Read the Savannah Paranormal Detective Agency 1
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Savannah Paranormal Detective Agency 3
Chapter One
It was hot. It was always hot. It was humid. It was always humid. And somehow, even in this Savannah summer, which continued to last, it always seemed like nighttime. It wasn’t always night, though, Max knew; it just felt like it because Debra had forced him onto her schedule. If he did things during the day, he would hear her yell, moan, or mutter to keep it down; so being a kind housemate he stopped his daytime activity. She also made him listen to her long winded laments about not being able to drink human blood. “Cow blood tastes horrible, and I’m not going back into the gorilla exhibit,” she said. Max would shudder and wonder what she was referring to when she made that statement five nights a week.
However, this night could last forever for all he cared. Isabelle Mercer, the thin fanged, freckled vampiress from the Junior Club of Savannahian Vampires, was walking - no - gliding him back home. The date that night had been lovely.
Earlier that week, Debra haggled her way to have Max and her clear a poltergeist out of the old Campbell Hotel. The vampire invested in a camera that she claimed would pay for itself after she uploaded the ghost hunting videos onto social media. It turned out the hotel had multiple rat colonies rather than ghosts. The clerk must have known; his laugh said more than words ever could. Debra left Max to take care of it, saying he could eat the rodents’ brains.
It was on his way back trying to find a place to dump his bag full of live rats - a place that Debra’s antics hadn’t resulted in them being court ordered to stay fifty yards away from at all times - that he stumbled upon Junior Club vampires in their white nightgowns. One of the vampiresses gave him $100 for the trash bag while another nudged Isabelle until she asked him out to a showing of Gone with the Wind later that week.
The movie wasn’t long enough. Every few minutes, Isabelle would turn and point out things she remembered from the Antebellum South. Now and again she would ask “Why would the Yankees do that?” or if Max needed more popcorn. The latter question made Max blush because Isabelle would smile each time she asked. He liked her smile, which unlike Debra’s didn’t seem threatening. Nothing about her seemed dangerous. Not only that, she didn’t tell him what to do nor did she call him a zombie. On the walk home, she even asked if he needed a place to stay with “fellow humans.” In that moment, he didn’t mind being in Savannah.
All that changed after he bid Isabelle goodnight and entered Debra and his city-provided mansion; an award for saving the city’s monsters from the Uranium Killer. The entryway, dining room, and living room, which for the last 200 years hosted Southern grandees and dames, were strewn with bicycles, some dirty, some worn, others pristine.
In the middle of the room, kneeling next to a bike, was Debra with a cell phone pressed against her head.
“Uh huh,” she said, “yeah, I think I found your stolen dirt bike. It’s a red MudMaxx 4200 with license number 42SVB? … What? Hold on, I think I have that somewhere around here.” She scanned the bicycles but did not acknowledge Max. “Excuse me? Are you accusing me of the recent rash of thefts? Sir, that’s libel!”
With a humph, she turned off her cellphone and crossed her arms. It was then that she finally acknowledged her partner in the paranormal detective agency.
“Max! Tonight’s been a busy one for me. Did you finally expel that horrific zombie-.” Her eyes went wide for a moment as she paused before recovering. “I apologize, I meant that horrific living-challenged American like you who was haunting the Old Hebrew House?”
The lawyer-turned-paranormal-task boy rolled his eyes. “I told you about that last night. The ‘monster’,” he said using air quotes, “is the golem who lives there. His name is Robert House; he’s the rabbi for Jewish monsters in Savannah, remember? He invited me to the comedy club on Thursday to see his show; he also wanted me to tell you to stop peering through his windows at night. His wife is really upset you keep doing that.”
The vampire’s eyes took a long, drawn out path from left to right as her mouth hung open. Once that ritual of Debra processing cognitive dissonance was complete, her face brightened up and she snapped her fingers.
With a voice like a child’s the night before Christmas, she asked, “Did you at least ask him if he needed some paranormal crime solved or had any preternatural chores you could do for him in exchange for a fee?”
Max’s shake of the head deflated Debra’s enthusiasm.
“Well, what did you do tonight while I labored alone in the bicycle paranormal recovery business?”
He thought about responding that if she didn’t steal the bikes, there would be no crime for their paranormal detective agency to address, but the now six months trapped by her side had taught him it was easier to have a conversation with the Sphinx than persuade Debra not to do something. That thought gave him pause as he pondered if he went to Giza would the Sphinx come alive and talk to him. Stranger things had happened since the zombification ritual in Haiti.
“Max!” the vampiress shouted. “I asked you what you were doing tonight!”
An annoyance crept up his spine, and the follow on third ask made his ears and cheeks burn. He gave her a glower, but she maintained an appearance that made it seem she was inconvenienced like a person waiting for a late train.
“I told you I was spending time with Isabelle.”
Her face soured with eyes pouting but a mouth that screamed betrayal. “That hussy. You were out with that rich, wishes-she-has-blood-so-she-could-be-blue-blooded Junior Club member?! Max, she and her poisonous ilk are no good for you. Did you know they took out yet another restraining order against me?”
He nodded his head. “Yeah, you drank too much pig’s blood, showed up on their lawn thinking you were Neil Armstrong, and you had to use their porch swing to re-enter orbit. I was the one who paid out of my pocket - the last of my pay you gave me over four months ago - to replace the swing and convince them not to arrest you. Without Isabelle helping me convince them, they would have the police haul you away.”
There was a long exchange of glares; Max’s held his increasing poverty and upsetness while Debra’s went blank.
“Oh, yeah,” she trailed off. “Hey!” she snapped her fingers. “You know what the best way to earn money is? I have a job!”
“I am not tricking the rabbi into paying us for a hoax haunting or going back to shaking down scouts for cookie money, Debra.”
The vampiress laughed and got up. Turning away from him, she went to the dining table and returned with a glossy sheet of paper. It was a picture of her from the deal-struck propaganda edition of Monsters Monthly magazine that featured Debra as the savior of Savannah’s monsters because of her role in defeating the Uranium Killer. However, unlike all the copies she had strewn about the various rooms, tables, and pasted on the walls, this image had her eyes crossed out and “REVENGE” handwritten in big, bold red lettering.
Max studied the image like a lawyer seeing key evidence for the first time. “Who did this? A rival? Someone you wronged?”
His partner rolled her eyes. “Rival? Bah! The only person who had it out for me left her anger behind because of Fred; may his eternal soul rest in peace and never make us do anything dangerous again.” She made a mocking quick sign of the cross. “This has to be the work of the most reactionary monster out there; one so angered that a new edition came out that his change tolerance the size of an atom has been driven to deface thousands of these and mail them all to me.”
His eyes went wide. “Thousands? For how long has this been going on?”
“This is the work of a Bigfoot!”
Somehow his eyes went wider. “You mean the Skunk Ape with the prison tats who apparently has table top roll playing powers did this?!?! Debra, I still don’t understand how you saved me by saying ‘Quick Load’ but if that Skunk Ape is targeting us beyond protecting Bull Street, we got to call the cops or something.”
With gentle grace, she placed the image on a bike seat and then put her two hands on his shoulders. A long, listless sigh escaped her mouth, and then she touched her forehead against his.
“Max, my dear Max. Once a human lawyer, probably smart for your kind, but cursed to have brain rot as all zombies do. Soon, there will be nothing of you left.” When she pulled her forehead away, there were moist tears forming in her eyes. “I said ‘Bigfoot’, not ‘Skunk Ape.’ Bigfeet believe in the status quo above all things, whether rejecting new magazine editions or changes to their faith systems. In the Holy Land, they remain Samaritans because they reject Judaism’s moving on from Temple worship, in Russia they are Old Believers who think anything after the Fall of Constantinople is a Tatar counterfeit, and in the United States they retain the Latin Mass the Franciscans taught them in the 1600s.”
“Wow,” Max said. He paused and took in the thought of traditionalist monsters. “So in California and Oregon, you’re telling me there are Catholic Bigfeet that reject the changes of Vatican II and deny the pope?”
A tear rolled off Debra’s cheek in a silent cry. “Max, if only you could hear yourself speak. What sort of Catholic could ever reject the pope? Max, my poor Max. This must be the last night for you before you become a mindless brain eater. Don’t worry, I have a perfect plan to end it all: you’re going to be Bigfoot bait.”
Max tried screaming, but Debra gagged him with a bike lock before he could.
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Until Next Time
Next week, we will continue the Savannah Paranormal Detective Agency adventure!
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