wasn’t making it any easier to get a fix. He’d let himself get distracted.
But one thing was for sure… He watched the cop in his mirror. She was certainly human, but she had the smell of werewolves on her. One was stronger but unfamiliar, but the other…She’d been near Nikolai earlier. It was really faint, but it was there. He hadn’t touched her-it would have been stronger then-but he’d been close recently. The scent brought back memories. It felt like there should have been a flood of memories, but because of Rocky, it was only a trickle and a sense of absence, loss, and a burning desire to tear Nikolai’s throat out.
He watched the cop car in the mirror until snow covered the glass. Not a bad-looking woman as far as he could tell with her so bundled up against the cold. He did have to chuckle at the stupid question about if there were any drugs or guns in the vehicle. Were criminals dumb enough to actually answer that truthfully? Earl had brought plenty of both. Out of view under the camper shell he had enough weapons to overthrow a Third-World nation and narcotics sufficient to knock out an elephant. The tranquilizers were in case he was out around the full moon and couldn’t make it into the time-locked steel cage that took up half the truck’s bed. Neither option was as nice as his cell back at the compound, but the portable cage beat the hangover from the sedatives.
The cop came back a minute later and handed over his license and a yellow carbon copy that read violation in big black letters across the top. “So much for getting off with a warning.”
Her uniform coat was a giant puffy green monstrosity with an embroidered yellow badge. A black knit cap hid her hair, and her cheeks were rosy from the cold. She was already coated in falling snow. “I only cited you for the stop sign. You’re lucky you caught me in a good mood. I can throw the speeding on there too if you want. Twenty over is a pretty hefty fine,” she stated flatly. The cop had fine features, a nose that was a little too big to be perfect, green eyes, and the hair that had strayed out from under the cap was a dark red. He decided that she could be pretty if she actually smiled, but she didn’t strike him as the smiling type. Human scents always told a story. She wore the smell of workaholic stress, was healthy despite a lack of sleep, lived alone, had a dog, and had eaten Oreos and Diet Mountain Dew for dinner.
Asking where she’d bumped into a former KGB assassin was out of the question. Nikolai could be masquerading as anyone. By most standards, Nikolai spoke better English than Earl did. “You get many strangers in these parts?” he asked.
“Not usually, until it’s good snowmobile weather, but lately we seem to be swimming in them.”
“Really…What for?” Where did you meet him?
But apparently she wasn’t the small-town type that liked to gossip about strangers. The cop just shrugged. “Just slow it down. You’d better be more careful. Your behavior could hurt somebody.”
That was the general idea. But he just nodded politely. Knowing where she’d met his enemy could be a real advantage, so he tried one last time before she had a chance to walk away. “What do you say I buy you some dinner and you tell me more about your lovely town?”
She paused, incredulous. “You realize that never works, right?” Then the deputy surprised him with the barest hint of a wry smile. “And you’re not my type. Good night, sir.”
“Type?” Earl muttered to himself after she was gone. “Hell, girl. I ain’t your species…” Earl stuck the new ticket in the center console with the others. Owen got mad when he didn’t save his receipts. Brushing the snow off the mirror, he watched her walk back to the cop car. At least she made those uniform pants look good. Must work out a lot. He waited for her to drive away and even waved as she went by before putting it in gear and heading back to the main street.
The last hour had been spent getting a feel for the area, but now he was starving, and Earl wasn’t inclined to hunt down his nemesis on an empty stomach. Plus, he wanted to talk to more of the residents. There were definitely strange things going down in Copper Lake. The presence of multiple werewolves suggested that Nikolai was up to something unexpected.
The Russian had always been like Earl, a loner. It wasn’t like him to run with a pack. Task-force intelligence had believed that Nikolai had gone so far as to refuse to create others of his kind for his controllers. Stalin had been the last leader that Nikolai had held enough respect for to bow to that command. Not that having fewer werewolves was a particular loss for the Soviet war machine, since the vast majority of them turned out just as dangerous to friend as to foe.
Kirk Conover had always felt that Nikolai had avoided creating others because he liked being special, being the only werewolf that the KGB could count on. Earl had known it was because Nikolai simply hadn’t wanted the competition. It had been a long time since the USSR had collapsed and Nikolai had gone missing, but Earl had just assumed that some things wouldn’t have changed. It smelled like he had been mistaken.
There was an open-late diner down the road a short distance from the hospital. It looked like it had been around for a while, the kind of small-town place where crusty old locals would sit and smoke and talk to whoever was willing to listen about anything that was new or out of place. It was exactly the kind of establishment where a Hunter could grab a cold beer and a hot steak, shoot the bull, leave a huge tip, and get some intel on what was actually going on. In other words, it was Earl’s kind of place.
Which was probably why the sight of the Suburban with the government plates in the parking lot immediately made him mad. Earl swore to himself as he parked the MHI truck behind the black vehicle. It might have been from some innocuous federal agency, but the number of extra antennas and dark window tint in a town teeming with werewolves just screamed Monster Control Bureau. “Well, ain’t that my luck?”
If the Feds were here because they knew about Nikolai, they’d surely screw it up. The Russian would go to ground and disappear for another decade. Earl took his time deciding on a course of action. He could get back on the road and drive around looking for werewolves or he could go inside and try to listen in on the Feds. Odds were that it wouldn’t be anyone who’d recognize him, and if that were the case, he might actually be able to overhear something useful from them. His sense of hearing was better than a normal man’s, so it was worth a shot.
Worst-case scenario, if it turned out to be a familiar Fed, he could try to pick an argument with them to see if they might slip up and say something they shouldn’t. MCB loved to throw their weight around, and one of his favorite hobbies was provoking the easily provoked MCB agents. The thought of confrontation was so tempting that Earl almost left his MHI hat on. Discretion finally won out, and he left it in the truck.
The diner was warm and smelled of good cooking inside. The place was relatively busy for how late it was, but it was a Friday night. Earl took a spot at the bar with a few older gentlemen who were busy complaining about politics. A teenage waiter with hair covering his eyes had a menu in front of Earl a minute later. The Feds were easy enough to spot in a corner booth, being the only customers wearing ties. Ties stand out even more when almost everyone else is wearing flannel. The younger of the pair was unfamiliar but had that typical MCB look, being an intense, muscle-bound, square-jawed specimen of ass-kicking and witness intimidation. The senior one had his back toward the bar, but that raspy bass voice was familiar. The senior agent was a thickset man, totally bald, with jowls and a big nose. What was it? Storm? Stork? He’d been Franks’ partner years ago…Sam had punched his lights out once at some Navy thing…Stark. That was it. Stark was a prick. So much for not being recognized.
The Feds were talking. Like most men who’d spent a lifetime around gunfire, Agent Stark spoke with the unconsciously raised volume of someone with some hearing loss. He was complaining about the weather, the locals, and the audacity of Copper Lake for not being Chicago, but nothing of any use to Earl. The waiter came back, and Earl surprised the kid by ordering two sixteen-ounce T-bone dinners, extra rare, extra everything. The waiter asked if he was expecting a guest. He just smiled, said that he’d been blessed with a fast metabolism, and went back to listening.
It wasn’t the Fed’s conversation that caught his attention, though. It was one of the locals.
“The thing must’a been a monster. I heard it was bad. Like it clawed him to bits.”
“Damn straight. I never seen the like. It ate part of Joe’s stomach. That boy’s lucky to be alive.”
Earl turned toward the two men sharing the bar to his left. “Sorry to interrupt…But did you say that somebody got eaten?”
“By a bear,” the first man replied. “Can you believe that?”
Earl whistled. “That happen a lot around these parts?”
“Only never, far as I know,” said the second, who seemed all too eager to share the story. “Everybody in town’s talking about it. My nephew works at the hospital, told me all about it.”
“Where you from?” asked the first suspiciously. Earl recognized the accent from when he’d worked a case in Finland. “You’re not from around here. You talk funny.”
“Alabama. Where bears don’t eat people, it don’t usually snow, and it’s customary for the new guy getting told the tale to buy the drinks for the men doing the telling.” Earl knew from experience that you couldn’t ask for a
