Amanda Stevens: Nighttime Guardian

At the other end of the boat, Ray Buford slapped at his bare leg. “Hellfire, Bobby Joe. Why’d you go and forget the bug spray? Skeeters gonna eat us alive out here.”

“Not if you get enough alcohol in your bloodstream. This is better’n any old bug spray.” Bobby Joe drained the last of his beer, smashed the empty can against his forehead, then slung the can overboard with a bloodcurdling yell.

Frowning, Nathan watched the container sink. Obviously, the Bufords didn’t put much stock in river conservation. No wonder the Pearl River suffered from such dangerous levels of pollution. Nathan was sorely tempted to give them both a stern lecture, but he doubted it would do any good, and besides, he didn’t want to risk alienating them. They both worked part-time for Takamura, and Nathan figured if the brothers got drunk enough, they might be willing to talk to him—which was precisely the reason he’d convinced them to let him help run their fishing lines tonight.

“Hey, wouldn’t it be funny if we saw that ol’ monster out here tonight?” Bobby Joe drawled.

“Yeah,” Ray replied dryly. “That’d be real hilarious, Bobby Joe.”

The younger Buford laughed, belched then pulled a wicked-looking knife from his belt and trailed it in the water. “Here monster, monster, monster. Where are you, boy? Come show that ugly face of yours. Make us famous.”

“What’re you, stupid or something?” Ray grumbled. “Shut the hell up.”

“Chill, man.” Bobby Joe made a chopping motion in the water with the switchblade. “That monster comes up here, I’ll show him, like I did ol’ Shorty Barnes that time.”

Shorty Barnes was the reason Bobby Joe had spent three years in Cummins Prison Farm, but Nathan wasn’t about to remind him of that fact.

“You’d show him all right,” Ray scoffed. “Hell, boy. He’d chomp your arm off in one bite, knife and all.”

“Sounds like you boys believe all those stories about the Pearl River Monster,” Nathan said.

“Oh, Ray believes all right. He saw that thing himself, didn’t you, bro?” There was a goading quality in Bobby Joe’s thick voice. “Go ahead, tell ’im.”

Ray didn’t say anything, but in the fading light, Nathan saw something that might have been fear flicker across his homely features.

Unlike Bobby Joe, Nathan wasn’t about to ridicule Ray Buford for his fears. Nathan used to dive in this river, in water so murky he sometimes couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. There’d been times when he’d become so disoriented, he couldn’t tell up from down, and in a cold, black panic, he’d sensed things he’d never told anyone about.

Twenty-one years ago, he’d never been as certain as everyone else in this town that Shelby Westmoreland had been lying.

An uneasiness settled over the boat. They were in the middle of the river now, over the deepest part. The water was more than fifty feet in places. Nathan had often wondered what kind of creatures could survive on that cold, muddy bottom. Man-sized catfish, if legend could be believed.

But it was the giant river loggerheads that had always given Nathan a healthy dose of caution. Diving in water populated by those creatures wasn’t for the faint of heart. Also known as alligator snapping turtles, they sometimes grew to over two hundred pounds, and Nathan had once seen a smaller one snap a broom handle in two with its powerful jaws. He hated to think what one of the larger specimens could do to a man’s hand.

The boat drifted toward the first marker, and Ray reached over the side of the boat to grab the white bleach jug fastened to the end of the trotline. He gave it a yank. “Damn. The line’s tangled.”

“Looks like one of us’ll have to go down and get it freed up.” Bobby Joe fingered his knife. They both looked at Nathan.

He reached over the side of the boat and grabbed the line. “Let’s try working it loose first.”

They tugged and pulled for several minutes before the line finally snapped free. Bobby Joe grunted as they hauled it up. “Musta hooked us a big sucker.”

When the line popped to the surface, Ray leaned over the side to get a look. “What the hell is that?”

The realization hit all three of them at once, and Ray yelped, jerking back so violently the boat threatened to tip. Nathan clung to the sides as he stared at the mass of flesh and bone tangled in the line.

“Man, oh, man,” Bobby Joe said almost reverently. “Would you look at that? Something’s done ripped that poor bastard all to hell.”

Ray didn’t say anything. He stared at the corpse with a look of sheer terror, flinching almost pitifully when the beam of Nathan’s flashlight accidentally caught him in the face.

Nathan leaned over the edge of the boat, playing the light over the body, what was left of it. The black neoprene wet suit was in shreds, but the mask was still in place. Sightless eyes stared up through the lens, and an icy chill sliced through Nathan.

The dead man was Danny Weathers.

Exhaustion tightened the muscles in Shelby August’s neck and shoulders, and she lifted her hand from the steering wheel to massage the soreness. Not so much exhaustion as tension, she realized, feeling the knots. Ever since she’d left the hospital in Little Rock where her grandmother had been admitted two days ago, Shelby had been experiencing a strange sense of disquiet, an uneasiness that had strengthened the farther north she drove on the interstate.

An hour out of Little Rock, she took the Arcadia exit, bypassing downtown to head east on a paved road that would take her to the river. A few miles in the opposite direction would have put her in the foothills of the majestic Ozarks, but Shelby came from the river bottoms—acres and aces of flat, swampy farmland steeped in superstition and mosquitoes.

Trees rose on either side of the road, obliterating the sky in places and turning the countryside almost pitch-black. The farther from town she drove, the more primal her surroundings. If she rolled down her window, she would be able to smell the river. But Shelby kept her windows up and her doors locked.

“Coward,” she muttered. She was thirty years old, no longer the same little girl who had cried “monster” more than two decades ago. But if the passing years had dimmed her memory of that night, time had done nothing to convince her that monsters didn’t exist. She knew all too well that they did.

But real monsters didn’t creep up from the river in the dead of night, as she’d once believed. They walked into offices in broad daylight and killed for the contents of a safe.

He can’t hurt you now, Shelby. You know that, don’t you?

She could picture Dr. Minger sitting behind his desk, his kind eyes soft and a bit blurred by the thick lenses in his glasses. Albert Lunt is in prison, serving a life sentence. No chance for parole. It’s over.

But it wasn’t over, Shelby thought, fingering the silk scarf she wore at her throat. It never would be.

Months of therapy had helped. The nightmares were fewer and farther between now, but they still came. Albert Lunt still terrorized Shelby’s sleep just as surely as he’d done the day he’d murdered her husband. Or the night he’d broken into her home and tried to kill her. As long as he was alive, he would always have this terrible hold on her.

I’ll find a way to get you, he’d promised as the police had dragged him from her home that night.

And a part of Shelby still believed—would always believe—that he would.

She shivered, even though the evening was warm and humid and the air conditioner in her rental car was turned low. She reached over and shut off the fan, wishing she could turn off her memories as easily. But they were there, niggling at the fringes of her mind as they had been ever since she’d left L.A. Distance wouldn’t quiet them, nor time. Nothing would.