Cry Wolf by Tami Hoag Page A

more hoarse than usual by a night of loud singing in a room where ninety percent of the people were chain smokers.
    He pushed himself up out of the creaking old desk chair, his body doing some creaking and groaning of its own after God knew how many hours in a sitting position. He stretched with all the grace of a big lean cat, scratched his flat bare belly, noted that the top button on his faded jeans was undone but left it that way.
    The page in the typewriter caught his eye, and he pulled it out and studied it, frowning darkly at the words that must have seemed like gems at the time he had pounded them out.
    She tries to scream as she runs, but her lungs are on fire and working like a bellows. Only pathetic yipping sounds issue from her throat, and they are a waste of precious energy. Tears blur her vision, and she tries to blink them back, to swipe them back with her hand, to swallow the knot of them clogging her throat as she runs on through the dense growth.
    Moonlight barely filters down through the canopy of trees. The light is surreal, nightmarish. Branches lash at her, cutting her face, her arms. Her toes stub and catch on the roots of the oak and hackberry trees that grow along the soft, damp earth, and she stumbls headlong, twisting her head around to see how near death is behind her.
    Too near. Too calm. Too deliberate. Her heart pounds hard enough to burst.
    She scrambles backward, trying to get her legs under her. Her hands clutch at roots and dead leaves. Her fingers close on the thick, muscular body of a snake, and she screams as she tries to escape the triangular head and flashing fangs that strike at her. The stench of the swamp fills her head as the copper taste of fear coats her mouth. And death looms nearer. Relentless. Ruthless. Evil. Smiling . . .
    Crap. Nothing but crap. With a sound of disgust Jack crumpled the page and hurled it in the general direction of the wastebasket—an old Chinese urn that may well have been worth a small fortune. He didn't know, didn't care. He had stumbled across it in the attic, buried under a decade's worth of discarded, moth-eaten clothing. Apparently it had been there some time, as it was a third full of the dead, decaying, and skeletal remains of mice that had fallen into it over the years and been unable to get out.
    Jack owned antiques because the old decrepit house had come with them, not because he was culturally sophisticated or a conspicuous consumer or particularly appreciative of fine things. Material things had become irrelevant to him since Evie's death. His perspective of the world had shifted radically downhill. Another irony. For most of his thirty-five years he had fought tooth and nail to achieve a status where he could own “things.” Now he was there and no longer gave a damn.
    “
Dieu
,” he whispered, shaking his head and wincing at the pain, “old Blackie must be sittin' in Hell laughin' at that.”
    Bon à rien, tu, 'tit souris. Good for nothin', pas de bétises!
    The voice came to him out of the past, out of his childhood. A voice from beyond the grave. He flinched at the memory of that voice. A conditioned response, even after all this time. Often enough a slurred line from Blackie Boudreaux had been followed up with a back-hand across the mouth.
    Jack pulled open the French doors and leaned against the frame, the smooth white paint cool against the bare skin of his shoulder. His eyes drifted shut as he breathed in the sweet green scent of boxwood, the fragrant perfume of magnolia and wisteria and a dozen other blooming plants. And beneath that heady incense lay the dark, insidious aroma of the bayou—a mixture of fertility and decay and fish. The scents, the caress of the hot breeze against his face, the chorus of birdsong instantly transported him back in time.
    He saw himself at nine, small and skinny, barefoot and dirty-faced, running like a thief from the tar-paper shack that was home. Running from his father, running to escape into