The Curse Of the House On Cypress Lane Omnibus by Hunt James

Author:Hunt, James [Hunt, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-09-11T22:00:00+00:00

8

Sheriff Bellingham sat behind his desk, chin resting in his hand, and blinked at the statements he’d been staring at all morning given by Billy Rouche and Owen Cooley. He’d been staring at that report for the past hour and still couldn’t force himself to believe that what Mr. Cooley had said was real. He was a father who had just gone through something incredibly traumatic. The man had obviously made something up in his head for him to cope.

Bellingham remembered a case from his days as a deputy where a young man had come back from the war in the Middle East. He was diagnosed with PTSD, but unfortunately didn’t seek out the proper care that he needed in order to help him cope with everything he’d seen in the battle. Instead, the man self-medicated with booze and drugs, and one night he stumbled down Main Street with a 9mm Smith and Wesson shooting at random cars and buildings

There was an hour of negotiation between authorities and the gunman as they cornered him down a side street. And after that hour, Bellingham watched the man put the gun to his temple and in a knee-jerk reaction Bellingham fired his weapon, winging the suspect in the arm that dropped him to the pavement. Paramedics rushed him to the hospital where they managed to save the man’s life.

Bellingham was publicly torn a new asshole for his actions by the sheriff at the time. But behind closed doors, Bellingham remembered how the sheriff had thanked him for what he did. If he hadn’t taken that shot, then the man would have died.

“Sheriff?”

Bellingham drifted out of the memory and saw his assistant in the doorway to his office. “Yeah?”

“Sheriff Barker over in Vermilion Parish wants to know if you need them for the search party tomorrow, and if you do, how many?”

“Yes, and whatever he can spare,” Bellingham answered.

“Gotcha.”

Veronica disappeared and Bellingham reclined in his seat, folding his hands behind his head, one on top of the other. The search for Jake Martin had turned up nothing. The dogs couldn’t catch a scent, and the trees grew so thick in those back waters that they couldn’t fit boats. They’d have to go in by foot, and even with the number of men that Bellingham was borrowing from across the state, he wasn’t sure if they’d be able to find him.

Like a lot of the people in town, Jake came from a family that had been here for a long time. Bellingham knew that Jake had an uncle with some swamp houses out in the middle of god knows where from back in the twenties when they used to smuggle moonshine during Prohibition. Now they were used to drink and gamble, howling like animals under the hot summer moon.

There was a lot of that in Ocoee, more than he liked to admit as the head of law and order in his parish. The swamp would always be full of rats. He just tried to make it so they didn’t scurry into town.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.