Lucky Day

Book 0: I Hunt Killers

by Barry Lyga

Genres: YA Mysteries & Thrillers

Synopsis

This is the story of the small town sheriff who captured one of the world's most ruthless and cunning murderers. A prequel to the New York Times bestselling thriller, I Hunt Killers. It all started with Dead Girl #1 and Dead Girl #2, the first killings in the sleepy town of Lobo's Nod in decades. Two murders: just a coincidence, or something more sinister? One thing's for sure--it was definitely inconvenient in a year when Sheriff G. William Tanner, a mourning widower, had to run for reelection. With a trail gone cold, it's only luck that links the murders to the most notorious serial killer in memory. And in a town like Lobo's Nod, the killer must be someone Tanner already knows....

Release date: April 1, 2014

Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 76

Sample

Prologue

The children of Lobo’s Nod are taught a certain tale about the founding of their hometown and the origin of its name, and by the time they are old enough for the truth, no one cares to teach it. Few, in any event, are the residents of Lobo’s Nod (affectionately dubbed “the Nod” by the locals) who can remember the truth. Most of the Nod grew up in the Nod, after all, and learned the soothing lie at Lobo’s Nod Municipal Elementary, and did not pay attention later at Lobo’s Nod High School when they were supposed to be taught the reality behind the falsehood. Then again, most of the history teachers didn’t bother. After all, they had grown up in the Nod, too, and the lie seemed harmless enough. It savored of the bland comfort of chicken broth on flu days. And chicken broth—regardless of the provability of its medicinal properties—never hurt anyone.

Few people knew the truth of the origins of the Nod.

Even fewer cared.

  

Stop an adult on the sidewalk on a random day in the Nod and ask for the story of how the town got its name, and you will most likely hear this story:

In 1787, before statehood, when this part of the country was merely a territory, a French trapper and hunter named Étienne LeBeau came west through one of the new United States. LeBeau had—so legend goes—fought bravely on the side of the Americans during their War for Independence, and for his bravery had been promised a spot of land “west of Carolina.”

With his comrades in tow, LeBeau chopped and hacked and rammed his way through undergrowth and overgrowth. On a warm day in September 1787, he and his party broke through a high wall of brush and beheld, in the shallow valley below them, a flat and green dell with ready access to a nearby river (since gone dammed and dry) and the spoor of plentiful game. LeBeau stood on the ridge overlooking the spot, and when his traveling party clamored for him to say something—anything—that would mean an end to their journey west, he remained silent.


Instead, he smiled. And nodded.

The place was thus named LeBeau’s Nod, which—over years of corrosive verbal miscommunication and nonstandard spelling—became Lobo’s Nod.

That is the lie.

  

The reality of the founding of Lobo’s Nod is closely allied with the lie; the very best lies share bed space with the truth, taking on their scent and their mannerisms, becoming indistinguishable from each other.

Étienne LeBeau was, in fact, a fighter in the War for Independence. A French soldier sent from the court of Louis XVI to wage war against the hated British on the American continent, following the Americans’ inspired victory at Saratoga.

LeBeau’s history in France is lost to the ravenous fog that eventually consumes all of time, but it is known that he deserted early upon reaching the shores of the New World and sold his services to whichever side would have him. After the war, he disappeared with a gang of similar-minded thugs into the woods of the Carolinas, where—it is true—he survived through his prowess at hunting and trapping, but also made a name for himself as a pillager, thief, rapist, and murderer.

In 1787, LeBeau finally pushed his luck too far, and it dropped over a cliff. With half his gang dead under militia bullets and bayonets, he fled far west of Carolina before being captured with his fellows. In an act that could have been grim retribution or rare, softhearted mercy, LeBeau and his gang were sentenced to exile from the new United States, to be cast out into the “Territories where the Sauvages & Beastes rage.”

With an armed detachment herding their shackled charges into the wild, LeBeau and his men marched for weeks before they came upon a brown-dead gully, overflowed with river effluvia, its few flat arable surfaces studded with heavy, plow-throwing rocks. It was here that the leader of the escort force left LeBeau and his malcontents, out of the civilized world, quoting the Good Book:

“‘And Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod.’

“This,” the leader is reputed to have said, “is the penalty for murderers.”

“Nod,” LeBeau is said to have retorted, “was east of Eden, espèce de con.”


The word nod in the original Hebrew refers to wandering, but LeBeau—perhaps out of age or exhaustion, but more likely due to the bullet wound in his leg he’d suffered when trying to escape—wandered not at all, settling instead in the reeking, rancid vale where the Americans had left him and his compatriots, in the land thenceforth known as LeBeau’s Nod.


Until years and ignorance corrupted it, as they corrupt all things.

One of the people in Lobo’s Nod who knew this truth was G. William Tanner. He’d learned it from his late wife, a Nod native and a schoolteacher. She’d told it to him one night early in their marriage, when the sex was nightly and the laughter had yet to deepen into the familiar tones of hard-fought love. It was a small story, but Tanner remembered it.

It wasn’t an important history, Tanner was well aware.

Still.

G. William Tanner—“G. William” to one and all, including his sainted wife—liked knowing the truth. Whatever it was.

That was one reason why—at the age of sixty-two and after burying his wife of thirty-seven years—he was once again running for election as the sheriff of the county that was home to Lobo’s Nod.

Chapter 1

A dead girl.

A.

Dead.

Girl.

When he thought the words over and over, they became meaningless to G. William Tanner. You could do that with any words, he knew, via thorough and unrelenting repetition, but somehow turning a dead girl into a hash of syllables seemed profane. Still, he couldn’t stop the words from repeating in his head over and over, and he couldn’t stop them from disintegrating into a mishmash.


The words became meaningless, but the idea and the fear never did.

There was no body, but there was an excellent chance Lobo’s Nod had had its first murder in recent memory.

In his office, G. William had a large corkboard mounted to one wall. Usually, its pushpin-pocked surface revealed nothing more exciting than the week’s duty roster, photos of the latest DUI stops, a court schedule, and the menu from whichever of the three decent-to-middling l. . .