The Narrows(22)

“Mr. Conroy, have you had any…disagreements…with anyone lately?” Humorlessly, he added, “Aside from Ted Minsky, I mean.”

“Disagreements?” Porter said, as if he did not understand the word. The old man’s eyes reflected the dancing flame contained in the glass housing of the lantern, which he’d set on the half wall of the nearest stall.

“Arguments,” Ben clarified. “Fights. Anything like that.”

Porter laughed. “What kind of fights you fellas think I’m getting into at my age?”

Eddie was looking at Ben with wide eyes, his face narrow and slack and nearly translucent in the firelight.

“What are you getting at, Ben?” Porter asked evenly. “I’m not following.”

Ben had raked a set of fingers slowly up and down his chin before mumbling something about just being curious. Animals don’t do this, he thought. Someone broke in here and took these cows’ heads, mutilated these poor animals. It would have had to have been someone—or a group of someones—who possessed more than just a mean streak and had some bone to pick with Porter; it would have had to have been someone evil.

A papery, rustling sound from above caused the three of them to jump. Ben looked up. In the glow of the lantern, it looked like the underside of the hayloft, which was directly above their heads, was moving. Ben clicked his flashlight back on and directed the beam upward.

The underside of the hayloft was teeming with bats, dozens of them, dangling upside down by their tiny, clawed feet, their piggish heads bobbing and jerking while the thin membrane of their wings quivered.

“Oh, yeah,” Porter said conversationally. “Been having a bat problem lately, too.”



4



On the car ride back to the station, Eddie said, “You know what eats brains, don’t you, Ben?”

“What’s that?”

“Zombies.”

“Ah. Of course. Zombie cows.”

“You joke, but strange stuff like that happens all the time.”

“Is that right?”

“Quit humoring me. You ever hear about those exploding sheep over in Ireland?”

Ben clicked off the cruiser’s high beams as another vehicle approached him on the wooded road. “What are you talkin’ about?”

“I read this news article on the computer once, about a farmer in Ireland. A bolt of lightning hit one of his sheep while it was out grazing on a hill. The static in the wool or something caused some kind of electrical chain reaction, and the lightning zigzagged from sheep to sheep—blam, blam, blam!—and fried every single one of the buggers right there on the spot.”

Ben laughed. “That sounds like bullshit.”

“Next day, there were thirty, forty of the sons of bitches sizzling in the field, looking like chicken legs that had been burned to charcoal on a barbecue.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t think lightning was the culprit this time.” He was thinking about the dead cows in the barn. What instrument would someone use to take off a cow’s head like that? Those didn’t look like cuts at all. And how would someone get a goddamn cow to stay put for the amount of time it would take to do something like that?

There was a ratcheting sound as Eddie reclined his seat. He took a cigarette out of the breast pocket of his khaki uniform, poked it between his lips, but out of respect for Ben’s rule about not smoking in the police cars, he did not light it. “Well, don’t sell that mountain lion business short,” he said, the cigarette bouncing. “Paulie Davenport over in Garrett said they had one been coming into the neighborhoods at night, knocking over trash cans and eating house cats or whatever. A bunch of guys saw it slinking away into the hills one night behind Torry’s Tavern, and one of them took some shots at it with a handgun but missed.”

“Just what I like to hear. A bunch of rogue drunks firing guns out behind a bar.”

“One of the other guys snapped a photo of it on his phone. Can you believe that?”

“Sure.” He knew the Potomac Highlands was no stranger to the creatures, though he had never seen one in person nor heard of them attacking livestock, especially not an entire field of grazing cattle. Not that it was impossible, of course. Recalling the crescent-shaped wounds at the throat of the first cow, Ben could acknowledge that they resembled the type of attack wound generated by a set of claws…

Even if it was a rogue mountain lion, Ben thought, that doesn’t explain the state of the carcasses. Mountain lions attack the head, sure…but what mountain lion eats only the brains and leaves the rest of the meat behind? That part troubled him the most.

“Davenport called someone at Fish and Wildlife, and they told him that it wasn’t unusual for a particular mountain lion to migrate halfway across the country,” Eddie said. “I mean, they said it’s rare, but they’ve seen it happen before.”

“How do they know?”

“They dig through its shit, see where it’s been and what it’s eaten. Also, I heard they do DNA tests on them, too. See, mountain lions out here have slightly different DNA than, say, mountain lions from Arizona or wherever.”

“I don’t think there are mountain lions in Arizona,” Ben said.

“Or wherever they’re from. The son of a bitch could’ve been from Colorado or Montana or the goddamn Pacific Northwest.”