Krewe of Hunters, Volume 2: The Unseen ; The Unholy ; The Unspoken ; The Uninvited, Page 2

  Every last bird was gone.

  He looked back at his old mission-style house, wondering if he’d somehow blacked out, had a vision, and yet managed to get into his car. But that was not the case. He didn’t black out. For him, visions were dreams. They occurred only when he slept, and he usually laughed them away. His father’s people believed that all dreams were omens, while his mother’s father—psychiatrist and philosopher William Douglas—believed that dreams or “visions” were arguments within the human psyche. In William’s view, fears and anxiety created alternate worlds seen only in the mind; their role was to help resolve emotional conflicts.

  Whichever approach was correct didn’t matter much. He’d seen what he had seen. This hadn’t been a vision or a dream.

  But it was odd that it had happened when he was on his way to meet with Jackson Crow, FBI agent and head of the mysterious Krewe of Hunters—a unit both infamous and renowned.

  * * *

  San Antonio. It was different, that was all. Different.

  Kelsey O’Brien looked out the Longhorn Inn’s kitchen window. From here, she could see the walls of the old chapel at the Alamo. The city was bustling, pleasantly warm now that it was spring, and the people she’d met so far were friendly and welcoming.

  She still felt like a fish out of water.

  That’s what she was missing—the water.

  She’d been in San Antonio almost three days and they’d been nice days. San Antonio was a beautiful city. Kelsey actually had a cousin living here, Sean Cameron, but he worked for a special-effects company, and they were currently out in the desert somewhere, trying to reproduce the Alamo as it had once been for a documentary. She was grateful that her old camp friend, Sandy Holly, had bought the historic inn and one-time saloon where she was staying. Sandy made her feel a bit less like a fish out of water, but it was strange not to be within steps of both the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. Her life—except for summer camp and college upstate—had been spent in the Florida Keys. Where there was water. Lots and lots of water. Of course, they had the river here, and she loved the Riverwalk area, with its interesting places to go and dine and shop. The history of the city appealed to her, too.

  It was just…different. And it was going to take some getting used to. Of course, she still had no idea what she was doing here, or if she was going to stay. She might not be in San Antonio long; on the other hand, she could be transferring here. And she might be taking on a different job.

  She was a United States Marshal, which meant she worked for a service that might require her to go anywhere. She’d certainly traveled in her life, but the concept that she could be moving here, making a life here, seemed unlikely—not something she would have chosen. Now that it might be happening, she had to remind herself that she’d always known she could be transferred. But her training had been in Miami, and because of her familiarity with Key West, where she had grown up, she’d been assigned, as one of only two Marshals, to the office there. She’d been doing the job for two years now, enjoying an easy camaraderie with Trent Fisher, her coworker. They reported in to the Miami office when required, and occasionally their Miami supervisor came down. Key West was small, and despite the friction that could exist between law enforcement agencies, she’d quickly established excellent working relations with the police and the Coast Guard and the other state and federal agencies with which the two Marshals worked. And then…

  Then she’d suddenly ended up here. She was still wondering why, because Archie Lawrence, her supervisor, had been so vague.

  “You’re going to love the situation,” Archie had assured her. “You go to this meeting, and then you’ll have a two-week hiatus to decide what you feel about an offer you’re going to receive. So, nothing is definite yet.”

  “I’m being given a vacation so I can get an offer and think about it?” That hardly seemed typical of the government. “What’s the offer?” she’d demanded.

  “That’s what your meeting is about,” he’d said.

  And no amount of indignant questioning or wheedling would convince him to share the details. If he even knew them… “Look, your meeting is with an FBI agent and you may be transferring services,” Archie had told her. “That’s all I’m at liberty to say.”

  “Why?” she’d asked him. “I don’t want to change agencies!”

  “Hey, it’s come down from the brass, kiddo, and it sounds unusual—two federal agencies getting together on a friendly basis. Hallelujah!” Archie rolled his eyes. “No one’s going to force you to change. You’re being presented with an opportunity. You can say no. I mean it. If you don’t like this offer, you have the option to pack up and come home, with no harm done to your status here. So quit asking me questions. Go away. Don’t darken my door—for the time being, anyway. You have things to do, arrangements to make.” He’d sent her one of his lopsided grins. She liked Archie and considered him a great boss. He was always easygoing until he went into “situation” mode and then he could spew out orders faster and with more precision than the toughest drill sergeant.

  Sometimes, of course, she wondered what Archie really thought of her. She was good at her job, although some of her methods were a bit unexpected. Luckily, a lot of criminals were still sexist. They didn’t realize that a woman could and would hold them to task, shoot with uncanny aim and manage handcuffs with ease. But she’d felt Archie’s eyes on her a few times when she hadn’t really been able to explain the intuition that had led to her discovery of a cache of drugs, a hiding place—or a dead body. She even wondered if he was hoping she’d take another position.

  Today, soon, she’d attend a meeting with a man from the FBI. He had an offer for her that presumably had to do with the unique abilities she’d shown during her two years with the government, and due to the status of this particular branch of service, various government offices were cooperating. On the one hand, she felt like telling someone that if she’d wanted to work for the FBI, she would have applied to the FBI. But she was curious, and she wasn’t prone to be difficult; it was just the mystery of the situation.

  Law enforcement agencies were not known for their cooperation—rather sad, really, since they were all working toward the same goal. That was one of the reasons she’d loved working in Key West; they had plenty to deal with, but they were smaller, and thus got along fairly well. Drugs were constantly out on the waterways. The Coast Guard was overworked, ditto the state police and the county police. The cops in Key West loved the Marshals. It had all been pretty good. State police, Monroe County police, the Coast Guard and the U.S. Marshal’s Office, all getting along, most of them meeting for a beer here and there on Duval Street or some off-the-tourist track location. In her case, it had probably helped that she’d gone to the University of Miami and done an internship with the U.S. Marshal’s Office. She’d zeroed in on her chosen profession early. And she’d expected to stay in south Florida.

  To contemplate a life here, in Texas, was just…strange.

  Nothing wrong with Texas, of course.

  But she had it all figured out. It was the water. In San Antonio, there was no coast. There was the river, though.

  She glanced at her watch. Two hours until her meeting.

  When she looked out the window again, she nearly jumped. In those few seconds, a massive crow had landed on the outer sill. The damned thing seemed to be staring at her. She waved a hand at it.

  The bird didn’t fly away. It continued to stare.

  Then it pecked the window.

  She almost stepped back, then didn’t. She scowled at the bird. “I’m a United States Marshal, and I will not be intimated by a bird!” she said aloud.

  “What’s that?”

  Kelsey swung around. Sandy Holly had come breezing into the kitchen.

  “You have really big, aggressive birds around here,” Kelsey said.

  “We do?”

  “Yeah, look!”

  When she turned to the window again, the crow was gone. It
bothered Kelsey to realize that the bird disturbed her. Ah, well, she had discovered earlier that one of the men she’d be meeting was Agent Crow. Maybe that knowledge had made the bird’s appearance seem like something more—like some kind of omen, for good or…

  Sandy smiled, raising her eyebrows. “Anyone would think you were trying not to like Texas,” she said.

  “No, no, I love Texas. Texas is great,” Kelsey told her.

  “Maybe you’re just a little nervous. This is the big day, right?”

  “This is it,” Kelsey agreed. Sandy Holly was proving to be a true friend. Kelsey had gotten to know her almost twenty years ago, when they’d been a pair of awkward eight-year-olds at the West Texas dude ranch Kelsey’s parents had been sure she’d want to attend. But she’d been terrified of horses, while Sandy was terrified of being alone. Sandy had ridden before, even at five, because…because she was a Texan from San Antonio. Texans rode horses and wore big hats. So, at eight, Kelsey had toughened up enough to tell Sandy she didn’t need to be homesick, and Sandy had promised Kelsey she’d learn to love horses. She did, Kelsey mused. Thanks to Sandy, she’d become an excellent rider. And, thanks to Sandy, she’d known where she wanted to stay when she came to San Antonio. The Longhorn Inn and Saloon.

  It wasn’t as if they’d seen each other frequently. After a few years, they had skipped camps of any kind. But they’d met with other friends in Vegas to celebrate their respective twenty-first birthdays and kept up with each other through Facebook and email. When she’d first talked about applying to be a U.S. Marshal, Sandy had encouraged her.

  Kelsey was particularly glad to be here because Sandy wasn’t in great shape at the moment—taking over the old inn had proven to be a monumental task, and there were problems Sandy had hinted about that Kelsey didn’t entirely understand. They hadn’t really had a chance to sit down and talk, since Sandy was running a business, which meant her time was limited. It was even more limited because she’d lost a manager the week before—the young man simply hadn’t shown up for work—and while Sandy had a great housekeeping staff of three, the organizational and hostessing duties had all fallen to her. Of course, as Kelsey well knew, Sandy could be high-strung, and she wondered if working for her friend wasn’t a little stressful. On the plus side, Sandy did like to hire college guys who needed a break on a résumé. None of them seemed to last too long, however.

  Sandy walked over to some controls on the kitchen wall and squinted as she looked at them. “Hmm. I’m going to hope this turns on the music and doesn’t open the storm windows,” she said, twisting the dial.

  Country rock filled the air.

  “I think you got it,” Kelsey told her.

  “How about some coffee?”

  “You can actually sit for a few minutes?” Kelsey asked. “And tell me what’s up?”

  Sandy poured coffee into cups and set them on the table, shrugging. “There’s nothing really wrong. The past few days around here have been tense, that’s all. People are so ridiculous!”

  “Okay, explain, will you?”

  Sandy let out a long sigh. “It’s just this haunted thing about the inn. I sometimes wonder if I was crazy or what to get involved with it, even though I like a ghost story as much as anyone. Well, you know I’ve wanted this place for years. I’ve always been fascinated by the history—especially what happened to Rose Langley.”

  “The poor girl who was killed right before the fall of the Alamo?” Kelsey asked.

  Sandy nodded. “Rose was killed by her lover—or pimp, depending on how you want to look at it—in Room 207. It’s a sad story about a good girl gone wrong. She took off from her parents’ home because she was madly in love with Taylor Grant, and when they were in Galveston, she ended up being more or less kidnapped by a notorious bad guy named Matt Meyer, who wounded Grant. She might have fought Meyer and gained time for help, but she seems to have been afraid he’d finish Grant off if she didn’t go with him. So, the revolution was about to begin, and Meyer wanted to fight for Texas. They came here, and apparently, Rose and Matt Meyer got into a terrible fight, and he murdered her. He’d been known to kill, so it wasn’t a surprise. We wouldn’t just consider him a criminal today, we’d consider him to be as sick and perverted as the most heinous killer out there. Oh—and, of course, he took off before the battle of the Alamo, or before anything resembling the law could catch up with him. But…”

  “But?”

  “I don’t know how much of this you remember from my emails,” Sandy said. “I had just bought the place—money down, no way out—when all of a sudden there were problems. I was already in here, deciding what to do about renovating a week or so before the closing, when a girl named Sierra Monte disappeared.”

  “Of course I remember. But remind me what she was doing here, when the inn was in the middle of changing owners,” Kelsey said.

  “Peter Ghent, the last owner, still had the place until closing. That’s how it works. I’d gotten a deal because there was no return on the down payment if anything went wrong. Anything. Ghent had some of the rooms rented, but he was like an absentee landlord. Sierra came here, apparently, because she wanted Room 207. Go figure. The rooms were super-cheap, even though it was a historic property, because Ghent wasn’t running it well. The bar sucked! It was all falling apart and I’d just started to renovate. But Sierra Monte insisted on staying. Anyway, she disappeared. A maid found blood everywhere and then the cops came in—but there was no body. And, of course, she disappeared from Room 207, so the legend continued to grow. I closed down for a bit when I took over to get the renovations finished. And then I didn’t rent out the room at all afterward but the mystery of the place encourages people to come in. You know how that goes. Now people are clamoring for 207. I’m careful who I give it to, though, because I’m afraid of some idiot freaking out in the middle of the night and jumping out the window or something! It’s hard to read people over the phone or through the internet, but, like I said, I’m careful. It’s rented out now—only because I have a big ol’ rodeo cowboy staying in it.”

  Kelsey winced. “I know what you’re saying. At the Hard Rock in Hollywood, Florida, people vie for the room where Anna Nicole Smith died. And people book way ahead for the ‘murder room’ at the Lizzie Borden house in Fall River, Massachusetts.”

  “Exactly!” Sandy said. “But now, the stories about Room 207 are scaring people away from the inn, not bringing them in!”

  As if to confirm Sandy’s words, a high-pitched scream pierced the hum of easy-listening music. Kelsey had just picked up her mug, but the earsplitting cry of terror startled her so badly that coffee sloshed over the brim. She leaped to her feet, staring at Sandy.

  Sandy stared back at her, stricken, shaking her head. Kelsey set her mug on the table and went flying out to the inn’s grand salon—now its lobby—looking around for the source of the scream.

  It came again, stretching long and loud, and Kelsey raced toward it.

  * * *

  When he reached the riverfront area and parked, Logan was still mulling over the strange behavior of the birds. He knew that the Native American half of the family—no matter how “modern” or forward-thinking they might be—would see omens in the situation. He couldn’t help wondering about it himself.

  But he had to put it out of his mind.

  Logan had been told by his captain that this meeting was important. In that case, he wasn’t quite sure why he was meeting an FBI agent beneath a brightly colored umbrella on the Riverwalk. It wasn’t that he had anything against the Riverwalk; it just didn’t seem like the place for an important meeting. Tourists thronged the area, along with locals. The shopping included both high-end boutiques and Texas souvenir shops, and the restaurants were varied as well as plentiful. He loved the river; watching water always seemed to improve anything. Still, this was unusual.

  He wasn’t surprised that he was noticed—and hailed—by many people. He’d spent his life in San Antonio, and he’d been called on du
ring many a “situation” at the riverfront, so he knew a number of bartenders, shopkeepers and restaurant owners. Of course, the tourists and visitors were something else entirely. One teenage boy called out, “Look! It’s Chuck Norris! Hey, Walker, Texas Ranger!”

  He tipped his hat to the kid. No need to make their visitors think Texans weren’t hospitable and friendly.

  He was dressed in standard departmental wear—boots, white hat and gun belt. He was carrying a Colt .45, his weapon of choice, and a popular gun among Rangers. He guessed that, in a way, he did look like Chuck Norris—or the character he’d played on a long-running TV show. Except, of course, that Norris was blond and light-skinned and he himself had dead-black hair and hazel eyes. People did stare. There weren’t even two hundred Rangers in the whole state, so he supposed that made his appearance especially interesting for tourists.

  Another reason not to carry out an important meeting in a public place.

  He did, however, recognize the man he was supposed to see, despite never having previously met him. Agent Jackson Crow was seated at one of the tables lining an iron fence that arced right out over the water, a cup of coffee in front of him. He was dressed in a black suit that seemed to scream FBI, to Logan’s mind at least. He wore dark glasses and seemed perfectly comfortable, sitting at ease while he waited for the meeting. Whatever people thought of him, he obviously didn’t give a damn.

  Logan walked straight to the table. Crow was aware of him; he stood.

  “Raintree, I presume,” he said, smiling as he offered his hand.

  Logan shook hands, studying Crow. Yep, Indian blood. He assumed Crow was staring back at him, thinking the same thing. “Yes. I’m Logan Raintree.”

  “Comanche?” Crow asked.

  “All-American mutt in every way,” Logan told him. “One ancestor was Comanche, one was Apache—and two were European. Norwegian and English. You?”

  “Cheyenne and all-American mutt, as well,” Crow said. “I like the concept of that. Sit, please. Thank you for meeting with me.”