Wild Card

by Mark Henwick

  “What’s our position with the pack at the moment?” I said to cover. “Alex and me?”

  He scowled.

  “The pack is disturbed. That’s one reason why I agreed to go along with this hunt the way you’re running it; you’re keeping them occupied. Unfortunately, you’re also acting like an alpha. You realize that you and Alex get their attention? Especially together.”

  “Not what we want—”

  “What you and I want on a personal level isn’t important to the pack.”

  I stopped him with a hand on his arm.

  “Felix, I know you’re not my alpha.” I felt awful, as if it was some kind of betrayal. But it needed saying. “Never have been. But I will do everything I can to keep your pack stable.”

  “And what if the only way to keep it stable is to take over?”

  “I don’t want it. Neither does Alex.”

  He shook his head. “You just haven’t tasted it yet. Like I said, the pack pushes things in certain ways.”

  “I can hardly understand what you want. When you start talking about what the pack wants, I fell like it’s a different language. One I can’t speak.”

  “You’re right there.” He loomed over me. “It’s not simple and easy like you want it to be. When you hunted up in Commerce, you felt the Call?”

  “Yeah.”

  He grunted. “That’s the language you need to learn. I can’t explain it with words, but let’s try this; have you given an Athanate oath yet, ‘on my Blood’?”

  “I have.”

  “Felt it, didn’t you? Just like you feel Skylur’s right to be head of Altau. His right to receive your loyalty.”

  “Yes.”

  “The House is held together by bonds. The Athanate to each other and the House, the kin to the Athanate. You share Blood. With the Blood comes the marque. For outsiders, that makes the House distinct. For insiders, it’s what binds it together. The marque requires the members of a House to act for the good of the House.”

  I shivered. This was close what Vega Martine had said to me before the Assembly, trying to stop me allying myself with Altau—the marque knows about need. I rejected her argument that made us simply pawns of the marque. The marque existed because of us, not the other way around. But my counter argument was more faith than logic.

  “That’s like the Call. The pack is held together by bonds, and the Call is how we feel it. The Call requires us all to act for the good of the pack.”

  He turned abruptly on his heel and walked off. I had to jog to catch up.

  “Alexander’s an alpha, whether he wants it or not. I’ve managed to ignore the tension caused by him being in the pack, but I can’t ignore the pair of you. From the point of view of the pack, it’s like a challenge that I’m refusing. The Call will demand a resolution. If it doesn’t come from me, then from the others.”

  We came out from the pines and continued down towards the ranch house.

  I stopped him again. I was having enough trouble making sure I understood without having to trot alongside him.

  “So, even though we’re not challenging, you’re saying either you deal with it as if we are, or someone inside the pack will challenge you. And then they’ll deal with it.”

  “If they win.”

  “If they lose?”

  “Another, and another. But it won’t come to that. The Confederation would be in here taking advantage long before. They’d just scoop the whole pack up under a new alpha, or split it into a couple of packs, north and south. And they’d make it work. They might split the territory. They’d lose half the pack in fights, but what would they care?”

  His face was bleak, and the cold, hard reality of what he was saying chilled me.

  “No alternatives?”

  “There are. Here’s one; you leave Denver, with or without Alex.”

  He might not be able to tell I was lying, but he could read the instinctive, angry rejection that flared up in me.

  He nodded, as if he’d expected exactly that.

  The sun had been up enough to take the chill off the air, but the breeze whispering out from the pines was still cold as a mountain spring.

  Felix’s eyes flickered off to the left; the little cemetery enfolded in its green arms; the yew trees that spoke of life and not death.

  Something wounded passed behind his eyes. He reached and took my hand between his.

  My breath caught in my throat.

  “Or you could marry me, Amber.”

  Crap! Not what I was expecting.

  I didn’t trust my voice, but I could see he knew my answer from his eyes.

  After a moment more, he dropped my hand and started walking again.

  I stood still in shock for a minute longer. Nothing had changed. The same breeze flowed down the mountain, the same flowers nodded in the beautiful little cemetery. It felt like something had been looking at me, and I hadn’t noticed until now, when it stopped.

  A large bird, a hawk probably, passed overhead, making the sun blink, before he turned and soared down the valley, barely moving his wings.

  Leatherface walked past, slowly, not looking at me.

  I followed Felix into the ranch and found him in his den, staring out the window.

  “What makes it impossible for us to be a separate pack in Denver?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” he replied. “But you risk everything trying to persuade the whole pack to accept you in their domain.”

  He held up a USB.

  “This is a list of the pack,” he said, turning to loom over me again. “You swear it would not be used to harm the pack?”

  “I swear.” That didn’t work; it sounded flat. I lifted my head and looked him in the eye, alpha to alpha. “I swear, on my Blood, I will not use this to harm the pack in any way.”

  A ripple passed his face and the wolf stared out at me.

  I could feel my own wolf stir in response.

  “We walked a mile today.” His voice was low, almost a growl. “Not in each other’s shoes, but still, we have a better understanding, you and I. None of which will make any difference if it comes to it, and the Call presses us to fight. We will both do what we have to. But if you misuse this information, I will hunt you down and kill you.”

  “I understand,” I said, my voice husky.

  The USB dropped into my hand.

  Leatherface was waiting outside the front door, the shotgun still resting against his shoulder. I headed down the steps and he matched pace with me, wordlessly, kinda like an escort. Was he seeing me off the premises?

  At the car, he nudged the tire with his foot.

  “City tire,” he said. His voice was creaky as old pine in a wind. He squinted northwards. “Big snow coming.”

  “Thanks…uh, no one’s told me your name.”

  “Duane.”

  “Okay, thanks Duane, I’ll put winter tires on.” It was too early for snow, but yeah, winter is coming. Where had I heard that?

  He nodded. “This weekend.” He turned and walked back up to the farm buildings.

  Chapter 43

  “You sure about this?”

  Melissa had persuaded me that this might yield a vital lead. I liked the look of the bar about as much as I liked the thought of kissing a rabid dog. It was a step above drinking in an alley from a bottle in a paper bag, but only one step. It was in northwest Denver, between where the quiet residential areas stopped and the sleek commercial zone started, and it was neither quiet nor sleek. The solid iron frames over the windows gave away the locals’ favorite after-hours hobbies.

  Melissa peered around nervously, then back at me. She seemed to take comfort from my presence.

  “I’m sure the address is right,” she said. “And it’s the right name.”

  “Hmm. Okay, let’s do it. Stick close.”

  We stepped inside, and Melissa stumbled as her eyes tried to adjust to the gloom.

  I saw people as warm bodies, surrounded by a haze. Good enough; I didn’t want
to stand there looking out of place, so I moved forward, my hand on Melissa’s back.

  The place smelled of stale beer. That was good; there were no Were or Athanate marques. All I had to look out for were Nagas and random jerks.

  The central bar and the pool table were lit, but the rest of the room was in shadow.

  A couple of men tried half-hearted comments as we made our way to the bar, but this was a serious drinking place, even at midday. I ignored them and they went back to talking to their glasses.

  I saw a biker sporting his gang colors, the eagle and capital A of the Sons of Silence, but he was here with his girl and probably just scouting. The disappearance of so many ZK bikers had probably left a bit of a vacuum in bars like this, and gangs would be putting out feelers.

  Clayton, former Detective in the Denver PD, was sitting about halfway down the bar, head in his hands. A folded newspaper was at his elbow, but he wasn’t reading now. He was staring deep into his rotgut. There were no answers there, but to be fair, there wouldn’t have been answers in a glass of water either. And from the look of him, I wasn’t sure how interested he was in finding answers anymore. We’d probably wasted our time coming here.

  I let Melissa past and took a better look at the other men in the bar. No one set off any alarms, but a couple of them were staring at us with enough interest that they rated designations. Okay. Batshit 1 and Batshit 2.

  Clayton sensed Melissa and his head twisted around. His eyes narrowed.

  “Owen,” he said after a pause. “You look different.”

  At least he wasn’t incomprehensible drunk.

  “You always did say the nicest things,” Melissa said.

  “Yeah. What I shoulda said was you gotta great new hairdo and how good it makes you look and shit like that.” He took a shot of his drink. “Truth is, you look older.”

  “Truth is, you look worse than I do, Clayton.”

  He laughed. The sort of breathy laugh that doesn’t take too much effort. “You’re right. I look like shit.” His head tilted and he looked at me from beneath heavy lids. “Who’s GI Jane here?”

  I smiled and leaned against the bar. He was still sharp enough to spot that. Maybe not time wasted.

  “Farrell’s a PI,” Melissa said. “I’m working with her.”

  The bartender wanted us to drink something. I wasn’t as tough as I once was; I doubted I could stomach what they called rum here anymore. Not after sampling Jen’s drinks. They had Pabst on tap, but instead I got a couple of bottles of Fat Tire beer for us to chew on.

  Clayton was frowning at his drink. “Farrell. Farrell. Heard something.”

  “People come and talk?” Melissa was interested. She meant people from the force.

  He nodded. “Time to time. Old cases. New scuttlebutt. Always was a good listener. Got nothing much else to do now.”

  I stuck the neck of the bottle in my mouth before my demon said something about destructive self-pity. I hadn’t been there; it wasn’t my place to judge.

  “So what brings a forensics star and a yellow ribbon PI to talk to me?”

  He knew. Through the bleary eyes and the fog of drink gleamed a hard, calculating mind. In the way of these things, that clever mind twisted back on itself. We weren’t his drinking buddies and we weren’t down here to shoot the breeze. It followed we wanted to talk about an old case, and in his mind there could be no other case than the one that had sunk him. His very own Moby Dick.

  “Your last case.”

  “Figures,” he said. “You want to talk about what I got nothing to say about.”

  “Come on, Clayton. Loosen up,” I said. “We’re not Internal Affairs. We’re not here to hash over the fallout. We want to talk about the case.”

  Melissa had briefed me as much as she could.

  Clayton had been highly rated in the PD, until he’d got his teeth into the same line of questioning as Melissa. Over the course of a couple of years, he’d squeezed in extra work on the number of unsolved murders among the poorest section of the Denver community: the homeless, the institutionalized. He’d managed to overcome suspicions and had interviewed dozens of people that the original investigating officers hadn’t had time for.

  It was regarded as a harmless eccentricity. It raised the profile of the PD in a section of society where it was needed. No one complained, except possibly his wife.

  Then, out of the blue, a prostitute he’d interviewed had accused him of rape. It was credible enough, but it depended almost entirely on the woman’s testimony. And the day before it was due to be heard, she’d disappeared.

  He’d claimed that he must have gotten close to someone who knew the truth behind the murders, and that he’d been framed because of it. His contacts in the community refused to talk to him anymore. The department had reinstated him, but not everyone bought his story. He ignored orders about which cases to work on. He ignored pleas from his wife and remaining friends to get back on track. He obsessed about the murders and the supposed conspiracy to derail his investigation.

  ‘Delusional’ got entered into his psych report, and finally lost him his badge.

  And his wife divorced him.

  “You can’t talk one without the other,” he said. “That’s what IA wanted to do.”

  “I’m betting, if the person who framed you was in your list of suspects, you had a hunch about who it might be.” Melissa took a sip of her beer. “Why isn’t there anything about that in the report?”

  “Because you don’t do that without proof, and I couldn’t get the proof.” She’d managed to needle him enough for him to sit up and glare at her. But I liked him a lot more after hearing that.

  “You didn’t even talk to your partner about it?” I asked.

  “My ‘partner’ wasn’t talking to me. The bastards gagged him. Said he might have to be a witness against me.” He slumped forward again with a muttered “Ah, shit.”

  I leaned across the bar. “There’s a new angle you haven’t heard about.”

  I thought for a moment we’d lost him, but his head tilted up enough for me to see a frown deepen the creases of his forehead.

  “What?”

  “Melissa’s been suspended for following in your footsteps.”

  He raised his head to look at her. “Idiot,” he mumbled.

  “If we can get her back, we can get you back,” I said.

  He shook his head. “Oh, I don’t doubt you’d try.” He was frowning again. “Farrell. Yes, that was it. They didn’t get to suspend you, did they? Didn’t get the chance.”

  “Not relevant,” I said.

  “I never make snap decisions about relevance. Bit twitchy about it, are you?” He laughed. “This is getting like a club for former employees of the law.”

  I’d just about reached the end of my patience, but Melissa sat alongside him and gave him the run-down on what she’d looked at and why. He kept his head down, but he nodded now and then, between drinks. Whatever he said, he was still interested.

  I got us all another round to stop the bartender from hassling us.

  He didn’t say anything when she finished, but she’d gotten him thinking about it again. It wasn’t for long though.

  “You tell me something, Farrell.” He took a swallow of his rotgut. “All that talk about military experiments gone wrong. You one? You leap tall buildings? Bend metal bars with your bare hands?”

  “I’m not a military experiment. If I were, they’d keep a better hold of me.”

  “Heh! That they would. But I recall now, you went into that building alone, against three guys with shotguns. They’re dead and you didn’t get a scratch. Don’t look like Supergirl.”

  “I’m not Supergirl, either.” I leaned closer again. I had his attention, held his eyes. “The truth is even stranger than that. But the problem with knowing that truth about me is you can’t do anything with it. We can do things with your truth, maybe even nail the killer that no one else believes in.”

  Clayton’s eyes lost
their focus. For a second, I was worried that he was about to pass out, even though he didn’t seem that drunk. But it wasn’t that. He was seeing things.

  “Oh, they believe all right,” he whispered. “Some of them. But a case with a profile like that and no end in sight? They don’t want that.”

  Okay, so he had a beef against the police and the city. It wasn’t surprising, but it wasn’t going to get us any further in a hurry.

  “So your evidence wasn’t good enough to close the case?”

  “Would’ve got it,” he said angrily. “I was that close. Just a little longer. That’s what they didn’t believe. That’s when they pulled my badge.”

  I edged in past Melissa, so I was right in his face, eyeball to eyeball.

  “Close to who?”

  “Trail’s cold,” he said.

  He stank of rotgut. He was leaking it like an old wooden barrel, his staves loosened from too many knocks, his hoops rusted and eaten away by the acid inside him. His breath, his sweat, his clothes—the rotgut permeated everything about him. But deep inside all of that…

  “Come on,” I coaxed him. His knowledge was like a splinter embedded in his head. It just needed teasing out. “You can tell me. You trust me. You know—”

  “Amber. Amber! ”

  I blinked. Melissa’s hand was tugging at my arm.

  Crap. What the hell was I doing?

  Clayton was sitting there like I’d hit him. His mouth was open and his eyes glazed.

  I’d just been halfway to compelling him. Was it justified?

  No.

  I stood back and folded my arms to hide the shiver. Looked anywhere but at Clayton.

  We didn’t need Clayton. Like he said, his trail was cold. And I didn’t need to do it this way, because if I started, where would I be when I stopped?

  “We’d better go,” I said.

  Clayton kept giving his head little shakes as Melissa and I left.

  Chapter 44

  I dropped Melissa back at Manassah and headed out to the area I had assigned to Nick Gray – South Platte and West Evans.

  I wanted to check on him, both his strange marque and his method of searching.