“You haven’t heard from her at all?” Amy asked.
“Two days now. Lara never goes that long without a phone call or a pop-in. Something.”
Amy mopped up the last of the soup with another piece of bread. “Did anything happen? You two didn’t fight or anything?”
“God no. Nothing like that.” Marisol folded her hands together. “But she’s different. Like there’s something going on but she won’t tell me.”
“Different how?”
“She just seems withdrawn, quiet. More than usual, I mean. But whenever I try to pry it out of her, she said it was just grief. I didn’t want to push it.”
Amy nodded, seeing no small echo of her own recent behavior. Consumed in her own misery, she had never considered the subsequent effects of it on those around her. She could see it now, loud and clear in the concern stitched in Marisol’s voice. Amy drained the last of her water. “Have you called her work?”
“She asked me not to call there. Too many questions, you know.”
“I called. The person I spoke to said she doesn’t work there anymore. Then they got all suspicious about who I was, how I knew Lara.”
Naked shock registered in Marisol’s eyes. “But she loves that job. And she’s good at it. They wouldn’t fire her.”
Marisol rose and got on the phone. One call to the Luna County Rescue, only to get the answering service. When Marisol came back to the kitchen table, the worry lines on her brow had deepened. She looked at Amy. “I don’t know where else to call. Where could she be?”
“There is one place.” Amy gathered up her cell and checked to see if the battery had recharged yet. Halfway. “But it’s out of the way. Can I borrow your car?”
12
SHE HAD PRINTED OFF a map of the route before leaving Portland but Amy still had trouble finding the turn-off and had to double back. The road was a path of packed dirt winding through the low hills, nothing marked. The turn-off wasn’t even a road, just a dusty track through the scrubgrass. Marisol’s car dipped in the wallows and Amy slowed down, praying she wouldn’t damage the borrowed Subaru.
Amy had planned to come here with or without Lara, hence the directions and map. Despite the number of photos she had snapped the first time, it was nothing compared to seeing it in person. You just couldn’t get the scale of the horizon or the sheer scope of that immense sky from a photograph. The incline let up where the track leveled off and she wound the Subaru around a shale outcropping and then braked hard at what she saw before.
Her dad’s truck, parked alone on the rock shelf.
Nosing up behind the Cherokee, she killed the engine and climbed out. The interior of the Jeep was empty and judging from the layer of grit dusted over its exterior, it had been here for a while. How many days, Amy couldn’t tell.
Amy took the horizon in a sweep and then hollered out Lara’s name.
The wind blew grit into her eyes. Nothing more.
The driver’s door was unlocked. She leaned into the cab, its familiar smell conjuring a flood of memories. The keys were still in the ignition. Elvis hung from the rearview mirror, its wobbly legs still and lifeless. On the backseat was a gym bag of clothes, a toothbrush in a plastic baggie.
Amy shut the door. Walking around the vehicle, she saw nothing on the ground, not even footprints. So where was Lara? How long had the truck been here? It looked as if she had parked the truck and simply vanished into the desert. Cutting north to where the plateau ended, the rocky bench of rock dropped at a sheer cliff. Before the plunge was a small berm of stones piled high around a wooden gravemarker. The epitaph had been carved by hand, the hands of the old man Hector who lived next to Lara. Simple and Spartan, like the man himself, the engraving read: JOHN WILLIAM GALLAGHER; Father, Friend, Lawman.
There had been nothing left to bury in that godforsaken patch of pine forest where John Gallagher had met his end but Lara had hired her neighbor to create the headstone and she herself had planted it here against this reverent scenery.
She traced a fingertip through the contours of the engraved letters. An almost urgent need to say something, to speak to him, tightened her windpipe but when she tried she didn’t know what to say. What could she possibly say that she hadn’t said to herself a million times over since the incident? Her voice cracked, tripping over the first word.
Dad.
“Amy?”
She must have jumped ten feet, scrambling away in the dust as if jolted by jumper cables. Amy spun around, her heart clanging in her ears, and zeroed in on the figure stalking up the rocky draw.
Lara Mendes strode forward, squinting as if she didn’t believe her eyes. Her dark hair was windblown around her face and her chest heaved as if she’d been running a great distance. Sweat beaded her skin despite the chill wind, dampening the thin tank top. Lara squinted, as if disbelieving what her eyes took in. “Amy? Is that you?”
Amy suddenly understood what heart failure meant, unable to slow the banging of her own. She stumbled forward and almost tackled the woman in a tight embrace. “Lara. Thank God you’re okay.”
“Why wouldn’t I be okay?” Lara wrapped her arms around the girl, felt her ribs squeezed tight as the girl held on. “What are you doing here? Is anything wrong?”
“No. I mean, yeah. I’m fine.” Amy pulled back a little to look at her friend but didn’t let go. “I got worried when I couldn’t get a hold of you. Where have you been?”
“Just taking some time. I didn’t mean to worry you.” Lara leaned back to get a better look at the girl. “You look thin, kiddo. You all right?”
“We need to talk.” Amy glanced down at the gravemarker. “But not here. And you should call Marisol. She’s a little worried. Which is my fault. Sorry.”
“Okay. We’ll go.” Lara’s eyes swept to the headstone and then back to Amy. “Do you want a minute?”
“Yeah. I do.”
They drove down out of the foothills, Amy following in Marisol’s Subaru. Marisol insisted they stay for dinner but Amy noticed a strange unease from Lara. Her eyes kept scanning the house, as if expecting something to happen while she explained her absence to her sister. Amy’s ears pricked up when Lara told Marisol that she’d been feeling under the weather but she kept her mouth shut at the contradiction. They said goodbye but not before Marisol pressed a platter of lasagna into their hands, claiming she had made too much and insisted they take it home. Amy thanked her and then she and Lara climbed back into the Cherokee and drove away.
“The place looks nice,” Amy said as she hauled her backpack into Lara’s small house. In truth, it looked exactly the same as it had the last time she was here. Some basic furniture, none of which matched, and few decorations. Almost military in its austerity. The only adornment was a slim vase of drooping bluebonnets on the kitchen table that needed watering.
“I keep meaning to get some nicer furniture. Look at this, I can’t even keep flowers.” Lara scooped up the fallen petals and dropped them in the trash. “Are you hungry? We can eat now, if you want.”
“Do you mind if I take a quick shower? I got twenty-hour bus stink on me.”
“Go ahead. There’s clean towels in the hall closet.” Lara unpacked the bag of food her sister had forced on her, secretly grateful her sister consistently made too much food at almost every meal. “I’ll warm this up. We’ll eat when you’re done.”
When Amy reappeared in the kitchen with clean clothes and her damp hair swept to one side, Lara noted much older the girl seemed. The pensive eyes and locked set of her mouth had piled a few years onto Amy’s eighteen. Lara wondered if the grief had caused it or the horror the girl had faced last Christmas. Did it matter?
“Now I’m starving,” Amy said when she saw the table setting.
“Sit down. Dig in.” Lara ladled a generous helping onto Amy’s plate and watched the girl attack it. It reminded her of Gallagher and she considered mentioning it but thought better of bringing it up. Keep things light until she could gauge the girl’s
mood. The reason for her sudden appearance. “So,” Lara said, tucking into her own plate. “How have you been? Coping okay?”
“Sure.” Amy wiped a napkin over her chin. “Well, no. I’m not coping.”
Lara’s eyes went up, taken aback at the candor. “How so?”
“P.T.S.D.”
“I see.” Lara lowered her fork, sensing a fraught moment. “Did a doctor tell you that?” When the girl shook her head, Lara asked “Then how do you know it’s post traumatic stress?”
“Easy enough to recognize. Paranoia, nightmares, nerves shot to hell. I haven’t slept a full night in months.” Amy cut into another wedge of pasta, voice drifting low. “I watched Dad go through the same thing. I know the symptoms.”
“You should talk to someone about it. A doctor or counselor. A friend, even.”
“And tell them what? I was almost killed by a monster and I’m kinda freaked now?”
“You don’t have to give all the details, do you?”
“I think that’s how it works,” Amy said. “They get you to talk through the whole experience, every detail, over and over again. Dissect all the minutiae. That would land me in the crazy ward.”
“Of course,” Lara conceded. “You can always talk to me. You know that, right?”
“I know but you have your own stuff to deal with. Don’t you have any, I dunno, after-effects of that whole thing?”
“Claro. But I guess I just deal with it differently.”
“How?”
Now it was Lara’s turn to shrug. “By burying myself in work. Keeping busy so I don’t have to deal with it too often.”
“Yeah. That’s healthy.” Amy rolled her eyes. “Did you get a new job? I called the rescue place, some dude said you didn’t work there anymore.”
“Wine,” said Lara.
“What?”
“That’s what’s missing with the lasagna.” Lara stood and fetched a bottle from counter. It was a screwtop and she shrugged as if to apologize for it. She poured a healthy splash into one glass and then two fingers into another for Amy. She slid the stingy glass forward to her guest and said “I lost my job.”
“How?”
Lara looked into her glass before taking a sip. “Cutbacks. Some insecure asshole at work looked into my shady background file, called me on it. All so he could be a big fish in a smaller pond.”
“But that isn’t fair.” Amy straightened in her chair, as if willing to march out and confront said asshole. “He can’t just get you fired.”
“He didn’t. He just blackmailed me into leaving. That’s what happens when you live under an alias.”
Amy ceded the point. She took a sip, then twisted her lips at the bitterness. She’d yet to develop a taste for the stuff. “Cheryl wants to sell dad’s house. I had to go through it, see what I wanted, what could go. I hadn’t been there since the incident.”
“That must have been hard.” Lara scratched her chin, thinking. “Can’t you rent it out? Keep the house but put it to some use?”
“I dunno. I hadn’t thought of that.” Amy raised her glass in a toast. “You’re a genius.”
“I try.” Lara returned the cheers. “That house belongs to you. You should keep it, no matter what it takes.”
Amy poked her fork through the remains of her plate. She looked up at Lara. “Dad still had some programs running on his computer. News feeds and pings from police sites. They kicked up some new results. I think we have a problem, Lara.”
“What do you mean?”
Amy took a breath and just went with the facts.“Two deaths in the last month, both in British Columbia. Listed as animal attacks. Both about a stone’s throw from where Dad died.”
Lara laid her fork down slowly. “What kind of animal was it?”
“Unconfirmed, in both cases. Wolves. Possibly a grizzly.”
“These are police reports?”
Amy nodded. “And the Fishing and Game authorities in the area.”
Propping her elbows on the table, Lara steepled her hands together. “What do you think it is?”
“You know what it is,” Amy said. Lara’s coolness surprised her. She hadn’t expected this skepticism. From her of all people.
“Spell it out for me, Amy. I want to be clear about what you’re saying.”
“It’s a wolf, Lara. A werewolf.” Amy leaned in. The woman’s aloofness got her back up. “We thought we killed them all when that ghost town went up in flames. We were wrong. One of them got away.”
Lara shook her head. “We saw them burn. We killed Grissom. You put a bullet through his head. It’s a coincidence. A grizzly, like the report says.”
“No,” Amy said, her tone cut with steel. “One of them survived. And now it’s running loose and killing people.”
The chair squeaked against the floor as Lara got to her feet and stepped away from the table. She turned to the sink, feeling a sudden need to wash the dishes. A murmur in her heart, as if it had missed a beat.
“You okay?”
Lara turned around. “Can you show me these reports?”
“Where’s your laptop?”
“In the living room.”
While Amy scurried to the other room, Lara drained her glass and quickly poured another. Her hand quaked slightly and she hid it when Amy returned and set the laptop on the table. Leaning over the girl’s shoulder, Lara scrutinized the reports, looking for some detail that would dispel the girl’s fears. There weren’t any. Reading it a second time, she sank into the nearest chair with all the weight of someone who had received a terminal diagnosis. A Spanish prayer whispered from her lips.
Amy watched the woman’s shoulders droop. “I know. I didn’t want to believe it either.”
“Can you show me those incidents on a map?”
Amy brought up a map of the area and marked two spots. A vast stretch of wilderness and mountains with nary a road, let alone a town. Amy drew another dot on the map, south by southwest of the first two coordinates. “That’s the ghost town we were at. Less than two miles from the first body.”
Lara’s face remained cold and blank.
“It gets worse.” Amy tapped the keys, bringing up the Paranormal Trackers site. She played the clip of the ghost hunters chasing phantoms in the forest and watched for Lara’s reaction.
Lara’s eyes went a degree colder. “Who are these idiots?”
“Ghost hunters. This clip was posted two days ago. They might already be there by now, chasing this thing.”
Lara stared at the screen as if there was something more to learn. “We can call the authorities. Warn them that what they’re facing is worse than a grizzly.”
“Like they’ll believe that?” Amy said. “Even if they did, it’s not enough.”
“What are you saying?”
Amy closed the laptop. “We have to do it. We have to go up there and find this thing. And we have to kill it.”
“No.” Lara stepped back quickly, as if she’d touched something hot.
“If not us, then who?” Amy watched the woman recoil but pressed on. “This thing is just going to keep killing. Anyone it doesn’t kill, anyone who survives an attack, is going to be infected. And then there’s more of them.”
“No. We went through enough. We did our duty.”
When Amy replied, her tone was calm and carefully enunciated. “I think it’s just one wolf. But without a pack or an alpha, it’s gone crazy. And it’s going to kill again. How soon before it infects a bunch of other people? How soon before it creates its own pack?”
The faucet dripped into the sink. Amy went on. “If we leave now, we can be up there in two days. You can find this thing. We hunt it down and we destroy it. Chances are, this thing will find you if it gets a whiff of you.”
“Stop.” Lara’s eyes flashed hot. “What do you know about it? About these things? Do you know what you’re asking?”
“I’m sorry. But we don’t have a choice here. We have to stop it. What would dad do?”
That was playing dirty. “Your dad would forbid you from going, that’s what he’d do.”
Amy held her tongue, knowing it was true. Silence crept across the room. It was broken by a sudden and urgent pounding on the door that startled them both.
Lara rose. “Who the hell?”
A muffled voice barked from outside the front door. “Open up! Police!”
13
TRUMBO.
Had to be. Who else would send cops to her door? A backhanded way to get her out of the picture. What Trumbo hadn’t foreseen was that the woman he knew as Lara Quesada used to be a cop as well. One that had worked numerous entries and knew by rote what was about to happen next.
Amy stood rooted to the spot with a confused look in her eyes. Why wouldn’t she? She had no reason to fear the police. Lara barked at her to get down just as the front door exploded inwards, popped off of its hinges by a black metal battering ram. Amy hit the floor and scrambled away in mindless panic at the startling sound of splintering wood. The stress disorder kicking in with a nasty bite, reducing the girl into a quaking mass on the poorly tiled floor.
Dark figures stormed through the door, an assault team decked out in armor and visors and AR 15s in their mitts. Lara dove for the panel box in the pantry and slapped the breaker down, plunging the entire house into darkness. When properly motivated, such as having an assault team storm her residence, she could move faster than humanly possible and appeared as no more than a wisp to the invaders. A moment’s confusion and a fumble for the flashlights bought enough time for Lara to snatch Amy from the floor and propel her down the hallway to the exit. The backdoor exploded inwards as two members of the assault team burst in, rifles shouldered and barrels up. Lara released the girl and surged forward like a freight train, plowing the two armed agents back into the wall. Fighting cops was something she never anticipated doing but she couldn’t allow herself or Amy to be caught. Her knee cracked the helmet of one officer and her elbow connected hard with the midsection of the other one, knocking the wind out of him in spite of the body armor. They sprawled at her feet and she hauled Amy forward, dragging her over the groaning officers.
Bad Wolf Chronicles, Books 1-3 Page 62