I just wanted to get rid of him. “What’s this lady’s name and number?”

“Um . . . let me see here,”

His squealing whine of a voice was shredding my last good nerve.

“Kelly Hughes. She’s in Glendale.”

He gave me her number, thanked me again. I told him to have a good life and hung up the phone. What a dink.

Ninety percent of what I do is gut feeling. That’s why I took the whiny man’s lead. People have an inner sense of the strange and supernatural. They tend to believe subconsciously what their conscious minds won’t allow them to comprehend.

People always ask me why I’m the only one who sees the freaks and monsters crawling in the dark corners of the world and I tell them it’s because I trust my gut. My gut and the fact that I’ve had my ass smeared across the city by some freak or another enough times to know there’s shit out there that just defies logic, plain and simple.

I arrived at Kelly Hughes’s house in Glendale. It was one of those Spanish pillbox numbers like I had, but hers was painted and clean, the fence was white picket, and there were flowers planted in window boxes. The whole thing made me sick.

The woman was pleasant enough. She told me how she’d never heard from her brother, Andre and his wife, Debra and kid, an eight -year-old boy named Doug, after they were supposed to have arrived a couple days ago. They were driving a 2004 Volvo wagon, silver. Calls have gone unanswered. She tried the police, but they turned up a big donut, and frankly, she told me, she thought the worst.

I had nothing to go by but my aforementioned gut, and it told me something was wrong. Families just don’t disappear off highways in the middle of the night. I asked her for all the info I’d need; phone numbers, descriptions. All that crap. I figured I’d start by tracing the cell calls and credit card charges to figure out where they disappeared.

The police are retarded. The last credit card charge by Andre Hughes was made from a remote spot on Highway 15 between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. What makes the charge interesting is that the amount, some forty bucks, was posted but never charged. Either something happened during the exchange or the merchant decided they didn’t want the money. I smelled trouble.

I drove the Nova out that way the same night. I didn’t bring Mo’Lock with me because he was meeting with some ghouls who had recently moved from Europe to L.A. In the last few months there had been a large influx of the friendly undead to L.A. It had something to do with me, but frankly, I didn’t give a rat’s ass as long as they didn’t eat anybody.