Read Online Carnosaur Crimes by Christine Gentry - Free Book Online

unlocking the truck when the dim vapor light on the storefront behind her winked out, and a shadow fell across the driver’s door. Someone had moved soundlessly up beside her. Startled, she whirled to her left side, door key poised between her knuckles to be used as an eye-jabbing weapon if necessary.
    A man stood next to her, his body haloed by backlighting. He wore a black tee shirt and jeans. For a split second as her eyes took in the short-cropped black hair and thin Amerind face, Ansel thought the dead poacher had been magically resurrected. A visceral fear engulfed her. This was impossible.
    â€œRelax, Miss Phoenix. I’m Agent Standback. FBI,” said the apparition’s calm, tenor voice as he brought out a badge from his rear hip pocket.
    Ansel sagged against the truck. “What the hell are you doing here?” she cursed, adrenalin anger replacing her fear.
    Standback’s sienna eyes gleamed in the moonlight. “Escorting you to Agent Outerbridge.”

Chapter 7
    â€œOnly two relationships are possible—to be a friend or to be an enemy.”
    Cree
    Never in her wildest dreams could Ansel expect to find herself where she was at the moment, strapped in a seat and staring past her feet out the tinted windshield bubble of a shiny black Eurocopter 120B as it lifted off.
    The noise was deafening. Turbines fired, the rotor drummed, and three humongous blades scythed through the hot evening air. Everything vibrated. The flight deck and the aft cabin containing three passenger seats. The tail. The nose. The resulting updraft produced by the thirty-seven-foot long helicopter sent jet fuel fumes and grit swirling like airborne banshees.
    Ansel’s hands gripped the arm rests as the skids abruptly left the ground, toes first. Then the aircraft’s nose lowered slightly and began its forward motion via a boost of added engine power. As the craft made a straight-angled climb, the concrete landing pad beneath her grew smaller with amazing speed, and her stomach flip-flopped. In less than a minute they were going seventy miles an hour.
    She wished that Reid hadn’t talked her into eating a chili dinner. What would he think about this? Ansel wondered as the small agricultural airfield used by crop-dusting planes became nothing but a postage stamp square dotted with pinpricks of light. It was too late now. All Reid cared about was her being be a “good girl” while he was away. Fat chance.
    As instructed, she’d followed Standback’s black Bronco in her truck and parked near the airstrip outside of Swoln. He’d told her nothing except that they would fly a short distance to meet Agent Outerbridge. Since then, Standback had been deliberately evasive with her questions, busying himself with pre-flight inspections, the engine warm-up, and then pre-takeoff checklists.
    â€œHow are you doing?” he suddenly asked, seated to her left.
    Ansel forced herself to look away from the pitch black void beneath her. His head was covered by a helmet with a radio headset and a microphone boom as was hers. One of his hands operated the cyclic stick between his legs while the other manipulated a collective lever between their seats. His feet also controlled two rudder pedals. Digital screens, knobs, buttons, and engine gauges filled the cockpit. Multi-colored, control panel lights illuminated Standback’s face with an other-worldly, neon glow just as surreal as this whole adventure.
    â€œI’m all right as long as we don’t fly over water,” Her voice sounded muffled through her earphones.
    â€œWe’ll be over solid terrain all the way,” he assured.
    â€œAt least the ride is smoother.”
    â€œAbove a hundred feet, this baby is pretty quiet compared to other copters,” Standback said with pride. “The aft New Generation Fenestron tail rotor really reduces noise print in forward flight. As we level off above the clouds and hit one-hundred-forty