by Alyssa Day
“You don’t need to check on me at all. I’m a big girl,” I said, trying for a saucy smile.
His forehead furrowed. “Does your face hurt?”
So much for saucy. I sighed and fed Lou, turned off the coffee pot, and headed for the door. “Just take me to work, please.”
After all, I still didn’t look as bad as Fluffy.
*
“My car’s still here, and it hasn’t been vandalized, so that’s a bright side,” I said, pointing.
“Did you expect it to be?” Jack pulled into the parking lot and practically all the way up to the door. “Curbside service.”
“No. Not really. But I didn’t expect to get beat up in my own parking lot, either.”
Jack’s face, already grim, got darker. “We’ll find him, Tess. I promise you that.”
I nodded, more to make him happy than from any real conviction. Maybe we would. Maybe we wouldn’t. I didn’t really believe in justice these days, and anyway, I kind of never wanted to be within fifty feet of the guy again in my life. I grabbed the door handle, but before I got out of the truck, Jack stopped me with a hand on my arm.
“Be careful today, all right? We’re making somebody nervous, which usually means we’re on the right track, but we know the culprits are willing to kill.”
“I’ll be careful. I’ll be at work all morning and then I’m heading home this afternoon. No outings after dark. No secret meetings in back alleys,” I joked.
Jack didn’t smile. “I’m serious. Also, before you go, can you please search your memory again? Is there anybody else who might have had a grudge against my uncle?”
I was shaking my head before he even stopped talking.
“No. You know how they always say ‘everybody loved him’ but it’s a polite lie? It’s really true about your uncle. Other than Gator, which we’ve already covered, Jeremiah didn’t have problems with anyone. There were people he didn’t really care for, like Walt and Hank and their drinking buddies, but nobody… Wait. There was one incident, but it was more than a year ago, and it was with a vampire, anyway. A vampire would have drained him, not shot him, right?”
Jack shrugged. “Usually. Unless he or she wanted to throw suspicion off.”
“He. His name was Arroyo. One name. He thought Jeremiah had offered him too little on some ‘fang of his enemy’ kind of melodramatic item he wanted to pawn. And this was even though your uncle was nice enough to come in at midnight to meet with Arroyo about it.”
Jack grinned at me. “You sound pretty indignant.”
“I was! There’s no market in vampire fangs, anyway. The people crazy enough to want one usually find other ways than pawnshops to find them, and if a vamp finds you wearing one around your neck, like that guy in Alabama who had a necklace of them…” I shuddered, remembering the news reports of the shreds of clothes and jar of teeth that had been left in a neat arrangement on the man’s bed. Human teeth.
Necklace guy’s teeth.
“Yeah, they tend to take that personally.” Jack ran a contemplative tongue over his teeth. “I wouldn’t appreciate seeing a tiger-tooth necklace either, so I can’t really blame them.”
“Anyway, Arroyo was angry, threatened Jeremiah with a ‘curse upon his house’ and other things I think he got off late-night TV.”
“How long had he been a vampire?”
“Couldn’t have been long, because he still drove his Arroyo Plumbing van to the shop. Jeremiah told me.”
Jack pulled out his phone—to look up the plumbing business, I assumed—so I said goodbye and headed over to open the shop. It might be an odd little place, filled with strange curiosities, but it was my odd little place, and I wasn’t going to let my assailant make me feel uncomfortable there.
“Screw you, Vinegar Boy,” I muttered, putting my key in the door. “You can’t scare me off.”
My phone rang just then, and I jumped about a foot in the air. Okay. Apparently I was just the teensiest bit nervous.
It was Molly. “Hey, what’s up, I thought I’d bring you lunch, what time’s good?”
It wasn’t yet ten, so I’d probably be hungry in a couple of hours. “Noon?”
“Works for me. See you then.”
“I’m looking forward to it. Molly—”
But I was talking to empty air.
Molly was the queen of short phone calls. She had to answer phones all day when she worked at the law office, so she hated talking on the phone in her personal life. I’d wanted to warn her about the black eye, so she didn’t freak out, but she’d just get to see me in all my purple-black-green glory.
I had a steady stream of customers, unusual for a Saturday morning. Within about an hour, I’d redeemed a few pawns (two iPhones and a diamond ring), and taken in a few new ones (a banjo, a chain saw, and an extremely old and ornate family Bible), and sold some signed Jacksonville Jaguars memorabilia to a dedicated football fan. I’d also answered “But how does the other guy look?” twice, reassured three people that no, my boyfriend wasn’t abusing me, and politely declined an offer to “kick his ass.”
Stupid shiner.
I was beyond thrilled to turn the sign to CLOSED when Molly stopped by with sandwiches, at least until she saw my face and dropped the drink carrier on the floor. Ten minutes of explanations (me) and mopping up (both of us) later, we sat at the table in the back and spread out the food.
“Thanks. I skipped breakfast, and I’m starving,” I said, tearing open the wrapping on the meatball sub. I took a deep sniff. “Ah, cheesy goodness.”
She laughed, then bit into her own salami and provolone, extra lettuce, extra Italian dressing. We didn’t do things halfway when it came to sub sandwiches from Lauren’s Deli; it had been a solemn pact between us back when we first got boobs and saw most of our friends turn boy-crazy and start eating only salads “hold the dressing.”
Screw that.
“You only live once, eat extra dressing,” was Molly’s motto. I didn’t have a motto, but if I did, it probably would have something to do with meatballs, sauce, and cheese on home-baked bread.
“How was the crowd last night? I’m sorry I couldn’t make it,” I said, when the hole in my stomach started to fill up.
“Fun. No fights, nobody threw up. Kind of boring for a Friday night.” She fished out another potato chip from our joint bag. “I have to skip out of here pretty quickly to go look at guitars with Dice this afternoon in Orlando. She broke another one.”
I sighed. “Again? Love song gone bad?”
Dice, bass guitarist for Scarlett’s Letters, had a boatload of talent and a problem with serial romances. Every time she dumped her latest true-love-forever, she wrote a song about it and then usually broke the guitar she’d written it with, in an excess of pain and melodrama. This wasn’t a big problem for Dice, whose real name was Veronica Dunstan-Smythe, and who had a BMW and a trust fund, but it involved a lot of guitar shopping for Molly.
I kept suggesting that life would be easier with a different bass player, but Molly said if she wanted easy friends, she would have dumped me years ago.
“So how’s Owen?”
I choked on my chip.
Molly grinned at me. “Going to be hard to explain that shiner, huh? Don’t you have a date with him tonight?”
Crap. I’d forgotten all about it. Which either said a lot about how crazy my life had been lately or a lot about how invested I was in Owen.
“Yes. I should probably text him and tell him I can’t make it. I just don’t have the energy to explain all of this to him,” I said, like a big, fat coward.
“He still doesn’t know about Dead End, or about your I See Dying People whammy, does he?” Molly shook her head. “You have to tell him sometime, if you’re going to keep dating him.”
I’d never seen Molly’s death, a fact for which I was astoundingly grateful. Some things a person really, really didn’t want to see, and I counted my best friend’s death—even in a vision—right up there at the top of the
list.
“I know, I know,” I agreed, totally not agreeing but not willing to argue about it. I’m more of a “put it off till tomorrow” person than a confrontational one.
“Okay, babe, gotta bounce,” Molly said, crumpling up the sandwich wrappers into a ball and doing a perfect shot into the trash can across the room.
She hugged me again, making me promise to call her immediately if anything else happened to me, and then she was off to buy another doomed guitar. I turned the sign to OPEN, and then decided to do a little cleaning.
When the bell over the door sounded again, I was surrounded by sparkling glass and the fresh scent of wood polish. Dave Wolf, dressed up in his good jeans and a new flannel shirt, walked in the door.
“Dave! It’s nice to see you. Your mom’s not working till this afternoon, though.”
Dave was one of the nicest guys on the planet, and he’d been blessed with the kind of rugged good looks you’d expect from a cowboy or a guy in an aftershave commercial. Brown hair, brown eyes, tanned skin, and muscles that came from swinging hammers and carrying wooden beams around on the job site all day.
His mother had despaired of him ever settling down with a nice woman and giving her grandchildren—even going so far as to entertain hopes of me catching his interest—until one day a few years back when he’d finally sat her down and explained that he’d much prefer to settle down with a nice man.
She’d looked at him in surprise (Dave had been very private all through school, even at home) and uttered the phrase that lived on in his stories every time he had a few too many beers. “But you’re in construction!”
After that, of course, Eleanor had turned her efforts to finding Dave a nice man. So far, though, the men he’d fallen for hadn’t been all that nice. Luckily, Dave wasn’t one to put up with bad behavior, so he tended to kick that type to the curb pretty quickly. He’d told me once that it was easy to get rid of the jerks and the way-too-emotionally-needy types, because he didn’t want them around his foster son.
After a couple of years as a foster parent, Dave had finalized the adoption process for Zane, and we’d all gone to the courthouse with them to celebrate. Afterward, Aunt Ruby and Uncle Mike had hosted a “Welcome, Happy Family” party at their house, and we’d all eaten cake and ice cream until we felt sick. (Or maybe that was just me and Zane.)
These days, Dave and Zane had a great life. They were always going on trips with the church youth group, and Zane played football and baseball and pretty much any sport he could fit into his schedule. I knew all this because Eleanor was the kind of grandma who showed everybody pictures as often as she could trap us in the vault…um…catch our attention.
“Holy crap! What does the other guy look like?” He rushed over to me.
I sighed. “Worse. He looks worse.”
“What happened?”
I really didn’t want to talk about it, but this was Dave. I gave him the brief version.
“That son of a bitch,” Dave said, clenching and unclenching his fists. “If I ever find out who did this to you—”
“You’ll do nothing, because Zane deserves to have a dad who isn’t in jail for assault,” I told him. “Now quit it. I have enough alpha male in my life these days without you going all testosterone poisoned too.”
“Yeah, about that. That’s why I stopped by. I hear Jack is in town. Why isn’t he calling me? Where is he?”
A new voice broke into the conversation. “That a very good question. Where is Mr. Shepherd?”
Startled, I swung around to see Agent Vasquez standing behind us. “How did you get in here? I didn’t hear the bell.”
“I’m P-Ops. We have our ways.”
I rolled my eyes. “Right. Whatever. Dave, this is Agent Vasquez, from the FBI. Agent, this is Dave Wolf, a good friend of mine.”
They shook hands. The agent didn’t try to shake mine again. Apparently he knew better by now, or he just didn’t want to know what his future death might look like.
“What happened to your face?” The agent had quite an intense “scary federal agent” vibe and his accent became more pronounced. “Who hurt you?”
“I ran into a car. I was boxing. A vinegar-soaked thug attacked me.” I smiled brightly, and they both flinched. (I needed to work on my smile, clearly.) “Two truths and a lie.”
Dave shook his head. “So, Agent Vasquez—”
“Dave Wolf, son of Eleanor, father of Zane, master carpenter, boyhood friend to Jack Shepherd,” Vasquez recited. “He hasn’t contacted you?”
Dave folded his arms across his chest and frowned. “Don’t you want to know my shoe size? Or what I had for breakfast?”
“Ten and a half, and waffles or pancakes,” Vasquez said.
“Whoa. Dude,” Dave said slowly, his face turning pale.
Vasquez laughed. “Sorry. Not magic, just good observational skills. Your shoes look like they’re the same size as mine, and you smell like syrup. I just like to play the spooky P-Ops card sometimes.”
I wasn’t buying it. “So, you’re not really spooky?”
“Oh, I’m spooky. In fact, I’m married into a family of witches whose pet basilisks turned my last partner into a stone statue.”
I blew out a breath. “Of course you are. I never would have guessed anything else.”
Chapter Fourteen
A customer came in, and I quickly wrote him up for two hundred dollars for his antique pocket watch. It was the third year in a row that he’d brought the item in for pawn in January, I noticed, and I smiled at him. “Paying for Christmas presents, Mr. Newton?”
“You know it. We went a little crazy on the kids this year,” he said, grinning cheerfully. “I’ll be in next month with a payment.”
When Mr. Newton left, I walked over to where Agent Vasquez was talking to Dave, probably getting him to give up all his dark secrets. Not that Dave was the type for dark secrets; he was a pretty open guy. Jack, on the other hand…
I seriously had to quit thinking about Jack.
“What’s up, Agent Vasquez?”
“Alejandro, please.” He smiled at me, and I briefly wondered if P-Ops was hiring based on gorgeousness these days. Because, wow. Dave apparently had the same thought, because his eyes got huge, and I could almost hear his lonely heart go pitter-pat.
I leaned over and whispered in his ear. “He just said he’s married, remember?”
Dave’s gaze darted to the agent’s left hand, and of course Mr. Spooky noticed.
“I am, but I’m flattered by the interest,” he told Dave, ratcheting up the Charming Meter.
I snorted. “Yeah, yeah, you’re flattered. Flattered, spooky, and incredibly nosy. So why are you really here?”
Dave winced. “Tess, that’s pretty harsh. I’m sure the man is just doing his job.”
“Right. But what is his job? Why is he here, when he has no jurisdiction?”
“Well—” Alejandro began, but I ruthlessly cut him off.
“Why does he keep showing up in my pawnshop?”
“I—”
“Why does he want to talk to Jack so badly?”
“I want to talk to Jack too,” Dave said. “I don’t know why the fed does.”
The fed gritted his teeth. “Ms. Callahan—”
I threw my hands in the air. “Oh, please call me Tess. Aren’t we all friends here? And by friends, I mean that I have the ability to sell you a stuffed alligator, and you have the ability to lock me up in a deep, dark, Black Ops site for the rest of my life. So, we’re really on equal footing, aren’t we?”
Alejandro looked at Dave. “She watches a lot of TV, doesn’t she?”
“I get that a lot,” I admitted.
Dave could tell that I was about to lose my patience. He turned to Alejandro. “Why are you here?”
Alejandro gave us his Serious Special Agent face. “This stays between us.”
I shook my head. “I don’t agree to that. Whatever you tell me, I’m going to tell Jack.”
/> “You couldn’t just agree and then go behind my back, like most people do?”
“She’s very honest,” Dave said.
“I’m a terrible liar. What would be the point? Let’s just get it all out in the open.”
Alejandro considered us for a moment. “If I tell you this, will you convince Mr. Shepherd to call me?”
“I’ll give him your number and ask him to call you, but I couldn’t even convince him to get out of my bedroom, so I don’t know what luck I’ll have,” I said, not realizing the effect that my astonishingly poor choice of words, combined with the bruising on my face, would have on both men.
“Did he hurt you?” Alejandro’s eyes turned to ice.
“I’ll kill him,” Dave said, leaning forward on the balls of his feet. “I can’t believe Jack… I’ll kill him.”
“What? No! He didn’t—no. He came and got me and made me soup. Then he slept on my floor as a tiger,” I explained. “To protect me, in case the guy came back. Come on, Dave. You know me. Do you think I wouldn’t be pressing charges against the person who did this if I knew who it was?”
I shook my head and walked back into the office to get some bottles of water out of the mini-fridge. Everybody needed to cool down a little bit.
When I walked back out into the shop, Dave was leaning against the jewelry case, and Alejandro was examining a Native American dreamcatcher on the wall.
“It’s from a Chippewa tribe, and the claim is that it has a nightmare trapped in it,” I told him. “It can be yours for the low, low price of five hundred dollars.”
Alejandro frowned, and whatever lurked in the shadows in his eyes chased the flippancy right out of me. “I have all the nightmares I could ever need, Ms. Callahan.”
“I’m sorry.” I handed him a bottle of water. “Look, please just say what you need to say.”
“Have you heard of the Blood Moon?”
“You mentioned it the last time you were in here. It’s a total lunar eclipse,” I said.
“I said that?”
“Hey, I have internet,” I told him.