Have Spacecat, Will Travel: And Other Tails by John Hartness (best color ebook reader .txt) 📗

drawn on my forehead, then I’d think my fellow Hunter might be responsible.

First thing I did after I went to pee was make sure there wasn’t a dick drawn on my forehead. It was clear, so I washed my face, ran a comb through my hair, pulled it back into a ponytail, and freshened up my deodorant. I didn’t see a whole lot of point in another shower, so I just brushed my teeth and wandered out into the house.

Tyson was sitting at a desk typing on a computer and waved me over as soon as he noticed me. “Come look at this,” he said. He pointed at the screen, which showed an image of short, razor-sharp teeth.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“That’s a computer model of the teeth of the thing that killed your coyote.” Skeeter’s face popped up in a corner of the computer screen, like a less-helpful Microsoft Paperclip. He went on. “That tooth pattern doesn’t match anything in any of our files or in DEMON’s database.”

“Skeeter, did you hack the government again?” I asked. The Department of ExtraDimensional Monsters and Occult Nuisances was the federal agency that didn’t officially exist, but didn’t exist specifically to handle the kind of threats that Skeeter and I dealt with every day.

“No, Amy ran a check against the computer model,” he huffed. I would have apologized if he hadn’t shown a tendency in the past to hack anything he felt like whenever he felt like it. Knowing he asked my girlfriend for help made me feel a lot better about the odds of us not getting sent to Gitmo this week.

“So we don’t know what it is, but we know it’s got a shitload of teeth. What else in this part of the world fits that description?” I felt a little shiver run up my spine. It was exciting, hunting something new for a change. After all these years, I’d put down enough werewolves and wrestled enough naked sasquatches to last a lifetime.

That number for naked sasquatch wrestling is one, by the way.

“Skeeter,” I started, barely able to contain myself. “Do you think…could we be on the trail of the elusive…chimichanga?”

Tyson looked at me like a cat watching somebody pee in the toilet. It was like he was pretty sure he understood the words I was using, but he didn’t quite comprehend how they were put together.

“Wait, I got it wrong again.” I held up a hand. “Don’t tell me…it’s a chalupa!”

Still staring.

“Churro?”

Nothing.

“Chorizo?”

“Bubba what the hell are you trying to say? Are you hungry or something?” Tyson looked at me like I had a second head growing out my neck, and this one had a green face.

“He means a chupacabra,” Skeeter said. “I don’t know if it’s a mental block at this point or if he just thinks he’s funny, but he has never been able to get away from the menu at a Mexican restaurant when we’re talking about a chupacabra. Which I don’t think this is, by the way.”

“Why not? Do we have a quesadilla’s bite to compare it to?” I asked.

“No, we do not,” Skeeter said. “But by all reports, the chupacabra drains the blood from its victims, which indicates fangs. There are no fangs in this bite pattern.” He rotated the image on the screen, and no matter how many ways I looked at the imaginary digital teeth, there weren’t any fangs there.

“Maybe they’re retractable, like vampire fangs,” I said.

“You said there was a lot of blood at the scene,” Skeeter said.

“Yeah, there was so much it made a mud blood puddle. Heh, that sounds like something out of a Harry Potter book,” I said with a chuckle.

“Not a very good bloodsucker if it leaves a bunch of blood behind,” Tyson remarked.

“Et tu, Tyson?” I asked.

“Hey, man, don’t get all Latin on me,” he protested. “Just because it ain’t a chupacabra don’t mean we don’t need to shoot it.”

“We don’t need to shoot nothing, Hopalong,” I said, motioning to his leg. “I couldn’t catch up to that thing with two good wheels, how you gonna do it with one?”

“I ain’t,” he agreed. “I’m gonna catch it with four.”

An hour later we pulled out of Tyson’s driveway with a trailer hitched behind his pickup. A pair of four-wheeled ATVs with high-powered spotlights mounted on the front were strapped down on the trailer, and we were loaded for bear. Or enchilada. Or really any damn thing we might run into. I had Bertha, my Mossberg, and a pair of H&K MP-5 submachine guns mounted to the handlebars of one ATV. Ty had his Colt 1911 loaded with hollow point .45 rounds, a Benelli M4 shotgun, and a Remington 700 with a night scope across his ATV’s gear rack. I didn’t so much think we were in danger of anything that might be out there as I thought we might be in danger of being mistaken for an invading army if we got anywhere near the Mexican border. We also had a couple of battery-operated flood lights and a flare gun with white phosphorous flares to light up the whole area if we needed it.

We pulled up to the house where I stopped the night before and unloaded the ATVs. I turned to Tyson. “You sure you’re up to this?”

“Son, that’s at least the fourteenth time you’ve asked me that since we left my house. For the last damn time, yes, I’m fine. I ain’t gonna go running after the damn thing. I’m gonna hang back and shoot the shit out of it.” He threw his leg over the four-wheeler and cranked the machine to life. We pulled our night vision glasses on and rolled out toward where the chalupa killed the coyote the night before.

Once we got to the creature’s known hunting ground, we started our search there. We made concentric circles on the ATVs, spiraling out from the kill zone at center in an ever-larger radius. After two hours of literally driving around in circles, I slowed