LITMIR.BIZ

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Josie talking to someone out front, but he hadn’t gone to investigate until he’d heard her voice rise and could make out her accusation that Vernon was slacking. Josie had looked startled when he spoke, and now he wondered what had been said that he missed.

      Whatever it was, she wasn’t repeating it. Sure, she’d given him some information, but he hadn’t mistaken that flash of fear when she’d realized he was behind her. Whatever had transpired between her and the surly foreman, she didn’t want Tanner to know it all.

      He sighed. This was so much more complicated than Holt and Max had made it look. In only two months, they’d already solved several cases the police had deemed not viable. At the rate his level of confusion was rising, Tanner seriously doubted he could contribute even a quarter of the success to the agency that his brothers did.

      His cell phone rang and he wondered who in the world was calling him this late. Then he saw the number for Wildlife and Fisheries and knew it was his buddy Tommy. Tanner was convinced the man never slept and lived at the office.

      “Tommy,” he answered. “What do you have for me?”

      “Not much, I’m afraid,” Tommy replied. “The blood belonged to a rabbit common to the swamp. Without the carcass, there’s no way to determine cause of death.”

      “I understand. I don’t suppose you’ve had a chance to check into the records on that footprint cast Ms. Bettencourt sent in before?”

      “Are you kidding me? You call and tell me you were hired to track the Honey Island Swamp Monster and we might have a print cast here—heck, I ran straight to storage and pulled it before I did that test on the blood.”

      “I was hired to track a vandal,” Tanner corrected. “I’m not making any other assumptions.”

      “Yeah, well, that print was creepy.”

      “Is that your official opinion?”

      “As a zoologist and amateur cryptozoologist, yes, that’s my professional opinion.”

      “Okay, I’ll bite. Why was it creepy?”

      “Well, everything indicates it’s a bipedal creature, but given the soil conditions and depth of the imprint, we’re talking something between six and seven feet tall and two hundred fifty pounds or more.”

      “Bear?”

      “With four toes? Dude, don’t even go there. Even with a foot caught in a trap, there’s no way a bear made this track. Besides, it says in the notes that the next partial imprint was over five feet away. What bear has a stride five feet long?”

      Tanner frowned, not wanting to admit outright that his buddy’s assessment was correct. “But it could definitely be a man.”

      “A man with legs long enough to make that stride, yeah. But you’re talking about constructing a suit that is good enough for Hollywood filmmaking with all the witnesses that are convinced, not to mention someone agile enough to move through the swamp wearing it. If it’s a man, this is the most elaborate hoax I’ve ever heard of.”

      “Thanks, man,” Tanner said, and tossed his cell phone on the bed.

      More dead ends.

      He heard the shower turn on in the next room and realized his bedroom must share a wall with Josie’s bathroom. Stepping back from the window, he sighed. As if he needed the visual of Josie showering playing in his mind. Josie fully clothed, complete with rubber boots and no makeup, was still far more temptation than he’d ever experienced. Picturing her naked might give him a heart attack.

      He’d seen her surprise when he pointed out the advantage of him staying on-site and her discomfort when he’d chosen the room closest to her own, but he wasn’t sure what the reason behind it was. She was about to open her house to strangers. Surely, that put her at bigger risk than providing a room to the person she’d hired to protect her investment.

      The one thing he was certain of was that it wasn’t personal. As a teen, Josie had never even noticed he existed. Her crowd had been the popular kids—the athletes from the “good” local families. Somewhere in town there was probably a loudmouthed ex-jock who called Josie his “woman” and put her in line behind football, hunting and beer. Maybe not in that order.

      The scrawny kid doing odd jobs on her family’s plantation didn’t even catch her eye. Nor did the geeky kid who hid in the back of the classroom. Granted, his mother had moved them to Miel his senior year of high school, so it wasn’t as though he’d been around unnoticed for years, but it had often felt that way.

      After his father’s death, his mother had hopped from town to town as often as she’d changed men. The last one, a trucker with a bad temper and a heavy drinking problem—both of which he’d taken out on Tanner—had brought them to Miel.

      And that’s where his mother died—holding a bottle of booze and the trucker long gone.

      Disgusted that he’d lapsed back into childhood angst and stupidity, he pulled off his boots and lay back across the four-poster bed. He wanted to get an early start tracking in the morning, and it was already close to midnight. If he had any sense left at all, he’d call it a night and turn in.

      He stood back up to shed his jeans and shirt, and that’s when he heard a noise outside.

      Immediately, he flicked off the lamp next to the bed and slipped up next to the window again. The noise had come from outside, but he couldn’t tell which direction. The patio lights extended only so far into the massive backyard of the plantation, so his field of view was limited. He was just about to decide it was the normal night sounds of swamp creatures when he saw something moving right where the patio lights faded away.

      Whatever it was, it was big. And he knew of nothing that big that belonged directly behind the house at this time of night.

      He grabbed his pistol from the nightstand and rushed into the hallway to bang on Josie’s door. She opened it a couple of seconds later, with a towel wrapped around her and water dripping from her head.

      “What in the world—”

      “There’s something in the backyard, just outside the light. I’m going to sneak out the front door and around the house. I need you to lock the door behind me. Do you have a gun?”

      Her eyes widened. “Yes, of course.”

      “Get it and hurry up,” he said before running down the stairs to the front door.

      He heard Josie rushing down the stairs behind him as he slipped out the front door. The hedges across the front lawn provided some cover for him until he was clear of the front porch lights. At the end of the hedges, he slipped quietly across the yard to the barn, which stretched the length of the side of the house, and into the backyard.

      It was pitch-black on the backside of the barn. A tiny glow from the moon broke through the dark clouds, but it made only shadows visible and even then, at a distance of ten feet or less, he’d be right on top of whatever was out there before he even knew what it was. Not the best of situations, but it was the one he had.

      He inched down the side of the barn, pistol held up near his shoulder, ready to fire, and then drew up short at the sound of dead grass crunching around the side of the barn. Clenching his pistol with both hands, he eased up to the edge of the barn and then spun around the side, gun leveled.

       Chapter Four

      Josie locked the door behind Tanner and ran upstairs. She grabbed her pistol from the nightstand and checked to make sure it was loaded and ready to fire, then grabbed sweat pants and a shirt and threw them on. She snagged her tennis shoes on the way out of her bedroom, not even bothering with socks.

      Socks weren’t necessary for shooting a vandal or a swamp monster.

      She pulled on her shoes with one hand while unlocking the door with the other. Then, gripping her pistol, she eased out the door and silently drew it closed behind

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