The Fear Hunter Read online

  “Yum!” she announced and took one out of the basket.

  I prepared the rest of the ingredients for the carrot soup and set it to simmer in one of the cauldrons. It was time to start on the million-year soup, which had the most ingredients.

  “Let me sharpen those knives for you,” Rocky said, opening his toolbox on the kitchen counter. “I could see you struggling with the carrots from over there.”

  I didn’t want to admit that my hands were the problem and not the knives, so I passed them over to him. As he started to work on the knives, the door opened and a large man walked in.

  As soon as he entered, time seemed to stop, and it was like the rest of the world vanished, leaving only him and me.

  I froze in place. I couldn’t take my eyes off of him, and there was a humming in my ears. I rubbed at them and realized that my mouth was open. He was tall, very tall. He was wearing jeans that fit him perfectly and a V-neck long-sleeved shirt that was pulled in every direction by his wide chest. He had big glasses, brown eyes, and a thick head of curly hair. He took my breath away.

  Either that or I was having an aneurysm.

  “What does an aneurysm feel like?” I asked Mouse as she kneaded dough.

  “What did you say?” she asked, looking up. I noticed the second she saw him because she made a squeaking noise, and she threw up her hands, sending the dough flying through the air, narrowly missing Rocky’s head.

  “What the heck?” Rocky demanded, and that’s when he saw the man too. “Criminy. Who’s that?”

  There was a loud crash, and Doris shouted “Oh, my!” sending her coffee mug to the floor as she clutched at her chest.

  Everyone’s mouths were open. I worried that a fly would fly into mine, but I was powerless to close my mouth. It was all I could do not to take a running leap at him, wrap my legs around him and go to town.

  Big ideas for a virgin.

  The man smiled and locked eyes with me.

  Oh my God. He’s looking at me. He’s looking at me.

  What am I wearing?

  Am I naked?

  Why am I not naked?

  A whole slew of crazy thoughts flew through my mind. Thoughts that I had never thought about a living man before.

  By the reactions of Mouse and Doris, I knew that I wasn’t the only person having those naughty thoughts.

  The man reached the kitchen counter. “I hear you make a mean cup of coffee,” he said.

  His breath smelled of Twinkies and something I couldn’t place that made my insides grow tight and hot.

  “You look just like The Rock,” Rocky said. “Is that your name? The Rock? My name’s Rocky. We’re kind of twins.”

  “I’m not The Rock, but I get that a lot,” the man said.

  “Except for your hair,” Mouse said, beaming at him like he was the second coming. “Your hair is all Bruno Mars. And your glasses are amazing. Really amazing!” She squeaked the last sentence and then covered her mouth with her hand as her face turned bright red in embarrassment.

  “Sonofabitch!” Rocky yelled and held up his hand. Blood dripped from it, where he had accidentally cut into his flesh while handling one of my knives. “I’ve never done that before. Oh, no. Blood.”

  His face drained completely of color, as he stared in horror, transfixed by his bleeding hand. “B…b…b…blood,” he moaned and his eyes rolled back in his head.

  “Not so fast,” the man said calmly and caught Rocky as he fainted dead away. The big man laid Rocky on the floor and raised his feet. It did the trick. Rocky’s eyes fluttered as he came to. “There you go. You’re coming back now.”

  “He’s like Superman and Marcus Welby all at the same time,” Doris gushed, still clutching her chest at her table.

  “What the hell’s going on?” Irving demanded. “What the hell’s happening? What the hell…holy crap. What the hell is that?”

  With all of the commotion surrounding the beautiful stranger and the bleeding, I hadn’t noticed that the door had opened again. This time another man walked in. He was wild-eyed and obviously in some kind of distress.

  And he was naked.

  And he was glowing.

  He was glowing a nice sky blue color.

  “Area 38!” he yelled.

  The man who looked like The Rock cocked his head to the side and smiled. “Now there’s something you don’t see every day.”

  “Area 38!” the glowing man yelled, again, lunging forward. I backed up against the wall in an effort at self-preservation. He didn’t seem to be armed, but he was naked and glowing, and that didn’t scream “safe” to me.

  The man who looked like The Rock approached the glowing man. He had an easygoing way about him, and the glowing man relaxed visibly around him, as if The Rock was a criminal whisperer.

  “Let me help you, man,” he said. His voice was deep and silky smooth. A warm wave of wonderful washed through me. I wondered if he recorded the tapes that people used to tame their anxiety attacks and get a good night’s sleep. “I’m here for you, bro.”

  The glowing man blinked rapidly, like he was waking from anesthesia and had forgotten that he had gone in for surgery in the first place. “Hey, I recognize you.” He pointed a glowing finger at The Rock and smiled. “You’re a fighter, right? Remington Cumberbatch. Remington the Death Clutch Cumberbatch.”

  Remington Cumberbatch. It was a mouthful of a name, I thought. Then, I felt myself blush at the thought of him being a mouthful. Wow, I had never had so many dirty thoughts in my life.

  Well, almost never.

  Remington smiled again, showing his beautiful white teeth. “Death Clutch is my old fighter name. I go by Remington Knockout Cumberbatch, now. And I’m only part-time in the octagon these days. I’m a detective for the Sea Breeze Police Department.”

  A detective for the Sea Breeze Police Department? He must have just arrived, or for sure, someone would have noticed him before. The headquarters were only a block away from the shop. Remington Knockout Cumberbatch would only be a block away. The thought made me hot all over.

  “I need a glass of cold water,” I said out loud.

  “Me, too,” Mouse squeaked, fanning herself with her floury hand.

  “Help. Blood. Help,” Rocky moaned on the floor. He tried to get up, but he fell back down in slow motion, as if someone had removed his bones.

  “I got you there, brother,” Remington announced and dove for him.

  He made it to Rocky, but the glowing man took that moment to shout, “Area 38!” again and made a beeline for the door.

  The glowing, naked man was faster than one would expect, since he was barefoot, and I would have thought he would have to be careful about his swinging private parts. Remington took a second to make sure Rocky was still alive and then he bolted for the door after the glowing man.

  When they were gone, the shop fell into an unnatural quiet.

  “What the hell is going on?” Irving demanded loudly after a moment. “Blue men shouldn’t be allowed to just walk around wherever they want with their peckers in the wind!” He wagged his finger at his wife. “And don’t tell me I’m misogynist just because I don’t like blue people!”

  “That’s not misogynist, Irving!” she yelled back at him, exasperated. “That’s racist!”

  Chapter 2

  “Double, double, toil, and trouble; fire burn and cauldron bubble.”

  –William Shakespeare, “Macbeth”

  I didn’t see Remington or the glowing man again that morning. After a couple of hours of normalcy, I had almost convinced myself that it had all been some kind of delusion, brought on by the trauma of my forced career change. But since Remington and the glowing man were both the talk of the shop, I knew that they had been real.

  “I’ll have a bowl of carrot soup and a couple slices of Mouse’s sourdough,” Amy Hawthorne ordered at around 11:30. “And a couple saucers of milk for the cats,” she added.

  Amy was a professional cat walker in Sea Breeze, and she had
brought three cats into the shop on leashes. The leashes were attached to a custom-made belt on Amy’s waist. The cats wandered around the table legs, getting tangled in the leashes. They didn’t seem particularly happy to be walked, but Amy didn’t seem particularly worried about that.

  “Where’s the man?” she asked me.

  “The man who glowed?”

  “No, the man. The man.”

  “Oh, Remington. He’s a new detective in town.”

  Amy’s eyes grew wide. “He’s a local? He moved here? I heard that he’s six-foot-eight, and he looks like The Rock.”

  “Six-foot-eight might be a stretch.”

  “I heard that Mouse nearly swallowed her tongue when she saw him, and you had to drive an EpiPen into her thigh for her to survive,” Amy continued, over the moon with the idea at Mouse’s almost demise at the sight of Remington.

  “I don’t remember an EpiPen, but she had to make a second batch of multi-grain,” I explained.

  The shop was bustling with customers. Outside, Sea Breeze was a hive of activity. We had very little tourism in town because the water was infected with sewage from Tijuana. So, no one was in the water, and only a few were on the beach. But the long pier across the street that ran far into the ocean was packed with fishermen catching their lunch, unafraid of sewage in their fish and chips. There were also runners getting their steps in, and mothers pushing baby strollers.

  At the end of the pier, the tackle shop was doing bang-up business. Back at the start of the pier and to the right was a workout area, and a handful of muscle-bound folks were pumping iron. The doughnut shop was doing a bang-up business, and there was no shortage of weed smokers in the park. No sign of hot cops or glowing men.

  I recognized several of the people coming and going, but the Bright family had kept to ourselves for years, and we didn’t get out much. Auntie Prudence was different, though. She loved her shop, and she loved meeting and knowing as many people as she could from Sea Breeze. And then everything had ended for Auntie Prudence in a sudden and tragic way. The Bright women were used to injustice, but losing Auntie Prudence hit us all hard.

  I poured soup into a bowl for Amy and served her. The door opened, and three young men entered. Two of them were wearing cargo shorts, and the third was wearing baggy jeans. They all wore t-shirts with writing on them. Two were about Star Wars and the third was about Star Trek.

  I directed them to a table, but they made it clear that they hadn’t come in to eat. “We’re gathering intel,” one of the men told me. “Area 38,” he added in a conspiratorial whisper.

  “There was a man here before, talking about Area 38,” I said.

  “Shhh!” one of them hissed. “This is top secret.”

  “Are you with the government?” They didn’t look like they were with the government. They looked like they had escaped from Comic-Con.

  One of them laughed. “We’re not from the government. We’re blowing the lid off the government.”

  “We’re going to reveal all about Area 38,” another one said.

  I leaned forward. “What’s Area 38? Does it make people glow?”

  “So, it’s true. The man really did glow,” one of the men said. “Brothers, it’s true!”

  His “brothers” slapped hands, like they had just discovered penicillin. I was sort of curious, too. After all, in all my many years on this Earth, I had never seen a man glow before.

  “What’s Area 38?” I asked, keeping my voice low.

  “Secret government experiments. Damned fascist Nazis,” one of the brothers explained.

  “Fascist Nazis are bad,” I agreed. “What kind of experiments?”

  “Experiments that make men glow, for one. And worse. Much worse,” another brother said.

  “Worse sounds bad,” I breathed.

  “What did the glowing man do when he was here?” one of them asked me.

  “He was agitated. And naked. He yelled a lot about Area 38. Then, he ran out of the shop, and a police detective ran after him. He might have arrested him, but I don’t know. I didn’t hear from either of them, again.”

  One of the brothers slapped his chest and sucked in air. “Do you hear that? The local police are in on it. The conspiracy is locked and loaded in Sea Breeze. This is big. I’ll take the carrot soup, by the way. And some of your homemade cinnamon bread.”

  I took their orders. We were deep in the lunch rush now, the busiest time of the day. The door opened again, and a couple came in. They were deep in conversation and walked directly to one of the tables behind the stacks. I recognized them as semi-regulars. They didn’t come in every day, but they came in at least once a week. Normally, they sat at a table in the center of the shop, but whatever they were talking about seemed serious, and I assumed they wanted the privacy that the stacks tables afforded. I didn’t know their names, but they looked like they were married and in their forties. They were attractive and well-dressed, which in this town, meant that they were wearing closed-toed shoes.

  “Today’s soups are carrot, spicy chicken tortilla, lentil, and million-year,” I told them as they sat down.

  “I’ll have the chicken tortilla and some baguette,” the man ordered.

  “I’ll have the million-year. I plan on living forever,” the woman said. Something passed unsaid between them, but I didn’t know what.

  I turned around to get their meals when Frances Finkelstein approached their table. She was one of the few people in Sea Breeze who I knew. Frances was a regular and ran the local real estate office and fudge shop. There wasn’t much demand for property in Sea Breeze because of the sewage problem, so Frances had to branch out to sweets to make a living.

  But that didn’t stop her from trying. She was always working, trying to sell a house. She had even braved visiting our house on more than one occasion.

  “Folks from San Diego would be chomping at the bit to get their hands on this historical wonder,” she told Auntie Ida one day, standing on our front porch. Auntie Ida didn’t let her into the house, of course, let alone let her sell it. We were planning on living there until we died, if that ever happened, or when the tide would turn against us, again, and we would have to move.

  Today, Frances was wearing a cheap business suit and pantyhose with beige pumps. Her hair was sprayed so that it hovered around her head like a brown shower cap. She had blue eye shadow on her eyelids and red lipstick on her lips, which had been smeared slightly from the lentil soup she had ordered for lunch.

  “Felicia,” she sang at the woman who planned on living forever. “I’m so glad we ran into each other. I wanted to talk to you about…”

  Felicia cut her off with a wave of her hand. “Not interested right now, Frances. Can’t you see we’re trying to have a private conversation?”

  “Of course,” Frances said, never losing her smile. “This will only take a minute. We really need to talk about…”

  “No,” Felicia interrupted, sternly. “Go back to your table. We’re busy. If we want to talk to you, we know your number.”

  “But…” Frances said.

  “No,” Felicia said, sternly. “I won’t get into this with you today. Read the room, bitch.”

  Frances’s jaw clenched, and then she smiled, again. “Sure thing,” she said, brightly.

  She turned around and walked back to her table. She threw me a look and put her hands out, palms up, as if to say, “What’cha gonna do?”

  I got back to work, serving lunch with Mouse. Most of the tables were full of diners, and we were almost out of carrot soup. I made a mental note to prepare more of that one next time. It was the brie in the soup that sold them. It got them every time.

  I carried a pitcher of water around the shop and filled glasses and a bowl for Amy’s cats. When I got to the stacks tables, Felicia put her hand over her glass. “You’re not serving me from that when you just served the cats,” she spat, loudly.

  I looked at the pitcher. “I didn’t touch the cat bowl with it.”

>   “I don’t care. I’m not drinking from the same container that served those filthy cats.” She stood and walked around the stacks. She pointed at Amy, who was also standing and looking around, as if she was searching for the person who had insulted her feline clients. “Walking cats is stupid! Insane! Why don’t you get a real job and stop torturing us with your stupid, filthy cats?”

  The shop grew quiet. At least half of a dozen diners stopped eating, and their soup spoons hovered halfway between their bowls and their mouths. I could practically see smoke come out of Amy’s nose, but her cats seemed perfectly content at being insulted. I wondered if I was going to have to stop a fight between Felicia and Amy.

  What a crazy day I was having. Life in my lighthouse was so much more relaxing. I sighed again and wondered at the injustice of Auntie Prudence’s death.

  “I’ll have you know that cats enjoy being walked!” Amy yelled at Felicia from across the room. “You take that back right now, or I’ll…”

  “Or you’ll do nothing!” Felicia yelled back. She returned to her chair and sat down, hiding once again in the stacks. She and her husband resumed their hushed conversation.

  Mouse gave Amy a hug. “I just took a batch of scones out of the oven. I’ll bring you two. On the house,” she said to her.

  “With clotted cream?” Amy asked, hopefully.

  The door opened again, and another couple walked in. I didn’t know their names, but they were regulars. They came in every day after pumping iron, outside across the street. They were both in perfect shape. The woman was in even better shape than the man. She had muscles everywhere. Even her neck looked like it could do damage. He was muscle-bound too, but he looked more relaxed about it. Maybe because his shirt was looser than hers.

  Mouse took their orders, and I wasn’t surprised when I heard them order the million-year soup and refuse the carb-laden bread. The lunch rush was slowing down. Most of the diners were finishing up and paying their bills. I rang up a few of them and cleared the tables. When I was washing down one of them, the door opened, again.

  An older man wearing skinny jeans, biker boots, a t-shirt, leather jacket, and a spiky gray Mohawk with more than a little gel. He wore chains, too. The real kind of chains, the kind used to chain things, and he was carrying an armful of posters.