Free Creatures of the Storm by Brad Munson

Peck?
You gave your officers Word-A-Day calendars as Christmas gifts,
didn’t you? Admit it.”
    Peck didn’t react. “Victims and witnesses
identified a bright red off-road vehicle as the reason the BMW left
the road in the first place.”
    “Astonishing,” Michael said.
    “To my knowledge, this facility has the only
bright red ATV in town.”
    “Again, remarkable coincidence.”
    Peck sighed again and put the notebook away.
“Look, son–”
    Steinberg’s expression twisted into an ugly
new shape. “I am not your son,” he said with all the venom he could
muster.
    Peck’s eyes narrowed. His
jaw tightened. “No,” he said, “you’re not. Because if you
were my son, you
little prick, you wouldn’t talk to anybody like that unless you
expected to get your head busted, and you sure as shit wouldn’t
talk to a police officer that way.”
    A cold blue current slithered down Lucy’s
back. She took a step forward. “Now, hold on, hold on, let’s–”
    Peck’s hand came up fast, so fast that for a
moment, Lucy wasn’t sure if he had a gun in it. He didn’t. All he
had was a finger pointing straight up from a canted elbow in a
“wait one moment, let me finish my point” gesture.
    “I’ll get to you in a minute, Doctor,” Peck
said without looking at her. “Let me finish with this one first.”
His eyes never left Steinberg, whose smirk was beginning to
falter.
    “Did you take the ATV out today?” he asked,
very steadily.
    Steinberg cleared his throat and darted a
look at Cindy, then at Lucy. “No,” he said, and looked away.
    “You want to try that again?”
    More boldly: “No,” he said. “I’ve been
working in the lab all afternoon. Since lunch. Which I ate in my
office.” He smirked again, a ghost of his original expression.
“Chicken salad.”
    Peck’s head swiveled to face Cindy Bergstrom.
She seemed to jolt when he looked at her, as if he’d touched her
with a live wire. “You agree, Cindy?”
    Christ , Lucy thought, does he know
everybody here? Okay, the Bergstroms had
been in town a long time, and he’d been Sheriff for a thousand
years, so, fine, he knew a lot of people, but still …
    Cindy looked at her desk, at the floor, at
the walls, everywhere but at Peck. “Yes. I mean, yes, sir. Um…”
    “He was here all afternoon?”
    “As far as I know.”
    “And the ATV stayed right where it is?”
    “Yes.”
    “And you have no idea how it got all muddy
and warm, just sitting there in the rain?”
    Shit , Lucy thought. So she wasn’t the only Junior G-Man in
town.
    Cindy’s eyes got big as golf balls. Lucy
could see white all the way around. “No,” she said in the tiniest
voice imaginable.
    “I don’t even have the keys,” Steinberg said
defensively. He managed to pull Peck’s gaze away from the
receptionist; Cindy almost collapsed the instant she was released.
“Doctor Wonderful there keeps them on her ample person at all
times.”
    This time Peck did look at
her. Into her, with his head tipped forward, his high prominent
brow shadowing ghostly blue eyes. He looked at her without a word,
as if to say, So now you’re going to join
this monkeyfuck ?
    Shit , she said to herself. Shit shit
SHIT . This was the last of it. This was
the end. When the Oversight Committee heard of this – and they
would – they were certain to pull the plug. Or worse yet, they’d
leave the facility right where it was and get somebody else to run
it, somebody who didn’t let psycho employees run people over,
somebody who hadn’t spent seven years kissing ass and playing the
game, and the last year pissing people off.
    Great fucking
choice , she told herself. Do the right
thing – turn the little maniac over to the cops so he would finally
get what was coming to him…and lose the facility. Or do the wrong
thing and cover his pimply ass one more time, to save the Station.
And, incidentally, herself.
    Like it was even a contest.
    She fished the keys out of her pocket. “Right
here,