He tossed Josh a nod of recognition, and he stomped toward the bar. It wasn’t an angry stomp; it was a stomp of sheer mass. The big man pointed at a bottle behind the counter and the bartender picked it up and started pouring.
While he waited for that drink, the Heavy approached Josh and Mark with his hand outstretched.
“Hey there, buddy! I hear you’ve got a problem.” His voice was quick and friendly, and so was his handshake. He angled his bulk against the side of the bar, skipping the stool and letting himself lean.
Mark was speechless, so Josh got the ball rolling.
“Well, first off, by way of getting fancy—Mark, this is Kilgore Jones. Kilgore, this is Mark,” Josh said. “He’s the man with the problem.”
Kilgore nodded. He’d heard part already. “The man with the goats. Or the ex-goats, as the case may be.”
“Oh, I’ve still got goats,” Mark assured him. “Not as many as we started with, but we’ve still got them.” He waved his empty green bottle at the bartender, who popped the cap on another one and handed it over the counter, along with Kilgore’s drink.
Kilgore took it and downed it in one swallow. “All right. Fill me in on the facts, and I’ll tell you if I think I can help,” he urged. “It might be you’ve got a bad dog, and if that’s all it is, I’m still happy to lend a hand. But Josh thinks it might be worse than that.”
Mark blew a sad, honking note down the bottle’s frosty neck. He braced his feet on the stool’s rungs and twisted them there while he spoke. “I guess I should start with the goats,” he said. “I don’t give a damn for goats. They’re bad-tempered, ugly little things, and they smell like shit. But I lost my job at the Caterpillar plant, and my wife got this idea.”
“The goats were your wife’s idea?”
He bobbed his head. “Hell yeah, they were. Do I look like a man who needs organic soap in his life?”
Kilgore shook his head, and a row of tiny silver hoops in his left ear jingled together. “No sir, you do not,” he said. His oddly boyish face stayed composed and serious.
“Well, I’ve got it now—by the metric assload. I didn’t know thing one about goats, but Elaine did a bunch of reading, and a few days later she came home with a pair of Saanens. It was my job to clean and repair the barn, and it was her job to milk the residents—because God help me, I wasn’t going to reach down underneath one.”
Mark curled his fingers around the beer. “And anyway, now we’ve got goats, and we’ve got a website, and we’ve got soap, and lotion, and yogurt—and just about anything else you can comb, curdle, or cook that comes out from a goat’s undercarriage. That was three years ago. And now I’m the vice president of Signal Valley Farms, which is to say I shovel goat shit and do what Elaine tells me. She’s the president, since it was her idea.”
The Heavy mentally jotted all this down and asked, “When did the trouble start?”
“A few weeks ago.” Mark took another hard draw on the beer and nearly choked himself with it. He looked into Kilgore’s face and didn’t see a guy who was about to bust out laughing.
He just looked interested, and a little concerned.
So Mark cleared his throat and made a face that implied acid reflux, and he continued. “I found a couple of the goats all torn up. I figured someone’s dogs got out, you know? Or if they weren’t somebody’s dogs, then maybe coyotes.”
“Maybe,” Kilgore said.
“Once we lost another couple goats, I started checking them out good before I buried what was left. And I’m telling you, it looked like they’d been … I don’t know. Gored, or something.”
“Gored? Like by a bull?” Kilgore frowned.
Mark shook his head. “Naw, more like a baby unicorn. They were punctured, but the holes were too deep to be teeth.” He held up his hands, trying to indicate his best guess. “It was like they’d been jabbed with something sharp, maybe the size of this bottle’s neck.”
“And how many have you lost now?”
“Eleven. The thing got one more last night.”
Josh elbowed Mark. “Tell him the rest,” he said.
“The rest?”
Mark stared at his bottle. “I shot it.”
“You shot it?”
“I shot it,” he said again. “But it didn’t die.”
“Ah.” Kilgore said. “Does that mean you got a good look at it?”
“Not a good look. And the look I got … I don’t know what I saw.”
The big man kept his somber face on and didn’t push too hard.
“You want to tell me what it looked like?”
“You’re going to think I’m nuts.”
“Bet you I won’t.” But that wasn’t enough to make Mark talk, so Kilgore added, “Look, man. I’ve heard some crazy shit in my time, and a surprising amount of that crazy shit has turned out to be true. So I’ll tell you what. I’ve got stories that would make you think I’m as nutty as a tree full of squirrels. I’ll tell you one of mine if you’ll tell me yours.”
“Deal,” Mark said. “Go on. Surprise me.”
“All right, I will. Two weeks ago I was up in Knoxville, and I got stuck in an attic with a pair of vampires who were righteous pissed to see me.”
“Wait. Stuck … ?”
“Now, I’ll grant you it was faster getting down than going up—I fell through the floor and landed on a table downstairs, which hurt like a sonofabitch. But that was after I ran one of them through with a sharp chair leg, and I poured some of Reverend Sam’s finest blessed H20 down the throat of the other.”
“Blessed … ?”
“You heard me. What’d Josh tell you about what I do?”
Josh beamed, and Mark acted queasy. “He said you fix unusual problems.”
And finally, Kilgore laughed. It was a merry sound, sharp and genuine. It matched the way he talked. “I do indeed fix unusual problems—mostly the weird ones that no one else’ll touch. So if you think I’m going to poke fun at you, you’ve got it all wrong. You can tell me what you saw, and nothing you can say will send me running. Lord as my witness, I promise you that.”
Mark gave up. “All right,” he said, shaking his head left and right, and trying not to taste any more of his stomach in his mouth. “All right, I’ll tell you what it was.”
He picked at the label on his bottle and dropped it down on the counter with a clank. And then he said quickly, “It was a big black shape with glowing red eyes. There, are you happy?”
“Happy? Hell, no. Big black shapes with glowing red eyes are pretty far down on the list of things that make me happy, but I’d appreciate it if you could be a little more specific. Can you tell me what kind of big shape?”
Mark thought hard. “It was big, but low to the ground. Maybe it would’ve been waist-high on me, but it was long. It had a big head and a humped back.”
“There you go, now you’re talking. Keep going. Tell me about the eyes. Red and glowing, I’ve got. What else can you tell me?”
“It was dark,” Mark said slowly. “And I couldn’t see too clearly. They were close to the ground, like it’s something that holds its head low. And I hit it broadside with at least two pumps from the shotgun, but it ran off and came back for more the next night.”
Kilgore pursed his lips, and it made his whole face look small. He leaned himself away from the counter and stood up straight. “I believe you,” he declared. “Now tell me, how far away from here is this farm of yours, and would you like to see something done about your problem tonight?”