Chaos Choreography (InCryptid, #5)(55)
“You watch Game of Thrones?” asked Malena, with even more suspicion, like I’d just proven myself to be completely untrustworthy.
“I don’t have time to watch anything, but I don’t live under a rock. I pick things up.” I stepped up to the ticket booth and forked over four dollars. All four members of my group received hand stamps, and we were in.
Most of the week, the flea market was a vacant lot that was formerly a drive-in theater. The marks were still there, if you knew how to look for them: the grid painted on the blacktop, the distant “flea market office” building that looked suspiciously like a repurposed concession stand. The rise of Netflix and cheap cable might have spelled the end of the drive-ins, but their bones lived on, and had been used to construct new hybrid creatures, half yard sale, half mega-mart, all a little shady. Things that fell off the back of trucks had a tendency to wind up here, as did bootlegs of the movies that would once have been shown on the drive-in screen. People were everywhere, minding their own business and mining other people’s junk for treasures.
“Everybody got their shopping lists?” I asked.
Nods all around.
“Great. Then let’s scatter, and get this over with.” I started down the nearest aisle. Dominic stuck with me. Malena trailed after my grandmother, looking both terrified and elated by the opportunity to spend time getting to know her better.
You’re welcome, Malena, I thought. A little alone time with my grandmother would either cure her hero worship or elevate it to terrifying new heights. Either way, it would be interesting.
“Do we really need this much rubber hosing?” asked Dominic, pulling my attention back to my own assignment.
“Potentially,” I said, looping my arm through his. “It has a lot of uses, including draining flooded areas. If we find another blood bath like the last one, I need to be prepared to take samples without disturbing the scene. Lower a hose, suck a little—but not enough to start breathing anything nasty—and voilà.”
Dominic gave me a sidelong look. “Samples.”
“Yes.”
“Of the blood.”
“Yes.” We’d reached a stall selling old gardening equipment, including an assortment of machetes. I stopped to check the quality of their steel. “We need to know if these people are being drugged, and if so, with what. That’s going to tell us more about the snake cult that’s pulling this crap. We have so little data at this point that everything is important.”
“So the rubber hosing is predicated on someone else being killed.”
I looked up from the machetes and nodded. “It is. I’d like to say we could stop it from happening again, but without more resources than we have, and without any real leads, I don’t know that we’re going to be that lucky.”
“A pity, then, that we cannot set up cameras in the theater.”
Cameras. I gaped at him. “You’re a genius. If we weren’t already married, I’d ask you to marry me, just for that.”
“While I am always glad to have you reaffirm your decision to marry me, what did I say that was so genius? We can’t set up cameras. We have neither the technology nor the training.”
I handed the stall’s owner a ten dollar bill and tucked my new machete into my shoulder bag. “No, but we don’t need to. Cameras have already been set up for us. Reality television, remember? And my cousin Artie is amazing with computers. If there’s any sort of cloud storage setup for the theater, I bet he can get in and see what’s what.”
Dominic smiled. “I appreciate this plan. Please tell him that it was born of my genius.”
“Will do,” I said. “Come on, genius. Let’s go find some lye.”
We found some lye. And some bleach, and some saltpeter, and an assortment of rare spices being sold as attractive ground cover. We also found a lot of knives, many of which found their way into my bag. Only some of them would be suitable for the kind of combat I prefer—the kind where I throw knives at people, and they stay as far away from me as possible—but there’s no such thing as too many knives. There’s only more knives than you have room to hide under your mattress, and I was planning to solve that by sending the bulk of the new armory back to the Be-Well with Dominic.
A stall at the end of one of the last rows crammed into the lot boasted a sign reading “TAROT AND TAXIDERMY.” I exchanged a look with Dominic, who seemed nonplussed.
“Well, there’s definitely taxidermy,” I said, indicating a mounted bison head that looked like the cousin of the deer we’d seen on our way in. It was next to one of those faux jackalopes that used to be popular in certain kinds of novelty shop.
(Faux jackalopes were popular even when jackalopes were more common, back when there were so many of them that people had to admit they existed. It’s just that real jackalopes look sort of like jackrabbits on steroids, with sharp claws and muzzles too long to fit most people’s ideas of what a rabbit looks like. It was much more profitable to slap horns on some innocent bunny and claim it was the real deal, especially when you were selling to people who’d never seen a prairie in their lives. People are weird, and there’s nothing new about that.)
Or wait . . . I narrowed my eyes, taking a closer look. The jackalope had a long muzzle and what looked like tiny daggers set into its digging paws. It wasn’t a fake. It had just been a baby when it died, which was why it was so much smaller than I expected a jackalope to be. And based on the condition of the fur and the quality of the glass eyes set into its fur-covered skull, it had been preserved within the last twenty years.