LITMIR.BIZ

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loose and he’d be real mad if he knew I was out here instead of inside playing. Bye.” She gave Choo Choo a final pat and trotted off, leaving Heather in a cloud of confusion.

      A monster? Maybe it was a story Charlie told to keep Tina from wandering, but the few times Heather had seen Tina in the past, the child was always on her own as she meandered around the property and her guardian had never seemed to mind before.

      Then again, things might have changed since Johnny was murdered.

      She thought of Bill Cloudman’s strange behavior. He was preoccupied, closemouthed, as if he, too, was on the lookout for a monster.

      On her way back over the bridge, she pulled out her satellite phone and accessed the internet, typing “Oscar Birch” in the search window. It took only a moment before her suspicion was confirmed.

      In spite of the radiant heat, Heather went cold inside. Tina was right. There was a monster on the loose.

      Bill stood in the relative cool of his front porch that afternoon, wiping oil off his hands from fixing Heather’s Jeep. Tank shifted uneasily at his feet, waiting for a ball to be thrown or the jangle of truck keys. He let out a bark, which elicited only a distracted look from his owner, lost in the memory of a long-ago sun-scorched day.

      Then, too, he’d had the tight feeling in the pit of his stomach, a prickle of instinct that told him something was going to go wrong. On that afternoon there had been a similar cover of clouds that undulated across the sky. Difference was, he hadn’t been alone then. Johnny Moon was there, chatting away, eager as always for any kind of excitement, reminding Bill in some ways of Bill’s dead sister, Leanne.

      “You got to let go sometimes, Sarge,” Johnny would say. “Live a little. Ask that fine reporter out. You know she’s got it bad for you.”

      He smiled at the memory. He’d decided to follow his partner’s advice and ask Heather to dinner that same night. Yes, Johnny had been full to the brim with life, even though Bill sensed worry in his young partner in the months before his death. Something was distracting him, but it never for a moment took away his ebullience.

      The trip wire did that.

      A thin filament of death, set carefully in place by a man as lethal as a rattlesnake with a bite every bit as vicious.

      Bill would go to his grave believing Oscar had known they were coming, planned the execution down to the last detail. Only, Oscar hadn’t known Johnny would cross it first.

      And neither had Bill.

      He sighed, watching a raccoon waddle down the thick bark of a pine tree on his way to forage. Tank jerked alert at the sound and took off running for the critter, which about-faced and climbed back up, hissing and snapping his displeasure at the dog.

      Bill’s mind wandered back to Heather and her geriatric pet. The presence of a dog in her life amused him. She acted tough, but he’d seen glimmers of that soft spot in her before. He couldn’t reconcile the two opposites in his mind, so he stopped trying. It was one of the many things he’d probably never understand about her.

      A dull ache was settling into his upper arm and he flexed his injured shoulder. Fixing the Jeep, after spending most of the morning cleaning up the broken glass, hadn’t helped the wound. Mopping up the paint had proved mostly futile, but he’d done what he could. The house was still smeared in ugly streaks of red.

      He lingered there on the porch a long time, until the sun was high. He allowed himself to remember, for the briefest of moments, how much his sister, Leanne, had loved the sunshine. Years before, he might have summoned up a prayer for those he had lost, Leanne and Johnny. Instead he turned back inside the paint-spattered house to find his gun.

      When the Glock was cleaned and oiled, he holstered it to his side, and after he fed Tank, they headed out onto the property. It was a sprawling ten acres of parched flatland, rolling hills and a spring, hidden by a thick cluster of pines. The smell of it soothed him—rusty earth, dry grass and heat. He’d been gone for so long, the ground had lost some of its familiarity. He needed to reacquaint himself, to relearn every dip, every hollow, every possible shaded nook that had grown over in the time he’d been away. His survival might depend on it.

      Bill started hiking to the farthest edge of the property where it sloped downward into a dry wash. The boulders piled in crazy formations along the edge formed a labyrinth of rock and hence a myriad of hiding places. As far as he could tell by a careful examination, no one had been prowling there anytime recently. The dry soil was marked only by the curving slices of rattlesnake tracks and the scattered dry bones of a hare that had probably fallen victim to a coyote.

      He continued upslope to the pine grove, a welcome cool against the sun that was hammering down mercilessly. Tank took advantage of the shade to stretch out and put his bony head on his paws. Here again, there was no sign that any trespassers had been present. Bill removed a pair of binoculars from his backpack and scanned the area below, his defaced cabin, tucked up against the side of a granite cliff, the flat area surrounding it and the distant cliffs standing like broad-chested sentries against the sky. Nothing out of the ordinary until Tank sat up abruptly, ears swiveling, body rigid.

      “What do you hear, Tank?” Bill whispered.

      Tank listened for another moment before he took off, bounding down the trail and disappearing into the trees. Bill followed as quickly as he dared, keeping to the shadows as much as possible.

      His pulse pounded in his neck. Was it Oscar?

      He stopped behind a fallen trunk and watched.

      Tank was not visible but he heard a quick bark, just one, and then the property fell into silence again. Bill had seen Tank in attack mode before only a few times, one of which involved a massive, drunk dirt biker who’d caught Bill unawares and knocked him to the ground. The dog had leaped immediately into the fray and caught the biker’s biceps between his jaws, which clamped viselike until Bill scrambled to his feet and called off the animal in stern Lakota, the language in which he’d trained the dog. It had taken all of Bill’s powers of persuasion to convince Tank to let go of the whimpering bad guy.

      Unfortunately, Tank’s impulsivity often got the better of his training. Had he gone after an animal? Or encountered a creature with much more deadly potential? Bill took a few deep breaths to relax his muscles before he slid the Glock from its holster and ran to the next tree.

      Tank let out a whine. Bill couldn’t see the dog through the thick screen of towering pine. Inching closer, he took each footstep gently, easing his boots into the soft cover of pine needles.

      Closer now. There was a small movement ahead. He took a breath and prepared to step around the wide trunk. Forcing himself to keep breathing, he did a slow count to three and charged.

      FOUR

      Heather screamed as Bill Cloudman suddenly leaped from behind a tree, gun in hand. Tina looked up from her kneeling position scratching Tank’s belly.

      “Hiya, Uncle Bill.”

      Bill’s face blanched slightly under the dark skin and he immediately pulled the gun behind his back. “Tina. What are you doing here?” He gave Heather an incredulous look. “Did you bring her?”

      Heather swallowed hard and tried to find her voice, heart still hammering against her ribs. “No, I didn’t. I was on my way to talk to you and I found her walking a couple miles outside town. It didn’t seem safe to let her walk on the road alone, so I gave her a ride.”

      She caught the question on his face. “I rode my dad’s old motorcycle. It’s parked over there in the shade.”

      Bill looked from Heather to Tina. He got down on one knee and gently caught her chin on his finger until her gaze met his. “Did your uncle give you permission to come?”

      Tina shrugged.

      He raised an eyebrow, his face stern. “Tina?”

      Tina shook her head. “Uncle Charlie doesn’t want me to

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