Barbara Dunlop - A Secret Life

Give him rats and muggers and street gangs any day of the week. At least he knew how to avoid those.

He hopped down into the airboat and grabbed the knapsack from the bench seat. Another breeze came up, and he inhaled the cooler air in relief as he climbed back onto the dock and headed up the stairs.

“You have everything you need?” Samuel was asking the women as Anthony came through the door.

“Anthony.” Heather rushed toward him. “My hero.”

Samuel snorted. “I cleared the cottonmouth out of the privy.”

“I need water before I worry about the outhouse,” she retorted. “There’s biology at play here.”

Anthony grinned. Okay, so Heather could grow on you after a while. He unzipped the pack and handed a water bottle to each of them, then opened his own and drank half of it down.

“So, what else is around here?” he asked Samuel.

Samuel nodded toward the north. “Old Man Barns used to live about a mile up the shore. I’m sure he must be dead by now. And there was a bizarre little hippie place down the other way. Don’t remember anyone living there full-time. There’s a network of trails out back that’ll take us to both.”

“Quieter than using the boat?” asked Anthony.

Samuel nodded.

Joan looked at Anthony. “You think there’s someone out there now?”

“The guy who broke in the second time pretty much vanished into thin air.”

The night photographs Samuel had taken had turned out not too badly, but nobody had seen the man around town.

Joan looked worried. She also looked as if she needed a hug of reassurance. She was obviously holding back because of Heather and Samuel. She and Anthony hadn’t announced their new relationship to the world. Not that he knew what their new relationship was, exactly.

He only knew he wanted to hug her, too.

He touched her shoulder, but it was wholly unsatisfying. “We’re just going to look around. If we see anything suspicious, we’ll report it to the police.”

Joan gave a slow, uncertain nod. “Okay.”

He turned to Samuel. “You ready?”

“Let’s do it.”

ANTHONY WAS dripping with sweat by the time they found Old Man Barns’s shack. Despite the earlier tease of a wind, the air had stilled and the temperature had crept up several degrees. They found the hippie place easily enough. But it was empty, and had been for some time.

Then they’d circled back farther into the forest, trying to find evidence of human activity. Again, nothing.

They were coming up on the Barns shack along a trail through the bush. There was nothing to indicate humans had used it recently, but then it wasn’t completely grown over like some of the old trails Samuel had pointed out.

Suddenly, Samuel put a hand on Anthony’s shoulder.

Anthony came to an immediate halt, twisting his head to look at Samuel’s expression. Samuel tapped his ear and then pointed to the shack. Anthony cocked his head.

They waited without breathing for a few seconds, and Anthony heard a thump. Somebody was inside the shack.

His heart rate jumped, and his sweat turned cold against his skin. The thump was replaced by a scraping noise, as if something were being dragged across the floor.

Samuel indicated with hand signals that he thought they should approach from the back. Anthony nodded.

They backed into the underbrush and made their way around in a wide circle. Scrapes and scratches formed on Anthony’s bug-bitten face and arms. Deep down, he wondered if they were crazy. But he also knew he had to figure out who was threatening Joan.

They made it within ten feet of the back wall of the shack, still camouflaged by the underbrush and the hanging moss.

The noise continued without pause or change. Whoever was inside didn’t know he’d been discovered.

Anthony pointed to the right. “Meet at the front door?” he whispered.

Samuel nodded. “Might as well find out if he’s armed.”

They split up to round the building.

On the way, Anthony checked the small window at his side of the building, but it was dusty and greasy and impossible to see through.

He carefully rounded the final corner to see Samuel coming the other way. Samuel checked out the front window, then shrugged his broad shoulders. He obviously couldn’t see anything, either.

They carefully inched toward the door. It was half-open, sagging on a crumbling jamb. The scuttling inside increased.

Anthony reached out and shoved the door open. Then he and Samuel flattened themselves against the outside wall.

The noise abruptly stopped. But no bullets rang out.

“Hello in the shack,” Anthony called, on the off chance it was an innocent tourist or some kind of squatter.

No answer.

“Get yourself out here,” Samuel called, more menacingly this time, still crouched low in case whoever it was started shooting.

Still nothing.

Anthony crept a little closer.

Samuel crept a little closer.

Anthony made his way onto the low sagging porch, carefully squinting into the dusty, dim interior, ready to bail if things went wrong. He blinked for a second, thinking he saw bones.

“What?” asked Samuel.

They were bones. “What the hell?”

Samuel swung up on the porch for a better look.

Suddenly, a massive gator burst full-bore through the doorway, its jaw wide-open.

Anthony shouted a warning, leaping out of the way.

Samuel reacted a split second too late.

The gator moved with lightning speed, its jaw snapping down on Samuel’s boot.

SAMUEL IMMEDIATELY grabbed a rock and aimed at the gator’s head.

Anthony went for its tail, gripping it tight and yelling obscenities at the top of his lungs. He reached for a stick and whacked its leathery skin. “Back here,” he yelled. “Back here!”

It opened its mouth for the briefest of instants, and Samuel jerked free, rolling over and over, while the gator shot forward, dragging Anthony with it.

“Can you make the tree?” he yelled to Samuel.

Samuel jumped to his feet, limping in a full run toward a huge oak tree.

“Go, go, go!” he yelled back to Anthony as he scrambled up the first few branches.

The gator turned, and Anthony sprinted for a second tree, gripping a branch on the run and yanking his feet up as the gator snapped from below. He grabbed the next branch, and the next one, and the next one. By the time he stopped to look down, he was about thirty feet above the ground, the monstrous gator standing perplexed below him.

“You okay?” he called down to Samuel.

“Not broken,” said Samuel. “I’m bleeding a bit.” Then he paused. “You sure you’re far enough off the ground?”

Anthony chuckled. “Adrenaline.”

Samuel laughed and shook his head. “I’ll say. I owe you one.”

“No problem. You going to be able to get the bleeding stopped?”

“I think so.” Samuel had already taken off his T-shirt and was tearing it into strips.

Anthony glanced back down. The gator was gazing around the forest with long, slow blinks. It seemed as though he’d forgotten the near miss. Just another day in the life of an alligator, Anthony supposed.

Breathing deeply, he rested his forehead against the rough trunk of the oak tree. “I miss New York,” he griped.

Samuel laughed. “You think this guy developed a taste for Old Man Barns?”

“You see the bones?” asked Anthony.

Samuel nodded as he wrapped a strip of cloth around his ankle. “Looked like they’d been there for a long time. I bet the old guy died of old age.”

Anthony agreed. If a gator had killed Old Man Barns, he would probably have dragged him into the bayou. “Seems likely. You going to be able to walk?”

“I think so.”

“You’re a freaking dangerous man, you know that?”

Samuel chuckled again. “It really doesn’t seem to be my week.”

“All this and Heather, too.”

Samuel straightened on the branch. “Who says I’m involved with Heather?”

Anthony had seen the intimate look that passed between them when they left the shack. “Do I look stupid?”

Samuel considered Anthony’s position in the tree. “At the moment? To be perfectly honest…”

Anthony groaned and shook his head.

Thunder rumbled above them.

He looked up to see that the clouds had thickened and closed in. The temperature dropped, and a few fat raindrops landed on the leaves around them.

“This just gets better and better,” said Samuel.

“I think you’re a jinx.”

“Are you kidding? I’ve survived a shooting and an alligator attack. What have you done lately?”

Good question. What had Anthony done lately?

A lightning bolt crackled above them, and he wondered if it was meant to punctuate Samuel’s question.

“Well?” Samuel prompted as the rain grew harder.

“I convinced a certain bestselling author not to fire me,” Anthony offered.

“Joan tried to fire you?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Why?”

“Because I booked her on Charlie Long Live.”

Samuel nodded. “I think Heather wanted to fire you for that one, too.”

The light was fading, and Anthony had to squint to see Samuel. “You sure you’re okay?”

Samuel took a deep breath. “I’m hurt, but I’ll live.” Then he nodded toward the ground. “Look.”

Apparently gators weren’t wild about lightning storms, either. While the two men watched, the gator turned tail and ambled down the bank, slipping silently into the rain-speckled bayou.

Anthony would have been lying if he didn’t admit climbing down to the ground again made him jumpy. But he needed to get back to Joan. And they needed to take a close look at Samuel’s ankle. And they needed to look somewhere else for clues.

BY THE TIME the last of the daylight faded, Joan was a jumping mass of nerves. The lightning provided sporadic flashes, but that just made things worse. The wind whipped at the hanging moss, creating fleeting, ghostly images that made the atmosphere even more eerie.