Chapters
We were on Link's trail for months, but no matter how close it felt like we were getting everything went cold eventually. I was missing something. The pet spent most afternoons sleeping in the back of the car, coming alive at night when the scent of its kind stuck in the air like pricey perfume and burning leaves. I never did find out what happened to the car's owner. Maybe he ran off or maybe something worse, something stranger happened before I could get down the hill in Kentucky. I was afraid of getting picked up when the missing person report registered, so I ditched the ride in West Virginia and got my hands on a U-Haul. The pet had the run of the trailer. I still don't know what it did back there, only that every time I lifted the gate I got hit with the momentary scent of sandalwood.
I could never do what Link did. I never learned how to talk to naked stoic lesbians. Like everybody else I only ever knew how to look. I'd like to think that the pet and I developed some kind of connection, though. It stuck with me, probably just because it knew I had a handle on Link. The guy was good at covering his tracks, that much I'll give him. Anyone else would have lost the trail as soon as they crossed the border into Pennsylvania, but not me. I knew Link's cigarettes, the way he stroked his own paranoia by sticking chewing gum into the door frame of his motel room so he could check the tracks left in it every time somebody opened it. All I knew was that Link had been wandering around the Eastern Seaboard for months and that it had something to do with stoics.
Everywhere we went we found stoics acting weird, well weirder, within just a few miles of wherever Link had crashed. Something was spooking the local populations, so they were being skittish. On a farm outside Punxsutawney we found a couple wild ones putting cows to sleep just by hitting the things with their hair and in Cambridge we sniffed out a brunette black-nail building a nest out of cardboard boxes in a department store stock room. Black-nails haven't wandered east of the Appalachians since the Mayflower landed. All that said, a bunch of freaked-out stoics doesn't amount to a real clue. Turns out what I was looking for had been right in front of me since we left Lexington.
One day the pet and I had to poke around in an office building in Hartford where I had it on good word from a local delivery man a few stoic models glitched out during a corporate uniform exhibition. I didn't want to go up there unprepared but I couldn't just drag the pet along in its natural state. I went into a Goodwill and grabbed some jeans and a t-shirt. Had a hell of a time getting it to put them on. When we got up to the office, the Malman Food Conglomerate (the guys behind those Crispy Beef Stick stands in malls), I couldn't find a single stoic in the place. I even snuck back into some locked rooms off to the side, but all I found was extra printer paper. I kept pulling the pet away from this girl in accounting, but it just kept going for her hair.
Then I finally realized what was going on. The cute accountant, she was too cute to be an accountant. Ain't nobody looks like that goes into numbers. I let the pet do as it pleased, so it tore off the t-shirt and dove at the girl, ripping the wig off her head and pinning her to the floor. The accountant shot up and perched on a filing cabinet, eyes glowing and nails growing longer. Before long, half the office was up and clicking. In the ensuing battle for dominance, I hid behind the water cooler and thought to myself, "Jesus, Link. What the hell did you do?" Little did I know, at that very moment in food courts around the country, Crispy Beef Stick stands were erupting with blue electricity and the scariest creatures ever mistaken for pretty girls began feasting on oblivious American consumers.
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