Monster Hunter Alpha-ARC (8 page)

“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 better bunch than the Finns, once they warmed up to you and decided you weren’t in need of a stabbing at least. Tough climates bred tough temperaments. “Name’s Earl.”

“That’s a fine tradition there, sonny,” nodded the first approvingly, and he held up three fingers for the waiter. “I’m Aino. That’s Henry. Up on Cliff Road, one of the local deputies, Joe Buckley, was in his car, bear came along and pulled him out the window and ate part of him.”

“He was where the Randalls keep their horses,” supplied Henry. “Other side of the hill from the old Quinn Mine. I used to work down there, ya know, back ’fore the big cave-in.”

“Dark day for Copper Lake,” Aino muttered.

Earl didn’t know if the old immigrant was talking about the bear or the mine collapsing. “Did they catch the bear?” he asked, and he had a sneaking suspicion on what the answer would be. Both of the old timers shook their heads in the negative. “I’m a professional hunter by trade. Maybe I could help.”

“Maybe.” Aino scratched his grizzled chin. “They looked for it, didn’t see nothing. Joe Buckley’s a good boy though, so you see any bears, stranger, you do us a favor and pop it dead.”

The waiter came back with three beers. “I got a few rifles in my truck,” Earl responded, and
few
was an understatement. He took a bottle and tilted it toward the gentlemen. “And I’m a fair shot.”

The waiter snorted derisively and blew the hair away from his eyes. “People like you put guns on our streets.”

Earl looked at the teenager in disbelief. “And people like you put the fries on my plate.” He waved toward the kitchen dismissively. “So hop to it, boy.”

The waiter stomped away. Aino gave him a big grin. That was a new record for Earl befriending a Finn. Apparently living in America took the edge off.

* * *

Stark couldn’t believe his eyes, but who should be sitting there at the bar other than the head contractor scumbag himself, Earl Harbinger.

The entire time he’d been eating his chicken-fried steak and talking with Agent Mosher, Stark had kept checking the test vial under the table. Once it turned blue, he’d told Mosher he needed to take a leak, and he’d gotten up with the plan of calling Briarwood to get their butts up here to make them all some cash. Seeing that pain-in-the-ass Harbinger joking and drinking with some old bastards floored him.

MHI is here.
Stark let loose with a long string of profanity under his breath. Those jerks would swoop in, kill the werewolves before Briarwood could, steal the PUFF bounty, and, worst of all, there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. He couldn’t even pull jurisdiction and toss MHI out, because that required paperwork, and he sure as hell couldn’t justify that if his official story was that the test kit had come back negative.

He hated Harbinger. Not only was he rich and successful beyond any public servant’s wildest imagination—the guy kept senators in his pocket like most people kept change—he was also a balls-out fighter. Rumor in the MCB was that Harbinger had actually kicked the snot out of several members of Director Myers’s strike team and gotten away with it. Which was another example of why Myers needed to be replaced. If Stark was running the show, there was no way that any MCB would ever be disrespected by a filthy werewolf.

That was the crux of it. Harbinger was a werewolf, a disgusting, stinking lycanthrope, no better than the trash that Stark had devoted his life to destroying. All the Special Agents in Charge knew about him. Those yokels were unwittingly sitting there next to a vicious animal, and Stark wasn’t even allowed to do the sensible thing and go pump a silver bullet into the monster’s head. Non-PUFF applicable creatures were out of his jurisdiction unless they went off the reservation and were caught up to no good. Sure, the second somebody like Harbinger screwed up, MCB owned their ass, but in the meantime his hands were tied. Nobody in the MCB knew exactly why Harbinger was declared off-limits, but Stark was sure that it had something to do with Monster Hunter International throwing big bags of money at spineless politicians.

He had to do something and quick. Harbinger would go to talk to the bitten deputy. That’s how he got his new recruits, after all: sweet-talking survivors. Being a werewolf, Harbinger would definitely recognize that the deputy was infected, probably smell it or something, and then MHI would get that bounty instead of him.

Stark made it around the corner to where the bathrooms were without being seen. Luckily for him, the place still had a pay phone installed—good thing that all these backwoods types got bad cell reception—which meant that he didn’t have to use his government-issued cell to call Briarwood. You couldn’t be too careful in this business.

The sultry European sex goddess picked up on the fourth ring. “Briarwood.”

He cut right to the chase. “If your boys can get here in time, you’ve got
two
bounties. But they had better hurry. There’s been a complication. Some of your competitors are here.”

“Competitors?”

“The boys from Alabama, if you get who I mean. One bounty is at the hospital. He won’t turn until the full moon, but if you get him early, the blood test will justify the PUFF.” Stark neglected to mention that the place was crawling with cops. That was Briarwood’s problem. “The one that bit him is around here somewhere. How soon can you be on-site?”

There was a long pause, like she was covering the phone and asking someone a question. “Our team is almost there.”

Stark glanced at his watch and swore. It was going to be close. “Head straight for the hospital.” He slammed the phone back into the cradle.

When Stark came around the corner from the bathrooms, Harbinger, who didn’t seem surprised in the least, was staring right at him. Stark froze. From across the room, the Hunter actually had the nerve to raise his beer like he was giving Stark a toast. So much for getting out without being seen. Stark walked up to the bar to confront the obnoxious Hunter.

Earl Harbinger didn’t look like anything special up close, just average. But there was something intimidating about the way he watched you, like he was trying to decide whether to eat you or not. But Stark was MCB, and MCB wasn’t easily intimidated, even by a werewolf.

“Hey, Agent Stork. Been a long time,” Harbinger said, sounding friendly as could be. That redneck-confederate-illiterate-goat-molester-country-music accent made Stark even angrier.

“Stark,” he corrected. “What’re you doing here, Harbinger?”

“Vacation. These gentlemen were just telling me about the quality fishing they’ve got in these parts. Damn fine steaks here, by the way. You?”

“Official business. And you better stay out of it.”

Harbinger smiled. “I’d have to take a significant pay cut to make your business worth my time.”

“Screw you,” he said automatically, but then Stark felt a brief touch of panic. Had Harbinger heard him talking to Briarwood? He paused, thinking it through; there was no way he could have, but it was still a sore spot for the agent. “Listen up, asshole. You want to—”

“Whoa there,” interrupted one of the yokels. “What’s your problem?”

“Shut your face, old-timer,” Stark snapped. “This doesn’t concern you.”