Saint Peter’s on a smoke break, the Devil’s dressed in silk, and you always eat the mother after drinking her milk

“It ain’t wrong for a man to protect his little girl!”

Benjamin “Bull” Montrose lived up to his name. About my age, he sported an iron grey crewcut over a craggy well tanned brow. His shoulder veritably rippled with muscle under a stained white t-shirt leading down to python like arms that ended in the massive grease stained calloused hands of an auto mechanic. Hands that were currently reaching for my throat.

Yeah, he was a big guy.

A big guy who was currently being held back by his ‘missing’ daughter. Lily looked just as she had in the most recent visions, a pretty girl with a round face and cheeks that still showed a little bit of baby fat, eyes rimmed red from crying and circled darkly from stress and lack of sleep.

“Bull, sit the fuck down. We haven’t even called the police yet.” This from Didi. She had a grim look in her eyes. Anwyn for her part had already produced her taser (look, don’t ask me where she kept the damn thing, it was almost as big as her entire forearm so it wasn’t in a pocket).

But I’m getting ahead of myself again.

The Montrose house was a study in contrast when compared to Ostrander’s place. The lawn was immaculate, the siding had recently been power washed, the driveway didn’t have a drop of oil on its poured blacktop.

The back yard had a bunch of new paving stones.

Bull and Eloise MacCaulley had been childhood sweethearts. They’d been an item all through high school, and only reluctantly split up when Eloise had gone off to college rather than try to do the long distance thing (and during the late 80s and early 90s that had usually involved snail mail and long distance phone service, so that was probably a wise decision). Bull stayed on the res and apprenticed with Steve Running Deer, the local mechanic.

Eloise, for her part, was in the big city living it up. She was enrolled at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh for five years, majoring in Elementary Education, always with an eye toward returning to her community and giving back. In her last year of schooling she became heavily involved with a psychologically abusive older man, an actor and con artist, and spent the next four of those years being horribly manipulated. He left her when he hooked up with a younger woman, and after a suicide attempt she returned to the only home she had ever known.

Apparently Bull’s second courtship of Eloise was viewed locally as one of the great love stories of the Red Lake Nation, ending with their marriage in 2000, with the disturbing coda of her dying in childbirth giving birth to Lily in 2003.

Bull was a very indulgent father, and his temper, once legendary, had been tempered by having to woo Eloise all over again. Lily was his entire world and while he rarely ever raised his voice he would have fought a bear bare knuckled to protect his little girl.

The house looked empty when we got there, so following a hunch I snooped around in the back yard. Those brand new paving stones sent an immediate shiver up my spine, and I don’t mean that figuratively. I got physically cold even in the 80 degree temperature when I stepped on one of them. Something was there, and I had a really bad feeling about what.

I called over the girls immediately. Didi was talking about ground penetrating radar and lamenting the res’s lack of it when Bull’s Ram pulled into the driveway.

“Found me out, huh?” The big man’s voice was resigned, but his eyes were proud.

“Bull, we have a couple questions about Frank Ostrander.” Didi took the lead here, being the local.

“I know why you’re here, Didi,” he let out a huge sigh, “you’ve known me your whole life. I ain’t a bright man, and I ain’t a complicated man. If you’re here asking about that big fucker, then you probably know what he did to my little girl. You know she’s all I got left. So you know that the bastard deserved everything he got.”

“Dad! No!”

And there on the back deck was the missing girl herself, Lily Montrose.

“Get back inside Lily! I killed him. I cut him up. I buried him in the back yard. I–.”

“Dad, you’re being an idiot. I did it.”

“Lilypad, I said get back inside. Your old man deserves whatever happens to him.”

“No. I killed him. I found the videos he posted of me.
I told him I was going to the police.” She was in tears now, her confession broken up by sobs as Bull’s face went grey. “He… he attacked me. He threw me into a tree. So I picked up a rock. And I hit him. And I kept hitting him. And I couldn’t stop hitting him, even after his face stopped being a face and the rock sounded mushy instead of crunching, but I kept hitting him. And then when he wasn’t him anymore and just meat and blood and bones I cried and I couldn’t stop crying anymore than I could stop hitting him.”

“I would have done far worse to him.” The disgust on Didi’s face would have paired well with the sick feeling in my guts. “But we need to take you in to the station, Lily. The whole res has been going crazy with everything that’s been going on. I’m pretty sure you have a solid case for self defense.”

It must have been the tension from the last couple of days. Fatigue toxins, adrenaline dump, call it what you will, we’d just checked off the second and third of the theoretical Wendigo victims, and hell, one was even still alive. Of course I had to stick my Size 11 in my mouth… “And we’re just going to ignore the fact that Mr. Montrose literally butchered another man’s body and used it as a footer for his garden path?”

So that brings us to where we came in.

Naturally Anwyn tased the big fucker.

And I totally deserved her going upside my head with it afterwards. “Ass.”

“Yeah… I could have handled that better.”

The inevitable ass chewing that was looming ahead for me was indefinitely postponed by the string of expletives that began pouring from Didi’s mouth as she shut off her phone and began walking toward us.

Charlie Laughing Fox had just been picked up on the outskirts of the res. Naked as the day he was born and muttering about little green men.

(Title: “Deliver Me” by Ben Caplan