The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove

women he'd had and women he hadn't including an erotic mental montage of the erstwhile actress and resident Crazy Lady, Molly Michon.
    So it was embarrassment as much as relief that he felt when, after the sound of a weed-whacker and the crashing of metal, Molly popped her head into the shed.
    "Hi, Theo," she said.
    "Molly, what are you doing here?"
    "Out for a walk."She didn't come in, just craned her head around the corner.
    "You've got to get away from here, Molly.There's some very dangerous guys around here."
    "Not a problem. You don't want any help then?"
    "Yes, go get help. But get away from here.There's guys with guns."
    "I mean, you don't want me to uncuff you or anything?"
    "There's no time."
    "There's plenty of time. Where are the keys?"
    "On my key ring.In the ignition of my car."
    "Okay. Be right back."
    And she was gone. Theo heard some pounding and what sounded like safety glass being shattered. In a second Molly was back in the doorway. She tossed the keys on the floor near his head. "Can you get to those?"
    "Can you unlock me?"
    "Uh.I'd rather not right now. But you'll be able to get to those eventually, won't you?"
    "Molly!"
    "Yes or no?"
    "Sure, but…"
    "Okay. See ya, Theo. Sorry about your car."
    And again she was gone.
    As he scrambled in the dirt to get to the keys, he was still troubled about the unwarranted wave of horniness that had overtaken him. Could it have been set off by the handcuffs? Maybe he'd been into bondage all these years and never even knew it. Although when he'd been arrested, right before Sheriff Burton had blackmailed him into becoming constable, he'd spent almost two hours in handcuffs and he didn't remember it being an especially erotic experience. Maybe it was the death threat. Was he turned on by the thought of being shot? Man, I am a sick individual, he thought.
    In ten minutes he was free of both the handcuffs and the dogging thoughts of sex and death. Molly, Joseph Leander, and the house trailer were gone, and he stood before the ruins of his Volvo with an entirely new set of questions nagging him. The roof of the station wagon was now mashed down to level with the hood, three of the four tires were blown, and on the ground, all around the car, were the tracks of what had to be a very, very large animal.
    There were two trails that had matted down the grass leading away from the shed and over the hill.
    One, obviously, was the track of a person. The other was wider than the dirt road that led into the ranch.
    Theo dug into the Volvo for his gun and cell phone, having no idea what to do with either of them.
    There was no one to call – and certainly no one he wanted to shoot.Except maybe Sheriff John Burton.
    He searched the area, found Joseph Leander's gun, and tucked it into the waistband of his jeans. The keys were still in the red four-wheeler, and after a minute of measuring the ethics of "borrowing" the truck against having been kidnapped, handcuffed, and almost killed, he climbed into the truck and took off across the pasture, following the double trail.
    Gabe Gabe and the rancher stood over the pulverized remains of theHolstein, waving flies away from their faces, while Skinner crouched a few yards away, his ears back, growling at the mess.
    The rancher pushed his Stetson back on his head and shuddered. "My people have been running dairy and beef cattle on this land for sixty years, and I ain't never heard or seen anything like it, Gabe."
    His name was Jim Beer. He was fifty-five, going on seventy, leathery from too much sun and stress, and there was a note of the sad lonely under everything he said. He was tall and thin, but stood with the broken-backed slouch of a beaten man. His wife had left him years ago, driving off in her Mercedes to live inSan Francisco and taking with her a note worth half the value of Jim Beer's thousand acres. His only son, who was to have taken the ranch over, was twenty-eight now and wasbusy getting thrown out of colleges and into rehabs all over the country. He lived alone in a fourteen-room house that raffled with emptiness and seemed to suck up the laughter of the ranch hands, who Jim fed in his enormous kitchen every morning. Jim was the last of his breed, and he would forever trace the beginning of his downfall to an affair he'd had with the witch who once lived in Theo's cabin at the edge of the ranch. Cursed he was, or so he believed. If the witch hadn't run off ten years ago with the owner of the general store, he would