by Noir, Roxie
Everyone except Grey. In a flash, she grabbed her jacket and purse from the lockers behind Tobias, and ran up the stairs, back to the well-lit liquor store. She didn’t have a plan — after all, Shovel had just left and could still be outside — but she wanted to be anywhere but the basement.
As she neared the door at the top of the steps, she heard his voice.
“Hey!” he shouted. “Wait!”
Grey didn’t wait. She pushed the door open, letting the ugly fluorescent lights wash over her. They felt like relief, and she sought out the security cameras at the corners of the store. She hoped they were recording.
The clerk looked up from the movie he was watching on his phone.
“Everything cool?” he asked, sounding bored.
Grey just nodded, then swallowed.
“Yup,” she said, a little breathless. “Totally cool.”
He nodded and went back to his movie.
Grey stepped into an aisle full of flavored vodkas, trying to collect herself. She slid her jacket on, finally breathing a little easier, then put her purse on her shoulder.
Standing in front of a shelf full of clear bottles, she took a moment to collect herself.
You’re fine, she thought. This is for the best. If you’re afraid to go back to the game, maybe you can finally stop.
She knew, deep down, that it wasn’t true.
For a couple of moments, her eyes scanned the bottles. Even though she’d been through this liquor store a lot lately, she never really went to the liquor store, and she was kind of surprised at the sheer selection.
What’s an acai berry? she wondered. Is it good? Does it make vodka taste good?
She heard the thumping up the stairs too late, and had just turned toward the door when the St. Pauli girl swung toward her.
It was the fighter. Grey swallowed, trying to stand up straight, jutting her chin out.
He stopped and the door swung shut behind him. For a moment, he and Grey just watched each other.
“Hey, man,” said the clerk.
The fighter slid his hands into the pockets of his black leather jacket and nodded at the clerk.
“Hey,” he said.
Then he looked at Grey.
“You all right?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she said, her own hands in her pockets, balled into fists. “I’m fine.”
“You ran out of there like a frightened rabbit,” he said.
“Well, a guy named Shovel wanted me to take my shirt off,” she said, feeling a little defensive.
The guy laughed.
“I didn’t mean any offense,” he said. “Shovel’s an asshole, but you want to know a secret about him?”
Grey felt herself relax a little. Maybe this guy wasn’t just going to make a play for her as well.
Maybe he had actually just wanted Shovel to quit harassing her.
“Sure,” she said.
“His name’s really Norbert,” he said. “Next time he’s a dick to you, just remember: Norbert.”
Grey couldn’t help but smile up at the guy.
“Norbert,” she said. “I’d go by Shovel too.”
“I’m Isaac, by the way,” the guy said. At last, he let a smile spread across his face, crinkling the skin near his eyes just a little.
Grey felt herself blush.
“Grey,” she said, taking his hand. It was hard and strong, the palm covered with callouses and the back covered in scars. He shook her hand, squeezing it just hard enough, and a warm tingle moved through her body until she had to look away.
Don’t even think about it, she told herself. Don’t think about his cute smile, or how you can see his muscles through his t-shirt, or how you could totally bury your hands in his hair and definitely do not think about how he was just willing to kick someone’s ass for you.
“You new in town?” Isaac asked. He put his hands back in his pockets, standing casually in the middle of the vodka aisle.
“I moved here a couple of months ago, right before the school year started,” Grey said. “I teach kindergarten.”
Isaac chuckled.
“Kindergarten by day and illicit poker games by night,” he said, shaking his head. “You teach the kids to count cards?”
Grey smiled and blushed again.
“Yeah, I probably shouldn’t be here,” she said. “I have a feeling the PTA wouldn’t be too happy if they found out.”
“That a woman of questionable morals was teaching their kids? Yeah, probably,” he said, still grinning.
“Hey,” Grey said. “My morals are just fine.” She paused, then had to smile. “You know, except for the part where I go to seedy back rooms and get threatened by men named Shovel.”
“Well, my lips are zipped,” said Isaac. “Can I give you a ride home or anything?”
Grey shook her head, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear.
“No thanks, I’ve got my car here,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”
Isaac nodded.
“Thanks for the offer, though,” Grey said.
I should have taken him up on it, she thought. I bet he’s got a motorcycle or something, and on the way home I’d get to hang onto him, his back between my knees...
Her face was on fire.
“No problem,” he said. “Maybe I’ll see you around?”
He raised one eyebrow.
“If not here, then somewhere,” Grey said. “It’s a small town.”
“True,” Isaac said.
Then he nodded and went back through the door with the St. Pauli girl on the front.
At the checkout counter, the clerk was still watching a movie as Grey left through the front door, the bell ringing in her wake, and got into her car.
What the fuck was that, she thought as she drove away.
I could do without Shovel, but if that’s where Isaac hangs out... I could go back, she thought.
Then she thought again about Isaac on a motorcycle, grinning at her, maybe winking. Helping her onto the back of it.
Stop it, she told herself firmly, and drove home.
Chapter Three
Isaac
On the small wooden landing inside the liquor store’s back door, Isaac took a minute. He tried very, very hard not to get violent in his day-to-day life, but when he’d seen Shovel threaten Grey, he’d barely been able to hold himself back. It was a small miracle that he hadn’t shifted right there and torn Shovel’s throat out for bothering her — after all, murdering someone was frowned upon, but shifting in The Downstairs was absolutely forbidden.
He swallowed, closing his eyes. Any moment now, Tobias the bouncer would stand up and check the staircase to see whether something was going on, since the door had opened but no one was coming down, but Isaac still needed a moment.
Grey. That was her name. He felt like he couldn’t control himself around her, like he wanted to take her in his arms, bury his face in her beautiful blond hair, feel her chest rising and falling against his own.
He hadn’t felt that way about anyone in years. Not since he’d met Dane, and those feelings had been different. Just as strong, but different.
What kind of kindergarten teacher plays back room poker with the lowlifes of Rustvale? He wondered, thinking of seeing her standing there, in a sundress and cardigan, looking every inch the sweet, perfect young woman.
I don’t think Grey’s a very good girl, Isaac thought wickedly. In fact, I bet she can be pretty bad.
He grinned at the dark, then headed down the stairs, nodding at Tobias. The bear shifter didn’t bother to frisk him — he knew that if Isaac wanted to hurt someone, he didn’t need weapons.
Tobias nodded back.
The poker game had started up again, though it looked like it was going to be a slow night, since Shovel and Grey were both gone. In the corner, Pete hadn’t moved, though Isaac could practically feel the other man’s eyes tracking him as he moved through the room, around the table.
“All right,” he said, sitting oppos
ite the older man. “Where were we?”
“Almost finished,” Pete said lightly. He leaned back in his folding chair, one hand resting on the notebook that he kept with him constantly. “We were discussing the split for your match.”
Isaac suspected that Pete thought the entire fight was just a dramatic negotiating ploy. After all, that was just about the only way Pete was capable of seeing the world, as one person against another. He was always figuring out who had the upper hand, who had a better position, even just standing in line at the grocery store.
“I believe I was saying that I need it to be 60/40 for it to be worth my while,” Isaac told him.
Pete seemed to take that in stride, looking down at a yellow pencil that he turned between his fingers.
“That’s after expenses, of course,” he said. “We’ve got to pay for the space, for setup, the referee, all that.”
“Of course,” Isaac said. He leaned back in his chair, mimicking Pete’s body language. “This isn’t my first rodeo.”
“It’s your last,” Pete said, his voice barely above a murmur.
“That it is,” Isaac said. “And that’s why I need a 60/40 profit share.”
Pete went silent again.
Don’t say anything, Isaac told himself. You know better than that. Everything with Pete is a tactic to get you to offer to take less money. Everything.
Isaac still remembered the first time he’d dealt with Pete. It was after he’d left home at seventeen, and he was going from ranch to ranch, farm to farm, looking for work. One of the farms was Pete’s, and after watching the kid work for a few days, Pete had approached him.
“You’re a good worker,” Pete had said. “You look like you’re a good fighter, too.”
Isaac had just shrugged.
“A hundred bucks for a fight,” Pete had told the kid. “One-fifty if you win.”
At seventeen and bordering on homeless, Isaac hadn’t needed Pete to ask twice. He’d have taken the fight for a third of that money, probably. That night, Pete had led him to the ring in the sub-basement of the liquor store, the place smelling of blood and fur, and Isaac had done his first bout in the wolf fighting ring.
He’d lost.
But he’d lost well and he’d gotten hooked. Isaac loved the sheer savagery of the wolf fights, of getting to openly fight someone else in the ring, letting his animal take over completely and being rewarded for it for once. It wasn’t long before he started winning some of his matches, then more of his matches, then almost all of his matches. He met Dane when he beat him in a fight.
In the meantime, he wised up to Pete and started making more money. When he was twenty-four, he’d taken a bite on the shoulder so bad that he was out for six months, and he couldn’t even work on a ranch, so Isaac had taken a good, hard look around at everyone he knew, all the wolf fighters who were older than him, and realized that not one was in a very good place.
So he asked Pete for a loan and took classes at Rustvale Community College. He went back to working and fighting, doing his homework late at night in tiny, drafty rooms, and transferred to Cascadia State. He got an accounting degree and a junior-level job with an accounting firm, and now he spent most of his time doing peoples’ taxes, fighting less and less.
For a while, he stopped fighting. Somewhere in there, he and Dane had moved in together and become proper mates. Dane had joined the police force and moved up the ranks. Isaac had a real job.
He’d missed the ring, though, and he’d started coming back from time to time, just to watch and cheer on the new kids on nights when Dane was working late. Then he’d joined in, just once, when someone had to cancel at the last minute. It turned out that he still loved doing it for all the same reasons as before, only now he was twelve years older than he’d been, a little slower and a little easier to hurt. When he woke up the day after a fight, he felt it in a way he hadn’t at seventeen.
Besides, he had Dane to think about. Dane, who still didn’t know he’d been fighting again. But Isaac needed one last fight, and a few thousand dollars wouldn’t hurt.
In the poorly-lit basement, the poker dealer murmured to the two remaining players. Pete fiddled with his pencil, and then finally looked up at Isaac, the hint of a smile on his face.
“I could go 50/50,” he said at last.
Isaac sighed and tapped his fingers on the table. That was all he’d wanted in the first place, but he couldn’t let Pete know that. Even though this was his last wolf fight, he’d dealt with Pete for far too long. He knew it wasn’t a good idea to ever give Pete a sliver of satisfaction, any idea about what Isaac had really wanted all along.
“I see documentation for all the expenses,” he said. “The pit fee, the numbers of tickets you sell, even the number of hours the crew spends cleaning up.”
Pete inclined his head once.
“I can do that,” he said. “You’re a stickler for receipts these days, I hear.”
Isaac ignored that. He wasn’t sure if it was a jab at him for being an accountant — not the most badass of professions, but one that paid good money and wasn’t likely to get him injured — or if Pete was just making a comment.
He never could tell with Pete.
“Yup,” Isaac said. “Let me know if you ever need your taxes done. I’ll even give you the old friend discount.”
He had a surprising number of clients from the wolf fighting pits. After all, some of the guys made good money and didn’t want the IRS sniffing around, so they went to Isaac.
Pete just smiled.
“I’m sure you will,” he said, holding out his hand.
Isaac shook it.
“Friday night?” Pete asked.
“Friday night,” Isaac confirmed.
“Looking forward to it,” Pete said.
Then he opened his ever-present notebook and wrote something down.
Isaac stood, nodded at Tobias and the poker dealer, and pushed open the back door, exiting the same way that Shovel had twenty minutes before. For a moment, he wondered if the other man might be there, waiting for him, so he looked around before he ventured out.
Unlikely. Shovel didn’t have the patience for wait for more than a few minutes, and he probably wasn’t brave enough to take on Isaac alone, even if he had a weapon.
As Isaac walked through the alley, he couldn’t help but glance over at the spot where Nicky had been found. Already, trash bags were piled high, and the blood had been washed away.
There could be another body there, he thought to himself. Just hidden under the trash.
I wonder how many people get murdered every day and just thrown into the landfill and we never know they’re dead.
A shudder ran down his back, and he strode quickly out onto Main Street, standing in the pooled light of a street lamp to call Dane.
“Sorenson,” Dane answered.
“It’s me,” Isaac said. “You’re working late again?”
Dane had caller ID on his cell phone, of course, but his office phone hadn’t been updated since about 1985, and the habit of answering his phone with his name was tough to break.
“Yeah,” said Dane, sighing into the phone. “I’ve got about a million hours of surveillance tape to go over.”
“From where?”
“Everywhere on Main Street or First Street,” Dane said. “We’re grasping at straws here.”
“Want some help and some takeout?”
Isaac could hear his mate hesitating for just a moment, almost like he had the entire Rustvale Police Department rulebook memorized and he was reading it over to see if that was a violation of the rules.
“Come on,” said Isaac, letting just a little bit of growl into his voice. “Last night you got in when I was already asleep and you left for work this morning before I woke up.”
Dane sighed. “Okay,” he said.
Isaac grinned.
“You want the usual from Peking Garden?” Isaac asked.
“And some egg rolls,” said Dane. “It’s
an egg rolls kind of night.”
“You got it,” said Isaac, and hung up the phone.
I have to tell him about Grey, he thought. And I have to not tell him where we met.
Thirty minutes later, Isaac walked into the Rustvale Police Department. The front desk was empty and the lights low, so he walked around and picked up the phone. Patty’s computer screen was half-covered in pictures of her grandchildren and inspirational sayings, and just like always, he wondered how she could even read her emails.
“Sorenson,” said Dane.
“I’m here,” said Isaac.
“Be right there.”
Isaac hung up the phone and picked up the bag of takeout, reading the saying across the top of Patty’s screen.
GO CONFIDENTLY IN THE DIRECTION OF YOUR DREAMS, it said.
Isaac managed not to roll his eyes.
The door to the right clicked open, and Dane stood there, his hair messed up, his tie slightly undone. Isaac walked over and kissed him, a quick kiss that turned into a long one as both of them slowly realized how long it had been since they’d seen each other.
It took all the effort Isaac had to keep his wolf at bay, and keep himself from stripping down right there in the police station. He knew the place had cameras everywhere.
Finally, Dane broke away and thumbed Isaac’s face, half-smiling.
“Come on,” he said. “I’m starving.”
They headed back to Dane’s desk, and while Isaac got out the food, Dane explained what they were doing.
“Okay, officially, you’re not here,” Dane said. “God, that smells amazing.”
“Got it,” said Isaac.
Dane gestured at his desk. On it was a monitor and a laptop, and to the right of the desk, he’d wheeled over a cart with a TV and VCR on it.
“We’ve gotten surveillance videos from pretty much every place in town that has a camera,” he said. “Some digital, some tapes. We’re going through them to see if we can find Nicky and piece together his course of action in the hours before he was killed.”
“I thought we’d be putting on trench coats and threatening bad guys,” Isaac said, drily. He handed Dane a pair of chopsticks.