The Grass Is Greener [McQueen Was My Valley 3] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting)

by Karen Mercury

  Now the impudent asshole had the nerve to lick his lips! He studied Perry with glee. “Gets boring out here in the field. Don’t you ever get bored? Now, you promise you’ll keep an eye out for that Hinton culprit, right?”

  Perry got bored silly a lot of the time. But he’d never stooped to amusing himself with other men, like Gabriel did. He had only made out with a female camper once, and that was only because she had flung herself at him. All right, a few times he’d made out with women. Women were insatiable badge bunnies when it came to uniforms.

  He didn’t directly answer Rowan’s questions. “What makes you think he’s in McQueen Valley? There aren’t many important things to blow up here.” Lots of tourists came to Monument Valley and Lake Powell not far away, though.

  Rowan snapped the lid shut on his laptop. “Chatter. I have reason to believe he’s now pursuing a subject who is staying in the valley.”

  “Who? I could be of more help if I knew who he was after.”

  Rowan was already around the driver’s side of the truck, tossing his laptop inside. “The Winterhawk bomber. I have a feeling he’s gone undercover, trying to blend in with other people. You’ll be of more help driving around out here.”

  Perry followed his newfound friend around the front of the truck. “Where are you staying? It might be more helpful if I knew that.” He realized he sounded like a desperate, love-struck idiot, grasping at straws. Why? He barely knew the asshat, who still might be a janitor after all.

  “Nowhere yet. I’ll probably check in at the Triple Play later today. Thanks for the help, officer.”

  And Rowan took off, heading toward the mountains, not the road.

  Perry was left standing, destitute, just a forlorn shadow of his former self. He tried to feel anger and outrage as he got back into his truck and googled Rowan’s name. He simply didn’t have it in him to feel hatred toward the man who had just given him the most stupendous cocksucking of his entire life. It wasn’t as though Rowan had tied him up and tortured him—well, a little, maybe. But maybe a certain form of torture was acceptable. Forcing someone to orgasm was hardly inflicting pain on them. And Rowan hadn’t even seemed interested in his own satisfaction. How could Perry feel outraged by a fellow who roamed the desert, janitor or not, giving mind-blowing orgasms to others?

  Predictably, there wasn’t even one item on the entire internet about any Rowan O’Shea. Those PMCs had a way of permanently deleting anything on any of their operatives. So Perry put his official government truck into gear. The truck now seemed small and feminine compared to Rowan’s mechanical monster, although Perry was often obliged to transport detainees in here, or throw eight-point bucks into the bed, certainly macho enough tasks.

  A different sort of anger welled in him as he returned to the main road. It didn’t seem to be properly directed against Rowan O’Shea. No, he was driving along in a fairly bland, empty-headed mood when he saw the encampment of the cartoon-loving threesome. Sure enough, this time he thought he saw blue and leopard skin blobs rolling around next to a boulder. The fluorescent furballs heaved up and down in a manner that was definitely indecent to the public.

  He muttered indignantly, “If I can see them from the road, then children can!” Finally having found an outlet for his fury, he drove to the camp and arrested the two critters. By the time he got there, they’d seen his approach and had straightened up their act, but Perry knew what he’d seen. He had to let the female bear stay, since he hadn’t seen her doing anything lewd.

  He didn’t realize until he was to the intersection that led to the Monticello police station. He was harsher on the Hanna-Barbera characters because he was mortified about the scene with Rowan. Perry had known many police officers who took their personal rage out on hapless citizens, that was certain. He had just never considered himself to be one of them.

  That was why he’d turned and headed for the Triple Play instead. He was glad he hadn’t called in the 10-15 on prisoners in custody. Not only would this save him a boatload of time and paperwork not taking the duo to Monticello, but he might feasibly discover more about Rowan O’Shea at the Triple Play.

  “We’ll send for Michelle,” said Red. “Was getting sick of camping out in the desert with all the scorpions anyway.”

  That was how Perry came to be heading to the front lobby doors of the Triple Play, escorting two full-sized Furries who didn’t even take off their heads. The lodge would see plenty of them if what Red Bullard said was true about the Great Utah Furfest coming to town.

  He knew Brooke and Xandra McQueen. Both women were certainly dazzling—and claimed by other men—but the third woman absolutely blew him out of the water. Delicate and refined, she looked like a Russian princess with her lovely pointed nose. Shame burned deep inside Perry as he recited his story of the randy Furries, leaving out any mention of Rowan of course. The new story was honest and true—he just left out any mention of a buff, cocksucking ace merc by the side of the road.

  “We’re furry lifestylers,” explained Red.

  “Yeah, a twisted and aberrant lifestyle,” said the lawyer, Sol. He was a nice enough guy from what Perry could tell, but overly protective of the McQueen family. “Who’s the nimrod who booked this convention? Cass? I’m going to have a word with her. We don’t want to become known as the California of Utah, hosting every single butt-sniffing conference in the world. Those pet psychics were bad enough, with their scepters and pendulums.”

  The Russian princess told her friends, “Furry fandom is a psychological kink not any more or less valid than any other subcategory in the kink roster.”

  “Let’s get you a room,” said Xandra to Red. “I think they’re cute,” she told Sol.

  The Newfoundland dog nipped at Red’s leopard skin trap door as they headed for the lodge. Perry was glad when the Russian princess lagged behind, seemingly interested in talking to him. She told him, “I believe that most of them claim to not engage in sexual activities with each other. They’re mostly interested in it for the camaraderie, sharing their love of anthropomorphized animal characters. That means an animal character with lifelike attributes.”

  “I know.” Perry smiled. “I took some cultural diversity classes in police officer’s training. It was just a strange sight in the middle of the desert, and I was afraid children on their way to Lake Powell would see them acting…well, too much like animals. Now that would really mess with their future memories of Atom Ant and the Banana Splits.”

  “Oh, I understand completely. I work closely with the police in Charleston, South Carolina. I autopsy corpses for a living. I completely sympathize with your dilemma. Children would be traumatized if they saw Penelope Pitstop engaging in coitus.”

  Perry was amused that the woman used the word “coitus.” They still trailed the group of McQueen sisters and Furries, but she was lagging slower still. “I’m afraid Penelope Pitstop was a woman, not an animal. Perry Donovan,” he said, pausing to stick out his hand.

  “Sasha McQueen. Yes, didn’t she drive a hot pink race car that looked like a Corvette Stingray?”

  “How do you know that? You’re not nearly old enough.”

  “Neither are you.”

  Now Sasha walked on ahead but without taking her eyes off Perry. She had a sly, knowing look similar to the look Rowan had given him while Perry was busily stuffing his cock back into his pants. As though she could see right through him. As though she knew what he looked like without clothes on. And she seemed to like what she saw.

  “Hey,” Perry found himself saying as they neared the parking valet’s podium by the front door, “there was a real awesome swimming hole near where I arrest—where those Furries were camped. Are you going to be here a few days?”

  Now Sasha did stop walking. “Why, yes. I have to attend my sister Brooke’s wedding this Saturday. What did you have in mind?”

  “Sasha!” Brooke had turned around and was yelling from the front door of the Triple Play, a grand, four-storied lobby hung with eno
rmous chandeliers made of antlers. Perry was becoming so accustomed to the luxury of the Triple Play it had irritated him a few times to be out in the freezing cold dark at three in the morning waiting for someone to shoot a deer. It wasn’t good to be irritated by his job. “Lunch served by Leif! Now!”

  Sasha waved at her sister. “Yes, dear,” she called back, as though harried by a nagging husband. But the smile she bestowed on Perry was unmistakable. She liked him. “What about the swimming hole?”

  It had been so long that Perry had actually had to make advances at a woman. The campers and BASE jumpers who had thrown themselves at him, well, that hadn’t taken any effort. “I believe it’s on Triple Play property, on one of the tributaries that runs off Prism Canyon. Would you like to swim in it?”

  She was so bright-eyed, such an elegant princess. “Why, yes! It would be good to see some of the countryside while I’m waiting here. Can you come for me tomorrow morning around ten? Suite one thirty-six.”

  Sasha dashed after her sisters without another word. In amazement that she had accepted his invitation, Perry turned and headed down the hill toward his cabin, looking back over his shoulder every so often, as though she would be following him.

  Chapter Five

  “So. Did you ever find out anything about Tony Danza?”

  She must have seen him coming. Rowan didn’t try to hide or skulk, just pulled his SUV right up alongside that game warden’s government truck. Sasha sat on a spread blanket on the lip of a cliff that looked down over the swimming hole Nathan Horowitz had told Rowan about. Nathan had confided in Rowan, once he was convinced he was a fellow PMC. It was easy for fellow mercenaries to check one another out, having access to all the best electronic intel. Nathan had told Rowan that Sasha had come here to Pepper Box Creek with “that blond conservation officer” who could only be Perry Donovan, intriguing Rowan further.

  Sasha looked like a perfect forties pinup in her wide-brimmed straw hat that protected her milky-white skin. She even wore a one-piece bathing suit of plaid seersucker. Was she that modest? She had nothing to hide.

  She reached out a hand for him to take, to yank her to her feet. She felt light as tissue, her ash-blonde hair bouncing around her shoulders. She had not been in to swim yet. Rowan was glad that his initial assessment of her held true. Yes, he wanted her. There was something delicate and refined in her that balanced any crude roughness in him. “The only thing I discovered of interest is that Tony filed for divorce in March from his wife of twenty-four years. But you know, I really think Jane’s last words had more to do with a brain bleed, impaired cognitive function, a memory mix-up from the sonic concussion.”

  Rowan had been trained not to dismiss seemingly trivial things. “I’ve seen tons of people suffering from concussions. And she genuinely seemed to think there was something about Danza that was important to this case. I’ll have to be honest, Sasha. My belief is that Jane knew the bomb would be going off. That’s why she shooed you out of the ballroom. That’s why she was coming to get you when it went off.”

  Sasha frowned. “That’s absurd. If she knew the bomb would go off, why wouldn’t she have warned her husband John? He was the obvious intended target. Why would she have let him keep talking and get killed?”

  “That’s the part I can’t figure. But when she was lying there, I asked if she knew the bomb would be going off that day. She said yes.”

  Sasha’s frown evaporated as she dismissed Rowan’s statement. “Just more of the brain bleed. I had a strange brain bleed, and I wasn’t nearly as close to the blast.”

  “Oh, yeah? What was your first thought after the explosion?”

  Sasha’s eyes widened and her pupils dilated. Looking at Rowan’s face seemed to be arousing her. “I wondered if you were all right.” She laughed lightly. “See? See what ridiculous tricks the brain can play when concussed? I wondered if a man I’d only known ten minutes was all right. Did you find out anything else about the bomber? It was the guy we saw at the Winterhawk, right? The Dickhead?”

  “It’s The Dickhead all right.” Rowan dared to take her by the shoulders, to impress her with the importance of his words. “Listen, Sasha. El Zeub has taken credit for the bombing, but he’s no Muslim. Not even a wannabe Muslim. I think he’s trying to stir up hatred with these bombings, and I think he was working for John Maliano. To rile people up with outrage over the bombings, to gain support for Maliano’s pro-war bills, to create a positive environment to award contracts to private military companies without so much as a complaint.”

  “That’s what I don’t get. Don’t you stand to gain by politicians such as Maliano? The more countries we invade, the more men like yourself are handed new contracts.”

  “True. I have to say I’ve been living off the spoils of war for decades now. Lately I’ve been rethinking that. But listen, Sasha. I think El Zeub has gone renegade and has turned against Maliano, the hand that fed him. I think he may be off his rocker on a few different levels.”

  “As though bombing innocent people isn’t already off his rocker?”

  Rowan had to laugh. “Listen, you said you work with bombs.”

  “Yes. I’m the Charleston Medical Examiner. Once in awhile I’ll have to autopsy someone killed by a blast, or go to the crime scene to investigate.”

  Of course, Rowan had known all that. It was fairly easy to google “Sasha McQueen” and discover she was Charleston’s ME with a “vast experience in forensic and anatomic pathology.” It had impressed him—as if he needed any more reasons to adore this woman. He’d also found a society article announcing her “amicable” divorce two years ago from a Colin Whitbread, some British asshole who made a pile of loot running a medical supply company. And he’d used his company database to run her numbers—he could do that, he was protecting her, and he needed to know everything about her. He discovered in addition to her Johns Hopkins honors, her age, her credit spending history, and absence of even a speeding ticket, that the divorce hadn’t been so amicable at all. Accusations of the asshole’s cheating and wife beating had been filed, but it hadn’t seemed to help Sasha’s monetary settlement. Since they’d had no children and Sasha was more than fully employed under her own steam, she only received their house in the French Quarter of Charleston, no monthly stipend.

  Rowan thought that was unfair. If a man was going to marry a woman under false pretenses, even if he suddenly turned to wife-beating and screwing around behind her back after the wedding, the cuckolded woman should receive more recompense than that. Maybe she’d been so eager to get rid of “Sir” Colin, knighted in England for being related to some asshat, no doubt.

  “All right, then you’ll want to know it was a shaped pipe bomb, an IED packed with fishing weights covered in rat poison. Your poor friend Jane had a fishing weight go right through her head. She died almost instantly.”

  “After talking to you,” Sasha said thoughtfully. “Even more reason to dismiss that Tony Danza business.”

  “Well, I’m not. Listen. I have reason to believe El Zeub is going to come after you next. I believe it was him who posted on a crazed bomber website yesterday that he was coming to McQueen Valley.” El Zeub had actually posted that he was coming here to “give the doctor a taste of her own medicine,” but Sasha didn’t have to know that. “The feds like someone else for the bombing so practically nobody is following El Zeub. My boss thinks I’m rogue for following him.”

  “They actually have crazed bomber websites?”

  “Believe it or not, yes. The website El Zeub frequents is a place for mad bombers to rant and flame each other, you know. Criticize each other’s methods of blowing shit up. ‘Oh, you didn’t use enough broken razors.’ A bunch of crybabies. So yeah, it is a mad bomber website. I’ve got my computer guy working on tracking his IP address, but I’m sure he’s moved on since then. If I show you a photo, can you commit it to memory?”

  “Oh, yes. I’m a human facial recognition program. Yes, that’s El Zeub, the guy you were chasi
ng at Winterhawk. Yes. Very bulbous nose, prominent zygomatic arch. Strange elongated ulna. With arms like that, he must walk like a Cro-Magnon man.”

  Rowan was impressed. “Yes, he does, now that you mention it.”

  “Narrow thorax. He could be susceptible to things like asthma. Do you know where he hails from?”

  “We know very little, just that he was born and raised in Orange, New Jersey. He seems to have become interested in bombs as a teen like a normal teen sort of hobby, but it’s been escalating. He’s been on our radar for about six months during which we figured out it was no coincidence bombings always preceded a stump visit by Maliano.”

  “Okay, you can put the phone away. I’ve memorized it. Thank you for not giving me a copy.”

  “Yes, I’d hate like hell for him to catch you with a picture of him, even a digital one. Which leads us to the next thing.” Rowan put his hands on her shoulders again and looked deep into her eyes. “I’d like to stick close to you for the next few days, until we find out where this Dickhead is. Never hurts to have a bodyguard with a Glock.”

  “Of course. That’s very safety-minded of you. But stick…how closely?”

  Rowan had read her as a conservative, even sort of prudish gal. Before marrying Sir Colin she had spent a couple of years dating an Olympic skier several years her junior. At Johns Hopkins she appeared to have been loyal to a fellow med student. There were no indications that she dated around or hooked up randomly with anyone. That made it tougher for Rowan, but in light of his long-term goals he’d be prouder at his success. He knew he couldn’t just grab her, a tactic that usually worked with most women. “You have a suite in the lodge?”

  “How’d you know that?”

  “Conjecture. I studied the floor plan. The suites are rather large. Would you mind if I slept on the couch?”