by Lynn Red
West took a step closer, pinning Elena between his muscled body and the door until she turned the key and tugged the handle, opening the door with the joyful jingling of dollar store door chimes. She bit her lip, wanting nothing more than to turn back around and kiss him so hard she pushed him back through the door.
But she had to tell herself to stop, at least for right then. West’s hand went back to her shoulder, his thumb curling thoughtlessly against her skin. Anyone else, she would have spun away, maybe even slapped on a wrist lock and took him to the ground. West though? No matter how much she wanted to keep herself from falling for him, here she was, wishing he’d move that hand a little more, a little lower.
“Let’s sit,” he said. “I guessed right with the black coffee?”
Elena hadn’t even realized she was basically chugging the steaming drink. “Huh? Oh, God,” she laughed. “Yeah, sorry, my head’s a million miles away.”
“A million? Or three feet?”
She didn’t respond, and he let it pass, but he didn’t release the grip he had on Elena with his eyes. “So,” he finally said, allowing Elena to exhale in relief. “Tell me what we’re working with. You said you had some prints?”
Shaking her head to clear the stupid, lovey-dovey cobwebs, Elena smiled and pushed a fallen curl of copper hair back behind her ear. She looked up to see West watching her still, but chose to stay on the straight and narrow.
“Yeah,” she said, obviously flustered. “We took that carrot, which is not freeze dried by the way, although it hung around long enough to be useful. Here, look.”
Elena opened her purse and produced the plaster bite cast, the ink print, and the model she’d commissioned from the single full-time dentist in town. The other was a witchdoctor who spent most of his time making tinctures and potions, but would certainly yank a tooth if you asked. All of them showed the same thing – big, square, buckteeth.
“Know any rabbits with a grudge against you?” Elena asked. “There’s not much else I can come up with. No witnesses, since you live out in the middle of nowhere, no hair samples, and obviously I couldn’t lift fingerprints off a carrot.” She neglected to mention the saliva sample she’d taken, since she hadn’t had any way to analyze it yet, there wasn’t much of a point.
He was just watching her, studying her face. “I don’t know any rabbits,” he finally said, breaking the tension.
Jesus, just kiss me already! Elena’s heart was screaming. Throw me across this table and kiss me and hold me and let me stop thinking about you! “Too bad,” she actually said, staring at the table. “You sure?”
“About what?” his voice was saddle leather, gravel and sagebrush. His tone said that he was absolutely sure about something, but not about the case. He narrowed those ocean blue eyes, which Elena noticed were still on her when she looked back up from the notes strewn about the table.
“About me,” she said, obviously not paying attention to what she was saying. “My work, I mean,” she corrected herself a second later, flushing.
West let a smile stretch nearly from dimple to dimple. “About you? Yeah, I’m sure about you.” In slow motion, he reached across the table and made a motion like he was going to grab her hand. Instead, he closed his fingers around one of the models, picked it up and turned it around in his hand.
“The case though? I’m a little less certain.”
Elena acted like she didn’t know what he meant. Every inch of her, every fiber of her being screamed out for him to move his hand a few inches to the left and touch hers. When he finally did, she felt the sparks fly from his fingertips to hers.
“I thought we agreed business only,” Elena said, weakly. “I don’t think most client meetings involve a lot of—”
West laughed under his breath. “I don’t think a lot of client meetings involve electricity, either.” He replaced the buckteeth on Elena’s desk with a soft clunk.
Elena felt it, she wanted to say something, but she knew she shouldn’t. Not again, she couldn’t give in again, and jump feet first into something that was just going to hurt her. She couldn’t let herself hurt again. The gentle look on West’s face told her she wasn’t the only one with a cloudy past. West had walls too, she saw, but they just weren’t quite as obvious.
He stood from the table, letting his fingertips brush her arm as he did, drawing an expectant breath from Elena’s parted lips.
Why won’t you just kiss me? Why do you keep listening to all the things I’m saying? she wanted to scream. “So, see you later?” she asked.
Every word she said, every breath she took, was tight in her chest. Tension, sweet and exciting and terrifying all at once, filled the room. West smiled again, ignoring what she’d said. “One thing about bears?”
She looked at him and turned her head slightly to the side.
“We don’t give up. When we find something we want, we make it ours. No matter what. Let me know if you find anything else.”
He turned, still smiling, and walked out the door.
Elena didn’t exhale until the door slapped shut and the bells jingled.
When she took another breath? The only thing she could smell, taste, or feel, penetrating her to the very core? It wasn’t the case, that’s for damn sure.
-6-
“Why can’t anything ever just be easy?”
-Elena
“Take a look at this shit,” Paul said, pushing the door open with his foot, and dropping a pile of envelopes on Elena’s desk. His tie was crooked, he hadn’t shaved in probably three days, and he had bags under his eyes that went all the way to his shoulders.
Elena looked up from her notes. “What’s up? Anything about our rabbit?”
Paul shook his head, irritated. “Worse than the rabbit. I got word that unless we can come up with—”
“Oh my God,” Elena cut in. “Don’t tell me we’re too short on money to pay rent, the electric is due, and the phone is about to be cut off? I don’t think I could take any more of that right now.”
The sleepless nights spent hunting rabbits, and the listless days trying to get her mind around why she felt so strongly for West, and all the rest of the time she spent trying to unravel the mystery of that enormous, beautiful bear in her mind? She was starting to crack.
Paul cocked an eyebrow. “Uh, no honey, sorry, we’re not that far down the path of desperation. If you’d let me finish, I was going to say ‘unless we can come up with some reason I can’t go, then I have jury duty’ but please, panic more.”
She let out a long-held breath with a sigh tacked onto the end. “Jury duty?” she asked. “Really?”
A grin parted Paul’s jowls.
“What’s all that shit you threw on the table? All those envelopes? I was sure you were about to drop a pile of bills on my desk and deliver some shitty Humphrey Bogart impersonation.”
“Just when I thought I was out,” Paul started, “they pulled me—”
“That’s The Godfather,” Elena said, letting a slight grin escape her sourness. “Try again.”
“You dirty—”
“No! Clint Eastwood! Come on, Paul, have you ever even seen a Humphrey Bogart movie?”
Paul coughed. “Of course,” he said. “Plenty of them. All of them. All of those movies from the thirties or whatever. I love ‘em.”
His characteristic bumbling with made up Hollywood facts made Elena smile like it always did. That was probably what he was gunning for, but she wouldn’t let him out of the corner he’d painted himself into.
“Name one,” she said, grinning. “Just one.”
“Er, Murder, She Wrote. Right?”
“I’m guessing you mean Murder, My Sweet, but that was Dick Powell. Come on, you can do better than that. I’ll give you a hint. Han Solo.”
“That was Harrison Ford, you jackass,” Paul said, pulling out one of his small cigars and sticking it in the corner of his mouth. “I know Star Wars.”
“Yeah, I’m sure you do. But what did he drive
?”
“Oh, the Millennium Falcon,” he trailed off, and screwed up his face in thought. “Which part is the hint?”
“The falcon part.”
“Falcon, falcon. Maltese Falcon!” he announced, triumphantly. “My favorite Cary Grant movie. Here’s lookin’ at you, girl.”
He cocked his head, and gave a wink-point that would have been right at home in a powder blue leisure suit.
Elena just shook her head, smiling so hard her cheeks hurt a little. “Thanks,” she finally said. “I really, really needed that.” She stuck one of her balled up fists into the side of her neck and massaged.
Paul wandered over and took over the massage. “I don’t know how you do it,” he said. “The hours you work, the dedication you have to this job.” he shrugged. “Makes me feel guilty as shit sometimes.”
She scoffed a laugh. “Guilty? Why? I’m not a priest.”
“Oh God do I ever know that,” Paul said with a snicker. “But it’s that thing where when someone else is working, I feel like I should be.”
“Nah,” Elena said, shaking her head. “You’re fine. I’m a degenerate workaholic who can’t calm down long enough to let that damn bear take her out on a date. You’re—”
“Whoa there, cowgirl,” Paul said. “Date? He asked you out? How do I miss all this?”
“Well if you were here twenty four hours a day, you wouldn’t miss anything,” she said with a smirk. Then, she shrugged. “Yeah I mean, he came up the other day for a case review. Of course, outside seeing another torn up garden on the news and ascertaining that, in fact, the tooth marks in the carrot belong to a rabbit, we’ve got approximately jack shit.”
“So I’m guessing you talked about something else on your date?”
“It wasn’t a date. It was a case review that ended up with,” she trailed off, biting down on her lip. How much was she going to reveal? How much was too much? Why did she even question it? Paul had been her best friend, confidant and business partner for almost a decade. Why the hell was she bashful about something as natural as finding a mate? She just didn’t know.
“What’s eating you?” Paul asked, cutting to the quick. “You ain’t been yourself since before we walked through that bear’s door. Or into his field, whichever it was.”
Elena let out a long sigh. She shook her head slowly. “I just don’t know.” She took a sip of three hour old coffee, winced slightly, and swallowed. “I’m... I guess I’m scared of opening up, you know?”
Paul went over to the coffee machine, and poured himself a cup. A moment later, he sat, and then spun his desk chair around to face his partner. “Talk,” he urged. “You talked me through two divorces. Least I can do is try to help you out with this.”
“I don’t know what there is to say, really. I’ve been alone so long that it made me feel weird when I got all stupid-eyed and excited about West. I’m not that girl. I’m not the fox who needs a boyfriend to feel good about myself. I’ve got work, and I’m damn good at it, I don’t need a man to make me whole.”
Paul nodded, waiting for her to continue.
It took a moment, but she finally did. “It’s like I’m scared that if I let him in, I’m giving up on being strong for me. That doesn’t make a goddamn shred of sense, but there it is.”
She fell silent, plucking at one of her fingernails. “I think if I let him in, if I start relying on him, then I lose myself, somehow.”
Her loyal friend watched, quietly, moving his cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other, and then back again. He intertwined his fingers and spoke down toward the table. “You can’t lose yourself,” he said. “When I help you with a case, do you lose what makes you, well, you?”
“I guess not,” Elena said.
“Well then why would it be any different with him?”
She didn’t respond. She chewed her lip, trying to make sense of the swirl of words and fear and comfort and excitement in her mind, but couldn’t wrangle them. Luckily, the scanner picked up a police broadcast before the silence stretched on long enough to get uncomfortable.
“Think about it,” Paul said, as the crackling voice came through the boombox speaker. “I won’t say anything else unless you ask, but you won’t lose a damn thing. You might gain something you never knew you needed.”
“I think I realized how much I need it the second I saw him,” Elena said. “That’s what’s scaring me so bad.”
Paul nodded when she looked up, but he didn’t say anything else. He knew she’d work through it in her mind, it would just take some time. He couldn’t force this, just like he couldn’t force anything to do with Elena. He gave up trying to make her mind up for her after she fought him for eight months about the name of this place. She wanted to call it “AADETECTIVE” because that would mean it would be first in the phone book.
He tried, unsuccessfully, to point out that first of all no one looked things up in the phone book anymore. Second of all? There was only one private detective agency in Jamesburg. Or at least there was only the one when they first opened. Now there were two others, but both were two-bit operations at best, part time hobbies for nine-to-fivers who wanted a little adventure in their lives; hell, one of them even hunted ghosts. Even in Jamesburg, ghost busting was best left for movies.
Paul laughed bitterly, imagining how boring life would have to be before a six-hour stakeout in a dumpster behind an office building to catch someone getting a little tail on the side would be seen as adventurous.
“Report, Detective Jorgenson advises that the scene is as reported – the suspect is not present. Detective Jorgenson informs that the scene should be considered,” the voice fuzzed out, like the dispatcher took her finger off the talk button. “Scene should be considered closed. There’s no suspect... er... suspected. All hyenas on scene return to patrol unless further notified.”
A chorus of ten-fours followed, with only one of the officers voicing doubt about what he’d been told. “Somethin’ ain’t right, Delilah,” he said. Delilah was the dispatcher’s name. She always worked day shift, except when her kid was sick, in which case she switched for the three to eleven. The things you learn about people when you listen to them talk all day can be amazing.
A few seconds later, her voice crackled back into the foreground. “Copy that, five-two-four. Anything particular that makes you say that? I’ll send a message to the detective in charge.”
“Nah, not really,” he said. “Jes’... one of those feelin’s you get after you been on the job a long time. There’s too much chaos here for it to have been a deer or a moose or anything else. Somebody did this on purpose. There was a bit-up carrot. Craziest damn thing. I’m not sure why it bothers me so much, but, there it is.”
His ‘s’ whistled, and with his accent, it sounded like he said ‘porpoise’ instead of ‘purpose’ but Paul and Elena exchanged a glance. An entire police force and none of them noticed the carrot except for this guy.
“He should get a promotion,” Paul said.
“We should get the hell down there,” Elena said. “If they’re calling off the hyenas, we got a few hours before dark.”
“You never stop thinking, huh?” Paul said, grinning as he gathered his coat. “But you’re right. You sure this is related?”
Elena snorted in that way she had. “Hmm... maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s nothing. Randomly destroyed garden, giant mess, no actual reason for it? Or at least none that we know of? Yeah you’re right. Probably nothing.”
The grin on her face told Paul that even with her slight crisis of identity, the fox he trusted more than anyone in the world was right there with him. “Let’s go,” she said. “Maybe I’ll celebrate by calling the bear if we find anything.”
“I’ll hold you to that,” Paul said. “But I’d rather you date that vampire judge, Rawls. That way you can convince him not to make me waste a week on jury duty.”
Elena shot him a wry grin. “Sure,” she said. “Make him a bear and we have a deal.”
The place they arrived a half hour after shutting the office door was much stranger than the others they’d investigated, or seen on the news. This was a huge operation, far more than West’s five acre organic farm, or the tiny lot Whit Whitman dismissed as deer damage.
But, even with the massive scale of the field, there wasn’t much to see that Elena and Paul hadn’t seen before. “This ain’t a farm,” Paul said, stepping out of the old Buick and onto a carrot top that had been ground into pulp.
Elena was nodding. “This is industrial.”
The Jamesburg Cannery Fields sign hung askance, dangling off the metal frame and swaying in the breeze. They were far enough from the road that only the barest noise reached them, but when Elena perked her fox ears, she could hear clearly anything coming or going.
Paul sniffed the air, and then one of the carrot stubs. “She’s been here,” he said. “And not too long ago. I’d know rabbit anywhere.”
“That’s a little creepy,” Elena said, patting her partner on the shoulder. “I didn’t know you had a rabbit fetish.”
He shot her a side-eyed glare. “Anyways,” Paul said. “You start at that end, I guess. This is a hell of a field to cover. I hope we find whatever we’re looking for sooner than later. I don’t much care for sitting around here in the dark trying to find clues with a flashlight.”
Elena nodded, more than slightly stunned at the enormity of the undertaking in front of her, and crouched down. When the going gets tough, she thought as the red fur slid out of her pores and she shuffled out of her now-too-big jeans, the tough turn into animals.
This was a trick she pulled out every now and then, but only when it came to desperate measures. Paul was stalking slowly down the eastern fence, so she took the west-leading one. With her head to the ground, not a single particle of scent nor stray hair, clump of dirt, or anything else out of place, would escape unnoticed.
Trekking along the huge chain link fence, she made her way to a corner and then turned north. There was just nothing to find, though. She completed her part of the perimeter with nothing to show for it except a bunch of carrot juice on her paws and a dirty nose. Paul finished his round shortly after.