Oh Bubba, Where Art Thou? (Bubba the Monster Hunter Book 26) Read online

  Oh Bubba, Where Art Thou?

  A Bubba the Monster Hunter Novella

  John G. Hartness

  Falstaff Books

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  Try Quincy Harker - Free!

  Falstaff Books

  About the Author

  Also by John G. Hartness

  My sister has been asking me for years to put my family’s story in a book.

  This is some of them.

  For Bonnie - be careful what you ask for, sis.

  1

  “I hate country music. I don’t even know why we wasted the money to come to this thing,” I said as we walked up Broadway back toward our hotel.

  “Well, to be fair, we didn’t pay for the tickets,” Amy said, walking beside me. She was right. She almost always is, not that I’ll ever tell her that. The tickets to the Ryman Auditorium Christmas Spectacular were a gift from the Nashville Police Department, a nice gesture of appreciation for our help in solving a disappearance a few months back.

  “Good damn thing, too,” I grumbled. “I mean, I reckon it was all fine, if you’re twenty-three years old, stupid, and want to get laid.”

  “And you’re only two of those things,” Amy said with a laugh.

  “I told y’all you should have come with me to Play,” Skeeter said from the other side of Amy. “The drag show was fab-u-lous, and that cute little bartender was mixing me double margaritas all night and only charging me for singles. I do believe he was trying to get me drunk.” Skeeter tripped over a crack in the sidewalk and almost took a header into a light pole. Amy caught his belt at the last second and kept my best friend, tech guru, and the current drunkest person in Tennessee from busting his gourd all over the sidewalk.

  “I do believe he succeeded,” Amy said with a laugh. “Now get your shit together before Bubba has to carry you to your room.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time,” Skeeter slurred.

  Amy looked at me with a question across her face, and I shrugged. “We did go to UGA, you know. Athens might be a little bit of a party town. Skeeter ain’t never weighed more than a buck-seventy-five, so about four beers and he loses control of his feet.”

  “So he got too drunk to walk?” Amy asked.

  “Nah, he loses control of his mouth at about three beers, so by the fourth he’s usually got somebody pissed off enough to knock his ass out,” I replied. “Then after I’d beat their ass, we were usually asked to leave, which led to a good half dozen trips across campus with Skeeter out cold over my shoulder.”

  “There’s a visual I hope I never have to see in real life.” Amy shuddered a little at the thought.

  “Me too,” Skeeter said. “For such a big dude, Bubba’s got bony shoulders. But what was so bad about the concert, Bubba? I thought there was supposed to be all kinds of big-deal country stars there.”

  “There were, not that I could tell you what any of them’s names are. For all I know, every damn one of ‘em was named Brett or Sean. It was like a douchebag convention, only with more guitars. I ain’t smelled that much Axe body spray in my life,” I said.

  “The level of testosterone was pretty through the roof,” Amy said.

  “You might have been the one in the gay bar, Skeeter, but we were in the presence of the tightest damn blue jeans I’d ever seen.”

  “Damn, Bubba,” Skeeter chuckled. “Now I’m a little bit jealous!”

  “And I reckon the tight pants strangled what little bit of talent these dudes had, because couldn’t nary a one of them do more than play three chords on their guitar or sing on key.”

  “But most of them had the booty shake down pat,” Amy added.

  “Yeah, it was more like watching damn Solid Gold than a country concert,” I griped.

  “So nobody sang about Mama, or trains, or getting drunk, or their woman leaving them?” Skeeter asked.

  I thought for a second. “Nah, there was plenty of songs about getting drunk and a bunch about shaking your sugar shaker, whatever the hell that is, and to listen to these boys, you’d think country girls only ever wear Daisy Dukes and that every redneck drives a truck and has a bunch of guns.”

  “I don’t want to say nothing, Bubba, but…” Skeeter saw the look on my face and let his little smartass comment die on the vine.

  “Then don’t. I have a truck for work, and I hunt monsters for a living. I need my guns.” I glared at him.

  “Don’t worry, Bubba. If Obama hasn’t tried to take your guns away yet, you’re probably safe for a little while longer.” He looked at Amy. “How did you like the show?”

  “I thought it was fine,” she said. “It’s not really my kind of music anyway, so it didn’t offend me like it did Bubba. And I thought the lights were pretty, so that was good. It was a little loud. Even with my earplugs in.”

  “You wore earplugs to a concert?” Skeeter asked. “God, you really are an adult.”

  “True, but I can still hear you, and I wouldn’t be able to if I had left my earplugs at home. Anyway,” Amy said in a way that let me know that the subject was closed, “it was very nice of the detectives to get us the tickets and nice of Father Joe to get us a couple of rooms at the Renaissance for the night.” She gestured to our hotel, and we all stepped into the lobby.

  “Yeah, it’s nice to be somewhere away from home and not have something trying to kill us for a change,” I said.

  Skeeter and Amy both looked daggers at me, and I held up both hands. “What? What are y’all looking at me like that for?”

  “You asshole,” Amy said through clenched teeth.

  “You totally jinxed it, Bubba. We spent the whole night with nothing nasty or magical coming out to kick our ass, and you had to go and tempt fate like that. I can’t believe you are that big an idiot,” Skeeter said.

  “Skeeter, you’ve known me since middle school. You know exactly how big of an idiot I am. Wait a minute, that didn’t come out right.”

  “And my point is made,” Skeeter replied. Just then his cell phone rang, and he wobbled around for a minute slapping his own ass and crotch before he figured out which pocket had his phone in it.

  “Cello?” Skeeter said into the phone. When he gets real drunk, he thinks he’s JJ from Good Times. I try to explain to him that he didn’t grow up in the projects, he grew up raised by a bunch of white people in Georgia, but he usually tells me to shut my cracker mouth, that he is dy-no-mite. It’s never worth the fight.

  But it was hilarious watching him try to act sober on the phone when he was absolutely shithouse drunk. He was all full of “yes, sir” and “no, sir” just like when we were sixteen and hauled into the principal’s office for a misunderstanding about planting marijuana in the Future Farmers of America community garden. The misunderstanding was that I didn’t understand how long it took weed to grow, so I forgot about it, and when we all came back to school after summer break, there were several pot plants flourishing in the rich Georgia soil. This was not considered nearly as fantastic by the administration as it was by the drama students.

  Skeeter listened more than he talked, so it must have been somebody pretty damn important. Finally, he hung up and looked at me and Amy. “Well, my buzz is
gone now.”

  “Who was it?” I asked.

  “It was Bishop McTigue. We’ve got a gig.”

  “Joe’s boss? Why didn’t Joe call you?”

  “Joe’s having a little bit of a crisis of faith right now,” Skeeter said, not quite looking me in the eye.

  “What the hell do you mean, he’s having a crisis of faith?” I asked. “Asked” might not be exactly the right word since I kinda blew his hair back with how loud I hollered at him. “He don’t get to have any kind of damn crisis of faith. He’s a friggin’ Knight Templar!”

  “Well, maybe crisis of faith isn’t exactly the right word for it,” Skeeter said. “It’s more like he’s negotiating his contract with the Church.”

  Damn, sounds like his weekend with his ex-girlfriend down in Florida went better than I thought. “Alright, so Joe’s out of the picture for this one. What’s the gig?”

  “Well, if you’re pissed off about the state of music, maybe this will make you feel better. You’re going to Muscle Shoals.”

  “Yes!” I fist-pumped. I ain’t ashamed of it. I was going to redneck Mecca, where some of the greatest pickers and singers in the world recorded. I was gonna be walking the same halls as Duane Allman, Keith Richards, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Bob Dylan, and Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show. Then I stopped.

  “What am I hunting?” I asked.

  “We ain’t quite sure yet, but it seems to be just a haunting,” Skeeter said.

  “I don’t do ghosts,” I said. “I don’t ever do ghosts. You know that.”

  “Why not?” Amy asked. “We deal with ghosts if need be. We have teams especially for that.” The “we” in question there was DEMON, the Department of Extradimensional, Mystical, & Occult Nuisances, the super-secret government agency Amy worked for. No shit, it was way off the map. Black helicopters and everything.

  “Well, of course y’all do,” I replied. “Like you said, y’all got whole teams of ghostbusters and shit.”

  “They really don’t like being called that,” Amy informed me.

  “Why not?” I asked. “I saw the remake. It wasn’t bad. Not as good as the original, but not bad. Anyhow, y’all can deal with ghosts because you’ve got all kinds of super-tech ghost-blasty shit that deals with ectoplasm or ethereo-plasm or whatever kind of shit ghosts are made of.”

  “Well, yeah,” Amy said, like you’d be stupid to go in after them with anything else. “But we also have mediums to help them cross over, too.”

  “Well, I ain’t got nothing that ain’t at least an XXL, sweetie. There ain’t been nothing medium on me since I was nine years old. And I shoot things. Or I beat the shit out of them. That’s what I do.”

  “Except ghosts,” Skeeter interjected. “Hard to shoot something that’s incorporeal.”

  “I don’t know what the hell that means, but I can’t shoot shit that ain’t got no body. My bullets just go right through it.”

  “That’s exactly what…never mind,” Amy said. “I see your point. So, what are you going to do?”

  “Well, I reckon first thing in the morning I’m gonna get in the truck and head down to Muscle Shoals. Good news is it ain’t but a couple hours from here.”

  “The bad news is they want you there by eight in the morning,” Skeeter interjected.

  I looked down at him. “How damn drunk are you? There ain’t no way in hell I am getting in the truck at…a quarter ’til midnight, driving close to three hours to Ala-damn-bama, then getting up and meeting with…some asshole at eight in the morning!”

  “Bishop McTigue said—” Skeeter started.

  “Is Bishop McTigue here?” I asked.

  “What?” Skeeter’s eyes crossed a little as he tried to focus on me, and I made it a point to sway in the opposite direction of what he was swaying. I’m a dick sometimes, but he’s my best friend, and if you can’t screw with your friends when they drink, what’s the point of living?

  “Is the bishop standing right here? And is he going to send me directly to Hell if I’m late for this meeting?” I asked, waving my arms around to further prove the point that there was no bishop around.

  “Well, no, he ain’t here, but…”

  “But nothing, Skeet. I have a beautiful woman, a hotel room with a jacuzzi tub that’s actually big enough for me and somebody else to fit in, and a bottle of champagne on ice not fifty yards from where we are standing. If you think for a second that I am spending the night tonight anywhere but in the loving embrace of all those things, you are the single dumbest person to ever graduate from the University of Georgia. And you met a lot of the football team, so you know that’s a high bar to clear.”

  Skeeter stood there for a few seconds trying to wrap his head around everything I’d just said and opened his mouth a couple times like a fish gasping for air, then his eyes rolled back into his head and he passed out, right there in the middle of the sidewalk.

  I bent over, picked Skeeter up, tossed him over one shoulder, and started up the steps to our hotel. Amy just stared at me.

  “What?” I asked. “Do I have a booger?”

  “You got champagne?” She looked up at me with a sweet little smile, and I grinned down at her.

  “You better believe. And I got Korbel, too. None of the cheap stuff for us, baby.”

  She shook her head at me, but grinned while she did it. “You got a lot to learn, Bubba Brabham, but damned if you aren’t a pretty quick study.”

  We walked into the lobby, I dumped Skeeter onto an empty luggage cart, stuck his room key in his mouth, and me and Amy held hands on our way to the elevator.

  2

  I pulled into the parking lot of Celebrity Recording Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, a little after noon. I got a little bit later start than I had originally hoped because in the middle of my morning shower, Amy stepped in there with me and volunteered to wash my back. I returned the favor, then we got on to washing some more interesting parts, and next thing I knew, we both needed another shower. So it was closer to ten than eight when I got on the road.

  I stepped out of the truck and gave the building a once-over. It didn’t look like the kind of place to spawn musical legends and create some of the greatest bluegrass recordings in history. It was just a low, one-story cinderblock building at the end of a poorly paved county road. The parking lot was huge for a building that probably couldn’t hold fifty people at its fullest, with room for a couple dozen cars and five or six tour buses all to fit with plenty of room to maneuver. A tattered and faded green canvas awning flapped in the breeze over the front door where a cheap black-and-orange hardware store “CLOSED” sign was taped over the small window.

  I opened the back door of the truck and flipped up the back seat. I popped the lid on one of the built-in cabinets under the seat and pulled out Bertha and her shoulder rig. I shrugged into the holster and slipped the big pistol into her home. I pulled out a magazine loaded with silver bullets and another full with cold iron rounds, and slid them into the mag holders under my right arm. A third spare magazine with alternating white phosphorous and silver rounds went into my back pocket, and I threw a baggy Dickie’s work shirt on to hide the gun.

  It didn’t make me look less threatening. That ship sailed a long damn time ago, but at least now I didn’t look like the giant psychotic armed leader of a biker gang. I tightened my ponytail, did a quick crumb check on my beard, and walked to the door.

  It was locked. I looked around and confirmed that yes, there was another car in the lot. It wasn’t much of a car, a beat-to-shit minivan riding on a donut, but it was there, and it didn’t look like it was broken down, so that meant somebody was inside. I tried the handle again, but it hadn’t miraculously unlocked itself in the last five seconds. I knocked, as softly as I could manage with a fist the size of a Honeybaked ham. Nothing. I knocked a little more firmly. I stood there for a good two minutes before I hauled off and banged on the door. Hard. From the other side, it probably sounded about like a horse trying to kick the door down because
that’s about how I was starting to feel—like a horse’s ass.

  Nothing. I stood there for another minute, then turned to go back to the truck. After three steps, I pressed the Bluetooth earpiece and said, “Goddammit, Skeeter, where are these bastards?”

  A weak voice came back to me. “Do you have to yell?”

  Oh yeah, Skeeter was dealing with a mother of a hangover. Serves him right, I thought. I was starting to get really grumpy since I’d left a sexy and very naked federal agent sprawled in the middle of a sea of sweaty sheets to drive to Ala-goddamn-bama and talk to some jackass about a gig I probably couldn’t do anyway, since I don’t do ghosts. And now this asshat wasn’t even here.

  “Hell yeah, I’ve gotta yell,” I yelled. “Ain’t nobody here, Skeeter. Where are these sonsabitches?”

  “Bubba, what the hell are you talking about? Where are you and what the hell are you doing there?” Skeeter asked, his voice getting stronger as he shook off his lingering drunkenness and was able to focus a little better.

  “You don’t remember? Goddammit, Skeeter, I’m in Muscle friggin’ Shoals because Bishop McTigue called and asked me to come down here and help out with a haunting, which I don’t even do, but I came because he’s Joe’s boss and because it’s Muscle Shoals, so, you know, Skynyrd, but now I’m standing out here freezing my nuts off in a parking lot in Alabama when I could be curled up around Amy in my room in Nashville, so you need to get this shit dealt with, and now!”

  Skeeter was silent for a few seconds, then came back on the line. “Sorry, what was that? I was busy throwing up. Did you say anything I give a shit about?”

  I sighed and looked down at my feet. “No, I reckon not.”

  “Good. I just messaged your contact at the studio. Somebody ought to be out to open the door in a minute. Now can I go back to bed? I feel like refried ass.”

  “Next time the cute bartender wants to hit on you, just get his number instead of taking all the free booze,” I advised.