Wolfwraith Read Free Page B

support, did she? Even though she drove a Jaguar now, courtesy of husband number two.
    He roused from his daydreams as a johnboat came around the point, holding a single man in an orange lifejacket. Soon Alex, a deeply tanned man with kindly brown eyes, eased the flat-bottomed craft up to the dock. Shadow caught the thrown rope with the claw and pulled the boat tight against the pier, tying it off.
    The claw consisted of four plastic bendable fingers across from a passive thumb. Even though he had no control over the thumb, he could reach over with his right hand and position it for a wider or narrower grip—the difference between holding a key or a beer can. The fingers, with polyethylene fiber strings running inside jointed digits, would close and bend with the flex of a surgically altered wrist muscle. A realistic, latex ‘skin’ covered the whole affair, including soft foam that molded the contraption to the same shape as his real hand.
    There’d been many amputees in this latest mid-east war. Body armor meant you’d probably survive a bombing, even if you lost a few parts. So a few Hollywood prop men had volunteered their services to match the skin tone, size and details of a prosthesis to the amputee. A casual observer wouldn’t guess it was ‘special effects,’ as long as Shadow wore long-sleeve shirts.
    Alex killed the engine and pulled his small, thin frame up on the pier. In his late fifties, he displayed considerable gray in his dark brown hair and close-trimmed mustache, yet moved with the agility of a much younger man. Low key in his management style, he had been helpful since Shadow came to the park.
    Straightening up, Alex smiled and asked, “What’s the word? What couldn’t you tell me on the radio?”
    “I think I found the body of one of the girls. It’s a body, anyway. I figured I’d better get you down here with the boat to confirm before announcing it to the whole world on the radio.”
    “Good thinking. Now, where’s the body?”
    Shadow pointed to the forearm in the distance. Alex took a small pair of binoculars from a case on his belt and scanned the shoreline.
    “Are you sure?” he asked. “Looks to me like a yellow piece of plastic, nothing more.”
    “It’s a body. I can see an arm.”
    “You’re not using binoculars. How can you be so sure? Especially at this distance?”
    “I’m sure.”
    “Only one way to find out,” the chief ranger said. “Let’s go.”
    Minutes after the two men left the dock, Alex eased the flat-bottomed, square-nosed johnboat close to the shoreline.
    The yellow material turned out to be a raincoat, ballooning slightly above the water from the air trapped inside the fabric. She was face down. The arm poking from the sleeve was obviously female; slender and graceful. Her skin had turned a shiny, fish-belly white. A bracelet adorned the girl’s wrist, a thin golden chain with a small, plain cross, adding counterpoint elegance to the harsh reality of death.
    Alex cut the engine back to idle as they nosed into the marsh grass. Once in position, he steadied the boat with an oar while they considered their find.
    “What now?” Shadow asked, feeling uneasy. “Do we leave her so they can get pictures or anything?”
    He hoped it would be the case. He’d seen plenty of bodies in his time, but never a young woman and he hadn’t had to pull one out of a bay. Maybe the rocking of the boat was throwing his stomach into a cauldron of nausea.
    “No, we’ll take her in. It’s obviously nothing more than a drowning.” Alex pushed the boat closer with the oar. “Can you handle it?”
    “Yeah, of course.”
    Shadow reached out and grabbed the dainty arm with his right hand. Bile rose in his throat at the unnatural coldness of no-longer-quite-human-feeling skin and the sponginess of slack muscles beneath. The corpse emitted no strong odor, but the rotted-fish stench of the tidal marsh, which Shadow normally didn’t even notice, clogged his nostrils. The