Cash Cassidy Adventures: The Complete 5-Book Series (Plus Bonus Novels)

by K. T. Tomb

  Had it been so long since Mexico? In any case, she couldn’t see herself parting with the old pistol, or her old truck, any time soon. And on that note, she would not be letting go of her upcoming project, that was for sure. Lux had a reputation to uphold if not the lifestyle to go with it. It wasn’t like she had much else other than her truck, her gun, and her boots. She wondered if she could get any government grants for being the most Texan woman of all time, but reminded herself that that wouldn’t be a very Texan thing to do.

  Leaving the weapons free area, pausing to grab a soda and sparking her last cigarette, she looked at her truck through the window of the shooting range over the head of the balding receptionist, Tony. Tony, as usual, tutted at her and pointed to the no smoking sign without even looking at it. She enjoyed their game, although they had perhaps spoken only twenty words to each other in the two years she had been frequenting this place. She knew his name was Tony from his name badge. She stepped outside and put a booted foot on the thirty-five inch tire of her truck. Her rundown 1978 Ford F-150 pickup sat by the curb like a sad puppy, the headlights giving her their best dejected gaze. The vehicle was definitely in need of some repairs, if not scrapping completely. Hopefully, when she was paid for this job, she could finally get some of the mechanical work done that was becoming rather urgent. Maybe even some of the aesthetic work, too, or at least swap out the seat covers for something that hadn’t fallen out of an 80’s sitcom. She was glad she had invested in getting the brush guard installed and the suspension lifted. If this contract was going to be as rough as the client had surmised, those improvements would certainly come in handy. If it turned out to be as lucrative as the client had predicted, then old Betsy would be getting the ultimate mud truck spa treatment.

  She looked around and then snuck a peek at her watch. It was three o’clock, right on the dot. The sweltering Texas heat poured down on her head from the sun high above her. Through her open window, she grabbed her straw cowgirl hat and swept her hair back from her face as she put it on and sat back to wait. Tardiness was not one of her customs, although it appeared apparent to her after fifteen years of adulthood that this philosophy was woefully under-subscribed. Like her services, it appeared.

  Fortunately for her limited patience, it wasn’t long before a sleek sedan pulled up to the park. The midday light reflected off the shiny surface, momentarily blinding her despite her knockoff aviator sunglasses. She squinted at the sedan, fixing her customary impassive expression to hide her irritation. It wouldn’t do to piss off the client, at least not until he’d paid. The door opened and a twiggy driver popped out and bobbed around the side to the passenger door. The driver opened the rear passenger door with a magnificent sweep, as if displaying some sort of grand treasure to the world.

  The treasure turned out to be a very thin and very old man who hobbled out, flailing a stick to get leverage on the baking asphalt. He was so wizened he could barely have topped five foot. Without that cane, she was sure that he would have toppled in the breeze like a dried-up leaf. He had a thin white beard, but only a handful of long white hairs sprouting from the top of his head. Certainly anyone else would have cut them off by now, she thought. He reminded her of the KFC colonel in miniature and he could have been older than God. But she kept her face well-schooled. The little man may look ridiculous, but he was paying her an even more ridiculous amount of money for the most ridiculous project of her life. Low on cash and lower on luck, she needed that money; so she needed that little man to see respect on her face instead of disdain or merriment at his appearance. She felt unkind for thinking it. She had been without the company of people too long, and it was as usual, having a misanthropic effect.

  “Hello,” she said when he had painfully made it several steps closer. “You must be Dr. Stevens.”

  The man wobbled, tottered over to her and sat on a bench opposite her truck with a great sigh. It was a louder sound than she had expected him to be able to produce, but she forced herself to appreciate his effort in getting out of his car at all to say what he had to say. She spun and parked her behind on the hood of her car, and then had to stand again. The hood was easily hot enough to cook meat on.

  So cool, she thought.

  Stevens at least pretended not to notice, but she was sure that the little man’s mouth curled slightly in a smile.

  “Aye. I am Dr. Stevens. And you must be Lux Branson, I assume?”

  “Yes, sir,” she grinned, only partly falsely. “Pleased to meet you.”

  She bent in slightly to take his hand, trying not to break it off in her grip. There was nearly a foot of height difference between them.

  “You’ve quite the handshake there, dear. It’s a lost art, don’t you think?”

  “No, I think people are just lazy,” she said, and instantly regretted it.

  Small talk had never been her strength. Now, sitting on a park bench beside her in the Texas heat was a little old man who was about to fund several years of tracking adventures that she’d had to miss out on, as well as the lucrative guide’s jobs that usually came along with them. Here she was, sitting down and telling him that he had the wrong idea about handshakes.

  Dr. Stevens’ crinkly face expanded to hide all his features except for his mouth as he let out a dry, cackling noise. For a moment she thought that the fossil was going to die on her right then and there, which would put a severe dent in her travel plans.

  “I suppose that’s the best answer I’ve ever got!”

  It was a laugh. He was laughing! Lux was relieved, but resolved to keep herself in check from then on out. She was hardly gregarious, which was fine so long as she didn’t have to engage with other human beings, ever. When she did, this sort of social error was commonplace.

  “So tell me Lux, about this so-called ‘tracking’ ability of yours. I’ve heard you’re the best.”

  Dr. Stevens lay his thick cane against the bench and caught her with his little rheumy eyes. They were old eyes, eyes that had seen a lot – perhaps even too much – of the world. Lux had seen enough of the world too, enough to know when she was being deliberately needed. So-called, indeed.

  “Well, I’ve worked as a skip tracker for about seven years now. There isn’t anywhere someone can run where I won’t find them. I haven’t failed yet, and I don’t intend to.”

  Bounty hunting paid, but barely. Still, no harm in taking pride in a job well done, no matter if it was usually luring people into traps with her looks so she could cart them off to jail.

  Dr. Stevens nodded slowly.

  “And other things?” His eyes seemed to clear. Strange. Like she was watching the process of Stevens manually focusing his eyes with strength of will alone.

  “What do you mean ‘other things’?” she said.

  “You can find people, but can you track things? Non-human things?”

  Lux wasn’t sure what he meant. Animals? Why not just say, ‘animals’ then?

  “If it leaves a trail, I can track it,” she said confidently, though she didn’t feel anywhere near as confident as she sounded. It had, after all, been a while since she had fired a gun at an animal. Hunting for sport had been drilled into her as a child, and then firmly drilled out of her by a burgeoning moral code that began on Kodiak Island, years ago. Lux had been tracking and hunting since she could stand up and hold a rifle. When she was seventeen and had dropped out of high school, she had spent every bear season in Alaska as a hunting guide and her charges had never gone home empty-handed. In her mind, that was some of the most stringent hunting that the continental U.S. had to offer. Slowly but surely, the thrill of watching fat, gloating morons gun down beautiful, dangerous animals paled. Walking away from animal hunting with no idea of how to support herself financially, she had returned to Texas, lost and freelancing with the local sheriff.

  Lux had tracked a man through the woods for a week once, right through the depths of east Texas, and those were some mean woods. But she had found the man and brought him in. Surely wi
th all her experience and expertise, whatever Dr. Stevens had in store for her would be a walk in the park. Her memories had taken her away from the conversation, but she found Stevens waiting patiently for her to come back to him. Polite to a fault, this one.

  “Good. What if you don’t believe it’s there?” he said.

  Lux was thoroughly stumped. What type of question was that? If she was tracking something, it had to be there. If she didn’t believe it was there, then she looked elsewhere.

  “Then I retrace my steps to find where I lost it,” she hazarded.

  “I mean something that you do not believe in. A creature, let’s say, a creature that is just a legend.”

  Lux breathed through her teeth. She had been commissioned by cryptid hunters before. Each time, she ended up dashing their lifetime supply of hope on the rocks. They were frauds, dreamers, conspiracy theorists. Not logical people, with no understanding of the wild. She would track a creature with them for two days before catching it and proving that it was a simple lizard, nothing special. But Dr. Stevens was different from the cryptozoologists she had met before. He was wealthy for a start; that much was clear.

  “In that case, I would follow the trail until I discovered what was creating it, legendary creature or no. Then, once I have proved that the creature doesn’t exist, I receive full payment anyway.”

  Dr. Stevens gave her a wrinkly smile.

  “That, my dear, is exactly what I wanted to hear,” he said.

  Lux wasn’t at all sure that it was. She had been under the impression that Dr. Stevens wanted her to track down a person and had expected some story about his wayward grandchild having run off to Chile and broken off contact. She had worked a few jobs like that as well, though she wasn’t at all sure that they were always within the strictest confines of the law. Stevens told her he had assembled a team for her already, four others. She took a piece of paper which listed a rendezvous point just outside of Belle. A wild goose chase, funded by a crazy old man. It looked like her run of bad luck was going to extend a little while longer. The paper had thinly scrawled handwriting that betrayed the shaky hand of the author. Clearly Stevens had written this himself. ‘Piney Woods’ was printed unsteadily at the top.

  Lux had heard the rumors about what lived in there. She had been raised on the outskirts of the woods and knew they were big enough to harbor any monster man could dream of. Almost every dangerous creature in America was represented in those woods. All of them had at “one time or another” been shot by herself or her father. Nothing had escaped the Branson family’s aim when she was a girl.

  “What is it that I’m tracking?” Lux asked with her heart sinking.

  Dr. Stevens appraised her carefully, but said nothing.

  “I can’t trace what I don’t know.”

  He reached a trembling hand into his pocket. What he pulled out was a rumpled, slightly coffee-stained envelope, folded over once. It was thick with papers inside, and battered white corners poked out of the opening.

  “Here,” he said. “This is the information you need. And this,” he pulled out another packet of folded paper from his other pocket, “is your team.”

  Lux took both and stared at them. She had a tight feeling in her stomach. There was no way she could afford to turn down the project. She had tracked animals all over the States, but Piney Woods changed things. It was a surreal place, thick with wilderness, wild memory and her personal history.

  Dr. Stevens fumbled through the team envelope.

  “This man here,” he brandished a small photo at her, “is Dr. Samuel Smith. He is an anthropologist. You are the tracker, but you need to show him all the evidence you collect. The rest is in here,” he tapped the two envelopes. “You will receive payment upon completion of the assignment.”

  She stared down at the coffee rings on the cream paper.

  Sloppy, she thought.

  Dr. Stevens heaved himself to his feet, his cane digging into the dry Texas dirt.

  “Wait,” she said, standing as he began to make his way back to the sleek sedan.

  “Why are you sending us out to find this… thing?”

  “That is something you will have to discover later, Lux.”

  She did not like that answer, but she scooped up the envelopes and watched the man slowly shuffle back to the sedan and disappear inside. The Texas sun baked down on her head, and at that moment, Lux resolved that this would be her last contract tracking job. With the money from this job, she could buy some new equipment, maybe a truck and finally work where she wanted, when she wanted and for whom she wanted.

  ***

  Belle, Texas was tiny; minute in the grand scheme of things. It was a community of rundown houses and hot swamp air that cloistered against every available inch of skin. The boggy forest stopped just short of the town, creeping up unnoticed on city limits, encroaching like a hungry predator, waiting eagerly to take back what had once belonged to it.

  Lux eyed the forest as she stepped down from her truck into the parking lot of a little diner called Crawford’s Choice. The two envelopes were tucked safely into her pocket, bulging out and making it impossible for her to forget them. She had promised herself that she would not open them until she was in Belle. When it was too late to chicken out. She had to take the job.

  She perched in a corner booth and ordered coffee, her fingers tracing the edge of the paper through her jeans. The crinkling noise it made was addicting to create. The brightly lit diner was friendly and crowded; jovial old men discussing the changing times, teenagers badgering each other, parents were reining in their wild rug-rats. The hubbub had not changed.

  She carefully opened the envelope containing the details of her team. There were four photographs inside, each with a name scribbled on the back. Dr. Samuel Smith, whose photo Dr. Stevens had waggled around, and three others: Julie North, Hal Woodward, and Ben Makarios.

  Lux felt relieved. They all looked sun-weathered and capable of handling Piney Woods. She had been afraid that she would be stuck with a bunch of city folks who couldn’t get their shoes dirty and thought they knew everything. But they all had scars, tan lines, and that dark glint of the wild in their eyes.

  She pulled out the information sheets on each one of them and began to read. They were a strange lot, her team. Dr. Smith was an anthropologist. Julie North was a biologist and survivalist. Hal Woodward was… well, she wasn’t sure what he was. The sheet read simply: adventurer. Ben Makarios was even less titled. His sheet gave him no label at all, and only the faintest of descriptions.

  Lux had worked as a bounty hunter long enough to recognize a criminal and she would bet her life that Ben Makarios was a felon; whether he had been convicted of anything was irrelevant. His eyes were a hard, steely blue and three teardrops were tattooed down his cheek which indicated death, sentence length or a victim of prison rape, according to prison tattoo culture.

  “Do you need another minute?” her waitress, bearing the name tag Jane, asked, her eyes too curious as she scanned the table.

  “No.” Lux shook her head. “I’d like whatever the breakfast special is,” she said, sliding the photos into a pile and flipping them over.

  Jane jotted it down on her little notepad.

  “Anything else, hun?”

  Lux cringed at the common term of endearment. Over-familiarity was anathema.

  “No, thanks.”

  Jane nodded and moved on. Lux was about to pull the photos back out when the door tinkled and she glanced up. There was no doubt about it; the woman who walked in was Julie North, biologist and survivalist. Julie had curly brown hair that was cropped close to her skull and barely skirted the base of the battered Wisconsin Timber Rattlers baseball cap that sat crushed low on her brow. Julie took a seat against the opposite wall and ordered coffee. Her gray eyes scanned the room every few seconds, not looking for a familiar face, but watching for potential danger.

  Lux pulled out Julie’s sheet again. She was from Wisconsin, born and raised.
After high school, she had studied at Madison before joining the Peace Corps and heading off to Guatemala. Julie had no next of kin listed.

  Lux frowned. There was a small box for next of kin on all four sheets, and none had a single person listed. A cold feeling crawled into Lux as she absorbed that. Lux herself had only one sister to whom she never spoke.

  She looked back at Julie and this time, made eye contact. She could see recognition in Julie’s eyes. For a moment, neither moved. Coolly breaking the temporary Mexican standoff, with casual grace Julie picked up her coffee and purse and wove her way across the diner. Lux scrambled to tuck all the papers and photos away and stuffed it all in her pocket just in time.

  “Hello,” Julie said. “Can I sit?”

  Lux nodded and held out her hand. “Lux Branson.”

  “Julie North.”

  “Have you met any of the guys?” Lux said.

  They were due to meet that evening, but she had decided to arrive earlier. She needed to think, and she needed to do it in Belle.

  “I’ve worked with Dr. Smith before, but not the other two,” Julie said, as she slid onto the bench.

  She craned her head around to scan the diner and then propped her back up against the wall so she could see Lux on one side and the diner on the other.

  “Yeah? What’d you think of him?” Lux looked down to her lap and fiddled with the assignment envelope. She should open it, read it, but every time she tried, something stopped her. She already knew what was in there.

  “He was strange.”

  Julie’s eyes flicked up to the door and back as a mother of three herded her wild-haired children to a table. “I mean, he was fine, you know, just a little weird. He studies mostly primatology and biological anthropology. Talks about bones all the time. But he’s a pretty great guy I guess.”

  Lux nodded along and sipped her coffee. Her stomach rumbled with an even mixture of hunger and nerves, neither of which were assisted by the roughly brewed caffeine. She wished the kitchen would hurry up, although she had no idea what she’d ordered.