Read Alien Hunter (Flynn Carroll) Online

Authors: Whitley Strieber

Alien Hunter (Flynn Carroll) (7 page)

BOOK: Alien Hunter (Flynn Carroll)
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The piano had started again, the music slipping and sliding in the wind. Abby, also, had played. His dad had played. He’d tried to learn, but he hadn’t inherited that gene. What he could do well with his hands was shoot. He could turn even an old snub-nosed Police Special into a useful weapon. A good pistol felt like an extension of his hand. Any pistol, for that matter.

Pushing through the snow, he was tempted to call Louie’s name, but even that might destroy the stakeout. Many a cop had wrecked a good collar with an ill-timed whisper.

He was sweating under his layers of clothing when he began to ask himself if he’d gone in the right direction. But he had, no question. So where was Louie?

The snow seemed less, so he tried the night vision goggles again. He could see a little better, but they didn’t reveal Louie ahead. Instead, what Flynn saw was a strange, formless shape in the snow.

Was that a rock? A gnarled bush?

He tried working with the goggles, increasing the magnification.

The material was jagged, gleaming darkly. He still couldn’t tell what it was.

Another patch of moon glow sped by. In it, he could make out a pale ripped edge protruding from the shape. Bone, maybe? If so, then that was a chunk of something the lion had just killed—a deer, hopefully.

As a precaution, he got his pistol back out and held it alongside his parka. If that was a kill, then the lion was protecting it, and that’s why it was hanging around.

As he crunched along, he stepped on something just beneath the frozen surface. It was hard and irregular and it shifted under his foot.

He bent down and pushed away the snow.

What first appeared was a pallid slickness. He kept brushing. Something just below it, hard tufts of material. Frozen hair, he thought. So this was a kill and that was why the puma had menaced him. It had been worried about having its food stolen.

It took all of his training not to cry out when he found the staring eyes and gaping mouth of Louis Hancock looking back at him. The eyes flashed with moonlight when there were rips in the clouds.

The guy had been taken down by the mountain lion, which was about the damnedest thing Flynn could imagine happening. As he pushed more snow away, he discovered that Louie had been hit from behind and thrown forward, then—incredibly—ripped in half.

The legs and abdomen were nearby, a knee and booted foot jutting up from the snow. So the lion must be big. Huge.

This stakeout was over. He reached up and pressed the call button on his radio. “There’s been an accident. Detective Hancock is dead. Come in, please.”

Silence.

“I repeat, Louis Hancock has been killed, apparently by a mountain lion. We need to close this thing down, we have a dead officer here.”

Silence.

He was coming to really not like these people. “You can’t continue the stakeout, you have a dead officer! I repeat,
dead officer
!”

The hell with it, he’d go in himself. He’d been on his way anyway, interrupted by this horror show. He went plunging toward the house.

The going was extremely hard, and he had to fight his way through some flurries so high that he was forced to lie forward and push himself ahead.

Every time he was forced to do this, he was very, very aware that he was entirely helpless.

He moved slowly, guided by the music. There were no lights showing in the house. When he finally stumbled out into the road, the going was a little easier, but not much. The house loomed ahead of him, tall and completely dark except for a single strip of light leaking from around the curtains of the room where Gail Hoffman was playing.

He was going up the snow-choked front walk when he saw the lion again. It was standing on the porch, back around the far edge, where it curved around under the living room windows. It was absolutely still, and it was watching him.

Once again, it had maneuvered brilliantly. He thought to back off, but any movement whatsoever was going to be a major risk. The animal could react a whole lot faster than he could. Certainly, trying to turn around and run would get it on him in an instant.

The puma was not protecting its kill. It was still hunting, and he was its quarry.

He calculated its distance from him at fifteen feet.

Its eyes were as still as glass. If the nostrils hadn’t dilated slightly as it breathed, it would have appeared frozen. The jaw hung slightly open, the enormous incisors visible.

Was
that the face of a mountain lion? He didn’t know enough about big cats to tell, but it seemed somewhat longer and narrower. He decided that his best move was to edge in close enough to guarantee a fatal head shot. With luck, it wouldn’t react in time.

Another step, then another, as he slowly came up out of the snow and into the compact front garden. Gail played on. The lion watched him.

He saw its eyes close for a moment, then come open again. The message conveyed was clear and it was shocking: the animal was so sure of itself that it was
bored
.

Again he stopped, because he had understood why. The game was already over. It had been since before he’d started his maneuver. The animal was waiting for him to realize that he was caught. No matter what he did, it was going to make its move while he was still too far away for a reliable shot.

Bored did not mean careless. The face remained a picture of attentive patience.

He noticed a flickering light in the sky. Lightning, he thought, which would mean that the blizzard was about to intensify. Could that help him? Would a really powerful flurry give him a chance to return to the road, perhaps to make his escape?

Then he heard a noise even more inexplicable than the earlier one, which had obviously been Louie’s death whistle. This was a whispering sound overhead, a big, rhythmic whisper of wind, too regular to be part of the storm. As he listened, it slowed and then settled, dropping down behind the house.

The rhythm was that of a helicopter blade, but it was too quiet. Way too quiet.

A moment later, the light in the front yard changed, and he saw why. The curtained room had just gone dark. The piano had fallen silent.

The lion, also, was gone, slipping away in absolute silence.

He stood still, listening, watching. Could it have jumped up on the roof? Carefully, moving slowly and as little as possible, he raised his head. There was no telltale shadow along the roofline. So it had retreated, backing down the porch until it was out of sight.

Was it trying to escape him or was it still hunting him? Since he couldn’t know, he had no intention of going around the corner of that porch. He needed some spot where he could still see the house, but which would give him protection for his back.

Fifty feet to his left was a tree, its trunk thick enough to enable him to lean against it, making attack from behind much more difficult. The lion would have to charge him from some point that he could see, and it would need to start far enough away to make the pistol useful.

The snow in the yard looked deep, and the slower he had to move, the greater the risk. But if he stayed here, the lion could get behind him.

He raised his gun up beside his shoulder where it could be aimed and fired in just over a second, then plunged off the snow-covered sidewalk and into the deeper drifts of the yard itself. He was at his most vulnerable now.

An enormous splash of snow hit him in the face, temporarily blinding him. He pulled a gloved hand across his face to clear his eyes.

The lion was beside the tree and it was already crouched, ready to leap at him.

Once again, it had outmaneuvered him. Yet again, he was too far away to risk a pistol shot. It, however, was close enough to take him.

Years ago, Menard had recorded a case of a mountain lion stealing a three-year-old out of the bed of a pickup, but he’d never heard of anything like this.

He’d probably been damn lucky to have seen it when he had, or he would have suffered the same fate as Louie.

He took deep, careful breaths, centering his attention on his body, letting his emotions race off down their own frightened path. “You’re here, you’ve survived so far,” he told himself. “You can win this.”

How had the lion ever gotten over to the tree? How had it concealed itself in the snow? He was having a hard time believing that an ordinary puma could function like this.

Once again, he had to fight the impulse to turn and run.

The lion moved off past the tree, carefully keeping the trunk between itself and Flynn, and once again he had the uncanny sense that it understood guns.

He asked himself, “Do I have any chance at all of getting to the house?”

From where he now stood, the tree was thirty feet away, the porch and front door twenty.

The door had a glass window in it backed by a curtain. Breaking in would take ten seconds.

When a path looked easy, that was usually because it wasn’t.

The moment he started back up onto the front walk, he had to assume that the lion would know his intentions.

He made a quick survey of the scene. The house was now completely quiet and completely dark.

Could it be that the lion was trained? Because another way of looking at this situation was that it was not only trying to kill him, it was also trying to keep him from getting to the house.

No, don’t even go down that road. The perp didn’t have a damn pet lion with a genius level IQ. The creature was bad luck, nothing more. Had to be.

Nevertheless, his cop’s intuition screamed at him: secure your position. You don’t know where that animal is and you don’t know
what
it is, not really.

Once again, he tried the radio. Once again, there was no response, which was completely unacceptable. When this stakeout was concluded he was going to file a red hot report with whoever was in charge of this outfit, about its leadership and its shitty procedures and its worthless equipment.

Six feet to the left of the front door, the porch ended. Beyond it were lumps along the side of the house that indicated the presence of a flower bed. Behind the house, just visible, he could see the dark bulk of what must be the garage.

Somewhere back there Diana and Charlie and Mike were deployed—unless, of course, their radio silence was unintentional.

He would need to find them, but not right now. There was another thing that had to be done, which was that the Hoffmans needed to be warned and they had to be offered the close protection they should have been given in the first place.

Angrily jabbing the transmit button on his radio, sending out call after unanswered call, he approached the house.

He pushed his fist through one of the small panes of glass midway up the front door. Working fast because he had lost track of the puma, he pulled the remaining shards of glass out of the bottom of the frame, then leaned in, twisted the deadbolt, and opened the door.

The alarm sounded its warning buzz, but he didn’t even try to cut it off. He wanted it to trigger. Surely that would bring Diana and Mike and Charlie in on the run—assuming, of course, that they were still alive. But surely—
surely—
they were. No matter how clever, a mountain lion simply could not slaughter four police officers. Someone was going to get to his gun in time.

The buzz of the alarm rose to a warble. Thirty seconds to go. “Miss Hoffman, Doctor Hoffman, police! Please disarm your system! Police!”

No reaction. They could have retreated to a safe room. They could be waiting there, guns at the ready. Hopefully, they were calling the locals.

His first order of business was to find such any safe room they might be in. It would most likely be in the basement, so where was that door?

He went into the living room. In the big stone fireplace, the fire that had blazed up earlier still sparked and muttered. Beyond this was the music room. With its drapes still closed, it was pitch black. Inside, he could see the darkly gleaming surface of a grand piano, its keyboard a pale grimace.

The alarm triggered, its horn blaring up from under the stairs. Returning to the front hall, he opened the door of the understairs storage, then waited another full minute before disconnecting it. If it was set to make a distress call, he wanted to make sure that happened before he disabled anything. Finally, he pulled out its power line. Silence followed.

“Is anybody here?”

He detected not the slightest sense of movement, not the whisper of a footstep or a breath or the faintest creak of shifting weight from upstairs.

The wind rose in the eaves and snow swept past the windows.

He examined the alarm system’s control box and was horrified to see that the jack socket was empty. It had no phone connection.

Stepping into the hall, he tried his cell phone, but there wasn’t even the hint of a bar. In the kitchen he snatched up the receiver of a wall phone, but there was no dial tone. Lines were down, of course, in weather like this.

If that flash of light had been the perpetrator in some sort of helicopter, no matter how incredible it seemed, the brilliant puma had been part of it, deployed as an assassin and a decoy.

He looked out the kitchen window, across the bleak pale desert of the backyard.

He shifted frequencies on the radio, emergency calling again and again, but nobody came back. Field communicators like these were adjusted to a range of just a couple miles. You didn’t want them being picked up on bad-guy scanners.

To be certain that he was right about the Hoffmans, he went through the house checking bedrooms, closets, bathrooms, even under the beds.

He pulled down the attic door. As soon as the stairs unfolded, though, he knew they weren’t up there. Nobody had trod on these dusty steps in a long while. Still, he shone his light up. “Doctor Hoffman, police! Miss Hoffman!”

No reply.

He climbed the old steps, feeling the slanted ladder give under his weight. “Doctor Hoffman, I’m a police officer. I’m here to help you.”

If he was wrong and they were up there, he might be about to get his head blown off. “Doctor Hoffman!”

Shining his light ahead of him, he went up two more rungs. He spotted a couple of cardboard boxes, but mostly the space was filled with loose insulation. Turning, he shone his light to the far end. The house had two wings, but there was no point in crawling any deeper. Anybody coming up here would have disturbed this insulation.

BOOK: Alien Hunter (Flynn Carroll)
12.28Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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