Free The Men Upstairs by Tim Waggoner

ripe melons.
    But the closest thing to a weapon I have with me are a few catsup packets from a fast food joint that I left in my cup holder. So much for macho daydreams.
    So like I said, no real plan, except to follow the Spindlekin and keep an eye on them. Maybe I’ll catch them doing something illegal, something I can get a photo of and show to the police. It’s a thin hope, maybe even a desperate one, but I have to do something. Besides, I’m a photographer. Watching is what I do best.
    The first stop is a small shopping center in a seedy part of town. Half the businesses have been closed for a year or more, but one establishment is thriving—A-1 Liquor and Spirits. If you want to start a business and stay in business, sell cheap food or cheap booze. It’s too early for the store to be open, but the men pull their van around back anyway. I can’t follow them into the shopping center without risking being spotted, so I pull into a gas station on the corner and park next to the air hose. I have a fairly decent view of the back of the liquor store from here, and I watch as a pudgy, balding man comes out the rear entrance carrying a cardboard box full of assorted bottles of booze. Metal-Face takes the box and puts it into the van while the liquor store employee goes back inside. Three boxes later, the Spindlekin are fully loaded. Gray-Hair gives the pudgy man something I can’t quite see—cash, I assume at first, until the man shoves the object into his mouth and begins furiously chewing. Whatever it is, it must be damned good, because the man’s eyes roll back in his head and his body quivers all over. The man stumbles back inside, obviously not in full control of his limbs at the moment, while the Spindlekin drive off.
    I pull out of the gas station in time to follow them. They drive to a different part of town, one that’s a bit more upscale, and pull into an office park. There’s no good place for me to observe them from across the street, so I risk pulling in after them. I slow down to allow some distance to build between us. They head to Ash Creek Veterinary Clinic and, as with the liquor store, they pull around to the back. I can’t follow without being seen, so I pull into a space in front of an accountant’s office next door. I don’t need to see what’s going on. I think of the bulging trash bags they brought home yesterday. Bags filled with empty beer and liquor bottles and small, hard shapes of various sizes. Objects that I now realize were bones. The Spindlekin have been lining up their supplies for the day. They hit the liquor store for their drink, and they’ve dropped by the vet’s for their meat. I imagine one of the clinic’s employees repeating the scene I saw behind the liquor store, except the man or woman here is probably bringing out plastic bags instead of boxes, bags containing the corpses of euthanized pets and aborted kittens and puppies. Good eatin’.
    I wonder if Gray-Hair pays their contact at the vet’s the same way he did the guy at the liquor store. Probably. I wonder if they’re using some kind of drug as payment. The idea of the Spindlekin being drug pushers seems almost disappointingly mundane, but if I could get some proof—a photo of them dealing, maybe even a sample of the stuff—then maybe I’d have something that would make the cops sit up and take notice. Especially when they learn the men are also buying dead animals from a vet.
    Suddenly my surveillance trip doesn’t seem as ridiculous as it did when I started out.
    I take out one of my cameras and snap a couple shots of the front of the vet’s office, and when the Sons of Babel van comes around the corner, I take a couple shots of it, too. These pictures aren’t proof of anything, I know that, but they’re a start. I decide that the next time the men stop and conduct a transaction, I’ll risk getting close enough to record images of the whole thing.
    As we head back onto the road, I’m excited. For the