by Hunter Shea
What a load of crap. He just wanted to get in Adriana’s pants before he was too far away to try.
Or had he meant what he said and the rumor about him and Adriana was a lie?
The wondering had Kelly in a slow burn all day. Finally, when her parents went to bed at eleven, she had to find out. She’d never snuck out before and her heart was in her throat from the moment she crept out of her room all the way until the Prius was several blocks from the house.
When she got to the party, things were in full swing. Kids from three different schools packed into Wendy’s house in East Hampton. Her living room was a haze of hookah smoke. Red Solo cups littered every surface in the house. There must have been over two hundred people there. Wendy’s parents had flown out to L.A. the day before. Her father was a movie producer and her mother was an actress, at least until the latest face-lift hadn’t gone so well and the casting calls dried up. Parental jaunts to Hollywood were always cause for celebration. And the celebrations were always slamming, each one more memorable than the last. Wendy would make one hell of an event planner when she graduated.
After searching both floors of the house, interrupting several make-out sessions and one blow job in the master bathroom, she found Joey, alone, sitting in a lounge chair outside the pool house. His eyes lit up when he saw her. She couldn’t get into his arms fast enough.
They talked for hours, with a lot of apologizing from his side. He’d had a change of mind the day after he broke things off, but he didn’t want to come crawling back and make her think he was just messing with her head.
When she left, he promised to take her out for dinner the next day.
In just a few hours, she’d gone from miserable, to scared, to angry, to blissful and back to scared. God, she was exhausted. All she wanted to do was slip into her pj’s and sleep until noon. But first, she had to get back in the house without making a noise.
“You can do this,” she said, easing off the brake.
It’s not like she snuck out to drink or get high or have sex. She hadn’t even taken a sip of beer. That wouldn’t matter if her parents caught her, if they even believed her.
She drove to the edge of her long, down-sloping driveway, put the car in neutral and turned the engine off. Gravity pulled the car to the closed garage door. Without power, it was hard to turn the steering wheel but she managed to slip the Prius quietly into its proper place. The garage is where they kept her mother’s Navigator. The nicer car got the better space.
Slowly closing the car door until it clicked shut, she bent to the side-view mirror to give herself a once-over, in case her mom and dad were waiting for her inside. The last thing she needed was to look like a wreck. They’d think she was trashed.
Kelly pushed her blond hair behind her ears and straightened her blouse. She was worried that she was so tired her eyes would be bloodshot, but luckily, that wasn’t the case.
“Okay, in the door, up the stairs and back to my room. Just three easy steps,” she said to her reflection.
Retrieving her house keys from her purse, she walked on tiptoes to the front door. Kelly looked up. All of the windows were dark. That was a good sign.
A deep, foreboding growl emanated from behind the bushes to her right.
Startled, Kelly dropped the keys on the porch. She drew in a sharp breath, worried about what animal was an arm’s length from her and if the keys made enough noise to wake her parents.
“Grrrrrrrrlllllll.”
What the heck is that? Kelly thought. Sounds like a drowning dog.
Keeping her eyes peeled to the bushes, she knelt down, scooping up the keys.
The branches twittered as something moved.
Rabies! Didn’t animals foam at the mouth when they had rabies? Maybe that’s why it sounds like that.
Kelly’s heart trip-hammered.
She had to get inside, fast, but how could she do that without making a ton of noise?
Her hand shook so hard, it took her three tries to slip her key into the lock. She gave it a half turn, slow enough so the tumblers didn’t ring out as the door unlocked. She couldn’t keep her eyes from the dark swath by the bushes.
The dog, or whatever it was, continued to rumble, almost purr, with its waterlogged warning.
Kelly opened the door.
The ticking of the grandfather clock echoed in the foyer.
She took one step across the threshold.
Something darted out of the bushes, knocking into her leg. She stifled a cry when she felt a sharp stab of pain in her ankle. Off-balance, she tottered on one leg, her wounded ankle hovering off the ground. The welcome mat inside the door slid and she flopped to the ground.
Tears burned her eyes.
It bit me!
There was nothing outside. Whatever it was had taken off.
Doing her best to hold her breath and keep her tears from completely blurring her vision, she got up and closed the door with a fluid clack.
The lancing pain in her ankle was unreal. It felt like she’d been stabbed with a hot knife.
Kelly limped up the stairs, one at a time, pausing to listen for sounds of anyone moving about upstairs.
By the grace of God, she made it to her room. She grabbed the pj’s she’d left on her dresser and went into her bathroom. Flicking on the light, she almost laughed at herself.
It was only a scratch. In fact, what felt like a seeping wound was a three-inch welt that had barely broken the skin. One tiny drop of blood sat poised at the corner of the scratch like an expectant tear. She sat on the edge of the tub, doused it with stinging alcohol, patted it dry and put a bandage on, just in case.
Slipping into her bed, she couldn’t believe how lucky she was, despite her brush with whatever dumb animal had been outside. She’d made it.
And she had a date with Joey tomorrow.
By dawn, she wasn’t sure what was keeping her up more, her happiness at reconnecting with her boyfriend, or the growing pain in her ankle.
CHAPTER 4
By four a.m., there wasn’t much left for Dalton to do. It was too early to play crowd control. Local PD had created a barrier the two news crews couldn’t cross. More would be on the way. A couple of vans with heavy, white satellite dishes on the roof were parked in the Sand Stone Motel’s lot. The ME was with the bodies. All emergency responders were ordered to steer clear of the remains until they could determine if the weird smell coming from the bodies was toxic or not.
He sat in his car with the door open, listening to a succession of animal disturbance calls from dispatch. After the fourth call, he went to look for Sergeant Campos. He found him talking to the fire chief.
“Do we have anyone from Animal Control here?” he asked Campos.
The sergeant narrowed his eyes and thought for a moment. “Someone should be here. I asked them to send Anita over about an hour ago. I’d rather this be some kind of animal attack than the work of a psychopath. I haven’t seen her, though.”
Anita Banks had worked for Animal Control on this end of the island for over twenty years. She was so good at her job that other counties, even neighboring states, brought her in for difficult situations. She’d helped remove several bears from New Jersey suburbs, put down a crazed chimp in upstate New York and handled more cases of rabid animals than anyone could count.
“Why do you ask?” Campos said.
“We’ve got four complaints about animals going through garbage and knocking things down in the past hour. The last one was at Shorey Road. If we have a rabid animal on the loose, I want to follow up. I was hoping to grab someone from Animal Control for the ride.”
Dalton looked over the row of parked vehicles, hoping to spot another county car toward the rear. He was relieved to find not one, but two. Now all he had to do was locate Anita.
The ME shouted from behind the dune for the sergeant. Campos turned to Dalton and said, “Do it, but be careful. If you find something, take your cues from Anita.”
“Got it.”
Now, if I were Anita, where would I be?
He walked through the crowd of cops, EMS and firemen. Gallows humor was in full effect. People on the outside would be appalled if they could hear the laughter, see the smiles while two people were laid out in pieces just yards away. They’d never understand. If you let the horror creep under your skin, it could destroy you.
Anita wasn’t among the throng.
Of course not. Knowing her, she couldn’t stay away from the crime scene. She’d be as close as she could, determining whether or not an animal could have caused such destruction, her mind formulating a case to either protect innocent creatures from being pulled into a dragnet or to humanely put down an animal that had crossed a very hard line.
Dalton circled back around the dune, away from the flashing lights and out of reach of the blinding brightness of the temporary crime scene lights. He found her sitting behind a stand of waist-high reeds. She’d parted them with a hand and observed the hazmat team as they took pictures.
“Busted,” Dalton said.
Anita fell backward, covering her mouth to suffocate a startled shout.
When she saw Dalton, she shook her head and smiled.
“You nearly gave me a heart attack, Gray.”
“Better than leaving you here breathing in God-knows-what. You up to taking a ride?”
“I was planning to wait until I got the all clear to get closer to the scene, though it seems gruesome enough from here.”
Dalton looked over at the guys in white suits, taking great care not to step their booted feet into any remains.
“Trust me, you’ve gotten a good enough view. Your next best bet will probably be in the ME’s office where you can check the bodies for bite marks.” He left out the part about the flesh dissolving from the bones.
He offered a hand to help Anita to her feet. She tied her long chestnut hair in a ponytail and wiped the sand from the seat of her pants. She was in her late forties, dressed in her everyday uniform of tan slacks with a forest green polo shirt. Her soft, gray eyes could get hard as steel if the moment called for it.
Anita said, “One thing I can tell you is that no single animal did that, unless we have a starved, half-mad lion on the loose. The closest would be at the Central Park Zoo, and I can’t see an escaped lion making it all the way out here without being spotted—or reported missing.” She took out a pack of gum and offered him a piece.
“I want to follow up on some other animal disturbance calls that have come in since I found the bodies. I thought you might want to tag along. Maybe we can stop this thing, or things, before someone else gets hurt.”
Anita took one last look at the crime scene and shook her head. “Lead the way, Officer. I’m all yours. I just need to stop at my van to pick up my tranquilizer gun.”
When Dalton got to the county squad car closest to the road out of the state park, he talked to Jerry, an EMS driver, who had been driving the car.
“I think I saw Mickey get out. He was just here talking to Jack a minute ago.”
Dalton spied Mickey Conrad, a vet on the force, jawing with Jack Brand, a longtime EMS attendant. Dalton couldn’t wait until he was no longer the new kid. It seemed every first responder on this end of the island had been on the job forever.
“Hey Mick, I need to use your car. Mine’s trapped.”
Mickey rolled and cracked his neck. His normally salt-and-pepper hair flashed blue and red under the strobing lights. Strong-jawed with an aquiline nose, Conrad looked every bit the hard-line cop, even though he could goof off with the best of them. “What for?”
“Sergeant Campos wants me to check out some animal disturbance calls, see if they’re what’s behind this.”
Mickey shot him a long, hard look. His regular shift ended at midnight. He didn’t want to be stuck out there any longer than need be, especially since there was little to do at the moment.
“Bring it back in an hour or you owe me a steak.”
Mickey was a notorious carnivore. When he said steak, he meant a twenty-ounce porterhouse at a good restaurant. No Sizzler or Outback Steakhouse for him.
“I will. I don’t make Mickey-steak kind of money.”
Dalton opened the door for Anita, who commented on his being a gentleman, and made a U-turn out of the park.
Officers Winn and Henderson pulled up to Randy Jenks’s small cottage. It had powder blue shutters in need of a paint job. Postage-stamp yards with healthy, well-tended lawns were in the front and back of the house. The windows were dark, but that was normal for this time of night. Randy’s curbside mailbox was full.
“Maybe he’s out of town,” Norman suggested as they walked to the front door. The neighborhood was silent as a tomb. Even the feral cats were tucked away.
“Let’s hope,” Jake said and pushed the bell.
The chimes echoed inside the house, but nothing stirred. He tried again and waited ten seconds.
Norman gave the door a few hard raps. He wanted to roust Randy if he was in a deep sleep, but he didn’t want to knock so hard he woke up everyone on the block.
“I’ll check the back,” Jake said, using his flashlight to lead the way around the side of the house.
A cooling breeze made the tops of the trees sway, carrying the scent of salt and pine. Henderson tried the bell again. He shined his flashlight through the front window into the living room. There was an empty couch, easy chair, a stack of magazines scattered across a glass coffee table, wrestling a pizza box for space. He pressed his face to the glass and pointed the light into the kitchen, sweeping it to the doorway of what must be the bedroom.
Another light pierced the dark from a different angle. Winn had gone to the bedroom window and must have been trying to peer through the gaps in the blinds.
He came back shaking his head. “He’s not in there.”
Henderson felt a knot tighten in his stomach, staring down the road leading to the Montauk Highway and ultimately, the beach. “For his mother’s sake, I hope he’s not back there.”
Dalton’s first stop didn’t yield much intel. An older woman had called in saying her cat had been chased up onto the garage roof by a wild dog with no collar. By the time he got there, the cat was still on the roof, mewling.
“Priscilla won’t come down, even when I opened a can of food,” the woman said. She wore a white housecoat and a hairnet. She stood by the garage in her bare feet, trying to coax the cat down.
“Do you have a ladder?” he asked.
“In the garage. Let me open it so you can get it.”
Dalton looked back at Anita, who was still in the passenger seat of the squad car. “You want to take this one?”
She smiled. “It’s just a scared cat. I’ll let you be the hero.”
He chuckled. Saving cats from trees and rooftops. He couldn’t remember what chapter that had been at the academy.
The woman came out with the key and pulled the door open. The segmented wooden door made enough noise to wake the dead. “It’s right there,” she said, pointing to the back of the garage. He maneuvered his way around the old Buick that took up most of the space and carried the ladder over his head.
“What did you say the cat’s name was, ma’am?”
“Priscilla.”
He leaned the ladder against the garage and climbed several rungs.
“Hey, Priscilla. Come on, let me help you get down. Psss, psss, psss. Come on.”
The cat, a gray-and-black-striped tabby, looked at him with wide, emerald eyes, and hissed. When he reached out to get her, she swatted his hand, raking his fingers with her claws and backing up. Dalton drew his hand back sharply.
Damn, that hurt! He’d heard that cat scratches burned so much because of the urine under their nails. Another reason to be a dog lover.
He wanted to say, I don’t like you as much as you don’t like me, Simba. Now get off the damn roof before I have Anita hit you with a tranq.
Instead, he climbed another rung, calling her name
softly. The cat wasn’t going for it. No matter. As soon as he got close enough, Dalton snagged the cat with both hands. She struggled mightily, hissing and trying to get at his arms with her hind claws. Midway down the ladder, she broke free from his grasp, hit the ground running and didn’t stop until she had dashed into the woman’s open back door.
“Why did you drop her?” the woman cried. She looked as upset as the cat.
“She wasn’t easy to hold on to,” he replied, putting the ladder back in the garage.
“You could have hurt her. Who’s your supervisor?”
He couldn’t believe it. Here he was, climbing up on a roof to get a vicious cat and the woman was threatening to complain to his supervisor. No good deed ...
After giving her Sergeant Campos’s information, realizing the laugh this would give him when and if she did call, he asked if she could describe the dog that had run Priscilla up the roof.
“I just happened to look out the window because I heard Priscilla crying. She does that when she’s scared. I didn’t see much, but I could tell it was big. Like a pony.”
“A pony is considerably larger than a dog. Are you sure about the size?”
“I know it wasn’t a pony, but you could put a saddle on it if you wanted.”
“Could you see the type of dog it was, the color of its fur?”
“It was too dark.”
“But you could see it had no collar?”
“People around here think there are no laws. They walk their dogs without collars or leashes and let them poop on my front lawn without picking it up.”
She droned on for a couple of minutes while Dalton looked for a way out of the conversation. It took another ten, fruitless minutes before he got back in the car. Anita couldn’t stop tittering.
“I take it you’re not a cat person,” she said as he keyed the ignition.
“Or a cat lady person. Next stop is someone who said he was attacked by a couple of dogs in his yard. I hope he’s quick. I don’t want to have to buy Mickey a steak.”