…A Dangerous Thing

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BILL CRIDER
is the author of more than fifty published novels and numerous short stories. He won the Anthony Award for best first mystery novel in 1987 for
Too Late to Die
and was nominated for the Shamus Award for best first private-eye novel for
Dead on the Island
.
 
He won the Golden Duck award for “best juvenile science fiction novel” for
Mike Gonzo and the UFO Terror
.
 
He and his wife, Judy, won the best short story Anthony in 2002 for their story “Chocolate
Moose
.”
 
His story “Cranked” from
Damn Near Dead
(Busted Flush Press) was nominated for the Edgar award for best short story.

Check out his homepage at: http://
www.billcrider.com
—or take a look at his peculiar blog at
http://billcrider.blogspot.com

Book List

Carl Burns Series

One Dead Dean

Dying Voices

. . . A Dangerous Thing

Dead Soldiers

Truman Smith Series

Dead on the Island

Gator Kill

When Old Men Die

The Prairie Chicken Kill

Murder Takes a Break

Horror Novels

(all published under the pseudonym "Jack
MacLane
")

Keepers of the Beast

Goodnight,
Moom

Blood Dreams

Rest in Peace

Just before Dark

Sheriff Dan Rhodes Series

Too Late to Die

Shotgun Saturday Night

Cursed to Death

Death on the Move

Evil at the Root

Booked for a Hanging

Murder Most Fowl

Winning Can Be Murder

Death by Accident

A Ghost of a Chance

A Romantic Way to Die

Red, White, and Blue Murder

A Mammoth Murder

Murder Among the O.W.L.S.

Of All Sad Words

Murder in Four Parts

Murder in the Air

The Wild Hog Murders

Murder of a Beauty Shop Queen

Standalone Novels

Blood Marks

Houston Homicide (with Clyde Wilson)

The Texas Capitol Murders

Stanley Waters Series

(co-authored with Willard Scott)

Murder under Blue Skies

Murder in the Mist

Sally Good Series

Murder Is an Art

A Knife in the Back

A Bond with Death

Western Novels

Ryan Rides Back

Galveston Gunman

A Time for Hanging

Medicine Show

Outrage at Blanco

Texas Vigilante

Stone: M.I.A. Hunter Series

(All published under the pseudonym "Jack Buchanan.")

Miami War Zone

Desert Death Raid

Back to 'Nam

Short Story Collections

The Nighttime is the Right Time

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.

C
arl Burns knew that the new dean wasn't going to work out when she bought the two goats.

Her neighbors were outraged, but Burns had to admit that in theory, as the dean explained, having goats running loose in the yard was a pretty good idea.
 
That way, you never had to mow the grass, thus saving time for scholarship and study, saving gasoline or electricity that might have been used for a power mower, and at the same time providing the lawn with a generous portion of natural fertilizer.

Goats also dispensed a very healthy milk, from which an equally healthy cheese could be made, or so Burns had been informed, not that he cared to find out personally whether it was true or not.
 
Though he had been quite fond of
Heidi
as a child, the phrase
goat cheese
, no matter how much it might appeal to the
yuppiefied
tastes of the nation in general, made Burns think of something dark and smelly and awful, maybe containing short, coarse hairs.

Besides the milk and cheese, another argument in favor of the goats was that they were, if you did not become too attached to them, quite good when barbecued.
 
Burns had actually tried
cabrito
more than once, and it wasn't bad, except for the occasional presence of the short, coarse hairs that he dreaded finding in the cheese.
 
They weren't very appetizing in barbecue, either.

As far as anyone in Pecan City could discover, however, there were no ordinances against keeping animals within the city limits.
 
There were a number of people in town who had a few chickens.
 
One man even had a horse in his back yard.

Of course, none of
those
people happened to be the Academic Dean at Hartley Gorman College.

"Thank God, I wasn't on the selection committee," Mal Tomlin said, tilting back his chair and puffing on his Merit Menthol 100.
 
"No one can blame me for this one."

"There's nothing wrong with goats," Earl Fox said.
 

He
had
been on the selection committee and was therefore regarded by Burns and Tomlin as at least partially responsible for the choice of Dr. Gwendolyn Partridge as HGC's new Academic Dean.

Fox lit up a Merit he had mooched from Tomlin and blew a defiant plume of smoke at the sign affixed to the wall of the History lounge.
 
The sign was composed of white letters on a black background and had once read:

NO SMOKING

PUBLIC AREA

Someone with a felt-tip marker, most likely one of the three men in the room, though none of them would ever have admitted it, had altered the sign by blacking out some of the white letters so that it now appeared to read

SMOKING

PUB IC AREA

"No one said there was anything wrong with goats," Burns said.
 
"It's the other things."
 
Burns was chairman of HGC's English Department, and some of the "other things" had him much more worried than did the goats.

"She's one of those unreconstructed hippies," Tomlin said.
 
He was worried too.
 
"Those people never know when to let well enough alone."

Tomlin was especially bitter because one of Dr. Partridge's first decrees had been that as of March 1, all HGC buildings would become "smoke-free areas."
 
It was bad enough that Tomlin, Fox, and Burns, who had himself quit smoking anyhow, were no longer supposed to smoke in the History lounge; now they weren't going to be allowed to smoke anywhere except outside.
 

Defying the rule for the lounge was easy enough, since only the three of them ever went in there, and no one so far had seen fit to enforce the edict.
 
The new rule, however, meant that someone was going to be cracking down.