“The team is on its way, and so am I. But give me one reason why I should share confidential information with you.”
“Because the next time I find something interesting, you want me to call you and not the New Orleans Times-Picayune .” I snapped the phone shut. I did so love toying with cops. Jodi would hate my guts, but she’d share. Of course, if she found the slightest reason to charge me with anything, no matter how minuscule, she would, just to get me back. Tit for tat. I wheeled the bike off the drive and beneath a shade tree.
“You’re nuts, you know that?” Rick said. “Stark raving crazy, you are.”
I unzipped my leather jacket, peeled it off, and draped it over the handlebars. “I may be here for a while. You staying or going?”
“I’m outta here.” He paused, torn by two distinctly different needs. “How do you know the rogue vamp came through here last night?”
I decided on the truth, as far as it went. I had to practice it on somebody before I tried it out on Jodi. “I followed him partway. Saw him come through here but never saw him leave.”
“You told the cops the place smells like dead meat. All I smell is fresh cut grass. And lady, I got a good nose.”
The fragrance of the newly mown lawn across the street did permeate the air, but I had automatically filtered out every scent but the one I was looking for. Not smart. I should have walked around the house first. I really had to work on my lying. Going for surprised and innocent, I asked, “You don’t smell that?”
Rick’s eyebrows suggested I hadn’t been entirely successful. He dug into his jacket’s inner pocket and held out some folded sheets, paper-clipped together. “The property owners you asked for,” he said.
I palmed the small wad, tucking it into my shirt. “Thanks.”
“I’d like to stick around but . . .”
“But you have issues with cops?”
“Something like that. I’ll see you later.”
“Sure. Dancing at the club you play at.” I offered him a half smile. “Beer’ll be my treat.” Nothing like a girl asking a guy out—looked like I was a modern-day gal, after all, or I just wanted to keep an eye on him and his acquaintances. Rick might be on his own rogue hunt, hoping to bag the creature out from under me, taking money out of my pocket. Maybe make a name for himself along the way. Or he might be on some other mission that could impact mine.
“Yeah. Well.” Which didn’t sound like a ringing endorsement for a date. But then he was probably too bruised to dance, from when I tossed him on his keister. Twice now. He turned a key; the engine of his red crotch rocket turned over and purred. I almost said, “Key starts are for wusses,” but I managed to keep it in. My own bike’s engine was running a little rough, so I had no call to be insulting someone else’s. Still. A keyed start? Where was the excitement and mystery in that?
I watched him motor off. He didn’t look back. Soon as he was gone, I redialed Jodi. When she answered I said, “You know a local Joe, Caucasian but Frenchy, olive skin, black and black, maybe six feet, slender? Name of Rick LaFleur?”
She hesitated. “No. Can’t say as I do. But he may go by other aliases,” she said. “Why?” It was the hesitation that did it. Jodi was lying to me.
“A source of mine claims he’s doing some low-level work for Katie and a few other vamps. I was checking him out.”
“Name’s not familiar. But I’ll keep my eyes open. ETA’s under an hour,” she said. “Stay close.”
“I’ll be here,” I said. I closed the phone and tucked it into my pocket.
Was Rick running a scam on me and/or the vamps? Reporting to NOPD? A street source giving the cops inside information in return for help on a past legal problem? Was he ratting out the vamps? And if he was, should I care? Should it bother me? No, it shouldn’t. But it did. It bothered me that he might be sharing secrets. It bothered me a lot. I’d rather he was trying to take my hunting gig. “Crap,” I said. “I’m starting to like vamps.”
Leaving my helmet and leather jacket with the bike, I circled around the house, into the woods, sweating in the humid heat. It wasn’t even summer yet and it was in the high nineties. I tried to imagine what it would feel like in August. A steam bath was trite but it was the closest analogy, and sometimes trite just meant true. A city-sized—heck, a state-sized—steam bath.
For an instant, the urge for home swept over me. I stopped and closed my eyes as homesickness shook me. I wanted mountains, towering ridges and deep folded valleys. I wanted hemlock, spruce, fir, oak, and mountain maple, babbling brooks and streams spilling off hillsides and under small bridges that echoed hollowly off chasms when a bike clattered across. I wanted cool breezes and nighttime temps that dropped to the forties this time of year. I wanted icy spring showers. I wanted home, not this flat, muggy, wet, heated, miserable place. But here was where I was, and some people loved it with the same passion I felt for mountains. For now, I had a job to do and a way to put money in my pockets. I sucked up the need for home and started into the trees’ shadow line.
A mosquito landed on my arm and shoved his proboscis into me for a blood meal, which seemed part and parcel of this job. I swatted it, leaving a bloody smear behind. Wiping it on my jeans, I muttered, “Damn bloodsucker.”
A snake slithered away from my approach and I halted midstep. I wasn’t afraid of snakes, but not being afraid didn’t mean that I particularly liked them. If I got bit, and if it was poisonous, I’d have to shift to deal with the venom. And shifting, even into Beast, was hard by daylight, especially without my fetish necklace.
I wasn’t familiar with local reptile varieties. The snake was three feet long and blackish, with a sort of diamond crosshatching down its length. Not a king snake. Not a garter snake. It rippled across the grass and turned its triangular, spear-shaped head my way. The arrowhead-shaped skull was the most common sign of a venomous snake. Maybe it was a diamondback, though its tail tip didn’t seem to have rattles. It slithered off into the shade.
I moved on, watching my step. If I landed on a snake, the boots would only help if it bit below my knee; above that was skin. I saw no more wildlife and quickly found the place where the rogue came out of the woods. On the lawn there wasn’t much to indicate the rogue wasn’t human, but into the woods a bit, he had run through a muddy patch and left three nice, clear, weird-looking paw prints with claw marks, half human and half something else. Big Cat.
The prints were about thirteen inches long, eleven at the widest point, across the toes. Two of the prints had human-shaped heels, which made it look awkward, something a Bigfoot expert would point to with pride. Deep, slashing indentations indicated the length of the claws—way longer than Beast’s. Big prints. Beast’s paws were about eight inches across, nails about an inch and a half across the recurved length, depending on how they were measured.
Liver-eater, Beast murmured to me, awake, her danger radar active.
Whatever it was, it wasn’t just a vamp. The term “rogue” wouldn’t do anymore, and until I figured out something better, liver-eater it was. It bothered me that Beast knew more about this thing than I did. Would this creature put Beast in danger from the cops?
I had an instant instinct to obscure the tracks, hide the creature’s trail—an instinct from Beast in survival mode. If I hid them, and the cops decided I had messed up a crime scene, I was going to have to start explaining, and that meant lying—lies that would eventually catch me up. So, against Beast’s better judgment, I left the tracks pristine and went to wait on the cops. First, I bypassed around the window where the rogue had entered. The screen was ripped and hanging. Shattered glass in jagged shards jutted from the bottom pane. Blood had dried on the broken ends. As I watched, a fly buzzed through. It didn’t come back out.
Stretched out in a lawn chair, distant enough from a fire ant hill to provide some safety, I pulled out the crumpled batch of property owner info Rick had given me. He had Googled up a map and drawn in the real estate, adding random notes on the taxpayers and owners on the bottom. The pages seemed to be compiled from several sites that collected personal information, most of which I used myself. On the map, the Jean Lafitte park and Bayou Segnette State Park were both colored in a verdant green, and until now, I hadn’t noticed how close they were to one another.
Every predator has its own territory/hunting range. Beast’s largest range had been over a hundred square miles. A large male mountain lion might have a territory of three hundred square miles. I guessed that a sabertooth might claim a proportionately larger range, and wondered if the park properties, as well as New Orleans city proper, fell within the liver-eater’s range.
Long-distance running is problematic for big cats. Aside from cheetahs, most cats are ambush predators, waiting for dinner to pass by and dropping onto it, maybe with a short sprint to finish it off. To avoid building up body heat, we seldom pursue prey at a dead run. Occasionally we are stalk ers, tracking prey by scent and print, but few of us ever run for any length of time.
The rogue had run an amazingly long distance last night. I remembered the sound of the shower running in the small house after the killing ended. Had the liver-eater needed to cool off? Had he taken a cold shower? Was that also part of the reason he slept underwater in the wooded lair, to stay cool?
On the map, I traced the distance between the vamp cemetery, the parks, and Aggie’s house. It was conceivable that all of it was part of the rogue’s hunting ground—and the French Quarter too. But I couldn’t guarantee that the map was drawn to scale; it might all be different from what I was thinking. I’d have to study it later. I folded the papers to the property owner info. A large tract of land bordering Jean Lafitte park was owned by Anna, the mayor’s wife—the woman who was sleeping with Rick and the liver-eater. I hadn’t noticed how much land had been put in Anna’s name. Goose bumps rose on my arms. Beast growled.