Trollhunters by Guillermo del Toro, Daniel Kraus Read Free Book Online Page B

knock a bust from its pedestal or a canvas from
its frame, your parents would be in so much debt you’d be in the poorhouse before you could—”
    “The poorhouse,” that was our cue. Tub jerked from his apologetic pose and went scrambling down the stairs. I was right behind him, beating at his shoulders, panicked and giddy all
at once. Lempke knew he’d never catch us in his stiff jacket and argyle socks, but he bent himself over the railing and raised his clipboard as if it were a throwing spear.
    “By my count, you each owe me over nine-hundred dollars in admission fees! Don’t think I won’t collect! As soon as I get a free minute, there’s a call coming to your
mothers and fathers, mark my words!”
    He had no idea that Tub lived with his grandmother and I only had one parent. Depressing thoughts usually, but for the moment the joke was on Lempke. We burst from a service entrance onto a
loading dock, laughing like mad, and we didn’t stop running until we were back on the road. We hung on to each other for a few minutes until we got to the first intersection, reliving the
escape through gasped sentence fragments.
    We gathered our breath and grinned at each other. Our wounds from the long day no longer looked so pathetic. They looked like tattoos shared by warriors of the same tribe. I felt great. Then I
noticed the sky. It was dark, almost full night. We must have spent more time in that parking lot than I had thought.
    Tub grabbed me around the neck and expelled an affectionate sigh.
    “I know your pop’s uptight,” he said. “But, seriously, how worried could he be?”
    A siren squelched. We looked down the perpendicular road and were bathed in swirling red-and-blue light.

Word on the street was that Sergeant Ben Gulager had been born with that lush mustache, and many a playground bounty had been placed on photographic evidence. It was just
Gulager’s third most notable physical feature. His hairpiece was also awe-inspiring, though only in its ineptitude, a black bowl-cut mop that always looked as if he had put it on
sideways.
    Yet no one dared laugh at Sergeant Gulager. The hairpiece existed to conceal his most defining characteristic, a gruesome, puckered scar on his right temple. Ten years before he had been the
first responder to a domestic disturbance on the south side of the city, a garden-variety case of plate-throwing between husband and wife. But after Gulager arrived, things turned ugly, and the
father whipped out a gun and started waving it at the triplets huddled behind the sofa. Gulager had not hesitated to throw himself in front of the girls, taking a bullet to the skull at nearly
point-blank range.
    His survival had been one of those miracles of physics at which doctors shrug. Surgeons judged it too risky to remove the nine-millimeter bullet from its position halfway between skull plate and
brain matter, and six months later Gulager was back on the force, no different except for a relentless stutter. The hair around the wound never grew back.
    The mustache, though, that was pure style.
    I can tell you from experience that one thing worse than being handed to your dad by a cop is being handed to your dad by a cop who is a local hero, a man who has never, as far as anyone can
tell, done anything wrong in his entire life, and would certainly never come home late enough to make his family worry.
    “You realize, Mr. St-St-Sturges, that this can’t go on muh-muh-muh-much longer.”
    Released from Gulager’s grip, I slunk across the kitchen and leaned against the refrigerator. Through the open front door, I could see Tub slumped in the back of the police cruiser,
looking despondent behind the fiberglass.
    Dad threw me a baleful glance before giving Gulager his most chastened look.
    “Sergeant, you have my word. Jim Jr.’s a good boy, but in this matter I’m at a loss, same as you. I have told him, again and again,
emphasized
to him,
stressed
to him the importance of getting