by RJ Blain
“I’m afraid that’s not possible, Detective Steinburg.”
“Why not?”
Sighing, I sat at the kitchen table. Since I’d already disregarded my doctor’s warning to avoid using my shoulder, I lifted my right hand and pinched the bridge of my nose. “Have you done a background check on me yet, Detective Steinburg?”
“No. You’re not a suspect in Mr. Maquire’s murder or the deaths of the two men in the vehicle, so the information you provided was sufficient.”
“All right. If you contact the Chicago police department, you’ll learn I was on the force until recently. I lost my eye pulling a family out of their vehicle during a rather bad traffic accident.”
“You’re a cop?” Something changed in Steinburg’s tone.
“Former. I don’t have a replacement eye rated for police work, so I’m retiring. If you need to see me for questioning, it will have to wait several days until I’m out of quarantine.” In reality, if I needed to go to New York City I could, but all things considered, I didn’t want to.
I knew nothing about the man who’d fallen or the other two men killed.
“Quarantine? Why are you under quarantine?”
“Lycanthropy exposure.”
“Your file states you’ve already been exposed.”
I sighed. “I required a transfusion, and my father supplied the blood. He’s a werewolf, so my virus levels are rather high at the moment. It’ll be three days until it can be confirmed if I’m infected with the virus.”
“That’s rather inconvenient. Care to explain why you required a transfusion?”
Dodging a cop’s questions wouldn’t help me in the long run. I muttered a few curses. “Drive by shooting yesterday near my parents’ place. I got lucky. I took two rounds to the shoulder. The shooter took the alpaca and left me for dead. Fortunately, he shot me not far from my parents’ home, and the neighbors heard the gunfire. Since I’m resistant to the lycanthropy virus, the hospital allowed my father to donate blood. So, until we find out if the virus takes root, they’d rather I stay close to home.”
“And you’re still in the hospital?”
“No. They flew in a surgeon from Des Moines who handled the surgery. Dad’s blood took care of the rest. I was discharged this morning, so I’m at my parents’ place.”
Detective Steinburg was silent for a moment, then he sighed. “Do you have a contact at your local station I can talk to?”
“Sure. I’ll put you in touch with my mother’s partner. He can field any questions you have. They already have my statement about the shooting and all the information on the suspect. I’m sure you two can compare notes.”
The silence dragged on long enough I fought the urge to tap my toe while I waited. “Your mother’s partner?”
“Just be glad I’m not putting you in touch with my father’s partner.”
“Let me see if I understand the situation. You, an ex-cop, was gunned down near your parents’ home, both of whom are police officers.”
“Correct.”
“And to think all I wanted to do was ask you a few questions about any people you might remember standing near you at the scene. This is not how I anticipated this conversation going, Mr. Gibson.”
“That’s how I felt when some dumb fuck in a Ford decided to open fire yesterday. I already told you everything I know, Detective. I’m happy to return to New York City in a few days to answer any questions you have. I’m also happy to talk over the phone. I just don’t remember anything beyond what I’d already told you.”
I gave him the contact numbers for my parents’ partners.
“I’ll be in touch,” the detective promised before hanging up on me. Long after the call disconnected, I stared at nothing. What could I have possibly witnessed that was worth killing me over?
Chapter Six
The first rule of the Chicago police department was to stay out of personal cases. Objectivity mattered during an investigation. While I’d had no hope of rising to the rank of detective due to my low magic rating and classification as the son of a lycanthrope, investigations had intrigued me. The entire process of determining the truth lit a fire in my blood.
Personal involvement led to mistakes, mistakes that could cost someone their life.
In Chicago, my involvement with the investigation would have been limited to my interrogation with any other participation in the case strictly banned. Expecting the same principles to apply in Lincoln, Nebraska classified me as an idiot.
At least I’d gotten the kitchen habitable and the fridge cleaned before the first cop came knocking at my mother’s door. I regarded my godfather and my parents’ supervisor, Sergeant Lewis Springfield, with a frown. He wore plain clothes, although I saw the lump under his jacket promising he had his firearm with him. “More questions?”
“Are your parents home?”
“I’m pretty sure they mugged someone for a motorcycle and went on a joy ride.”
Lewis chuckled. “That works for me. I got several interesting calls today.”
“NYPD?”
“And from Chicago. Can I come in?”
“At your own risk. I’ve decontaminated the kitchen, but the rest of the house worries me.”
“They still have you working as their maid?”
I laughed. “They have no idea I’m out of the hospital, and I hope to keep it that way. Come on in, just watch your step. Mom’ll skin you if you ruin her fur collection, and one of the bags tore.”
Dad’s fur completely covered one hallway, but with some effort, I’d be able to gather it back up.
“Bags? Fur collection?”
“Dad scared my alpaca, so I knocked him out and sheared him for his fur for Mom’s enjoyment. Someone had a temper tantrum last night for some reason and ripped open one of the bags.”
“I wonder why. Kitchen’s safe you said?”
I waved for my godfather to follow me. “I even detoxed the coffee maker. I might con someone to pick up some paint for me, as no one told my mother pancakes don’t belong on the ceiling. It turns out pancake batter will leave a stain if the pancake is stuck to the ceiling overnight.”
“You should probably take it easy on your shoulder, Shane.” Lewis pointed at my sling, which waited for me on the kitchen table. “That does you no good if you’re not wearing it.”
“It kept getting in the way.”
“That is the entire point of wearing the sling.”
“You’re over here in a godfather capacity, aren’t you?”
Chuckling, Lewis clapped his hands. “You haven’t lost your basic grasp of reality. Well done. I feel a bit sorry for that detective you routed to your parents’ partners. Once Marshal got done with him, Winston had a turn, and they grilled him for over an hour. By the time he was passed to me, he’d been rather tenderized. Nice enough fellow for a New Yorker. We got a hit on your shooter from him. Detective Steinburg recognized him from the sketch.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously. The fellow’s name is Mark O’Conners, second-generation Irish-American who somehow found his way into an Italian mafia in New York City. The NYPD has been after him for years. The man who fell from the skyscraper had known ties with a branch of that mafia.”
Most large cities in the United States had a mafia of some form; even Lincoln had one, but it specialized in the pixie dust trade. Since the CDC turned a blind eye on them dealing the mood enhancer, the police did, too—as long as the drug didn’t become a public hazard.
Lincoln’s crime tended to involve petty theft, traffic violations, and domestic disturbances.
“How does this involve me?”
“The branch involved is the mafia’s sex trafficking operation.”
My eyebrows took a hike towards my hairline. “I’m not nearly pretty enough to be sold in a sex trafficking operation, Lewis.”
“I wouldn’t know about that. Sure, you won’t be modeling anytime soon, but that scar is actually pretty nice. Cheap bastards sh
ould have given you a better eye, though.”
“At least the color’s decent, right?”
“If you were the target of the sex trafficking operation, they would have grabbed you instead of your alpaca.”
I opened my mouth, thought about that for a few minutes, and clacked my teeth together. “That’s just wrong, Lewis. She’s an alpaca.”
“No, we have reason to believe she’s a human woman who has been transformed into an alpaca.”
I again opened my mouth but words failed me. Sally was human? “But aren’t full-scale transformative magics permanent?”
“Not if it’s done by a practitioner using a certain ritual. One of the men in the car was a practitioner known to be experimenting with transformation rituals.”
“Wait. One of the mafia’s men fell from a skyscraper onto a car containing other members of the same mafia transporting a possible sex trafficking victim?” The coincidence astounded me almost as much as the idea someone would turn a woman into an alpaca to kidnap her and sell her into the sex trade.
The sex trafficking didn’t surprise me; Chicago had a huge problem with sex trafficking, although I’d been fortunate enough to avoid being involved.
“You caught onto the gist of it pretty quick.”
I thought about Sally’s behavior since I’d adopted her, and several things made a sickening amount of sense. If she’d been kidnapped and transformed into an alpaca retaining a human’s intelligence, she wouldn’t trust anyone—especially not men.
Her behavior around the cops made sense, as they’d been very open about what would happen to her. In her position, I would have been spitting angry over anyone casually discussing my murder.
“You look like you’ve swallowed a frog, Shane.”
“I thought she was rather clever for using the tub as a toilet in the hotels I took her to, and she was pretty cuddly—more so than I expected from an angry alpaca. But if she’s a transformed human, she likely realized I was her best bet and didn’t want to rock the boat, right?”
“That’s a possibility.”
“And then she watched O’Conners gun me down before being kidnapped again.”
“Had I known she was a probable sex trafficking victim, I would have ordered your father to use his sniffer and hunt her down. While we have plenty of werewolves on the force, his nose is particularly sensitive, and he’s familiar with her scent.”
“Well, they went on a joyride on a motorcycle to follow the spit trail.”
“Does she know your father’s a werewolf?”
“Definitely. He terrified the life out of her. She’s seen him in all three of his forms.” Groaning, I turned and banged my forehead into the refrigerator door. “I’ve probably traumatized the poor woman even more. Do we have any idea who she might be?”
“No clue in hell. New York has a lot of missing people. Their last count was over four hundred cases of missing women during the past six months. She could be any one of them. She might be someone whose disappearance hasn’t been reported yet, too. We have no way of knowing unless we find her and figure out a way to transform her back into a human. With the practitioner dead, Detective Steinburg isn’t even sure it can be done.”
I banged my head against the fridge a final time before pacing around the kitchen. “So it’s entirely possible I’m a target right along with her.”
“You were always a quick study. You’re more of the ‘kill him so he can’t talk’ type of target, but you are a werewolf’s son. You’d actually be a good addition to a sex trafficking operation. If you don’t become infected, you have many of the benefits of werewolf genetics without the risk of spreading the contagion. If they figure that out, they may want you alive.”
Decades on the force had obviously taken their toll on my godfather. “Why, exactly, do you think I’d be a good addition to a mafia’s sex trafficking operation?”
“Do I really have to explain this to you?”
I pointed at myself. “Twenty-seven year old virgin.”
“Damn it, Shane. How many times do I have to tell you that your mother isn’t going to actually make you marry the first woman you sleep with? You could be a slut if you want with no consequences.”
I laughed. Lewis had tried to impress on me—many times—my father’s one-woman policy didn’t have to apply to me. “I wasn’t ready to split my time between the force and a woman, Lewis. I was hoping to meet someone on the force, too, but it turns out Chicago’s pretty heavily prejudiced against lycanthropes.”
“I got the impression they were pretty disappointed you’d been exposed to the virus. I rather enjoyed singing your father’s praises—and yours, of course—to the detective I spoke to. I think I startled him.”
“They have token lycanthropes on the force, but they’re given the most dangerous jobs. Since I didn’t actually have the virus, I was usually sent out to deal with pissed off werewolves.”
Lewis wouldn’t understand my dubious relationship with Chicago’s vampire population—or their demonic friends, and he wasn’t going to hear about it from me.
“That was actually pretty smart of them. You’re still young enough most werewolves will view you as a puppy. It’s one thing to get into a fight with another werewolf, but another to pick a fight with a young cop who smells like some pack’s puppy. I bet using you limited injuries substantially. All you’d have to do was flinch to bring them in line.”
“Ex-cop,” I reminded him.
Lewis snorted. “You can take the cop out of the force, but you can’t take the cop out of the cop, Shane. You’ll be a cop until the day you die, even if you don’t ever wear a badge again. Don’t try to pull that shit with me. I know better. And so help me, if you start whining about it, you’ll never be too old for me to turn over my knee and give you a spanking you’ll remember.”
Laughing, I shook my head and thumped down onto one of the kitchen chairs. “Now that’s how you rile up a lycanthrope. You spank their kid. It’s a good way to have to clean blood off the walls for weeks. If it makes you feel better, I did tell Mom and Dad ‘arrest him’ wasn’t another word for ‘kill.’ I also reminded them it didn’t mean ‘beat.’ I thought they could use a reminder.”
“How is it they managed to produce someone like you? Are you a parasite? Did you siphon away your parents’ common sense and dignity while you were in the womb?”
“I don’t think it works that way.”
“It would explain a lot.”
“All right, Lewis. You didn’t come all this way in plain clothes to tell me my alpaca is probably a victim of the sex trade. What are you up to?”
“Know how to ride a motorcycle?”
“Of course.”
“How do you feel about being bait? If Detective Steinburg is correct, they’re going to come after you again. With the right bait, we might have more luck than our NYPD friends.”
After spending my life around cops, I recognized Lewis was playing a dangerous game of one-upmanship against the NYPD, who had a lot more funding, a lot more cops, and a reputation the Lincoln police could never hope to gain.
Sergeant Lewis wanted a piece of the glory pie.
Typical werewolf.
Since I could, I popped my fake eye out and rolled it across the table. “This is a reflection of my opinion.”
“That’s disturbing. Please don’t do that.”
Grinning, I returned the glass orb to its proper place and blinked a few times.
“Come on, Shane. You could have washed it off first.”
“You’re the one who wants me to draw gunfire so you can catch yourself a mafia hitman, Lewis. I only have two questions for you.”
“What?”
“Do you have a vest for me? When do we leave?”
“Yes, and now. I even have a proper gun for you, one that doesn’t looks like you got it from a toy store. What is that thing anyway?”
“50mm Desert Eagle.”
“I’ve changed my mind. Bring your little
toy, and make sure you have enough ammo for it.”
“Aren’t you going to ask me if I have a permit for it?”
“No.”
“What kind of cop are you again?”
“The kind who taught his godson how to shoot when he was five years old. Stop your whining and get your ass in gear. We’ve got work to do.”
I only hoped I wasn’t about to do something I would regret.
Next time, assuming I survived long enough for there to be a next time, I would remember my godfather was just as crazy as my parents. When I thought of a motorcycle, I thought of something like a Harley, a bike meant to impress with its roaring engine and massive body.
Lewis had a pair of dirt bikes on steroids in his truck. In my testosterone-poisoned teens, I would have thought they were the coolest things on Earth. Now all I could think about was how much it would hurt when I pancaked myself onto the highway.
“Remember that guy with the real glass windshield, Lewis?”
“I remember him.”
“This is the motorcycle version of his windshield.”
“Where’s your sense of adventure?”
“Hiding with my dignity and planning an escape with my self-respect.” I scowled, crossed my arms, and regarded the pair of death traps with my left eye narrowed to a slit. I didn’t even care what the hell my right eye looked like anymore. I hoped it creeped my godfather out.
“Don’t be a scaredy cat. They only do one-sixty.”
I upgraded their status from death trap to incredibly sexy, lethal, and tempting death traps with invisible rockets attached to them. “When you get me killed, my mother is going to have her first shift. Dad’s going to froth at the mouth and require treatment for rabies. They’re going to eat you. They’re going to gnaw the flesh from your bones and use them to decorate their house.”
“That’s probably an accurate statement. Come on, Shane. I’ve been waiting years for you to come back so we could take these babies on a ride.”
“I need to have a long, serious talk with the chief about the mental stability of his officers.”