Quinn Security

by Dee Bridgnorth

  Rachel was a proud woman. The characteristic was one that Conor happened to admire. Over the years, he’d seen what she was constantly up against at the station. In order to prove herself and earn respect, she’d had to be ten times smarter than her male counterparts, ten times as bold, make sure she was a better shot and a cleverer investigator. Conor didn’t doubt her abilities. She was an excellent shot, he happened to know. She could hit a bullseye target from one hundred yards away. She was practically a sniper with a handgun. But her skills would be no match for a dark lord who could seep into her mind from miles off if he wanted to control her thoughts and actions.

  Her exploration through the field with the professor had unfolded without incident, but Conor had kept on her, following behind her cruiser at a distance as she dropped the professor off at the little motel he was staying at out in the plains. He had resolved she would be safe when she returned to the stationhouse and it was only at that point that he’d made the long haul out to Jackson Hole.

  Of course, in a perfect world he would be able to convince Rachel right off the bat to stay with him in his cool cabin on the outskirts of Yellowstone. But he knew that arguing that her safety warranted such a thing would not be well received. She was too self-sufficient, too proud to accept that she might need a bodyguard. She was a cop, after all, and as far as she was concerned, no one had tried to attack her. Conor had considered—all day in fact he’d wrestled with the memory of their amazing kiss—making the argument of her staying with him on the grounds of their budding attraction. But he didn’t have much confidence that she’d go for it on that basis either, which was why he’d spent the latter half of his afternoon driving on out to Jackson Hole to buy two brand-new air conditioners.

  If he was going to make sure to protect Rachel, whether she liked it or not, or whether she even realized it or not, by God he was going to be cool, and so was she.

  He might not have made immediate plans with her to get together again, but something told him he would.

  As he drove into the Fist, coming onto Main Street, the town seemed pleasantly alive. Residents were out strolling the streets, pouring in and out of Angel’s Food and the many little shops after it. He kept going until he reached Libations that looked especially lively and pulled over, parking along the curb once he’d turned the corner on Trout Street.

  He climbed out of his pickup truck, checked that the two boxed AC units in the truck bed were still tightly secured with straps, then started into the bar where Shane had been nursing a pint of beer at their favorite table in the back.

  The bar was crowded. It took some maneuvering to weave his way through the patrons. Libations never saw as much business as it did in the height of summer when the tourists outnumbered the residents, twenty to one. The bar like many of the businesses in the heart of town relied on their summer sales to float them through the long, Wyoming winters when the Fist truly was a ghost town. Conor would’ve thought that Jack Quagmire would be behind the bar, but he only saw the usual faces, three bartenders and a handful of bar backs, as he worked his way through.

  One young woman, who looked like a big city type and had definitely had too much to drink, pawed at him just as he almost reached his brother. She slurred some kind of inarticulate compliment into his ear, draping her loose arms all around him, and he politely wrangled her off of him and told her to enjoy her evening.

  Shane was chuckling, having witnessed the tipsy assault, as Conor took up in the wooden chair across from him.

  “I’ve been fighting them off myself,” he commented as he poured Conor a beer from the pitcher he’d ordered. As he passed the glass to his brother, he said, “I don’t think I was ever so popular when I was single.”

  “I don’t think you ever smiled when you were single,” Conor pointed out. “You’re finally approachable.”

  Shane frowned and resolved, “I’ll have to work on that.”

  “Whitney’s having a daddy-daughter night?”

  “That she is,” he confirmed before taking a long pull from his beer. “She’s trying to butter him up, I suppose, about the wedding. I’m telling you, Conor, this thing is snowballing out of control. I could’ve driven on over to city hall with her and signed the papers, that’s what I think of all the hoobala of weddings. But Whitney’s dead-set on having a big, fairytale affair at Yellowstone.”

  He didn’t seem annoyed or put off by it, just happy to have dodged the bullet of having to gush and ooze over magazines full of floral arrangements and bridesmaids’ dresses to excite her father into paying for what would surely turn into a very expensive wedding.

  Conor took a large, thoughtful gulp of beer then leaned over the table and asked his brother, “I need some advice.”

  “Oh?”

  He had another think on the matter. “It’s Rachel.”

  Shane’s eyebrows drifted up to his crew cut hairline with interest.

  “I met with her last night as I told you all I would.”

  “Right,” he allowed, fully invested in what Conor was about to tell him.

  “She knows a hell of a lot,” he stated. After another thoughtful beat, he clarified, “Rachel knows everything.”

  “Everything?”

  “She figured it out,” he said, unable to suppress the impressed grin that had come over him. “She’s one hell of a detective. Man, she almost roasted me, but I didn’t confirm much. Of course, knowing Rachel, she doesn’t need my confirmation. She has her story and her gut is telling her that she’s right. Shane, she is right.”

  Shane considered the predicament, drinking his beer and refreshing his glass.

  “It’s a lot like what you went through with Whitney, I imagine, once Whitney had seen Kaleb shift out of his wolf form only to then watch Lucy light up like the sun and battle Dante in the streets.”

  “Hey, now, Conor,” he stated right off the bat. “Let me first discourage you from thinking you ought to handle Rachel in the same manner I did Whitney. Don’t bring the situation to the pack, that’s number one. It won’t go well. And don’t, I repeat, don’t turn her just to force her to keep our secret.”

  Conor chewed on his brother’s advice for a moment.

  “I never told y’all, but I turned Whitney without her permission.”

  “You what?”

  “That’s right,” he said, shaking his head. “It was arrogant and evil and worst of all completely selfish. I’m lucky she still loved me after that.”

  “Well, I wasn’t planning on turning Rachel without her permission,” he assured him. “But I was considering updating Troy so that he could warn the pack.”

  Shane winced as though the very idea would be very bad for Conor. “Let’s say she knows everything—”

  “She does,” he insisted, “right down to having figured out that Dante is our uncle.” Conor omitted the detail of having told Rachel himself that one critical tidbit, and instead pressed his point clear on through to its conclusion. “She knows all of us Quinns are werewolves. She knows Dante is as well, and that he’s been trying to form his own pack by turning the residents he can get his hands on. She doesn’t know how large our pack is, but I figure that’s only a matter of time. And she doesn’t know how large Dante’s pack is, but hell, neither do we. She’s connected the dots and if she’s smart—and I’m telling you, Shane, she most certainly is—she’s going to rightfully figure that sooner or later there’s going to be a pack against pack battle for control of this town.”

  “What do you think she’s going to do about it?” he asked.

  “That’s the thing, I’m not entirely sure. The sheriff has ordered her to drop the Alighieri investigation, but she obviously hasn’t. I think her highest hope is to proceed, compile the crimes and evidence, and maybe go over the sheriff’s head to get the necessary parties arrested. Might bring in the authorities from Jackson Hole.”

  “Going over the sheriff’s head isn’t going to help her make detective,” he pointed out.

 
“It could,” Conor countered, “in Jackson Hole. In another city. Sure, she probably wants to stay in the Fist and be the sheriff herself, but she’s smart enough to question if that’ll ever happen, you know?”

  “Jesus,” he grunted, pondering the massive media storm this could incite.

  “I don’t know how to handle this or how to handle her,” Conor said.

  “Troy needs to know,” Shane told him, revising his prior advice. “But maybe not just yet. The big fish to catch is Alighieri, right? Maybe, I don’t know,” he trailed off, thinking off the cuff. “Maybe you can make a deal with her that once we get him, she can take full credit?”

  “That might satisfy her,” Conor allowed, but he couldn’t really see Rachel sitting back on her haunches while the Quinns moved forward without her.

  “Bottom line,” Shane reminded him, “she’s not going to capture Dante. We haven’t even found a way to capture him. She’ll sooner get herself killed trying.”

  “That’s my real concern,” he finally admitted.

  “Conor, we have to be extremely, and I mean extremely careful,” he warned. “I sometimes have trouble sleeping at night knowing that the sheriff could at any moment find out what we all are. I think the only reason he’s dropped his formerly tenacious suspicion is because he and I bonded when we had to find Whitney. Now that I’m engaged to his daughter, he has to see me as an upstanding guy. But his daughter is one of us, and I can feel it in my bones that it’s only a matter of time before he realizes all of us are werewolves.”

  “Does Whitney want to turn him?”

  “As far as I can tell, the option hasn’t even entered her mind.”

  “This is a crazy world we live in.”

  Shane drank more of his beer as they sat in silent agreement.

  ***

  While Conor and Shane ordered another pint, figuring a bit more alcohol would smooth out the jagged stress that had become their lives, down the street Adelaide Marple returned the telephone to its cradle on the counter, unable to imagine why her ex-husband, Harry, hadn’t picked up or returned any of her voice messages.

  It was fast approaching closing time and Peggy looked anxious because of it as she stocked postcards into the empty slots on the rotating display.

  Peggy was a sweet girl who kept her curly blond hair pulled back with bobby pins and tended to wear jean skirts and high-heeled sandals. She’d taken the news of Jake’s murder remarkably well, having tempered her emotions and blinked the tears away, but she’d been in a solemn, almost disturbed mood because of it, and she didn’t want to have to be in Devil’s Advocate a second longer than necessary. As far as Peggy was concerned, the crazed murderer who had slashed Jake’s throat could return at any moment to kill her.

  Where in the hell was Harry?

  She heard the soft click of the back door closing and a moment later, Dean appeared, having walked through. He was carrying a heavy box of specially ordered trolls wearing the classic Yellowstone National Park uniforms. Trolls were coming back in vogue and despite the horror of her son’s tragic and inconceivable murder, Adelaide was determined not to miss out on the commerce opportunity.

  “I’m thinking,” she told Dean as he set the heavy box down, “that we can clear all those snow globes from the window display and set up the trolls there on the shelves.”

  “Sounds good,” Dean agreed good-naturedly, but the plan only made Peggy go pale.

  “It’s nearly closing time,” she objected.

  “Well, go on then,” Adelaide told her. She’d been trying not to get annoyed with the girl all day, and quite frankly at this point she’d rather Peggy just go on home so that Adelaide wouldn’t have to suffer any more grief than she already had been. “Clock out and I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Really?”

  “You think I’m messing with you?” she said, her fuse shortening. “Go on, now.”

  “Thanks, Adelaide,” she said before starting through the souvenir shop and slipping into the back to collect her purse in one of the employee lockers in the breakroom.

  “I haven’t been able to reach Harry,” she complained worriedly to Dean, who was carefully handling the snow globes. “I’m starting to worry.”

  “Is it possible he’s out of town, on vacation or something?”

  She frowned. “That man has never been able to save a dime in his whole life. I don’t see how he could afford to go on vacation.”

  “Did you try his work?”

  “He doesn’t work,” she frowned. “He’s been on disability for as long as I can remember. Alls he does is sit at home and yell at the TV.”

  Dean neared the counter, having set a number of trolls on the shelves, and asked, “You think it would be worth it to make a trip up to Montana?”

  “Maybe,” she allowed.

  “Tell you what,” he offered, “I can make a few calls to the police station near him, see if I can get an officer to go on out to his house.”

  “Would you?”

  “Wouldn’t take more than a phone call or two,” he allowed as though it would be no problem. “If Harry isn’t at home or in town, well then I might be able to cash in a favor and get a line on where his vehicle is at. You know the plate?”

  “I believe I do, yes,” said Adelaide, feeling a spark of hope. “Dean,” she then said, worry having settled in her heart all over again, “What if something happened to him as well? Harry wasn’t the nicest man, but what if…?”

  “Don’t go off worrying just yet,” he advised kindly. “Let me make those calls, okay?”

  Adelaide pressed her mouth into a fretful line and agreed, all the while keeping to herself the fact that Harry and Jake had endured a terrible fight the last time Jake had dared to visit his father.

  She’d never let herself consider the horrifying possibility that her ex-husband could’ve done something so fatally violent to their son, but now that very possibility was burning in the forefront of her brain.

  ***

  Just as Adelaide was closing up shop, Dean having shelved the trolls on the window display, Conor hustled through the door.

  “Conor?” Dean said, surprised to find his brother winded as he spilled inside.

  “You got a dolly?”

  “Ah, I believe so,” he said, and then Conor did a bit of a double take at him. Dean glanced down at the Devil’s Advocate tee-shirt Adelaide had put him in. “Yeah, I guess I work here now.”

  “That’ll beef up the ol’ resume.”

  “I prefer to think of it as undercover work,” he laughed. “Let me get that dolly for you. I’ve got one in the back, I believe.”

  “Thanks, man,” he said. “I’ll be right outside.”

  Conor stepped back out onto the sidewalk where the air was so still and stifling that it seemed oxygen wasn’t reaching his lungs. He climbed into the bed of his pickup truck, which he’d parked right in front of the little souvenir shop, and began unharnessing the boxed AC units.

  “Has Rachel come back?” he asked Dean as soon as his brother rolled the upright dolly out onto the sidewalk.

  “Not yet,” he told him as they proceeded to load the two units onto the dolly. “What’re these?”

  “A present,” he said, “more for my benefit than Rachel’s.”

  “You bought her air conditioners?”

  “If you’ve ever set foot in that apartment,” he explained, “you’d know why.”

  Together, they rolled the dolly into the store, Dean having held the door open, which he did again as soon as they reached the employees-only door in the back, Adelaide having kept at their heels, curious about what was happening.

  “Hey, Adelaide,” Conor said when they reached the foot of the stairs that led up to Rachel’s new apartment. “You mind letting us in to Rachel’s place? I’d like to have these puppies installed by the time she gets home.”

  “Isn’t that thoughtful of you,” she smiled. “Of course.”

  She padded up the stairs as each brother
lifted a unit off the dolly and carried them up after her. Adelaide had unlocked and opened the door by the time they reached the landing, and as they heaved the boxes on in, she told them, “Rachel might be back soon. Want me to give a call to warn y’all?”

  Conor smiled, “That would be mighty helpful, thanks.” As soon as she left them, having closed the door behind her on the way out, he devised, “I’m thinking one in the window behind the couch and the other in her bedroom.”

  “I take it you love this girl?” Dean asked offhandedly.

  Conor froze. He stared at his brother as Dean wiped sweat off his brow and planted his fists on his hips, studying the boxed AC unit at his feet.

  Did he?

  “Let’s get to work,” he managed to say, trying his damnedest not to consider too deeply whether or not his brother had been right. “Why don’t you handle the one in here and I’ll do the bedroom?”

  As they worked in their respective rooms, Dean spoke loudly, “My girl’s from out of town.”

  “What girl?” he called out, as he freed the AC unit of its boxed packing materials and assessed the open window.

  “You know, my one true mate. Troy said she’s a city girl. I don’t think I’ve ever imagined myself with a city girl.”

  “Right,” Conor said loudly, recalling the comment their eldest brother had made.

  “I hope she comes to town soon.”

  Conor didn’t know what to say to that so he didn’t respond, only hoisted the heavy air conditioner into the window and wrestled the pane down onto it so that it would be firmly braced into the window at the correct angle.

  “You ever think to ask Troy about Rachel?” he called out. “He can see things clearly now, you know!”

  “Ah,” he stammered, “well, I haven’t asked him.”

  “But you want to, right?”

  Did he? Conor was faced with the realization that he both did and didn’t. He knew how he felt about Rachel, though at this point in time he wouldn’t go so far as to call it love, but he couldn’t deny that he was somewhat afraid to ask Troy about it. Would he really want to know the truth if it could mean that Rachel was not in fact meant for him?