What Reviewers Are Saying About Larranaga's “In The Company of Wolves” series
“Larranaga's intricate development of characters and the way he compares them to wolves and pack hierarchy is captivating.” - GoodbooksToday Reviews
“Another little twist and you're once again reading late into the night to see what is coming next.” - LibraryThing
“Full of lies, deception and drug induced hallucinations, you are kept on your toes till the end with the outcome never certain. The analogy with wolves which runs through the story is clever.” - Basingstone Book Reviews
Download Book I: http://www.amazon.com/In-Company-Wolves-Thinning-Herd-ebook/dp/B00FRM6FG4/
In The Company of Wolves
Follow The Raven
by Jim Larranaga
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and events are the products of my imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is the product of your imagination, or our shared collective unconsciousness. - JML
People are creatures of habit, and Gino wasn’t breaking any molds as he shuffled across the parking lot of a Moose Lake convenience store. Quin watched him through a pair of Steiner Predator Binoculars—perfect for hunters sighting big game or bounty hunters following men on the run. Gino grabbed a newspaper and made a beeline to the men’s room, where he’d sit in a stall and catch up on yesterday’s news. After ten minutes he’d flush, wash and dry his hands with paper towels—not the hand dryer—and buy a large coffee and a lottery ticket. For three days Quin had observed Gino’s predictable routine from the comfort of his truck, and today that routine was about to change.
Gino was a short, pudgy drug dealer who had missed his court date. And with bail piece in his back pocket, Quin was itching to escort the forgetful delinquent back to Minneapolis. He opened the glove box, sifting through heavy-duty cable zip ties, debating if he should use them or the Smith & Wesson handcuffs. If he forced Gino to his stomach, zip ties would be ideal for securing both his wrists, but if he needed to apprehend him in the restroom stall, then handcuffs would be a better option for securing one wrist before locking the other to the stall door or handrail.
This guy was definitely Gino, but Quin grabbed the fingerprint scanner connected to the Minnesota criminal history database and the FBI’s list of wanted persons. Skips—people who skip out on bail—usually give up once they know a bounty hunter has tapped into the database; there’s no bullshitting a fingerprint.
His phone vibrated on the dashboard. Agent Kruse again.
He raised the phone to his ear, still watching the convenience store. “Yeah,” Quin answered.
“Where are you?” Kruse asked.
“None of your business.”
“You’re late for training.”
“I took the day off, remember?”
“You didn’t mention any day off.”
“I have a funeral today.”
“If you want bereavement time off, you need to fill out Form 105b,” Kruse reminded him.
Quin had learned months ago that the FBI had a form for everything. “I e-mailed it to you. Gotta go,” he said, hanging up on Kruse. He grabbed the cuffs and stepped out of the truck, jogging to the convenience store, his cowboy boots pounding hard against the pavement. He’d considered contacting the sheriff prior to making this arrest, but other bounty hunters listened to police radios and he didn’t need any competition stealing his show. He’d call the sheriff soon enough.
The store was quiet and smelled of hazelnut coffee and doughnuts. No sign of Gino. He walked back to the restroom and stepped inside. He had studied this room the day before and it had a deadbolt lock on the inside so the staff could clean it, which apparently they never did. There were two urinals and two stalls. Beneath the door of the larger, handicap stall at the far end next to the wall was a pair of white Sketchers and blue jeans around the ankles.
Quin stood in front of the door. Drug smugglers always carried guns, so he’d have to secure both of Gino’s wrists in one swift motion and then frisk him. Quietly, he removed the cuffs from his back pocket and with a silent count to three, kicked the stall door open with the heel of his boot, then lunged at the man inside.
Gino raised his hands as the door blasted inward. Quin cuffed one of his wrists before Gino shouted, “What the hell?!”
Gino sprang upward like a rabid dog with his uncuffed right arm swinging, his fist connecting with Quin’s jaw. The punch stung, dropping Quin to his knees onto the cold tile floor. Gino kicked wildly, his pants at his ankles, high-tops bashing Quin’s chest, when Gino’s silver Beretta 9000S dropped onto the floor.
Quin reached for it and staggered back out of the stall, slipping on the wet floor before he was able to stand. “Pull up your pants,” he said, gasping for breath.
“Who are you?” Gino said, standing with one wrist cuffed to the stall, his pants still around his ankles. “You want meth, is that it?”
“I’m not a customer. I’m here to re-arrest you,” Quin said. “Notice the free bracelet around your wrist?”
“Re-arrest me? You got the wrong man. I wanna lawyer!” Gino shouted, his youthful face and acne red with anger.
“You already have a court-appointed attorney and judge waiting for you,” Quin reminded him. “Your biggest problem isn’t legal representation, it’s punctuality.”
Gino fumed, “C’mon, man…”
“Pull up your pants.” Quin waved the gun. “I don’t need to see your junk.”
Gino stretched his underwear and jeans over his fat ass, but with one arm he couldn’t tighten the belt around his belly. “What are you, a cop?”
“Bounty hunter.”
Quin knew this wasn’t over yet. Gino only had one wrist cuffed and he was desperate enough to lunge at a man with a gun.
“Cuff yourself to the handrail,” he said to Gino.
“Why? Or you’ll kill me?”
Lowering the gun, aiming right at Gino’s crotch, Quin said, “I could injure you so you piss sitting down the rest of your life.”
Gino flinched at the thought of life without his dick and snapped the dangling cuff around the handrail on the stall. “You got the wrong guy!”
This was as good a place as any for the fingerprint scanner to make its grand entrance. Quin slid it out of his blue jeans pocket and scanned Gino’s thumb. The name on the display was Ambrogino Baxter.
“That’s you, right?” Quin flashed the scanner at Gino.
“Shit, c’mon,” he moaned. “I paid a bounty hunter yesterday to let me off. I doubled it.”
Doubling it meant he’d already bribed another bounty hunter to look the other way. Plenty of bounty hunters made a better living taking bribes and setting skips free than turning them in for money. Catch and release was very profitable and a lot less hassle than transporting skips back to jail. For Quin, it really wasn’t about the money anymore. This was fun. The mental and physical challenge was therapy for him. While most twenty-five-year-old guys were fishing on weekends, Quin was bounty hunting.
“Who set you free?” Quin asked.
“Hell if I know,” Gino said.
“What did the bounty look like?”
“I dunno, he cuffed me, put a bag over my head. It was a real shake-down.”
“You bought yourself a few extra days of freedom
, but it’s over,” Quin said, easing the gun behind his back and into his belt.
“I’ll pay you, too. Let me go. I gotta family, you know?” Gino said.
“Really? You’re a hardworking family man? That’s not what your mother says.” Quin pulled out his phone and swiped through his photos to a picture of an old curly-haired woman with bags under her eyes. “Recognize her?”
The man squinted in disbelief. “What the…? That’s my ma!”
He reveled in Gino’s confusion. The first place to start a search for a skip was their family; parents, siblings, or cousins often had reasons to turn in their own kin. In this case, Gino’s mom had footed the collateral for her son’s bail, and now she was more than happy to have somebody searching for her black sheep.
“You should talk to her,” he said, dialing her number.
“No!” Gino shouted.
“Hello, Mrs. Baxter? Quin here…yes, it’s a pleasure hearing your voice, too. I found him. May I put you on speakerphone?” He held the phone up to her sweet boy’s face.
“Gino! You no-good hoodlum!” Mrs. Baxter screamed, her voice filling the restroom. “I put a lien on the house and you run from the law?”
“Ma! Cool it!” he shouted back. “Listen to me, Ma!!”
“No, I’m talking now,” she said. “This home is all I got. Don’t you put me out on the street. Why can’t you do the right thing? Take your punishment like a man!”
Quin was enjoying the sight of Gino, chained to the stall, braced for more verbal ass-whipping from his mother. She screamed expletives while he shook his head, and then she started up again.
“Turn her off,” Gino begged Quin. “Hang up!”
“He’s in good hands now, Mrs. Baxter,” Quin said. “You’ll keep your home.”
He hung up, laughing at Gino. Justice had been served.
“Who are you?” he asked again.
“Quin Lighthorn.”
He studied Quin’s earrings and long hair. “You’re the Indian I’ve seen sleeping in the truck.”
“You got a problem with that?”
“No, no, my great-grandmother had Indian blood in her,” Gino said, as if they were somehow distant blood brothers.
“Everyone’s great-grandmother had Indian blood,” Quin replied. “Welcome to the tribe.”
Gino huffed, spitting out every skip’s desperate cliché plea: “You didn’t read me my rights, you know.”
“I’m a bounty hunter, I don’t have to read you your rights.” Quin dialed 9-1-1. “Can you send a squad car to the Holiday Station at Moose Lake? Some poor guy locked himself in the men’s room.”
Within a half-hour Gino was slouched in the back of a Carlton County Sheriff’s squad car. Quin slid the cuffs into his back pocket and motioned to Gino’s Porsche. He told the sheriff, “That’s his car over there. Sal Foster of Freedom Bail Bonds will contact you Monday about transporting Gino back to the city.”
The sheriff nodded and looked into the window at Gino. “What’s he dealing?”
“He’s a mule, transporting meth to dealers between here and Canada,” Quin explained. “Doesn’t know when to quit, a real workaholic.”
“Good job,” the sheriff replied, seemingly envious of this catch; but Quin had an advantage. He knew all the habits of drug mules from where he had grown up in Arizona. Gas stations were the oasis for people carting drugs across the border.
His phone flashed with a message from Agent Kruse: “I’ll see you at work first thing in the morning.”
He climbed into his truck as the squad car pulled away. Rather than respond to Kruse, he sent a text to Sal Foster at Freedom Bail Bonds: Gino Baxter is back in captivity.
Standing in Oak Ridge Cemetery, a lonely five acres of land surrounded by birch and oak trees, Quin watched a raven perch on a branch, wiping its beak as it built its nest of twigs and grass. The bird was a welcome distraction from the funeral and all the loneliness he felt here. Some of the headstones were so old and weathered he couldn’t read the names of those who had passed before his friend Rebecca Baron.
In front of him her relatives and friends watched as her mahogany casket was lowered into the ground; it made a clanking sound that spooked the raven in the tree. The bird hopped further out on the branch and made an angry croaking sound, but Quin was the only one who seemed to notice the wildlife. Everyone else stared at the casket.
Rebecca, a woman Quin had once rescued, was finally reunited with her deceased daughter and was being lowered next to her, in a separate box, below the frost line. This cemetery was once a wide expanse of prairie land, roamed by the Sioux tribes and later divided into farms by Europeans who carved the earth into cemeteries sub-divided into small plots like Rebecca’s. Quin knew of old burial rituals where Indians wrapped their deceased loved ones in cloth and laid them to rest up in trees. This was to prevent animals like wolves from digging their dead. Nobody did that anymore. White people preserved their dead underground in expensive boxes.
There was a sniffle from a woman standing in front of him. He looked to his right and noticed Christopher Gartner loosening his tie. Quin hadn’t seen or spoken to him in six months and the man looked ten pounds heavier; he wasn’t a skinny stray dog anymore. He wore a black Armani suit and a red tie, and Quin felt underdressed in his cowboy boots, jeans, and navy jacket.
“Quin!” Christopher whispered. “How are you?”
“I’m all right. You put on weight.” He meant it as a compliment because Christopher had looked too skinny before. “You look good, though.”
“Unemployment does that to you,” he replied, unbuttoning his suit coat and wiping sweat off his pale brow. “I was a nervous wreck working at Safe Haven. The place gave me ulcers. Where’ve you been?”
“Training with the FBI,” Quin said, watching the mourners talking and hugging.
“I’m on the witness list to testify against Ben Moretti,” Christopher said. “How about you?”
“I’ll testify, too, if they need me.”
“Ben posted $5 million bail and he’s free,” Christopher said, snapping his fingers. “Just like that.”
“With certain court-ordered restrictions,” Quin said. “That’s how the system works.”
“Well, you’re the expert. I don’t like the idea of Ben Moretti walking around free. Gives me anxiety.”
“You got nothing to worry about,” Quin said.
“What makes you so sure? I’m the whistle-blower. I helped bring Ben to his knees.”
“He’s too busy working with his attorneys before the trial to even think about you.”
Christopher reached out and grabbed Quin by the elbow. “Can I have a word with you, away from Rebecca’s family?”
They walked across the cemetery lawn, acorns crunching under their feet. Christopher walked fast, his black leather shoes slipping on the wet grass.
“God! Three hundred sixty bucks for these Salvatore Ferragamos,” he complained, “and I step in goose shit.”
Quin glanced at the ground. “That’s deer. Scat.”
“Of course it is,” he replied, embarrassed, wiping his shoe in the grass.
“What do you want, Christopher?”
“I’m low on dough,” he said, looking over Quin’s shoulder back at the funeral in the distance. “And I submitted Rebecca’s death certificate to the insurance company. They’ll send you a claim form and because of the amount of the death benefit, the insurance company will want to do a wire transfer—”
“I haven’t forgotten.”
“Of course you haven’t forgotten the payout,” he said. “I want to make sure you don’t forget about me. We agreed to partner on that deal. I was the death broker who filed the paperwork. That was a perfectly legitimate business transaction that you couldn’t have pulled off without me.”
“My friend Hawk funded the insurance policy. You couldn’t have done it without us, either,” Quin said.
“I know, we’re partners.” Christopher backed down. �
��Whatever you think is fair. Ten percent would be cool, but whatever…”
There was desperation in his voice. Quin had heard this tone when they’d worked on the Safe Haven case. “You were a successful death broker before all of this. Why do you need money now?”
“Everyone’s broke at different levels,” Christopher said. “I need to find another line of work.”
“When the insurance money comes in, I’ll pay you ten percent,” Quin said. “You can use the money to make a fresh start.”
“You’re working for the bureau full-time now?” he asked.
“I’m in training, sort of.”
“What kind of bureau training?”
“Bounty work,” Quin said, considering whether he should tell Christopher how the past six months had been a psychedelic mind warp. He wanted his friend to know how challenging life had been for him while Christopher assisted in the investigation, but he wasn’t allowed to talk about any of his recent paranormal training with the FBI.
“What could the bureau teach you about bounty hunting?”
That was a good question, and one Quin had contemplated many times since partnering with the FBI. He was already damn good at catching skips, and his experience in tracking wolves had taught him a thing or two about predator behavior that he’d never have learned working in the city. So what could the FBI teach him about bounty hunting?
“I’d tell you about the training but it’s confidential,” he replied.
“Have you spoken to Candace Johnson?” Christopher asked.
Quin shrugged. “Don’t know anybody by that name.”
“Sure you do. Candy? A blonde?”
“One of Ben’s girlfriends? The woman who kept calling me?”
“Yeah, but she’s not Ben’s girlfriend, far from it,” Christopher said. “I assumed you knew that.”
“No, I’m not involved in this case anymore.”
“She’s a writer doing a story about Ben and she wants to interview you too, Quin. When are you available?“
He remembered her brief visit to his hospital bedside. Candace was nothing if not persistent. He opened the calendar on his phone. “I’m usually free for dinner after seven.”
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