Cheaters and Chupacabras

By Christin Haws

Ivy Russell is a private detective in "the big city in the cornfield". Most of her work comes from chasing cheating spouses and looking for missing persons. But while working in a neighborhood popular with cheaters, she finds that infidelity isn't the only thing lurking in the night. And despite all protests to the contrary, warnings from her friend Baz (aka Detective Barnabas Johnson), and the frantic antics of friend and impending bride Michelle Mitchell, Ivy finds herself on the case.

With help from her friends Leo DeWitt and Arturo "Art" Lopez, Ivy balances an unhappy Baz, the demands of being maid of honor, and looking for cheaters and missing persons with finding what idiot turned a chupacabra loose and why...before it puts her out of business.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christin Haws
• Release date: Dec 21, 2013
• ISBN: 9781310300813

Christin Haws

Christin Haws is a writer and podcaster with a fixation on reruns and cop shows, a love/hate relationship with the Chicago Cubs, and a tendency to use humor as a coping mechanism. Decidedly unhip, she occupies space in a small town in the middle of a cornfield.

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Cheaters and Chupacabras

An Ivy Russell Novella

By Christin Haws

Copyright Christin Haws 2013

Cover art courtesy of Carrie Olds

Smashwords edition

This is a work of fiction.

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Table of Contents

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

About The Author

Home

One

Ivy Russell climbed the tree with more agility and speed than most people think a fat girl is allowed to have. She did have the slight advantage of having climbed this particular tree a few times before, but still, experience didn’t diminish her skill.

She didn’t go up very high, maybe twenty feet, just enough so she could see into the second floor window of the house with little trouble. Situating herself in the tree to free up her hands, Ivy pulled her phone from her pocket and waited. The couple had walked through the front door of the house about twenty minutes before. It wouldn’t be long before they made their way to the master bedroom.

Five minutes later and Ivy’s butt started to cramp. She pocketed her phone and shifted herself around to relieve the pressure. The offended muscle relaxed. The light went on in the bedroom. Ivy’s phone vibrated in her back pocket.

Cursing a blue streak in her head, Ivy scrambled to get her phone, but not so quickly as to lose her balance from her perch. Broken limbs were not her friend in this, or any, situation. Ivy dismissed the text from Michelle (and thanked some sort of benevolent entity that she remembered to put her phone on vibrate before she got out of the car), and enabled the camera, checking to make sure the flash was off. Nothing would end her night faster than a flash in a tree.

Except maybe a broken limb, hers and/or the tree’s.

The couple moved in front of the window, wrapped in an aggressive embrace. The man, salt and peppered into his late fifties with a matching mustache, was still fully clothed. His companion, a girl about thirty years younger with fashionably long and fashionably bleached hair had already lost her dress, her black lace bra and matching panties an appropriate outfit for an evening of lust.

The young lady playfully pushed the older gentleman away, holding onto his tie as he took off his suit jacket. She gave him a good look at her trim body and overflowing cleavage. She gave Ivy a good look at her face. Ivy managed to snap two good pictures of the woman before the passionate make-out session resumed. Ivy took a few pictures of that, too, as well as a couple of shots of the man once he came up for air. Pocketing her phone, Ivy began her descent from the tree.

Not bad for a night’s work. Easy compared to what it could have been, particularly with Michelle texting her at an inopportune moment. Familiarity helped. Patricia Whitesale hired her at least three times a year (usually more) to track her cheating husband, Edmund. In fact, Ivy often said that if it weren’t for Edmund Whitesale’s inability to keep it in his pants and Patricia Whitesale’s constant suspicion, Ivy wouldn’t be able to afford being a private investigator.

Ivy jumped the last feet from the tree and waited in the shadow of it for a second, listening to the neighborhood. It sounded like business as usual in this middle-class residential area of Buddingfield, mostly quiet with the sound of a few cars cruising the streets in the nearby blocks. The Whitesale’s didn’t live here; they lived in big-house country in a development on the south side. The girl didn’t live here either; that was why Ivy was on the case.

Patricia hired her to do the same thing every time: identify who her husband was sleeping with. The result was always the same, too. Ivy would pass along the name of the girl of the month, Patricia would have a dramatic emotional fallout and swear that this time was the last time, and then a few months later, Patricia would call Ivy to do it all over again. Ivy couldn’t see the appeal of staying with a serial cheater, but she figured that if Patricia didn’t love Edmund (and she suspected that she did), then the money must have been better married.

The house, as near as Ivy could figure, belonged to a friend of the Whitesales, but Ivy didn’t think the owners lived in it either. She’d come to think of it as the Buddingfield Bang House, where the philandering rich husbands of the city-in-the-cornfield took their mistresses for an uninterrupted evening of passion. In truth, she tried not to think about it at all. Bathing in bleach wasn’t good for you.

Ivy crept around the side of the house without looking too much like creeping. People notice if you’re trying to be sneaky. People don’t notice too much if you keep it casual. Walking through side yards was commonplace when she was a kid, but had fallen out of fashion as she got older. Still, a girl dressed in jeans and a navy blue t-shirt and black sneakers walking through a yard wouldn’t draw nearly as much suspicion as a girl skulking through the bushes lining the house, wearing all black and trying too hard not to be seen.

Once Ivy hit the sidewalk, she was nothing more than a normal pedestrian.

She checked the clock on her phone as she headed the two blocks north to her car, the streetlights lighting her way. It was a little after midnight. Considering she’d spent six hours following Edmund Whitesale around, she was feeling pretty good. Usually by now she was tired, cranky, and sore. It must have been the lack of time sitting with a tree branch up her backside that made the difference.

Chuckling to herself, she crossed the street.

A scream ripped through the neighborhood, bouncing from house to house like a burglar looking for an open window. Ivy stopped dead in the middle of the street, spinning around, heart racing as she tried to figure out where it came from. The source eluded her. Another sound, a screech lower in octave, but just as loud, chased after the scream. Ivy cringed and covered her ears as the noise raked its way down her spine.

It took a second for the adrenaline to kick in and jerk Ivy into movement. She scrambled out of the road and ran for her car, digging in her pocket for her keys on the way. Ivy might have been a good tree climber, but fast she wasn’t and running wasn’t her specialty. Huffing and sweating in the summer night air, Ivy unlocked her car, slid into the seat, cranked the engine, and flipped on her police scanner. Just as she shut her car door, red and blue lights flashed between the houses a few blocks to her left. A few seconds later, the police chatter confirmed that the screams had been reported and officers were en route.

Ivy sighed in relief and sat in the idling car as the adrenaline drained from her bloodstream, leaving her with the shakes. Situation handled and she wouldn’t have to deal with the police. Her win streak continued.

After a few minutes, her heartbeat returned to a normal rate and the shakes subsided. Ivy switched off the scanner. She buckled up and put the car into gear, waiting until she hit the stop sign before turning on her lights.

Ivy didn’t know what had just happened, but she was pretty sure that it didn’t sound good for someone.

Two

The next morning, Ivy sat at the computer in her office, downloading the pictures from her phone to her computer and waiting for the microwave to reheat her coffee. Even though she made it to bed a little after one that morning and had slept until eight, she felt like her head carried a weight that only caffeine could lighten. The sleep hadn’t been a good one. Too many bad dreams about what made that screeching sound, too many grisly ends for the screamer.

The microwave announced her coffee was ready. Ivy got to her feet and took the five steps from her desk to the microwave, which was stacked on a mini-fridge. The coffee pot filled with day (or two, she couldn’t remember) old coffee sat on top of the microwave. Ivy retrieved her reheated cup of coffee and added creamer before setting the cup down on her desk without slopping it everywhere, a rare achievement.

The office was on the ground floor of a thin, three-story building Ivy owned in a semi-residential, little bit used part of town. The front door facing the street was glass and flanked by two large windows, but she didn’t advertise her private investigative services on them. The door opened into a small lobby area that Ivy didn’t bother to decorate. To the left of the door were the stairs that led to the upper floors. Ivy’s apartment was on the second floor; she rented out the third floor apartment to an old classmate from her hometown. When Ivy was in, her office door was open so she could see anyone coming into the building.

In her small office she managed to fit a desk, couch, and two chairs along with her mini-kitchen set-up. Just past the coffee pot-microwave-mini-fridge stack (which some felt was an electrical fire waiting to happen; Ivy felt those people were fear-stricken weenies), was the bathroom, which wasn’t anything more than a closet with a toilet and a sink. The wood paneling finished off the look. It wasn’t stylish, but it was home.

Ivy sipped her old, reheated coffee from her favorite chipped mug and disconnected her phone from the computer. She looped her USB cord and put it away in its designated spot in her desk, nestled between her tray of flash drives and her Argentine Colt .45. The top of her