Small Town Monsters. Craig Nybo

as he strolled out of the diner. He took two deep breaths of clean mountain air. He couldn’t help but smile a little. The roads shone, licked clean by a light drizzle the previous night. Todd Cottrell droned by in his old Ford pickup, his two purebred Weimaraner hunting dogs in the bed, lavishing in the cool air. Todd spotted Kurt standing on the stoop of Abigail’s , wearing his beige uniform and dark brown baseball cap with the DePalma Beach Police seal embroidered in gold thread on its front. Todd waved and smiled as he drove by. Kurt waved back.

      Kurt walked to his muddy Blazer, parallel parked in front of the diner. He got into the police Blazer and fired the engine to life. He backed out onto Main Street and drove at a leisure speed toward the station. It would be another slow day. That was okay; Kurt liked slow days. The tourist season had ended, ebbing traffic to a trickle. There was hardly a speeder to bust after mid-August. Each day lay before him like a blank canvas and it was up to him to paint. Kurt thought of the little town as one of America’s best-kept secrets; he feared that if the outside world ever caught wind of its quaintness, people would swarm the place and change it forever.

      DePalma Beach wasn’t perfect; but was there really a

      Concerning:

      Kurt McCammus

      Todd Cottrell

      Todd Cottrell’s 2 purebred weimaraners

      Clay Hickman

      The General

      Craig Nybo

      4

      perfect place? People had their secrets; but people always had their secrets. Kurt had his own secrets; he had left them, along with a couple dozen open homicide cases, back in Los Angeles. He had come to DePalma Beach to start fresh—to wipe his slate clean. He wanted to look life in the eye again, man-to-man, rather than be beaten down by it.

      “Kurt, you there?” the voice of Clay Hickman squelched through the radio.

      Kurt picked up the handset. “Just leaving Abigail’s. What’s up?”

      “I think we got something.”

      “What is it?”

      “I don’t know. Just got a call. Looks like wolves or coyotes got to Buren Peoples’s herd.”

      Kurt sighed. “What does he expect me to do about it?”

      “Buren’s in an uproar. He says it might be aliens or Bigfoot or something.” Clay chuckled.

      Kurt sighed. “Can you meet me up there?”

      “Oh, come on, Kurt.”

      “Clay, who’s the chief around here?”

      “Okay, I’ll head up there. But lunch is on you.”

      “Deal.”

      “It’s a waste of time if you ask me.” A new voice came over the radio.

      Kurt rolled his eyes. “General, is that you?”

      “Old man Peoples is a menace and a hermit. You boys’d be best to leave him alone and find something else to do.”

      “General,” Kurt said into the handset, “I can’t stop you from listening in on the police band, but I’ve told you a hundred times, this is not a public channel.”

      “I’m doing my civic duty,” The General said.

      “Look, I know you have the best intentions; but if you don’t stay off this band, I’m going to have to cite you.” Kurt hated to threaten the old man. The General was a nice old codger, a veteran of World War II, always eager to tell a story about the front lines in the European Theater. Somewhere along the line folks had taken to calling him The General. The old man

      Small Town Monsters

      5

      hadn’t objected. Kurt figured he wasn’t alone in not knowing The General’s real name.

      “Well, that’s a fine how-dee-do; a man tries to do his civic duty and all he gets for it is a brow-beating.”

       “Just stay off this channel. Listen all you like, but please don’t break in. If you have something to report, call it into the station.”

      There was a click as the General signed off.

      Kurt put the handset to his mouth. “Clay, you still there?”

      Clay chuckled into the handset. “Yes, I’m here.”

      “It isn’t funny.”

      “Okay, you got it, chief; it isn’t funny.” Clay chuckled anyways, even though it wasn’t funny.

      “Just meet me up at Peoples’s ranch.”

      “Okay, but like I said, you owe me lunch.”

      Craig Nybo

      4

      Chapter 3

      Kurt guided his Blazer through the roughed up trace of a road that cut through Buren Peoples’s ranch property. Buren sat on the passenger’s seat, full of his usual unfounded anxiety, his too wide eyes flicking back and forth across the road and into the nearby forest, jumping at the flick of a branch in the trees, the shadow of a cloud drifting into the path of the sun, the crest of a span of geese cutting their way across the sky. If there was a mar on DePalma Beach, it was the right-wing conspiracy theorists who lived on the fringes of the county. Buren Peoples led the faction. In his heart, Buren stood for truth, liberty, and equality, but somewhere along the line something had broken loose in the old man’s head and rattled around for a little too long. Buren owned a semi-profitable ranch fifteen miles west of town. According to Buren, many unseemly things had happened on that ranch.

      Police visits to the ranch were an inevitable part of Kurt’s job. One day Kurt spent the better part of an hour standing on Buren’s ranch house roof looking for the UFO that had abducted Buren and deposited him in the woods twenty miles away and short four hours of his memory.

      Kurt saw it as a matter of perspective; he could view Buren as a nuisance or he could consider Buren a necessary part of the

      Concerning:

      Kurt McCammus

      Clay Hickman

      Buren Peoples

      Small Town Monsters

      5

      whole. Buren was harmless and kind in his own way. A twisted part of Kurt actually liked answering the rancher’s calls.

      “Happened out on the west forty,” Buren said. Buren carried a slight body with spindly legs and whip-like arms. He always wore the same battered cowboy hat, a mangled Stetson with dark sweat-stains around its brim. Most of his teeth were gone, rotted out and long since pulled. Buren could afford to get his teeth fixed, but who was he trying to impress?

      Kurt looked in the rearview mirror at Clay, who sat in the back seat with a snide grin on his face. Kurt shot him a reproachful stare and looked back out the windshield.

      The Blazer cut across Buren’s rough property. With no roads, the four-wheel drive bounded through ruts and holes, bouncing and splashing through mud puddles. Buren had a nice spread—over twenty-one-hundred acres. He kept nearly three-thousand head of sheep. For a recluse, he made a nice living.

      “There,” Buren said, pointing at a copse of evergreen trees to the far right of the Blazer. Kurt turned the wheel and the Blazer bounded toward where Buren pointed. “I think we got something big on our hands,” Buren said, a deep sense of concern in his voice. “Something bigger than us humans, that’s sure.”

      As the Blazer rounded the trees, Kurt spotted the reason Buren had called; Easily 20 head of sheep lay mangled across the ground in discarded heaps, their bones broken, much of the meat torn from their carcasses.

      “What the hell?” Clay asked, sitting up and gawking out the window from the