Bad Wolf Chronicles, Books 1-3

by McGregor, Tim

  Lara retrieved her bag and turned towards the exit. “Goodnight, Trumbo.”

  “What’s the big secret, Lara? Trouble with the law?” He rose up and blocked her path to the door. “My guess is you’re an illegal, which would explain why you’re so good at sniffing out lost migrants in the desert.”

  “Take it up with the pastor, Trumbo. I don’t have time for your bullshit.”

  “I will, Lara. I will. See, this is just a courtesy I’m extending to you. With money tight, the pastor’s got to cut some bodies from the team. The man’s a softie and he’s gonna agonize over who to let go. You’re gonna make it easy for him by walking away. Tonight.”

  Lara stepped to her left to march around her colleague but Trumbo blocked her again. She squared him with a look. “Get out of the way.”

  “Do you understand what I’m saying? You can quit now or I can make a phone call to immigration. That’s gonna be messy and it’s gonna look bad on the pastor’s mission. Do you want that?”

  She took another deep breath to slow the uptick in her pulse. Her heart was banging dangerously hard. Stupidly, Trumbo pressed in on her, glaring down at her with an intimidating stare. He stood a foot taller and outweighed her by fifty pounds but none of that mattered when the wolf was roused. Her hand shot out and shoved him away. Trumbo caterwauled into a desk.

  She didn’t look back to see the walleyed expression on his face. “Don’t ever get in my way, Trumbo.”

  Trumbo sputtered a threat as he shot to his feet but Lara was already gone.

  ~

  The Jeep Cherokee was parked at the end of the lot, the last vehicle left as the sun went down. Lara climbed under the wheel and leaned back in the seat, needing to ride out the jolt to her system. Her hands were trembling bad so she folded her arms to still them. She hated losing control like that, giving in to the instinct to strike out in anger. She could have seriously hurt Trumbo.

  Why did he hate her so much? Enough to root around the personnel files for something to leverage her out of the team? The past two months had been the longest bout of normalcy in so long and she didn’t want to lose it now. It was a job that she liked, one that had purpose and meaning and one where she could sometimes apply the awful curse she carried into something good.

  And now it was all gone, thanks to one petty man’s ego.

  Sitting up, Lara slotted the key into the ignition but let her hand drop away without starting the engine. A hot flash of anger had her consider going back inside to confront Trumbo but she brushed it aside. Too dangerous. Just get out of here.

  She turned the key and the old Cherokee rumbled to life. She pulled out of the lot and rolled east down 2nd Avenue. Elvis dangled from the rearview mirror, a plastic toy that shook and swiveled with every bump in the road. It had come with the truck, the ornament hung there by its former owner, John Gallagher. She’d meant to get rid of the silly thing because it reminded her of Gallagher and she missed him terribly. Although they had gotten off to a shaky start as partners in the homicide detail back in Portland, Gallagher had proved to be the one person she could count on when her whole world went to hell. Alone among her old colleagues, Gallagher had never given up looking for her. He knew the truth about her and had brought her home, tried to help her. But he was gone now and she couldn’t turn to him anymore, despite how often she thought of him. That left only one other person in the world who knew of her secret and that was Gallagher’s teenage daughter, Amy.

  She needed to call Amy, if only to check in with her. It had been a month since they’d spoken but the girl didn’t sound well, despite her protests to the contrary. It was understandable. Grieving the loss of her father was one thing but the girl had been there with them, forced to confront a primordial evil that had no right to exist outside of folktales. The last time they had spoken, Lara had the impression that her call dredged up everything for Amy, opening the wounds again. Not wanting to hurt the girl any further, she’d decided to wait until Amy called her. That had yet to happen.

  She’d call her tomorrow, just to check on her. Lara glanced at the fuel gauge and then steered for home.

  8

  THE HOUSE LOOKED SAD and hollow. Standing on the curb with cold feet, Amy looked up at her father’s house and chewed her lip. Her earlier resolve to face the awful task of dealing with dad’s house dissipated like smoke as she hovered on the sidewalk, scolding herself for being scared while her feet itched to bolt.

  Trudging up the street she had avoided for months, she had thought that seeing her old home would be, if not heartbreaking, at least bittersweet. It wasn’t. With the front entrance boarded-over with cheap plywood and the garage door crumpled inwards and tagged by graffiti, the craftsman looked alien and pathetic. Like the other empty houses that haunted the block after the crash, their exteriors fading in the sun from neglect while the realtor’s signs went ignored in their parched front lawns. This wasn’t home, she thought. It’s just another empty husk of wood and shingle. Someone else’s home, someone else’s life.

  Don’t be chickenshit, she growled. Get it done. Do it for dad. The house keys, unused for months, dangled from a chain in her hand.

  The mangled garage door rolled up halfway and then stopped. She ducked under, squinting in the gloom until she located the side-door. Her shoes crunched over a mess of pennynails and woodscrews littered over the concrete floor, remnant trails of disaster from the catastrophe that had destroyed the garage. A flashback image of monstrous teeth snapped through her mind, a beast’s snout smashing through the aluminum panels of the roll-up door. Earlier she had thought about bringing the gun hidden under her bed but dismissed the notion. She regretted that now. Shaking it off, she unlocked the side-door and passed through into the hallway.

  The stillness inside was unnerving and popping the light on did nothing to smooth the gooseflesh pimpling her arms. Without thinking, she called out to the empty hallway before her.

  “Hello?”

  Had she expected a reply? It was more of a warning than a hail, to chase off anything or anyone that might be squatting inside the house. When nothing answered back, the fear itching her spine receded and she ventured further in. Entering the kitchen, the fear was gone completely but the grief came on so fast it snatched her breath away and knocked Amy to her knees. It was the smell of the place that punched the hardest. The smell of home, the smell of him, bringing everything back faster than she could deal with it. She remained on the floor until the hiccuping sobs throttled back enough to breathe.

  A metal bowl sat on the floor to her left, moldering kibble spilled from it onto the dirty linoleum. She blinked at it like she didn’t know what it was for. She had almost forgotten about their dog, the dog that had never been given a name.

  Pushing herself up, she wiped her eyes and reached for the tissue box on the hutch. Same place it always was. Like everything else in the kitchen, nothing had changed or been moved. Dirty coffee mugs sat in the sink waiting for a wash that would never come. It was almost like it used to be. Her dad would come clomping around the corner any second now, asking her what she wanted for dinner. The husky would linger near the door, whining to be let out.

  She shook it off. Pretending was useless. The house was stale and no figure would emerge from the other room like nothing had happened. She marveled at her own capacity for delusion. “Do what you gotta do,” she muttered to the empty kitchen. “Then get the hell out.”

  Shuffling back into the garage, she scrounged up two cardboard boxes and started in the living room. Collecting framed pictures and few nick-knacks (like a silver candle snuffer that had belonged to her grandmother), she decided to pack up the things she wanted and leave the rest. What was she going to do with all this furniture? If they couldn’t sell the house ‘as-is’ then she’d call a charity to come take everything away. She made the mistake of lingering over the first framed photograph of herself and her dad taken when she was twelve. Both of them with fishing poles, beaming at the camera over a tiny p
erch she had caught. Seeing it stung so she put it in the box and collected the rest of the pictures without looking at any of them. She would sort through them later.

  Moving on to the kitchen, she found even less to hold onto. A few snapshots stuck to the fridge with fruit-shaped magnets. Dad’s favorite mug; a joke gift she had given him ages ago. The words ‘World’s Greatest Deadbeat Dad’ emblazoned on the side in a cartoonish font. He’d used it every morning for the past six years. A notepad on the chipped counter, the one they’d used to write grocery lists or jot notes to each other when their schedules clashed. A scribble in his pen, asking her to walk the dog because he had to work late. As fresh and mundane as if it was left yesterday. Was there a photo of the dog? She didn’t think so. A shame. She tossed the notepad into the box and moved on, working fast to outrun the tears.

  Halfway up the stairs, a chill passed through her bones and a noise broke from below. She froze to still the creaking steps under her feet to listen for another sound but it was gone. She called out again but nothing sounded in the house. Her imagination, she decided.

  Her bedroom seemed old and foreign after all this time. The posters and trophies from basketball and track seemed like they belonged to some other girl’s life. Most of her clothes had been cleared out months ago by her mom. She rifled the closet and checked the drawers of her desk but found nothing to keep, nothing to hang onto. There was no connection to the girl who used to live here. Of the books stacked neatly on the shelf, she took only the battered Penguin of Jane Eyre and a water-damaged paperback of True Grit.

  Nothing else held a wisp of interest so she left the remnant pieces of this other girl’s like to the dust and moved on to her dad’s room. Opening the closet, she tried to block out the smell of him wafting from his hanging clothes and reached up to the shelf above. Slipping her hand under the stack of sweaters he’d received as gifts over the years but had never worn, her fingers latched onto a shoebox. Lifting it down onto the bed, she flipped the lid to reveal stacks of old letters. Missives from family members she’d met only once or old love letters from her mom. These she tossed aside, digging for something until she upended the box onto the coverlet. The gun wasn’t here. An old Glock that had been her dad’s first service issue on the job, one that he had used with deadly force against a junkie back during his days as a beat uniform. A bad shooting is how he had described it, after which he had shelved the piece for good and purchased a new firearm out of his own pocket. The thing had remained in this old shoebox of reminisces since then but it was gone now. He must have gotten rid of it without telling her. Disappointing to say the least. She’d hoped to add it to her arsenal.

  Picking through the scattered mess on his dresser top, she took an old Timex with a broken snap band and his old wedding ring. She scrounged around for his police badge before remembering it was in his office.

  The office was a spare room next to the mud room at the back of the house. A small desk and two filing cabinets. Commendations and citations framed under glass hung on the wall. Amy gathered a few more snapshots pinned to the corkboard and searched the desktop for her dad’s badge but it wasn’t on the desk nor hidden in a drawer. She wondered if he’d had it on him when he died. Gallagher had been alone in the house when a suspect named Edgar Grissom broke in and attacked him. Grissom, Amy would later learn, was a lycanthrope and he wanted Lara Mendes. He abducted her dad and fled up north to the wilderness across the border, knowing Lara would go after him. They had both gone, along with the nameless husky, to save her dad. In the end, she and Lara were the only ones to come back alive. It was more than likely that her dad’s police badge was in his pocket when the explosion went off.

  Unsurprisingly, the filing cabinets held only files, paperwork from cases her dad had worked on. She wondered why he kept these at home. Amy had no use for them but balked at the idea of trashing it all into the recycling bin. Maybe her dad’s last partner, detective Rueben Wade, would know what do with them. She rifled through the debris on the desktop for Wade’s cell number when her hand bumped the mouse and the creaky old computer whirred and warmed to life. Amy watched the screen pop up, groaning at the thought of going through the old PC before getting rid of it. Two buttons on the screen flashed on and off, alerts of some kind demanding attention.

  Clicking the first popped a new window onto the screen. A list of information scrolled down with locations and dates. It was a news alert program that was still running on her dad’s computer, even after months of dormancy. A catalog of information that held little interest until her eye snagged a phrase in the list.

  Wolf attack.

  Clicking the line in the scroll down list popped a new window with more details. The mutilated remains of a hiker were discovered in the forests of British Columbia. Authorities determined the deceased had been attacked by wolves.

  A sliver of ice crackled up Amy’s spine. She clicked the next item in the news alert and these details chilled her blood another degree down the scale. A similar incident described as a wolf attack in roughly the same area. A body found dismembered on a hiking trail deep in the forest. Wildlife authorities in the area stated that the animal involved must have been abnormally large and powerful to inflict the amount of damage to the victim.

  Loud as bombs, the alarm bells started ringing. Opening another window, she typed the location into a Google map and held her breath. When the results popped up, her stomach dropped. The last reported attack occurred in the Kootenay mountain range, north of the border. Not far from the remote ghost town where her father had died, where she had last encountered a pack of grisly werewolves.

  9

  THE SUN HAD GONE down by the time she rolled into Albuquerque. Pulling off the 85, Lara wheeled the Cherokee through a sparse neighborhood of low slung homes and dusty streets before turning into the driveway of a weathered ranch home with faded stucco. The gravel yard was potted with yucca and a small blue bicycle lay on its side near the front stoop. Lara slid out from the cab and stretched, her spine stiff after the drive from Las Cruces.

  Looking up at the sun-bleached facade of her sister’s house, she was glad to be away from that blowhard Trumbo. The anger over his threats had cooled with every mile left in the rearview mirror, replaced by a melancholic acceptance of the end of her tenure with the rescue mission. The pastor didn’t care about her spotty bonafides but Trumbo wouldn’t let up if he thought his own neck was on the line. It was just unfair. Her whole life she had felt like an outsider, never fitting in anywhere. Even in her old job, it had taken a long time to settle in and feel wanted, accepted. But the wolf had taken that from her and now this petty coworker of hers had taken this from her. Was there nowhere for her to fit in? The bile rose up quick and she took a deep breath to shake it off. She didn’t want to drag the bitterness into Marisol’s house.

  The screen door banged open and a little boy appeared on the stoop, peering out at the dark vehicle on the parking pad. “Tia?” he said, a note of caution in his voice.

  Lara beamed up at him. “Hola little man. Isn’t it past someone’s bedtime?”

  Jackson Sparks scurried down the steps and slammed into his tia’s knees. Five years old with a shock of dark hair and a smear of dinner still on his chin. He flashed his aunt with big, bright eyes. “It’s Friday. I get to stay up until you get home.”

  “Is that the rule?” Lara bent down to his level and scooped him up in a tight bear-hug. She felt his little arms hug her back and all the bitter anger blew off like chaff in a strong wind. “I missed you, little man. You been good?”

  “Yup,” Jackson said. “We had pizza.”

  “Did you save me a slice?”

  “Two.”

  “Thank you.” She kissed his cheek and leaned back to get a better look at him. “¿Como tu madre?”

  “She’s good.”

  “En espanõl.”

  “Bien.”

  “Mejor. Entremos.” She took his outstretched hand and let the boy lead her up the st
eps.

  Jackson dragged his aunt through the small living room where the television flickered with the sound muted. In its place, Cumbia drifted out from another room, filling the house with a lulling beat. “Mama!” Jackson shouted. “Tia’s here!”

  Marisol Sparks stepped out of the kitchen with a smile and a tight embrace. The family resemblance was minimal beyond the hair and eyes. Marisol was shorter than Lara but had a bigger smile, punctuated with dimples and near perfect teeth. “I was starting to wonder where you were. Did you work late?”

  “Just some office nonsense.” Lara lifted her nephew’s hand into the air. “Why is this little man still awake?”

  “Friday.” Marisol shrugged, like she had no say in the matter. “Tia gets to take him to bed and read him a story.”

  Lara looked down at Jackson. “No, no. That’s not the deal. You’re gonna read me a story, right?”

  “No,” he said, twisting his face into a corkscrew. “You read, silly monkey.”

  Marisol palmed the crown of her son’s head. “Okay, tia’s home now so go put your jammies on.”

  The boy sprinted away in a peculiar trot. Marisol nodded at her sister to take a seat. “He gets stranger by the day.”

  “He’s amazing.” Lara settled into the small kitchen table where a single place setting was waiting for her. “Did he go through a growth spurt?”

  “I can’t tell.”

  “He looks taller.” Lara watched her sister fix a plate of salad and pizza and bring it to the table. “You okay? You look tired.”

  Marisol slunk into a seat opposite her sister. “Busy week. It always hits me on a Friday. Do you want some chili peppers for that? I think I put them back in the cupboard.”

  “I’m good. Sit.” Lara waved at her to stay put then tucked into her plate. “Are they still screwing with your schedule at work?”