The Montauk Monster Read Online Free PDF Page B

much as you don’t like me, Simba. Now get off the damn roof before I have Anita hit you with a tranq.
    Instead, he climbed another rung, calling her name softly. The cat wasn’t going for it. No matter. As soon as he got close enough, Dalton snagged the cat with both hands. She struggled mightily, hissing and trying to get at his arms with her hind claws. Midway down the ladder, she broke free from his grasp, hit the ground running and didn’t stop until she had dashed into the woman’s open back door.
    “Why did you drop her?” the woman cried. She looked as upset as the cat.
    “She wasn’t easy to hold on to,” he replied, putting the ladder back in the garage.
    “You could have hurt her. Who’s your supervisor?”
    He couldn’t believe it. Here he was, climbing up on a roof to get a vicious cat and the woman was threatening to complain to his supervisor. No good deed ...
    After giving her Sergeant Campos’s information, realizing the laugh this would give him when and if she did call, he asked if she could describe the dog that had run Priscilla up the roof.
    “I just happened to look out the window because I heard Priscilla crying. She does that when she’s scared. I didn’t see much, but I could tell it was big. Like a pony.”
    “A pony is considerably larger than a dog. Are you sure about the size?”
    “I know it wasn’t a pony, but you could put a saddle on it if you wanted.”
    “Could you see the type of dog it was, the color of its fur?”
    “It was too dark.”
    “But you could see it had no collar?”
    “People around here think there are no laws. They walk their dogs without collars or leashes and let them poop on my front lawn without picking it up.”
    She droned on for a couple of minutes while Dalton looked for a way out of the conversation. It took another ten, fruitless minutes before he got back in the car. Anita couldn’t stop tittering.
    “I take it you’re not a cat person,” she said as he keyed the ignition.
    “Or a cat lady person. Next stop is someone who said he was attacked by a couple of dogs in his yard. I hope he’s quick. I don’t want to have to buy Mickey a steak.”

CHAPTER 5
    Benny Franks shivered under a sheet, two blankets and a comforter. Even though the night was humid, he’d turned off the air-conditioning in his room. His stomach had been queasy all night, but it looked like whatever illness had crept into him was taking things to a whole new level. Bubbling noises percolated from his abdomen. His nose had started to run an hour ago and he burned through a box of tissues at NASCAR speed. A pair of sodden hand towels lay draped across his blanketed chest.
    Maybe it’s food poisoning , he thought. The pulled pork sandwich he’d had at Summer’s barbecue had tasted a little off. Leave it to his girlfriend to make him sick. She was always experimenting with different food. Just because she watched the Food Network, she thought she was a chef. He remembered the time she’d fed him homemade sushi—though she left out the homemade part at the time—that had landed them both in the ER the next day. He’d shit himself three times before adding a fourth in the car ride to the hospital. They laughed about it now, but it wasn’t funny at all at the time.
    Or maybe his stomach was just repulsed by what he saw at the beach. Holy God, that was awful.
    Summer had asked him to stay the night, but the way his stomach had been cramping, he’d rather be home alone. Sitting on his couch, watching Gladiator for the twentieth time, he’d started feeling woozy and desperately needed some fresh air. Sitting on the porch only made things worse, so he went for a walk. That seemed to settle things down, so he kept on walking. It was a nice night and the moon gave him plenty of light to see by.
    Tired of looking at the same weather-battered homes on his block, he’d jumped in his car and headed for the beach. The state park was closed after dark, but no one really