by Noir, Roxie
As they walked inside, Grey still half folded into herself, Dane found himself rushing to open doors for her, even pulling out her chair in the interview room. He’d started sweating just a little, the thought of being alone with her so alluring that it made him nervous.
You’re asking her about finding a dead body, he kept reminding himself. Not romantic. Not sexy. Probably the least sexy thing that’s ever happened to her.
“All right. First, I need you to state your name for the record.”
Dane hit a button behind him, and the room’s recording equipment clicked to life.
“Grace Patience Joy Macauley,” she said, enunciating each name clearly.
Dane couldn’t help himself. He raised his eyebrows.
“My parents were optimists,” she said. “Call me Grey.”
A hint of a smile played around her lips, the first one that Dane had seen.
He felt just a little bit melty inside.
“All right, Miss Macauley,” he said. “Could you just tell me what happened tonight, in your own words?”
She nodded, then swallowed and looked down at the scarred tabletop in front of her, taking a moment to collect herself.
“I was walking home from a friend’s house. We’d had dinner and a drink or two, and that alley is a shortcut I’ve used sometimes,” she said, her perfect, melodious voice soft. “I mean, Rustvale is pretty safe, and even at night I never really thought twice about it, though maybe I should have.”
Dane nodded.
“I turned the corner there, and I saw a guy right next to the dumpster,” she went on. “I kind of jumped, because I’d gone a couple of steps without realizing that he was there, and, I mean, that’s not good, when you’re alone in a dark alley and you don’t realize there’s someone that close.”
She swallowed, her eyes distant as she remembered.
“But there was something really strange about him,” she said slowly, her brow furrowed. “Even though I jumped, he didn’t react, and he was just still. So still, it was weird, so I took a step toward him and asked if he was okay, and obviously he didn’t answer, but I still thought he was asleep, or... on drugs, I guess, or something,” she said with a little shrug. “I was actually just about to leave him alone, when a car turned into a driveway across the street and for a second, I could see this puddle of blood around him.”
She shuddered, hugging her arms more tightly around herself.
“So I screamed, and then I ran into the Chinese restaurant and called 911.”
“You didn’t recognize him?”
She shook her head.
Dane nodded. From where he sat, he could smell her. She smelled like roses, just faintly, though there was something else, another scent that he could barely detect. It was something less pleasant than roses.
Maybe her friend’s house smells weird, he thought.
His eyes flicked up to hers and held them for just a moment, and then Grey looked away quickly.
Dane’s stomach plummeted.
She’s hiding something, he realized. He wasn’t sure — he didn’t know — but his gut was rarely wrong. There was something that Grey wasn’t telling him, and he didn’t know why.
Did she do it? He wondered, just for a moment.
He looked her over again.
No way, he thought.
Am I telling myself that because I want to push up her dress and see what her thighs feel like on my face? he thought, blushing despite himself.
“You said that you use the alley as a shortcut?” he asked.
Grey nodded.
“It’s probably stupid,” she said. “Well, it’s obviously stupid,” she muttered. “I found a dead body.”
“Is it actually shorter than taking the street?” he asked.
She sighed, blowing a strand of blond hair from her face.
“Probably not,” she said. “It might just feel shorter.”
“Where does your friend live?”
“You know that big apartment building that’s over near First and Sierra?” she asked. “The Regent, I think it’s called?”
Dane nodded.
“She lives there,” she said.
Dane tapped his pencil in frustration. There was still something, but having her here was clouding his judgement, making it hard for him to focus on whatever was wrong.
Then she looked up at him, and he felt like he was drowning in the blue pools of her eyes.
Fuck it, he thought. Try again later. Whatever it is, it’s not coming right now.
“Well, that should do it for now,” he said, clicking off the recording equipment and standing.
“That’s it?” she asked.
“It’s a start,” he admitted. “I’m not sure how much closer we are to catching whoever did this. It sounds like you just got unlucky.”
“I could’ve gotten unluckier,” she pointed out.
True, thought Dane.
“Can I drive you home?” Dane asked.
He could have sworn he saw her turn slightly pink.
Stop it, he thought. You’re seeing what you want to see, and you absolutely cannot so much as look at her funny until this investigation is over. You haven’t even proved that she didn’t do it.
“I’m not a suspect?” she asked.
Dane did smile, that time.
“Should you be?” he teased. “Anything you didn’t tell me?”
For a moment, her face faltered, and then she smiled again. Dane felt that single tick of suspicion one more time, then banished it.
“Come on,” he said, opening another door for her. “You must be exhausted.”
She nodded, her blond hair bouncing in front of Dane.
Chapter Two
Grey
Don’t go, Grey told herself. Not after last night. What are you, insane?
She stirred her baked potato soup, letting the steam rise into her face. It was still too hot to eat, but she inhaled its scent — just like mom made.
Stay in tonight, for once.
She walked into her living room, put her soup on the coffee table, and turned the TV on, flipping through game shows and sitcom re-runs. Anything to take her mind off of the dirty, smoky room that she didn’t need to go back to.
Not only did you nearly lose three hundred bucks, you lied to that hot policeman, she scolded herself.
Thinking of Detective Sorenson, she blushed. He’d said for her to call him Dane, but thinking of him by his first name just felt... wrong, somehow. He was investigating her case, and even if he’d told her that she wasn’t a suspect, Grey was anything but an idiot.
She’d found the body, and there hadn’t been anyone else around. Whoever found the body was always a suspect, and that was that, no matter what a sexy tall detective with the most serious brown eyes she’d ever seen might say.
Grey blew on her soup, trying to cool it off, the remote in one hand. For a moment she paused on local news, but it was reused footage. Behind the reporter, she could see the black plastic bag that had held that guy’s body, and her stomach flopped over inside her.
She flipped the channel and took a bite of soup.
It’s only eight-thirty, she thought. They’re only just getting started.
Besides, you came out ahead last night. You’re up almost $300, so if you lose some money, it’s fine. You’ll be right back where you started.
She flipped the channel again, this time to a man in a suit waving his hands over a weather map of the west coast.
You shouldn’t go because you have to be up and at school in the morning, she reminded herself. You can’t teach a bunch of kindergarteners on five hours of sleep.
And, sooner or later, you know that one of the parent volunteers is going to notice that something is up, and they’ll talk to the principal, and they’ll talk to the school board, and before you know it I’ll be on the local news, just like poor Nicky.
She took another bite, the soup in the bowl getting low.
Well, not dea
d. But some terrible picture of me will be up there and a blond lady in a bad suit will go on and on about a local Kindergarten teacher caught in a gambling bust.
The bowl was empty now, and Grey settled back into the couch, drawing her feet up under her.
You’re staying here, she told herself again and again. Remote in hand, she went through the channels again, landing on the local news.
The same woman was talking to the camera, but behind her, Grey could just barely see Detective Sorenson and the other police officer take the black plastic off of Nicky, revealing his strange, dead face.
In seconds, Grey grabbed her wallet and was headed out the door.
This time she drove. It was only a few blocks, and it felt silly, but the night before she’d walked, and look where that had gotten her.
Just an hour, she told herself as she walked up to the liquor store on First Street. Or fifty bucks. An hour or fifty bucks, and then you’re going home and going to bed.
As she walked through the store, the clerk looked up from the movie he was watching on his phone, gave her a quick once-over, and then nodded.
Grey went to the door in the back, covered in a giant poster of the St. Pauli girl, holding a beer in front of each comically-sized boob. Just like she did every time she came here, Grey wondered how she got them to be so perky. Some kind of push-up bra, sure, but something extra? A corset? Boning? Just genetics? Grey considered her own rack pretty good, but it wasn’t beer advertisement good.
It’s probably photoshop, she thought, as she took the grimy doorknob in her hand and walked through.
It took her eyes a minute to adjust, just like usual. The door led to wooden stairs, and she stood at the top for a moment, trying to see in the dark, before descending them carefully, one hand on the railing.
At the bottom was an absolutely massive man, bald with a beard, and he stood from his chair when she approached.
“Hi, Tobias,” she said. She handed him her bag, which he put into a cubby behind him, and then raised her arms from her sides.
“Back again?” he rumbled, carefully patting her down.
“Yeah,” she said, half dejected and half excited.
“Be careful,” he said. “It’s a regular wolves’ den in here.”
His remark caught her off-guard. Grey had grown up in Reno, Nevada, not Cascadia, and she had trouble telling who was a shifter and who wasn’t. She was pretty sure that Tobias, who was massive and at least six and a half feet tall, was a grizzly shifter. Along the same lines, she had a strong suspicion that most of the men and women at the poker game were wolves, but she didn’t really know how to tell for certain.
A certain snarl in their voices? That lupine look? It was impossible, sometimes.
“Thanks,” she said to Tobias, a little uncertainly.
The poker room wasn’t fancy. It was an old, barely-finished basement, and it smelled like stale beer, old whiskey, and cigarettes smoked twenty years before.
There was a single table in the middle of the room with three people around it, whiskey in tumblers on the table, cards in front of them. Just seeing it sent a spike of anticipation through Grey’s body, the thrill of gambling making her giddy already.
Around the periphery of the room were boxes of liquor, piled high, along with old beer signs, posters advertising vodka, and other junk.
Besides the poker players, there were always a few other people hanging around. One was an older man with close-cropped gray hair and steely eyes. He spent most of his time either keeping some sort of records in a book, quietly watching the poker game, or talking to other men who came and went. Any conversations were always nearly silent.
Grey always tried not to look at the man in the corner too much. Something about him made her uneasy, and that was hard to do — after all, she hadn’t seen anything wrong with taking a back alley that led her to a dead body. But even though she knew she was at a fairly high stakes poker game, high enough stakes that the room had a body guard, that guy was the thing that made her nervous.
Right now, he was deep in conversation with another guy, someone with chin-length wavy brown hair. Grey could tell that things were getting heated, but she could only see the older man’s face, not whoever he was talking to.
Behind him was a door that she’d never seen open, though she was nearly certain that sometimes she could hear strange noises coming from behind it that no one else in the room seemed to notice. Grey tried not to think about it, which usually wasn’t hard. Once she started playing, the warm hum of anticipation and adrenaline sang through her.
At the center of the table was a big guy with thinning red hair pulled back in a ponytail and a red goatee, watching Grey enter the room.
“Deal you in next round, Princess?” he asked.
Grey hated that he called her Princess, but she knew it might be useful. After all, no one else was likely to thing that a sweet young thing named Princess was much of a threat, right?
She thrived on the other players underestimating her. It was how she’d won three hundred bucks the night before.
“Yes, please,” she said, as politely as she could.
After all, princesses were polite.
At the sound of her voice, one of the guys playing poker turned around. She didn’t know his name, she just knew that the other players always called him Shovel, and she wasn’t really sure why.
“You got some nerve,” Shovel growled at her.
Grey froze.
Everyone turned to look at Shovel, then at her: the other players, the dealer who’d called her princess, the somber older man in the corner.
The guy the older man was talking to, the one with the wavy brown hair. For an instant, they made eye contact, and Grey felt a shiver move down her spine.
Not the time for cute boys! she reminded herself.
“What are you talking about?” she asked Shovel. Somehow, she managed to stay polite, keep her voice calm.
“You nearly got us busted wide open,” he said, turning in his chair.
Grey could see the empty whiskey glass in front of him. Half of her was scared, but half was excited — Shovel could be an unpleasant drunk, but when he was drunk, he was also a terrible poker player.
“I didn’t do anything,” she said.
Shovel stood, his metal folding chair scraping along the concrete floor, the sound like nails on a chalkboard.
“Walking through the alley after a game like that,” he said. “Now the cops are sniffing around everywhere, asking ‘what’s a nice young lady like her doing in a dark alley at night?’”
Grey swallowed, her spine stiffening.
If you were smart, you’d leave right now, she thought.
I guess I’m not smart, then, because this guy’s an asshole and I’m staying right here.
“I didn’t tell them a thing,” she said defiantly. “I’m not an idiot, I didn’t tell the cops I was walking home from an illegal gambling den.”
“Yeah?” said Shovel. “How do I know you’re not wearing a wire right now?”
Grey forced herself not to roll her eyes.
“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “They’re not the FBI, they’re—”
“Show me,” Shovel said.
Grey felt like her stomach dropped out of her body, and her furious reply died on her lips.
“Show you what?” she asked, after a long moment.
“Lift up your shirt and show me you’re not wearing a wire,” he said, leering at her.
Grey felt her face turn bright red, and she backed up a step, toward Tobias and the staircase.
“No,” she said.
Shovel advanced a step, then another one, his leer growing vicious.
“I think you better,” he said.
“Hey!” shouted the wavy-haired guy from the back, and everyone turned toward him. Shovel glared.
“She says she’s not wearing a wire, she’s not wearing a wire,” the guy said, advancing across the room. “How about you leave he
r alone?”
Grey swallowed, her mouth falling slightly open. The guy with the wavy hair was hot, with slate-blue eyes, wide cheekbones, a day or two of stubble, and a nose that was just a little crooked. He had the look of someone who really knew his way around a bareknuckle fight.
Shovel snorted. “And you’re gonna make me, pretty boy?” he asked. “You looking to get that nose broken again?”
Grey took another step back, hoping that maybe she could escape before something serious happened. The guy with the wavy hair was big and tall, six feet at least, and he had the body of a fighter, of someone accustomed to using his muscles. It was great that he was coming to her defense against Shovel, but if he turned on her, there wouldn’t be much she could do.
“You need to leave,” the fighter told Shovel. His voice was very, very quiet, and for a moment, Grey could see Shovel’s eyes widen. “If you threaten her again, if you look at her or if you touch her, I’ll show you how much it hurts to get your nose broken.”
Shovel snorted.
“The fuck do you think you are?” he said, his jaw flexing and working. “You come back to the ring and think that gives you the right to tell us all what our business is?”
“If your business is harassing innocent women, then yeah, it does,” the fighter said. “Now, are you leaving, or what?”
Grey took another step back toward Tobias and the exit. She could feel her hands shaking, watching the two men argue.
Sure, he came to my rescue, she thought. But he wins, and then what? He turns on me next?
Uncertainty flickered in Shovel’s eyes. The other guy towered over him, and Shovel was older, fatter, and drunker.
At last, Shovel snorted, and jabbed a finger into the other guy’s chest.
“Fuck you, Isaac,” he said. “This isn’t over.”
Then he tossed back the rest of his whiskey, grabbed his few chips from the table, and stormed off through the basement’s back door. For a moment, a cool breeze swept in as Shovel left through the locked exit that led to the alleyway. The door swung shut behind him, re-locking itself.
The basement was quiet again, and everyone turned to look at the guy who’d threatened Shovel.