How to Run with a Naked Werewolf (10 page)

Besides, the bar was just a short walk in a town that was only a few city blocks long. I had been going stir-crazy in the room. Watching Caleb in his environment might give me some insight into who I was traveling with. I worked through a couple more rationalizations before I sneaked into the bar through the employee entrance and edged my way down a dark-paneled corridor, following the noise of the barroom.

My semiprivileged upbringing hadn’t acquainted me with dives like this. Despite growing up in Tennessee, home of country music and hard living, I couldn’t say I’d walked inside a honky-tonk until I got a job at a place in Texas called Oil Slick’s. The waitresses had to wear tiny red tank tops and jeans that were practically painted on. I’d never waitressed, but I still made decent tips, because the customers found my clumsiness
endearing and my butt suitably heart-shaped. Gustavo, the enormous boulder-shaped bouncer who watched over the barroom, made me feel safe when the crowd got too loud and the customers got too close. The other girls were nice enough, as long as I put my share in the communal tip jar. Over the first few weeks, I perfected the art of not answering personal questions, which eventually became a vital survival skill.

But the first time a fight broke out at one of my tables, I ran to the bathroom and threw up. Being around violence like that, I just lost it. I realized it was going to be an occupational hazard, and I thought the best way to desensitize myself to it would be self-defense classes. So two stops later, in Topeka, I took a Monday-morning women’s defense class at the Y. I followed it with brief stints in karate and tae kwon do. Heck, I even took a month’s worth of jiujitsu before I got spooked by a fellow student whose dark hair and unsmiling blue eyes reminded me of Glenn, and I ran for Nevada. I was far from an expert. I knew just enough to defend myself if needed. I would have to enroll in a class once the Network got me settled again. For the moment, I was pretty happy with my misappropriated baton.

The music grew louder as I made my way to the barroom. It was a blend of rock and country and was very, very bad, which was almost a prerequisite in a place like this. Smoke billowed over the room, the neon from the Early American Beer Sign decor turning the fog a faint, improbable pink.

I paired up with a painfully thin woman walking from the ladies’ room to the jukebox, so I could get a
better look at the bar. Waitressing had taught me how to move unobtrusively through crowds. Between that and my new wardrobe, anyone who didn’t know me would think I just wanted to peruse song selections with my skinny gal pal. In the glow of Hank Williams Jr. and Alabama titles, I spotted Caleb at the end of the battered oak bar. A weathered, chubby man in a dingy gray apron stood behind the bar, shaking his head as he chatted with my werewolf traveling companion. At the sight of his dark head bent over a pilsner, I took a deep breath and felt that terrible tension ease from my chest. A faint, warm, pleasant buzz spread out from my belly to my extremities, easing the wind’s chill from my cheeks.

Although his back was turned to me, I saw Caleb perk up the minute I walked in. As he turned, I ducked behind a large biker making his way over to the pool table. If the Harley enthusiast noticed a tiny woman suddenly melting into his shadow, he didn’t say anything. Caleb’s eyes scanned the room before turning back to his beer.

For a few moments, I watched Caleb in conversation with the bartender. He was relaxed, but there was an air of menace in his posture. Whatever had happened before I arrived, he was not happy about it.

I felt something brush against my shoulder as someone moved from the front entrance toward the barroom. The contact surprised me, and I jumped, barely containing the urge to yelp. Caleb’s head turned toward me again, and I scrambled into a nearby booth. Just as I sat down, a weaselly little blond man slid into the seat
across from me. He seemed just as surprised to see me there as I was to see him.

The man grinned at me. “Well, hey there, sweetie. How are you?”

I blinked rapidly, recognizing that eager, crooked smile, the bulbous little nose. I’d seen those features in the photos from Caleb’s files. Somehow, I’d managed to grab a booth with Caleb’s quarry. And he seemed to think my rapid blinking was some sort of eyelash-batting gesture.

Fan-freaking-tastic.

If I jumped
out of the booth as if my butt was scalded, Caleb would probably notice. If I tried to slink away quietly and offended Jerry, making a scene, Caleb would probably notice. All I had to do was humor this moron for a minute or two and then hightail it before—

Crap
. Caleb had noticed.

And from across the room, he did not look happy. He stood, moving swiftly around the tables, approaching Jerry from behind. I shook my head slightly, prompting Jerry to ask, “Everything OK, sweetie?”

Caleb frowned, and I drummed up the ditzy-blonde voice I’d perfected at Oil Slick’s. “Hi! Do you mind if I sit here?”

Jerry’s dim but perfectly friendly grin was back. “Well, since you already are, I don’t mind at all. Can I buy you a drink?”

“I’ll have whatever you’re having,” I said, smiling sweetly.

He hollered, “Beer!” across the barroom, which prompted a rude gesture from the bartender. Jerry turned back to me. “Well, look at you. Here I thought I’d met all the pretty girls in town. You’re new around here, huh?”

Right, right, idle chitchat. I can do this
, I told myself. I could keep Jerry pleasantly distracted and maybe even get him outside, where Caleb could intercede without causing a loud, violent scene. Jerry didn’t seem like a sleaze, which helped considerably. He just seemed like a rather sad, lonely guy who had very bad judgment regarding auto loans and business transactions. Part of me sort of wanted to help him escape out the back door. I smiled, although the expression was a bit shaky, and leaned across the table toward him.

“My boyfriend and I just blew into town a few days ago. But I can’t seem to find him. I guess I’ll just have to spend my time with you.” I slowly walked my fingers up his denim-clad arm.

“Well, his loss is my gain, sweetie. I’ll just get us some drinks.” Jerry waved his arms in the direction of the bar and frowned. “Len doesn’t seem to be cooperatin’,” he said, frowning slightly at the bartender, who was pointedly ignoring him. “Why don’t I go get you that beer?”

I smiled, all sweetness and light. “Why don’t you?”

He sauntered toward the bar, grinning at me the whole time.

Now was probably a good time to run. As nonsleazy
as he seemed, Jerry could try his own luck with Caleb. When he turned his back to me to order, I hopped up from the table, made toward the back exit, and ran right into Caleb.

There’s nothing like a face full of pissed-off werewolf to get your adrenal responses going.

“What are you doing here?” Caleb hissed, dark eyes flashing faintly golden as he wrapped his fingers around my wrist and pulled me toward the corridor. Although he clearly wasn’t messing around, his grip wasn’t tight enough to hurt, and I felt insistently guided rather than dragged against my will.

“I got bored,” I whispered, in an effort not to attract Jerry’s attention. “And then I got here, and it all just sort of spiraled out of control.”

“I told you to stay at the motel.”

“I’m starting to grasp why,” I told him. “And I’m sorry. I got anxious when you didn’t come back.”

And I grasped exactly how needy that sounded as the words came out of my mouth. Maybe if I started drinking, I would develop some sort of verbal filter around this man.

A fleeting, pleased look flashed across his face, just before another more lasting look of . . . guilt? That seemed like a strange response to an awkward admission of semifondness. He cleared his throat and pushed me away, against the wall, until there was enough room to make the dance chaperones at my old high school happy.

“Look, Anna, I think we should talk.”

And then, of course—

“Uh, hello?” Jerry asked, returning with beers in hand. “Is this your boyfriend?”

I gave a very startled Caleb an uneasy glance and mumbled, “Ummm . . .”

Even I am amazed by my own smoothness sometimes.

Caleb was the first to snap out of whatever bad-decision haze was circling our heads, drawling, “Yeah, this is my girl. And she doesn’t need anybody buying her beers but me.” He slid his arm around my waist and pushed me behind his broad back.

Resigning myself to being the mewling damsel in this messed-up situation, I dropped my forehead against the back of Caleb’s jacket and sighed, before loudly protesting in full-on Southern drawl, “Aw, baby, he didn’t meant anything by it!”

Jerry raised his hands, spilling the better part of the beer down his shoulders. “Hey, man,
she
sat down with
me
. I didn’t mean any harm.”

“You wanna talk about this outside?” Caleb growled as I backed toward the employee exit and calculated my chances of bolting for the motel room and avoiding the inevitable fiasco of fisticuffs. And frankly, my feelings were a little hurt that Jerry had thrown me over so quickly when faced with my pissed-off “boyfriend.”

Defensive and agitated, Jerry retorted, “Hey, maybe if you were taking care of her at home, she wouldn’t have to go looking for it elsewhere.”

“That’s it,” Caleb barked, grabbing a handful of Jerry’s blue-jean jacket and rattling him back and forth. “Now I’m kicking your ass!”

I let out a plaintive wail, as if I couldn’t believe our lovely evening on the town was being ruined by such barbarism.

Jerry clawed at Caleb’s hands, trying to wriggle loose, like a worm on a hook. “No, she’s not even worth it, man.” With that, he managed to jerk away from Caleb’s massive hands and turned to walk away.

Now, having spent some time around the male barfly, or
Alcoholus moronicus
, I’d learned to recognize the signs when a guy was faking walking away from a bar fight so he could sucker-punch his opponent. I was about to shout a warning, but Caleb apparently recognized those signs, too, because when Jerry turned to whip his beer at Caleb’s head, both of us had already stepped out of the way, leaving the bottle hurtling toward the large barback, who had just carried a keg through the employee entrance behind us. Thinking Caleb was the beer tosser, the barback took a swing at him. But instead of hitting Caleb, the punch landed right in the face of an old, grizzled trucker type, whose partial denture plate went flying out of his mouth and behind the bar.

The toothless trucker was none too pleased about this development and dived at Caleb and the barback. Caleb moved to push me out of the way, but I’d already ducked, naturally falling into step with the waitresses. They tended to tuck away into a safe corner until the fists and flying objects stilled. And considering the way the fight seemed to spread throughout the barroom like a virus, those objects would likely remain in motion for some time.

Caleb had ducked the barback’s first punch but caught the second on its upward swing at his chin. Although it would have been better to keep moving, I was transfixed by the grace with which Caleb moved that massive, powerful body around; sidestepping and dodging like a matador, all the while tracking Jerry over his shoulder so the little weasel couldn’t escape.

The physician in me couldn’t help but tally the injuries. Caleb’s emergency-room bill would have been considerable if he wasn’t going to heal up automatically. His effort to keep watch on Jerry kept getting him punched in the face. I could hear the bridge of his nose crack under the pressure of the barback’s fist, not to mention two fractured ribs and a split in the skin over his left cheek. Across the barroom, I saw an old, wizened trucker flip another onto a scarred pine bar table hard enough to break his clavicle. And a fireplug of a waitress brought her tray down on the trucker’s head so hard he was going to have at least a minor concussion.

Unfortunately, Jerry was picking his way across the room, around the flying fists, and seemed to be ducking toward the front door. And Caleb was too distracted by the painfully thin jukebox woman biting his arm to notice.

I scrambled across the room with all the grace of a drunken gazelle and cut Jerry off before he reached his escape route.
OK, brain, what are you doing? You don’t approve of Caleb’s job, and you don’t know Jerry, so why are you trying to come up with a distraction to keep him from getting away?

“If you wait a minute, I’ll show you my boobs.” I blurted out the words, stopping Jerry in his tracks.

What?

Jerry had the exact same reaction, blinking rapidly at me as he spluttered. “Wh-what?”

This was the brilliant distraction you came up with?
I seethed at my cerebral cortex.
How did you get me through medical school?
I could only blame the bad influence of the biker-babe clothes.

“D-did you say you’d show me your boobs?” Jerry spluttered nervously, as if he was on the verge of giggling.

I scanned the room for Caleb, who was now being detained by the headlock the three-hundred-pound barback was putting on him. And now I was on the edge of panic, because there was no way I was flashing this guy. I did not spend four almost homeless years avoiding a pole—despite several potentially lucrative offers—to start publicly baring skin now. I had backed myself into a corner, in terms of negotiations. I would have to keep this in mind for future bar fights. “Maybe just one.”

Behind Jerry, there was a flash of familiar plaid. At some point during my mammary-related musings, Caleb must have shaken off the angry barback, because he was now creeping up behind Jerry, holding a finger to his lips, and brandishing a purloined pool cue. I grimaced, as if in heavy consideration.

Jerry was about to protest this bargain when Caleb crept up behind him and whacked him over the head. If Jerry had any friends who might have objected to
him being whacked over the head and then packed out of the bar like baggage, they were too caught up in the fight to notice.