AN: Thanks to all of you who have read, reviewed, favorited, and followed this story! Here is the next installment, please enjoy! Sadly, with the exception of the mistakes, everything belongs to Janet.
I wrote up my report, and I included the pictures we'd taken in it. I emailed a copy of it to Connie, and I went to bed. I woke up the next morning to the feel of little claws on my chest. "Good morning, Beautiful," Lunch Box said.
"Umm hi," I said. "Ranger must be home."
I sat up, and Lunch Box climbed up onto the top of my head.
"I don't need your help going to the bathroom," I said.
I reached up to take him down, and he lunged at my finger and dug his nails into my scalp.
"Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn," Lunch Box said. I walked out to the kitchen where Ranger was sitting at the counter eating a bowl of granola and yogurt.
"Why does the bird sound like Clark Gable?" I asked. "Oh and help?"
Ranger walked over and relieved me of Lunch Box and put him down on the counter. The bird looked at Ranger's cereal with loathing. I felt him. It appeared pretty boring. The bird looked balefully at me, and I brought the fruit bowl down and plopped it onto the counter. "Go nuts."
It was Christmas for the bird as he jumped into the bowl, and started massacring some grapes.
"Didn't sleep well?" Ranger asked.
"No," I said. "I kept having weird-assed dreams about an accordion that was shaped like a car, and people timing how long it takes me to eat a bowl of Froot Loops."
"I told you that a peanut butter and olive sandwich before bed was a bad idea," Ranger said.
"I was hungry," I said. Ranger smiled at me, and we were interrupted by my phone ringing. It was Bernadette calling. "Hello?"
"Stephanie! Oh, I wish I'd never hired you!" she wailed so loud that I had to hold the phone away from my ear. "I don't know how he knows, but he knows you've been following him for weeks. When he came home last night, he told me that he wasn't having an affair, but something was going on, and he couldn't tell me about it. He told me he was tired of living like this, and he just left. I don't know what to do."
"That's all he said?" I asked.
"He said that he had to fix some things and then he was coming back. He said he'd tell me everything once he knew it was safe, but if he didn't come back this morning, I had to tell you about the Black Socks."
"The 1919 White Socks?" I asked.
"No," she said. "It's a file on his computer called the Black Socks. He said everything you would need was on there."
"What's in the file?"
"I don't know," she said. "It's password protected."
"I'll be right there," I said. I hung up and looked at Ranger. "Dickerson is missing."
"Let's go," Ranger said. I looked at the fruit massacre on the counter. "Leave it; we'll deal with it later."
Half an hour later we were parked in the Dickersons' driveway. Bernadette was waiting for us on the front steps, and she didn't look well. She was sweating profusely, shivering, and pale as a ghost. Ranger jogged up the steps and scooped her up like she weighed nothing because she probably really didn't weigh much and he carried her straight through the house, to her bedroom and put her on the bed. He went into the bathroom and came out with a sleeve of some kind and put a needle on something that looked like an insulin pen a diabetic might use. He jabbed it into her leg, right through her slacks, and depressed the plunger.
He pulled his phone out and called Bobby, and told him to get to us, ASAP, and then he put a blood pressure cuff on Bernadette. "What did you just give her?" I asked.
"It's a cocktail of medication she has to take when she has an episode. She's having one now."
She was already almost completely unconscious. "What do we do?"
"We watch her until Bobby gets here and we hope that she doesn't have a seizure, or a stroke before he does. If she doesn't, then the medication is working and we'll get a nurse to watch her, if she does, she'll need an ambulance."
For twenty tense minutes, we waited for Bobby, who came in and took over assessing Bernadette. "What's going to happen to her?" I asked.
"Her pain receptors are going to activate, and she's going to be in agony until the episode passes. If it's bad enough, they will induce a coma until it's over," Ranger said. "Bernadette isn't going to be able to help us on this one any time soon."
"How long do the episodes last?"
"Depends on how bad it gets," Ranger said. Bernadette suddenly went rigid and started seizing. Bobby kicked us out of the room and Ranger called 911.
"What does she have?" I asked.
"I don't know if it has a name. She has an orphan disease, which means that in the world there are probably only two or three cases of it."
We waited for the ambulance and Bobby rode with them to the hospital taking control of her care. Ranger and I were left looking at the debris left over in her room after the paramedics had taken her away. Between the two of us we cleaned up the mess, and Ranger took the garbage out to the street.
The Dickersons' house was neat and had last been updated sometime in the mid-nineties. The walls were a pale lemon yellow, there was oak everywhere, all of the hardware on the cabinets was brass, and there were faux granite Formica countertops in the kitchen.
There was neatly vacuumed wall to wall carpeting in the sunken living room, and in the bedroom, but oak floors everywhere else. Ranger and I went through each room, on the top two levels, and found a sewing room, a guest room, the master bedroom, but nowhere that might be used as an office, and we didn't see any computers.
We went down to the basement and found a large flatscreen television, some damned comfortable looking Lazy Boys and a wet-bar but again no office. Everything in the Dickerson house seemed relatively normal, so we searched in the backyard.
We found Dickerson's office in a pretty little garden shed. It was a cute little granny cottage with window boxes filled with annuals, and inside there were shelves dedicated to science books, his desk and, a bank of filing cabinets. The drawers were for his tutoring, his fantasy baseball league, and finally his teaching. On the desk was his laptop, some calculators, different binders labeled with curriculums and lesson plans for each grade he taught, and then empty trays for each grade, labeled, 'to be marked' and 'marked.'
I sat down at his desk and found a folder on his computer labeled Black Socks. It was password protected, and after trying things like his address, Shoeless Joe, Bernadette, and anything else I could think of, we decided that it would be better just to give it to Hector to crack.
We looked through the rest of his man cottage, and I flipped through lesson plans. I didn't find anything except a couple of pretty cool experiments planned for September. He had a couple of ideas for new clubs to start at school, like a coding club, and a Selfie contest that he wanted to organize so that at the end of the year the school could crown the selfie King and Queen. From his emails it looked like he was being considered for a Vice Principal position when the current VP retired, so he had everything going for him.
"I want to go check his coffee shops," I said. "And then what?"
"I'm going to have someone sit on the hospital, someone on the house and then you and I are going to watch the Moore House."
By noon Hector was working on cracking open the file on the computer, and Ranger and I were sitting in front of the Moore house. When Connie and I were staking out Dickerson, we'd stashed a handheld gaming system in the glove box of the car, and we took turns playing with it to numb the boredom. Somehow I doubted Ranger was going to be cool with that.
I've been living up close and personal with Ranger for a while, and one of the things that I've learned about him is that he meditates every morning. That's no surprise, but there is a definite difference between the way he looks when he's meditating and when he's concentrating, and I'm pretty sure the reason he always seems so zen on stakeouts is that he's meditating. I bet his resting heart rate was somewhere around nine. To satisfy my curiosity, I pressed the button on his watch that gave me a readout of his heart rate, and it came back at 42.
"Wow," I said. "You're in really good shape."
He smirked and looked at me. "You're just noticing this now?"
"No, I'm just saying that considering your love of cheese and bacon fries, I thought it would be a little higher."
"I give in to that temptation once a month, at most. It's not going to have any real long-term effects," Ranger said. I took his watch off and put it on me. His telemetry on his computer was going to spazz when I put my numbers in. A minute later it kicked out the reading of 80 BPM.
"Is this bad?"
"It's normal, and not bad considering you're stressed and on your fourth cup of coffee today."
"Well, what would get your heart rate this high?"
"Those shorts you were wearing yesterday," he said. And that was pretty much the extent of our conversation for the next half an hour. It was okay though. I had a plan.
When the book went missing, everyone, including myself found it hard to believe that I had been in possession of a novel of some kind, for recreational reading purposes. I decided I needed to be more well read, but reading just wasn't my thing. So I decided that I'd make a list of all of the books I was curious about and downloaded them all in audiobook form. So over the last few weeks, I'd been through Sherlock Holmes and a little Jane Austen. The next book on my list was one of those books that on the dust jacket felt like it was cheesy, but everyone assured me that it was excellent so I was trying it. It was about a Victorian-era woman who gets caught in a storm on her way to the Caribbean and wakes up shipwrecked in the South Pacific in the 18th century. She gets picked up by Privateers, just before a mutiny on board the ship.
The Captain is killed, and she and the first mate end up marooned. She tells him where she's from, and what happened, and she tries to remember everything she can about this particular mutiny from her history books.
I fished my auxiliary cable out of my bag, and shove it into the dash, turned on the radio and started the book. Ranger responded by flicking a switch on the dash. "What's that?"
"Runs the radio off of a solar panel instead of the car battery," he said.
I didn't think he was paying any attention to it, as we sat watching the house for hours, but I was utterly engrossed in the book. At four Ranger picked my phone up and paused the story just as the main character told the first mate that she knew where the mutineers from the Bounty were hiding. The plan was to get to Pitcairn Island where they could hopefully seize the Bounty and sail it back to England before Christian, and his Crew set fire to it.
Ranger pulled his phone out of his pocket and answered a call. "Where are you? Fine."
He hung up and looked at my phone, downloaded the app I was using to listen to the book and had me log into it on his phone. I guess Ranger was into the story too.
"What's up?" I asked.
"I have to go to New York City," he said. "Connie and Tank are on their way, and you're going to swap places with Tank."
So a few minutes later, Tank pulled up behind us. I got out of the Cayenne, and into Connie's car with her. "What no Explorer?" I asked.
"Nope," Tank said, "They are all out on another job."
"Damn," I said.
"It's okay," Connie said. "Lester's hooked us up."
She got out of the car and got something out of the trunk. It was one of those windshield covers that blocked the sun and supposedly kept the car cool. Together we got it into position, and then Connie pointed out an electric cooler in the back that was hooked up to its own car battery. "Popsicles and water. We're good to go."
I glanced dubiously at it and then watched as Ranger and Tank drove off in their gloriously cold vehicle.
"It's going to get really hot in here," I said. "Maybe we should move to some shade?"
"Bathrooms are located where?" Connie said, ignoring my suggestion.
"A five-minute walk that way," I pointed over my shoulder and plugged my phone in. "Question. How the hell are we supposed to watch the street if there's a giant cardboard screen in front of us?"
"Oh," Connie said, "Lester has that covered too. We have a dash cam."
She reached into the back seat and pulled out a knapsack full of gizmos and set up a little portable monitor on the dash, giving us a clear view of the street ahead.
There were only two hours left to the story, and I knew Connie had read it because she was one of the people who recommended it. I briefly told her where we were in the story and hit play. When it ended, there was still no movement on the Moore house. I'd call it and head home except that I was reasonably confident that if Dickerson were going to show here, it would be sometime after dark.
I looked at Connie, and despite our cooling measures, it was still really damned hot in the car. Connie was compensating for that by shoving two frozen gel packs from the cooler under her bra. It was hard to say if the wet spots on her top were from condensation from the ice packs or if it was sweat. Not that anyone was going to notice that when confronted by her nipples. Connie was on high beam, and I don't mean regular high beam. I mean the obnoxiously bright halogen high beam that you see on newer pickup trucks. I was finding it difficult to look her in the eye because damn, it was impressive.
"What?" Connie asked when she noticed the direction of my gaze.
"Connie, your nipples are so hard you could use them to punch a hole through time, " I said. "Maybe you need to take the gel packs out now."
"I know, but they are necessary," Connie said. "I think I've sweat off thirty pounds today. How much longer are we going to be stuck sitting here? We've only got grape popsicles left."
"I'm giving it until ten, and then I'm bailing," I said.
"Here's a question," Connie said, "But did you check the tracker you planted on his car?"
"Didn't need to," I said, "His car's in the driveway. And I don't know if he had a rental or he borrowed a car or what because Bernadette was in absolutely no shape to talk when we got there."
"Do you have any more books?" Connie asked.
"No," I said, "But that last one was excellent. I really like how the guy did the voices."
"You know who I would like to have read me a story?" Connie asked.
"Lula?" I said.
"Not who I was thinking, but I would sell a kidney to hear an unedited rendition of her reading Pride and Prejudice," Connie said.
"Holy crap," I said. "That would be amazing. Hey, you know what? Recording audiobooks might actually be a good career option for Lula."
It made sense. She and Sally Sweet were living together, and they had a recording studio in the basement. She couldn't work as my sidekick because of her pregnancy, and she was bored. Hell, I'd pay her to read the books for me.
"Want to hear something creepy?" Connie asked. "Ed Kemper, the serial killer, he started a project while in prison where inmates recorded audiobooks for the blind, and there are apparently thousands of hours of his voice recorded, reading things like children's books, and cookbooks," Connie said.
"Okay yeah, that's just scary. Tell me Kemper isn't who you want to hear read you a book?"
"Tom Hiddleston."
"Nope," I said, shaking my head, "That's a bad idea; you listen to this stuff in the car. What if he read a sex scene? You'd drive off of the road."
While I did voice this objection out loud, it didn't stop me from searching for a new book by the performer. "Ooooh, he reads Dracula. It says it's a radio play."
"Download it," Connie said, "Do it now."
So I did.
Two hours later the sun had set, the play was over, and I swear that in no way was I freaked out. Sure Connie may have suggested that some of the Rangemen might be vampires, and when she said that, Hector did spring immediately to mind. I rarely saw him during the day. When he went out, he always went out wearing sunglasses and usually a hoodie with the hood pulled up. He preferred little windowless rooms, and he scared the crap out of everybody, including Ranger.
Once that thought began to fester, Connie and I decided to let it take hold, and after about ten minutes we were both starting to nurse a fear of the server room. So we patted ourselves on the back for our stellar decision making and decided to say fuck it to the audiobook thing. Instead, we sat there in silence as twilight gave way to night, and tried not to wet ourselves every single time the wind picked up and jostled the camera on the dash. It was now too dark to get a clear picture on our monitor and naturally, we started to imagine weird shadows on the screen.
"We should probably take the windshield cover off now," I said.
"You do it," Connie said.
"Why me? It's not like we have to get out of the car to do it. You don't have to put it in the trunk. It can go on the back seat."
"And if there's a vampire sitting on the hood of the car, waiting to hypnotize us as soon as we take it down?"
"We'd have seen him on the camera," I said.
"No, we wouldn't. Vampires don't show up on cameras or in mirrors. Everyone knows that."
"Don't be ridiculous; Vampires didn't have reflections because cameras and mirrors all used to use silver in some way, and silver and the undead don't go well together. This camera is digital, and mirrors don't have silver in them anymore."
"No, they don't have reflections because they don't have a soul," Connie argued.
"I would buy that, except Vinnie has a reflection and so does Joyce," I said. Aha! I had her there.
"If it's so ridiculous, why don't you take it down?" Connie challenged.
Well, the answer to that was simple; there might be a vampire sitting on the hood of the car waiting to hypnotize us into letting him in.
Thump, thump.
The noise had come from the roof of the car. Something had landed on it.
"That was just our imagination," I said to Connie.
"Yep," she said, "Absolutely just our imagination."
"Okay," I said. "We have to take this thing down. Dracul…Dickerson is most likely to show up now that it's dark. If we're going to follow him, we can't do it with the cover on the window."
Thump, thump.
The noise had relocated to the hood of the car.
"Okay," I said, "Here's the plan. You close your eyes, and I'll take the thing off of the windshield. If you hear me talking to Dracula, stop me from letting him in."
"I'll turn the child locks on so you can't open the doors," Connie said.
"You know we're assholes right?" I said.
"Absolutely, and we're never speaking of this again."
"Ready?" I asked.
She closed her eyes and nodded. "Yes?" She said.
She sounded as sure as I felt. I took the thing down, and a pair of green eyes on the hood of the car glowed back at me. One or both of us screamed, and the cat on the hood of the car took flight and bolted across the street. "Did you see that thing?" Connie said. "That was no normal cat, it was as big as a fucking mountain lion."
"I thought you were keeping your eyes closed against vampire hypnosis!"
"I was too scared, and I sort of wanted to see a vampire," Connie said. "What if he was hot?"
"We're never speaking of this again," I said.
