Wilder Animals

by Geonn Cannon

  Second looked back at Ari and hesitated. “Hey. Are we just going to leave him here all by himself? It’s starting to look like Clark ain’t coming back. It’d be cruel to just abandon the guy.”

  “Five seconds ago, you were terrified of him.”

  “I know, but… we could at least fill his dish. Did you see one in the kitchen?”

  Ari couldn’t let the men look for dog food that didn’t exist. It might make them ask questions that didn’t have answers, and she didn’t want them confused. She stood up and barked as loudly as she could. Both men were startled so she barked again, baring her teeth at them before jumping onto the floor. Head down, ears back, eyes locked on the men, she started forward.

  “Oh, shit.” Second shoved Tom toward the door. “Okay. Okay, screw this asshole dog. Let’s go. Let’s go!”

  They fled without bothering to lock the door behind them. Ari lay down on her belly and transformed back. Her joints twisted and popped into place, sending bursts of pain up and down her spine before settling at the ends of her extremities. The muscles that had been hurting after her long trek up the stairs and the steep street now howled in agony as they were twisted and contorted into a new shape. Ari bit back a scream and flopped onto her side, trembling through the final stages of the transformation. She looked down at her feet and flexed the toes, then stretched out so that she was lying flat on her stomach.

  The pain faded until she was left with only a dull throb throughout her body. She pushed herself up, sitting with her legs folded underneath her, and flexed her hands. Her mother had told her that all canidae still felt pain when they transformed, but she never thought about what to expect. Her mother and Milo and every other wolf she’d known had acted like it was no big deal. When she transformed at the cabin and felt the pain, she’d panicked. She was positive the cure hadn’t worked. Gwen reassured her, calmed her nerves, and determined the pain was at a normal level.

  That was the moment she was grateful she wasn’t with Dale. If she’d panicked, Dale would have panicked along with her. It was better to have the bumps and setbacks with someone who had been through them before. It saved Dale so much stress that Ari was able to justify the anguish of being away from her for so long.

  She got to her feet and braced one hand against the wall, moving to lock the door before she went to the living room window. She pushed the curtain aside and looked down. There was a moment of vertigo as her brain tried to marry the angle with the fact she was standing on solid ground. Five floors below, she watched as Tom and the other man exited the building and walked across the street to a blue pickup. The angle was too steep and the apartment much too high for her to read the license plate, but she still craned her neck and gave it a shot.

  The truck pulled away without revealing anything that would help her identify its passengers, so she left the window and went to retrieve her clothes. The thought of anything she owned spending time on the floor of Clark Wilcox’s bedroom floor for any length of time was enough to make her want to burn them. But unless she wanted to change again, she had to wear something to get home.

  After she was dressed again, she retrieved the iPad. She knew most people were incredibly lazy with passwords. Being a private investigator himself might have made Wilcox a bit smarter, but Ari doubted it. She went to the desk and looked for numbers on Post-Its or some other reminder. She wanted to search further, but she didn’t want to be trapped by any other goons that came looking for Wilcox.

  She locked the door as she left the apartment. The next door over opened and a woman stuck her head out. She looked at Ari with skepticism.

  “You his girlfriend?”

  “God. No.”

  “Good. You’re too pretty.” She twisted her neck. “He have a dog in there? I heard a dog barking.”

  “No dogs.”

  “Pets are against the rules,” the woman said.

  Ari nodded. “I’ll keep that in mind if I ever move in.”

  She hurried downstairs, then went down the hill to her car. She stayed aware of her surroundings in case the goon who recognized her from Wilcox’s office had someone waiting behind to watch for her. The street seemed empty so she tossed the iPad onto the passenger seat and drove back to the office.

  Dale looked up as she came in. “Hey. How’d your morning go?”

  “I’ll tell you while you’re getting into that.” She handed Dale the iPad. “Wilcox put a passcode on it. I tried the usual, but—”

  Dale held the tablet up flat in front of her face, turned it on, and tapped four numbers. The screen remained blank. She typed in four more, and the screen opened. She handed the iPad back to Ari.

  “There you go. 7-5-2-1.”

  “How…?”

  “The passcode keyboard pops up in the middle of the screen, not in the usual spot. Wilcox left fingerprint smudges over those numbers. I went in numerical order, then reversed it. I just got lucky. It could have taken a lot longer to work all the combinations.”

  Ari said, “Redheaded genius.”

  Dale grinned. “So how was the rest of your day?”

  Ari relayed what had happened with Tiffany and then her encounter with the goons. Dale waited until she’d heard the whole story before she spoke.

  “You changed? How are you feeling?”

  “I wouldn’t say no to a massage. But otherwise I’m fine.”

  Dale said, “And you don’t have any idea who these goons were?”

  Ari shook her head. “One was named Tom. I’m good, but I’m not good enough to get anything out of that unless there’s contact info on this.” She held up the iPad. “Whoever they were, they didn’t seem to know Wilcox was dead.”

  “If they keep lurking around, they’re going to figure it out sooner rather than later.”

  “Yeah. Which means I should start digging through this.” She tapped the iPad. “Thanks again for cracking the case, you hacker goddess.”

  Dale winked and gave her a thumbs-up as Ari took the tablet into her office.

  Chapter Six

  Ari had a marijuana problem. It wasn’t an addiction, but the opposite. When each transformation came with agonizing pain, Dr. Frost had suggested pot as an analgesic. It worked to a degree. It certainly lessened her pain levels, but it came at the cost of a foggy brain, drowsiness, and a permanent stink that was even worse due to her heightened senses. Now that the pain was at a manageable level, she could stop smoking it. The problem was that she and Dale had made sure she would always have enough available in case of any flare-ups. But now they had four glass jars of pot in their fridge and no intention to ever smoke it.

  She had spent the entire afternoon at the office going through Wilcox’s iPad, trying to figure out why the goons had wanted it so badly. The notes were filled with the various information related to every case: client’s name, focus of the investigation, other names, addresses, schedules, etc. It was arranged by case number, and the majority of entries were written with shorthand. There was only so much she could do with information like “#208339 B Sm/w.”

  The real prize was in the Video app, but the problem there was far too much information. There were over six hundred videos of varying lengths that all featured the same plot: men and women, men and men, women and women, all of them engaged in various acts of… well, she’d be generous and call it ‘romance.’ Wilcox had an amazing ability to get in close to the action. Ari had seen porn that had been shot less professionally. Every video had a clear shot of the participants’ faces, but each one was labeled to correspond with the cryptic notes. Ari wasn’t about to watch every video and hope for a clue to jump out at her, so she put the iPad aside for the time being.

  On the way home, she and Dale stopped for groceries. Ari was putting away the mayo when she spotted the jars of marijuana and decided the time had come to get rid of them. She took one jar and went to the stairs that led up to the laundry room between their basement apartment and the rest of Neka’s house. When Ari first started using the tre
atment, they’d checked with Neka to make sure it was okay for her to smoke in the yard. Neka had agreed as long as they sometimes shared their stash.

  Neka opened the door and smiled. “Hey. Gotta admit, it’s still kind of strange getting visitors in the laundry room. Not that you’re a visitor really…”

  “I get it,” Ari said with a smile. “I was just wondering if you wanted our pot.”

  “Is this some kind of reverse trick-or-treat?”

  Ari chuckled. “Maybe so. The medical condition I was using it for is… passed… so I don’t need it anymore. I never really liked the smell.”

  Neka took the jar. “Thank you. Yeah, if you’re just going to throw it out anyway, we’ll take it off your hands.”

  “We?”

  “Oh, yeah. I started dating someone while you were away. Dale actually helped introduce us. He worked at the copy place with her.”

  Ari tilted her head. “Copy place?”

  “Mm-hmm. The one on Prospect. She worked there for about five or six weeks. She met Simon there and thought we’d hit it off, so she introduced us.” She tucked her hair behind her ear. “Actually, I wanted to invite you to dinner with us some night this week. Whenever you’re free.”

  “Yeah, that sounds great,” Ari said.

  “And I’ll give you a discount on the rent for the pot.”

  Ari managed a smile. “I appreciate it, but you don’t have to. It’s a gift.” She gestured back down the stairs. “I need to, uh…”

  “Sure. We’ll work out the details later.”

  Ari went back downstairs. Dale was in the kitchen putting away the Pop Tarts. Ari stopped in the doorway of the kitchen and stared at her. “You worked at a copy place?”

  Dale turned. “Oh. Uh, yeah, just for a few weeks.” She scratched her neck. “Which bag had the oranges?”

  The bag was on the floor. Ari stooped to pick it up and handed it to her. “Why?”

  “Because I’m going to put them away…?”

  “No, why were you working at a copy place?”

  Dale sighed. “Because I needed the money. I could only take one or two out of every five or six cases we were contacted about, and that wasn’t going to keep the lights on very long. The store needed someone to organize their books. You know, like when you hired me in the first place.”

  “You could have called me. Mom could have loaned us a little cash.”

  “Yeah, I could’ve called,” Dale muttered.

  “What?”

  Dale sighed. “I could’ve called, but that was about the time you stopped bothering to answer your messages. It was just a part-time job, Ari. I’d spend the morning at the agency, but there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot to do there. Meanwhile I had the rent on this place, I had the rent on the office, I had bills, and you were suddenly incommunicado. So I took a job. Are you mad at me for that?”

  “I’m… I’m curious why you didn’t tell me.”

  “Because it wasn’t a big deal.”

  Ari pushed her hands through her hair. “You told me to go, Dale.”

  “I did.”

  “Going out there with mom was important. For the wolf, for my relationship with Mom—”

  “I know.” The oranges were all put away, so Dale folded the reusable bags to store them next to the fridge.

  “Will you stop putting away the groceries for five seconds and look at me?”

  Dale sighed and flattened her hands on the bags. “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to know I nearly cost you everything. Okay? We could’ve lost the office. We could’ve lost everything you built. I was ashamed, Ari. And then you weren’t answering my calls, so I didn’t know if you were alive or if you were hurting again and your mother was just trying to spare my feelings. You just vanished. So I was scared and angry and worried the whole time you were gone. And then you just show up again. And I was thrilled. I’m so thrilled you’re back, Ariadne. Sometimes I wake up at night just to touch you to make sure you’re really there. So I put all that aside because it didn’t matter anymore.” She stepped back from the table and brushed past Ari. “Can you finish putting things away?” She didn’t wait for an answer, disappearing into their bedroom and shutting the door behind her.

  Ari wasn’t sure if following her was the right thing to do, but she couldn’t just sit down and stare at the wall. She knocked softly before she opened the door. Dale had left the lights off and was lying down facing the wall. Ari walked to her side of the bed and sat down, looking away from Dale.

  “I stopped checking the voicemail because it hurt too much. I loved being up in the woods. I loved bonding with Mom. And the wolf… the wolf needed it so much. But every time we would trek down to the ranger station to check the voicemail, I wanted to come running back to Seattle as fast as I could. Mom had to drag me back out to the wilderness a couple of times. I stopped because I knew you wanted me to be up there. If I’d known…”

  Dale sniffled. “I didn’t know how hard it would be,” she whispered.

  Ari turned and stretched out on the bed. She spooned Dale and kissed her shoulder. “Neither did I. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry, too.”

  “You don’t have anything to be sorry for. You kept everything going. I don’t care if you worked at some copy place. You did it for us. For the life we built. Thank you.”

  Dale reached back and stroked Ari’s hip. “I really am glad your trip went so well. You’ve never told me about how things went with you and your mom.”

  “It went great. We talked a lot. She…” Ari chuckled. “This might be a story for a less emotional time.”

  “No, I want to hear. What?”

  “She slept with Milo.”

  Dale twisted to look at her. “Milo Duncan? But your mom is straight. And Milo’s… Milo’s our age. And oh my god when?”

  Ari shrugged and laughed. “When she went to England, after wolf manoth.”

  “I thought she was going to hook up with the pack leader. Um. Bug?”

  “Ant.”

  “Right.”

  Ari shrugged. “Apparently it didn’t work out. Mom went to say goodbye to Milo and apologize for, you know, all the manipulation and everything. Next thing she knew, Milo had seduced her.”

  “Wow.” Dale had fully turned to face Ari. She angled her head to press her lips against the leather of Ari’s collar. “I’m not mad at you anymore. You know that, right?”

  “I know.” She smelled Dale’s hair. “But I still need to make it up to you.”

  “Okay.” She sighed and settled against Ari’s body. “We should go back out. Turn off the lights, finish with the groceries.”

  Ari said, “Mm-hmm.”

  “It’s too early to go to bed.”

  Her voice fading, Ari agreed with a muttered, “Yeah.”

  Dale sighed again and closed her eyes.

  #

  In the morning, Ari waited until she was in the office to check her email. She’d received a message from Tiffany giving her the okay to start digging into Wilcox’s client files, so she cracked open the file and began reading. He worked a lot of overnight security jobs, standing guard outside office parks and strip malls that were concerned about break-ins. There were seven of those in the past six months, some of them overlapping. Ari couldn’t make the time tables work in her head and finally determined he had either hired someone to do the watching for him or had just skipped surveillance altogether. It would only be an issue if one of the businesses got robbed on a night he wasn’t there, and he might’ve been willing to take the risk.

  Dale came in with coffee and breakfast sandwiches while she was comparing the case files to the notes in the iPad, hoping for something that could crack the code. “Finding anything interesting?”

  “I’m trying to decide if Wilcox was shady or dirty.”

  “Could be fifty percent of both to make up one entirely nasty whole.”

  Ari said, “Looking possible.”

  Dale dropped down on
to the couch instead of going to her desk so they could ostensibly be having breakfast together. They had started the morning by making love to officially end the fight they’d had the night before. She was grateful Dale had been able to get out her anger; it gave Ari an idea of how far she had to go in order to truly make up for her absence. But first she had a pile of clients to go through. Wilcox had helpfully kept two files for every case. One included everything he’d managed to dig up on the case, while the other consisted of what she at first thought were diary entries. They contained his thoughts on the clients and various hassles he’d gone through in pursuit of the truth.

  “Oh, God,” Ari muttered when she realized what she was reading.

  Dale looked up from her sausage biscuit. “What?”

  “Wilcox was writing his memoirs.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  Ari cleared her throat and read from the file she had open. “‘The rain came through the night before and scrubbed the whole city clean, but it didn’t get into the cracks. Not the cracks way deep down, where the real scummy things lurked. I was in one of those cracks, still drunk from the night before so I wouldn’t have a hangover for this job. Big mistake. But I could power through. It’s what they paid me the big bucks to do.’”

  Dale groaned. “I see it making a billion dollars as a summer blockbuster. They’d probably get Chris Pratt to play Wilcox.”

  Ari said, “And some twenty-year-old newcomer to play his love interest.”

  “And Charlize Theron to play the sexy rival private eye.”

  “Right,” Ari laughed. “You just want Charlize Theron to be in everything after Mad Max.”

  “Hell yeah I do. Furiosa forever.”

  Ari scrolled through the pages. “From what I can tell, these are all based on real cases. I just have to dig through the noir nonsense to find the facts of the matter.”

  Dale said, “What are the facts of what you just read me?”

  “He was on a stakeout and it was raining.”

  “And he was drunk. That rang true to me.”

  Ari snickered and skimmed the rest of the file. “It’s helpful. He gave his impression of the client.”