Gentleman Takes a Chance (38 page)

Rafiel huffed again and when he answered he was peevish. "Very well," he said, in a tone that implied it wasn't very well at all. "But I hope you know what to do, because this can't go on. With the deaths at the aquarium—and by the way, the latest one, Joe Buckley, had water in his lungs, so it wasn't a body disposal, it was murder by shark—and now some mysterious animal going around town killing people, not to mention what my colleagues are convinced is some madman who just propped up the body afterwards . . ." This time the sound was just a sigh. "I don't know how to cover up all of this, Tom. I just don't. And I'm an officer of the law. The killings must stop. And I think there's more than an even chance that it's all Dire. I'm . . . following up on it, but I really think there's a good chance he came to town before, you know, when they felt the deaths, and he set all this up. And we must stop him."

"I understand," Tom said and he did, and in this case he could even empathize. "I'll think of something. Look, I'll come down and help you talk to Conan, okay?"

After Rafiel hung up, Tom started tying his boots, a task made more complex by the fact that Notty was trying to help. "I'd better think of something, eh, Notty?" he said, as he petted the little round kitten head. "Or we are in deep, deep trouble."

Notty looked up at him with guileless intensely blue eyes that seemed to say he had every confidence in Tom's ability to make it all right. Tom wished he did too.

Every shifter could be a target,
Kyrie thought. And even as she was thinking this, she had to put up with being interviewed by a young man with sparse red-blond hair and the slightly bulging blue eyes that always give the impression their possessor is desperately looking for a fairytale to believe in. He, somehow, seemed absolutely convinced that Kyrie must have a wild animal stashed somewhere, and must have deployed it to kill this woman journalist.

If only you knew,
Kyrie thought, but just looked placidly at the man. "No," she said, in a firm voice, while she kept an eye on Conan who was dealing with the tables. She stood with her back to the counter. On the other side of it, Anthony was cooking orders. He'd been interviewed, but his interview had been very brief, since he hadn't left the stove since he'd come in at about four in the morning. And no, he hadn't seen any dead woman against the lamppost, though, frankly, if she'd been propped up and looked natural, he might not have noticed. After all, he'd been running in, and he'd been working what very much amounted to double shifts because of the weather and their being shorthanded. And now he had to go back to the stove before it went up in flames; did Officer McKnight mind?

Officer McKnight could not persist against Anthony's push to get back to work, and therefore he was now absolutely determined to make life difficult for Kyrie. Kyrie looked up and resisted an urge to smile. She wondered if she was supposed to cry into the table-wiping rag she was holding and confess that yes, she'd done it all.

She decided against it on principle. The man looked like he'd had his sense of humor surgically removed at birth and he might very well take her at her word. Instead, aloud, she said, with increasing firmness, "No, I was not mad at her for publishing the dragon pictures. Why should I be?"

"Well . . ." McKnight said, and looked at her with those bulging eyes, making her think he was going to dart an improbably long tongue out and catch a fly or something. "The thing is Ms. . . . Smith, you and your . . . partner, Mr. Ormson own this diner half and half, right."

"Right," Kyrie said, wishing if he was going to pronounce Smith that way he would add "if that is indeed your real name."

"And this woman published pictures of dragons in the paper and said she'd seen them at the back door of your diner. Now . . . wouldn't you think people might be afraid to come here? That it might ruin your business?"

"What?" Kyrie asked, completely puzzled. "Are you truly asking me if I think that people are afraid of
dragons
? Are you afraid of dragons, Officer?"

"Well . . . that's neither here nor there, is it? I mean, I know that dragons are imaginary and I . . ." He shrugged. "But this is not about what I believe. Don't you think that people out there on the street might think that there are really dragons and that they might get attacked, if they come here?"

Kyrie shook her head. "No. In fact, considering all the recent movies and stories with good dragons, I think that if they were to believe dragons existed—and frankly I don't think even a lot of our college student clientele believes any such thing—they would be thrilled. If anything, that picture in the paper might bring us droves of customers." She realized as she said it that this was true, though certainly that was not how she and the others had first thought of it.

McKnight clearly hadn't thought of it that way either. He said, "But—" and then repeated "But, but," like it was the sound his brain gave off while sputtering and trying to start. "But you have to understand," he finally said. "Not everyone might have felt that way. And what if they were scared and stopped coming here. Wouldn't you have hated that reporter? Wouldn't you have thought of doing . . . something to her?"

"Something?" Kyrie said. She frowned. "What exactly are you suggesting? That I roamed the streets looking for a wild animal, whom I then convinced to chomp on this journalist, when she was conveniently just outside our door?" She glared. "Because a death by wild animal attack will, of course, hurt our business far
less
than rumors of dragons."

"Well, no, but you might . . . you might not have thought of that, as you were, you know . . ."

"Looking for a wild animal to kill her? Tell me, was it a mountain lion or a bear? And how did I keep it from killing me? My extrasensory powers?"

McKnight looked confused. Or rather, he looked more confused than normal. "But . . . but . . . if you had . . ."

"And what if I had grown wings and flown?" she asked.
Which I can't do. Though my boyfriend can.
"Do I have to answer hypothetical questions on that too?" She glared at him. "Given an ability to find wild animals disposed to kill inconvenient journalists at the drop of a hat, and supposing I had the superpowers to prevent them killing me, I still wouldn't have killed the journalist."

"Oh? Why not?"

"Because she was a person. A human being. And she'd done me no noticeable harm. Do you often kill people because they're annoying or sensationalist, Officer?"

"Me? Well, no, of course . . ." He seemed to finally realize he wasn't going to win this argument no matter how hard he tried. "Right," he said. "Right. Thank you, Ms. Smith. I will . . . I will go and ask your customers if they've seen anything."

Yes. Do, why don't you? Because that won't affect business at all,
she thought irritably, as she ducked behind the counter, and found Anthony's gaze trained on her, half amusement, half awe.

"What?" she said.

"I think you have a bit of policeman caught between your teeth," he said.

"What?"

"Metaphorically speaking. I think that's what Tom calls biting off someone's head and beating them to death with it."

"Well," Kyrie said, deflated, as she got the carafe from the coffee maker and put the latest round of prepared orders on a tray to take out. Conan had been half handling all the orders, but she was fairly sure the breakfast crowd would prefer their eggs before they got all cold and rubbery. "He's dim."

"Yeah. I wonder why Rafiel didn't ask us the questions himself."

"Dunno. Dealing with some administrative stuff, I guess," Kyrie said, and started towards the tables, carrying the tray. She smiled and joked with her regulars. But her mind wasn't in it.

No, her mind was carefully processing the input of her nose. How many shifters were there in the diner? They knew for a fact that the diner had been soaked—some years ago—in pheromones designed to attract shifters. It had called her all the way from the bus station, in response to something—she wasn't sure what. For all she knew it had called her all the way from Cleveland where her last job had been. How many more people did it call? And what were their forms?

She didn't think they were implicated in the death of the journalist, Summer Avenir. She didn't think so, but you never knew. After all, the Ancient Ones weren't the only ones who could lose their heads when faced with something like pictures of shifters on the front page of their local paper and just outside their favorite diner. While Kyrie and Tom had no wish to associate wild animal attacks with their diner, some customer who just wanted to stop a threat might have more direct views of how to do so.

She saw Tom and Rafiel come in through the back door, poor Tom looking very pale and cranky, which made perfect sense, since he'd slept all of two and a half or three hours at most.

At the moment she saw them, she was standing by the front door and away from most of the occupied tables. She stood her ground, ostensibly waiting for them to go by her, so she could move freely.

But as they came close enough, she asked Rafiel in a whisper, "The teeth that killed the woman . . . They weren't alligator teeth, were they?"

Rafiel had a headache. No, it wasn't a headache as such because headaches were natural occurrences that came and went without much provocation.
This
headache was like a living thing, compounded half of pain, half of fear and mostly of anger. It sat on his brain, seeming to squeeze all rationality out of it.

He wanted to be mad at Tom for refusing to even consider calling the Great Sky Dragon and the triad to their aid. What was he doing? Did he think they could play heroes all by themselves? Who were they against this ancient shifter group that permeated all nations and was a law unto itself. If the group decided whom to kill and whom to let live, to whom could they speak out against it? How could they when they were part of it too?

To some extent Dire was right when he told Rafiel and Kyrie that in the ancient times there had been many deaths, that in those days shifters were viewed as dangerous, as things to be eliminated.

But then again, weren't they dangerous? So many of them seemed to have a lust for killing and a total disregard for those outside their group.

Rafiel stood in the brightly lit parking lot and squinted against the light, and watched Tom walk from the inn, around the thawing slabs of ice in the parking lot. The sun was out, things were melting. Probably only to freeze again this night, but for now, ice was in retreat.

Rafiel squinted at Tom and thought to himself that if shifters were known, and if they were known for what they were, those creatures that Dire called ephemerals would be more than justified in exterminating them all, root and branch, the guilty with the innocent. But then . . . but then he and Tom and Kyrie were innocent.

And if we want to remain so, we'd best find a way to control those among our kind who aren't
—
those who are a danger to the society we live in.
From there it followed that Tom had been right. They could not call on the Great Sky Dragon. They couldn't call on any of the old, corrupt organizations that looked down on the society amid which they lived and from which they derived the benefits of civilization.
No. It must be us. Me and you and me against the ancient shifter world. And Keith too, if he's willing.

The ridiculous thought of the four of them facing down the Ancient Ones, much less the Ancient Ones, the triad and whatever was killing people at the aquarium—if it wasn't Dire or the crab shifter—made his head throb all the worse. The Rodent Liberation Front might be more their speed.

Tom, who always looked like heck when he was tired, now looked tired and grumpy and ill-awakened, with shadows under his eyes, and the sort of expression that suggested he was about to face a firing squad by the early dawn light.

He stomped across the parking lot towards Rafiel and greeted him with a grunt. They walked across the parking lot together, presumably, Rafiel thought, to talk to Conan. What Tom expected to get from Conan, if not the help of Conan's patron, was beyond him.

And then, as they got into the diner, and went close by Kyrie, he found his arm grabbed and Kyrie asked, "The teeth that killed the woman . . . They weren't alligator teeth, were they?"

Tom snorted behind Rafiel and said, with certainty. "It wasn't Old Joe."

But Kyrie was looking at Rafiel with those bright eyes of hers, that inquisitive all-attentive gaze she so rarely turned towards him. "Was it, Rafiel?"

He shook his head slowly. "Not so far as the examiner on the scene thought. He said bear or dog"—he shrugged—"only much, much bigger teeth. I could imagine, by a stretch of the imagination, its being a dragon, but not an alligator, no."

While he talked to Kyrie, Tom had gone behind both of them and into the glassed-in annex, where Conan was cleaning a table. Tom cheerfully helped him put the menus and condiment bottles back. Then he grabbed the wrist on Conan's good arm. Rafiel had no idea what he said to the man. Tom spoke in too low a voice to be heard. But Rafiel saw Conan pale, and then Tom shook his head and said something else, and Conan looked at him half in fear, but seemed calmer and nodded.

Rafiel wished he could hear it, but doubtless, through this headache, he wouldn't make any sense of it, in any case. Aloud he told Kyrie, "Looks like you'll have to take over all the waitressing. I think we're talking to Conan." He watched Tom take Conan to the table nearest the window—the one where the two sets of glassed-in walls met, and fortuitously the corner nearest the lamppost around which the dead woman had been wrapped.

"I won't sit people near there," Kyrie said, and turned to meet a couple who had just entered. Which left Rafiel with nothing to do but go talk to Conan.

Conan was sitting across from Tom, and as Rafiel approached, Tom got up. Before Rafiel was fully settled, Tom came back with three cups of coffee, a bowl full of the little packaged creamers, and a container of sugars. Conan hesitated and looked almost guilty taking the coffee. Or perhaps he just looked guilty. He looked guilty most of the time, a sort of cringing general-purpose guilt that made Rafiel's headache worse.