Deep Trouble Read online

  The lights came on as quickly as they went out, blinding us. Instantly, the room was abuzz.

  “Offhand, I’d say the ghosts don’t like to be dissed,” Sara said with a grin that dared Simon to disagree. Simon scowled at her, but no one else at the table paid him any attention; they were all busy comparing notes and speculating on what had just happened.

  I kept my head down and focused on my meal, which was excellent. By the time the guests had finally finished talking about the unplanned “dinner show,” dessert had been served. Much as I would be happily rid of our supper companions, I’m not one to ever pass up a good piece of pie with ice cream.

  If Simon intended to say more, Chip’s glare kept him quiet. I just wanted the evening to be over, and I wondered whether Sara would break up with me after dinner or wait until tomorrow. After all, I was at best a sham, and at worst a laughingstock in the eyes of her colleagues, and I’d known from the start that Sara could do much better than someone like me.

  When we had all finished dessert, the emcee announced a twenty-minute intermission before the evening session. I figured that allowed for a smoke and a bathroom break and gave the plus-ones a chance to go back to their rooms or head to the bar.

  Chip steered Simon away before his husband had the chance to make a parting shot. Nate seemed sincere when he said it was nice to meet me, but the rest of the farewells were banal pleasantries. Sara took my hand as we walked out to the parking lot.

  I turned to face her when we reached my truck. “I’m sorry,” I said, choosing to be the one to bring it up. “You didn’t need that tonight. Blair always says that you can dress me up, but you can’t take me out.” I braced myself for the worst. This thing between Sara and me was new, and we were both gun shy. She certainly didn’t need me making her lose face in front of her colleagues—and competitors.

  “You’ve got nothing to be sorry about,” Sara said, with a flash of anger in her eyes. “Simon Graham is an asshole. He’s the one who brought up the whole subject, and he’s the one who pissed off the ghosts. You did fine.”

  “I didn’t mean to cause you any embarrassment,” I replied.

  “You didn’t,” Sara countered. “Simon managed to embarrass himself single-handedly. As for your hunting—what you do is hard and dangerous, and important. Some people might not understand, but I do.” She reached up to touch my cheek. “No harm, no foul, Mark. I’m still really glad you came for dinner. And I’m sorry I can’t go home with you tonight, but…”

  “I know. Evening session, then more mingling,” I replied, and while I wished Sara could take the night off, I was equally glad not to be involved in the evening wind-down at the bar with Simon and the others.

  “I’ll call you when I get back to Kane tomorrow,” she promised. “And we can plan your next trip up to visit. Okay?” That’s when I realized she looked a little scared, too. Maybe she was afraid being put on the spot by Simon and Nate had made me ready to bolt.

  “Definitely okay,” I said and pulled her close for a kiss. It was just right—and not long enough. She looked a little flushed when she finally stepped away.

  “I’ve got to go. Stay safe, and call me,” she said, ducking in for another peck on the cheek.

  “Have a nice evening,” I said, reluctantly letting go of her hand. “And be careful driving back.”

  I watched her go into the hotel, then climbed into my truck. Much as I hated social events, it was worth it for some extra time together. I looked back up at the old hotel, silhouetted against the night sky, and thought I caught the scent of jasmine and the faint ring of a tricycle bell.

  “Thank you,” I said to the ghosts of Hotel Conneaut. “I think you got the last laugh.”

  I didn’t go straight home. Since I knew I’d be kinda down after leaving Sara at the hotel, I headed over to meet my friend Louie Marino out at the Drunk Monk, our favorite watering hole on the east side of the lake.

  The Drunk Monk has a picture of a tipsy friar on its sign. Inside, it’s a cozy neighborhood bar with a pool table, some dart boards, good food, and cheap beer. Danny, the bartender, is a retired Marine, so there’s never any trouble—at least, not for long.

  Tonight, Louie already held down a table, and he’d brought a friend. I remembered the guy’s name—Patrick Carmody—just before I sat down.

  “How’d it go?” Louie asked. I signaled the server for a beer like they were drinking and slumped back in the booth.

  “About as well as you might expect.”

  Louie snorted. “My expectations for you are pretty low, Mark.”

  My response was the one-finger salute. Louie and I go way back—all the way to grade school. He’s a cop in Linesville, which is just up the road from the little burg of Atlantic where I live. And Patrick, if I recalled, was a police officer in Meadville.

  “Haven’t seen you for a while, Patrick,” I said. “How are things in the big city?” Meadville was only “big” compared to how small all the other towns were.

  “Mostly good,” Patrick replied with a shrug. He was about the same age as Louie and me, with white-blond hair and blue eyes. “The wife and kids are fine, parents doing okay, nobody’s sick. So—good.”

  “Patrick’s having some trouble, and I think you can help him with it,” Louie said, falling silent as the server brought me a beer.

  “Oh, yeah?” I asked, taking a swing. “What’s going on?”

  Patrick looked around, checking to make sure no one around us was listening. “I got called up to Radio Tower Hill because of some property damage and a report that someone had seen a hairy naked man running around. So, I went up, and I found some odd footprints. I tapped into the security cameras around the broadcast tower, and I got this.”

  He held out his phone and brought up a grainy video. At first, it looked like a hunched over, very hairy shirtless man walking across the camera’s range. But when Patrick zoomed in, there was no mistaking it. The creature had the body of a man—and the head of a pig.

  “Shit. The pig people are back,” Louie muttered.

  Everyone around these parts knew about the pig people of Radio Tower Hill. The hill is one of the highest points around here, out off Kerrtown road. Since the road only goes up to the fenced-off broadcast tower, it’s a popular make-out place for horny teenagers. But the isolation that makes the hill road a Lovers’ Lane also attracts cryptids that would rather not have a lot of people around. Chief among those are the infamous pig people.

  “Where the hell do they come from?” I wondered aloud. The pig people were Meadville’s version of the Jersey Devil or the Mothman—creatures so strange you’d think they had to be fictional, reappearing generation after generation but never scientifically confirmed.

  Lucky for us, the pig people just wanted to be left alone, but they protected their privacy by scaring off anyone who crossed their path and damaging property, like the radio tower fence. They were good at evading cameras and hunters. There were never more than one or two of the pig people at a time, and while they had the constitution of a wild boar, they had the intelligence of a human. But the pig-man hadn’t hurt anyone, hadn’t even threatened anyone. Killing him wouldn’t be easy. Trapping him would be even harder.

  “Did you call Animal Control?” I asked, even though I felt sure I knew what Patrick was going to say.

  “I told them we had a wild boar up there,” Patrick said. “They just laughed and asked if I was the ‘new kid’ and that it was a snipe hunt.”

  “Which is why I thought he ought to talk to you,” Louie said. He didn’t push me into explaining why, and I appreciated him letting me make that judgment.

  “Can you help?” Patrick asked.

  I ran a hand over my face, fighting the urge to rub my tired eyes. After the clusterfuck at the hotel reception, I had to get my head back in the game. “Yeah. Maybe. Do you know how many of them there are?”

  “Just saw one on the cameras,” he replied. “Pretty sure it’s the same one because he’s
got a big scar on one shoulder.”

  “Okay, do you know anyone with a beater camper? One they don’t want back.”

  “A camper?”

  “Yeah. We’re gonna do a catch and release.”

  That’s how I ended up out on Radio Tower Hill with Louie and Patrick, ready to snare ourselves a pig-man. Louie and I had gone boar hunting once, so we knew how to set a snare. Patrick had called a large animal vet that worked with the Meadville PD and said he needed tranq darts for a really big wild hog.

  I wasn’t crazy about the tranqs. They’re unpredictable, even with a vet involved. Boars also can get heat stroke easily, and while I didn’t know how much a pig person had in common biology-wise with a boar, I didn’t want to kill the guy if I didn’t have to. If I had my druthers, we’d trap the pig man, knock him out, and take him way up into the Big Woods where he wouldn’t bother anyone else.

  This should have felt like an easy run. After all, no ghosts, demons, ghouls, zombies, or really scary monsters were involved. Just a guy who was more pig than man. Then again, I’ve seen things go south on an average deer hunt, so I try not to ever let my guard down. And something in my gut told me this wouldn’t be as easy as it looked.

  “You think this pig-man is bigger than the boar we got the last time?” Louie asked as we set the steel cables.

  “Bigger maybe,” I replied. I dug a few inches down into the dirt and buried the mix of fermented corn and grease that wild hogs love. I was betting Pig-Man had the same fine tastes as his porcine relatives, and that it would draw him into the snares, where Patrick could get off a clean shot with the tranq gun. “I don’t think the boar we got weighed as much as a full-grown man.”

  Louie shrugged. “Maybe not a linebacker, but a little guy? Maybe.”

  “That’s just it,” I said, wrinkling my nose at the smell of the bait. “That’s a big range. Make the dart too weak, and it won’t take him down. He’ll be groggy—maybe—but not for long. Too strong, and he’s dead before we get him down the hill.”

  “I thought you were a monster hunter,” Patrick said over his shoulder as he set up a rough blind to hide him from the pig man’s view.

  “When I have to be,” I replied, finishing up the last snare while Louie spread leaves and dirt to camouflage the snares. “But this guy is just busting up fences, scaring the locals. If we can move him out where there aren’t any fences or locals, he’s happy as…well, a pig in slop.”

  Once we had everything set up, we pulled back to the blind to wait. Stakeouts were the boring part of monster hunting and being a police officer. We had to stay quiet and focused, but no one can stay at high alert for hours on end. The real challenge was not getting distracted because that was when everything was sure to go to shit.

  After a few hours, we heard snuffling. Louie and I had checked out the whole top of Radio Tower Hill, looking for where the wildlife made their trails. Even this close to town, there were more deer, foxes, possums, coyotes, and other wild animals than most people think. The trick when trapping was to find a path that only your target animal used. I felt pretty sure that’s what we snared, but it’s not like we had any control over the rest of the furry creatures to tell them that route was off limits.

  I listened, and I saw the others rouse as well. Patrick reached for the tranq rifle. I had a K-bar and a nice heavy sap, in case the dart didn’t take and the pig person needed a little tap on the back of the head. Louie had a pole snare, the kind Animal Control uses on raccoons, only the industrial-sized version made for restraining unruly livestock without hurting them.

  Shuffling, heavy footsteps sounded like they were in the right place. I didn’t want to move, didn’t want to breathe wrong and have the wind pick up my scent or snap a twig and ruin everything. I had no idea how well the creature could hear, but I knew that regular pigs could sniff out truffles and bombs, despite being immune to their own odor.

  Closer. Closer. Then a loud, angry squeal as the snare caught.

  “Go, go, go!” I ordered. Patrick already had the tranq gun ready. He fired once, then twice. We waited. For an animal that had been shot full of sedative, the pig-man thrashed and howled plenty.

  “Shit,” Patrick said. “I must have missed on one of those.”

  “How many does it take to bring him down?” Louie asked. I wondered the same thing, if we also had to worry about over-tranqing the creature.

  “At least two good hits,” Patrick said. He loaded another round and fired. “Shit. He’s moving too much.”

  “Tranq him again, Patrick,” I said. “I don’t want to have to shoot him.”

  Patrick edged around the blind with the dart gun. Louie moved off the other side to cover him. I stayed where I was, ready to jump in if they needed me.

  Patrick took a step closer to the pig-man for a clean shot. But he underestimated the creature’s reach, and Piggy swiped out with one arm, slashing with sharp nails. Louie dove to push Patrick out of the monster’s way. He and Patrick went down in a heap, out of Piggy’s reach. When Louie rolled off, Patrick didn’t move.

  “Shit. I think he tranqed himself,” Louie said. He felt for a pulse. “Yep. Out cold.”

  I swore creatively. “That’s just great! Now we’ve got to carry two of them down the hill to the truck.” I reached into my bag for my secret weapon that works on most carnivorous monsters. Bacon balls.

  I realized that it would have been wrong to give Piggy regular bacon. Pig people might be monsters, but as far as I knew, they weren’t cannibals. I’d altered my recipe. These were turkey bacon balls, for a more civilized trap.

  “One little piggy went to market,” I coaxed, edging closer with the bacon ball in front of me, letting it waft its hickory smoked goodness toward the snared pig man. “One little piggy stayed home.” I had the bacon in my left hand and the heavy leather sap in my right. “And one little piggy went wee-wee-we—” I tossed him the bacon ball, and as he dove for it, I brought the sap down with a thud on the back of his head.

  Piggy slumped. Louie pounced with heavy-duty zip ties and restrained his wrists. I rolled the pig-man over and kept a foot in the middle of his back while Louie released the creature’s feet from the snares and zip tied his ankles.

  “How long will that keep him out?” Louie asked.

  “With luck, more than two hours,” I repeated. “We need to get him to the Big Woods and out to the drop point.” I straightened and looked at our two fallen comrades. “So…which one do you want to carry?”

  A lot of grunting and straining later, Louie and I got Piggy and Patrick down the hill. Louie dumped Patrick into the back seat of the truck cab. I rolled Piggy off my shoulder with a thunk and into the beat-up camper. We stuck our gear bags next to Patrick and headed down Radio Tower Hill for the highway. Night had fallen by the time we headed east.

  “I love this drive in the fall,” Louie said. “The trees are beautiful.”

  “Yeah, but there’s a whole lotta nothin’ out there,” I replied. “The middle and top of the freaking state is nothing but forest.”

  Patrick was still out, and after Louie checked in with the vet who gave us the darts, we knew that the hospital couldn’t do more than let him sleep it off, but we’d be tied up with a bunch of hard-to-answer questions. We ignored Patrick’s snoring and kept driving. Louie found one more dart in Patrick’s bag that had gotten overlooked in the excitement, which we’d need if Piggy woke up before we made it to the drop point.

  Kane was a little over two hours from Meadville, and I kept to the speed limit since I didn’t want to get pulled over. An hour and a half into the drive, we heard irate squeals from the back, and belatedly realized we should have gagged Piggy. Not long after, the thud of him hurling himself from side to side made the whole camper shake.

  “You’re sure he’s not going to get out the door?” Louie asked.

  “That’s why I put the steel bar on it.”

  “And we just hope passing motorists don’t wonder who we kidnapped?” />
  “You’re a cop. You just flash them, and they go away.”

  Louie rolled his eyes. “Flash my badge. Not flash them. God, you’re a child sometimes.”

  I grinned. “And yet, you’ve known me all my life, and you’re still here.”

  Louie groaned. “I blame it on being from a small town. Not many people to choose from.” The grin on his face put the lie to his words.

  From the sounds of it, Piggy trashed the inside of the camper like a rock star. I didn’t know whether he’d gotten out of his zip ties or just managed to hurl himself from side to side trussed up. Since we had another dart, my brilliant plan was to get to the trailhead, knock out a window in the camper, and tranq Piggy again. He might have a hell of a hangover from the drugs, but it was better than having to shoot him.

  Louie and I chatted about everything and nothing as we drove. Louie filled me in on what was new with his wife, Madison, and their kids. He asked about Sara; I told him about what an embarrassment I’d been at her dinner and how I figured she would never want to see me again.

  “I doubt that,” he assured me. “Not that you aren’t an ass, or embarrassing, but Sara knew about the whole hunting thing the first time she met you. She knows that the stuff you hunt is real.”

  I shrugged, still feeling insecure. “Being able to deal with danger is one thing. Getting embarrassed in front of your colleagues is another.”

  “But the ghosts showed up,” Louie protested. “That means the skeptics are the ones who should have been embarrassed, not you.”

  “Maybe.”

  Louie looked at me appraisingly for a moment, and the silence got uncomfortable. “Mark, she’s not Lara.”

  My ex-wife Lara had gotten impatient with how long I grieved after the wendigo attack. I hadn’t gotten the memo that said grief came with a deadline. She wanted to move on, and I couldn’t, so she moved out. Other than a few disastrous blind dates set up by well-meaning friends, Sara was the first woman I’d dated. The fact that I cared for her made it even scarier.