by Tanya Huff
“All right, if I can’t make a buck out of them live. . . .”
He smiled.
Werewolves.
Wolves.
Dead wolves meant pelts. Take the head as well and there’d be a dandy rug.
People were always willing to pay for the unique and the unusual.
Nine
“Has anybody seen Daniel this morning?”
Jennifer glanced up from the burr she was working out of her sister’s fur. “He headed up the lane about an hour ago. Said he was going to wait for the mail.”
“But it’s Sunday.” Nadine rolled her eyes. “Honestly, that child and the day of the week. Peter, could you go get him.” Her tone fell between an order and a request.
Good sergeants used much the same tone, Vicki reflected; maybe the wer could integrate more easily than she’d expected.
Peter dragged his T-shirt over his head and tossed it at Rose. “You think you can find the car keys before I get back?”
“They’re in here somewhere,” she muttered, shuffling through yet another pile of papers. “I know they are, I can smell them.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Vicki advised, rescuing a lopsided stack of Ontario Farmers from sliding to the floor. “If we don’t find them by the time Peter gets back, we’ll take Henry’s car.”
“We’ll take the BMW?” Peter kicked his sneakers off. “You know where Henry’s keys are?”
Vicki grinned. “Sure, he gave them to me in case we needed to move it.”
“All right!” He dropped his shorts on Rose’s head. “Don’t look too hard,” he instructed, then changed and barreled out the door, heading at full speed up the lane.
Mark had intended to just drive by the farm, to see if he could spot any of these alleged werewolves and get a good look at their pelts, but when he saw the shape sitting by the mailbox it seemed like a gift from God.
“And as I have been assured, God is on our side.”
So he stopped.
It didn’t look like a wolf, but neither did it look quite like a dog. About the size of a small German shepherd, it sat watching him, head cocked to one side, panting a little in the heat. Its pure black coat definitely appeared to have the characteristics of a wolf pelt, with the long silky hairs that women loved to run their hands through.
He stretched an arm out the open window of the car and snapped his fingers. “Here, uh, boy. Comere. . . .”
The creature stood, stretched, and yawned, its teeth showing very white against the black of its muzzle.
Why hadn’t he brought a biscuit or a pork chop or something? “Come on.” Pity it was black; a more exotic color would fetch a higher price.
And then he saw a flash of red coming up the lane. When it reached the mailbox, he realized that the black must only be about half grown. The red creature was huge with the most beautiful pelt Mark had ever seen. Long thick hair shaded from a deep russet to almost a red-gold in the sunlight. Every time it moved, new highlights flickered along the length of its body. Both muzzle and ears were sharply pointed and its eyes were delineated with darker fur, giving it an almost humanly expressive face.
He knew people who would pay big bucks to own a fur like that.
It studied him for a moment, head high, ignoring the attempts of the smaller one to knock it over. There was something in its gaze that made Mark feel intensely uncomfortable and any doubts he might have had about these creatures being more than they seemed vanished under that steady stare. Then it turned and both creatures headed back down the lane.
“Oh, yes,” he murmured, watching them run. “I have found my fortune.” Best of all, if anything went wrong this time, crazy Uncle Carl and his high caliber mission from God would take the rap.
First on the agenda, a drive into London to do a little research.
It didn’t take long for Vicki to discover the attraction Henry’s BMW held; low on the dashboard, discreetly out of sight from prying eyes and further camouflaged by the mat black finish—on everything including the buttons and the digital display—was a state of the art compact disk player. She was perfectly willing to admire the sound quality, she was even willing to listen to Peter enthuse about woofers and tweeters and internal stabilization somethings, but she was not willing to listen to opera all the way into London, especially not with the two wer singing along.
They compromised and sang along with Conway Twitty instead. As far as the wer were concerned, the Grand Ol’ Opry ran a poor second to grand old opera, but it was better than no music at all. Vicki could tolerate country. At least she understood the language, and Rose had a hysterical gift for mimicking twang and heartache.
They cut through the east end of the city, down Highbury Avenue—Highway 126—heading for the 401. The moment they hit traffic, Rose reached over and turned the music off. To Vicki’s surprise, Peter, reclining in the back with his head half out the window, made no protest.
“We don’t see things quite the same way you do,” Rose explained, very carefully changing lanes and passing an eighteen wheeler. “So we have to pay a lot more attention when we drive.”
“Most of the world should pay more attention when they drive,” Vicki muttered. “Peter, stop kicking the back of my seat.”
“Sorry.” Peter rearranged his legs. “Vicki, I was wondering, how come you’re going to see the OPP on a Sunday? Won’t the place be closed down?”
Vicki snorted. “Closed down? Peter, the police don’t ever close down, it’s a twenty-four hour a day, seven day a week job. You should know that, your brother’s a cop.”
“Yeah, but he’s city.”
“The Ontario Provincial Police are police just like any others . . . except no one keeps messing with the color of their cars.” Vicki liked the old black and whites and hadn’t approved the Metro Toronto Police cars going bright yellow and then white. “In fact,” she continued, “in a lot of places they’re the only police. That said, on a hot Sunday afternoon in August, everyone with a good reason to be out of district headquarters should be and I might be able to get the information I need.”
“I thought you were just going to go in and ask them for the names of everyone who has a .30 caliber rifle registered?” A Chevy cut in front of them and Rose dropped back a careful three car lengths, muttering, “Dickhead,” under her breath.
“I am. But as they have no reason to tell me, a lot is going to depend on how I ask. And who.”
Peter snorted. “You’re going to try to intimidate some poor rookie, aren’t you?”
Vicki pushed her glasses up her nose. “Of course not.” It was actually more a combination of a subtle pulling of rank and an invoking of the “We’re all in this together” attitude shared by cops all over the world. Granted, she wasn’t a cop anymore, but that shouldn’t affect the ultimate result.
The OPP District Headquarters overlooked the 401 on the south side of Exidor Road, the red brick building tucked in behind a Ramada Inn. Vicki had the twins wait by the car.
Had she still been a cop, it would’ve worked. Unfortunately, that she used to be a cop, wasn’t good enough. Had she not then tried to “intimidate a poor rookie” it might still have worked, but the very intense young woman she spoke to knew Vicki had no right to the information, “working on a case” or not, and, her back up, refused to show it to her.
Things would have gone better with the sergeant if Vicki hadn’t lost her temper.
By the time she left the building, most of the anger was self-directed. Her lips had thinned to a tight, white line and her nostrils flared with every breath. She’d handled the whole thing badly and she knew it.
I am not a cop. I cannot expect to be treated like one. The sooner I get that through my fat head, the better. It was a litany easy to forget back in Toronto where everyone knew her and she could still access many of her old privileges, but she’d just been given a nasty preview of what would happen when the people on the Metro force were no longer the men and women she’d served with. Her
hands clenched and unclenched as though they were looking for a throat to wrap around.
She started for the car, standing in solitary splendor at the edge of the lot. With every step, she could feel the waves of heat rising up off the pavement, but they were nothing compared to the heat rising off her. Where the hell are the twins? She half hoped they’d done something stupid just so she could blow off some steam. With most of the distance to the car covered, she saw them heading across the parking lot from the Ramada Inn carrying bottles of water.
When they met, both wer took one look at her and dropped their eyes.
“It didn’t work, did it?” Rose asked tentatively, peering up through her eyelashes. Under her hair, her ears were forward.
“No. It didn’t.”
“We just went for some water,” Peter offered, his posture identical to his sister’s. He held out the second of the plastic bottles he carried. “We, uh, brought you one.”
Vicki looked from the bottle to the twins and back to the bottle. Finally she snorted and took it. “Thank you.” It was cold and it helped. “Oh, chill out. I’m not going to bite you.” Which was when she realized that they thought she might.
Which was so absurd that she had to laugh.
Both sets of ears perked up and both twins looked relieved. If they’d been in fur, they probably would have bounced; as they weren’t, they merely grinned and drank their water.
Dominant/submissive behavior, Vicki thought draining her bottle. She worried about that a little. If all the wer but the dominant couple were conditioned to be submissive as a response to anger or aggression, that could cause major problems out in the world.
As Rose went around the car to the driver’s side, two heavily muscled young men lounging around the Ramada Inn pool began calling out lurid invitations. Rose yawned, turned her back on them, and got into the car.
And then again, Vicki reconsidered, maybe there’s nothing to worry about.
She tossed her empty bottle into the back seat with Peter. “Let’s go get lunch while I come up with another brilliant idea.”
Unlike a number of other places, London had managed to grow from a small town serving the surrounding farming community into a fair sized city without losing its dignity. Vicki approved of what she saw as they drove into the center of town. The city planners had left plenty of parks, from acres of land to tiny playgrounds tucked in odd corners. New development had gone up around mature trees and where that hadn’t been possible new trees had been planted. Cicadas sang accompaniment throughout most of the drive and the whole city looked quiet and peaceful, basking in the heat.
Vicki, who liked a little more grit in her cities, strongly suspected that the place would bore her to tears in less than twenty-four hours. Although she emphatically denied sharing the commonly held Torontonian delusion that Toronto occupied the center of the universe, she couldn’t imagine working, or living, anywhere else.
“The place is called Bob’s Steak House,” Peter explained as Rose pulled into a small, nearly empty parking lot. “It’s actually up on Clarence Street, but if we leave the car there we have to parallel park.”
“Which we’re not exactly very good at,” Rose added, cutting the engine with a sigh of relief.
Vicki would have been perfectly happy stopping for fast food—all she really demanded at this point was air conditioning—but the twins had argued for a restaurant “where the meat isn’t so dead.”
A short block east of the lot, Rose rocked to a halt in front of a little corner store and exclaimed, “Baseball stickers!”
Peter nodded. “Make him feel better.”
“Is this a coded conversation,” Vicki asked of no one in particular, “or can anyone join in?”
“Daniel collects baseball stickers,” Rose translated. Her brow furrowed. “No one’s quite sure why, but he does. If we bring a few packages back, it’ll make up for him not being able to come with us.”
“You two go ahead.” Vicki rummaged in her bag for the car keys. “I’ve got this urge to go back and check the car doors.”
“I locked mine,” Peter told her, paused a moment, and added, “I think.”
“Exactly,” Vicki grunted. “And I don’t want to have to tell Henry that we borrowed his BMW and lost half the pieces.”
Rose waved a hand at the empty street. “But there’s no one around.”
“I have a naturally suspicious nature. Get the stickers. I’ll meet you back here.”
What’s the point of new legislation on Sunday openings, Mark Williams wondered, heading back to the alley where he’d left his jeep, if the places I need to go are still closed? A truly civilized country wouldn’t try to cramp a man’s style and . . . hello!
He sidestepped quickly behind a huge old maple and with one hand resting lightly on the bark, leaned forward to take another look. It was Ms. “No First Name” Nelson. He thought he recognized the walk. Few women covered the ground with that kind of an aggressive stride. In fact. . . .
He frowned, watching her check the car doors, wondering why the body language seemed so familiar.
Drives a BMW, eh. Not too shabby.
As she turned away from the car, he ducked back, not wanting to be seen. A number of his most profitable enterprises had begun with him watching and keeping his mouth shut. When he felt enough time had passed, he took another look.
Jesus H. Christ. She’s a cop.
For those who took the trouble to learn certain subtle signs, playing spot-the-cop became a game easy to win. Mark Williams had long ago taken the trouble to learn the signs. It never hurt to be prepared and this wasn’t the first time that preparation had paid off.
What’s she got to do with those werewolves though, that’s the question. Maybe the aged uncle hasn’t been as clever as he thought. If she’s a friend of the family, and a cop. . . .
He came out from behind the tree as she disappeared up a side street at the other end of the parking lot. He couldn’t tell if she was packing heat, but then, she could be packing a cannon in that oversized bag of hers and no one would be the wiser. Thinking furiously, he sauntered slowly across the street. If she could prove the aged uncle had been blowing away the neighbor’s dogs, she didn’t have to bring up the subject of werewolves at all. Uncle Carl would. And Uncle Carl would get locked away in a loonybin. And there would go his own chance to score big.
She was onto something. The pine needles on yesterday’s T-shirt proved she’d found the tree and he’d be willing to bet that that little lost waif routine she’d pulled in the aged uncle’s flower factory was just a ploy to get close.
He laid his hand against the sun-warmed metal of the BMW.
I’m not going to lose this chance.
She wouldn’t appreciate it. She’d say he was interfering, that she could take care of herself, that he should stop being such a patronizing s.o.b.. Mike Celluci put down the electric razor and glared at his reflection in the bathroom mirror.
He’d made up his mind. He was going to London. And Vicki Nelson could just fold that into corners and sit on it.
He had no idea what this Henry Fitzroy had gotten her involved with nor did he really care. London, Ontario probably couldn’t come up with something Vicki couldn’t handle—as far as he knew, the city didn’t have nuclear capabilities. Fitzroy himself, however, that was a different matter.
Yanking a clean golf shirt down over his head, Celluci reviewed all he had learned about this historical romance writer. Historical romances, for God’s sake. What kind of job is that for a man? He paid his parking tickets on time, he hadn’t fought the speeding ticket he’d received a year ago, and he had no criminal record of any kind. His books sold well, he banked at Canada Trust, he paid his taxes, and his charity of choice appeared to be the Red Cross. Not many people knew him and the night guard at his condo both respected and feared him.
All this was fine as far as it went, but a lot of the paper records that modern man carried around with him from birth, were
missing from Mr. Fitzroy’s life. Not the important things, Celluci admitted, shoving his shirttails down behind the waistband of his pants, but enough of the little things that it set off warning bells. He couldn’t dig any deeper, not without having his initial less than ethical investigations come to light, but he could lay his findings before Vicki. She used to be a cop. She’d know what the holes in Fitzroy’s background meant.
Organized crime. The police didn’t run into it often in Canada, but the pattern fit.
Celluci grinned. Vicki would demand an immediate explanation. He hoped he’d be there to hear Fitzroy try and talk his way out of it.
2:15. Family obligations would keep him in Scarborough until five at the earliest and even at that his sisters would squawk. He shuddered. Two hours of eating burned hamburgers, surrounded by a horde of shrieking nieces and nephews, listening to his brothers-in-law discussing the rising crime statistics and criticizing the police; what a way to spend a Sunday afternoon.
“Okay, so if the gun part of Rod and Gun Club refers to the rifle range and stuff,” Peter, having convinced Rose that he should have a chance to drive, pulled carefully out of the parking lot, “what’s the rod mean?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Vicki admitted, smoothing the directions out on her knee. The napkin had a few grease stains on it, but the map was actually quite legible. “Maybe they teach fly-tying or something.”
“Fly-tying?” Rose repeated.
“That’d take one real small lasso, there, pardner,” Peter added, turning north.
Vicki spent the next few blocks explaining what she knew about tying bits of feathers to hooks. As explanations went, it was sketchy. Neither, when asked, did she have any idea why theoretically mature adults would want to stand thigh deep in an ice cold stream being eaten alive by insects so that they could, if lucky, eat something that didn’t even look like food when cooked but rather stared up at them off the plate in its full fishy entirety. She was, however, willing to allow that it took all types.