Bewere the Night by Ekaterina Sedia Page A

heard part already. “The man with the goats. Or the ex-goats, as the case may be.”
    “Oh, I’ve still got goats,” Mark assured him. “Not as many as we started with, but we’ve still got them.” He waved his empty green bottle at the bartender, who popped the cap on another one and handed it over the counter, along with Kilgore’s drink.
    Kilgore took it and downed it in one swallow. “All right. Fill me in on the facts, and I’ll tell you if I think I can help,” he urged. “It might be you’ve got a bad dog, and if that’s all it is, I’m still happy to lend a hand. But Josh thinks it might be worse than that.”
    Mark blew a sad, honking note down the bottle’s frosty neck. He braced his feet on the stool’s rungs and twisted them there while he spoke. “I guess I should start with the goats,” he said. “I don’t give a damn for goats. They’re bad-tempered, ugly little things, and they smell like shit. But I lost my job at the Caterpillar plant, and my wife got this idea.”
    “The goats were your wife’s idea?”
    He bobbed his head. “Hell yeah, they were. Do I look like a man who needs organic soap in his life?”
    Kilgore shook his head, and a row of tiny silver hoops in his left ear jingled together. “No sir, you do not,” he said. His oddly boyish face stayed composed and serious.
    “Well, I’ve got it now—by the metric assload. I didn’t know thing one about goats, but Elaine did a bunch of reading, and a few days later she came home with a pair of Saanens. It was my job to clean and repair the barn, and it was her job to milk the residents—because God help me, I wasn’t going to reach down underneath one.”
    Mark curled his fingers around the beer. “And anyway, now we’ve got goats, and we’ve got a website, and we’ve got soap, and lotion, and yogurt—and just about anything else you can comb, curdle, or cook that comes out from a goat’s undercarriage. That was three years ago. And now I’m the vice president of Signal Valley Farms, which is to say I shovel goat shit and do what Elaine tells me. She’s the president, since it was her idea.”
    The Heavy mentally jotted all this down and asked, “When did the trouble start?”
    “A few weeks ago.” Mark took another hard draw on the beer and nearly choked himself with it. He looked into Kilgore’s face and didn’t see a guy who was about to bust out laughing.
    He just looked interested, and a little concerned.
    So Mark cleared his throat and made a face that implied acid reflux, and he continued. “I found a couple of the goats all torn up. I figured someone’s dogs got out, you know? Or if they weren’t somebody’s dogs, then maybe coyotes.”
    “Maybe,” Kilgore said.
    “Once we lost another couple goats, I started checking them out good before I buried what was left. And I’m telling you, it looked like they’d been . . . I don’t know. Gored , or something.”
    “Gored? Like by a bull?” Kilgore frowned.
    Mark shook his head. “Naw, more like a baby unicorn. They were punctured, but the holes were too deep to be teeth.” He held up his hands, trying to indicate his best guess. “It was like they’d been jabbed with something sharp, maybe the size of this bottle’s neck.”
    “And how many have you lost now?”
    “Eleven. The thing got one more last night.”
    Josh elbowed Mark. “Tell him the rest,” he said.
    “The rest?”
    Mark stared at his bottle. “I shot it.”
    “You shot it?”
    “I shot it,” he said again. “But it didn’t die.”
    “Ah.” Kilgore said. “Does that mean you got a good look at it?”
    “Not a good look. And the look I got . . . I don’t know what I saw.”
    The big man kept his somber face on and didn’t push too hard.
    “You want to tell me what it looked like?”
    “You’re going to think I’m nuts.”
    “Bet you I won’t.” But that wasn’t enough to make Mark talk, so Kilgore added, “Look, man. I’ve heard some crazy shit