Gentleman Takes a Chance (7 page)

"What does Rafiel want?" she asked Tom as she worked. Rafiel had gone back to his booth. "I know he called, and said something about a murder, but then we got . . . sidetracked."

"There was a murder," Tom said, in an undertone. She noted that there was now an assembled burger near the grill, and that he was taking bites of it between flipping the burgers on the grill. This was good, because it meant Tom had become himself enough that he wanted his meat cooked, and with mustard and whole wheat buns and lettuce and pickles.

"And he thinks it involves shifters," he said, taking a bite of his burger.

"Oh," Kyrie said. "When it rains . . ."

"Yeah, apparently it pours when it snows too," he said, with a significant look at the windows, fogged with the inside heat and humidity and still being dusted with an ever-thicker snowfall.

He set the food on the counter, neatly grouped by table for her to deliver and said, still in that undertone, "I take it he poses no threat?" He gave a head gesture towards Red Dragon who sat in his booth looking forlorn and as confused as a little kid among strangers.

Kyrie frowned. "Ask me again in half an hour," she said, and delivered all the orders before making her way to Rafiel. She had left him sitting at his table, without so much as taking his order, because he was a friend and, as such, not likely to take offense if she didn't attend to him.

"I'm sorry," she said, as she approached him. "We're very shorthanded today."

He nodded, though his glance went, inevitably, to Red Dragon with his foreshortened arm, as if he suspected her of making a bad joke. "It's okay," he said. "I just came to ask you and Tom to come with me. I need your help. Well . . . I need the help of . . . people I can trust, and I don't want to . . ." He shook his head, and looked at Tom behind the counter. "I don't suppose you could get someone else in, to look after the place? While you come with me? Or could Tom manage alone?"

Kyrie looked up as the bell behind the front door tinkled, and yet another couple came in, muffled to the eyes and sliding on the coating of snow and ice that covered the soles of their shoes. They dropped into seats at a nearby table, and Kyrie said, "I don't know how Anthony managed alone, Rafiel. I don't think we can go anywhere now. Besides, how do you propose to drive in that?"

Rafiel shrugged. "Four-wheel drive and I'm used to this. I learned to drive in this."

Kyrie nodded. Rafiel, like Anthony, was local. "Well, I still don't know how I can come with you. Not with . . ." She waved around at the diner, and nodded towards the new customers, assuring them silently that she could see them and would be with them shortly. "Maybe if one of our employees shows up," she said, doubtfully.

"Yes. Get me a coffee and a piece of pie, please. I'll wait."

She frowned at him, because his willingness to wait meant he was convinced this did indeed involve shifters, and that meant there was no one else he could trust.

Looking towards the booth, she assured herself that Red Dragon was still there, now looking fixedly at Rafiel with a scared expression. Perhaps it was Rafiel that he thought he had to protect Tom from.

She took the order of the new couple—two coffees, which meant they had braved the walk just to be near other people—and went back to grab the pie for Rafiel.

"Chick-pea pie," she announced, as she set it down in front of him—a joke that had developed from the fact that Rafiel never specified what kind of pie he wanted, which led to her inventing more and more outrageous pretended contents to his food. "And your coffee."

"What does he want?" Rafiel asked, looking at Red Dragon and not even acknowledging her joke.

"He says he's come to redeem himself by protecting Tom," she said, and was gratified to watch Rafiel's eyebrows shoot up. She wasn't the only one who found this absurd.

"Kyrie says that you can't manage the diner alone," Tom heard Rafiel say, in barely more than a rumbling whisper. Tom had just moved the furthest away from customers possible, while remaining behind the counter. The sheer pileup of dishes from the tables Kyrie was cleaning demanded that he put them in the dishwasher, which was around the corner from the coffee maker, and almost to the hallway.

He looked up from slamming the dishes down. Rafiel had a slice of apple pie in one hand and his coffee in the other and was standing by the portion of the counter where Tom normally put the dishes for Kyrie to carry away. Past him, Kyrie was cleaning one last table. There remained four fully occupied ones, but everyone had been served, and had gotten their bill, and seemed to be just sitting around, talking, reluctant to face the storm again. "Maybe if it slows down now." "It might, you know?" "It's nasty out."

"I'm surprised there's anyone here," Rafiel said. "At least anyone who doesn't need to be here. What possessed you to come in?"

"I shifted," Tom said, slamming the last few plates into the dishwasher, shutting it and turning it on. "In our bathroom. There's . . . uh . . . no bathroom left."

He looked up, to see Rafiel staring at him, as he half expected, openmouthed. "In your bathroom? Why?"

Tom shrugged. "It will sound very strange."

"Not as strange as deciding to shift in the bathroom. How could you possibly think you'd fit. Or that there would be—"

"Fine," he said. "There was a voice in my head. The Great Sky Dragon's voice."

"The . . . ?"

"Yeah."

Rafiel looked at Red Dragon. "Threatening?"

Tom shrugged. "I thought so at the time. Now I'm not so sure. He was talking about some Ancient Ones or others who were, supposedly, after me."

"I see," Rafiel said, in that way he had that made it clear he did not see at all. He ate his apple pie in quick bites.

"At the time," Tom said, "I didn't even realize the voice was in my head. It sounded like he was talking to me through the bathroom window. Considering the last time I met with him . . ."

"He almost killed you?"

"Yes. Panic had carried me halfway through the shift before I realized he was in fact in my mind, and for some reason this failed to be reassuring."

"Ancient Ones," Rafiel said. "Shifters?"

"I don't know. He didn't say. I just . . . I'd had a weird dream about . . . very old shifters. Some with shapes that . . . well . . ." He felt stupid, but had to say it. "A saber-toothed tiger and all that."

"Stands to reason," Rafiel said. "We're not easy to kill . . . so some of us would be very old."

"Well . . . we don't know if our longevity is any greater. Legends aren't exactly clear on that, are they? Vampires, sure, but shifters . . ." He shrugged. "If we lived that much longer than normal people, wouldn't the world be overrun by us? And wouldn't it be far more obvious that we exist?"

"How do we know there aren't a lot more of us than we thought? I mean, we know shifters are attracted to this place. Do you know how many of your customers are shifters?"

"Yes. You and Old Joe out back, though I'm not sure I'd call him a customer." He added at Rafiel's blank look, "The alligator." He took a quick look around the diner. "Speaking of which. I should check on him. If Kyrie asks, tell her I just went out back and will be right back."

He ducked out into the back hallway, hoping that Old Joe would still be there. The man seemed to be old and confused enough that he shifted shapes at all sorts of times for any reason or no reason at all. And Tom dreaded the thought of his being naked and lost in the snow, scared away by the cantaloupe that Anthony had thrown at his head.

Rafiel heard Kyrie behind him. No. He smelled her before he heard her—that sharp tang that indicated a shifter, followed by the symphony of scent that was Kyrie herself. She didn't wear perfume—that would probably have covered up all other scents to him—but her smell reminded him of cinnamon and fresh cut apples and the smell of fresh mown grass. All of those were very subtle undertones overlaid on a smell of soap, but they twisted together in a scent that meant Kyrie.

"Tom went outside. Something about an alligator," Rafiel said without turning back.

Kyrie gave what was not even a suppressed sigh, just a slightly longer breath. He could almost hear her shrug. He couldn't tell if it was impatience or exasperation. "Yeah," she said. "He's one of Tom's strays."

There would have been a time when Rafiel would have pursued that hint of impatience with his rival. No matter how much Rafiel might deny it or what he might say, Kyrie remained his dream girl, whom he thought the perfect woman for him. The one he loved and could never have.

For a moment, a nonphysical ache seemed to make his heart clench, and then he shook his head. "Look, it's just . . ." He shook his head again when he realized he was about to tell her that he couldn't discuss Tom without appearing partial because he still wanted her and wanted her badly. Then he realized he couldn't tell her that.

The problem with it, he thought, repressing an impulse to kick something, was that he liked Tom. They'd saved each other's lives, more or less, a couple of times. They'd fought side by side. There was something in that for men—something older than time, older than human thought. It made them blood brothers; comrades at arms. But beyond all that, he
liked
Tom. Tom was odd and he did things Rafiel couldn't fully understand but then, in a way everyone appeared like that to everyone else.

Tom came in the back door then. Because of the slight curve of the hallway, Rafiel couldn't see him, but he could hear him, talking to someone who answered back in a raspy voice. This presumably meant, Rafiel thought, that Tom was bringing back the former alligator now in human form. Not that he put it past Tom to drag an alligator into the diner. And the fact that he could easily convince everyone in there that this was perfectly normal and nothing unexpected was part of what was unique about the man. Part of the reason Rafiel knew it was no use to try to seduce Kyrie. Not anymore. He had seen his competition and he knew he didn't measure up.

Instead, he turned around, to look at Kyrie, who was staring down the hallway, towards the sound of an opening door. "He keeps old clothes in one of the storage rooms," she said. "For Old Joe. Because he shifts for no reason, and it means he ends up naked a lot."

Rafiel shrugged. "The reason I came," he said, "is that we found an arm. At the aquarium."

"An
arm
?" She looked at him blankly, with a horrified expression. "An
arm
?"

"There was a cell phone ring that came from inside one of the sharks," Rafiel said. "The cleaning divers heard it. They thought, you know . . . the shark had swallowed a cell phone. People lean over—there's an observation area—and they drop things in the water. But then they found the bones at the bottom of the tank. Human bones. That's when we were called in, to determine if they were, in fact, human. They were. A couple of vertebrae. Some toe bones." He waved his hand. For some reason the finding of those fragments of humanity at the bottom of a shark tank affected him more than finding a whole decomposing body, as he often had. They were more pathetic and more anonymous, demanding more of his pity, his outrage—and his justice.

He shook his head, to dismiss the image of the bones—a handful of them, no more. Kyrie looked at Tom, leading Old Joe—a man so old he was almost bent over, and whose skin and hair were not so much white as the curious colorlessness of the very aged—to one of the corner tables, and now Tom was ducking behind the counter and getting a bowl of clam chowder and taking it back to Old Joe.

"So they opened the shark," Rafiel said, hearing his own voice sound toneless. "And they found a human arm, still clutching a cell phone."

"Someone fell in the aquarium?" Kyrie asked, and now Rafiel had her full attention, and Tom had come up and was nearby, his eyebrows raised.

"Was it a shifter?" he asked. "Who fell?"

Rafiel shook his head. "No. It wasn't . . . it's just . . . we went over today, with a team, and did the full work-up, and while we were there, I kept smelling this shifter smell, around the shark tank and up to the little observation area. And then around the offices, too. So I made sure to forget one of my notebooks behind, and I went back to pick it up. There was only one employee there, closing up for the day, really, and she didn't mind having me look around the crime scene." He cringed inwardly, knowing exactly how many violations of procedure he had incurred, but knowing that procedure, somehow, failed to account for shifter criminals and the shifter policemen whose life might be destroyed by them. "If it's even a crime scene, of course."

"And?" Kyrie said.

"And there was a definite trail of shifter-smell winding around the observation area from which the vic could have fallen into the tank."

"But surely," Tom said, "it could also mean that of the many visitors to the aquarium, one was . . . you know, like us."

Rafiel nodded. "Oh, it could mean that. Definitely. And that's the problem. I couldn't smell all around and . . ." He shrugged. "I wanted your noses on the case, as it were. I . . . stole a set of keys while the employee was busy." That she had been busy on a wild goose chase for the wallet he claimed to have dropped somewhere only made him feel slightly guilty. He noted that neither Kyrie nor Tom looked shocked by his behavior, either. Tom chewed his lip and looked like he was thinking. "I truly can't go," he said. "Kyrie is not that good on managing the grill area. It's new. The whole stove is. She's not used to it yet."

Kyrie looked as if she would protest, but was sweeping automatically back and forth across the tables with her gaze, even as she frowned. "Perhaps," she said, "I can come with you if we do it briefly?"

Rafiel looked towards Tom. He knew very well that Kyrie didn't need anyone's permission and, in fact, he was perfectly well aware that Kyrie would resent his openly asking if Tom minded her going with him. Because it would imply Kyrie needed a minder and that she was less than a fully conscious participant in the relationship. Both of which were lies.

So Rafiel didn't say anything, but he looked at Tom.