Raising Wolves

by Preston Walker

  "I'll track you down," Monty said, with a grin. "Take care of that whelp of yours. She'll be happier once you get out of the city."

  "I think she will. Take care."

  Monty dipped his head in farewell, and climbed back into his shiny little hybrid. He sped away, and Jordan slid behind the wheel.

  "Alright, kiddo. One more stop then we'll head home."

  Darla didn't answer. She'd fallen asleep. Jordan smiled gently, relieved. She'd be a grumpasaurus in the morning, but at least she wouldn't terrorize the store tonight. He parked as close to the doors as he could and carried her inside, grabbing a blanket that he kept in the truck for occasions just like this. He lay it across the bottom of a shopping cart, nestled her on top of it, and marched inside. It didn't take him long to find what he needed. He'd had to do this last year, too, just on a slightly smaller scale. He knew exactly what brand and shade of paint to get, which cabinet doors would fit seamlessly in with the existing decor, and which carpet and drapes would match closely enough to the originals to be essentially unnoticeable. The primary difference this time was that he wasn't going to bother replacing any furniture. Everything he needed was on the back of his truck.

  The cashier gave him a judgmental look as he piled his purchases on the conveyor belt. The look didn't bother him. Nobody was going to call the cops for a late-night shopping trip, but they absolutely would call about a feral wolf dressed in a little girl's clothes. God forbid they saw her shift. It was a fear that he lived with constantly which had never yet come to pass. He knew that it could though. If he let down his guard for even a moment, she would have a meltdown in public and he would lose everything. The thought of her being captured, tazed, shot, or screamed at made his blood boil with rage and his chest clench with anxiety. Monty had given him more than he would ever know. He'd given him the freedom to run and hide his daughter from the watchful eyes of humanity.

  The materials cost a little more than he'd expected, and he was glad that he didn't have to worry about next month's rent. He could focus on paying for mobile Wi-Fi and gasoline, which would be more expensive now that he was carrying so much extra weight. He would even be able to afford the tablet that Darla had been begging for since her third birthday, full of educational games. Feeling happy and optimistic, Jordan loaded his purchases into the back of his brand new house and buckled Darla into her seat. The long night ahead felt like the last few yards of a marathon, and he could almost taste the water on the other side of the finish line.

  A strange car was parked on his street in front of the big two-story house. He wouldn't usually have noticed, but the threat of shadowy authorities was fresh in his mind. He noticed that Mrs. Mullins' living room lights were on. She usually drank herself to sleep by ten. Jordan paused in the middle of the road, hesitant to park and too nervous to flee. He decided to drive to the end of the cul-de-sac, under the trees, and watch the door.

  It wasn't long before someone stepped out of the front door. Mrs. Mullins followed, shaking her head and gesturing emphatically. Jordan watched her closely. She wasn't upset with the visitor, he decided. She was ranting about a mutual irritant. He suspected that irritant was him. The man she was talking to wore a suit with a fedora and carried a briefcase. He nodded and shook his head sympathetically as she talked, then shook her hand and left, so he entered the strange car and drove away. Mrs. Mullins crossed her arms over her skinny chest and stomped over to the side of the house, glaring at his empty parking spot. She lit a cigarette. She continued ranting, to herself this time, as she paced his parking space. He worried that she was going to camp out there for the rest of the night.

  Soon though, she stubbed out the cigarette and marched back inside. A few minutes later, the lights in the front of the house turned off. He scanned the building, finding the bedroom window to his apartment. The door was left open, so if she went inside... yep. The lights came on in his apartment. The jig was up. It wouldn't matter now if he worked on the apartment all night, she would still evict him. He sweated for a while, turning options over in his head. He wanted to run but couldn't, not without his laptop or Darla's Wolfie. These were essential, irreplaceable items. He could only back up so much information onto the server; most of what he worked on was protected information. He kept it securely contained on the laptop itself, as well as boxes filled with external hard drives, both of which were in the apartment.

  The lights turned off, and he let out a breath he hadn't been aware of holding. He waited twenty minutes, long enough for her to get upstairs and start drinking, then quietly pulled his truck around. Backing into the parking space, he wasn't going to stick around long enough to fix the place, but he could at least give her the materials. It wasn't like he needed them for himself, and the store wouldn't take most of this stuff back. It was mixed and cut to his specifications; they couldn't just restock it. He left Darla in her seat while he unlocked the basement door and the trailer. He was grateful that his apartment had a private door; he wouldn't want to have to navigate this project through the shared hallway.

  He made sure to lock the truck before unloading the materials, not afraid of Darla waking up; she could sleep through a bomb dropping. He was anxious about the man who had been talking to Mrs. Mullins, and about Mrs. Mullins herself. If he stretched his imagination just a little, he could easily see Mrs. Mullins holding his daughter hostage for rent money, and who knows what that guy would do. These thoughts made Jordan work quickly, and he had unloaded the trailer in minutes. Once that was done, he grabbed their most important things (Wolfie, the laptop, the boxes full of hard drives) and stashed them in the truck beside Darla. He took a second to be sure that the street was still empty, then returned to the apartment for the things that were technically replaceable, but still wanted, like her princess bedding and their clothes. He grabbed a box of cereal bars and juice boxes for the morning, not knowing how long he was going to be driving, but he knew he didn't want to stop any time soon.

  Satisfied that he had everything that they would need in the immediate future, he hurried out of the apartment and locked the door behind him. He stashed the arm load in the trailer and locked that too. A feeling in his gut told him to check on Darla before he got behind the wheel, so he walked around the passenger's side to do just that. His heart jumped in his throat as he turned the corner. The man in the fedora was peering into her window and fiddling with the lock.

  CHAPTER SIX

  "Nobody? You're certain?"

  "Yes sir, no homicide allies in San Perdido. Looks like our last boy had... oh, ouch. A close encounter with the undead. Guess if you work in the morgue..."

  "No detectives? No officers? I'd take a traffic cop at this point."

  "Sorry, Jeffery. Looks like our police allies in Perdido have all been killed in the line of duty or transferred."

  "Son of a... okay. Can you transfer me to Bates?"

  "Mr. Bates is in a meeting right now."

  Jeffery wanted to tell her to interrupt him, but he knew with a sinking dread that it would put Bates in a foul mood before he'd even informed him of the situation. He would yell. He might even fire him. Jeffery was painfully aware of every failure he'd ever had on the job, and this was one of his bigger failures. He wanted Bates to be as calm as possible when he broke the news.

  "Alright. Give him a message to call me as soon as he's done, please."

  "You got it. Should I tell him what it's in reference to?"

  "Um... tell him we have a rogue Nero Hunt, and the hippie cover has been forcibly decommissioned."

  "That sounds vague and ominous. Playing up the drama, are we?"

  "I wish, Sarah. Give him the message."

  "Will do. Be careful, okay?"

  "Yeah."

  Jeffery hung up the phone and passed a hand over his face, then looked around the bloodied office and sighed heavily. He really didn't want to comb through records beside a corpse, but he didn't seem to have any other options. He'd chased Shania (or whatever her real name was
) as far as the nearest busy street, then lost her scent in a whirl of smog. She'd probably caught a cab. City wolves drove him nuts for that reason alone; out in the wilderness, you had a trail. In the city, public and private transportation smudged the scent out of existence the second you lost sight of your quarry. He'd returned to the shop in defeat, locked it down, and called Sarah, who had given him another dead end to add to his collection.

  He knew that there had to be something here to point him in the direction of Steel's grandchild, but he couldn't begin to think where to look for it. April's mutilated body was a grim distraction. He was going to have to do something about her if he had any chance of finding anything, so he searched the backroom and the stockroom for anything that would help, and eventually came across a bundle of oversized canvas bags intended to haul massive tents and temporary gazebos. He also found several boxes of trash bags and several rolls of duct tape, and grabbed one of each. He carried everything upstairs, forcing his mind to disassociate as he couldn't allow himself to feel anything, not until he'd taken care of the problem.

  He spread the canvas bag beside her and opened it. Then he lined it with plastic trash bags, taping them in place with the duct tape. He didn't allow himself to focus on the reasons why, so just completed the tasks, one after the other. Once he was done, he reached over and closed her eyes without looking at her directly. It would be easier to ignore who and what she'd been if she wasn't looking at him. He lifted her at shoulder and hip, and was grateful for rigor mortis. She rolled like an object toward the bag.

  It was then that he saw what was in her hand. Her left arm had been twisted under her, and he'd assumed that she'd simply fallen that way. But there, encased in her rigid fingers, was a flash drive. He carefully retrieved it, sticking it in his pocket before resuming his gruesome chore. With a little muscle and a lot of energy spent ignoring what he was doing, he managed to bundle her into the canvas bag and zip it closed. Once she was hidden from view, he could relax and so pulled the flash drive from his pocket.

  "Died protecting you, did she? Let's find out why."

  He pulled his laptop out of the satchel he'd been carrying since he left Moorside, which seemed like days ago, but had really only been a few hours. Six hours, he corrected himself, and change. It was long past dinner time and his lunch had consisted of airline peanuts, but he couldn't bear the thought of food. He was going to have to scrub himself pink before he would be able to eat again. Tapping his fingers impatiently as the computer booted up, he was finally able to enter his password, though got it wrong twice, and had to take a breath. He whispered the password to himself, one character at a time, as he typed it in. He tried to avoid doing that; it wasn't exactly the best way to keep a secret; but he didn't see the harm this time, since the only ears in the room wouldn't be hearing anything any time soon.

  Once it was up and running, he slid the cap off of the flash drive and stuck it into an available port. It loaded, and he opened it, pulling up what appeared to be a tidy virtual replica of the filing cabinet. Twenty-two folders out of thirty were labeled with nothing but a five-year span. He clicked the current one, and was prompted to enter a password.

  "Damn it," he whispered, under his breath.

  He looked around, trying to decide what a woman like April would use for a password, discounting Shania, or anything related to her; he was fairly certain that she hadn't actually been a significant part of April's life prior to being the cause of her death. He knew she was a werewolf advocate; that she had been for twenty years; that she had a ridiculous name, and that she loved it enough to name her store with the thesaurus version; he knew that she was always careful, but routinely impulsive and he knew that she had, for some reason, been hiding stray shifters from the outreach program. He decided to start with her name.

  "April Sprinkle," he muttered, typing it in.

  That wasn't it, of course. He pushed his glasses up and rubbed his eyes, telling his brain to get in gear. He tried every combination of her name and words with similar meanings that he could think of, to no avail. Then he tried her birth year, her birth day, and the words "soul oasis" in a dozen different combinations, but nothing seemed to work. Frustrated, he set the computer aside and walked back to the filing cabinet. He examined it. Not just the files, but the filing cabinet itself. To his surprise, he found something. A tiny rolling paper was wedged under the welded lip of the cabinet front, inside and on top. He carefully pulled it out, and saw that it had been stuck there with some kind of tacky material. It was all he could do not to tear the delicate paper. It had writing on it, in the same hand which labeled the file folders.

  Leet looking glass 2016 year pupper shift sand doggo 2021

  He typed it in, just as it was written, but it didn't work. Frowning, he stared at it some more.

  "Leet. I remember that. It's the... the, the replacing letters with numbers thing, isn't it?" he muttered to himself.

  He tried it again, this time replacing every letter he could with a similar-looking number or symbol. It still didn't work, and he frowned again, before trying the new words and numbers in every way he could think of, but eventually he was forced to give up. He was going to have to take this back to the office and get one of the computer guys to crack it. He sighed and closed the prompt box, then scrolled through the files again. Twenty-two years’ worth of information, plus some. There were eight files below those which were labeled with nothing but seemingly random letters and numbers. He tried opening them, and typing their file names in as the passwords, but that didn't work either. Frustrated and feeling overheated, he pushed the computer away in disgust and checked the time. Bates really should have been out of his meeting by now.

  As if on cue, his phone rang.

  "Moranis."

  "Moranis, what's this gibberish Sarah tried to pass off as a message?"

  Jeffery sighed.

  "I thought there might have been a rogue werewolf running around calling himself Nero Hunt, but now I'm pretty sure I was mistaken. Regardless, we have an ally down."

  "What do you mean, 'down'?!"

  "Ms. Sprinkle has been killed."

  "By whom?!" Bates shouted.

  Jeffery winced. He knew Bates was going to shout.

  "I'm not entirely sure. A woman claiming to be her sister told me that a man, ostensibly a Mr. Nero Hunt, was meeting with her and killed her. However I have found no evidence that there was anyone here except for the two women, and I realized rather belatedly that the woman claiming to be the sister was in fact a werewolf herself. She took me by surprise and I lost her. I found an empty file folder labeled 'Darla Steel-Hacker' and a flash drive that I can't get into without a password. I'm sitting in the second-story office of the Spring Showers Spiritual Oasis with a body, and Sarah tells me that we no longer have a connection with the homicide division in San Perdido."

  Jeffery heard Bates light a cigarette, and was taken aback. The boss had quit smoking months ago. He wondered if this particular case was stressing him out more than Jeffery thought.

  "Where's the body now?" Bates asked, more calmly.

  "In a canvas bag wrapped in plastic, up here in the room with me."

  "No leads on the other girl?"

  "None at all."

  "Right. Check the human vital statistics for that county for the name Darla Steel-Hacker, Hacker-Steel, or simply Hacker or Steel. If Alex and his partner went through April, they should have a birth certificate or social security card on file for her. Are we missing any wolves by name of Hacker?"

  "No, sir. That was my first thought too, but I have no records of anyone named Hacker. But..."

  "But what, Moranis?"

  "Well, sir, April had more records than I do. Almost double, in fact. I haven't looked through them yet, but if all of these records are shifters, we have a much bigger problem than we thought. Not to mention that our allies are hiding things from us."

  "Hm," Bates said, thoughtfully. "After you look Darla up, go through those files
. I want to know who they are, what she has on them, and why we haven't heard of them."

  "Yes, sir."

  "And eat something."

  "Yes, sir."

  "And after you eat, get back there and hang out for a while. I'll send some of the guys down to deal with April. If you happen to stumble across a will or anything, let the boys know when they get there. They'll be tying up her loose ends as well as dealing with the body."

  "Yes sir, will do."

  Bates sighed heavily again.

  "Good work, Jeffery. Just don't screw it up now."

  "Yes... sir...?"

  The line went dead and Jeffery shot the phone a strange look. Bates had never called him Jeffery before, not in all the years they'd worked together. Bates had always called him Moranis, and he had always called him Bates. He wondered if the random Jeffery meant he could call Bates by his first name. He tried it out.

  "Yes, Axel, I do have those numbers for you."

  Jeffery made a face and decided against it. Bates would always be Bates. It suited him better than Axel anyway. Jeffery couldn't picture Bates wailing away on a guitar or getting tattooed, or any of the edgy things that the name "Axel" brought to mind for him. He shook his head, annoyed at himself for getting distracted by something so inconsequential, and began examining the room once more, starting with the filing cabinet. April had secrets, but at least she'd kept them organized. Which is better than I can do, he thought ruefully. He sighed as he resigned himself to a long night of picking through bloody papers.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Adrenaline flashed through Jordan's body, and every thought of being quiet and unobtrusive fled from his mind.

  "Hey! Get away from her!" he shouted, lunging at the man.

  The man spun toward him, catching his flying fist cold with one hand.

  "Ah, Mr. Hacker! So nice to finally meet you. You're a hard man to find."