McKean S01 A Dangerous Breed Read Online Free Page B

it but they got him before he could take it out.”
    The room stank of blood and animal smells. My stomach began to churn violently, the way it used to do in Iraq. I was glad to follow my companions when they moved out onto the house’s wide front porch.
    “Front door was ajar,” Tanner continued. “Not all that unusual for farm folks - ”
    “But some of the smarter breeds of dogs,” McKean interjected, “can turn doorknobs.”
    “Yeah,” Tanner agreed thoughtfully, as if McKean had added a new dimension to his thinking.
    “Peyton McKean!” a friendly voice called from inside the living room.
    “Vince Nagumo!” McKean replied as the FBI agent came out and shook our hands. “What brings you here, as if I didn’t know?”
    Nagumo, a slight Amerasian fellow with an intelligent face and surprising green eyes, gestured inside the house and said, “This, and your call last night about the human coyote, and something you probably don’t know. There’ve been two other murders just over the Adams County line: one at a farmhouse, one at an all-night convenience store. Same MO. Bones everywhere. The attacks seem to be centered on the wildlife refuge. Governor’s calling in a National Guard containment effort on whomever, or whatever, is doing this.”
    Tanner slipped his hands into his back pockets, spat off the porch and nodded toward the plowed fields. “Nice thing about land like this, you can see a lotta footprints. Guess what kinda footprints are out there.”
    “Coyote?” McKean responded.
    Tanner nodded.
    “You know what else?” the sheriff asked.
    “What else?”
    “Nuttin” else. Tracks go up over the swale to the north, heading back to the wildlife refuge. About twenty, twenty-five animals. That’s a huge pack. Now, seein” as this scene’s still pretty fresh, I got a notion to drive up that way and try heading “em off before they get back into rough country.”
    “Absolutely!” McKean exclaimed. “And we’ll follow, won’t we, Fin?”
    I swallowed hard. “One of these days, Peyton, you’re gonna get us into some real trouble.”
    My Mustang’s air filter ate a ton of dust chasing Tanner’s patrol car over a dozen washboarded farm roads following the coyote tracks. The sparkling metalflake midnight blue finish on my hood and its airscoop turned a dreary slate gray under a coating of fine pulver and I turned on the windshield wipers occasionally to push the accumulating grit out of my view. Eventually we crested a hill of dry wheat and drove down into the channeled scablands of the wildlife refuge, where the road turned into two dusty ruts winding between mesas and ponds. I began to get a claustrophobic feeling as the cliffs hemmed us in on either side. Several miles in, Tanner pulled over beside a small saltpan and I stopped behind him. Before McKean or I could get out, Tanner leaped from his patrol car, drew his pistol and fired two quick shots at something hidden in sagebrush on the far side of the saltpan. We got out as he crossed the saltpan and hauled out of the brush the carcass of a large coyote, freshly bloodied with a bullet hole through its chest.
    “Caught him off guard,” Tanner crowed. “There’s more but they ran off.”
    McKean knelt and inspected the carcass. “Looks like pure coyote except for its large size. That size may be due to hybrid vigor.” Its paws twitched as if the impulse to run still glimmered in its nervous system.
    “Hybrid vigor?” I asked. “What’s that?”
    “A common finding when distantly related animals interbreed,” McKean expounded. “The offspring possess positive traits of both parental lines and the result is often a vigor greater than either parent had, based on the combination of both parent’s positive traits. Larger size is one of the most frequently encountered of such new traits.”
    I queasily scanned the surrounding sagebrush for signs of trouble. “You’re saying there’s a bunch of extra-large coyotes running around