2 Blood Trail (32 page)

Russet brows drew down. “Why tell me?”

Mark smiled, being careful not to show his teeth. “Do you see anyone else to tell? I thought you might want to do something about it.”

The growling faded and stopped. “But . . .”

“Never mind.” Mark shrugged.
Careful now, it’s almost hooked
. . . . “If you’d rather sit safely at home while other people save your family. . . .” He started to raise the window.

“No! Wait! Tell me.”

Got him
. “My uncle, Carl Biehn . . .”

“The grasseater?”

The disgust in the interruption couldn’t be missed. Mark hid a grin. He’d been about to say his uncle had seen something through his binoculars while bird-watching but hurriedly rewrote the script to take advantage of the prejudice of a predator for a vegetarian. Even if it did throw his uncle to the wolves. So to speak. “Yeah. The grasseater. He’s the one. But no one’ll believe you if you just
tell
them, so meet me in his old barn tonight after dark and I’ll give you the proof.”

“
I
don’t believe you.”

“Suit yourself. But just in case you decide your family’s worth a bit of your time, I’ll be in the barn at sunset. I suppose you can tell your . . . people anyway.” He sighed deeply, shaking his head. “But you
know
that without proof they won’t believe you—A grasseater? Ha!—not any more than you believe me and if you don’t come, you’ll have missed your only chance. Not something I’d like to have on my conscience.”

Mark raised the window and drove away before the creature had a chance to sort out the convolutions of that last sentence and ask more questions. A number of things could go wrong with the plan, but he was pretty sure he’d read the beast correctly and the risk fell within acceptable limits.

He glanced in the rearview mirror to see the creature still standing by the side of the road. Pretty soon it would convince itself that, regardless of the stranger’s motives, it couldn’t hurt to check out the proof. In the way of the young, it wouldn’t bother telling anyone else, not until it was sure.

“Come on, save the world. Be a hero. Impress the girls.” Mark patted the bundle of leg-hold traps on the seat beside him. “Make me rich.”

 

Rose got back to the fence with the jug of water just as the dust trail behind the car began to settle. She’d seen Peter talking to someone but hadn’t been able to either see or smell who it was.

“Hey!” she called. “You standing in the road for a reason?”

Peter started.

“Peter? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” He shook himself and came back over the fence. “Nothing’s wrong.”

Rose frowned.
That
was a blatant lie. About to call him on it, she remembered the advice Aunt Nadine had given her when she’d mentioned Peter’s recent moodiness. “
Let him have a little space, Rose. It’s hard for boys around this age.
” They’d never had secrets from each other before, but perhaps Aunt Nadine was right.

“Here.” She held out the jug. “Maybe this will make you feel better.”

“Maybe.” But he doubted it. Then their fingers touched and he felt the light caress sizzle up his arm and resonate though his entire body. The world went away as he drank in her scent, musky and warm and so very, very close. He swayed. He felt the jug pulled from his lax grip and then the freezing cold splash of water over his head and torso.

Rose tried not to laugh. He looked furious but that she could deal with. “I thought you were going to faint,” she offered, backing up a step.

“If we could change,” Peter growled, tossing his head and spraying water from his hair, “I’d chase you into the next county and when I caught you I’d . . .”

“You’d what?” she taunted, dancing out of his reach, suddenly conscious of a strange sense of power. If only she weren’t wearing so many clothes.

“I’d . . .” A rivulet of water worked its way past the waistband of his jeans. “I’d . . . Damn it, Rose, that’s cold! I’d bite your tail off, that’s what I’d do!”

She laughed then, it was impossible not to, and the moment passed.

“Come on.” She picked up the mallet and headed toward the fence. “Let’s get this done before Uncle Stuart bites both our tails off.”

Peter grabbed the bale of wire and followed. “But I’m all wet,” he muttered, rubbing at the moisture beading the hair on his chest.

“Quit complaining. Mere moments ago, you were too hot.”

She lifted the mallet over her head and the smell of her sweat washed down over him. Peter felt his ears begin to burn and all at once, he came to a decision. He would go to Carl Biehn’s barn tonight.

He toyed with the idea of telling his Uncle Stuart and then discarded it. One of two things would happen, either he’d dismiss the information about the grasseater out of hand and want to know what this human was up to, or he’d believe the information and want to receive the proof himself. Either way, he, Peter, would be out of the action.
That
wasn’t going to happen.

He’d tell Uncle Stuart when he had the proof. Present it to him as a fait accompli. That would show the older wer he was someone to be reckoned with. Not a child any longer. Peter’s head filled with visions of challenging the alpha male and winning. Of running the pack. Of winning the right to mate.

His nostrils flared. If he came back with the information that saved the family, it couldn’t help but impress Rose.

 

“You the young woman who’s waiting to see me?”

Vicki came awake with a start and glanced down at her watch. It was 6:10. “Damn!” she muttered, shoving her glasses back up her nose. Her mouth tasted like the inside of a sewer.

“Here, maybe this’ll help.”

Vicki stared down at the cup of tea that had suddenly appeared in her hand and thought,
Why not?

A moment later she had her answer.

She very carefully set the cup down and forced her scattered wits to regroup.
This is the clubroom at the Grove Road Sportman’s Club. So this little old lady in blue jeans must be . . .

“Bertie Reid?”

“In the flesh. Such as remains of it.” The older woman smiled, showing a mouthful of teeth too regular to be real. “And you must be Vicki Nelson, Private Investigator.” The smile broadened, the face around it compressing into an even tighter network of fine lines. “I hear you need my help.”

“Yeah.” Vicki stretched, apologized, and watched as Bertie settled carefully into one of the gold velour chairs, teacup balanced precisely on one knee. “Barry Wu tells me that if anyone in this city can help, it’s you.”

She looked pleased. “He said that? What a sweetie. Nice boy, Barry, bound to be in the medals at the next Olympics.”

“So everyone says.”

“No, everyone says he’ll take the gold. I don’t. I don’t want to jinx the boy before he gets there, neither do I want him to feel badly if he comes home with the silver. Second best in the entire world is nothing to feel badly about and all those armchair athletes who sneer at second deserve a good swift kick in the butt.” She took a deep breath and a long draught of tea. “Now then, what did you want to know?”

“Is there anyone around London, not just at this club, who can shoot with anything approaching Barry Wu’s accuracy?”

“No. Was there anything else?”

Vicki blinked. “No?” she repeated.

“Not that I know of. Oh, there’re a couple of kids who might be decent if they practiced and one or two old-timers who occasionally show a flash of what they once had but people with Barry’s ability and the discipline necessary to develop it are rare.” She grinned and saluted with the cup. “That’s why they only give out one gold.”

“Shit!”

The old woman studied Vicki’s face for a moment, then put down the teacup and settled back in the chair, crossing one denim clad leg over the other, the lime green laces in her hightops the brightest spot of color in the room. “How much do you know about competition shooting?”

“Not much,” Vicki admitted.

“Then tell me why you’re asking that question, and I’ll tell you if you’re asking the right one.”

Vicki took off her glasses and scrubbed at her face with her hands. It didn’t make things any clearer. In fact, she realized as the movement pulled at the bruise on her temple, it was a pretty stupid thing to do. She shoved her glasses back on and scrambled in her bag for the bottle of pills they’d given her at the hospital.
There was a time I could make love to a vampire, walk away from major car accident, rush a client to the hospital, stay up until dawn, and spend the day arguing ethics with Celluci, no problem. I must be getting old
. She took the pill dry. The only alternative was another mouthful of tea and she didn’t think she was up to that.

“Cracked my head,” she explained as she tossed the small plastic bottle back in her bag.

“In the line of duty?” Bertie asked, looking intrigued.

“Sort of.” Vicki sighed. Somehow in the last couple of minutes, she’d come to the conclusion that Bertie was right. Without knowing more about competition shooting, she
couldn’t
know if she was asking the right questions. Her voice low to prevent the only other occupant of the clubroom from overhearing, she presented an edited version of the events that had brought her to London.

Bertie whistled softly at the description of the shots that killed “two of the family dogs,” then she said, “Let me be sure I’ve got this straight, five hundred yards on a moving target at night from twenty feet up in a pine tree?”

“As much as five, maybe as little as three.”

“As little as three?” Bertie snorted. “And both dogs were killed with a single, identical head shot? Come on.” Setting the teacup aside, she heaved herself out of the chair, pale blue eyes gleaming behind the split glass of her bifocals.

“Where are we going?”

“My place. One shot like that might have been a fluke, luck, nothing more. But two, two means a trained talent and you don’t acquire skill like that overnight. Like I said before, there’s damned few people in the world who can do that kind of shooting and this marksman of yours didn’t spring full grown from the head of Zeus. I think I can help you find him, but we’ve got to go to my place to do it. That’s where all my reference material is. This lot wouldn’t know a book if it bit them on the butt.” She waved a hand around the clubroom. The fortyish man sitting at one of the tables stroking the cat looked startled and waved back. “Gun magazines, that’s all they ever read. I keep telling them they need a library. Probably leave them mine when I die and it’ll spend ten or twenty years sitting around getting outdated then they’ll throw it out. Did you drive?”

“No . . .”

“No? I thought every PI owned a sexy red convertible. Never mind. We’ll take my car. I live pretty close.” A sudden flurry of shots caught her attention and she strode over to the window. “Ha! I told him not to buy a Winchester if he wants to compete this fall. He’ll be months getting used to that offset scope. Fool should’ve listened. Robert!”

The man at the table looked even more startled at being directly addressed. “Yes?”

“If Gary comes up tell him I said, I told you so.”

“Uh, sure, Bertie.”

“His wife’s down in the pistol range,” Bertie confided to Vicki as they headed out the door. “They come by most evenings after work. He hates guns but he loves her so they compromised; she only shoots targets, he doesn’t watch.”

Bertie’s car was a huge old Country Squire station wagon, white, with wood-colored panels. The eight cylinders roared as they headed out onto the highway and then settled down into a steady seventy-five kilometers an hour purr.

Vicki tried not to fidget at the speed—or lack of it—but the passing time gnawed at her. Hopefully Donald’s wound would remind the wer of why they had to stay close to the house after dark, but she wasn’t counting on it: As long as the wer insisted on their right to move around their land, every sunset, every extra day she spent solving this case, put another one of them in danger. If she couldn’t convince them to stay safe, and so far she’d had remarkably little luck at that, she had to find this guy as fast as possible.

A car surged past, horn honking.

“I wanted to get a bumper sticker that read, ‘Honk at me and I’ll shoot your tires out’ but a friend talked me out of it.” Bertie sighed. “Waste of diminishing natural resources driving that speed.” She dropped another five kilometers as she spoke, just to prove her point.

Vicki sighed as well, but her reasons were a little different.

Bertie Reid lived in a small bungalow about a ten-minute drive from the range.

Ten minutes had anyone else been driving
, Vicki sighed silently as she got out of the car and followed the older woman into the house. “May I use your phone, I’d better call—
Oh, hell, what do I call Celluci? —
my driver and let him know where I am.”

“Phone’s right there.” She pointed into the living room. “I’ll just go put the kettle on for tea. Unless you’d rather have coffee.”

“I would actually.”

“It’s only instant.”

“That’s fine. Thank you.” Vicki was not a coffee snob and anything was better than tea.

The phone, a white touch-tone, sat on of a pile of newspapers beside an overstuffed floral armchair with a matching footstool. A pole lamp with three adjustable lights rose up behind the chair and the remote for the television lay on one wide arm, partially buried under an open
TV Guide
.

Obviously the command center
. Vicki punched in the Heerkens number and looked around the living room while she waited for someone at the farm to answer. The room bulged with books, on shelves, on the floor, on the other pieces of furniture, classics, romances—she spotted two by Elizabeth Fitzroy, Henry’s pseudonym—mysteries, nonfiction. Vicki had seen bookstores with a less eclectic collection.