by Hunter Shea
CHAPTER 5
Benny Franks shivered under a sheet, two blankets and a comforter. Even though the night was humid, he’d turned off the air-conditioning in his room. His stomach had been queasy all night, but it looked like whatever illness had crept into him was taking things to a whole new level. Bubbling noises percolated from his abdomen. His nose had started to run an hour ago and he burned through a box of tissues at NASCAR speed. A pair of sodden hand towels lay draped across his blanketed chest.
Maybe it’s food poisoning, he thought. The pulled pork sandwich he’d had at Summer’s barbecue had tasted a little off. Leave it to his girlfriend to make him sick. She was always experimenting with different food. Just because she watched the Food Network, she thought she was a chef. He remembered the time she’d fed him homemade sushi—though she left out the homemade part at the time—that had landed them both in the ER the next day. He’d shit himself three times before adding a fourth in the car ride to the hospital. They laughed about it now, but it wasn’t funny at all at the time.
Or maybe his stomach was just repulsed by what he saw at the beach. Holy God, that was awful.
Summer had asked him to stay the night, but the way his stomach had been cramping, he’d rather be home alone. Sitting on his couch, watching Gladiator for the twentieth time, he’d started feeling woozy and desperately needed some fresh air. Sitting on the porch only made things worse, so he went for a walk. That seemed to settle things down, so he kept on walking. It was a nice night and the moon gave him plenty of light to see by.
Tired of looking at the same weather-battered homes on his block, he’d jumped in his car and headed for the beach. The state park was closed after dark, but no one really cared if you dipped inside for a bit. He’d pulled in at the western edge of the beach. The ocean air made things even better.
He was just getting back to normal when he spotted what looked like heaps of garbage past a stand of reeds.
Fucking slobs.
It wasn’t like he was about to clean the beach himself, even though there was a trash bin nearby. Let the parks people do it. It’s what they got paid to do.
Only, the closer he got, the more he realized it wasn’t someone’s picnic refuse.
It was someone!
Then he saw the heads. It was two someones.
Stepping onto a matted-down section of reeds, he knelt down to get a closer look at a gelatinous stack of human ruin. Did they blow themselves up? No way. People would have heard it and the beach would be clogged with morbid onlookers.
Whatever comfort he’d restored to his stomach was turned on its head. He gagged. The pulled pork lodged in his throat.
The last thing he wanted was to be connected to this scene. He’d had enough trouble with the law and despite what most people thought, he’d put those days behind him. He ran to the water and let his dinner fly. The Atlantic could have his DNA, not the Montauk PD.
Head reeling, he stumbled back to his car.
Just go home and forget you saw it. Someone will find it soon enough and call the cops.
He started the car, putting his hand on the gearshift.
What if some little kid looking for shells finds them in the morning? That kid would be scarred for life.
He punched the steering wheel, silently debating with himself. He opened his cell phone, then snapped it shut. If he called it in, the cops would have his cell number and easily trace it back to him. He remembered the old phone box beside Hanson’s thrift shop on Main. It was like a tiny monument to another time, before even five-year-olds had their own iPhones.
Would it still work?
When he pulled in front of Hanson’s, he grabbed some quarters out of the console. The phone was nicked with scratches and deep gouges. Some kids must have taken a knife to it for shits and giggles. To his complete surprise, a dial tone sang in his ear when he lifted the phone off the hook.
At least something went his way tonight.
He put his shirt over the mouthpiece and did his best to alter his voice when he connected with the police. He kept it brief and urgent and hung up before they could ask any questions. Then he went back home and crawled into bed, where his stomach decided to pick up right where it had left off.
Revulsion at the bloody mess wouldn’t explain the chills, sweats and runny nose. Of course, every time he thought about the moment he reached down and touched the mass of flesh and red meat, bile would hit the back of his teeth and the chills would deepen.
Why the hell did I do that? Seeing it wasn’t enough?
He always had to take things a step further. It’s what landed him in jail when he was nineteen.
Sure, he’d done some good by calling the cops, but what on earth possessed him to even go near that?
Benny sneezed, filling the hand towel. He’d call Summer in the morning and see how she felt. It was probably the pork. His nighttime discovery just added fuel to the fire.
Dalton and Anita pulled up to a tidy Cape house on Herkimer Street. All of the downstairs lights were on.
Dalton looked at his notepad. “This house belongs to Brian Ventura. He said two really big dogs were going through his garbage. When he went to scare them away, they turned on him and chased him into the house.”
Anita got out of the car. “Let’s hope he got a good look at them.”
Ventura opened the door before Dalton could ring the bell. He looked to be in his midthirties with dark, curly hair and tired eyes. His Mets robe was worn, the ends of the sash tattered. He was slightly stooped over and holding an ice pack to the small of his back.
“Please, come in and have a seat,” he said. “Thanks for coming. I wasn’t sure if I should even call and make a big deal of it at first, but there was something way off about the way those strays acted.”
Dalton eyed the ice pack. “Are you all right?”
He shook his head. “I tripped over one of my garbage pails. Took a nice spill. Nothing some ice and Motrin can’t handle.”
Dalton introduced Anita, who shook his hand.
“If you came to get them,” he said to her, “they’re long gone. As soon as my neighbor turned on his floodlights, they took off like a shot. They were like mini-Thoroughbreds.”
Or very fast ponies, Dalton thought. He asked Ventura to take them through what had happened, which he happily did, complete with plenty of hand gesticulations. Whatever he saw, it had put a damn good scare into him.
“When the lights came on, were you able to see the dogs?” Anita asked. With anxious fingertips, she worried at the end of her ponytail.
“Not really. I’m telling you, they zipped back down my alley way faster than I thought a dog could run.”
“You didn’t catch anything, like an approximate size, color, if they had long or short hair?” Dalton prodded.
Ventura winced when he settled back into his chair and paused to think. “Look, I know they were big, kinda like that dog from the comics.”
“Snoopy?” Dalton said. He wasn’t much of a comics-page guy and Charlie Brown’s beagle was one of the few dog comic characters he knew.
“No, the huge one that gets in all the trouble.”
Anita said, “You mean Marmaduke?”
Brian snapped his fingers. “That’s it.”
“That would be a Great Dane,” Anita said. “They can get pretty big, scarily so for people who’ve never seen one up close before.”
Dalton took down notes. Ventura added, “I think they were short-hair dogs because I would have seen a lot of hair, you know? It happened so fast, I couldn’t tell much. I just know this.”
He stopped to adjust the ice pack. Dalton glanced at Anita, who looked concerned.
“These dogs, they weren’t afraid of me one bit. I didn’t surprise them. I pissed them off. If you find them, you better be real careful.”
Dalton thanked him for calling it in and left a card to reach him if they returned to the yard. He advised Ventura to stay in the house should they come back. He
didn’t need to be told twice.
Back in the car, Dalton looked at his watch and said, “I better get back to the beach. What’s your take?”
Anita tugged on her hair. “I can see one dog, a stray Dane or mastiff, with a bad temper. But two working in tandem? I don’t like it.”
Neither do I, Dalton thought as he turned the car back toward Shadmoor State Park.
CHAPTER 6
By the time Dalton returned to the beach, the sun was cresting on the horizon, hot and amber with promises of a hazy, humid day. Many of the first-responder vehicles were gone. The sun glinted off the sand as if it were a sea of gold. The beaches in Montauk were some of the prettiest in the state—until they were the setting for a grisly double homicide.
He tossed the keys to Mickey, who grabbed them in midair and checked his watch.
“I’m five minutes early, Mick,” Dalton said.
“Lucky for you,” he said, smiling. “The ME’s almost done collecting all the parts. Whatever gas was coming from the bodies is gone, too. All we have to do is keep the early joggers away for a little while.”
A dozen seagulls squawked overhead, circling the area where the bodies lay. Mickey followed Dalton’s gaze and gave a short laugh. “You missed it. One of those sea buzzards swooped down and gobbled up some of the parts. I thought Campos was going to shoot the damn thing out of the sky.”
“As far as they know, it’s just entrails thrown from the back of one of those party fishing boats. A meal’s a meal to them,” Dalton said.
Anita placed a hand over her stomach. “And on that note, I’m heading home. Gray, you call me if anything else comes up, okay?”
“I will. Go home and get some sleep. You earned it.”
She adjusted the strap of the case for her tranquilizer gun over her shoulder and headed for her van, waving back at them.
“Any luck?” Mickey asked. He took a sip of the dregs of coffee in his cup, grimaced and dumped it on the beach. A slight breeze blew the foam cup from his hand and they watched it tumble under Dalton’s car.
“Followed up on a few reports, but no one got a good look at whatever woke them up. They all agreed that whatever they saw, it was huge, like a Great Dane. One guy was chased by a pair of them back into his house.”
“Two dogs together? That’s strange. I wonder if we have one of those fight-dog places around. You know, those Michael Vick jackwads who abuse dogs so they’ll kill anything in sight? You think it could have anything to do with this?”
Dalton massaged some of the tension from his neck. “I haven’t a clue. If it’s dogs, what kind of dogs could do that? Anita said it looks like a lion tore those people apart. But there’s no way a lion, or a tiger or bear, could make it all the way out here without riling half the people on the island. I think some lunatic lost his mind. Hopefully the ME can pull some prints, give us some answers.”
Mickey clapped him on the back. “Bet you didn’t think you’d be dealing with psycho crap like this out here, did you?”
“No. It is kind of out of place.”
“You have no idea. I’ve been working Suffolk County a long time and I’ve never seen anything like it. Is it weird that I’m starving?”
“For you, no.”
The first jogger of the day, a woman in her forties in a black tracksuit, her hair tied up and earbuds firmly in her ears, approached the crime scene, oblivious. “I got this,” Dalton said. He intercepted her before she could get too close. Jogging in place, she asked him a few questions, which he declined to answer, then turned and went back the way she’d come.
It went like that for the next couple of hours. Dalton kept checking in on the progress of the ME. Almost everything had been collected, bagged and tagged. Sergeant Campos left along with Mickey not long after. Dalton stayed around with a couple of guys from the Montauk PD. One of them was Officer Norman Henderson.
“Randy Jenks wasn’t home,” he told Dalton.
“Any chance he may have crashed at a friend’s house?”
Henderson stared at Randy’s car, scratching his beer belly. “I doubt it. If I had money to bet, I’d put it all on Randy being one of those bodies. Now we have to find out who the woman was.” He considered the news crews. A pretty young brunette talked to the camera, the wind blowing her hair across her face. “If that is Randy, I don’t want to be the one to tell his mother. This will kill her. And I really hope she doesn’t find out by watching the news. If she sees Randy’s car on TV, she’ll assume the worst.”
“Should we tell them to keep their cameras away from that area?” Dalton was more than happy to relocate them to another part of the beach.
“If you do, they’ll get more curious than ever, and you can guarantee that they’ll focus on the car. Better to let them yammer where they are.”
By eight o’clock, a new shift of county cops came to relieve him. Dalton stuck around to fill them in, telling them they should appreciate the fact that the bodies had been taken away. Everyone was stunned by the severity of the murders. A typical crime out here was a celebrity getting drunk and making a scene in a fancy restaurant. He left the beach at nine.
He was glad he’d moved to his tiny apartment in Montauk. When he’d first joined the force, he lived near Queens, which was another world and hours away. Now that the adrenaline had worn off, he barely made the ten-minute drive home without falling asleep at the wheel.
After a long, hot shower and before crashing in his darkened bedroom, he rooted around his drawers for a road map of Montauk and some Post-it notes. He dropped them on his living room table, yawned so hard and long his jaw cracked, and stumbled into bed. Maybe things would make more sense after a few hours of sleep.
Kelly first mistook her alarm for the chiming of the ice cream truck. In her dream, she ran down her driveway dressed in a one-piece bathing suit, her wet hair loose and wild, shouting for the ice cream man to stop. If she didn’t get a Creamsicle, the rest of the day would be ruined.
The dream shattered and she bolted up in bed long enough to slam a hand down on the snooze button. She settled back into her pillow and moaned.
It was Saturday morning. She wasn’t going to spend the day swimming in the pool and she sure as hell wasn’t going to wait around for the ice cream man. No, she had to get up for work at the Montauk information center. All she wanted to do was fall back into her dream, to a time before she had real responsibilities and summers meant total and absolute freedom.
Her head pounded. When she tried to move onto her side to get comfortable, a barbed pain rocketed up her leg. Cringing, she looked at the clock. If she was lucky, she’d slept two hours. She just couldn’t shut down. Joey invaded every thought.
Well, Joey and the dull throb in her ankle.
While she pondered calling in sick, she kicked the covers off so she could go to the bathroom. Kelly looked down at her ankle, wondering if she’d somehow twisted it when she tried to get away from that dog last night. The way it felt, she had to have a nice bruise.
She had to grab a pillow and bite down to hold back her scream.
“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” she stammered, flicking her hands to work out her mounting anxiety.
Her entire foot, from the ankle down, looked like it’d been driven over by a garbage truck. Her normally pale skin was mottled black and red and varying shades of purple. She felt a sick heat building under her tainted flesh.
Clear pus seeped from under the wet bandage.
Kelly had to drag her leg behind her as she dashed to the bathroom to throw up. Her stomach heaved until her ribs ached. Trembling on her knees, she voided everything until she was left convulsing with dry, painful hiccups.
She pulled herself up, holding on to the edge of the sink.
Her face was pale and beaded with sweat. Gray smudges underlined her eyes.
“How can I get so sick so fast?” she asked her ghostly reflection.
Now that the vomiting was over, the chills settled in.
&nb
sp; The information center would have to live without her today. Kelly limped back to bed and called her boss. For once, she didn’t have to fake sounding sick.
And what the hell was up with her foot? Did she break something? It hurt like hell when she put pressure on it.
This is going to ruin everything!
If she didn’t get herself together by tonight, she might lose Joey—again. That couldn’t happen.
She had to practically shout at her body to get off the bed and go back to the bathroom. While she searched for some aspirin, her mother knocked on her door.
“Time to get up, honey. I’ll drive you to work today. Your father’s playing the Lawn Ranger.”
Kelly fumbled with the childproof top. It popped off and landed in the toilet with a plop.
“I’m not feeling so good, Mom,” she said. “I already called in. I’m just going to go back to sleep.”
“Is there anything I can get you? You want something to drink or some toast?”
“No, I don’t need anything. I just want to sleep.” She dropped four aspirin on her tongue, chasing them down with a glass of water. She gagged, but forced herself to keep the pills down.
Somehow, she stumbled back into bed and pulled the covers up to her chin. Her foot felt like it was on fire. Hopefully the aspirin would take the swelling down, as well as the pain. She had to see Joey later.
Her mother came in, breaking the rule Kelly had set when she’d turned sixteen. Normally, an infraction like this would lead to a mini-war. She didn’t have it in her at the moment to fight.
“Oh, you don’t look good at all.” She pressed her lips to Kelly’s head. “You have a nice fever going.”
“I just took some pills. I’m going back to sleep.” Kelly rolled over, wincing when her good foot brushed against her bruised foot.
“How about I get you some burnt toast? It’s good for your stomach.”
“I hate burnt toast, Mother. Can you please just let me sleep?”
