Reece shot her wide eyes at Troy. She was horrified. But that didn’t mean something had happened to Angel Mercer.
“I’ve been holding down the fort,” Lucy went on. “I called Angel a bunch of times on her cell phone and landline. Nathan, the busboy, even drove on out to her place, knocked on the door and peered in through the windows, but couldn’t find her. ‘Course, Jack’s searching for her now, got the sheriff involved. I’ll tell you right now, if Angel winds up like poor Ms. Holly van Dyke…” A pained look of terror washed over Lucy’s otherwise angelic face and she couldn’t bear to finish the thought.
Troy felt his jaw clench with insult. As one of their own, Jack should’ve called Troy about Angel’s disappearance. But he hadn’t. He’d called the sheriff instead. It didn’t bode well for demonstrating the kind of respect that Troy deserved as the new leader of the pack. It didn’t bode well at all.
“I’m sure Angel is okay,” Reece tried to assure her, but Lucy hardly looked convinced.
“Alls I can think is that when she left before dawn this morning, that rabid wolf up and attacked her in-between her house and her car. The sheriff put that curfew on all of the Fist, but you know the residents ‘round here think of curfews in terms of the nighttime hours, not the wee hours of the breaking morning. But it would’ve surely been dark out when Angel left her place, you know?”
“I’ll look into it,” Troy told Reece directly, “after I drop you off at the library.”
Having overheard what should’ve been a private exchange, Lucy quirked a curious grin down at Reece like she’d just witnessed what would surely become the juiciest chunk of gossip this side of the 21st century.
“Say,” she sang out, looking from Troy to Reece and back to Troy again, connecting all kinds of dots. “You two seem awful cozy this morning.”
Reece glared at her with a dry, humorless stare.
“Are y’all getting to know each other these days?”
Unamused, Reece told her, “I’ll have the blueberry pancakes.”
Lucy frowned and jotted down the order then made note that Troy would have his usual before flitting off towards the kitchen.
“Nosey little thing, that one,” Reece grumbled as she lifted her steaming mug of coffee to her mouth.
“That surprise you?”
“The only thing that surprises me is that Angel Mercer has gone missing.”
***
It had surprised Troy, as well, and disturbed him.
Having dropped Reece off at the library, Troy drove through the heart of the Fist along Main Street, cut a right on Bison Road, and took the first left onto Berry Road that would take him some five miles northwest to the Quinn Security offices.
From the outside, Quinn Security could’ve been mistaken for a state-of-the-art cabin. It was of Amish design popular in these parts with dovetailed joists and rounded log sidings but had the overall architecture of an art deco building one might find in a major city like Jackson Hole.
Jack Quagmire had one hell of a heated conversation coming his way, that’s all Troy had to say about it, and he felt his molars clench when he noticed the profound absence of the older werewolf’s truck in the parking area. Troy had spoken with Jack briefly over the phone after watching Reece trail up into the library, ordering him to come to Quinn Security immediately. Jack should’ve been here by now. All four of Troy’s brothers were, as evidenced by their pickup trucks that were lined out front.
Inside, he found Kaleb and Dean at their desks which faced the large picture windows on the west side of the cabin. Shane was pacing the room, sharpening his ka-bar against a whetstone. And Conor was in the breakroom, straight on through the backside of the room, doing something that smelled like coffee.
“Jack’s on his way,” Dean told him preemptively, having read the fury on Troy’s face.
“Did you guys know Angel Mercer went missing?” he demanded.
“Not before you did,” Kaleb promised. “I hadn’t a clue until you called me.”
“That trip to see Sasha was a damn waste of time,” Troy complained and though his brothers couldn’t agree more, Shane had other ideas.
“We’ll wait on your orders, Troy,” he assured him—Shane was expert at demonstrating his respect for hierarchy—“but I don’t see the harm in venturing out to speak with the neighboring packs.”
“We have to start hunting,” Troy countered. “It might end up working in our favor that Angel’s gone missing. We all know her scent, which is more than we can say for the Younger who’s been roaming our streets.”
“We can track her,” Dean agreed.
“We certainly can,” Conor stated, reinforcing the plan as he emerged from the breakroom.
The click of the entrance door popping open interrupted their conversation, and Troy turned to find one very sheepish-looking Jack Quagmire slinking into Quinn Security.
Troy felt his spine itch with a transformation threatening to come over him, that’s how furious he was to meet eyes with a subordinate werewolf who had not only gone over his head to handle the Angel Mercer disappearance, but had gone completely outside of the pack.
Controlling his emotions, Troy summoned Jack deeper into the room with a wave of his large hand and asked, “You thought to call Rick Abernathy instead of me?”
“Now, hold on a minute, Troy,” he said in a cowering, defensive tone.
But Troy was already shifting as he advanced on Jack, and not a moment later both men had been reduced to snarling wolves that Shane had to dive between so that blood would not be shed.
“Calm down!” Shane barked, shoving the wolves away from each other. “Let’s handle this as men!”
Seething, Troy wasn’t about to shift back unless and until he saw that Jack had, and the standoff ensued for a tense beat.
“Quagmire!” Shane warned. “If you want to play at this, you’ll have five wolves to contend with! Shift now or suffer the consequences!”
The rest of the Quinn brothers were on their feet, surrounding Jack’s wolf form and waiting for Troy’s say-so to shift and attack. But Shane had gotten through to the man and in the blink of an eye, he transformed back into this human form.
Troy growled at him, then transformed himself so that they could talk like men.
“You have an excuse or explanation?” Troy challenged. “I’ll hear it now.”
“Alright,” Jack said, calming and catching his breath. “I’ve been keeping my eye on Angel, more than usual, because of what happened to Holly van Dyke.”
It sounded familiar and Troy could relate, so he didn’t interrupt.
“Last night, she made it home just fine. Tucked herself into her house. I expected her to emerge the following morning at her usual time, between five-thirty and a quarter to six. But she never came out of her house.”
If Troy gleaned anything from this information, it was that she wasn’t attacked by a Younger. A Younger who’d lost control of itself would be essentially stuck in its wolf form. It wouldn’t be able to break in and enter a house, which was why Troy hadn’t been too unnerved to leave Reece by herself in her cottage that first night she’d called him.
Jack went on, “I wanted to go into Angel’s home to make sure she was okay, but the last thing I needed was to be arrested from trespassing or breaking and entering, so—”
“You had no choice but to call the sheriff,” Troy supplied, understanding the other man’s logic.
“That’s right.”
“Did Rick go inside?” he asked as he touched eyes with Shane and then Kaleb.
“He called her a bunch, wasting time if you ask me,” Jack explained. “Then he told me Angel was an adult and even if she was missing, I hadn’t waited long enough to demand that the police do something about it.”
Shane interjected, “Which is when you should’ve given us a call, Jack. Why do you think we opened Quinn Security in the first place?”
“I know why you opened this place,” he barked right back. “I
didn’t get the chance. Word spread like wildfire and the next thing I knew I was getting an angry call from Troy here ordering me to meet you all.”
“She went inside her house and never came out?” Troy questioned, pondering the information that didn’t sound quite right.
“I don’t see how she couldn’t be in there,” Jack insisted. “But she didn’t answer her phone, not the landline and not her cell. And she didn’t come to the door.”
Dean asked, “Did you get a scent on her?”
“It was impossible,” Jack complained. “Her whole house smells like her. Her scent wafts out through the seams in the windowpanes, for Christ’s sake, whether she’s home or not.”
The men all had a think on that and Jack’s expression became clouded over with grim, apologetic wince.
“Now, don’t get mad, Troy,” he said with preemptive positivity.
Troy felt his entire body grow tense and asked in an unamused tone, “What?”
But before Jack could deliver even more bad news, there came a single, loud pound on the entrance door and Sheriff Rick Abernathy called out, “Hidy ho!”
“You didn’t,” Troy growled at Jack, who only shrank with more shame.
The sheriff did a noisy job of kicking mud off his boots and held the door open for Officer Rachel Clancy to follow him inside. She politely wiped her boots as Rick stomped right on through, looking around like it was his job to appraise the place and he didn’t see much value.
“You boys build this cabin yourselves?” he wondered, giving the handsome wooden banister, the staircase of which wound its way to the second floor, a pound or two with his fist to determine how shoddy the workmanship was.
“Impressive,” Rachel said softly in all sincerity to the sheriff as if to gently nudge his opinion in the same direction.
“For the Quinns,” he allowed with a little chuckle, and Rachel looked embarrassed enough for the both of them.
Troy scowled. “To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit, Rick?”
He knew addressing the sheriff casually by his first name would irk him.
“Oh, I think you know why I’m here,” he began, as he slowly stalked towards Troy, straightening his spine and broadening his shoulders, not that he could match Troy’s mountainous size. “I’m handling Angel Mercer’s ‘disappearance’.” He used air quotes on the word, as though he was dealing with a bunch of hysterics who had jumped the gun. “Got a locksmith over at her place as we speak.”
Jack let out a quiet sigh of relief and then looked like he was itching to get over there.
“I know you boys like to think you have a presence in this town,” Rick went on. “But I can’t have you tripping up my investigations, you hear?”
Rachel offered, “We certainly appreciate how much you all care, but it’d be best, if you’d like to be involved, that you take the sheriff’s directive.”
Rick furrowed his brow at the officer as though he couldn’t agree less. If anything, the sheriff wanted the Quinn brothers as far away from each and every investigation he conducted as humanly possible.
Of course, the Quinns weren’t human, so there was no comparison.
“Have you caught the wolf that attacked Holly?” Troy challenged, knowing full well that the sheriff and his men had covered no more ground than Troy and his brothers had.
As Rick responded vaguely, Troy thought he caught sight of his brother, Conor, giving Officer Clancy the once-over. It was discrete, but Conor’s dark eyes never lied, and if Troy wasn’t mistaken, he thought his brother was full-on drinking in the sight of Rachel, who had a natural way of making her masculine police uniform look feminine.
“Never you mind about that wolf,” Rick advised. “And like I mentioned, I’ll thank you to let my department handle the Angel Mercer situation.”
“Well, thanks for stopping by,” Troy told him in a flat, excusing tone, hoping the man would get the hint and leave.
As Rick did a slow, judgmental lap, taking a gander at the offices as he rounded back towards the entrance door, Conor quietly neared Rachel and asked, “How’s Libations treating you?”
She shot him a sideways smile as though the bar had never treated her all that well. It was no secret around town that Rachel lived in the apartment directly above Libations. The deal she’d made with Jack was that if she didn’t complain about the noise, which tended to billow up until the late hours of the night, he’d let her drink on the house whenever she stopped in. But Rachel wasn’t much of a drinker and she liked to turn in early when she could so she could get up with the rising sun.
“At least it’s temporary,” she said, reminding either herself of that wishful thinking, or Conor, Troy couldn’t decide.
She joined Rick at the entrance door he’d opened, gave her landlord, Jack Quagmire, a friendly nod, to which he told her, “Come on down for a beer or two sometime.”
“Will do, Jack,” she said and with that she followed the sheriff out into the bright Wyoming morning, politely closing the door behind her.
“What if Angel’s still in that house?” Troy wondered out loud.
But Jack had a far more sinister take on the situation. “What if she’s not?”
***
That evening, just as Troy was pulling his truck up to the Devil’s Fist library to meet Reece and take her safely home, Lucy Cooper angled her rusty, old VW bug into the dusty parking area in front of the corrals in Yellowstone National Park and pulled the key from the ignition.
She hadn’t thought to change into her hiking sweats in the bathroom of Angel’s Food after her long, unexpected shift. Climbing into the backseat, she wrestled out of her blue uniform, pulled on a pair of stretchy yoga pants and a loose tee shirt, and then, with the rear door open, stepped her feet into a pair of jogging sneakers.
Once she’d locked up her car, she started towards the corral stables where Whitney Abernathy would be waiting for her.
It was too breezy out to keep her long, flowing blonde hair down. It’d drive her nuts, so she tied it back in a loose, floppy bun, and came up to the rear of the stables, as dusk began to settle eerily over the Fist.
“Hey, girl,” she said, nearing Whitney. “You ready to rock ‘n roll it?”
Ever the master of managing her personal timetables, Whitney had already changed into a pair of jogging shorts, sneakers, and in true defy-daddy fashion, a skimpy sports bra. She was stroking a bristle brush down the shiny flank of a brown mare that snorted her appreciation over and over.
“Look at you,” said Whitney as she set the bristle brush on a nearby stool and began pulling her wild, red hair into a high ponytail. “I like those stretch pants, but won’t you get all hot and sweaty?”
“I’ll manage,” she assured her, Lucy’s way of maintaining she wasn’t the sort to strip down to a sports bra just to avoid a bit of chest sweat. There were other hikers and joggers out there on the trails, after all. “Say, how ‘bout we try Eagle’s Pass this time?”
Whitney’s eyebrows popped up to her auburn hairline. “Eagle’s Pass? It’s gonna get real dark real quick out here.”
Eagle’s Pass, the longest, winding trail this side of Yellowstone, wrapped up the northeast side of the park, then curved west only to cut immediately south. It was ideal for experienced cross-country joggers because the loop was a little over ten miles and mostly flat. But because of its length, it was time consuming, and generally Lucy and Whitney had only dared run it in the morning.
“I need to clear my head,” Lucy explained. “The more fresh air, the better.”
“Worried about Angel?”
“Who isn’t?” she replied as they started off at a warm-up pace along the dusty trail.
Once they hit their stride, coming through the thickening woods, and established the rhythm of their breathing, Whitney said in a few huffs, “My dad will get to the bottom of it.”
Lucy didn’t want to sound like she had little faith in the sheriff and hoped that her huffing and puffing woul
d mask her doubt. “I hope so. Jack Quagmire seems to think she never came out of her house.”
“Let me tell you something about Jack Quagmire,” said Whitney, slowing to a brisk walk as they neared an incline that would be too strenuous to hold a conversation on. “He was the only person who saw Angel go back into her house… and he’s the only person who’s been making advances towards her, if you know what I mean.”
Of course Lucy knew what her friend meant. Everyone in the Fist knew that Jack Quagmire had been angling to take Angel out on a date. He was persistent, but not necessarily pushy. Lucy knew for a fact that Angel was flattered about the situation. She appreciated a free drink or two at Libations and she never minded when Jack sat in the back of Angel’s Food for hours on end just to be near her. But Jack was no creeper… or was he?
“You think Jack did something to her?” she questioned.
Whitney took the break in their jog to stretch her hamstrings a bit and the way she began to talk about Jack, explaining the possibilities, made Lucy wonder if her friend’s head had been filled with the sheriff’s theories, and not her own.
“Maybe he got bold. Worked up the nerve to catch her before she could slip into her house. Maybe he’d only meant to ask her out on a proper date and things went south on him. It could be that Angel was horrified to find he’d followed her home and her facial expression insulted him.”
“You don’t think he did something to her?” Lucy asked, terrified. “You don’t think he hurt her, do you?” Whitney’s suggestive shrug and the way her eyebrows lifted in a doubtful manner caused Lucy’s stomach to tighten in knots. “Then why would Jack call the sheriff? Why wouldn’t he just take off?”
“My dad says that’s how a guilty man covers his tracks. Muddies the truth with half-truths. He might have worried someone saw him head on out to Angel’s, so if he ran off and later my dad found Angel harmed, or worse, then Jack would look guilty. But if he’s the one to call the police, then he looks less guilty and more concerned, you know?”
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