Quinn Security

by Dee Bridgnorth

  Himself?

  Without her?

  Why?

  His reason had been because looking into where Delilah might have stolen away to would be far too dangerous for Whitney to tag along. The fact that Shane even thought that revealed a whole world of mystery. How would he know it would be dangerous? And what had made him so invested that he’d decided to take charge and investigate all by himself?

  Whitney was hellbent on finding out.

  She eased off the gas when she realized that the one sedan that had separated her from Shane’s pickup had turned off onto an unmarked dirt road. Though there was a good two hundred yards between her and Shane, it didn’t feel like enough. But if she dropped further back, then she would run the risk of losing him should he turn off of the highway. It was too windy to fall back too far.

  Luckily, traffic swelled up all around her as she came into the heart of the Fist. As soon as she slowed to a thirty-mph crawl, coming upon Bison Road, she had to merge with the slow and steady flow of rural traffic. Shane’s pickup slipped out of sight, here and there, but she kept watching the side streets to make sure he didn’t turn off onto one of them as he drove along Main Street.

  She felt a twinge of doubt as she passed Devil’s Advocate. She could pull off, leaving Shane to do whatever it was he was planning, and give a knock on Delilah’s apartment door, but she decided against it.

  Shane had already stopped in on Delilah. He hadn’t found her. Had he found something else in her apartment that was enough of a lead to propel him down the full length of Main Street? Whatever he knew or suspected had brought him to Yellowstone, but she deduced that he obviously hadn’t found what he was looking for.

  As soon as she crossed Trout Street, watching the library zip by on her left, the road opened up again, Shane’s pickup in the far distance stirring up a thick trail of dust, and she realized he was heading out towards the eastern plains.

  Ronnie’s curious comment came to mind. Apparently, Delilah had been tangled up with some guy who lived out on the plains. Was that where Shane was heading?

  Even more curious was the fact that, even though according to Ronnie this man who had a hold on Delilah had come to Yellowstone, Whitney herself had never seen him. The description he’d given her was far from ideal, and when she wracked her brain, she couldn’t recall anyone by that description interacting with Delilah one way or the other.

  She’d been pressing the gas too hard and suddenly realized she was right behind Shane’s pickup.

  “Goddamn,” she muttered to herself as she hit the brakes, hoping to fall away before he lifted his eyes to his rearview mirror and spotted her.

  She let out a rocky, relieved breath when she’d fallen back to a safe distance.

  Whatever he was up to, wherever he was going, she’d soon find out.

  Chapter Seven

  SHANE

  Traversing nearly the whole of Yellowstone had been a colossal waste of time. Shane figured it would be, but, being an organized soldier on a mission, he had needed to cover all of Delilah’s usual ground before making the leap his gut had been urging him to do. There had been a lot of ground to cover at Yellowstone. It had taken him the better part of the day to trek through its many trails. He hadn’t hit all of them, only those Delilah was known to travel for work and pleasure. He hadn’t even caught a faint whiff of her distinct scent.

  But at least having hunted for her throughout the vast National Park he could rest assured that he’d left no stone unturned in terms of the exotic girl’s daily routine.

  Now, it was time to venture into another, far less frequent routine of hers, driving out onto the eastern plains beyond the Fist to confront the one man who Delilah wished had died years ago.

  Larry Hardcastle.

  The man was a drifter of sorts, in spirit, who had settled in the outskirts of the farthest reaches of the Fist. In a word, he was slimy, a real slippery fellow with tight, beady eyes that conveyed a depth of animosity that Shane had never respected. He’d been a fisherman in his day, this was decades ago when he’d worked out of little port town in Alaska called Valdez. As far as Shane was concerned, Larry still had the stink of fish on him and always would.

  Nowadays, Larry didn’t do much with his time other than drink and occasionally track down Delilah to hassle her about money. Apparently, Larry had never believed her when she’d explained to him that the trust fund her mother had left her—one which Larry felt entitled to since he’d married Adelaide Dane and had only enjoyed a few years with her before she drunk drove herself into the Pacific Ocean one night, leaving Larry to raise his then twelve-year-old stepdaughter—had been completely depleted. The money was gone, she’d told him. But Larry had never accepted the truth.

  Delilah had revealed her dark dynamic with slippery Larry to Shane, slowly and in bits, during their infrequent encounters. Shane had put the pieces together, eventually understanding that Delilah had been raised by Larry—barely—and taken off, fleeing Alaska a few months shy of her eighteenth birthday.

  It never sat right with Shane that Delilah had ended up in Devil’s Fist, not considering that Larry Hardcastle had sunk his twisted roots in this town well before she had. Why had she moved here to clean up her life if it was the one place Larry had claimed?

  Shane had always suspected there was much more to it than that. Delilah had probably told him what she thought he needed to hear, in order to endear Shane to her plight.

  Whether or not that hunch of his was accurate, one thing was for sure. No one had it in for Delilah more than Larry Hardcastle.

  Shane eased off the accelerator, bringing his pickup truck to a crawl as he turned off of the highway onto a dusty, dirt road. Heat waves caused the flat, barren landscape to ripple like water, and he had to squint to spot the dilapidated shack in the distance at the end of the road.

  It suited Larry, that shack. It was rotten and sunken in just like the fifty-two-year-old man’s personality. The worst thing about Larry, however, was that he was a fairly good-looking guy. He looked youthful, decades younger than his actual age. The man rarely swung into the heart of the Fist, but when he did, it was to pound a beer or two at Libations and further drink in a little small-town scenery. Or to see if he might cross paths with the stepdaughter he was convinced had ruined what should’ve been the best years of his life.

  Shane rolled to a bumpy stop in front of the old shack. There were sun-cracked tires scattered among the sparse tufts of bluestem grass, as well as other useless junk—a dingy kitchen sink, a shattered toilet, scrap metal, and a metal trash can that had clearly been used for a fire on more than one occasion.

  He pulled the key from the ignition and glanced at the passenger’s seat where he’d set the Polaroid photo of Delilah and him tussling. Something told him that Larry had taken the photo, that he’d come back later that night to slip it under Shane’s door. Maybe it was meant to be a warning. Maybe it was meant to throw Shane off of his guard, unnerve him, and put him in the right, boot-trembling frame of mind to be willing, later down the road, to bend to Larry’s twisted demands.

  Larry would only have one demand—money. It seemed to be all he cared about and the only reason he’d taken on raising Delilah after her mother’s tragic car accident. He’d adopted her for that trust fund money. He’d filed some paperwork so that he could also receive welfare from the state. Delilah had turned into something of a meal ticket and he never liked that in return she’d had the teen-aged audacity to actually expect to be raised by him and cared for.

  Shane tucked the photo into the glove compartment, flipped it shut, and scanned the dusty yard of dead weeds around the shack.

  Larry’s car, an ancient Buick that had to have been built in the early 1960s was parked out front with all four of its doors open for some unexplainable reason. The man certainly wasn’t inside of it.

  When Shane climbed out of his truck, he figured the reason. There was a sour, stale beer stink wafting out of it. Larry had probably g
otten tanked in the old Buick, spilled the greater portion of a six-pack inside, maybe pissed on it once or twice in a drunken blackout, and this was his solution. Air the damn thing out and hope the problem corrected itself without too much more effort.

  Christ.

  The front door was pushed inward and fully open, only a slack screen door in place to keep the gnats and mosquitoes from buzzing their way inside.

  He pounded on the doorframe.

  An annoyed groan came from deep inside the sun-deprived shack.

  Shane pounded again.

  “Who in the hell is it?” shouted Larry who, according to the sounds of it, was stumbling to his feet.

  His voice was jagged and gravelly, as if he didn’t so much breathe oxygen but rather thick cigarette smoke.

  Sure enough, when Larry came to the screen door, there was a bent, lit cigarette clamped between his chapped lips. He hadn’t bothered to throw a shirt on, and his belt wasn’t fastened quite right. His sunken, gray-haired chest and wiry arms betrayed his boyish face. Larry only passed for early 40s when he cleaned himself up some.

  “Quinn,” he said as though it was an accusation. “What the hell do you want?”

  There was enough history between them that Larry knew him by face and name and of course his private association with his stepdaughter. Naturally, any friend of Delilah’s would have to be a foe of Larry’s, so these encounters were never pleasant.

  “I’m looking for Delilah,” he stated.

  “So what?”

  “So, what do you think? You want to tell me where she is?” he said, thoroughly irritated.

  Larry let out a wet laugh that turned into a hacking cough and the screen that separated them wasn’t enough to keep the splatter of spitting air from passing through. Shane took a step back and grimaced in disgust.

  “How the hell would I know where she is?” Larry countered.

  “You always know where she is, Larry,” he pointed out. “That’s how come it’s so easy for you to hit her up without warning.”

  “Yeah, I ambush her,” he agreed sarcastically. “I’m a real harasser.”

  “You’ve been known to stalk after her in Yellowstone, ruin her day.”

  “Is that right?” he challenged. “And my day isn’t ruined when she don’t pay me what she owes me on time?”

  “She never owed you a damn dime, Larry,” he said through clenched teeth.

  “Oh, no?”

  That was Larry to a T. The whole time he was raising Delilah with her mother’s money and an extra chunk of change from the state, he was also tallying every expense the girl cost him. In the twisted gutters of his depraved mind, he actually believed she was indebted to pay him back. He didn’t have the first clue about what it meant to be a parent and father. All he cared about was himself and making Delilah miserable at every turn.

  “Cut the crap, Larry, and tell me if you’ve seen her.”

  “No,” he insisted definitively. “I haven’t seen her. Now, would you mind gettin’ the hell off my property?”

  “You call this property?”

  “Oh, you came here to insult me, did ya?”

  “When was the last time you saw her?” he asked.

  Larry sucked on his cigarette until the lit end crackled through its wrinkled bend, nearly burning his knuckles. He made blowing a stream of smoke out into Shane’s scowling face something of a performance then studied the butt of the spent cigarette as if it was far more interesting in the conversation at hand.

  “Well?” Shane pressed.

  “Who knows? Months ago.”

  Shane knew that was bullshit. Delilah had complained that Larry had stormed into the corrals at Yellowstone not two weeks ago, embarrassed her in front of one of the stable workers, some kid who had been carrying a torch for her and wouldn’t likely forget the drama that Larry had caused her.

  “Try two weeks ago,” he told him.

  “Fine then,” he admitted. “I saw her a few weeks ago. Went over to that joke of a job she’d got at the National Park. Crossed paths with her in the bar maybe a day or two after that. Nothing crazy and nothing fancy and nothing that sticks out in my mind. Satisfied?”

  “Hardly.”

  “She owe you money, too?” he asked, but this time his tone sounded companionable, as though they might become bonded and brotherly over having been stiffed by the likes of Delilah Dane. When Shane didn’t respond except with a glare, Larry guessed, “Or did ya pay her for a lil’ sompin’ sompin’ and she’s yet to deliver the goods?”

  Shane appreciated absolutely no part of the insinuation and if there hadn’t been a screen door between them, he might’ve smacked the grin right off the guy’s face.

  “She didn’t show up for work,” he said instead, which set Larry off laughing.

  “So what?” he laughed. “That girl’s just about as reliable as the wind. She’ll change directions without a care in the world. Work,” he laughed harder. “She don’t give a good goddamn about any job. That girl’ll come and go as she pleases, and anyone who don’t like it, well they know where to shove it.”

  “Have you been by my place to find her?” he asked, pointblank with no preamble.

  Larry sobered up from his laughter and there was a glint in his eyes, but Shane couldn’t tell if it was guilt or confusion.

  “What do you mean, have I been by your place? I don’t even know where your place is.”

  Everyone knew where Shane’s place was, where all of the Quinn cabins were, because everyone in the Fist knew where Quinn Security was, and the Quinn cabins were tucked right behind them, plain as day.

  “Last night,” Shane clarified. “Did you come to my cabin last night?”

  “Last night I drank me into something of a stupor,” said Larry easily. “If you don’t believe me, go on and take a whiff of my car over there.”

  Shane more or less already had, but Larry pissing himself in the back of his barely-drivable Buick was hardly evidence that he hadn’t first stalked and spied his stepdaughter after the parade.

  As Shane stared the guy down, Larry asked, “What? Did something happen to her?”

  “I can’t find her and I’m not the only one who’s worried,” he told him honestly.

  “And you think I had something to do with it?”

  “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t.”

  “Ouch,” said Larry before he punched the screen door open, nearly smacking Shane in the face. “Well, hell, come on in and have a look around. She ain’t here and if she’s run off again like she always does, I swear I didn’t have a damn thing to do with it.”

  Shane debated going inside. It smelled rank and he knew, thanks to his werewolf senses, that Delilah wasn’t inside the shack, dead, alive, or otherwise.

  “I want her alive and well and here,” Larry tried to convince him. “Girl owes me thousands upon thousands.”

  “You know what,” said Shane, truly despising the guy, “I think I will have a look around.”

  ***

  Just as Shane was holding his breath to step inside of Larry Hardcastle’s dingy abode that was littered with crushed beer cans, overflowing ashtrays, and the dregs and remnants of canned meals crusted onto plastic plates, across town Jack Quagmire was furthering his personal mission to make Angel Mercer his one true mate.

  This time, he’d brought Angel with him, though it had taken much convincing. He’d stopped in at the diner after his failed, offensive attempt with Troy Quinn, hoping that Lucy Cooper would be there. He knew Angel was, since she was due in at Angel’s Food for the afternoon, but when he’d arrived and Lucy wasn’t there, the urgency of his plan only heightened.

  If Lucy was at her new home, Kaleb Quinn’s cabin, then Jack reasoned that they could drive over and see if Lucy might be able to make their collective dream come true on the spot. Angel had been reluctant to leave the bustling diner, but there were plenty of waitresses on staff.

  “I don’t know about this,” said Angel from the pass
enger’s seat once he’d pulled to a stop and turned off the engine in front of Lucy and Kaleb’s cabin. “I don’t like showing up places unannounced.”

  Angel looked devastatingly gorgeous, her blond shiny hair pulled up in her signature pompadour hairdo. She’d done her eyes up with dramatic, false lashes and had painted her lips a petal-pink shade. Though she still wore her blue button-down dress uniform, she made it look sultry with zero effort thanks to the full curves of her body. Drinking in the sight of her, he only felt that he needed her to be his, once and for all, more than he ever had.

  “There’s no harm in trying,” he prodded, as he popped her seatbelt off and reached over her to push her door open. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

  Angel cut her big, blue eyes to him. She didn’t have to say out loud what the worst thing might be. He could see it written all over her face. Going against their king was a bold and unwise move. But more so than that, they both feared that attempting to untie her from Dante might conjure the rogue werewolf to them in an instant. Wouldn’t Dante Alighieri fight for what he felt was his? He surely would since that was the very essence of his dark attack against the entire town. He wanted nothing more than to fight—to the death and beyond—for what he believed he was due.

  “You’re too important to me,” he told her. “Come on.”

  As he stepped out into the stark sunlight, Angel followed suit and soon they were nearing the front door of the cabin.

  Jack felt slightly paranoid that Troy Quinn might smell them from his own cabin that Jack had stopped off at not a few hours ago, so he knocked quietly and quickly and hoped like hell that Lucy would let them in without much preamble.

  When the door popped open and Jack saw Lucy’s angelic face, he offered her a big, ol’ friendly smile and said, “Is there any way we could talk privately inside?”

  “Jack! Angel! Hi!” she said, surprised to see them.

  Jack was urgent to get out of Troy’s potential view. “Seriously, though—”

  “Sure, come on in!” said Lucy, happy to see both of them.