Night Shifters (80 page)

He had the hood firmly pulled over his head, and started to open the door, then stopped. “Do you have a quarter? Because I can’t use a credit card on this. It would be way too obvious.”

Rafiel grabbed a quarter from the drink holder, where he normally kept parking-meter fodder. He flipped it at Tom, who grabbed it out of the air. Good to know he was getting the feeling in his hands back.

He watched Tom get out of the car, very quickly, cross the high school campus semidiagonally, so that any witness would say he came out of the school. Sometimes—he thought, as he watched Tom cross the street and run, hell-bent for leather, towards the convenience store, so fast that he wasn’t any more than a brief dark blur amid the snow—it was easy to believe the things Tom told him about his teenage years. Casual juvenile delinquence would impart that sort of knowledge. How to trick the police, 101.

In less time than seemed possible, for what he needed to do, Tom was back, coming into the car through the back door and saying, “Drive, drive, drive.”

Rafiel drove. “Who answered?”

“I think just the receptionist or dispatcher, or whatever. She told me she would transfer me to someone else, but I hung up.” He grinned at Rafiel, a feral grin, and leaned forward on the seat. “I grabbed the phone with my sleeve. And I wiped the coin before putting it in.”

Rafiel sighed. “Probably overkill,” he said. “We are not exactly the most advanced scientific police in the world.” He took a bunch of turns, very fast, not so much seeking to be physically far away from the convenience store, as seeking to be in a place no one would associate with the convenience store. In no time at all, it seemed, he was driving through an upscale neighborhood of the type that used to be a suburb in the days when the main form of commuting was the trolley car. Eight blocks or so, in a direct shot from downtown Goldport, this neighborhood was all shaded, set-back, two- and three-floor houses, which managed to look much like Christmas cards under the snow. “As long as they don’t catch you in the act of putting the coin in, or dialing them up, that’s pretty much it. Oh, if it’s anyone but McKnight, they’ll exert due diligence, too, by going to the clerk and asking if they saw someone call.”

“Unlikely,” Tom said. “I was at the back of the store the whole time. Unless he can see through brick walls . . .”

“Yes,” Rafiel said, and then, because the way that Tom was leaning forward over the seats was starting to give him visions of suddenly hitting a tree and ending up with Tom splattered all over his dashboard, “You know, we have laws about seat belts, in this state. As a policeman—”

Tom didn’t answer. He just leaned back and buckled the seat belt. Then he made a sudden startled sound. “Kyrie,” he said. “I haven’t called Kyrie.”

Kyrie was bargaining with fate. She was working, steadily, as if nothing had happened, but behind her smile, her ready quips at the customers, she was bargaining with fate.

She had started from the point of view that if Tom were to walk in, right then, she would only tell him how worried she’d been. She wouldn’t make a big deal at all out of it. But since then, as the minutes passed and she heard neither from him nor from Rafiel, she’d started bargaining.

Okay, okay, if Tom walks in right now,
she told herself,
I’ll just smile and tell him how glad I am that he’s alive.
Aware that she’d actually paused to listen for the sound of the back door opening up, she let out a hiss of frustration at herself. It wasn’t sane, and it wasn’t rational, but the thing was that she’d been expecting Tom to come in in response to her silent concession. She sighed at her own stupidity, and looked at the wall. Okay, he’d been gone more than two hours. What if he was frozen by the side of the road?

She could call Rafiel. She should call Rafiel. But what if Rafiel hadn’t found him, yet? Or worse, what if Rafiel had found him? And he wasn’t alive? In that case, the longer she took to find out about it, the better, right?

No. No. She was being stupid. It was unlikely he’d be dead, and if he was ill or severely hypothermic, of course she wanted to know. Needed to know. She set down the latest batch of orders and nudged Conan, who was getting much better at tending tables, but who, despite lots of coffee, looked like death warmed over.

“Take over my tables for a little while, okay?” she asked.

He nodded. His gaze turned to her, said what he could not say in full voice. And it was something that Kyrie simply didn’t want to hear.
What if he’s dead? What if I left him and then the Ancient Ones killed him?

Kyrie shook her head at him, slightly, denying her own misgivings as well as his. And then she stepped behind the counter and reached for the phone on the wall, trying to figure out how she could ask Rafiel questions without either giving away the shifter thing, or alarming Anthony, who was looking at her curiously. She was sure he had decided that she and Tom had had a spat. He was giving her that look of concern and gentle enquiry friends give you when they don’t want to stick themselves in the middle of your marital disputes.

She took a deep breath. She could just ask Rafiel how it was going.

The phone rang, so suddenly and loudly that it made her jump. She fumbled for it, almost dropped it, managed to get it to her ear and say, “Hello?”

“Is that how you answer the phone for a business?” Tom’s gently teasing voice was such a relief to hear that Kyrie felt her knees go weak, and tears sting behind her eyes.

“Idiot,” she said.

“Um . . . that’s also not the approved . . .” Tom said. She could see him grin as he spoke. And then, as though realizing he could only push his luck so far, he said, “Look, everything is okay. Sorry to take so long to call back, but we found Old Joe—”

“Old Joe?” Nothing could be further from her mind than the transient alligator shifter. She saw Anthony give her an odd look. Clearly that had also not figured in his speculation.

“Yeah. I’ll explain when I get back. Look, it might be easier . . . if you can leave Anthony and Conan in charge and join us in the room at the bed-and-breakfast?” He chuckled softly. “I’d like to add girls to the repertoire of odd visitors I shower with.”

“Idiot,” she said again, very softly.

“Yes, I am. Conan made it back okay, right?”

“Yeah. Conan is fine. He’s getting better at waiting tables, too.” Again, Kyrie was conscious of Anthony’s baffled look at her. She did her best to brazen it out, as she asked, “So you met Rafiel?” At least she assumed so, unless he had now taken to using the royal we.

“Yeah. He’ll be coming back with me. We’re going by a doughnut place first, though, apparently.”

“What?”

“I don’t know,” Tom said. Kyrie could hear another voice in the background, that she had to assume was Rafiel talking. “He says they have a tracker in his car, and if he doesn’t go by a doughnut place at least once a week they kick him out of the force.”

“Ha ha,” Kyrie said.

“Yeah, I told him it was lame, too, but at least he’s making an effort at making fun of himself. A few more years and he should be human. Hey. Stop hitting me. Police brutality. So, do you think you can make it to the room? In about fifteen minutes?”

“I’ll manage,” Kyrie said.

“All right. And, listen . . . I’m an idiot. Sorry if I worried you.”

She tried to deny that he worried her at all, but her mouth refused to form quite that big a lie. “It’s okay,” she said, instead, because she had bargained with fate, and she’d promised not to kill him, not to maim him even slightly, and finally that she wasn’t even going to yell at him. “It’s okay.”

Tom thought the place must have been a Dunkin’ Doughnuts in a previous life, but it had now become—according to the sign hastily painted on a facade in which the Dunkin’ Doughnuts name was still readable from the too-white shadow of the letters that used to cover it—good morning doughnuts.

The whole place had the sort of look of someone in limited circumstances and hiding out under a false name to avoid embarrassing the family. On the door, a hand-lettered sign read cash only please, which gave the impression that the people running it were planning to escape to South America at any moment, taking their ill-gotten gains with them.

But inside, it was surprisingly cozy, with aged but well-scrubbed formica tables, around which gathered bevies of retirees and housewives. This was clearly a gathering spot for a working-class neighborhood.

Behind the counter, a Chinese family made Tom tense, before he scolded himself that race had nothing to do with it. Yes, most dragon shifters might be Asian. But he clearly wasn’t. And the dire wolf was just as bad as the Great Sky Dragon’s triad. Perhaps worse, as at least it could be claimed that the Great Sky Dragon tried to protect all dragon shifters—while the dire wolf seemed to have very few loyalties but to himself. Tom wondered if Dire was representative of the Ancient Ones at all. Perhaps he’d just chosen to claim the role. There was no telling.

Rafiel was clearly known here. He ordered a dozen doughnuts, rapidly choosing the flavors, and grinning at Tom’s bewildered expression. “I told you. We’re required to visit these places. At least once a week.”

Tom shook his head, smiling a little.

“Do you want coffee?” Rafiel asked. And when Tom nodded yes, he proceeded to order three. “I owe one to a guy in a doorway on Fairfax. He told me where to find you.”

“The guy in a khaki jacket?” Tom asked.

“Yeah. He didn’t seem to want to go to a shelter at any cost, and he had one of those Mylar blankets.” Rafiel shrugged. “I wondered . . .” But never said what he wondered as he handed the bills over to the lady behind the counter.

Later in the truck, Tom said, “I wondered too. But he didn’t smell of shifter.”

“I know,” Rafiel said. “Though to be honest, as cold as I was, I don’t think I could smell anything.”

“That’s possible,” Tom said. He bit his lip. “But I think I or you would have smelled something . . . even just a hint.”

Rafiel nodded. He put a hand into the doughnut box, nudging it open in a way that bespoke long practice. He wedged a doughnut in his mouth, as he shifted into gear with his free hand. Then, with the doughnut still in his mouth, he backed out of the parking lot of the doughnut shop and onto the road.

“Why a dozen doughnuts?” Tom asked. “Seriously. Don’t tell me they’d kick you out of the force. Why a dozen doughnuts?”

Rafiel took a bite of his doughnut, dipped into the box again for a napkin and wedged the napkin-wrapped doughnut into the cup holder on the dashboard, all while driving with one hand, in a way that Tom had to admit, given the snow and what looked to him no more visibility than about a palm beyond the windshield, seemed a bit cavalier.

“Energy,” he said. “I think I’m going to have a long night of it. I don’t think I can go and interview the male employees now, of course. But if Old Joe was right, and if there really was a body at the aquarium, I should get a call any minute now. And that usually means a few hours securing the scene, sweeping for evidence and all that. It’s not a five-minute job.”

“Right,” Tom said.

“But first,” Rafiel said, in all seriousness, “we must take the coffee to Khaki Guy, whom we’ll do our best to sniff out, if he is a shifter. And then we must meet Kyrie. There’s a meeting I’m not looking forward to.”

“Why?” Tom said, surprised.

“Because I didn’t call her as soon as I found you.” He grinned wider and added, with every appearance of enjoying the thought, “She’s going to rip my balls off and beat me with them.”