Claw Back (Louis Kincaid) (4 page)

After he stirred sugar into his coffee and took a quick gulp, he shook a bag of Tender Vittles into a bowl and refilled
the water dish. When he went back onto the porch,
Issy
was waiting for him. He held open the door and the cat came in.

“That was quick.
Too hot for you, too, huh?”

The cat went to its food, scarfed it down and began to lap up water. Louis watched her, noticing for the first time that she looked thinner than usual. Not that he ever paid that close attention.
Issy
had been a shadowy presence in his cottage for five years now. He had taken the cat in after she was accidently abandoned by a woman he had been involved with in Michigan. He had never liked cats much, but now, as he looked down at
Issy
he had to admit he had come to like having her around. It wasn’t like have a dog or something. All he had to do is let her out and in, toss some food in her bowl and pick up the dead lizards she left
on his bed
. She made no real demands on him. She was the perfect
companion
.

He made a mental note to call the vet and picked up his coffee, heading to the bedroom.

The phone rang, pulling him back to the kitchen counter.

“Hello?” he said, sliding onto a stool.

“Mr. Kincaid? Louis Kincaid?”

“You found me. Who’s this?”

“Katy
Letka
.”

“I’m sorry...who?”

“Katy
Letka
. I’m the FWC vet who came to get the panther yesterday.”

“Oh, yeah.
Right.”

“Listen, I know it’s early but this is important.
I called the sheriff’s department to find you and they said you’re really a private investigator.”

“Yeah,
I’m on
a special assignment
with the sheriff’s department
for now.”

“Well, I need some special help.”

Louis waited, stirring one more sugar into his coffee, wondering what had driven Katy
Letka
to call him -– a cheating boyfriend, a deadbeat dad?

“This is about Grace,” she said. “We found her collar early this morning. It had been cut off.”

“Don’t you have investigators?”

“We used to have a guy but he got canned in staff cutbacks
and he wasn’t very good anyway
,” she said. “And this is not the usual thing we investigat
e
. This isn’t normal. Something’s wrong. I think Grace has been abducted. Will you help me?”

“
Abducted? Who would abduct a wild animal?
”

“I don’t know. That’s the problem. I don’t know where to go with this.”

Louis paced slowly around the kitchen. He wanted to help. He had already been assigned to the case -– even though Mobley had probably done it as a joke. But it wasn’t a joke to Katy
Letka
.

“All right,” he said. “Where do we start?”
             
“I’ll show you where we found the collar. There’s a place in
Immokalee
where we can meet up -- Juan’s.”

“I know it.”

Juan’s Place was a red and white cinderblock bodega favored by the migrant fruit pickers who made up a good portion of
Immokalee’s
population.

Louis pulled into the dusty lot and spott
ed
the van with the FWC emblem among the rusty pickups. When he swung his white Mustang alongside, Katy
Letka
got out
of the van
. She was wearing the ball cap, a long-sleeved white shirt and khaki pants, the kind with Velcro pockets and zippers at the knees
that could convert the pants into shorts with the flick of a wrist.

Even in his t-shirt and jeans, Louis was sweating by the time he approached the door of her van.

“I took the liberty,” she said, holding out a tiny Styrofoam cup.

“Thanks,” Louis said, staring down into the ink-black coffee.
“Any sugar?”

With a rip of a Velcro pocket she produced three packs and a plastic stir.

As Louis sipped his coffee his eyes locked on the huge vehicle sitting on the other side of the FWC van. With its monstrous gnarled tires and stripped
-
down frame it looked like an A
TV
on steroids. There was a large
empty
cage in the back. One of the two FWC guys who had showed up to rescue the panther yesterday was loading bottled water into a cooler. Like Katy
Letka
, he was dressed in
long
pants and
a
long-sleeved shirt.

“So where are we going exactly?” Louis asked.

“About ten miles southeast of here,” Katy said.
“In the middle of the
Okaloachoochee
Slough.”
She eyed
Louis’s
’65 Mustang convertible. “
Your car won’t make it.
You’
ll have to
ride out with us in the swamp buggy.”

Louis downed the coffee and followed her to the back of the ATV.

“You might want to put this on over your t-shirt,” she said, holding out a wad of clothing.
             

“Why?”

“Where we’re headed the forecast is ninety-eight degrees with a hundred-percent chance of insects.”

Louis shook out the wrinkled long-sleeved shirt with a FWC emblem on the pocket, slipped it on and climbed into the back seat.

The swamp buggy came alive with a roar. The guy behind the wheel turned and stuck out a hand. “I’m Daryl,” he said with a smile. “Better buckle up.”

About ten minutes outside town, they left the blacktop road for a gravel turnoff and were soon rumbling through heavy brush. Then the gravel
disappeared
leaving only two
ruts
in the deep yellow grass. Squat palmetto palms swiped at the sides
of the
swamp buggy and it was so jarring Louis had to grit his teeth.

Talk was impossible, so he let his mind wander as his eyes moved over the jungle-like terrain.

He had been in a place like this once before, a desolate spot called Starvation Prairie, where he and Joe had
hunted
a child kidnapper. It had been the case that had brought them together. She was a Miami homicide detective, he was a PI. They had ended up lovers.

Joe...

It had been easy when she was still in Miami, just three hours
away from him
across Alligator Alley. But now she was in Michigan and there was more than just miles between them.

The swamp buggy jerked to a stop. The engine roar was replaced by a silence so thick he could feel the pressure in his eardrums.

Then
came
the drone of insects.

He felt a tug on his arm. Katy was holding out a blue plastic bottle. “Here,” she said.

Louis took the bottle. “Avon Skin So Soft?”

“Best mosquito repellent on earth.”

He sprayed his face and neck and jumped down from the buggy. The ground was spongy with pine needles, the air soupy with smells like things were dying all around him. He fell into step behind Daryl and Katy as they pushed through the brush.

Louis spotted a strip of yellow tape tied around a tree. Katy stopped at the tree and held out a large plastic bag to Louis.

“This is where we found her collar,” she said.

Louis took the plastic bag. The collar inside looked just like the one Bruce wore, except it had been cut.

He fingered the radio unit through the plastic. “Okay, I don’t know much about panthers,” he said. “Let’s start at the beginning. How did you know that it...Grace was missing?”

“Most our panthers are collared. Every two days, our plane goes up to give us readings on their radios.”

She glanced up at the heat-hazed sky and wiped her brow.

“Normally, a female panther’s territory is about seventy-miles and Grace had stopped moving,” she said. “I wasn’t worried because I thought she might be denning.”

“Denning?” Louis asked.

“When they’re getting ready to have kittens, they reduce their range,” Katy said. “But then the radio signal went dead.”

“That’s why you put out the BOLO?”

She nodded. “Sometimes the radios malfunction. We wanted the rural deputies to keep an eye out for her just in case she was hit by a car. This morning, while we were searching her last coordinates, we found her collar. When we saw it was cut off I knew something was wrong.”

“Poachers?”
Louis asked.

“
There’s
only two poaching cases we know of,” she said. “One was a hunter who said he shot the panther because he was threatened.
Which is ridiculous because panthers are shy.
They stay away from humans.”

“And the other guy?”

“Some rich asshole who
got drunk with his friends and decided he wanted a stuffed panther head mounted on his wall.
One
of his buddies turned him in. He’s doing
five to ten up
in
Raiford
.”

Louis peered at the collar through the plastic, fingering the cut in the heavy leather. It had been sawed off with a large blade.

“Did you find any blood here?” he asked.

“Blood?”
Katy asked.

“From Grace.”

She shook her head. “We looked, in about a twenty-yard radius but we didn’t see anything to indicate she was hurt.”

“Then she had to have been tranquilized.”

Katy just nodded, still looking around the brush like she had maybe missed something.

“He wanted her alive,” Louis said. “What would someone do with a live panther?”

She looked up at him. “I don’t know.”

Louis walked away, eyes to the ground. Every crime scene was the same – the
perp
always left something of
himself
and always took something away. It could be a discarded cigarette butt or dirt picked up in the tread of a sneaker.

In this jungle, evidence was going to be hard to find.
But not impossible.
Lee County’s CSI team was one of the state’s best. It was just a matter of getting Mobley to cough up the money and manpower for a missing cat.

The squawk of a radio drew Louis’s attention back to Katy. He was too far away to hear the conversation. When Katy signed off, she waved him over.

“I got the lab work on Bruce,” she said. “They found
acepromazine
in his system.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a tranquilizer,” she said.

“
I thought you tranquilized him on the
patio?”

“No,
acepromazine
is a fucking horse tranquilizer,” she said. “The injection site was his chest. He was darted.”

Louis was confused. “So how’d he break his leg?”

She didn’t seem to hear him. She was staring at something in the distance, her jaw clenched.

“Katy? How’d he break his leg?”

“He must have climbed a tree,” she said, pointing to a towering tree. “They do that when they feel threatened. He was darted and fell.”

Louis shaded his eyes to look up at the spindly cypress tree. “
How long do they stay out?”

“Half hour, maybe forty-five minutes.”

“Plenty of time for someone to load a panther into a cage in a truck and get away someplace isolated.”

Katy nodded.

“
Grace went missing first, right?”
Louis asked.

“Yeah.”

“Maybe he wanted two,” Louis said.
“A male and a female.”

He wiped the sweat from his face and looked back at Katy.

“How many panthers are left in the wild?” he asked.

“Maybe thirty,” Katy said. She hesitated. "We’re losing them fast.”

“Well, maybe someone’s building an ark,” Louis said.

CHAPTER F
IVE

             
All the way across town, he heard sirens. As he pulled into the parking lot of the Lee County Administration Building, he remembered something a female cop had once told him. The sudden swell of multiple sirens was like a baby’s cries -- experience told you just how serious it was.

             
A couple sirens, combined with an ambulance or two, probably indicated a traffic accident on a major road. Sheriff’s cars streaming in one direction was likely a backup situation for an officer in trouble. Cruisers from every agency whizzing through every red light meant something big was going down.