Scent

by Kelly, Clint L.

  She didn’t care how sweaty he was. At that moment he needed to be kissed, and she obliged. “One more of those,” she said, “and all is forgiven.”

  Nick pulled her, giggling and protesting, into his moist clutches. “The fuzzy slippers are a nice touch,” he murmured, nibbling her neck and ear. “But I’m betting if you mix a dab of Cassandra with that little backless number tomorrow night, it’ll take the vice squad to sort us out!”

  She laughed as he buzzed her under the chin. Then he drew her close, and she no longer cared about the perspiration and the soggy clothes. In fact, she marveled at how agreeable he suddenly smelled.

  A man watched from the shadows of the privacy hedge a few driveways up the street, a borrowed mutt on a leash. A handful of kibble and the little female mixed breed had gone along without a whimper. The man didn’t remember which house he filched the mutt from, but it would be up to her to go home when her services were no longer required.

  For now, he was just an ordinary insomniac with a big mortgage, walking a dog with a small bladder.

  He’d stayed back and watched the place for three hours. He needed time to think and sort through the options. If anyone thought that was a long time to be airing a dog, they didn’t ask, and if they had, he had his spiel ready. “She’s incontinent, poor thing, but I’ve not the heart to put her down. I mean, look at her.” Whereupon closer scrutiny would earn a hangdog expression from Miss Mongrel. Natural actor, that one.

  He noted the arrival of the clergyman, the return of Cassandra Dixon, the departure of the clergyman, the departure of Nicholas Dixon, the return of Nicholas Dixon, and the departure of the security guards. Other than a couple of halfhearted woofs from the Great Dane, a yowler of a catfight, and a couple of late-model, oversized cars passing on the street, he and Fifi had had the neighborhood to themselves.

  And now, judging from the shadows dancing against lamplight, the Dixons were having a cozy little reunion.

  He’d considered poisoning the Dane, just for the fear factor. And a week before, he’d come close to snatching away old Mags, out for her morning constitutional in sea green designer walking togs. For that matter, he’d toyed with plugging the security guys on principle. Didn’t SFPD think he was a sufficient threat to warrant ongoing taxpayer-funded law enforcement? Blame that two-bit thug he’d hired to do a little damage. Shots had been fired with zero to show for it except a whole lot of unwanted investigation. You got what you paid for these days, and he’d bought a double helping of incompetence.

  Maybe he should poison the guest list at the Crystal Decanter Awards Gala. Or start a fire in the hotel. Or detonate the Dixon limo en route.

  Too imprecise, the collateral damage unacceptable. And far too impersonal. No, the best way to bring down the house of Dixon and make Nicky pay was to march into the Fairmont San Francisco tomorrow night and gun Cassie down on live TV. That way, he could look Mrs. D in the eye at the moment her lights went out, and Mr. D in the eye at the instant he understood the full consequences of messing with Brenda Gelasse.

  Fifi stirred restlessly in his arms. He set her down, fed her the last of the kibble, and unsnapped the leash. The dog wandered off, casting uncertain backward glances at the man in the shrubbery.

  “Yeah, mutt. Get lost,” the man said. “And next time you’d do well to keep better company.”

  Chapter 16

  At 10:47 on the morning of the gala, the phone startled Cassie awake.

  Her hair appointment with the most in-demand stylist west of the Mississippi on the most important day of her life was in exactly forty-three minutes. Miss it, and she would have to wear a wig. No, she would have to wear someone else’s head entirely.

  “Nick. Nick! We’ve overslept, my hair appointment is now, and you smell like the 49ers locker room after a tough loss. Get the phone!”

  Nick moaned from beneath the glass-topped coffee table and groped above him for the source of the jangling. He found it, lost it, and regained it on the fourth ring. He mumbled something that sounded like, “The Nixon resonance,” then listened intently.

  After a couple minutes he told the caller to hold on and waved the phone in the air. “It’s your daughter,” he said. “She left early to help set up for the grade school carnival. She doesn’t know why we resembled a pile of dirty laundry in the middle of the living room floor but she has a pretty good idea and it’s disgusting. Now she’s at Andre’s — he helped her with the setup —and plans to stay there until tonight when no, she is not joining us for the gala but fulfilling her promise to Mrs. Gaylor next door from seventy months ago that she would babysit Max and Martine so the Gaylors could go celebrate their tenth wedding anniversary. If we had been listening, we would remember that she told us eleventy-something times that this was coming but oh no we had to go and schedule the gala at the same time and no the Gaylors do not want to join us at the hotel because they really want to be alone for the first time in a million years and how could we forget? And why you had to go and make a hair date with that pretentious Molaire or Feraire or whateverthe-heckhisname is beyond her when Andre is standing by perfectly willing to give you the most incredible style since Queen Nefertiti’s. My head’s killing me. Where’s the ibuprofen? It wasn’t in the medicine cabinet last time I looked.”

  Cassie’s own head was doing the Watusi, and her neck felt as if she’d slept on rocks. She took the phone and heard the now-familiar sounds of a hair salon in the background. “Beth, I want you to come home and get ready for the gala. This is the most important night of our lives, and you can’t not be a part of it!”

  “That’s a double negative, Mom, and you told me the most important night of your lives was the night I was born. As if it matters these days. In two months have we spoken two sentences? I promised the Gaylors I’d be there for them, and . . .and . . .”

  Cassie heard the catch in her daughter’s voice. “What, Beth?

  What is it?”

  Beth paused, then hurried on. “It’s just I thought you would have invited me to go dress shopping with you and maybe given me a test sample of Cassandra. I wouldn’t have anything to wear now, but it doesn’t matter. I’ve committed to the Gaylors and can watch the gala on their TV. Sorry, Mom, but you just haven’t been around to talk with. I’d really love it if you’d come here to J. Primo’s and get your hair done.”

  “My hair!” Cassie shrieked. “Beth, I feel awful about the dress. But I’ve decided Cassandra’s an adult fragrance; it’s not appropriate for a young teenager. I know I’m going back on my word. And you’re right, I haven’t been there for you. This is going to change. But right now I’ve got to get off the phone. An event this important — well, Beth, I just think it best that I see Geno Figare. It’s an international broadcast and I’ve got to look . . . you know, international. I’ll make this up to you, I will, once the madness has died down. I love you, honey, believe me, but your dad and I have been scratching and clawing for this day, and I’m afraid it consumed us more than we want to admit. Please understand.”

  “Yeah, Mom. I get it. You guys knock ’em out. Andre says to wish you luck. Bye.”

  “Beth!” But she was gone before Cassie could say, “The night you were born was the most important of our lives.” Beth didn’t get it. The sad hurt in her voice said that loud and plain. Still, Cassie didn’t have the time to call her back. Not now.

  “Our baby girl standing us up?” Nick asked, wiggling out from beneath the coffee table.

  Cassie fought back the tears. “We haven’t been there for her, Nick. I planned for this night with little or no thought for Beth. She’s hurt and has every reason to be.”

  Nick stood and worked the kinks out of his shoulders. “She’s a strong girl, just like her mom. You know kids — she’ll get over it. You and I need to get ready for our close-ups, Miss Lamour.” He leaned over her and leered. “Is the bed head look this year’s emerging trend?”

  With another shriek, Cassie ran for the bathroom, yelling on the way.
“Nick, call Geno. The number’s on the corkboard. Beg him to hold my slot. Did you pick up your tux? Has anyone fed Gretch this year? Have you seen my speech?” The rest was swallowed by the hiss of the shower.

  Nick flopped on the couch and stretched, luxuriating in the memories of last night. And that was without benefit of so much as a single drop of Cassandra.

  What on earth will tonight bring?

  The television in the hospital room was tuned to a twenty-four- hour news station. The anchor spoke somberly about the previous day’s extraordinary incident at the San Diego Zoo, in which a garden-spade-wielding chimpanzee attacked a female keeper and nearly decapitated her. Horrified onlookers reported that the chimp “had murder in its eyes” as it held the spade like a weapon and pursued the screaming woman about the primate enclosure.

  One odd side note to an already bizarre event was reported by the paramedics who rushed the injured keeper to the emergency trauma center. The cut and battered woman, they said, carried “the most beautiful aroma about her.” Investigators were said to be closing in on the cause of the rash of animal attacks in the Golden State.

  Joy ignored the broadcast, gazing instead at Royce Blanken-ship. He sat at her bedside, head bowed, eyes closed, lips moving ever so slightly. He appeared to be praying and she felt an enormous peace. The weariness she wore upon awakening, as if arriving in Room 607 after a long and arduous journey, drained away.

  Royce loved her.

  So frail was her touch on his elbow that for a full two minutes he did not appear to realize she was awake. Joy savored those minutes. Just the two of them.

  A nurse came, checked the IV drip, made a quick adjustment, and was gone. Royce stirred and turned to look at her.

  His eyes said he might want to kiss her, to tell her the depth of his loss when he thought she might not return. He held her hand to his cheek, and then he smiled. “Of all the many thousand smells I know, I can smell only one at the moment, the warmth of your hand.” Inexplicably, it was the hand that had fed the raccoons and was one of the only expanses of skin on her body that did not bear the scars.

  His lips brushed the back of her hand, and the fingers that had not moved in many days gently caressed the stubble of his upper lip. For her, and her only, he had not shaved. She knew somehow it was the way of grieving, the way of loving, for a man of discipline.

  “You are my Joy,” he said, voice tight with emotion. “I won’t lose you again.” And without hesitation, “Please marry me?”

  Her sensible brain said it was too soon. Not that she came from a long line of patient people. Her navy father waited just six weeks to pop the question, and her mother’s philosophy was, “Seize the sailor.” When did this tidy, reserved professional turn into such a man of impulse? Why was she so glad he did, so glad he’d asked the question?

  She studied the fine, lean features, the close-set, nut brown eyes. The hair trimmed military-precise. The ears too large, the chin too thin, the brows forming two C-clamps of deadly seriousness. And, of course, the nose. The Nose. That amazing pathway to all things aromatic. She had tempered the fierceness in him, damped the fire that was far from out. He wanted her middle-aged plumpness, saw past the bandages and the coming cosmetic surgery into the chambers of her heart.

  Joy wet her cracked lips before speaking. “Royce Blankenship, I will marry you on one condition. You must buy a new car.”

  They held each other for a good long time before the mirth at last subsided. And for a little longer after that.

  He had checked over the .38 revolver, knowing it was clean, operational, and reliable. No plan of his would go awry due to faulty equipment.

  And if Brenda’s .38, the one he insisted on keeping at her place, should happen to be the weapon used in carrying out the Crystal Gala Assassination Plot, then so be it. She had not played fair, cuckolding him for that flower-sniffing pretty boy from Azure.

  He was Brenda’s husband, divorce or no divorce. He had more testosterone in a single earlobe than Nicholas Dixon had in his entire miserable body. Brenda always did like the newest bauble. She saw Dixon lose interest for a moment in his swollen pregnant wife, and bam, just like one of those Amazonian tree frogs snatching a beetle off a branch with a flick of its tongue, Brenda had him in her arms. She never behaved the same again. It’s Nick this, Nick that, “if you were half the man Nicky is . . .”Well, Nicky boy, you decided to take my wife away from me, and now I’m going to take your wife away from you. I’d lost interest until your mug started showing up everywhere, reminding me of the revulsion I still have for you. Let’s call it unfinished business.

  And Brenda, sweetheart, you don’t change out a husband like a spent lightbulb. Not this one, you don’t. Stormy we were, but not without magic. You happen to be the most maddening woman ever to don a pair of pantyhose, but you have fire and you have money.When I’m done with Nicky’s missus, I’m coming for you and old man deBrieze, and we’re going to jet on down to Argentina and see if we can’t get ourselves lost on one of those mega cattle ranches they’ve got there. Then we start a new life on your millions, and deBrieze goes away.

  He had spun the cylinder on the revolver and listened to the satisfying clicks. That baby would spit death clean as a viper strike. The evening would be spoiled for all the pretty ones and all the good-smelling ones. But it was all business, baby. All business.

  Chapter 17

  Faye Guterman, lead investigator for the Crime Prevention Analysis Lab, or C-PAL, at California State University, San Bernardino, eyed the tall stack of reports crowding her desk. They’d started as a trickle but soon formed a gush.

  Tall, willowy, red-haired, and tanned the color of caramel, Faye was the glamour girl of lab research. The interview process with a male supervisor had been swift, and it was “job filled” before the ink dried on her application. Fortunately, she had a plentitude of scientific qualifications to meet and exceed any number of physical assets.

  “You’ll find the causes of crime in public parks or the likelihood of suffering a car prowl by parking at the Delgado Cineplex,” her employer had said on day one, “but whenever a rash of associated adverse events threatens the public good, look out. The local police will handle the easy cases; the difficult ones they’ll dump on you. Goes with the job.” The truth of that assessment was hard to tell from the job description, unless it was under “other duties as assigned.”

  Brittany Edmunds, a lab assistant and the report dumper, added to the stack. “Don’t look at me,” the stout woman said. “A little expertise in animal behavior, and wham, the strange and unusual flow your way. What was it you said the other night on TV?”

  Faye looked sheepish. “That I’ve encountered every aberration in the human animal, so why not delve into nature’s other oddities?”

  “Bingo! You get the press, and C-PAL gets the grants. You look good on the tube, sugar. All fire and command, flowing copper-red hair, like you was the new Kate Hepburn or something. I love those funky little awards you’re always handing out.”

  “The Sawdust for Brains Honors.”

  “That’s them. America’s salute to the dumbest human interactions with the animal kingdom. This year’s winner was something. Dad takes his family to the national park for a photo op with nature. Smears marshmallow cream on his kid and snaps away while a black bear licks the kid’s face like a lollypop. We got to get that man out of the gene pool!”

  Faye gave the barest of smiles. She thought of her controversial paper comparing psychiatric disorders in humans and animals, which had brought her to the attention of the chief of staff at C-PAL. Her views were decidedly unorthodox. “It’s that ongoing conundrum posed by the similarities in the neurological/ behavioral continuum in the canine and the human male. You study the dominance aggression and cognitive dysfunction in dogs, and one day you will have a clearer understanding of the forces compelling the common street thug — or thoughtless dad with a camera.”

  “Don’t I know it? My shiftless cousin
Cletis broke out of his kennel, and it will take Animal Control and a tranquilizer gun to put him back.” Brittany paused, and a huge grin broke like morning across the broad face. “Listen to us, the Thelma and Louise of political incorrectness!”

  “Hey, I just follow the facts wherever they lead.” The latest facts were leading Faye into strange waters. “Listen to this recent rash of human-animal encounters:

  “Six orca trainer incidents — stomach rammings, pool drag-gings, and arm, leg, and head bitings. By the grace of God no deaths, but a total of one hundred thirty-eight stitches, a set of ruptured kidneys, a lacerated liver, a fractured pelvis, two near drownings, and a lot of frightened people.

  “Twenty-one canine incidents — not just the typical pit bull or rottweiler bitings, but Aunt Matilda’s cocker spaniels, Welsh corgis, and retrievers gone wild, plus a pinky finger lost to a crazed Chihuahua in Point Loma. Sadly, two children have also lost their lives, three others are in critical condition, two mothers will require years of reconstructive facial surgery, and all but two of the dogs had to be put down.”

  Faye shook her head. The several reports of the growing number of strange occurrences across the state were especially disturbing when seen together. “In an entire year, the average number of dog-bite deaths nationwide is seventeen. Four in a single state in three weeks is alarming.

  “That’s not all, Brit. The list details attacks on humans by seven head of cattle, nineteen working horses, and three prized thoroughbreds. Rats have grown unusually aggressive in six reported cases, including the highly publicized city hall death. No less than thirty domestic feline incidents. From hamsters in Hayward to ferrets in Fresno, in the past month the California animal world has gone haywire. And because of the state’s mostly mild spring climate, the attacks are almost as likely to be from wildlife. Two big cat attacks and two mountain lion maulings in Trabuco Canyon. The citations also name bear, raccoon, primates, a zoo elephant, and perhaps strangest of all, a coyote that jumped a rancher in broad daylight and mangled the woman’s ear so badly that it had to be amputated. How is it possible? Nonrabid coyotes are highly wary of human encounters and go out of their way to avoid them.”