by Faith Hunter
I told him all I knew about our job and said, “I’ll stick a bag in the SUV and head out. I’ll text you with the hotel and where to meet up.”
Eli had eaten three eggs while I talked, and stuffed a fourth one in his mouth as I walked off. Over my shoulder, I said, “One thing. If those eggs give you gas, I will not pay to have the hotel room fumigated.”
Alex groaned and snorted with laughter behind me. “His egg farts are enough to gag a goat.”
“Yeah, you should worry about that, Kid,” I said. “You’ll be sharing a room with your brother.”
“Aw man. No private rooms? Gimme that box of eggs. Give it to me.” There were sounds of scuffles, muted screams, and laughter behind me, and I was pretty sure Eli gave me an obscene hand gesture, but I didn’t look back to be sure if the guys were really killing each other or not. It took effort to live with two men, and part of that effort meant treating them like brothers, crudities and all. And besides, Eli did get awful eggy flatulence, and he had been on an egg protein kick for weeks.
Weapons locked into the special compartment and a satchel of work clothes tossed in the back of the SUV along with all the special equipment I might need in a were-hunt, I helmeted up and zipped up my winter riding leathers. No one who had lived in the Appalachian Mountains would call the temps cold, but the air was always wet. What some locals called humid in summer was just damp and miserable in winter. Unpleasant most anytime.
Eli—who was truly a jack of all trades—had become a pretty good Harley mechanic. Just last week we had taken the carb apart and cleaned it, replaced the plugs and checked the points and spacings, made sure the battery was working well and that the fuel lines were flowing. I had noticed it took more general maintenance to keep a bike running smoothly in the humidity of the Deep South. Dense, wet air is hard on engines, and thanks to Eli’s expertise, Bitsa was in excellent working condition as I took off on her, the engine a dark snarling purr between my thighs.
But even with a smoothly running bike, riding a hog in Louisiana is a challenge. The roads are ribbed because their surfaces expand and shrink, and because the ground beneath them is marshy, with a high water table. By the time I got to Houma, I was vibrating all over and my hands were swollen like the hands of a jackhammer operator, so I stopped for a late lunch just outside town. After a fried soft-shell-crab po’boy and a huge vanilla shake, I cleaned up in the restaurant bathroom before I went to visit the sheriff. She was Rick’s first cousin, and I wanted to be presentable. I even put on lipstick, the bloodred I preferred, and rebraided my hair.
Like a lot of places in the South, everything important to a town—except for grocery stores—is within walking distance, having been built back when walking was the poor man’s transportation method of necessity, if not of choice. Churches, graveyards, lawyers’ offices, restaurants, specialty shops, businesses, hair and nail salons, antiques shops were cheek by jowl with parish offices, farm bureau offices, and corporate offices. There were Porta-Potties on street corners and men in construction clothes, most of the workers looking Latino—part of life in this part of the world, so close to the gulf and Mexico. The place smelled of water, but different from New Orleans. There, the scent hinted of power and sometimes I thought I could almost feel the force of the Mississippi moving so close by. Here I still smelled the salt of the gulf and the brine of the swamps, but I also got the lazy, sunbaked, rotting-vegetation scent of marsh, and the smell of slow-flowing water. Languid was the word that came to mind.
And the food scents filling the air from deep-fat fryers and ovens and stovetops smelled equally of Mexican and fish, different from New Orleans. And here there was no overreaching stink of urine and vomit, scents I had come to ignore most of the time in the party city of the South. The air smelled cleaner. Slower. Easier.
The sheriff’s office and the tax collector were in the same white, two-story building where I parked Bitsa under a tree and entered the front doors. I was stopped by a guard, a big-bellied man of about sixty, with a gun and an attitude. He hooked one hand over the butt of his gun and the other into his belt and stepped in front of me as I entered. “Hold on there, little lady,” he said to me. “How can I help you?” He smelled of chewing tobacco and his teeth were stained dark brown. He was going bald on top and trying to disguise that fact with a futile comb-over from just above his left ear.
I chuckled and said, “Little lady? Really?”
He squinted at me as if checking to make sure he had gotten my gender right. “What else I’m supposed to call you?” he asked, his eyebrows coming together. I looked like a motorcycle mama in my leathers, and my skin was dark, like a furriner, so I knew why people didn’t want to let me in. But really. Little lady?
I didn’t bother to enlighten him on the modern forms of address. When I was growing up in the children’s home, it was called throwing pearls before swine to try to explain manners or etiquette and simple basic pleasantness to people who simply had no clue. “I’m looking for Sheriff LaFleur. She’s expecting me.”
“You don’t say. Lemme check on that. Name? ID?”
“Jane Yellowrock.”
He grunted, looked at my driver’s license, and told me to have a seat. Instead I stood, staring at him until he began to sweat. Then pulled my cell and dialed Rick. I didn’t give him time to even say hello. “Special Agent Rick LaFleur. I am trying to get into the sheriff’s office, and Officer”—I peeked at the man’s badge—“Officer Delorme won’t let me in.”
“I’ll call the office. Sit tight.”
“I’d rather stand and stare at Delorme.”
“Be nice to the locals, Yellowrock.”
I laughed and disconnected. About two and a half minutes later a woman rounded the corner. “Dellie, this is the woman I was expecting.”
“You sure, Nadine?”
“I’m sure.”
I followed Nadine LaFleur to her utilitarian office, admiring the building but fighting off a case of the sneezes. The building was old enough to have a faint, nose-wrinkling stink of mold and dust and age. The sheriff’s perfume was strong enough to take the edge off, but was also an additional odor for my sinuses to fight.
I stepped into Nadine’s office and took my first good look at Rick’s first cousin. She was Frenchy—dark-eyed, black-haired—and stout, maybe five feet four inches of shrewd, narrow-eyed political acumen. She looked meticulous, tough, and competent, giving off a far different impression from Rick’s pretty-boy, come-hither personality. Not that Rick wasn’t smart and tough, but he hid it well. Nadine didn’t try to hide it. Underneath her perfume were pheromones of aggression, anger, frustration, and territoriality.
Nadine was glad I was here but equally wanted me to be gone. She settled on a grudging but determined welcome. Closing the office door with a firm snap, she stuck out a hand and gave mine a firm shake before indicating one of the chairs in front of her no-nonsense desk. “Rick says you can help me with the dog attacks,” she said.
“Uh—”
“Except I don’t think it’s dogs. I think it’s werewolves.” She slapped a stack of files on the desk in front of me, opened the top one, and spread the photographs inside across the desktop. I had been right in my first estimation of what I would see here. It was gruesome. And Nadine was watching me like a hawk for any reaction that was squeamish or girlie. I hadn’t taken a seat yet, and so I inhaled slowly as I leaned over the desk, palm flat on the desktop, letting my weight fall onto my left arm and using my right hand to reposition the photos in order of interest: overall crime scene photos together, heads together, torsos together, limbs together.
My Beast pushed into the forefront of my brain and looked with me, though she still had some trouble accepting two-dimensional photographic representations of anything. No scent, she thought at me. No dead meat smell.
No scent, I agreed. Paper pictures.
Stupid paper pictures. N
eed scent.
I have a feeling we’ll get all the scent we want, I thought back. Sadly.
A quick scan of the first crime scene showed me body parts scattered over a small clearing, blood soaked into the ground, clothes bloodied and shredded, a backpack, contents spread to the side. The body had been dismembered and eaten. The age and gender of the victim were impossible to discern: no face, eyes, nose, or lips over the gory skull, no flesh or viscera over the chest and abdomen, hands too swollen by decomposition to guess at a gender. Long brown hair on a chewed scalp. And maggots. Lots of maggots. I hate maggots.
Oh, yeah, Nadine was watching me like a hawk.
I lined the photos up the way I wanted and opened the file beneath. This one had sat in the sun for a while before it was discovered. Scavengers had been on the scene longer. There was less to see. The third crime scene, however, was fresher and had taken place after a rain. The black mud had dried, protecting the tracks and physical evidence better than the other scenes. I checked the time stamp. Yesterday. These pics were the ones I needed.
I had studied up on wolves, wild dogs, and other predators after I fought the werewolves, research that would have come in handy ahead of time, though that wasn’t something I could have planned on needing. But it was handy now, and I dredged up the facts from my memory.
“Measurements differ on how and who you ask, but researchers with digital bite meters have done testing and discovered that adult humans have a narrow range of bite force between one twenty to two hundred twenty pounds per square inch, or PSI, of bite force.” My voice sounded dispassionate, reasoned, and almost pedantic. Maybe even bored. And not at all nauseated. Go, me. Keeping my eyes on the photos, I continued. “Wild dogs, German shepherds, pit bulls, and Rottweilers can have a bite force from three twenty to five hundred PSI. Hyenas, by contrast, have a PSI of a thousand, and wild male crocodiles have been measured at around six thousand, by far the highest bite force on the planet. Wolves at play measured in at four hundred. Wolves eating have, rarely, measured in at fifteen hundred and can snap their way through an elk femur in less than eight bites.”
I turned the shot of the shattered femur to Nadine. “I’m guessing this wolf bite was upward of twelve hundred PSI, maybe even higher than fifteen hundred, because I’m not seeing but two bite marks, which means he snapped it like a twig.”
I pushed the skull pictures to her. “The orbital bones are cracked, the jaw was forcibly removed in what looks like a massive wrenching motion, and the skull itself was cracked open.” I turned to another shot. “Brain removed.” I pushed a photo of the torso toward her. “All internal organs eaten.” I pointed to what looked like two puncture marks. “Wolves and dogs share a similar canine tooth length and have the same number of teeth—forty-two—but this one bite mark”—I indicated a set of score marks on a meatless bone—“looks deeper than dog canines. What did the medical examiner say?”
Grudgingly Nadine said, “He suggested the canines of the predator were longer and sharper than a dog’s. Maybe two and a quarter inches long.”
That was big even for a werewolf. “And?”
“He says there’s no animal in the state that has teeth that long except the Florida panther.”
She was testing me. Nadine smelled of challenge. Which meant she was holding back on something and was wondering if I’d catch it. I paged through the photos and realized what was missing. Inside me, Beast huffed with amusement. Alpha woman is playing cat games. Hiding paw prints in mud. Inside me, she yawned to show her canines. Beast killing teeth are longer than small cousin called Flo-ree-da.
Still mostly toneless, I asked, “Where are the photos of the footprints?”
Nadine relaxed suddenly and blew out a breath. “Okay. You know your way around. I wasn’t sure Rick—never mind. Here.” She handed me another folder, this one much thinner.
I chuckled drily and opened the file to expose pics of prints in the mud, cracked and desiccated, several full of dried blood. Without looking up, I said, “You weren’t sure if he sent you some ditzy woman he was sleeping with or a real expert.”
“Yeah,” she said, her tone as dry as mine. “Women seem attracted to my cuz.”
I separated out and placed three different paw prints on the desk. “He is a pretty boy, not saying he isn’t.” I pointed from print to print. “All these photos have claws in the prints. Puma concolor coryi, like all pumas, have retractable claws and most prints display clawless, meaning claws retracted. Yours?”
“All with claws exposed. So. Not a lion.”
“And Florida panthers have been extinct in this state for a century or more,” I said. “It would be astounding to have three in one place.” I tapped the smallest print and spread my hand over it. According to the ruler beside the print, the paw pad was more than four inches across. “This wolf or dog is the smallest of the three, and while the density and water content of the substrate makes a difference in the size of the paw prints, I’d estimate this one weighed in at one twenty. Big for a gray wolf.” I pointed to the larger print, which was more than five inches long and more than four inches across. “Maybe three hundred pounds. Gray wolves in this country are big, very big, at one fifty. That medical examiner?”
Nadine shook her head. “He said something about a dire wolf.” She shrugged. “An extinct wolf. He’s an amateur paleontologist and archeologist.”
I went back to the photos and handed her shots as I explained them to her.
“The limbs were disjointed by wrenching, pulling, and biting, the tendons twisted and snapped. The femurs were well gnawed but also cracked open for access to the marrow, indicating that strong bite I mentioned. The pelvic cavity was wrenched apart. I need to see the site to be sure, but I’m inclined to say werewolves, at least three, and one of them a freaking monster.”
Nadine shook her head and rubbed the back of her neck as if to massage away tension. Her face and forearms were tanned, but above her sleeve line her skin was pale olive and very much like Rick’s. She gathered up all the photos and shuffled them into the order she liked and set them in the proper folders. Then she sat in one chair on the supplicant side of her desk and pointed again at the other chair. It put us sitting side by side. She crossed her legs to reveal a pair of fancy cowboy boots, which I wanted to inspect, but I figured it might be rude for me to grab her foot and haul it up. She tapped the folders on her knee, staring off into the distance.
“Ricky said you have a contract with PsyLED to identify the animals and/or perpetrators and attempt a general location.”
I guessed where this was going. “And kill it or them only if necessity or emergency or exigent situation requires it. At which point I get paid a flat kill fee per head. All liability to be covered by the federal government.”
“How about if I get the governor to one-up that?”
Ah. Negotiation. I was getting good at negotiation. Innocently I asked, “Meaning?”
“What if the state government and the governor agree to pay for any liability over and above what the feds pay, but you agree to per-head cost for kills?” She met my eyes, hers cold and hard and mean. “Those things killed Mason Walker. He was a harmless, homeless war vet with enough medals to decorate a good-sized Christmas tree. He lived under one of the overpasses in town that cross over the canal. There was no reason for him to be down in Chauvin, or none that I could see. He didn’t have transportation, he didn’t have money, he didn’t have anything to offer anyone.”
Except sport, I thought. And didn’t say it aloud because sometimes the truth is unnecessary and cruel. Instead I said, “So someone picked him up. Drove him south. Into the woods or the marsh.”
“And chased him. And killed him. And. Ate. Him.” Her words were harsh, her tone vicious. Okay, so she got the sport part.
“And you liked him,” I said gently.
“He was nice. Would give you the shirt off his
back. Nice people are few and far between in this world.” She slapped the folders onto her desk with a sound like a gunshot. “I want them dead. Not in a jail where I can’t keep them. Not in a court system that would just as likely let them loose because they can’t help it if they are this way. I want them dead.”
“And the way to get the governor to do this?” Because in my experience the governor of a state had a dearth of both money and compassion.
But Nadine smiled, and it would have looked good on an alligator, all teeth and killing intent. “Because I used to be married to him. And because I asked. And because he owes me more than money can ever repay and he knows it.”
Ah. Blackmail of sorts. Nadine had something on her ex and wasn’t above using it. I gave her a figure and her eyes didn’t bug out, which I thought was a good start. “Per head.” Still unbugged. “Not including all expenses, hotels, ammo, food, lost or damaged weapons to be replaced, all medical costs or burial costs in the event one of my men is injured or dies, all liability costs, and a nice fancy piece of paper that waives any chance of litigation should someone innocent or collateral get injured or killed before, during, or after the takedown. Your ex will be expected to sign a contract and get it witnessed.”
“I’ll send you the fax number at the governor’s office.”
“Ricky Bo might get riled at you taking this away from PsyLED.”
Nadine suggested that Rick could do something anatomically impossible with himself. I left the sheriff’s office laughing, with a promise of a call about the governor’s agreement. And the promise of the contracts to be faxed once that agreement was reached. I could probably have gotten the promise of her firstborn if the kid was a big enough pain in the butt, but I had the Kid. I didn’t need another. I promised her nothing, except to read any contract the governor marked up and sent back to me. I didn’t expect it to happen, but it would be interesting if it did.