The Montauk Monster (6 page)

Dalton arrived at the same time as the ambulance. It was from Southampton Hospital. He’d never met the two female EMTs before. They were met at the door by Les Salvatore. “Come in, quick! My wife is hurt real bad.”

“After you,” Dalton said to the serious-looking EMT. She nodded and was followed by her partner. Dalton looked over his shoulder to see quite a few lights flickering on in the surrounding houses. This would be the talk of the neighborhood tomorrow.

He wasn’t prepared for the sight that greeted him when he walked into the living room. The man’s wife was stretched out on the couch. One leg rested on the coffee table, the bottom half wrapped in a bloody towel. She was crying, great heaving sobs. He could hear the pain in her voice.

One of the EMTs bent close to her and asked, “What’s your name?”

The woman winced and replied, “Ma-Margie.”

While the one talked, the other unwrapped her leg. The wound was horrendous. Dalton could see the fallow of bone beneath the glistening maroon of torn muscle. He had to clamp down on his back molars to keep himself in check.

Turning to Les Salvatore, he said, “Tell me what happened.”

Les’s eyes darted between Dalton and his wife. He desperately wanted to be by her side, not talking to a cop.

“We need to let them do their job right now,” Dalton assured him. “When you called 911, you said your wife was bitten by a wild animal.”

Les swallowed hard, his shaking hands rubbing the back of his neck. “Yes, she said one bit her. But there were three in the yard.”

“Did you see them?”

“No. I was asleep when it happened. I only came down when I heard her screaming. They—they smashed against our back door, trying to get in. The whole thing is destroyed.”

The EMTs wrapped Margie’s leg in gauze and took her temperature.

“I’ll go take a look. Stay with your wife while they get her settled down. I’ll be back.”

Les hurried to the couch and grabbed his wife’s hand. She looked up at him with pleading eyes.

What the hell happened? Three dogs this time. And they tried to bust down the door? He had to see it for himself.

Neighbors were gathering outside, trying to peer into the Salvatores’ windows and open front door. He motioned to them to step back. “Everyone, please go back to your houses. It’s a minor emergency. Give your neighbors their privacy, please.” He knew his words would have no effect, but it was worth a try.

He trotted to the back of the house. A pair of lights lit up the yard.

The screen door, or what was left of it, had been torn off the top hinge. The bottom looked like an aluminum foil ball. The wood door was splintered in a dozen or more places. A sizable hole had been punched into its center.

“Fuck me sideways,” Dalton muttered. Dogs couldn’t do this.
Rams or bulls, maybe
. It was a miracle the door held.

A long smear of blood stained the bottom panel of the door, with more spatters on the patio itself. The table was also destroyed. Pebbled glass crunched under his shoes. If Anita thought two animals working in tandem was next to impossible, wait until she heard about this.

When Dalton returned to the living room, the EMTs had Margie Salvatore on a stretcher.

“Her fever is spiking. We may need to put some ice packs around her,” one of them said to the other. Les stood close by, scared and confused.

Margie’s head swiveled on the small pillow they’d placed under her. Sweat ran down her face. Her eyes were closed and starting to swell, as if she was having an allergic reaction. There was no way he was going to get a description of the animals from her right now. It would have to wait. As they left the house, a couple of Montauk PD cars arrived.

“I’ll stop by the hospital later, see how you’re both doing and if your wife can go through what happened,” Dalton said to Les Salvatore. The man nodded nervously and followed his wife into the back of the ambulance.

Officer Norman Henderson ambled up the walkway while another cop—it was too dark to tell who it was—tried to convince everyone to go home.

“What the hell happened?” Norm asked. He chewed a great wad of gum that made his cheek bulge.

“Another animal attack. This time, it was three. You have to go in the yard and see what the hell they did to the doors. Something weird’s going on here.”

“None of us need to be Sherlock to come to that conclusion,” he said without sarcasm.

Henderson stared at the entrance to the yard as if he was gearing himself up to look at the carnage.

He said, “Speaking of which, I think we just ID’d the couple. Winn and I talked to Hal, you know, the bartender over at the Beach Comber? He said Randy Jenks was there the other night and he left after last call with Rosie Wilson. We verified it with Richie Burnes. He said they left to get to know each other better.”

“Rosie, the old barfly? Randy’s like, what, thirty years younger than her?”

Henderson shrugged his large, round shoulders. “Hey, you drink enough and everyone’s fair game. Randy’d had a bad breakup with his girlfriend of about five years. And you know Rosie.”

Dalton stared at the Salvatore house. “Yeah, I
knew
Rosie.”

“One-eleven, please respond to a 211 at 14 Marty Drive.”

Dalton answered quickly, “In progress?”

“Negative.”

“Looks like another busy night,” Henderson said. “I’ll follow you.”

What now
, Dalton thought as he ran to his car. It felt like the whole town was coming apart at the seams.

He couldn’t shake the feeling that something far, far worse was yet to come.

When Mandy Sullivan first heard the glass break, she’d been in the bathroom patting a cold, wet washcloth to her head for the second time that night. Menopause was once again having its fun with her, refusing to let her sleep, scorching her with hot flashes and making her feel like crap. She needed sleep desperately and was contemplating calling in sick to work in the morning.

She’d just wrung the washcloth out when something crashed into the kitchen downstairs. She heard a lot of frantic movement and her chairs being scattered about. Holding in a scream, she ran into her bedroom and locked the door. Her husband, Chris, was up and rooting around the closet for his old rifle.

“What are you going to do with that thing? It’s just an air rifle.”

His graying hair was as wild as his eyes. The rifle was pointed at the floor. “It’ll put a hurt into whoever’s down there.”

Somehow, she’d convinced him to stay in their room and call the police.

Whoever had been crashing about either left or hid when the two cop cars pulled up. Chris opened the bedroom window and called down, “Someone’s in the kitchen. It sounded like they were trashing the place. They must have heard you coming because they’re not making any noise right now.”

The young county cop nodded and cautiously moved toward the house and out of his sight line. The older local cop said, “Stay right where you are. We’ll call you down when everything is clear.”

Chris and Mandy had been meaning to have an alarm installed. Their house, a three-story Victorian, sat in a lot all its own with no neighbors in clear sight. It was a beautiful place. They’d gotten it for a song when the housing market tanked. Mandy was always paranoid about it standing out too much and being an easy target for burglars. Chris assured her constantly that burglars were not a concern, not out here in Montauk. They left New Jersey in the rearview mirror specifically so they didn’t have to worry about things like that.

And now this. Chris groaned in silence, knowing that Mandy would put the full-court press on him to move.

“You can come down now,” one of the cops said from downstairs.

As they walked out of the bedroom, Mandy looked back and slapped his arm. “Would you please put that air rifle away? What do you want, to be shot by the cops by accident?”

When she saw the state of her kitchen, she had to bite her tongue to keep from screaming.

“What kind of animals would do this?” she said through gritted teeth. Chris held on to her shoulders.

The kitchen was demolished. The thieves, or better yet, vandals, had reduced her table and chairs to splinters. The refrigerator had been tipped onto its side and the entire contents were strewn about the floor. A thick sludge of liquids oozed from the tiled kitchen and onto the dining room carpet. The double window over the sink had been smashed to pieces, filling the sink with shards of glass.

“I know it’s hard,” the younger cop said after introducing himself, “but do you see anything that might be missing?”

Chris looked around. “How the hell can we tell? I do know what’s broken.”

Even the oven door had been ripped off. These vandals were thorough, if anything.

“Why us?” Mandy asked.

The cop brought a dining room chair over for Mandy to sit on. “I know it’s hard to make sense of this right now. All we can do is get all the facts in order so we can catch the people who did this.”

Mandy smiled, appreciating the sincerity in his face and voice. She began telling him about everything before dialing 911, when there was a knock at the back door. “Dalton, it’s me.”

The cop excused himself and carefully walked through the mess to open the door. The older cop stood on the top step, using his flashlight to scan the yard.

“Sir, do you have a light for the yard?” he asked.

Chris exhaled heavily. “It has a short. I actually meant to have it fixed next week.” Mandy shot him an angry look, as if this were all his fault. Of course, vandals would never break in if he had a working backyard light, especially one that would be on this time of night.

“Well, whoever was here left by the same way they came in, the window. There’s bits of glass out here, and I think I can see depressions in the grass.” He finally looked into the kitchen and whistled. “Holy crap, they did a number on this place. You see any footprints? It’s a little muddy out here.”

The good-looking young cop, Gray something, looked around. “There’s so much food and spilled condiments and juice, it’s just one big mess.” He gingerly stepped to a dry spot. “Wait, see over there? What’s that?”

The cop in the doorway leaned in, holding on to the doorframe to keep from falling. “That can’t be right.”

Chris approached the kitchen but stopped shy of going in. “What do you see?”

“It looks like—paw prints,” the young cop said. He exchanged a look of alarm with the other one.

“There’s no way a dog could knock a refrigerator over,” Mandy said, joining Chris at the kitchen entrance. “And look at my table. That’s solid oak.”

The older cop reached for his walkie-talkie. “I’m calling in for backup.”

“Good idea,” the younger one said. “Ask for Anita Banks if she’s on call.”

Mandy looked at Chris with utter bewilderment. What was happening? Why were the cops suddenly so worried?

“Mr. and Mrs. Sullivan, I just need you to go back to the dining room. I’ll be with you in a minute,” the young one said.

Chris was about to protest but Mandy pulled him back. “Just let them do their job,” she whispered. Her head was spinning. Whether it was from the menopause or the madness that was her kitchen was up for grabs.

She held her husband’s hand tight when he pulled a chair next to hers and sat down. They watched the police as they talked to each other in hushed voices.

No one saw what was about to happen coming, least of all the cop standing on the back step.

And even if they had, there was nothing they could do to stop it.

Henderson leaned in close to Dalton and said softly, “Kid, you may be right. I didn’t want to say it in front of them, but from what I see out here, this was done by animals. Just how many I can’t tell. There are too many tracks and they go all over the place. I’ve done enough hunting in my life to know the difference between human and animal prints. The part that worries me is that only a bear could wreck a room like that. I’ll swear on my mother’s grave that when we get some light back here, we won’t find a single bear track. These prints are big, but they’re not bear.”

Dalton unconsciously balled his fists, clenching them. He hoped to hell that Anita could make it out here now, before things cooled off. Maybe she could tell them what they were dealing with and where the animals were headed. Judging by their strength, he wasn’t sure her tranquilizer gun would be the way to go. This might be the night he used the shotgun in his car.

“I don’t like the idea of a bunch of animals not being afraid of breaking into houses,” Dalton said. “I mean, who the hell ever heard of such a thing?”

Henderson shook his head. “I’ll be damned if I know. It’s like one of those stories where the circus train crashes in the night and the animals descend on the town. Except there’s no circus, no train and we have no idea what’s out there.”

They turned to look into the dark, empty yard. A bat chirped overhead, disappearing behind the stand of pine trees that lined the back of the lot.

When Dalton turned to talk to the Sullivans, a soft, galloping sound caught his attention.

Something was coming.

“Henderson, I think you should—”

It happened too fast for his eyes and brain to register. One second, Henderson was standing in the doorway, his feet planted on the top step. The next, a gray blur darted from Henderson’s left, barreling into the man. He let out a heavy grunt.

And then he was gone.

Dalton paused for a moment, a temporary paralysis that turned his muscles and joints to hardened cement. Shaking it off, he ran into the yard, heedless of his training and the mantra to always use caution.

The yard was empty.

An L-shaped depressed trail in the grass, about the width of a man, snaked away from the house, leading into the pine trees.

He turned to Mandy and Chris Sullivan, who stood holding each other. “Lock this door! Other units are on their way. Tell them I’m in pursuit of whatever took Officer Henderson.”

Both nodded rapidly, neither able to verbalize a coherent reply.

Dalton slammed the door shut and turned his flashlight on. He spoke into the walkie clipped to his shoulder.

“Dispatch, this is one-eleven. I have a downed Montauk PD officer, Norman Henderson. In pursuit.”

He started running.

“One-eleven, are you requesting an ambulance?”

“Yes. I don’t know! Something took him! Send everyone you have out here, now!”

He pumped his legs as fast as they could go, his shoulder slamming into the bark of a tree as he slipped under the thick awning of full, lush limbs. The darkness here was absolute, swallowing the meager illumination from his flashlight. Scanning the ground, he saw the wide track continue through browned pine needles. It weaved around trees while maintaining a direct course deeper into the woods. If he remembered right, the trees would soon peter out, leading to Ditch Plains Beach.

Which was adjacent to the beach at Shadmoor State Park.

“Henderson! Norm!”

His lungs burned as he ran, calling out for the man who had always been his favorite on the Montauk PD. It was Henderson who took the time to show him every nook and cranny of the town when he first arrived, a cherry red recruit who had never gone farther than Jones Beach and thought Montauk was in another world, which, in a way, it was. He and his wife had had him at their house for a couple of barbecues, where there had been as much laughter as food.

He’d be damned if he gave up on him.

He broke through the trees, coming upon an open field of tall grass and ragweed. Again, following the trail was made simple by the indentation in the vegetation. And there was something else: a strange odor that burned his nose. Back under the trees, the strong scent of pine must have kept the heady stink at bay. Now, it smelled like he was running behind an open garbage truck in August.

“I’m coming, Norm!”

Dashing into the sometimes chest-high ragweed, he lost the trail a couple of times but was able to quickly regain his bearings. He stopped for a moment to listen between his ragged breaths. He had to be close behind. Any sound would at least confirm that.

All he heard was a series of waves breaking on the nearby beach.

“Shit.”

He resumed his pursuit, using his hands to block the brittle stalks of ragweed from his face.

The trail and ragweed ended at a small rise overlooking the beach.

Looking down, his stomach clenched.

A wide swath ran in an almost straight line through the sand. It stopped at the surf line.

Dalton leapt down the hill, the soft sand suctioning his feet, trying to hold him back. He ran into the ocean up to his thighs, calling Henderson’s name until his throat hurt. He looked up and down the beach, but could find no reentry point back onto the beach.

The big man, and whatever had taken him, was gone.

Jason Kwap took another hit from his favorite bong, the one shaped like a naked Jenna Jameson. He’d found it in a head/porn shop down in Florida. He’d just finished his second year at the Art Institute of Jacksonville and was enjoying his reunion with his best pal since grade school, Tom Morton. They had big plans. While Jason honed his art skills, Tom stayed closer to home, getting a degree in English at NYU with heavy doses of every writing program they had.

When they graduated, they planned to collaborate on graphic novels and children’s books. Diversity was a good thing. The key was that they worked together and got rich and famous together. Somehow, they were going to be the next Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, or Shel Silverstein and, well, Shel Silverstein.

“Pass me the remote, Jay,” Tom said, leaning as far into the couch as he could.

“No. You’re not changing the channel.”

“Dude, I am not going to get baked to a cooking show.”

Jay passed him the bong. “Are you kidding me? Look at the tits on Giada. And you know she wants the world to see them. Why else would she wear shirts cut down like that?” Then he said in an awful Italian accent, “Now those are-a nice cannolis!”

Tom coughed out a thick lungful of weed smoke. They both laughed, staring at the wide-screen TV. After a minute or so, Tom said, “You’re right, man. Her rack is crazy.”

Jason backhanded him on the upper arm. “I told you. People think I don’t appreciate the classics.” On the screen, Giada rolled out some phyllo dough to make little spinach pastries. The camera panned down to the flour board, giving them a glance at her cleavage as she worked the dough.

“Speaking of racks,” Tom said, taking a long pull from his beer, “you talk to Trish about the party?”

Jason sat in a haze of smoke. He frowned. “I don’t think she’s gonna come.”

“Why not?”

“I think she’s still pissed about my breaking up with her on the limo ride to the prom.” He ran his fingers through the tight curls of his hair.

“It’s been two years.”

“I know. Then again, that’s what I do. I break hearts. The city of Jacksonville has been filled with tears ever since I left.”

Tom grunted. “The town of Montauk has been crying ever since you came back. So, no Trish. Well, I asked Annie and she’s good to go,
and
she’s bringing her three hot cousins visiting from North or South Carolina, like there’s any difference. Counting everyone else, I think we’ll have like twenty people.”

They gave each other a hard fist bump. Jason said, “Sweet. It’ll be nice to get everyone together again. I’m picking up the keg tomorrow afternoon. You need to get like a dozen bags of ice.”

“Got it covered.”

Giada went to commercial and they were about to see if anything good was on Skinemax when something thumped against the sliding glass doors.

“What the hell was that?” Tom asked, staring at the darkness past the glass with wide, watery eyes.

Jason made a motion to get off the couch, then eased back down. “If that was Tim playing around, I’m going to run out there and kick his ass.”

They jumped when the glass rattled again. This time, Jason did get up, clutching the Jenna Jameson bong. “How much will you give me if I make Tim drink the bong water?”

Tom waved him off. “Tim will make you clean up what he pukes with your tongue. He’s a fucking gorilla.”

Jason looked at the door, then at the bong, hefting it.

“Just tell him to cut the crap and come in.”

“You’re such a pacifist,” Jason said.

“I’m a rationalist. Now open the door and tell him to get his fat ass in here.”

Jason walked with bare feet across the cold tile. It was so dark outside. Tim could be hiding anywhere.
So help me, if he tries to jump me, I’m introducing Jenna to his head
, Jason thought as he slid the door open.

Cool, fresh air washed over him.

“All right, asshole, you can come inside. We’ll share. Hurry up. Giada’s coming back on.”

Tim didn’t reply. It was as quiet as an empty funeral parlor, which was weird. Normally, this time of night in the summer, the chirping of crickets was deafening.

“Tim! Come on, man. I haven’t got all night.”

He heard the bumper music for Giada’s show. “All right, funny guy, enjoy sitting in the yard.”

As he went to grab the door’s latch, something leapt out from the bushes. The shrill scritch of nails scraping against the new brick patio beat a frantic pace. He saw a large shadow loping toward him.

Jason tensed.

That isn’t Tim.

Before it could get too close, Jason did the first thing his instincts told him to do. He swept his arm back and threw the bong as hard as he could at the approaching shadow. He flinched when he heard a wet smack as the bong hit home.

Something yelped, high and agitated.

Jason jumped back into the house, slamming the door shut. He watched the shadow retreat, hopping over the seven-foot wooden fence into his neighbor’s yard.

Tom was still on the couch, mesmerized. “What just happened?” he asked, never taking his eyes from the TV.

Jason pressed his thumbs into his eyes and shook his head. “I have no frigging idea. All I do know is that I just busted Jenna.”