A Girl’s Best Friend (Moonlight Detective Agency Book 3)

by Isobella Crowley

  Now, the man straightened even more from his formerly slumped position, and a faint gleam crept into his eyes. “I might know a way to help you out,” he replied.

  For a few minutes, they exchanged banal, vaguely worded comments. It seemed obvious that the guy was trying to make sure he wasn’t a cop. To help convince him, he shifted his position to the guy’s other side and allowed more of the light to fall on his face.

  “Hey,” the stranger said and pointed at him, “you’re that David Remington guy, aren’t you?”

  He laughed, nodded, and sipped his beverage again.

  “I heard about that shit in Times Square before Christmas, and someone was talking about everything else you did last summer.”

  Remy nodded and pretended to be amused while the man recounted some of the absolute worst of his misadventures. His stomach knotted and it took considerable effort not to hang his head in shame.

  But, for the purpose of the investigation, it was good that he still had his old reputation.

  Conrad looked typically impassive, but Remy could feel the strait-laced bastard’s disapproval. It almost seemed like he was embarrassed on his behalf.

  After bullshitting for a couple more minutes, he finally had results.

  “I can introduce you to Snow White,” the guy offered slyly. “I’ve heard good things about her. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience if you have an open mind.”

  “That,” he responded at once and beamed, “sounds like exactly what I’m looking for.”

  The dealer glanced around. “Okay, do you wanna go right now?”

  “Sure,” said Remy. “Wait…uh, let me see if I can collect my date.”

  He scanned the crowd but couldn’t locate Riley. Acid roiled in his gut as he imagined her already back to her old ways, shaking down some random, hormone-addled dude for gifts and compliments.

  The man tapped his arm. “Hey, I ain’t waiting all night. You wanna go, we do it now. Also, what’s with this guy? He your fuckin’ bodyguard or something?” He meant Conrad, of course.

  Remy turned back. “He is, actually. Don’t worry, he’s cool. But…uh, yeah, let’s go.”

  Shit. Where the hell is she? We could use her on this. Besides, she’s alone and I hope she’ll be okay.

  He could not, however, pass up the opportunity. The dealer offered to walk them directly to their next lead.

  For starters, he guided them through the crowd, across a kitchen, and out a back door, which opened onto a staircase descending into an alley.

  “Hey,” the guy commented without stopping or looking back, “sorry about your girl. She’ll text you if she needs you, though, right?”

  Remy adjusted his tie. “Oh, of course she will.”

  Chapter Nine

  Port Morris, the Bronx, New York

  It turned out that their new friend’s name was Serge and that he’d had a car waiting in the alley.

  Remy had to admit he was relieved. Getting into a vehicle with criminals whom he did not personally know was risky, to say the least—Conrad shot him a couple of sharp glances—but he really, really didn’t feel like walking all the way to the East River in the current tit-freezing weather.

  The car’s driver was a big, hairy bruiser who looked like he weighed around three hundred pounds and was almost certainly armed. Before they departed, the hulking man patted both Remington and Conrad down to confirm that neither carried a gun.

  “Damn,” the investigator drawled and still pretended to be a dumb rich kid with no appreciation of what he might be getting himself into, “you guys seem like professionals. That’s good to know. It’s usually the stupid amateurs who try to screw you over.”

  Serge chuckled. “You got that right.”

  They drove for ten minutes or so, seemed to zig-zag across major streets and down minor ones, and eventually arrived on a wharf in the industrial area of eastern Port Morris.

  A sentry materialized out of the shadows the instant their driver killed the engine. Remy noticed that the silhouette was short and broadly built.

  “It’s cool,” Serge said, “I know these guys. Let me do the talking, all right?”

  “Sure,” Remy agreed. “Oh, do me one favor, though—don’t tell them my name. I mean…since I’m kinda locally famous and all…”

  The man nodded. “Right, yeah.” He stepped out of the car and gestured for the two passengers to stay where they were until further notice.

  Through the side of the vehicle, they heard him greet the sentry to briefly explain the situation. The huge driver, meanwhile, kept an eye on them via his rearview mirror.

  “Why,” the sentry growled, in a definite dwarven accent, “did you bring them here? You could have dealt to them on your own.”

  Hmm. Either our boy Serge is about to get us machine-gunned and taken to the trash compactor, or we’re about to meet one of the head honchos of this little operation and crack the case a couple of days earlier than I’d guessed.

  The dealer apologized to the dwarf and explained that his customer was a rich guy with a major habit and numerous friends—the kind of person who might want to buy wholesale. They hadn’t really discussed it like that, as Remy recalled, but he wasn’t complaining.

  Conrad turned to him. “Wholesale?”

  “Absolutely,” he stated and forced himself to smirk. The driver looked unamused but didn’t react at all.

  After a little more haggling with the sentry, Serge opened the door. Remy and Conrad got out.

  The dwarf glowered at them. “Be still. Raise your hands over your head.” They did as he instructed and he patted their lower bodies down. “Now, get on your knees so I can search the top.”

  Remy bit his tongue to keep from cracking up at that but obeyed. The dwarf resumed his search and ran his hands over their chests, arms, and shoulders.

  “Good.” He grunted. “Now, come.”

  He led them toward a big-ass shipping container next to the river, one end opened toward the water. A few short men walked in and out, carrying improbably large loads in their arms, and others milled around and appeared to be on watch.

  The guards, Remy saw, were definitely armed but only two had guns. The rest carried axes and hammers.

  The sentry made a few odd hand gestures and said some things to the others in one of the dwarven languages, and no one bothered them as they proceeded toward the open end.

  For the sake of maintaining his act as a dumbass, Remy considered cracking a joke about short people now having their own mafia but thought better of it.

  “There,” the sentry indicated and shoved the human and the lycanthrope into the back of the shipping container.

  Within, the workers were busily unpacking crates and moving multiple large bags of white powder onto a metal pushcart near the water’s edge. The lighting was too poor for Remy to get a good look, but the product resembled cocaine. If it was Snow White, it must need to be mixed with water or something before being injected.

  A relatively thin dwarf greeted them at once from the other side of a small folding table, on which a lamp rested. He was mostly bald except for a thin strip of black hair running down the center of his head, and his chin was covered by mere stubble, although he had an impressive Fu-Manchu mustache that trailed against his chest.

  “You,” he rasped, “you are here to buy. Wholesale? To resell?”

  The investigator smiled and straightened his tie. “The notion had occurred to me. At the very least, I’d like a good-sized personal stash so I can keep coming back to it if I like it, and sell it along to someone else—cheaply—if I don’t.” He chortled. “No harm, no foul, right?”

  “I see.” The dwarf smiled in a nasty way. “Most people like it.”

  He laughed again and did his best to seem as careless as hell, like an overgrown frat boy to whom this was all a game. “Awesome. That’s what I like to hear.”

  When he thought back to the druggies in the warehouse yesterday, he tried not to shudder. Somehow, he did
n’t imagine that they’d liked the drug once they tried it.

  “To be clear,” he went on, “we are talking about Snow White here, right? I haven’t seen the stuff before, myself, and it almost looks like you’re moving coke or some shit.” He glanced around for effect.

  Fu Manchu’s manner grew grimmer and more officious but not exactly hostile. “Yes, and do not question its authenticity. We are trustworthy. You will get exactly what you came here for.”

  “Wellllll,” Remy drawled and made a show of tapping his lips with his finger, “can I get a demonstration or something? It’s not like I’m questioning you but so I know how you…uh, do this stuff.”

  The dwarf sighed. “You must mix it with clean water.” He instructed them to wait, cast a sharp look at Conrad, and walked off to find an appropriate sample.

  One of the guards who carried a battle ax that looked like it weighed a good twenty or thirty pounds moved in a little closer behind them.

  “You,” he rumbled, his voice directed toward Remington, “must have a great deal of wealth to be able to afford someone like him as your protector.”

  Shit, does that mean he knows Wonder Boy is a werewolf? Or does Conrad simply give off an ex-Special-Forces or ex-Russian-Mob vibe or something?

  “Oh, ha,” was all he said. He grinned and rocked on his heels. “We make do. I have thought that maybe Conrad really should grow a full beard instead of going with the goatee. It’s kind of half-assed, don’t you think?”

  The lycanthrope merely smiled pleasantly.

  Up ahead, toward the back of the container, it looked like Fu Manchu had found what he was looking for and now headed back to them.

  At the same time, someone else—probably a dwarf judging by the short heavy footsteps—had come in behind them. Remy glanced at a typical dwarven silhouette, likely another guard or middle-manager type. He turned his head forward.

  Fu Manchu was about ten feet away when the guy from behind passed Remy on the side. Suddenly, he stopped dead in his tracks and looked at the two guests. His face was hidden by a long, slanting shadow.

  “Hi,” Remy quipped and waved.

  The dwarf leaned forward to peer at his face. As he did so, light from a portable lamp fell across his own.

  It was Surrly.

  “You!” the dwarf snapped and drew back as his hands clenched.

  Ohhhhh fuck. Remy moaned inwardly, although he kept the smile nailed to his face. For a moment, he wished he’d been able to smuggle a bazooka down the front of his pants and that the dwarves wouldn’t have noticed.

  All around him, the other crew members tensed and he could feel their angry eyes on him. A similar adrenaline vibe emanated from Conrad. This might well get ugly, and fast.

  “He,” Surrly went on, “is not a buyer. He’s here to snoop on us. He’s Taylor’s assistant.”

  Gasps and snarls were uttered all around.

  Remy pushed his cufflinks back from his wrists. “Partner,” he corrected them.

  Behind him, something crashed and almost exploded, and a blur of speed and motion turned the area near the mouth of the container into a whirlwind of violence. Surrly stumbled back a few more steps as another guard charged and hoisted a huge mallet, and Fu Manchu dropped his drug sample to fumble for a weapon.

  The investigator grasped the folding table and flung it at the hammer-wielding guard. The lamp tumbled and cast its light sideways along the floor.

  The dwarf swung his mallet and knocked the table aside, but one of the legs scraped across his face under the eye and he cringed, momentarily stunned. Fu Manchu emerged from behind a crate, now armed with a loaded hunting crossbow.

  In the split second he’d bought himself, Remy hunkered down and looked behind him.

  As he’d suspected, Conrad had changed into his wolf form—heedless of the fact that doing so had shredded most of his clothes—and launched himself at the bruiser with the ax. He bounded off the dwarf’s body and left it mangled, bloody, and twitching slightly.

  For obvious reasons, it looked like the werewolf would draw most of the aggression.

  “Crap.” Remy hissed a sharp intake of breath and ducked aside as splinters of wood rained like shrapnel and dwarves converged upon the werewolf. Another guard stepped behind the investigator and aimed a sawed-off shotgun at his chest.

  He fell back with his hands up. They must have planned to kill Conrad and take him alive for questioning. He did not like the thought of that.

  The lycanthrope, growling and spitting in primeval fury, surged past Fu Manchu and attacked the guard with the mallet who Remy had thrown the table at a moment before. His teeth sank into the dwarf’s head and separated the top of his skull from the rest before the whole tangle of bodies crashed out of clear sight.

  “No!” the shotgun wielder gasped, distracted by the death of his comrade.

  Remy seized the initiative. With one hand, he swatted the gun aside while with the other, he grasped the thick hair on the back of the dwarf’s head and drove his knee into his face.

  The shotgun fired and boomed with terrifying volume, but the buckshot scattered against the wall while the dwarf’s nose crunched against his patella. Then, before the guard could counterattack, he bolted for the exit.

  Conrad, although farther back, was already doing likewise. He engaged the guard with the shotgun as Remy emerged into the open air.

  He had to think of something, and fast. Surrly and Fu Manchu shouted behind him and outside, two of the exterior guards had begun to jog toward him.

  Only a few feet in front of him and not far from the lapping, ice-tipped waters of the East River was the big rusty pushcart onto which the dwarves had piled the majority of their merchandise.

  Remy dashed toward it. “Mix it with water, you say?” He almost cackled. “I bet it doesn’t quite work when it’s mixed with the entire fucking river, does it? I imagine it would be a little too watered down, like basic white girl coffee before they add the pumpkin spice.”

  He threw himself at the cart. It squeaked horribly and budged about an inch.

  “Well, shit.” He panted.

  One of the exterior guards pounded toward him. “Get away from that, you little bastard.” He rumbled a warning.

  “Little?” He scoffed. “I’m at least a foot taller than you.”

  In a snarling tornado of fur and teeth and claws, Conrad burst out of the shipping container and intercepted the charging dwarf. Remy quickly lost sight of the details as the two struggled.

  He turned back to the cart and pushed it again. It now actually started to move, although it still made way too much noise and resisted his efforts as much as possible. Not only had the wheels begun to sink into the cold mud, but at least one of them was bad and twirled haphazardly on its vertical axis.

  “Of all the fucking times”—he grunted and shoved his shoulder against the cart—“for there to be a failure of some cheap-ass mechanical component. Aren’t dwarves supposed to be good at fixing stuff?”

  Behind him, the sounds of the struggle intensified. Conrad hadn’t overcome the dwarf yet, but he seemed to be winning. However, the others had now begun to pile out of the container. If they could surround him, they might be able to kill him.

  And then, although it pained him to admit it, Remy knew he would be easy prey.

  He saw a flat square of wood on the ground, the fallen cover of one of the crates. Leaving the cart where it was, he dashed over, retrieved the wood, and ran to the front of the cart where he jammed it right in against the bad wheel.

  “This had better work,” he snapped. “It worked in college when Justin’s car was stuck in the snow. And snow and mud are basically the same thing, right?”

  When he returned to the front, he once again heaved himself against the bars and directed all the force his body could muster toward the river.

  The cart squealed and his body trembled with strain before the wheel jumped up onto the flat, hard surface of the board and the whole mass lurched ahead. I
t began to pick up momentum on its route toward the water.

  “Ha, ha, ha!” Remy guffawed. He turned and shouted toward the melee. “Say goodbye to Snow White, everyone.”

  The volume of his voice was enough that it echoed across the waterfront, magnified by the river itself, and rose even above the din of dwarf-on-wolf combat. He wondered what any random New Yorkers might have thought if they heard him.

  For a brief instant, the fighting stopped cold.

  “No!” Surrly howled. His gaze locked onto the rolling cart. “Get it. The merchandise—save the merchandise!”

  Conrad detached himself from the brawl and his powerful lupine body bounded over to Remy as the dwarves made a beeline for their precious drugs.

  “Time to go,” the investigator suggested. Without waiting to see if his companion was about to argue, he bolted down the waterfront. He didn’t even bother to bob and weave but only sought to put enough distance between himself and the cartel to be well out of the effective range of a horde of guys with stumpy little legs.

  Fortunately, Conrad’s four feet sounded like they trailed right behind him.

  Someone stepped out from a shadow ahead.

  “Hey, man!” Serge protested and flailed his arms. “You can’t—”

  Remy shoved him aside and he sprawled into the snow, his legs kicked straight up as the escapees sprinted onward.

  Over the next few seconds, the sound of Conrad’s gait shifted from the loping of four feet to the pounding of two, and the dark silhouette in the corner of Remy’s eye went from horizontal to vertical and identifiably human.

  Behind them, in their mad, breathless flight, they heard a deep and gravelly voice shout after them.

  “You’d better run. Don’t think this is over.”

  Oh, I’m sure it isn’t. I can’t believe I actually retrieved that asshole’s stolen diamonds. Ungrateful son of a bitch.

  After a moment, they ducked through a fence and reached a street well away from the waterfront. Sirens were approaching and if a cop came past, he might guess they’d been involved in the incident.