Blood Moon (Bear Sheriff Book 1) Read online

  “Okay,” she said. “That’s good.”

  “Don’t leave here without me,” Marcus ordered. Angie had plans to work on Charming’s expansion. Marcus didn’t think it was a good idea at the moment, but if it kept her preoccupied and out of his hair long enough for him to do a real investigation, talk to the major players in Charming, and try to solve this case – then it was well worth it.

  He left the Mayor’s office and headed towards the bar.

  Should I take the Mayor up on his offer? This is a lot more than I can handle by myself. I need to find the killer, but I don’t know if I can do it alone. A couple of officers from Haven, or maybe even a federal detective – they have to be more qualified than I am, right?

  And what about the press? Copeland wants to make a big story – is that the right move? I don’t want to scare the killer off, but maybe, just maybe, it’ll bring some new information forward.

  It is the smart play.

  But if I bring in outside help…

  The offer with Joanna Rivers is off the table.

  He meant to meet with her, soon, but she could wait. He had no information to give her, yet.

  Butchie’s was open, though for once, it was dead. He recognized Butchie’s car in the parking lot and pulled up next to it, getting out and stretching his legs. The sun was beating down on him, a sign that the raging storm the night before was gone.

  Inside, he found Butch sitting behind the bar, watching the news.

  “You see this, Sheriff?” he asked, turning the volume up for Marcus to hear. “A string of murders. Started over in New York, but they’ve been moving steadily westward. Last one was in Kansas City. They think it’s the same guy.”

  Marcus glanced at the TV but dismissed it, telling Butch, “If we don’t get to the bottom of what’s going on around here, we’ll be making the news next.”

  “Right, right,” Butch said, turning the TV off. “That poor girl.”

  “Tell me about her,” Marcus said, sitting on the barstool across from Butch.

  “Want that beer?”

  “Just a water.”

  “Ah, well – maybe one day,” he told Marcus, pouring him a glass of water. He sat back down and slid the glass across the bar. “They came in here early afternoon to get dinner. She – uh – what’s her name? She ordered a beer, I think. Marcie brought it over to her.”

  “Erica was the one that was murdered. The other woman is Angie.”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Butch said. “Heard that through the grapevine. Well, uh, Erica, she ordered a beer and some food. They both ordered food. Erica went sort of heavy on the beers, but nothin’ out of the ordinary, you know?”

  “She do anything out of the ordinary? Piss anyone off? That sort of stuff?”

  “Nah, not that I can remember,” he said, thinking. “Played a few songs on the jukebox – you know, I sprung for one of those internet ones. Played a few songs that weren’t the kind we’re used to around here, but that’s all.”

  Marcus thought for a few moments. As far as he could tell, Erica hadn’t done anything that warranted any sort of retaliation – especially her murder. He took a sip of his water.

  “What about the other woman? Angie? She do anything funny?”

  Butch thought for a few moments, then shook his head. “She was even quieter than the other one. She ordered a water, a small meal, and she kept her head down. Tipped real well, though. Marcie was pleased, I was a bit jealous.”

  “Hmm,” Marcus said, rubbing his hand on his chin. These last few days had been rough, and there seemed to be no end in sight. “Who all was in the bar?”

  “The usual crowd, Sheriff.”

  “Give me a list,” Marcus said, pulling out a small pad of paper and a pen. “Everyone you can remember.”

  “Okay, well, there were the Copelands, of course. You saw them fighting,” Butch began. Marcus wrote down Stu Copeland and Cliff Copeland, then crossed out Stu’s name. “Jimmy Rivers,” Butch continued, staring off into space and thinking hard. Marcus did the same, writing Jimmy Rivers onto his notepad, then scratched it out. He jotted down Erica and Angie, putting a big X through Erica’s name. Butch’s list continued and Marcus jotted down all of the names. Most he remembered seeing in the bar, but there were a few he’d missed on that night. At the end of the list, Marcus wrote Marcie and Butchie. “Whoa, Sheriff, I had nothing to do with that woman’s death!”

  “I know, Butchie,” Marcus said, scratching out his name. “Just had to put it down there for good measure.”

  “Yeah, that makes sense,” the bartender said.

  Marcus looked at the list of names, thought a few moments, and then slapped it shut and stood up. “Thanks for the water, Butchie. And the help. You don’t know how valuable you’ve been.”

  “Not a problem, Sheriff. Maybe next time you’ll have that beer.”

  “Maybe next time,” Marcus said, leaving the bar. Once the door had close behind him, Marcus pulled the list back out. Unfortunately, Butchie was still a suspect – though Marcus didn’t think that he’d had anything to do with the murder.

  He could rule out Stu Copeland and Jimmy Rivers since they’d been in jail when Erica had been murdered. He glanced back down at the list. He’d crossed out Angie’s name, too.

  But I can’t know that for sure.

  He growled to himself. She wasn’t a suspect. He couldn’t think like that.

  There’s the motive…

  I know her. I know her well enough to know that she wouldn’t kill her friend, no matter what kind of problems they were going through.

  Do I, though? Do I really?

  Marcus pushed those thoughts away. He had a list of suspects, and they wouldn’t interview themselves. He walked back to the Bronco, fired it up, and looked at his list again.

  Paul Koling, the list read. Marcus didn’t know Paul, but he’d heard he was a good guy, who liked to pop into Butchie’s right after work and have one beer before heading home to his wife and two kids.

  He drove towards his house, anyway.

  Chapter 14

  Angie’s meeting with Irving Copeland had been short, and an utter waste of time. Whatever Marcus and Dean Copeland had done to put the Mayor into such a stormy mood, Angie didn’t know – but she’d suffered the consequences.

  He’d shut down all of her ideas with hardly any conversation. He was more focused on finding out who Erica’s killer was than talking business, and every few minutes, the conversation would steer back to the murder and the attempt on Angie’s life.

  He’d been especially interested in hearing what his son had been up to the previous night and what had happened to Angie.

  I must have told him five or six times. The same exact story, over and over. And no matter what, it’s all he could talk about.

  She couldn’t blame him. He was the Mayor of a town who’d just had its first murder, and the killer was still at large. Marcus wanted to keep the story under wraps, which Copeland had no interest in. Copeland wanted to blow the story out of the water; FBI, news reporters, the whole nine yards.

  And he’d decided she could wait.

  It was frustrating, but Angie had to admit they couldn’t truly get to work until all of this was past them. Angie left the office, uncaring about what Marcus Stone had told her to do. She wasn’t going to sit around in Copeland’s office all day while he went out and ran down leads, trying to solve her friend’s murder.

  Angie wanted to be useful. She wanted to contribute. She wanted to solve the murder, both to avenge her friend and to get her job back on track.

  She had walked back to the Great Southern, grabbed her car, and drove all of the way to Haven. Haven wasn’t much larger than Charming, but it had one thing that Charming didn’t: a gun store. According to Arizona laws, purchasing and carrying a firearm didn’t require any registration, permits, or applications.

  Angie Campbell, for the first time in her life, was going to buy a pistol. It’ll even help me fit in bette
r, she grinned. She had a feeling that nearly every resident of Charming had a firearm in one way, shape, or form, and she would be no different.

  The inside of the store had a feeling unlike anything she’d ever experienced before. A couple of gruff men eyed her as she walked around, completely out of her element.

  “What’s a pretty lady like you doin’ in here?” one of them asked, swaggering up to her. When he grinned, Angie noticed he was missing more than a few teeth, and those that he had left were stained with chewing tobacco.

  Just the kind of man I’m looking for.

  “I’m looking to buy a gun,” she said. She tried to project confidence, tried to act like she knew what she was doing, but she was failing miserably. It wasn’t a feeling she was used to, though she realized it was happening more and more often.

  “What fer?” he asked. “Protectin’ yerself? Huntin’? Fishin’?”

  He busted up laughing then – so too did his buddy – as if he’d made funniest joke on the planet. Angie found herself grinning, and even managed the slightest laugh before she answered, “Protection. There’s… someone after me.”

  The laughter died down. “After ya’? I can help, y’know.”

  “I’m sure you can, and I appreciate that,” Angie deflected. “But I think a small pistol would suit me just fine.”

  She listened to the man as he walked her through a number of different pistols. He’d insisted that she carry a small revolver, but after seeing Marcus’s, Angie wanted something different than the Sheriff. She wanted something that was her own, something made for her.

  After two hours in the store – much, much longer than she’d ever anticipated – she bought a small pistol, paid in cash, and left the store.

  Now I can get back to Charming and finally get to the bottom of this.

  And how do I intend to do that? Buying a gun doesn’t make me a police officer, doesn’t make me a Sheriff, doesn’t make me actually qualified for solving a murder. But I’m not going to stop, I’m not going to give up.

  The pistol was for protection, and she hoped that she didn’t need it.

  The drive back to Charming seemed to drag on forever. She’d already burnt up most of her day between waking up early and wasting her time at Copeland’s office to spending hours in the gun store. But that didn’t matter too much, either. She would wait for the sun to go down before doing her investigation.

  And that’s not too far off, anyway. I wonder what the Sheriff is doing, now.

  She imagined that he was either overworking himself, or he was driving around town looking for her even as she pulled back into town. Angie didn’t know Charming inside and out, and truth be told, there weren’t that many roads, but she avoided the main drag until she got close to the Great Southern.

  She pulled into an abandoned parking lot a block down from the motel, killing the engine. The sun had just dropped below the horizon, bathing Charming in bright, warm sunlight – and for once, if she could manage to ignore all of the bad here – Charming actually was nice.

  But then she felt the small pistol wrapped tightly in her hand and everything came flooding back to her. The murder, the attempt on her life, Mayor Copeland and how he’d ignored her, and even Sheriff Marcus Stone.

  What’s he going to say when I finally do meet up with him? When he finds out I haven’t been waiting at the Mayor’s office all day long?

  He treats me like I’m a little kid – and I’m not. I’m capable. I’m smart. I’m determined.

  The roar of a vehicle brought her out of her thoughts. She glanced left towards the road but there was nothing there but darkness. To her right, nothing.

  Wait!

  There! There wasn’t nothing there, not exactly. To her right on the other side of an old fence was an old alleyway, overrun with trash and weeds. It’d obviously been abandoned when these buildings had fallen out of use, but there was a vehicle rolling through the dark alleyway.

  The killer! He’s sneaking back to take a look and I’m going to catch him in the act! Angie’s grip on her pistol tightened even more.

  Squinting into the growing darkness, Angie saw the truck, only it wasn’t a truck, not exactly. It was a Bronco.

  The Sheriff’s Bronco.

  What is he doing here? Is he…? No, he can’t be. He can’t.

  Angie ducked her head as the vehicle pulled up on the other side of the fence, stopped, and the engine died. She heard the door to the vehicle open, then footsteps on the cracked asphalt, and then the door slammed shut. The footsteps moved away and Angie put her head back up. She caught a glimpse of jeans and a white shirt. Sheriff Marcus Stone was stalking down the alleyway, towards the Great Southern, away from her.

  Angie couldn’t let him get away. Either he was here to investigate the place, just like she was – and she wasn’t missing out on that, or he was here to do something else.

  She clutched the pistol in her hand and opened her door as quietly and quickly as she could. Then she shut it just as carefully, making sure to hold the door handle in and push it shut. Then she ran over towards the alleyway.

  Looking carefully, she could just see the Sheriff disappearing around an old dumpster. She found a gap in the fence and dropped to her knees, sliding through the gap. She got to her feet, brushed the dirt off with one hand, and quickly followed the Sheriff.

  She came around the dumpster, convinced she would be able to catch another glimpse of Marcus, but he was gone.

  Where did he go? He should be right up there.

  The alleyway led to the far side of the Great Southern. A few old, ragged trees lined the other side of the alleyway, indicating the edge of town. But no matter where she looked, Angie didn’t see Marcus.

  She wouldn’t give up, though.

  She kept low, the sun finally disappearing completely and basking the entire alleyway in darkness, but she didn’t let it bother her.

  Angie found herself ducking behind trees as the alleyway ran out. Her idea was to move around the side end of the Great Southern, go around the back and take a look at the broken window, then work her way towards the front. Somewhere along there, Angie figured she would see Marcus – then she could figure out what he was up to.

  At the end of the motel, Angie paused. There was some kind of sound on the back side – something Angie couldn’t quite pinpoint. For some reason, her heart started to pound in her chest and she leaned against the wall of the building for support.

  What am I doing? What if it’s the killer?

  Don’t be stupid, Angie – you have a gun. That’s why you brought it. Hopefully it is the killer! You could solve this right now! Get revenge on Erica’s murder and get back to your job, get back to your life!

  But what if the killer is Marcus?

  No choice. Turn the corner!

  Angie took a few deep breaths, lifting her pistol, and turned the corner.

  She fully expected to see the killer on the back side of the motel, either going back in the broken window or looking around.

  She thought it was possible she would find Marcus there, down on his knees, investigating the scene of the crime. There probably wasn’t much to find, after the rain storms and all, but it couldn’t hurt to look, right? After all, wasn’t that why she was here?

  What she saw, Angie wasn’t prepared for.

  Standing not 10 feet away from her, on all fours with its head sniffing the ground, was a massive brown bear.

  Her first thought, of all things was: Are there bears in Arizona?

  Obviously, there were, because there was one standing right in front of her.

  And Angie screamed.

  The bear jumped upwards, on all fours, towering over her, and roared – in surprise or menace, Angie wasn’t sure.

  She’d never been this close to a bear, not even in a zoo, and panic overtook her. Nothing could have prepared her for this.

  Without thinking, she raised the pistol, aimed it directly at the bear’s chest, and pulled the trigger.
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br />   She didn’t know how many times she pulled the trigger – her hands were shaking, her ears ringing with the sound of gunfire – but then it was clacking and was empty.

  She felt something in her throat and realized she was still screaming.

  The bear in front of her was roaring – she hoped in pain, she hoped it was dying – but then it was stumbling towards her, one step at a time.

  I need to reload. Where’s the extra clip? Shit, I left it in the car!

  She saw that it wasn’t enough to stop the bear as it continued coming at her, though much slower than she would have thought possible for a bear. Angie found herself rooted in place. Fear had finally gripped her and there was nothing she could do.

  The bear reached her and Angie knew her life was about to end.

  Why did I ever do this? I should have stayed in the Mayor’s office. I should have listened to Marcus…

  Marcus…

  The bear collapsed in front of her, less than an inch from her feet. Angie felt her heart thumping in her chest, adrenaline rushing through her, and she thought she was going to be sick…

  And then something was happening. Whatever it was, Angie couldn’t describe. She’d never seen anything like it. It defied all logic.

  The bear in front of her was almost shimmering. Its legs suddenly started to shorten. Claws retracted from its fingertips, and they were fingertips, now. The fur was receding, leaving instead just skin. Human skin.

  Laying in front of her was Sheriff Marcus Stone. Blood welled up from wounds all across his body, just where she’d shot the bear.

  “Help me,” he moaned. “Please.”

  Angie screamed again.

  Chapter 15

  Marcus had been shot before, more times than he could remember. But he never got used to the pain, especially not after being shot four times.

  Angie had caught him unaware, and he chastised himself for that. He hadn’t been thinking clearly; his mind had been on the scent, on someone that was so familiar to him that he was seconds away from finding out who had broken the window. What he couldn’t figure out in his human form, he’d been able to once shifted – and he had let his guard down.