, reminding him they were still healing, even six weeks later.
It also reminded him he had a follow-up appointment that afternoon with Zenona.
“Demetrius conveniently had business stuff to do today,” Jugs said, then made a sound of disgusted disbelief. “He should be standing here breathing in a metric-ton of dust and your funk.”
“Demmy likes the smell of my sweat.”
“You may want to get him checked.”
Cody snorted a laugh. “He’s not a dog. You’ve lived with a veterinarian too long.”
Jugs made a noncommittal noise. “She’d probably say the same thing.”
Cody paused and checked over his shoulder.
In the harsh glow of the bulb Jugs tugged at the cervical collar, pulling it away from his jaw.
He looked around the attic, not settling on any one spot for long.
Now that Cody was paying closer attention, he could see bags beneath Jugs’s eyes. “Trouble at home, buddy?”
“I don’t know. Apparently I’m doing a lot of things that annoy Aggie.”
“Yeah? Like what?” Cody resumed moving, the wounds pulling with every reach.
“Breathing. Eating. Using the bathroom.”
“Wow, that’s quite a list. Have you thought about stopping all of that?”
That earned a low rumbling chuckle. “You’re a dick, Bonker.”
“I’ve got it, and I swing it.”
A soft squeaking ahead made him freeze. He waved a hand by the headlamp, turning it off.
“Got something,” he whispered.
“Finally. What is it?”
“Not sure yet.”
“Then how do you know you found it?”
He resisted cussing Jugs out. Barely. “I heard it.”
“What kind of sound was it?”
“If you’d shut your yap a second, I might be able to hear it again.”
“Damn, you taking lessons from Aggie?”
Cody had to clench his teeth hard to keep from responding. He cocked his head and listened. It came again, a soft squeak that almost sounded like a question. Cody slowly turned his head and said in a soft voice, “Get the cage ready.”
Jugs nodded and descended out of sight.
Turning back, Cody let out a yelp of surprise as something wriggled toward him out of the shadows along the base of the wall.
He fell on his ass and scooted backwards.
The critter squeaked in surprise and scurried away into the shadows.
In the brief glimpse he’d caught, however, he’d recognized it, and his muscles loosened as he laughed quietly.
“You okay?” Jugs was back, having lifted a small wire cage into the attic.
“It’s a ferret.”
“A ferret?”
“Yeah, a ferret.” Cody got to his feet. Hunched over to avoid knocking himself out on a rafter, he returned to the attic entrance for the cage. “Seems friendly enough. Do you know what they eat?”
“Human fingers?”
Cody squinted at him. “You’re in a really dark place. What’s going on?”
Jugs widened his eyes and pointed to the brace around his neck. “I don’t know, Bonker, what’s going on with you?”
“All right, all right. Calm down. Let me corral this thing, and we can go get lunch.”
“Talk nice to it,” Jugs said as Cody carried the cage across the attic. “Not like you talk to your employees.”
“For the love of…”
He adjusted the pads before getting on his knees again, grunting at the aches that flared up and down his body. He was much too young to be feeling this old.
After a few fumbling attempts with the cage door, he managed to get it open then settled in to wait. His knees protested the position, but he maintained it.
Waving to activate the headlamp, he made quiet kissing sounds.
More squeaking floated out of the shadows.
A moment later, the ferret scampered toward him.
It sniffed around his knees and hands, whiskers and tail twitching, then entered the cage, going round and round inside to sniff all the corners and bars.
Cody closed and latched the door then pushed to his feet, narrowly avoiding banging his head.
“That’s how you catch a critter,” he said as he carried the cage to Jugs.
“You did that real well.” Jugs took the cage then nodded back the way he’d come. “What about those three?”
“What?” Cody turned and discovered three more ferrets sitting up on their hind legs and studying him with dark, bright eyes. “It’s a goddamn colony.”
“I’ll get more cages,” Jugs said as he disappeared down the ladder. “You keep them occupied.”
Cody took another thirty minutes to round up the remaining ferrets. By the time he’d handed the last cage down the ladder to Jugs, he guessed he may have sweated out at least five pounds. The heat pressed against him, and the inside of his mask stunk like coffee breath.
After a final circuit of the attic, directing the headlamp into all of the corners to make sure he hadn’t missed one of the critters, he was satisfied they’d all been accounted for.
He checked along the base of the roofline but found no obvious entry points.
The ferrets had come from inside the house.
The ladder shuddered under his boots as he descended.
When he reached the bottom, he pulled down his mask and wiped his face and neck, sighing at the touch of the house’s cooler air.
After folding up the ladder and pushing the door into the ceiling, he went downstairs.
Their client, Gerald, was in the kitchen, hair a wild cloud of gray and a tight-fitting, high-necked track suit clinging to his thin frame.
“I had a roommate a few weeks ago who rented one of the upstairs bedrooms,” Gerald said.
“He bought the ferrets from some guy at a county fair or something. When I discovered them, I made him move out. I thought he’d taken them with him, but apparently I was wrong. Were they starving or dehydrated?”
“They need baths and some food and water, but they seem okay,” Cody said. “We’ll drop them off at the animal shelter. Sounds like he was a pretty crappy roommate.”
“That’s a kind description. Do you accept credit cards?”
“Absolutely.”
Cody wrote out a receipt, bumping up the charges to accommodate the condition of the stuffy attic and the multiple ferrets. Gerald thanked him and asked if he was a runner.
“With this big ol’ bulky body?” Cody shook his head. “I’m more of a corpse pose kind of guy.”
Gerald grinned, then squinted. “I don’t mean to pry…”
Cody mentally braced himself. Clients had asked a wide range of questions in the past. “But?”
“Those marks on your neck. Are they from the vampires last year?”
A cold wave pushed out from the base of his spine, touching every organ and bringing gooseflesh up along his overheated skin.
He was back in the basement of the DPW garage, tied to a chair and helpless as Aldrik pressed his cold lips to his neck.
The spark of pain when his fangs broke the skin flared through him, simultaneously hot and freezing.
Cody blinked rapidly, looking around the bright kitchen, one hand on the smooth, cool marble of the island as if to hold himself up.
He picked out the gleam of sunlight along the edge of the stainless steel refrigerator; the dark green leaves of a plant near the window; breakfast dishes stacked neatly beside the sink.
“I’m sorry, I can see I’ve upset you,” Gerald continued, running his hands over and over together. “That wasn’t right of me to ask.”
“No, it’s not…” Cody stopped himself at the slight tremor in his voice. He cleared his throat and finished, “It’s all right. Just surprised me is all. I’m not used to the question.”
“The only reason I asked is because of this.” Gerald tugged down the neck of his track suit to expose two scars.
“They got you, too.”