The Long Fall Up by William Ledbetter

Author:William Ledbetter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Interstellar Flight Press

I clenched my teeth to keep from laughing when Dr. Lawrence climbed out of my deputy’s patrol car. He was dressed in silly desert expedition clothes and a hat, the same getups that Abbott and Costello wore when they met that mummy.

He strode toward me, clutching a smoldering pipe in one hand and extending the other. “Hello, Sheriff! Good to see you again. Your deputy tells me you have a . . . er . . . ‘mansta’ problem?”

“Mansta?”

He raised his hands, clawlike, growled, and gave me a lurid grin.

“Mansta? Huh. I guess Elmer was from New Orleans after all.

“I’m not an expert on manstas, Sheriff,” he said, stifling a snicker, “but I’ll do what I can.”

I led him over to where Mable was giving the loader operator step-by-step instructions about how to do his job through a bullhorn.

“Be careful! If someone is under there, you’re going to rip them in half.”

“Mayor Harjo, Doctor Lawrence is here.”

She lowered the bullhorn and turned around, then raised her eyebrows.

He removed his pith helmet, revealing dark, sweat-plastered hair, then took her hand and bowed slightly.

“Such a pleasua to meet you, Madam Maya.”

I stifled a growl as she looked him over, noting the tanned bare legs and equally bare ring finger, then did something I had seldom seen her do. She batted her eyelashes and blushed. “Well, hello there, Doctor. Please call me Mable.”

“And you can call me Ted.”

I cleared my throat and said, “Doctor Lawrence was just telling me he didn’t think he could help.”

“On the contrary,” the doctor said, still looking at Mable but pointing his stupid pipestem at me. “I might be able to help a great deal. There is a good chance this is nothing more than a sinkhole or a methane explosion. I might be able to help establish that.”

I hadn’t seen a monster, either, but his casually waving it off as fiction irritated the hell out of me.

“Mayor! Sheriff! Come see this,” one of the workers, Johnny Nguyen, yelled.

I rushed over and braced myself to see a dead friend, but instead found Johnny kneeling next to an animal track that was at least two feet long. I couldn’t count the number of times I’d been called by old ladies in the middle of the night to come arrest a prowler, only to find their flower beds filled with small tracks that looked just like these.

“That’s an armadillo rear-foot track,” I said. “No mistaking that splayed five-toe arrangement.”

Mable stared at the print with wide eyes.

The good doctor knelt and placed his arm on the ground. The print was about three inches longer than his arm measured fingertip to elbow.

“Astounding,” he muttered. “There’s a species of armadillo that can get as large as a pig, but this . . .”

“Harry?” Mable stood with arms crossed and jaw set, looking every bit the part of a battlefield general. “Based on the size of that footprint, how big is this thing?”

I looked down at the print again and a chill crawled up my spine.

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.