(See Pat? No dangling cliff hanger this week!)
**********
Day 6
Tom
watched as Alex Hamilton, aka the fat Aussie bastard, plowed his way down Main
Street headed right for the Washington State PI. Curious that the county’s most
prominent pimp knew exactly who the mule would be, he thought. He glanced over
at Jenna McGowan, aka the Washington State PI, and flinched. She had seen
Hamilton, all right. By the looks of it, she was all set to kill him the moment
he came within range. Curiouser and curiouser. One thing was certain, he needed
to forestall the pending confrontation,
preferably without alerting Hamilton that Ms McGowan was in contact with the
local authorities. No problem there; all
he had to do was harass the pimp a bit. No way a career criminal like that
would run the risk of contacting a mule right in front of a cop. Then he’d have
time to force an explanation out of Ms. McGowan.
He
started the engine of his patrol car, revving the huge V8 hemi enough for it to
be heard over the car’s sound isolation and the regular street noise, and
slowly pulled out into traffic. He smiled, genuinely amused, when Hamilton’s
startle face flashed his way and then turned back fast enough to give the pimp whiplash. Hamilton turned on the next cross street—two blocks
before the drug store Ms McGowan was coming out of—and walked at a brisk pace
toward the pedestrian-only mall.
Yep, he’d
been headed for the lovely PI, all right. And judging by his reaction, Hamilton
had been so very focused on her that he hadn’t seen Tom in his patrol car. That
fit with her strong reaction of hate toward the pimp since emotion that strong
for someone you don’t know, or didn’t know you knew, was always reciprocated.
Tom stifled the urge to follow the fat bastard—great, now she had him calling Hamilton
that!—and continued down Main Street at a leisurely pace. The pedestrian mall wasn’t a problem, cops
could drive on it. But it was best to let Hamilton think he’d gotten away
before blowing his contact.
**********
“Hi,”
Tom said out his rolled down window an hour later. Ms. McGowan glanced behind her,
toward him, then smiled. He was officially off duty now, in civies and driving
his old pick-up truck.
“Hi
yourself,” she said, quickly picking up on the game he had in mind. Just two
strangers meeting for the fist time at the city park. He pulled up to the curb
and parked.
“The
cops in this town must be pretty lax if you feel confident parking on the wrong
side of the street like that,” she said with a smirk. Tom shot her a dirty look
before letting his face relax in to a sexy grin.
“Oh, I
don’t know about lax,” he drawled. “But I’m confident they’ll let me slide this
one time. I’m Tom, by the way. Don’t remember every seeing you around town
before.
“Jenna,”
she said with a smart-aleck grin. “I’m not from this town.”
“Just passing
through or…?” he asked.
“Or,”
she replied. She waited a moment to let him know she was still teasing/needling
him, then smiled for real. “I’m in town following up on a few job leads. Just
got here today.” She turned away from him and looked around the park. “I have
to say, this park is truly exceptional. Who came up with the idea for a dog
bowl for a pond?”
Tom
laughed at that. This park was rather exceptional, but it was also more than a
touch whimsical. That “pond” was a magical portal into a huge underground water
system used by water-type shifters. No one knew who built the water bowl pond,
probably the same person who opened a portal in it, but it had fired the
imagination of the town’s artistic set. They now had a huge kitty litter sand
box, a cork screw pet tie-down stake that doubled as a curly-que slide, and
other house pet themed playground equipment. Even the non-shifters in town
loved this park.
“That
is putting it mildly,” he agreed as he sat down next to her on the dog bone
park bench. “About every six months, someone comes along and adds another “attraction”
to this park. There’s been talk of tearing down that old warehouse next to it
to make room for more stuff to be added.”
She laughed
and a chill ran down his spine. Tom couldn’t help leaning just a bit closer to
catch her scent. She’d obviously found the stash of heat-defeating body sprays
the drug store stocked because he didn’t catch the overwhelming scent of a
bitch in heat, but her natural scent, augmented with natural plant-based perfume,
fired his every canine sense anyway. There were other dog shifters in town,
even a couple German shepherds like him. Not one of them smelled as good as
this female, though. He shifted slightly to release some of the pressure on his
suddenly stirring cock. Oh, damn, this assignment was going to be hell on his
cold water bill.
“So,”
he said, forcing his mind to over-ride his body. “Just how do you know Alex
Hamilton, a.k.a the fat Aussie bastard, anyway?” He smile faltered, then became
wooden. She shrugged.
“I’m a
dingo, he’s a Tasmanian tiger. My kind have been trying to hunt his out of existence
for thousands of years.”
Score! He thought excitedly. He’d known
Hamilton was a shifter, but no one in town knew what type. And his sexy little
PI was a dingo. That explained why his nose told him “canine” but not what
kind. He’d never run into the Australian breed before, in shifters or in
regular animals.
“I
thought Tasmanian tigers were extinct,” he commented.
“Real
ones are,” she agreed. “They lost the evolutionary battle over a
hundred years ago. We’ve been trying to force the shape shifting type to follow
their animal bretheren but so far, no luck.”
“Why?”
Tom asked, curious. Shifters usually banded together, not hunted each other out
of existence.
“Trust
me, the world would be a better place without them.”
“I have
a hard time believing there are not good Tasmanian tigers around,” Tom said
with disbelief.
“Well
there aren’t, and that’s not species bias talking. They kill any of their young
that doesn’t pass muster. And for them, “muster” means being cold, nasty, psychotic
pieces of filth.” She shrugged. “We tried the live and let live approach back
when we first settle in what is now Australia. They started this war by
slaughtering our young. They’ve continued to give us reason to keep trying to
eradicate them.”
“I don’t
understand,” Tom said.
“It
wasn’t humans who killed off the real Tasmanian tigers, Tom. Fossil records
clearly show that ancient tigers were much smaller than they were when they
officially died off.”
“Real
tigers were small and the shifter type were bigger,” Tom said, realizing the
point she was trying to make. “The bigger species killed off the smaller one.”
“And
decimated our people as well as many other animals, too,” she agreed. “They are
cold-blooded killers. They destroy everything they touch. Once the giant
lizards of Australia died out, they had no natural predators, so they began
killing everything. Now we dingos keep their numbers under control.”
Tom
nodded, understanding her point but not liking it. He was a cop. He’d seen
criminals that were totally unrehabilitatable, no matter how many breaks a
judge gave them. The thought of a whole race of mindless criminals running
around unchecked was worse than the idea of shifters killing shifters. The
humans could keep their ideas of turning the other cheek. That kind of thing
worked for them, but it didn’t usually work for folks whose animal nature was
just a turn away from showing at all times.
“That
makes it kind of interesting, then, with you being sent here to make contact
with him and all,” Tom said after a moment.
“Sweetie,
you have no idea. I’m pretty sure this was all a set-up for me.”
“And
you contacting me was…”
“The
best answer I could think up to ambush the fuckers right back.”
