Larson: McCullough’s Jamboree – Erotic Jaguar Shapeshifter Romance

by Kathi S. Barton

  “I bought it yesterday with Dad’s help. We’re going to have it renovated and then give it to Mom for Christmas. She’ll have a kitten.” Larson said that she more than likely would. “I want her to be happy. She’s made me happier than I’ve ever been. And now with all of you around me, loving me too, I feel like a regular person.”

  “Yes, well, a regular person that has all these special abilities, one of which will turn you into whatever you want at a moment’s notice.” They were both laughing as they entered the diner. “So, are you planning to expand this place? I would add about a dozen more booths, as well as an outdoor seating area. I tried to get May to do it, but she said that she had enough on her plate without having to go outside and wait on people. She wasn’t a people person, I don’t think.”

  Jon pulled out a sheet of paper that Larson could see was a list of other things that Jon had to do. Jon laughed when he asked him if he really needed to write it down. Jon shook his head and put it away.

  “Mom. She likes lists, and to make her feel like I’m paying attention, which I always am, I write things down for her. She can be really intense when she wants to be about things. Like Aunt Virginia. She sure can put a man in his place when she feels the—”

  When he stopped talking, he knew that something had happened. Paying for the food by throwing down money, they left as Jon seemed to be listening to someone. As soon as they were outside of the restaurant, he turned to him.

  “I have to go be Sam. Now.” Larson nodded. “You know your part? You know what you have to do, don’t you?”

  “Yes. I know. I’ll follow the plan.” Jon paused in taking off. “What else has happened? Jon, I don’t want you hurt.”

  “Get home and wait. I have to go, but just wait for the man to come to you.” He nodded and Jon hugged him. “It’ll be just fine, Uncle Larson. Just fine.”

  Then he was gone. Getting into his car, Larson had to sit there for several moments just to get his heartrate to settle. Someone was going to take his son. Well, not his son, but they thought they were. As soon as he heard from his mom, he knew that things were rolling in the right direction. He just hoped that the bad guys followed the plan too.

  Chapter 7

  Dusty held the little guy tightly in his arms. He’d never held a child, at least not this small, before and was terrified of dropping him. Putting him on the floorboard so he’d not roll off the seat, he looked at the little guy.

  “This just ain’t right.” The kid, of course, said nothing, but did stare at him with those big blue eyes. “Nothing was ever said about what I was to do with you, and this, this just ain’t right. I can’t do this.”

  He started the car and made his way to the McCullough house. Dusty had made a decision that would get him killed, either by the police—who he thought would be kinder in killing him—or Harley. Harley would make him suffer in ways that Dusty didn’t want to think about.

  “I’m telling you right now, kid, you’re lucky as fuck.” He glanced over at the kid and wondered why he thought he was understanding every word he said. “They won’t believe me when I get there. And if they want, I’ll let them kill me off. But I don’t want to suffer. I can’t stand pain. I’d do just about anything to keep from hurting. Not that I don’t deserve it, but I don’t want to.”

  Pulling into the little drive next to the mammoth house, he sat there. There were people walking around the house, all of them with tool belts on and some of them with hard hats. He wanted to be like them, a person that had a good job with benefits. The only benefit he had was that he got a lot of money that he saved up. And now he couldn’t even get to that. Things were not as he wanted them to be, that was for sure.

  “I don’t know why I think you can understand me, and maybe it’s just me being scared shitless, but I got me a bunch of money saved up. If you can understand me, I want you to have someone go and get it, and use it for some kind of charity shit. I know that your family does that sort of thing, but you go on ahead and use it for that for me. All right?”

  The baby blinked at him, and Dusty was sure as he was sitting there that he’d do it. Reaching down for the little boy, he stared at him and saw intelligence and compassion. Then Dusty realized that the kid wasn’t no more than a couple of weeks old at best. That he’d not understood a single word he’d said. Getting out with the baby in his arms, he paused when three large men came out of the house.

  “I didn’t hurt him, not at all. I brought him to you because of what Harley wanted me to do with him. I can’t do that.” The first man came toward him, and Dusty put out the child for him. “If you’re going to kill me, you should know a couple things first. I have a list of people I’ve killed, and I’d like to tell you where they are.”

  “All right.” He took the baby from him and handed him to the man behind him. “My name is Larson, and this is my son.”

  “Yeah, he wanted your baby most of all, but he’d have taken any of them. I wasn’t too squeamish about taking any of them, but I ain’t gonna kill them for anyone. That kid didn’t do anything wrong other than to be born to you, and I am not going to kill him for Harley, that’s the God’s honest truth.” Dusty let out a long breath as he continued. “There is a chipper at the house that I was to take the baby to. Harley asked me to wait for him to get there, and then he’d kill the kid while we watched. He wanted to throw that little thing in the chipper and watch it.... Well, you can guess what he wanted.”

  “And you had a change of heart why?” Dusty told him. “You’ve never killed a child? You want me to believe that?”

  “You can or not, but I have never done that. I might have cuffed a couple of them, but I don’t kill them. Not a kid…no way, no how. I have me a list of dates and times. Bigger than the one that you might have found in the storage place where I had my guns hidden. You found it, I know. I’ll give you that and anything else you want if you can cut me some slack about my prison time. I know I’m going, but I’d like to not be put in general lockdown. I’ll not make it.” He looked up when a woman came out of the house. She was holding a baby and he nodded to her. “I’m powerfully sorry that I took him. I’ve been thinking...Well, I guess I should have done some thinking before now, but I want to tell someone everything, right down to where the bodies are. Give them people closure, if you won’t mind.”

  “All right. Will you come into the house? We have everyone ready to take your statement.” He wasn’t sure how that had happened, but he looked at the baby as he walked by it. It wasn’t the same. Dusty didn’t know why he thought that, but it wasn’t the same baby he had held in his arms. “Are you coming?”

  He entered the house and nearly wept with relief. There were others there, FBI, police, as well as a couple of men with DEA written on their chests. Drug Enforcement Administration wasn’t one that he’d thought would be around, but he didn’t care. They would help him, they all would.

  When he was sat down at a large table that still had plastic around the legs, he looked around the big house. It was coming along, nicely too. He could see this big family, gathered around it and having a good time. He envied them in that moment. To have something so normal, so mundane as dinner together, was something that he’d never experienced with a family. He had no one.

  “Do you think I could have something to drink? Not booze, though that would help, but just some tea or something? I have a lot to tell you, and I’m thirsty from being so nervous.” Not only did they bring him a large glass of iced tea, but he had a plate of scones too. Dusty touched the pretty plate and started to cry. It was just too much, the kindness of these people. “I’m not a nice person. I didn’t have to be like this, but it was easier to be a bully than it was to be nice. And it got me things. I’m a failure at life.” He cried harder than he had in his entire life.

  “Mr. Crane, would you like a moment?” He shook his head, then nodded at the woman. “My name is Lauren McCullough. Are you armed?”

  “Yes. I can get them if you’d just not sh
oot me yet.” She said she wouldn’t if he wasn’t stupid. “I’ve been that my whole life, ma’am. I don’t think I know how to be anything else, but I’ll get it off my chest now and you can do with it what you want.”

  After being disarmed, he was put into cuffs. It was something that he expected, but it made him feel like a criminal and so out of place in this grand house. He looked around the place again and then at Lauren.

  “Harley Wells and I grew up in an orphanage. Neither of us were adoptable. We were what you might call the violent type. My parents were druggies, and both of them died when I was just a little thing. Harley was left there when he was just a baby…his momma never turned herself in or anything, and probably knew that he was going to be a handful.” Lauren nodded, but didn’t say anything. “I’m not going to tell you a lie about anything we did together. You have to know that we weren’t treated well at the orphanage, and when we got out, nearly the same time, we didn’t have any skills to teach us to be any different than we had there, mean and stealing. Times were different then, so we had a difficult time of it. Anyway, I’ll start with the Simmonses.”

  “All right, tell me how you were involved in their deaths.” He said that he wasn’t. “Mr. Crane, you said you’d not lie to me.”

  “I didn’t even know what he was going to do until it was a done deal. I thought he was just going to rough them up a little, then take them someplace to be found later. The boat, and their deaths, it was all him. I did help him with the two men that were killed afterwards, but not the couple.” She started writing things down. “We had money. Or I do. Harley never could save a nickel when he could use it to try and make himself a quarter. I didn’t spend anything that I made, and let me tell you, that was harder than you think. Anyway, when I heard that he’d killed them, I went to him to find out why. That’s when I learned about the shares. To be honest, I figured he was going to take them without me knowing and disappear, but he was fooled with, and that pissed him off.”

  “Do you know where the money is?” He said that he didn’t. And didn’t know what the amount was until Harley told him. “Did you at any time have any contact with the Simmonses when they were alive?”

  “No. I wouldn’t know them if they were here. I told you, I didn’t know a thing about their being killed until afterwards. Harley, he has a temper, and he would say he was going to do things but he never got around to it.” She asked him if he had done anything for him. “Yes, a lot of times. I was his hitman, I guess you could say.”

  He told them everything he could think of about the Simmonses’ deaths. Even how Harley had asked him to find the kids so he could see if they had it. But Dusty had never told him that he’d found the kids and left them alone. He could see how they were grieving, and he just couldn’t bring himself to hurt them anymore.

  As they talked about the events of today, he nodded. “I asked him to take me out to the place I was to meet him. I don’t know how to read well, so directions don’t mean all that much to me. But once we got there, I could see that there was a brand-new chipper there. You know, one of those things that you put trees in and it comes out the other side like mulch. I asked him about it.”

  “What did he say?” Dusty sat there, fingering the sweat on the glass he had. He thought about what Harley had said, and how he’d said it. “Mr. Crane?”

  “He told me that he’d bought it for this occasion. I wasn’t sure what he meant. Like was he finally going to clear cut the trees? I knew that he had the property, but I’d never been there before. Harley told me over and over that he had that place, and that it was overgrown with trees and stuff. Bushes.” He looked at the woman. “Let me do this in my own way, please? I can’t...it’s hard to talk about what he said, I mean.”

  “All right. Take your time.” He nodded. “Would you like more to drink? I have some whiskey you can have if you want.”

  “Yes, I’d like that.” She got up, but he wasn’t thinking that he’d be able to follow her. There were six armed men in the room with him, and each of them looked ready to go to war. When she returned, she gave him a shot glass and a bottle of whiskey. The good stuff too. He poured himself a shot of it and drank it down before speaking again.

  “Harley took me out to the farm, as he called it. I don’t know why. There didn’t seem to be any cows or nothing there. Just scrub and trees, lots of trees. The house was in poor repair, but no different than what we grew up in, I guess. But there was this chipper by the barn. Still all wrapped up and shiny red.” He poured himself more whiskey and then drank it down. His hands were shaking worse than they’d been when he’d been told about the kid and what was going to happen to it. “He said that I was to bring the kid to him there, and to wait for him. He had to establish himself an alibi or something. Anyway, he ran his hand over the thing and said, just like he was telling me what he’d had for breakfast, that he was excited as fuck to watch the splatter come out the other end. I wasn’t sure that was what he was saying, so I asked him, right out. ‘You killing that kid in this?’ Harley looked crazy then, and nodded. Said it was payback to that McCullough that took his money.”

  Dusty drank two more shots before he thought he could go on. And when he did, he told them how he’d picked up the baby and brought it straight here. He said he had more to tell, but right now, he needed to just sit and think for a moment.

  “Does he know that you’re here?” He shook his head and pushed the glass away. “We want you to take him the child, Mr. Crane.”

  “Are you fucking insane? I just told you what he was going to do with it. You want him to kill this kid anyway?” She said no, but he’d be all right. “How am I gonna be all right? I will hand him over this kid and watch him kill it. I might be a lot of things, lady, but I’m not a murderer of little babies.”

  She turned and looked at the younger man when he entered the room. “This is Jon. He’s special. I want you to watch him, and then I’ll explain to you what we want you to do. All right?”

  He nodded and watched the kid. When he shifted into a wolf, he sat there with his hands gripping the table. And as the kid shifted into several other animals, all Dusty could think about was that he was special all right. Scary special. Then when he took a step toward him and knelt down, Dusty looked into his face.

  “I’ll do just what you wanted.” Then he was the baby, just lying there on the floor looking up at him with the same face, the same intelligent eyes, and everything. He looked at the woman again when she said his name. Dusty had a feeling it hadn’t been the first time she’d said it either.

  “You’ll take Jon as the child. He will make sure that you and he are both safe, but we need to catch Harley at this. Otherwise it’ll be you that goes down, not him.” He asked about the other deaths, the ones that he’d committed too. “You let me worry about those when this is done. Right now, we have to get you on the road to where you’re to meet him.”

  Jon, now a kid again, followed him out to the car. He was shaking so bad now that Dusty wasn’t sure he could drive them there in one piece. But when Jon touched him, just put his hand on his shoulder, he calmed a great deal. But it was his smile that told him things were going to be all right.

  “You’ll be fine, Dusty. Just trust me.” He nodded and said that he’d really had no choice. “Yes, you did, and you made a good one. Just follow the instructions like Aunt Lauren told you, and you’ll be fine. I promise.”

  Nodding, he got into this car. It was as good as he was going to get, a promise from a kid no more than fifteen or so years old. But to look at him, deep into his eyes, Dusty thought he was older, and even older than himself. Whatever happened, he felt better about the fact that he’d went this route rather than with Harley. But Harley was surely going to be pissed off when he figured it out.

  ~~~

  Harley was ready to call Dusty again when he saw the dirt flying up behind a car. He was so excited that he’d been nursing a hard-on for the last two hours. All he needed to do was call Larson
and demand the money. After that, he’d be gone in the wind and nobody would ever find him.

  The kid was asleep, and that suited him just fine. Dusty said that he’d gotten lost, but it mattered little to him. As soon as he disposed of the kid, he was going to run his friend through the same chipper. They’d be picking up pieces of these two for years and never find them all. Dusty asked him what he’d done. Harley looked at the blood stain that had been a stranger no more than an hour ago.

  “I had to see if it worked, didn’t I? I didn’t want to come all the way out here and find out that the stories I’d read weren’t true. So I had a test run.” He giggled when he saw Dusty looking at the field of blood. “I was surprised at how fast it went. I mean, with this kid, we’ll have to be watching close or we’ll miss it.”

  “Harley, who was that?” He said he didn’t know him, but that he’d been wandering around the yard when he’d gotten here. “So, you just asked him to get into the thing and he did it without any troubles?”

  “No, moron, I killed him first. Christ, what is wrong with you? You act like you haven’t ever seen a dead body before.” Dusty said nothing, but continued to stare at the bloody grass. “I tell you, Dusty, this is the best plan that I’ve ever come up with. I’ll get the money and get to take out my revenge too.”

  He looked at the kid and decided that it was the ugliest baby he’d ever seen. He pointed out some of its flaws to Dusty, who just shrugged. He asked him again what was wrong with him.

  “Nothing. Just make the fucking call so we can get out of here. I don’t like it out here. We’re sort of exposed, don’t you think?” He supposed that they were a little, and pulled out his cell. Taking several pictures of the baby, he asked Dusty if he was doing it right. “You should take one of you and him, so he knows that you got him.”

  “Good idea.” He handed his phone to Dusty. “Make sure that you take one where you can see his face. I don’t want him to be thinking that it’s just any old baby I got. Oh, and you have to show me how to send it. I never can get that part to work.”