Quinn Security

by Dee Bridgnorth

  Gretchen had been far from pleased. Of course, since she was a lady, she hadn’t yelled or cursed from the other end of the line. She had done something far, far worse. She had fallen deathly silent and from that moment onward, had only responded to Elizabeth with one-word answers. The most shocking of which had been hearing her mother breath yes in response to Elizabeth having asked her if she would please come on out to Wyoming.

  The drive out to Jackson Hole wasn’t terrible considering that it was massively shorter than her original drive to Wyoming from Southern California. She kept the AC blasting in her Mercedes and listened to relaxing music the whole way.

  When she reached the cute, metropolitan city, she marveled at all of the apparent conveniences. Had she come to Jackson Hole straight from L.A., she would’ve balked at what little the city had to offer. But after spending more than a week in the one-horse-town of Devil’s Fist, Jackson Hole seemed like an endless paradise. There were Big Box stores and little boutiques, restaurants and bars as far as the eye could see. There were even gyms and taxi cabs and other city staples that she had all but forgotten about.

  She found the county courthouse easily enough thanks to the GPS navigation system in her Mercedes. After parking, she made her way inside and checked the marquee to find where the county records offices were. As she scanned the marble marquee, she suddenly realized that her walk through the lobby hadn’t sounded quite right.

  Of course, it hadn’t. She wasn’t wearing high heels. She’d forgone her designer wears in favor of hiking boots and a pair of jean shorts that cut off right above her knees. She had made a number of trips to Acorn Fashion and Accessories as the days had passed, and she was wearing one of the many casual, sensible tee shirts she’d bought when she was last there.

  After what felt like hours, but had really only been twenty minutes, Elizabeth had learned that the deed for the building had reverted back into the possession of the county itself since Adelaide Marple hadn’t any next of kin to inherit the burned down building.

  With a stroke of her pen, Elizabeth made out a check directly to county and as soon as it was processed, she owned a little piece of Devil’s Fist.

  If her mother had been silently furious that she’d sold her father’s land, Gretchen would have to be pleased with this turning of the tides.

  Feeling good about herself, she checked the time on her wristwatch and started for her Mercedes. She would arrive at the airport on the outskirts of the city right on time if she left immediately and didn’t hit too much traffic.

  As she drove, she tried not to think about Dean. Hadn’t she thought about him enough? Hadn’t she analyzed and overanalyzed the situation as much as she could? Obsessing about it further wouldn’t bring any new revelations.

  Why couldn’t he be more like his brother, Conor? Why couldn’t he accept the fact that at this point in time, she didn’t know what she wanted to do? If Conor could allow Rachel to move at her own pace, then why was it so difficult for Dean to do the same?

  The real trouble was that her attraction to Dean hadn’t wavered one bit. She still wanted to be with him. She still felt drawn to him. She still gravitated towards him, even to the extent that when she was around him she literally leaned into him or felt the urge to take hold of his arm or hand. She had felt on the brink of love and it wasn’t lost on her that she’d definitely been falling for him. Those emotions hadn’t slipped away or disappeared. She felt like she was suspended in the air, hanging just shy of plummeting into being fully and hopelessly in love. But the feeling had been clouded over, masked in a stormy bog of uncertainty, which Dean himself hadn’t been helping to alleviate. It seemed he managed to spoil every second they’d spent together, wasting no opportunity to nudge if not push her into agreeing to become his one true mate.

  For the hundredth if not millionth time, she willed herself to clear Dean Quinn from her mind and pulled her Mercedes curbside along the Arrivals terminal of the airport.

  Knowing her mother, Elizabeth wouldn’t be able to honk and pop the trunk of her car and expect Gretchen to do the rest, so she shifted into Park, climbed out of her Mercedes, and slapped a twenty into one of the terminal custodian’s hands, mentioning she would only be a few minutes.

  Inside, she found her mother tapping her high-heeled foot from where she was standing—and by the looks of it, had been waiting—beside a tremendous dolly that was packed to the gills with suitcases of all different shapes and sizes.

  “Mother!” she exclaimed, rushing through the crowded airport towards Gretchen, who looked instantly horrified.

  Her big, green eyes widened as she glanced up and down Elizabeth. “Good grief, what on earth are you wearing?”

  She tried not to roll her eyes as she pulled her mother in for a great, big hug and asked, “How was your flight?”

  “Horrendous,” she complained. “You look like a gardener. Why are you wearing that?”

  “It’s more comfortable,” Elizabeth said easily as she began pushing the tall dolly towards the sliding glass door exit.

  “You look pale,” Gretchen added.

  “I’ve been wearing less makeup.”

  “Good Lord, why?”

  “I thought you sat in First Class?” she said, changing the subject though she had little hope her mother would drop the issue of her appearance so easily.

  “First Class?” she balked. “Those little mountain planes don’t have classes. We were all packed in like sardines in a can. It was torture. They didn’t even offer cocktails!”

  Outside, Elizabeth made careful work of packing her mother’s many suitcases into her Mercedes, which felt like a losing game of Tetris.

  Eventually, after much determination and hard work, she had filled the car. She opened the passenger’s side door for her mother and then climbed in behind the wheel.

  “I thought this model had more leg room,” Gretchen complained when she realized her pointy knees were nearly touching the curve of the dashboard console where the glove compartment was located.

  Elizabeth made quick work of helping her mother roll her seat back, but with all of the suitcases piled high in the backseat, it only bought her a little more than an inch more space.

  “That’ll have to do,” she informed her mother. “It’s only a two-hour drive.”

  Gretchen groaned. “Please tell me that a chilled bottle of champagne is waiting for me on the other side of this journey.”

  Elizabeth hadn’t thought of that, but she loved her mother enough to lie. “Definitely!”

  ***

  At around the time Elizabeth and her mother fell into what felt to Elizabeth like uncomfortable silence—Gretchen had made several complaints about the temperature of the Mercedes as well as the unappealing music her daughter had playing, neither of which Elizabeth could seem to get right for her mother’s impossible-to-please liking—back in Devil’s Fist, Sheriff Rick Abernathy was meeting with Detective Rachel Clancy in one of the interview rooms.

  “We only have one more week to go before the full moon,” she reminded him from where she was seated across the narrow table. “Patience is key at this point.”

  “I’ve been patient,” he told her in a hushed volume as he leaned across the table. “I’ve got a damned werewolf caged in my basement. I can barely sleep for fear that Dante will realize as much and free Eddie in the middle of the night. Not to mention, I’ve got the dark lord breathing down my neck, demanding answers as to why I haven’t taken Lucy Cooper out. I’m sick over this.”

  “Why don’t we talk to Troy tonight?” she suggested, but Rick knew when he was being blown off.

  “You think I haven’t tried to talk to Troy?” he hotly returned. “The minute I got Eddie to agree to work for us, I told him. Eddie wants to be free just like I do. He’ll do anything. I even got him to shift back into his human form to iron out the details. Troy knows about all of this and still I’m told to be patient?”

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Sheriff,” sh
e regretted to inform him. “I’m not even a werewolf. I have no standing in this conversation.”

  “But Conor listens to you. He respects your opinion. Couldn’t you talk to him?”

  “You think I’ve left Conor out of the loop?” she questioned. “I’ve told him everything. He knows where you stand and he knows where Troy stands.”

  “Well, mark my words, if we don’t do something and Dante sees that Lucy is going about her life as usual, he’s going to do something to me and it won’t be good. And Lucy will be in no better a position if Dante assigns the order to take her life to someone else, and you know it.”

  “Troy isn’t concerned about that. We all know that Lucy can more than handle herself.”

  “Well, I can’t!” he snapped. “I can’t handle myself and I won’t be able to handle this situation much longer. I don’t have to remind you that Dante has been sniffing around the stationhouse, inquiring about Eddie’s whereabouts.”

  “I realize that.”

  “Sheila has done her best to insist to him that Eddie was arrested for assault and was transferred to a jail in Jackson Hole, but Dante isn’t buying it. I’m telling you, he can smell it that his right-hand man is still in the Fist.”

  Rick was beyond frustrated and the worst part was that he knew he was getting through to Rachel. The problem was exactly as she had described it. She didn’t have any standing. She was outside of the Quinn clan pack.

  She suggested for the second time, “Let’s call a meeting at Quinn Security for tonight and try to talk to Troy.”

  “I guess I have to agree, don’t I? That’s the best we can do.”

  “Look on the bright side, Eddie is out of your hair, right?”

  It was a silver lining, but it wasn’t bright enough to give Rick much hope.

  The fact of the matter was that Eddie really was on board. The Latin chants were at Quinn Security and even though the professor had snitched on Rick, Rick still felt like he could proceed, not to follow Dante’s orders and kill Lucy Cooper if not paralyze her powers, but to take matters fully into his own hands.

  As he rose from the table, he told her, “Fine. Set it up. I’m going to use my lunchbreak to check on Eddie. Hold the fort down for me.”

  “Yes, Sir,” she agreed and they left the interview room.

  When Rick stepped outside of the station, he felt a longing twinge for the old life, the way this town had felt before werewolves had emerged. He hadn’t realized how good he’d had it. Devil’s Fist used to feel like his town. He used to preside over it. He’d felt proud every time he set foot on the crime-free streets. Now all he felt was terror roiling through his barrel chest no matter how deeply he breathed.

  He took a moment to watch pedestrians stroll by. Some were residents he recognized and he greeted them with a hidy ho!. Others were tourist, latecomers who had lingered after summer had past. He wished his biggest priority was grabbing a pint at Libations where his old buddy Jack would lend a listening ear. Those were the days and if Rick had anything to do with it, he would restore the good ol’ days himself.

  With that in mind, he climbed into his SUV and started along Main Street. He checked his rearview mirror often, as he turned up Bison and then onto Berry Road, looking out for any of the Quinns’ pickup trucks.

  His paranoia kicked up as he came upon the Quinn Security building. He eased his SUV onto the shoulder just shy of the dirt driveway that led up to the state-of-the-art cabin and spied the vehicle parked there. There was only one pickup truck and he recognized it immediately. It belonged to Shane, and Rick let out a disgruntled snort.

  Where in the hell was Troy? Where were the rest of them? Were they enjoying life as though Rick’s fate wasn’t clenched in the palms of their hands? Probably.

  He pulled up the steep drive and pulled his SUV next to Shane’s truck.

  Climbing out, he mentally strategized how he would do this. It wouldn’t be easy, but he had no choice. Full moon or no full moon, this war was going to end. Now.

  After giving the front door a courtesy knock, he let himself in and found Shane at his desk. Rick tried not to be obvious when he scanned his eyes throughout the large room in search of the ancient books that the professor had left somewhere around here.

  “Hidy ho!” he called out, giving Shane a big, ol’ smile.

  “Hey, Sheriff,” said Shane, looking up from his computer. “What can I do for you?”

  It was a good question and Rick felt ill prepared to offer an excuse.

  “Fire code enforcement,” he said, thinking fast and off the cuff. “Don’t mind me.”

  “Let me know if you need anything,” Shane told him without a shred of suspicion.

  Rick made the rounds, checking the smoke alarms throughout the offices as he secretly searched for the books that he knew Gaylord had left here. When he reached the conference room, he eased the door closed but didn’t shut it. A stack of books was lying in a heap on the conference table, each with a number of Post-Its marking select pages.

  Unsure of what exactly he was looking for, he pulled out his cell phone and began flipping through the first book. Since he knew he needed Latin chants, he didn’t bother snapping off any photos of the flagged pages that were in English. Finally, he came to a page in the third book that was full of what appeared to be Latin. The professor had underlined certain passages. Rick zoomed his camera app in on those and clicked off photo after photo, checking each one to be sure the image was crystal clear.

  Minutes later, he emerged from the conference room and breezed by Shane’s desk.

  “All’s good, my friend,” he told Shane.

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “Where is everyone?” he asked, making a little small talk before he left.

  “Troy is at my mom’s,” Shane told him.

  Rick could turn that into another excuse if he wanted, and he did. Nikita Quinn had been on his mind all week.

  “Yeah?” he casually returned. “I might stop by in that case. Oh, hey,” he said, switching gears. “How’s about you invite your mother over to my cabin one of these nights for the four of us to have dinner?”

  Shane smiled up at him a bit quizzically and mentioned, “There’s only one thing my mother eats, you know.”

  “Fresh meat?”

  “That’d be it,” he told him humorously.

  “I’m one hell of a hunter,” Rick said. “I’ll have a fresh deer for her if you’d like to set it up for tomorrow night? I think I ought to get to know the woman who will soon be part of my family.”

  “You got it, Sheriff. Just make sure the meat is raw. She’s never had so much of a bite of anything cooked as long as I’ve known her.”

  “Noted,” he allowed with a good-natured smile. “I’m already looking forward to it.”

  With that, he let himself out of the building and climbed into his SUV.

  Minutes later, he pulled into his own driveway and went directly down into the basement where he found Eddie hunched in his human form against the bars of the dog crate he’d been locked in.

  “We need to do this,” Rick told him. “Tonight.”

  Eddie sat up straight within the crate, his dark eyes locking on Rick.

  “The Quinns will be otherwise disposed in a meeting at Quinn Security,” he went on. “I know how to take Dante down, but I can’t do it alone. How are you with a bow and arrow?”

  “You’re going to let me out of here?”

  “You’re going to work with me?” he immediately countered.

  Eddie stared at him for a long moment then promised, “I’ll do anything for my freedom.”

  Precisely what freedom Eddie had just referred to, Rick didn’t think to ask.

  ***

  Gretchen frowned down at the table between herself and Elizabeth as if touching its sticky surface would infect her with some kind of backwoods disease.

  “Is there nowhere else to dine in this town?” she asked, appalled at the diner her daughter had dragged he
r into. “I doubt they have cocktails here.”

  “There’s a bar up the street you might like,” Elizabeth offered even though she knew full well that Gretchen would hardly like Libations. “I thought we might get a bite before heading over.”

  “Really, Elizabeth, I can’t for the life of me understand why you begged me to fly out here. Wyoming is a dusty, boring place.”

  “You’ve been here before?”

  Gretchen cut her critical eyes up to Elizabeth and said, “I don’t have to have come here to accurately guess that there’s nothing in this state worth visiting.”

  “I thought so as well,” she allowed, “before I saw Yellowstone. It’s beautiful.”

  “Is that why you had me come out here? You want to show me Yellowstone?”

  “No,” she said honestly. “I wanted to talk to you about Daddy’s land.”

  “I already told you, I didn’t even know he owned it.”

  “But you seemed upset I had sold it,” she pointed out just as Lucy Cooper breezed in to take their order.

  Without so much as glancing up at the blonde waitress, Gretchen told her, “I’d like a dry martini with exactly three olives—”

  “Mom,” Elizabeth interrupted. “They don’t sell alcohol here.”

  “’Fraid not, Ma’am,” Lucy agreed. “But our coffee’s the best in all the Fist.”

  Elizabeth ordered on behalf of her mother, “She’ll have blueberry pancakes, a side salad, and a tall cup of coffee. Me as well.”

  “You got it,” she said cheerfully as she jotted the order down.

  Once Lucy had trailed up the aisle, Elizabeth promised, “We’ll swing by Libations next for a cocktail.”

  “I don’t suppose there’s a five-star hotel in the immediate vicinity?”

  “Why did you react the way you did when I told you I sold the land?”

  Gretchen sighed but didn’t immediately answer.

  “What aren’t you telling me, Mom? Father is passed away,” she reminded her. “There’s no sense in keeping secrets.”