Claw Back (Louis Kincaid) Read Online Free PDF

a gesture to follow.
                  The first thing Mobley did was reach over to turn up the volume on the police radio near his desk. Red lights zipped back and forth on five channels. To anyone else, the radio traffic would have sounded like excited gibberish but Louis understood every word. The wounded officers had already been released from the hospital, Collier County S.O. had joined the pursuit and the fleeing suspects had caused a traffic accident on Tamiami but had managed to drive on, dragging a sparking fender behind them.
                  Mobley glanced at Louis. “I don’t have time right now for you and your dead cat,” he said.
                  “He wasn’t dead,” Louis said. “He was --”
                  Mobley held up a hand to silence him as he leaned toward the radio. The suspects had entered I-75, heading south at a high speed . One of Mobley’s deputies radioed in for permission to continue the pursuit in what was suddenly far more dangerous conditions -- a crowded freeway. The deputy sounded young, his strained voice nearly drowned out by the screaming siren in the background. A superior officer, also in the chase, gave him the okay to continue.
                  Mobley hadn’t sat down, hadn’t moved from his spot behind his desk. He reminded Louis of how Susan Outlaw looked a few years ago when she was waiting for news on her son Ben a fter he’d been kidnapped. It was a combination of emotions: fear for those you cared about and helplessness because you couldn’t be out there -- wherever there was -- to help. 
                  For the next five or six minutes, they listened to the anxious chatter of officers and wailing sirens. Then suddenly it was over, the young deputy ’s voice dominating the others as he announced that the Monte Carlo had clipped a semi, went airborne and flipped until it was nearly cut in half by a tree. With a small break in his voice he ended his transmission with, “both suspects appear to be DOA.”
                  Mobley keyed the radio and asked for the exact location of the roll-over. He was told the pursuit had ended two miles north of the Collier County line, in Lee County.
                  Mobley’s turf. Mobley’s headlines.
                  Mobley turned the radio down, walked to the open door and told the secretary to schedule a press conference in an hour. He came back to his desk and dropped into his chair.
                  “You got about thirty seconds before I get slammed,” he said.
                  “The panther wasn’t dead,” Louis said. “It was illegally darted, fell from a tree and went looking for water .”
                  “Sounds like hunter trying to poach a trophy.”
                  “It’s not a poaching incident,” Louis said. “The wounded panther was not the same cat Fish and Game put the BOLO out on. That was a female cat named Grace. And we know for a fact that she’s been abducted, probably by the same person who tried to take Bruce.”
                  “Bruce?”
                  “The male cat in Lehigh Acres.”
                  Mobley’s eyes came up to Louis’s face, flickering with disbelief. “I’m about to coordinate the processing of an armed robbery scene with multiple fatalities and you’re giving me some fairy tale about kidnapped cats?”
                  “I can appreciate your position,” Louis said. “But there’s only a handful of panthers left out there. Fish and Game monitors them very closely . It’s a federal crime to even mess with the cats.”
                  “But not our crime, Kincaid.”
                  “You’re wrong,” Louis said. “It is our crime. You gave it to me.”
                  Mobley smiled. “You thought I was