A Dark Path #5
“Be careful,” I tell him.
“Yep.” He starts toward the woods and disappears into the swirling white miasma.
I look down at the boy. “What’s your name?”
“D-Danny Hochstetler.”
“How old is your brother?”
“Twelve.”
“What are you doing out here this time of night?”
“F-fishing.”
“Where?”
He swivels his arm and points toward the woods. “That deep hole over by those trees.”
“What are your parents’ names?”
“M-Mose and Ada Hochstetler.”
I recall the couple and realize he lives just down the road. Tilting my head, I hail Dispatch. “I’ve got a juvenile with me.” I give my location. “His brother is ten-thirty-one. Stand by.”
“Roger that,” comes Margaret’s voice.
I look down at the boy. “Don’t worry. We’re going to find your brother.”
He raises his tear-streaked face to mine. I see freckles on fat cheeks and a nose that’s runny and red from crying. He’s trying to be brave, but can’t seem to take his eyes off the woods.
“I have an idea,” I tell him. “Come on.”
When I take his hand, he follows me to the Explorer. I open the door and flick on the overhead emergency lights. I reach for the spotlight handle, swivel the beam, and focus it on the spot where Tomasetti disappeared.
“Want to toot the horn a couple of times?” I ask.
He blinks, starting to calm down, and nods. “You think it’ll help?”
“I think if Sammy hears it, he’ll come this way.” I indicate the horn. “Go ahead. Give it a shot.”
Anxious to help, the boy uses the heel of his palm and lays on the horn. Once. Twice. Three times.
“Good job.”
The boy looks up at me, his lips quivering with an almost-smile.
I’m about to put him in the back seat when Tomasetti emerges from the fog, a boy at his side.
“There he is!” Squealing, Danny launches himself at his brother, runs to him, and envelops him in a halting, uncertain hug. “Where did you go? I thought the monster got you.”
The older boy is discernibly shaking and has a scratch the size of a toothpick on his cheek. “I tripped on that branch in the path and fell.”
Danny’s eyes skim down his brother’s legs. “Did it…”
Sammy blinks hard, too old to cry, but tears on his cheeks nonetheless. “It ran right by me. So close I could have reached out and hit it.”
“Do either of you have any idea what kind of animal it was?” I ask.
Danny shakes his head with an adamance that tells me he has no desire to even ponder the question.
Sammy swallows hard, his eyes flicking from me to Tomasetti and back to me. “I’m not saying it was a monster,” he says, “but it was a monster.”
By the time Tomasetti and I take the boys home to their parents, it’s 3:00 A.M. I’ve just made the turn onto the township road east of where the boys were fishing when my cell phone erupts.
The display tells me the incoming call is from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. I hit SPEAKER and answer with my name.
The caller identifies himself as Martin Hooper, the wildlife officer for Holmes County. “I hear one of your citizens had a close encounter with an aggressive animal this morning.”
“Make that four citizens, two of whom are juveniles.” I recap each incident. “I have a photo of the wound if that will help you identify it.”
“I’d certainly like to see it,” Hooper tells me. “I’m just north of Painters Mill, Chief Burkholder. Southbound on Ohio 83. I’d like to take a look at the scene of the first attack.”
Next to me, Tomasetti recites the GPS coordinates.
“Got it,” Hooper says.
“There’s an old wooden bridge,” I tell him. “We’ll meet you there in a few minutes.”
Skid had never been a fan of the graveyard shift.
Since the chief had promoted Mona from dispatcher to officer, he’d been happily working second shift, which suited him just fine.
The problem was, he liked Mona a little too much, and when she asked him to fill in so she could visit family in Portsmouth, he’d been sucker enough to agree.
“That’s what you get, fool,” he muttered.
To top things off, he hadn’t mustered the nerve to ask her out.
Not even for an after-work-she’s-just-one-of-the-guys beer.
Considering the size of their police department—just four full-time officers, one part-timer, three dispatchers, and the chief—he wasn’t sure it was a good idea. But she sure was cute.
“Skid, ten-eighty-eight,” came the dispatcher’s voice over his radio. Ten-eighty-eight was the ten code for “suspicious activity.”
Frowning, Skid picked up his mike. “What’s the twenty on that?”
“Three forty-five Horseshoe Bend.”
He sighed. “Ten-seven-six.” En route.
Skid made a U-turn at the service station on Fourth Street. He wanted to crank up the speedometer, if only to alleviate his boredom, but the fog was too thick. Still, he blew the stop sign at Hogpath Road and made the turn onto Horseshoe.
It was a quiet stretch on the outskirts of town, older homes on treed lots that backed up to the creek.
Flipping on his overhead lights, he made use of the spotlight affixed outside the cruiser as he idled down the street, keeping his eye on the house numbers, watching for movement.
Last time he responded to a call on this road, a couple of juveniles had taken a sledgehammer to Mr. Morrison’s mailbox.
Through the drifting white mist, he spotted the house number he was looking for and pulled over to the curb.
Using the spotlight, he scanned the area.
Sure enough, at the end of the driveway a trash can had been tossed onto its side.
Several garbage bags were torn open. Trash was scattered in a twenty-foot radius.
He could see the yellow halo of the porch light through the billowing fog, someone standing on the front porch, so he got out and headed that way.
“Mrs. Worthington?” he called out.
“Did you see them?” came a gravelly female voice.
As he neared the porch, he could just make out the silhouette of an elderly woman. It wasn’t until he reached the porch steps that he saw she was wearing a pink housecoat and clutching a baseball bat in her hands.
“Morning, ma’am.” He motioned toward the trash cans. “Looks more like dogs got into your trash.”
“Whatever done that wadn’t no dog, young man.” She gestured with the bat toward the mess. “You should have heard the ruckus. Sounded like a damn frat party.”
“Did you see anyone?”
“With this fog? What do you think?”
Skid resisted the urge to roll his eyes. “What about a vehicle?”
“They was on foot.” Using the bat, she motioned toward the side of the house. “I heard them run around to the back.”
“How long ago was that?”
“A couple of minutes. Must have been three or four of them. Howling like a bunch of damn hellions.”
“Stay put, ma’am. I’ll check it out.”
Grumbling, she closed the door.
Cursing beneath his breath, Skid left the porch.
Chasing a group of juveniles through the woods in heavy fog in the middle of the night wasn’t exactly the way he’d envisioned this shift.
If he was lucky, the dumb shits were long gone.
Yeah, he thought as he made his way around the side of the house, Mona was definitely going to owe him after this. If not a date, then at least a beer.
Drizzle dampened his face as he started toward the backyard. He shone his beam ahead, but the fog was so thick he couldn’t even see the trees that grew along the creek a few yards away.
“Painters Mill Police Department!” he called out. “Come on out here and show me your hands! Now!”
He entered the woods, annoyed because his new boots were getting wet. Visibility was nearly down to zero. Drizzle floated in the yellow beam of his Maglite. He was about to turn around and go back when he heard something move through the grass scant feet away.
“Stop right there!” he shouted. “Get out here!”
The sound that came back at him was part scream, part growl, part … he didn’t know what.
“Police department!” he shouted. “Come here! Now! ”
Something rushed him. Not a person. A black form. Three feet high. Shrieking. Lightning fast. Trying to maintain a safe distance, Skid stumbled back. He caught a glimpse of a large dark form coming straight for him. Some kind of animal.
“What the hell?”
Skid lashed out with his foot. The toe of his boot landed against a body that was as solid as rock.
He was reaching for his service weapon when the thing rammed his legs.
A curse flew from his mouth as he went down.
He brought his Maglite down hard on the beast’s head.
A scream-roar rent the air. The animal tossed its head and charged.
Skid swung the Maglite again, scored another direct hit.
The animal pivoted. A final screech and it galloped into the forest.
Martin Hooper is nothing like the last wildlife officer who covered Holmes County.
His predecessor had possessed a lumberjack persona.
Hooper, on the other hand, is a youngish, scholarly-looking man with cropped hair, a trimmed beard, and wire-rimmed glasses.
He’s about my height with a stout build, wearing his official olive-green uniform and jacket, his badge prominently displayed at his left shoulder.
“Morning!” He calls out the greeting with the glee of a man who has little use for sleep.
Introductions are made and the three of us exchange handshakes. “We have yet to identify the animal,” I tell him.
Tomasetti motions toward the woods. “We actually heard it moving through the brush when we were here earlier, investigating the first attack.”
Hooper raises a brow, intrigued and maybe enjoying the mystery a little too much. “Did you see it?”
“Too dark and foggy,” I tell him. “But we heard it.”
“Low growls mostly,” Tomasetti says. “Heavy bodied, but not very tall. Fast as hell.”
“Hmmm.” Hooper pulls out a small spiral notebook and an old-fashioned lead pencil. “Has anyone gotten a look at it?”
“Not enough to give us a decent description.” I pull out my notebook and read my chicken-scratch notes. “Low to the ground,” I tell him. “Two or three hundred pounds. Pointed ears. Dark in color.”
“Tracks? Paw prints?”
I shake my head. “The only tracks we saw were from deer.”