Gentleman Takes a Chance (44 page)

Tom, in the process of swathing his face in shaving cream, so that he looked like a turbaned Santa Claus, gave Rafiel a questioning look, then shrugged. "You're light-haired," he said, speaking in a weirdly stilted manner, almost not moving his lips—probably to avoid getting shaving cream in his mouth. He rinsed his hands. "To get my beard properly shaved, I need to grind the electric razor into my skin, and then I end up with burns. Besides," he shrugged, "when I started shaving, I was homeless. They have hand razors in those little kits shelters give away as charity. Electric razors not so much."

The idea that Tom had been homeless for years seemed insane, Rafiel thought, as Tom shaved a strip of cream off his face, rinsed the razor and looked at him. He had unearthly blue eyes, very intense in color. They looked like nothing so much as the blue on the type of pioneer enamelware often sold at touristy shops. It was disturbing to find himself under scrutiny by those sharp, bright eyes.

"Talk," Tom said.

"Hey, I'm supposed to say that," Rafiel said. "I'm the policeman."

He sat down on the one loveseat from which he had an unimpeded view of the bathroom. Tom, who had shaved another strip of cream and beard, shrugged. "If you didn't have something to talk about you wouldn't be here waking me."

"Well," Rafiel said. "I do need to talk to someone and you and Kyrie"—he shrugged—"are practically the only friends I have. At least the only friends I have that I'm not related to. And that I can . . . you know . . . be frank with."

"Right."

"But it's not like I know anything. It's more like I need to figure things out." Not Dinner, having ascended the heights of Rafiel's lap, was climbing under Rafiel's shirt. "What's he—?"

"Notty does that," Tom said, in a resigned tone. "Crawl under your clothes, I mean. He's a baby. Cold."

"I suppose," Rafiel said, though frankly, if he was going to have a feline getting in his clothes, he'd much rather—by far—it were Kyrie. "All right. Well, these are my suspicions." He proceeded to lay out the case against Lei Lani, such as he could make it out. Her half-truths, her exaggerations. As he was talking, the phone rang.

"Boss?" McKnight's voice.

"Yes?"

"That woman, Lei Lani?"

"Yes?"

"She doesn't seem to have graduated from the University of Hawaii. The aquarium there never heard of her, either."

"I see," Rafiel said. "Do a full records search, would you?" he said and hung up before McKnight could protest. He related the knowledge to Tom, who raised his eyebrows.

"But the fact she didn't attend the University of Hawaii," Tom said, as the blade went swish-swish across his face, rinse-rinse under the faucet, and then swish against his face again, "doesn't mean that she is a shark shifter."

"No," Rafiel said. "And that's what's making me uncomfortable. Look . . . I wish I could smell her out, but I can't. John Wagner says that aquatic shifters have pheromones you can only detect in water, which makes sense, of course, except that it makes it really hard to figure out who they are."

"Yeah," Tom said, rinsing the razor and setting it aside and then rinsing his face and drying it. He removed the towel from his hair, and started brushing the hair out vigorously. "The thing is—"

"The thing is that she might just have been taking boyfriends there, and when her boyfriends were found dead in the aquarium, she panicked and decided to put the guilt on someone else. It's entirely possible," he said, "that someone else is a shifter—shark or otherwise, and responsible for getting the victims in the tank once Ms. Lani is done with them. For all I know, the Japanese spider crab shifter—if there really is one—shoves people in the tank because he disapproves of fornication in the aquarium."

"Wouldn't the Japanese spider crab have done that before?" Tom said. "I mean, from what you said, he's been at the aquarium for years, right?"

"But we don't know that Ms. Lani or someone like her has been having fun at the aquarium for that long," Rafiel said. "This could be a response to something perceived as a new wave of immorality."

"I guess," Tom said nodding. "Which, of course, leaves us up a creek without a paddle, because we can't prove that Lei Lani is a shifter. And even if we could, how could we prove that she's the one getting them in the shark tank?" He crossed the room to where his tote bag was open on the floor, and retrieved underwear, jeans and a red T-shirt, then retreated with them all to the bathroom, closing the door till the barest crack remained open to allow the sound through. "I mean, the victims are dead. They can't exactly tell us what went on."

"The problem," Rafiel said, as Notty climbed the rest of the way inside his shirt and installed himself on his shoulder, under his shirt, his little orange fuzzy head protruding from Rafiel's collar and making a sound reminiscent of a badly tuned diesel engine, "is that if shifters weren't a secret, and I could tell my medical examiner what to look for, I'm sure they could find traces of whatever happened, maybe enough to tell us if we're looking for a crab shifter, a shark shifter or none of the above."

"Unless your medical examiner is a shifter himself," Tom said, emerging from the bathroom, and tying his hair back. "I wouldn't recommend it. If you're lucky, he'll recommend a psychiatric evaluation. If you're not, he might believe you"

Rafiel sighed. "I know. But we still have to figure out something."

"Yes," Tom said. "Yes, we do." He turned around to face Rafiel and smiled a little. "Nice second head, by the way."

Rafiel petted Notty's head protruding from his shirt. "Yeah, I think it will make me a veritable chick magnet."

"Not advisable. Notty would eat the chicks."

"Probably. But you know two heads . . ."

"Think better than one. Yes. Which reminds me . . . Could you . . . I mean, you have the keys to the aquarium, right? I mean, that's how you took Kyrie there before?"

Rafiel nodded.

"Well, then I think I might have an idea. We'll need to go by my house but I think there's something we can do"

Kyrie's head was whirling. Mr. Lung had believed her, when she said that Tom would not kill himself, provided it wasn't his independence that had been compromised. And he'd told her to let Conan Lung—whom he assured her was no relation, except in the way that all dragon shifters were supposed to be descended from the very first dragon—in on whatever the plan was. He promised that so long as Conan was with them, or where he could see them if they got in trouble, help would be instantaneous. So now, the question was—how to trap Dire?

And did she want to entrap him? Did she truly want to kill him? Despite everything that she'd told the owner of the Three Luck Dragon, she felt squeamish at the thought. After all, he hadn't tried to kill her. If that was what he wanted to do, he would have done it long ago. He'd pursued her, and tried to scare her and hurt her, but he had not actually sought to kill her.

Should she kill someone who wasn't trying to kill her? To say that he was a sadist—which, of course, he was—and was trying to terrorize her and hurt her just didn't seem enough reason to kill him. As she drove into the parking lot of The George and noted Rafiel's car parked where he normally parked when he was visiting, she sighed. It stretched the definition of self-defense to kill someone merely because they were psychopaths.

Oh, she was quite sure that Dire had killed plenty of people in his time. Well . . . she was almost sure he had killed Summer, the journalist. But horrible as that crime was, it was almost sure that he had done it to protect them. To keep them secret. Yes, of course it could be argued that by keeping their secret, he kept his own. But he could just as easily have killed them, and he hadn't. She opened the door of the car and got out onto the cool parking lot almost deserted in the after-lunch lull.

"Hello, Kitten Girl," a familiar voice said.

She spun around to see Dante Dire—in human aspect, wearing a well-tailored black suit, standing just steps from her. Her stomach knotted. Her heart sped up. She tasted bile at the back of her throat. He could read thoughts. Had he been reading her thoughts the last few minutes?

If so, he seemed in a strangely good mood. "I want you to know I've solved all our problems," he said, grinning at her. "I want you to know you don't have to worry anymore."

Our problems? What can he mean?

He laughed at what was, doubtlessly, her very confused expression. "Ah, I see you don't know. Well . . . it's like this. You know I came here to decide on who had killed a great deal of young ones, right? I was to do preliminary investigations, and then tell the council what I had found and wait for their decision. They'd probably send three or four more to verify my conclusions, and you know . . ." He put his hand in his pocket and made a sound of jingling, probably with change. "The truth is if they probed the problem, they would find that it was of course you and your friends . . . If it were just your friends, I wouldn't mind denouncing them. I don't know why the daddy dragon has an interest in Dragon Boy, but I'm sure—Dragon Boy not being one of his own nestlings, see?—that if push came to shove, he would let Dragon Boy go. And I could fulfill my mission and go back to my normal life."

As he spoke he approached her, and somehow his voice became lower and more seductive. "And let me tell you, my normal life is the sort of life anyone would dream of. I have my own private plane. I have bank accounts in every country. I've lived long enough to allow me to accumulate more money than I know what to do with. When I arrive somewhere, even if I arrive naked," he flashed her a smile, "I can always be properly attired and in a brand-new car within an hour."

He came very close, until his face was almost touching hers, and his voice descended till it was just a purr. "You can share that life with me, Kitten Girl. I can show you the world and everything beyond. Come on. You were made for better things than this dinky little diner."

Kyrie knew that he was doing something to her mind, even as he spoke, in that low seductive voice. She could feel her mind not so much changing as being changed for her. All of a sudden, as if she were looking through Dante Dire's eyes, the diner did look small and dinky—almost decayed, in fact, though they'd remodeled it extensively when they'd taken over three months ago.

Why do I want to do this? Is this really what I want to do with my life, serve hash and soup to students and people who are making barely more than minimum wage? Is this really how I want to spend every day?
All of a sudden the place where she had at last felt she belonged seemed tacky—a squat of concrete, a glare of neon. And Tom, who was like the other half of her heart, seemed like a boring young man with curiously foreshortened ambition. All he wanted to do was take cooking classes and spend his life incrementally improving food and service at The George until it was the best diner in Colorado. In his free time, he did accounts or researched recipes. The most exciting thing they'd done in the last three months was take a weekend off and go to Denver to visit the
Titanic
exhibit at the Natural History Museum. Truth be told, Tom was a very boring man. And her life with him would be a very boring life.

In her mind's eye the years with Tom stretched endlessly, never too flush with money and forever living on the outside of all fashionable or even exotic entertainment. Nothing would ever happen, nothing ever break the routine.

"That's it," Dire said, softly, his face so close she could feel his warm breath on her skin. "That's exactly it. He'll kill you with boredom, Kitten Girl. He'll be the death of you.

"Or . . . you could come with me," he said. Through her mind there flashed, in succession, images of her in various designer clothes, images of her on a Mediterranean beach. Images of her eating in fine restaurants and taking airplanes. By Dire's side. And in her mind, for whatever reason, she was madly in love with Dire.

Kyrie didn't love Dire. In fact, she couldn't imagine being in love with any psychopath. She shook her head. "You're in my mind," she said, speaking through her clenched teeth, against the waves of love and attraction washing through her brain. "And you weren't invited."

He chuckled softly, in amusement. She raised her knee and hit him between the legs. Hard. The images vanished from her head. Before he could recover, before he could shift, before he could climb into her mind again, she ran, like mad, into the diner. She knew it wouldn't afford her much protection—or at least she thought it wouldn't—but she didn't care. She wanted away from that cold, dark mind.

She ran into the diner through the back door, and ran down the hallway into the diner itself. Anthony, who was peeling potatoes, turned around to give her a very puzzled look.

"I'm sorry," Kyrie said, ducking behind the counter. "I thought you'd need me. That I was away too long."

"No, you're fine. As you see, we don't have that many tables occupied."

"Yeah, I see," Kyrie said, as she put the apron on.

"Oh, Keith came in," Anthony said. "He says he can use the cash."

"Oh good," Kyrie said.

Anthony chopped the potatoes into sticks. "Well, with him here, rush hour wasn't really a problem. And Conan is getting better, despite that arm."

"Yeah. He's fairly smart," Kyrie said. Anthony said something about Conan singing really well, too, but Kyrie wasn't thinking of that. She was thinking of Dire, out in the parking lot. She didn't want to kill him. Not if she could help it. But she wasn't sure she could.

In Rafiel's car, Tom called Kyrie on the cell phone. Or rather he called The George, but it was she who answered, as he expected.

"Hi, Kyrie," he said.

She seemed faintly surprised and oddly suspicious. "Who is this?"

Had he slept such irregular hours that he still had sleep-voice? He didn't think so, but he cleared his throat all the same and said, "Me," with, he realized afterwards, the kind of confidence only a boyfriend would have in being recognized from such a syllable.

It seemed to work. Or at least she said, "Oh. I didn't expect you to be awake." She took a deep breath. "You know,
he
has impersonated Rafiel before . . ."