The Jersey Devil Read Online Free Page A

even had your coffee yet.”
    â€œI did have a bite of sausage,” he replied with a wink.
    â€œBill will be down in a bit. Give me a shout if you find any,” Carol said as she walked to the kitchen.
    At his age, if he found what he was looking for, he’d do more than shout. He’d ring the damn bells at St. Luke’s church. With each morning he woke up, he had less and less time.
    But something told him big changes were blowing on the wind, just the way that scruffy Bob Dylan used to sing in his nasal whine. Like his old great Aunt Ida, he’d been looking deep into the tea leaves, and things were starting to stir again.
    * * *
    Six hundred miles away, Norm Cranston considered finishing the warm dregs sitting at the bottom of the bottle of Modelo he’d left on his back porch. He never was one for the hair-of-the-dog-that-bit-ya theory. Instead, he poured it onto his lawn, tossing the bottle in the blue recycling bin on his deck. It had rained overnight. The air smelled sweet, renewed.
    He greeted the singing birds with an echoing belch.
    Boy, he’d had too many last night.
    Norm liked to drink alone, throwing one-man, one-cat welcome home parties whenever he’d been away for a spell. He’d returned yesterday from a weeklong stint in Ohio, following up on a rash of sightings of a Bigfoot–esque beast near the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. The Grassman tended to be a little shorter than your typical Sasquatch, with a tendency to track deer, its favorite prey. Though relatively quiet over the past several years, three sightings had been made by backpackers two weeks back. Word had spread and people were starting to fear going to the park. The Ohio Forestry Service had hired him on the QT to come out and follow up on the stories, hoping he’d find nothing and report it as simple misidentification. He’d gone so far as to camp out alone for six nights. As expected, he didn’t come across the Grassman. What the backpackers probably saw were bears.
    When he’d interviewed the witnesses, he wasn’t shocked to learn that they were all city dwellers with scant experience in the great outdoors. They weren’t accustomed to coming across any wildlife bigger than a raccoon. Bear encounters were frightening, and easily misconstrued by a brain that was misfiring while allowing the bladder to empty its contents.
    â€œLions and tigers and bears, oh, my,” Norm said, drinking orange juice straight from the carton. He’d spend the weekend working on a couple of articles, then a blog post, reassuring folks that the Grassman was not a threat to those seeking to bond with nature in Ohio.
    Of course it wasn’t. If there’d been an actual Grassman, Norm was pretty sure his ass wouldn’t have been out there. At least, not alone.
    â€œHey, Salem, you mind g-going out to get some groceries? The cupboards are pretty empty,” he said to his black cat, perched on the windowsill above the kitchen sink. Salem followed him with his wide, orange eyes. Norm’s neighbor, Pam, always watched the lazy ball of fur when he was away. She made sure there was plenty of food for the cat. It wasn’t lost on Norm that the cat was taken care of far better than he had ever been.
    â€œOr maybe you’ll share your Fancy Feast with me.”
    Salem made a contented cooing noise. Norm patted his head.
    â€œYou always were generous.”
    He put a Jimmy Dean frozen sausage and biscuit in the microwave. While he waited, he spotted himself in the small oval mirror he kept by the fridge. His eyes were bloodshot. His goatee that hung six inches from his chin was kept from going wild and woolly with a series of different colored rubber bands. Norm stepped back, rubbing what was becoming a considerable beer gut. He’d be forty-two in the fall. There were aches and pains that came with the age, but he could still motor when he had to. Hell, he’d just backpacked