“Yeah, that happens. You need stronger bones.” Which was total BS, because I’d lost track of how many fingers I’d broken over the years against various skulls, human and other. “Drink more milk.”
“Those poor saps will want some milk to wash out their eyes.”
“That’s actually a myth. You want to scrub your face with Dawn dish soap, and then rinse it off with water,” I explained. Trip gave me a quizzical look, wondering how I knew about getting pepper sprayed. “I was a bouncer, remember? Hazard of the job.”
“Oh yeah . . . ” he said. “What do we do now?”
I handed him the cultist’s phone. It was a map of the area with a blinking dot that was steadily moving away from us. “We can use this, but we need to find a way to disappear before we get busted.” This place had to be covered in security cameras.
Trip immediately started relaying directions to Earl as we kept our heads down and kept walking, nice and calm, nothing to see here, officer. APD would certainly arrest us. By the time Boone got everything sorted out with his local contacts, our quarry would be long gone.
We’d wound up in some gigantic food court area. There were hundreds of people waiting in line at dozens of establishments, and every available table was taken. Unfortunately, a bunch of witnesses from the sky bridge were still pointing at us and talking about the fight. And of course, from the opposite direction, more cops were coming, but they hadn’t seen us yet.
“This way,” Trip said, and I followed him around a corner, and then another, where it was slightly quieter. There were still lots of people, but none of them were currently gesturing at us or taking our picture. Down some stairs, and then another turn—this place really was a maze—and now it was just people who looked really tired or hung over, sullenly eating their takeout in quiet.
“If we go after her, we’re just going to get picked up. The cops will all have our descriptions by now.”
“They will,” Trip agreed. “Be on the lookout for a ruggedly handsome black man and the Rock’s chubbier stunt double.”
“Hey now. It’s getting thinner up top but I’ve still got most of my hair. If we’re going to get back in the chase, we’re going to need to hide our faces.” At least disguises couldn’t be too hard around here.
Trip kept giving the others directions from the tracking device as we went down some more stairs and out an employee-only door that led into a narrow alley. A few people in costumes had snuck out here for a vape break. I could tell they were a group because of the matching costumes. One of them was close to my size, only he was dressed in a gigantic blue suit. A Cookie Monster helmet was sitting on a post next to him.
“Hey, man, how much for the costume?”
“What?” the guy asked, obviously confused. “It wasn’t that much, I guess. I just got it off of Amazon.”
“No.” I took out my wallet. “How much to buy it from you right now?”
“Uh . . . what?”
I checked my wallet. I had eight hundreds, six fifties, a bunch of twenties, and no time to haggle. Damn it. Earl had better reimburse me for this. I pulled out all the cash and shoved it toward the perplexed cosplayer. “Here, take this, and give me your costume, right now. There’s no time to explain.”
He took the money, looked at it surprised, but then said, “But I can’t take it off. I’m not wearing anything under here. It’s really super hot in this thing.” In fact, his face was really sweaty.
“Gross,” Trip said.
“Okay, just the helmet thing then.” Then I pointed at his buddy. “But you’ve got to throw in Elmo’s head too, for my friend.”
“Oh, come on,” Trip said. “Can I at least have Oscar?”
“No!” It turned out the one wearing a garbage can was female, and she put her hands on her mask protectively. “Mine’s custom. I put a lot of work into it!”
“Fine,” Trip said as he begrudgingly took the Elmo helmet from the other guy.
Headless Elmo and Cookie Monster counted their money. “Whoa, thanks, dudes!”
It was costing me about thirteen hundred bucks to avoid getting arrested, but hopefully this would work. I put the helmet on. It smelled like someone had been eating goat cheese in there.
We hit the street, following the tracking app. She was way ahead of us, but it looked like the shape-shifter was moving at walking speeds, probably trying to avoid any further attention. Trip kept giving directions to the others. Hopefully one of them could get eyes on the Ward before she vanished.
Thankfully, Skippy’s flying skills saved the day.
“This is Milo. The drone is over the location Trip gave. I do see one woman carrying a red backpack. She’s no longer in the black jacket though. Looks like she had a white shirt under it.”
Despite the giant googly eyes on my head, the vision on this thing was horrible because I had to look out a mesh-covered slit in the mouth. I kept bumping into a lot of people, but I tried to get into the spirit of it. “Me so sorry! Me clumsy!”
“You look like a ridiculous bobblehead,” Trip muttered.
Doubtlessly true, because so did he, but sometimes you just needed to embrace the absurdity. “Me want cookie! Me want catch shapeshifter to get arcane super weapon! Nom nom nom!”
“I refuse to do the voice. I’ve got too much dignity,” Trip insisted.
“Elmo need tickles!”
“Don’t make me shoot you.”
I switched back to my real voice. “Well, someone’s in a mood.”
“I didn’t realize I got pepper spray on my hand when I punched that cultist, until I touched my eye putting this stupid thing on my face.”
Trip had a good excuse to be cranky. That shit burns.
The blip on the phone kept moving in the same direction, coinciding with the info Milo was feeding us. She must not have known about the cultist’s bug
