Read Online Claw Back (Louis Kincaid) by P.J. Parrish - Free Book Online Page A

petition in her class to get the Florida panther named the state animal and she was sad about the one that had gone missing.
                  “Find the damn cat,” the sergeant said. “I don’t want to have to tell my kid the thing is dead.” 
                  Then he handed over the keys to a souped-up Jeep that had been commandeered from a drug raid and told Louis that he should check out “the weirdos out in the swamp camps.”
    There were hundreds of hunting camps on private land in the Everglades , the sergeant explained. After the federal government created the preserves in the seventies, the camps were grandfathered in and a handful still existed, handed down from one generation to the next.  
                  Most were down south of I-75 but there was one just a few miles from where Grace had disappeared, the sergeant said. It was called Hell’s Hammock.
                  Be careful, he added, they’re all mouth-breathers who love their guns and hate the government. And that includes anyone wearing a badge.
                  Louis hadn’t told anyone else where he was going. He hadn’t even called Katy.
                  It wasn’t just the fact that the swamp camp men were bound to be hostile to a strange black man let alone a woman ranger . He was shutting her out for now because this was his world – going after dirt bags in a possibly dangerous situation. She didn’t belong here.
                  He would tell her later. His plan right now was simple: j ust quietly look around and check these guys out.
                  If he could find them.
                  Sergeant Sweet wasn’t sure exactly where Hell’s Hammock was. The directions were vague, just landmarks mainly. About halfway across I-75, he was supposed to watch for a gravel service road just past the first rest stop. Louis had found the road but deep into a jungle of palmetto palms it began to narrow. The brush created a tunnel so thick and close Louis had to shift in the seat toward the middle to keep from getting scraped.
                  The road forked and dead-ended a couple times, forcing Louis to back up and look for landmarks he had missed. The sergeant had said to watch for an American flag tied to a tree and turn left , but the only thing hanging from trees out here was Spanish moss.
                  Damn . Another dead-end . And this one looked like he wasn’t even going to be able to back out. He glanced down at the police radio on the seat but the signal had died miles ago.
                  He downshifted and eased the Jeep forward. There was a patch of sunlight ahead. And a tatter of a faded old flag hanging limp from a tree.
                  After a left turn, the thicke t opened into a small clearing. He went another twenty yards then stopped, taking stock. There were three buildings, crudely made from plywood and topped with tin roofs. The largest of the three had small windows covered with shutters and a sagging porch. The other two buildings were small, probably a storage shed and an outhouse. There were no vehicles of any kind to be seen.
                  And no sign of a human being.
                  Except...the front door of the main building was wide open.
                  Louis turned off the Jeep. In the quiet that piled in he could hear the whisper of the pines that ringed the compound and then the cry of a swallow-tail kite.
                  Maybe the men were out hunting. He got out of the Jeep, scanning the ground for tracks but saw nothing in the dirt and long grass. In fact, except for the open door, the camp looked deserted.
                  He had a sudden flashback to walking into another camp. It was years ago and thousands of miles away. Northern Michigan, in the dead of winter, and he was hunting a cop