The Flock (10 page)

Ron arrived in Salutations early the next morning. He had hoped that Kate would have phoned him, to possibly arrange a meeting, but she had not. Really, she was a strange woman; about as different from any he had ever considered dating. Perhaps it was that strangeness that attracted him. She certainly was the brainiest woman with whom he'd ever wanted to spend time. Along the way from where he had met her until they'd arrived at Holcomb's compound, there hadn't seemed to be a living thing they'd encountered that she wasn't at least passably familiar with. Strange, perhaps. Amazing, definitely.

Very early that morning, he had made a phone call of his own. Not one he'd been particularly looking forward to, though. Mary Niccols' phone number was on a page of his Rolodex that was getting thumbed quite often. With every call about a problem gator, it was time to call Mary. There were a few other trappers out there, but she was the best of the bunch, and the Department had come to depend on her such that she was their first choice in most situations. Of course, it had come to a point where Mary was hard to reach, sometimes.

And there was the problem of their relationship. For a time, they had sparked; they'd had something going for a while. But Ron had put a stop to it. She'd been too persistent about things in general, and about his ancestry in particular. Mary was near full blood Seminole, could even speak a bit of Miccosukee, and she had begun to pressure Ron into “returning to his roots.” And that was when Ron had put an end to their budding romance. He told her, and he told himself, that it was that, only that, and not Mary's profession, not her lack of formal education, and not her dark features and fear of his bloodlines that had made him back away.

As their relationship had grown from a playful friendship to a physical love affair, Ron had felt an ugly discomfort rising in his mind. How would he present Mary to his family? His mother had always been so happy that Ron's Indian heritage was so buried in the Caucasian features he'd inherited from his father's side. Indeed, his mother, who was half-Seminole, looked no less Anglo than most of the other women in the neighborhoods where Ron had been raised. He had thought of the expression on his mom's face if he brought Mary home to meet her. He thought of the dark children they would likely produce. Was he some kind of racist? Better not to deal with that issue. Better to end the relationship and never face that particular beast.

And so he had broken it off with her, never telling her and never fully explaining himself. How could he have told her? He wanted to sweep the times with her away, and not be reminded of the shadows that waited in his own thoughts. But due to her reputation as the best trapper on his supervisor's list, Ron was forced to call her more often than he felt comfortable doing.

Ron returned to his spot at the substation. Mary's battered, green truck was already there and she was sitting in it, the driver's side door opened. Niccols was at ease, her legs dangling, boots beating a soft rhythm to some tune that played only in Niccols' head. The lady had a tendency to fidget when she wasn't out hunting; it was just another thing about her that bothered Ron, or something else that he could consider a flaw. He parked his own truck behind the trapper's and climbed out. She came up to meet him, the sun glowing on her. When he was honest with himself, he had to admit that she was a true beauty. Her hair was long and very dark—she wore it over her left shoulder—not quite raven black, but nearly so. The Native American features that were so buried in him were quite evident on her face; prominent cheekbones accented a pair of long-lashed blue eyes that betrayed her own Anglo heritage. She was smiling, flashing those straight, perfect teeth.

“How are you, Mary?” He winced as Niccols gripped his hand, her slim but hard fingers squeezing with powerful ease. There was no bravado in the greeting, but the woman had a natural strength that was hard to control. Ron also felt a familiar jolt of physical excitement when their fingers meshed. But he sublimated that feeling, as he'd taught himself to do.

“Doing fine, Ron,” she said, smiling, her sun-darkened face friendly. She would be happy to rekindle their romance, had even told Ron in just those words. But she hadn't been uncomfortably persistent about it. “So. What's this about a snake? Boa? Python? What are we talking here?” She stood no more than five foot five, built lithely, a powerful torso above strong legs, but still very feminine in a muscular way. She was wearing faded jeans and a sleeveless cotton shirt that showed off the physical power of her upper body. He tried his best not to think of her as attractive.

“Well, to tell you the truth, Mary…I'm not sure. I'm not even sure there
is
a snake. There have been four dogs that have vanished without a sound and without a trace in the past couple weeks or so.”

“Nothing, eh?”

“Nada. Not a peep. Not a drop of blood. Not a blade of grass out of place.”

“Cool.” Niccols smiled. “I like a challenge.”

“This is the part of Salutations where most of the pets vanished. Well, not counting a couple of cats, this is where they've all disappeared. Phase Three, you know.”

“Dogs, huh?” She didn't need to mention alligators. Mary knew them as well as anyone, and she knew that if there had been sign of the big reptiles, then Ron would have said something. She had nailed the previous two problem gators in Salutations.

“Yes. Two were small. Maybe twenty pounds. But the other two were big animals. One was an Airedale. I can't imagine any animal making off with something the size of an Airedale without some commotion.”

“Unless it was a snake.” Mary smiled again, showing her perfect teeth. “I ever tell you about that python I caught over in Frostproof?”

“Frostproof? Hell, no. That's not that far from here. How'd you miss telling me about
that
one?”

“Yeah. Retired doctor had a place on Lake Reedy. Some neighborhood pets had vanished, and the raccoons he was feeding weren't coming around to the slop trough anymore. He told me he and his wife had enjoyed sitting on the deck and watching them come up to eat the scraps every night. I warned him about rabid coons, but he ignored me, of course.

“Anyway, they also had a terrier which they would keep locked up in the bedroom at night when the coons came around. But in the day the dog had the run of the yard. Well, they'd noticed that the coons had stopped showing. They started leaving all kinds of food for them, but none of them showed up. And they'd noticed that the numbers had been getting thin for a while, less each week. Finally, none of the coons were showing up for supper. He and his wife figured they'd just gone off into the swamps, or something.

“Then, one day they let the terrier out in the yard. This was about a month after the coons had stopped coming around. He said his wife let the dog out, and it started barking at something. But it barked all the time. At anything. So they didn't pay it much mind. But all of the sudden, right in the middle of a barking fit, it stopped. Just shut up. It stopped so sudden-like that they went out to see what was going on.” Mary chuckled, a little bit of trapper humor.

“What'd they see?” Ron asked, smiling at Mary's morbidly amused expression.

“What they
saw
was about fifteen foot of python wrapped around their dog. By the time they got out there, the dog was already dead, squeezed about as big around as my wrist. The doc's lady started screaming while that snake unhinged its jaws and made a big snack out of Bowser. After that, it crawled under their house where it had been denning for a few months, apparently, since it had been enjoying a steady supply of baited coon. When the coons were either all eaten or spooked off, the only thing around for it to eat was that dog.” The trapper shook her head in disbelief. “Damn, people are stupid.”

“Mary! Don't talk about the public that way,” Ron chided. “Heck. If it weren't for all of those stupid people, you wouldn't have this career you've got going.”

“Yeah, you're right. God bless the stupid buttheads.” Mary looked around, taking in the whole of the artificial township that was visible to her. “So. Where do you think this snake might be? Think he's denned up somewhere around?”

Ron turned back to his truck, waving his arm for Mary to follow. “Come over here,” he said. “I'll show you this map and maybe you can make some assumptions.”

Niccols waited while Ron reached into the truck and produced the map. It was a studio layout, blue line in great detail, which showed each lot and parcel, even naming each individual owner and the size of properties, right down to the inch. Mary looked at the map, quickly picking out the places Ron had highlighted. She pointed with a brown finger at the lot marked
#1
.

“First dog disappeared from here, hey?” She squinted, reading the lines scribbled down in yellow fluorescent ink. “Big dog, too. Biggest of the lot.” Mary could see that Ron had written the animal's weight: 60 pounds. Then she pointed again, her index finger etched a bit with dirt and oil. “And the next dog was just a week later? No way. No way does a snake,
any
snake do something like that.” She looked at Ron who was still gazing at the map. “I mean, even if it was a twenty footer, it couldn't digest sixty pounds of dog meat that fast and come back for twenty more pounds. Hunh-uh. No way.”

Ron sighed, ran his hands through his sweat-damp hair. “Yeah. I know, I know. But there's the way it happens. Each owner tells me the same story. Place is real quiet. Happens in the late afternoons, while the sun is still up. Not night, yet. The dogs have never barked or shown alarm, and then…poof…they're gone. No tracks. No blood. Nothing.”

Mary shrugged. “Hey. Look. I could use the money, hunting for a big snake. Catching it. But this doesn't look like a snake.”

“What then?” Ron was folding his Berg Brothers map, carefully bending it the right way.

“Well, hell. I think somebody's taking them.”

The paper ruffled in the still air. Ron stopped. “What?”

“Somebody's taking them. Stealing them. Dognaping, they call it.”

“Well, I thought of that.” He resumed folding the map. “I thought of it, too. But I don't think that's what it is. I'd think of them running away before dognaping would occur to me.”

Mary reached out and took the map from Ron. “Give me that thing. You got the names of the folk with missing critters?”

“Yeah, sure,” he said, reaching into his shirt pocket for the small notebook he carried there. “Got 'em all right here.” Ron began to tear the names and addresses out of the spiral-ringed book. “I've got them at home, and on some paperwork in the glove compartment. You keep these.”

Mary closed her fist around the three little squares of paper, Ron's black ink scribblings showing boldly. “Let's talk to some of these people. See what we can figure out. Hell. Maybe there's more than one snake. Maybe there are two.”

“Or three,” Ron added.

The two of them saw a flash of a shadow in the trees and looked up to see an osprey glide past at treetop level.

“You know,” Mary muttered. “There could be a freaking
army
of giant snakes in that wilderness.” She indicated the green forest beyond them with a wave of her muscular right arm. “There's no
telling
what's in there.”

“No telling,” Ron agreed.

 

“Good idea to take your truck.”

“Huh? Why is that?” Ron looked over at Mary, who was sitting low in the seat, peering at the corner of the mirror on the passenger side of the truck.

“Well, if I had been driving instead of admiring the neighborhood, I think I might have missed the fact that we're being tailed.”

Ron glanced in his rearview mirror. “Tailed? Who the hell…” He slowed down a bit, almost to a crawl to get a look at the car that was about a block behind them.

“Recognize it? It's a 1999 Buick Grand Regal. Royal blue metal flake paint, with a V-8, loaded. Rental, I'd say. Know who it might be?”

Riggs crossed the next intersection and continued to steal an occasional glance back at the car. The windows were tinted and he couldn't make out the driver. “No. I've never seen it. If it's a rental, it could be anyone. How do you know it's following us, anyway?”

“Believe me. He's following us. Not a very good tail, if you ask me. I've been followed by some guys who were good at it.”

“You were?”

“Yeah. Once, back when I was still married, my husband thought I was steppin' out on him and he hired a private detective to follow me. I only found out when he felt guilty about it and told me. He finally coughed up the file he'd built. Pictures and everything. Just added fuel to my desire to divorce him.”

“You never told me about that,” Ron said, a squint in his eyes that betrayed his surprise.

“Well, as you should recall, you didn't like for me to mention my short-lived marriage when we were dating. It made you jealous.”

Ron could think of nothing to say to that.

“Anyway,” Mary continued. “I never even knew he was there. That guy was good. This guy,” Mary pointed back with her thumb, “ain't worth a darn at it.”

“Well, we're going to be pulling over in about five seconds to talk to Mr. and Mrs. Brill who owned that Airedale. If the guy is following us, he'll have to either stop or pass us. Maybe we'll see who it is.” Ron squinted, rubbed the sweat off of his brow. “I'll bet it's one of those Salutations security officers.”

“I dunno,” Mary said. “Why would they be tailing us? Who else wants to know about us?” Mary wiped at her forehead, too. “And tell me something else, Mr. Fish and Wildlife.”

“Yeah? What?”

“Why the
hell
did they give you a truck with no air-conditioning?”