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.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
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.
“Where are they?” Heather’s disembodied voice asked from the other end of the couch.
Joan was beginning to worry something had gone terribly wrong. What if they’d found the murderer? What if he’d killed both men? What if he was on his way to the shack right now?
Something bumped against the door, and she let out a squeal of fear. Heather launched herself from the other end of the couch to press up against Joan, gripping her arm tight.
The door opened, and a lightning flash illuminated Anthony’s face. Joan could have wept with relief.
But then another flash illuminated Samuel, leaning heavily on Anthony.
She jumped to her feet. “What happened?”
“Why didn’t you light the lamps?” asked Samuel.
“What lamps?” asked Heather, the creak of the couch indicating she’d stood. “Where were you?”
“Ran into an alligator,” said Anthony through the darkness.
The lightning flashed again, and he quickly sat Samuel down in a chair before they were plunged into total darkness all over again.
“Matches are over the stove,” Samuel wheezed. “Oil lamp on the windowsill.”
Joan could hear Anthony feeling his way across the room.
“You’re hurt again,” Heather whimpered, brushing Joan’s shoulder as she made her way toward Samuel.
Anthony struck a match, and Joan instantly felt better. He put it to the wick of a hurricane lamp, and light filled the little shack.
“There’s another on the front window,” said Samuel, and Anthony took care of it.
“Let me look,” said Heather.
“I’ll get one of the water bottles,” said Joan, somewhat surprised that Heather was offering to play nurse-maid. Her sister didn’t have the strongest stomach in the world, and an alligator bite might be pretty horrific.
She prayed that it wasn’t serious and took comfort in the fact that Samuel was conscious and at least walking with help.