I really like being an exterminator, I make a decent living, the work varies and, in an odd sort of way, it makes me feel like a hero. You know, like the knight on the white horse charging in to slay the monster and save the helpless villagers. I guess you could trace my penchant for heroic delusion back to my early high school years, which were spent chasing down dark alleyways and back streets with Bernie Levine. We were Dr. Van Helsing and Jonathan Harker hot on the trail of the notorious count, or a pair of brilliant young scientists out to save the world from the giant mutant cockroaches.
I can't tell you how many Saturdays Bernie and I spent driving out to Tonopah in Dad's old pickup, to while away an afternoon in the cool, dusty darkness of the old movie house. Consuming unhealthy quantities of candy, popcorn, and soda, we watched breathlessly as each victim fell to the ravages of one fiend or another, always cheering when the fearless monster hunter laid the dastards low. Yeah, there was Godzilla, King Kong, Them, The Wolf Man, and Dracula, he was the best.
I really loved vampire flicks, all those beautiful women wandering around in nightgowns or low-cut dresses. For a fourteen-year-old boy from a small town in Nevada, that was pretty hot stuff. Anyway, to Bernie and me, Lathrop Wells after dark was a horror-film wonderland.
Uncomfortably near the Nevada Nuclear Test Site, the town had enjoyed a remarkable but short-lived prosperity back in the early Sixties. More recently it had declined into a kind of comfortable obscurity, but it was a nice place to live, if you didn't mind the heat.
I'm the only exterminator in Nye County, so I know most everyone, at least in passing, and I hear most of the gossip. In general, life in Lathrop Wells had always been pleasant, if predictable. But all that changed last June. I'll never forget that first Monday. I got up at seven, the air was clear and the morning chill had already burned off, which meant that we were in for a mighty hot afternoon.
I'd just taken a sip of coffee, when the headline of the Tonopah Daily caught my eye. BODY FOUND DRAINED OF BLOOD. Picking up the paper, I scanned quickly down the column avidly soaking in the details of our first ever local murder mystery.
)
