Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 43912 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 220(@200wpm)___ 176(@250wpm)___ 146(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 43912 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 220(@200wpm)___ 176(@250wpm)___ 146(@300wpm)
“Sally!”
Ilona always uses my first name. She refuses to stand on formality. I don’t like people using my first name. Feels a little too personal. Disrespectful.
“Ilona.”
“They’re all the same,” she says. Ilona has beautiful dark skin and eyes. Her raven hair is always shining beneath the harsh fluorescents and medical lights. If you asked me to describe her, I’d be very tempted to use the word Goth, but it doesn’t suit her at all. Beneath her laboratory coat, she is wearing a bright pink sweater and deep fuchsia pants. Her feet are clad in what I strongly suspect are expensive, limited edition sneakers. But bright clothing does nothing for her, not in the context of this inherently dark place. There’s a shadow over this woman that all the neon in the world cannot illuminate.
“What are all the same?”
“The patterns,” she says, gesturing toward the poor bastard on her table. There seems to be even less of him now. I guess some parts have been taken for testing or similar.
“I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Someone, or something, is feeding on these people. The wounds correspond to rasp marks. They haven’t been cut open in the traditional way. They’ve been sort of chewed through by something with mouthparts.”
“So I’m looking for something very large with mouthparts.”
She looks at me through her spatter-proof eye protection glasses. Unfortunately for me, they have indeed seen some spatter. Bits of person get in between our shared eyeline. “Like an oversized snail, maybe? Some snails are carnivorous.”
“I think we would have noticed a man-eating mollusk on the loose in New York, Ilona.”
“It’s surprising what you can miss,” she says. “Besides. It might not be a man-eating mollusk singular. It could be a small host of them. Perhaps a few hundred. You know, they could be chancing upon the bodies very shortly after post-mortem and destroying the evidence.”
“So I am looking for someone who kills people, then uses a specially bred snail horde to destroy the evidence.”
“It would be an incredible way to do it. Very smart. Very unexpected.”
“Are there snail droppings? Anything to indicate the presence of these creatures? Slug trails?”
“Well,” she says. “No.”
She seems disappointed that I brought up that inconvenient question. Ilona is good at what she does, but her additional speculation is rarely useful.
“What else is of note? Besides the consumption marks, as yet identified?”
She gives a little shrug. “I’m still waiting for several of the tests to come back. Most of them won’t be run until tomorrow at the earliest, and more likely, next week.”
This is why the long arm of the law takes so much time to get to anything. Criminals don’t have to wait for tests and processes. They can just go out and do crime whenever they feel like it. This person, this awful murderous monster, has the luxury of deciding what his work day looks like. I’m going to be waiting for results for one thing or another until I retire.
I am left with eyewitness reports. I end up sitting in a twenty-four-hour diner going over notes on my phone.
- Red eyes.
- Very tall.
- Wings.
These three descriptors pop out again and again and again. At this point, if I don’t take them seriously, I’m ignoring evidence. Ignoring evidence is a bad idea unless you want to be a shitty cop, which I suppose I don’t want to be.
“This is some Scooby Doo shit,” I murmur to myself.
My eyes are starting to go blurry. I can only sleep when exhausted, and I’m definitely getting there. The sun is starting to rise as I drag my ass into my apartment.
It is cold, messy, and small. None of these things matter because I spend less than eight hours a day here. I live out in the city. This is just where I crash. I could easily live in one of those tiny Japanese apartments where your bed is basically your bath, or whatever. I essentially live in one anyway. The size of this place is under a hundred square feet.
I save room by not having a kitchen. Sure, I have a place where they put counters in and a sink, but I haven’t entertained the concept of kitchen any more than that. I put a big, old bookshelf I inherited from my grandmother where the refrigerator would usually go. The cabinets designed for cookware and dinnerware are all full of books. I put up shelves everywhere I could, and all those shelves are likewise full. If I have one vice, it’s book collecting. A lot of these tomes come from library sales and flea markets. The rest of them come from the depths of the internet, niche tales from niche authors who engage in niche narratives.
Unfortunately, even though every single spare inch of space has a book jammed into it, there’s still not quite enough in the way of storage. There are piles of books here and there on the floor from where I have attempted to order them. I trip over one of them, sending it sprawling over a rug with a nautical compass theme which spreads over much of the floor. It’s an old family heirloom, that’s what I tell myself. I got it at a flea market, and logic dictates that it was probably someone’s family heirloom before it got hocked for drugs or whatever.