Blue Moon ns-1 Page 13

  I limped to his side and tried again. "Have you lost what’s left of your mind?"

  He laughed. The sound was rusty. I’m sure Manden-auer didn’t laugh much, if ever. Why he’d choose now was beyond me. This situation was anything but funny.

  "Strange you should ask that, since my mind, along with my soul, was lost a very long time ago."

  I frowned. "Feeling a little sorry for ourselves, are we?"

  The remnants of his smile deepened. "You amuse me, Jessie McQuade."

  "Yeah, I live to please."

  I contemplated the fire. In the depths I saw the outline of a wolf. What else would he be burning? Though the fur was gone, the size was wrong to be the huge black beast that had been taunting us. I squinted against the leaping flames. It appeared the wolf had been tossed on a pile of… something. Hard to tell what, but probably leaves. They made good kindling.

  "You want to tell me why you’re burning this wolf?"

  "I told you at the office of the medical examiner. It is safer to burn them."

  That’s right. He had.

  "Flames and trees do not mix, mister."

  "I am careful. I have done this a thousand times before."

  A thousand? Right. Maybe his mind was more lost than even he was willing to admit.

  "You couldn’t wait? Burn it somewhere safer? Don’t you think the DNR would like to check this out? Even the CDC?"

  "I am sure they would." He took several steps to the left and stomped on a stray ember with his boot. Then he raised his gaze to mine. "But it is too late now, is it not?"

  "I’d say so, thanks to you."

  He turned away, but not before I could swear I saw him smile again.

  Which made me wonder… a whole bunch of things.

  Was Mandenauer crazier than he appeared? Could he be a holdover from the wolf hunters who had nearly eradicated the species by the mid-1900s?

  Back then the wolf had been considered evil—out to kill every domestic animal it found. Ranchers hated them—still do—and hired wolf hunters to take care of the problem. However, the true culprits were often coyotes or feral dogs, as well as wolves.

  I’d seen pictures, read stories, about the atrocities committed upon the wolf population. They had sickened me. I’m not saying wolves aren’t varmints, that they don’t kill stock and even a pet or two. But shoot the damn things; don’t mutilate them. Sometimes the inhumanity of men made me want to become a complete recluse rather than remain a civil servant.

  I’d met a few wolf hunters and they were as creepy as Mandenauer. They continued to kill wolves whenever they could—despite any laws to the contrary—as if in doing so they recaptured a bit of their youth.

  But Mandenauer had been hired by the DNR, which, contrary to popular belief, was far from stupid. They would have checked him out thoroughly and made certain he was the kind of man who would follow their anal ordinances to the letter.

  The CDC agreed a new strain of rabies was spreading. I had seen some of these wolves, and they weren’t acting like wolves. Of course they could be werewolves, as Cadotte would have me believe.

  I kicked the dirt. Hell, I was starting to see a conspiracy behind every tree.

  Something sparkled in the dirt I’d stirred up. I glanced at Mandenauer, but he was busy with his wolf pyre. I winced as I bent my sore knee to scoop the bright and shiny item into my hand.

  A single key. No key ring. No markings to indicate it belonged to a car. Most likely a house key, but how had it gotten here? I shrugged and slipped the thing into my pocket.

  A chorus of yips started nearby and I jumped, then spun toward them, rifle raised, my hand halfway to the safety before I recognized the nature of the calls.

  "Coyotes," Mandenauer murmured. "Odd."

  He was right. Why hadn’t the wolves run the coyotes out of the area as wolves always did?

  "Maybe foxes?" I proposed.

  Wolves tolerated foxes. Lord knows why.

  The old man shook his head. I had to agree. I knew the difference between a coyote and fox. Something strange was going on in these woods, but then, what else was new?

  "What happened?" I indicated the pyre.

  Mandenauer had been staring into the forest in the direction of the coyotes’ calls. He blinked and forced his attention back to me. "You wish for a tall tale?"

  "Just the truth, thanks."

  "Truth. What is truth?"

  My patience, nothing to brag about on a good day, snapped. "Spare me the existential bullshit and tell me what happened."

  He smirked. The guy certainly was a jolly old elf tonight.

  "I trailed the animal. It leaped at me from the night. I shot it."

  "Yee-ha."

  He shrugged. "You wanted the truth. The truth is not very ‘yee-ha,’ I have found."

  Right again.

  "How did you know the wolf was rabid?"

  Mandenauer shoved a stone closer to the fire with the scuffed toe of his boot. "Does it matter?"

  "Of course it matters! We can’t just go around shooting every wolf in the forest."

  "The DNR has given me leave to handle this situation as I see fit."

  That didn’t sound like the DNR. Control freaks thrived in government positions, and they rarely gave carte blanche to anyone. Certainly not trigger-happy old farts like Mandenauer.

  "If we eliminate them all, your wolf problem will be resolved much more quickly. And who is to say that the uninfected wolf today will not be an infected wolf tomorrow?"

  "Then we’ll have to shoot the coyotes, the raccoons, the opossums. This could get messy."

  "Yes, it could."

  He reached out his bony hands and warmed them on the flames. We stood shoulder to shoulder as the fire died to embers. Then we stood until a cool breeze picked up the ashes and flung them into the forest.

  As we returned to the car I had to squelch the nagging thought that Mandenauer had not just been talking about animals.

  Chapter 20

  The Gerard house was dark and silent, as was the rest of the neighborhood. Considering it was about four in the morning, this wasn’t a big shock.

  I wasn’t sure if Cherry was sleeping or if she’d gone to the hospital with Mel and not yet returned. Either way, 1 wasn’t going to interview her until a more humane part of the morning.

  By then I’d be able to read over Brad’s notes. I patted my pocket, relieved to discover the notebook was still there. I’d forgotten about it in all the excitement. If I was lucky, Brad had done a bang-up job and my interview with Cherry would be blessedly short. But I wasn’t counting on it.

  I checked in with Zee. I should have known better.

  "Christ on a crutch, Jessie. Where have you been?"

  "With Mandenauer. In the woods. Where else?"

  "You were gone half the night. Isn’t he some hot-shit hunter? Like you."

  "He’s right here."

  I slid a glance at Mandenauer, but he’d leaned his head back on the seat and closed his eyes. At his age it was definitely past his bedtime.

  "I didn’t think you’d left him in the woods," Zee snarled.

  She obviously couldn’t care less if she insulted our guest. Why should he be any different from the rest of the planet?

  "Did you get anything?" she asked.

  "One."

  "What did it look like?"

  I frowned at the radio. What an odd question. Besides, I had no idea. I'd only seen the wolf through the flames.

  "Cinnamon-shaded female," Mandenauer said, his eyes still closed. "About one year old."

  I repeated the information to Zee. Silence came over the line. That was a first. I shook the mike. "Zee? Where’d you go?"

  She coughed—long and hard—her lifelong smoker’s hack. By all rights, she should be dead from the cigarettes, if not the mileage. In the end, the force of her cough would probably be the death of Zelda Hupmen.

  "Sorry," she wheezed. "Got a call. Since it’s been so damn boring for the last hour, I
couldn’t contain my excitement."

  "You want me to take it?"

  "Nope. Nothing but a dead deer on the road. Officer is already en route. Why don’t you take creepy-crawly home and then go there yourself?"

  "Now?"

  "Now. You came on early today and stayed late yesterday. Clyde told me to even out the overtime. He can’t afford it."

  There was the Clyde I knew.

  Ten minutes later I parked next to the car Mandenauer indicated was his. Long and black, all it needed was curtains on the windows to be mistaken for a hearse.

  "Any dead bodies in the back?" I asked.

  Mandenauer sniffed. "This is a Cadillac. A classic. Worth three times what I have paid for it."

  "You must have paid a penny."

  Mandenauer ignored my jibe, climbed in his car, and rumbled into the fading night. I climbed the steps to my apartment, the bandolier still strung across my chest, my rifle unfired. At least I wouldn’t have to clean the thing tonight. I planned to dive right into bed as soon as I put all my weapons away.

  I was tired—an unusual occurrence for me. Even when I had a night off I stayed up until breakfast and slept through the day. I know I’m backward—just ask my mother.

  But I’d found that keeping to a schedule made my schedule easier to keep. Most people who worked third shift attempted to live like real folks when they weren’t working. This, in my opinion, was what led to them being too tired to function for most of their life.

  At any rate, I was exhausted at 4:00 a.m. and that just wasn’t like me. Which was my only excuse for not noticing right away that I wasn’t alone when I stepped into my apartment.

  I unloaded the rifle as I walked down the hall and into my bedroom. Call me paranoid, but a loaded gun in the house is a very bad idea.

  Replacing the weapon in the safe, I hung the bandolier alongside it and locked the door. I drew the totem over my head and laid it on the dresser. I’d learned my lesson about wearing the thing to bed. It had taken all day for the red marks to fade.

  The overhead light hit the wolf’s face and reminded me of something I’d been meaning to do. Quickly I rooted around in my nightstand until I found a magnifying glass attached to an old key chain. I checked the markings on the totem. Like Cadotte had promised, they were there. But did they mean what he said? I still couldn’t buy it.

  As I unbuttoned my uniform blouse, I realized I hadn’t removed my gun belt and pistol. Leaving my shirt hanging open, I retraced my steps and performed my usual ritual with the Magnum. I wasn’t going to lock all my guns in the safe. When I turned away from the refrigerator, I saw him.

  The sliding glass doors were open and a pre-dawn breeze fluttered the drapes. Had they been like that when I’d come in? Surely I would have noticed.

  A man stood in the opening. With no light from outside, no light from within, I could barely discern his outline from the ebony sky. But I could hear him breathing. I reached for my gun and he rushed me.

  I’d learned to fight as a kid, which meant I’d learned to fight dirty. While rolling around in the dirt with little boys, a little girl quickly learns she’d better get mean or she’d get hurt.

  I’d refined my street skills at the academy, where we’d learned hand-to-hand combat—the kind of fighting that usually went down in bars.

  Except when I had to fight drunks, they were slower and stupider than me. My intruder was none of the above.

  On my initial strike to the face, he grabbed my wrist, twisted me around. I kicked backward, going for his knee. He did a fancy sidestep, twirled me like a dancer, and kissed me on the mouth.

  The first taste and I knew. Cadotte. Who else?

  My racing pulse slowed as he deepened the kiss. Had he been here all along, waiting for me to return? Or had he climbed up the building again and slid inside?

  I yanked my lips away. "What in hell are you doing here?"

  He didn’t answer. I couldn’t see his face. Unnerved, I struggled to get free. He only pulled me tighter against him, where I discovered he was very glad I was home.

  Though my body shouted for me to take him to the ground and climb on top, my heart still pounded with an excess of adrenaline, and my emotions were too tangled for me to be anything but angry.

  "Let me go."

  "No." He nuzzled my neck, scraped his teeth along a throbbing vein, licked my collarbone—

  I stiffened, remembering the dream. "Right now, Ca-dotte!"

  His laugh rubbed his chest against mine. My shirt was still open, my bra a mere wisp of lace. I bit my lip to keep from moaning out loud at the friction. How could I be angry, aroused, and frightened all at the same time?

  "Don’t make me hurt you."

  "Why don’t you go ahead and try?" he whispered.

  Now how could I resist an offer like that?

  Before he could think, I brought my knee up hard and fast. He twisted quicker than a cat, and all I hit was his thigh.

  "Ah, ah, ah. If you did that, there’d be no fun later."

  I shoved him away and he let me. For a tall, lanky geek with glasses, he had more muscle mass than I would have figured. But since I’d seen him naked, I should have known better.

  I tried a flat-handed shot to his chest. He blocked that and did some fancy Oriental jump-kick that I was barely able to deflect.

  "What the hell was that? Kung fu?"

  "Tai chi. It’s very good for you."

  "I bet."

  He became less and less the geeky egghead with every passing moment. So the professor knew martial arts? Time to get serious.

  I couldn’t see much beyond a shadow in the starless darkness that filled my apartment. But I caught no glint of glass on his face, so punched him in the nose.

  Or at least I tried to. He grabbed my fist inches from his nostrils. How in hell did he do that?

  "Say uncle," he murmured.

  "Bite me."

  I’d never been very good at giving in.

  "Jessie, Jessie. You aren’t going to win."

  Why it annoyed me so much that he was besting me in a physical fight, I have no idea. He was a guy. They were stronger. It was a medical fact, which had always pissed me off.

  Maybe part of the reason I didn’t want to give up and say uncle was because his macho-man muscling me around was the most arousing foreplay I’d ever experienced. So I hooked my ankle around his and took him down to the floor.

  Chapter 21

  I was supposed to land on top, where I could then crow victory and give in to my urges as a reward. Instead I ended up on my back, Cadotte settled firmly between my thighs. I was winded; he wasn’t even sweating.

  "Tell me that you love me." I heard the laughter in his voice and I smiled, too.

  "Kiss my—"

  His mouth covered mine. My brain melted as my body ignited.

  It had been so long since I’d had sex, and I had never had sex that began like this. I was so excited I could barely keep myself from arching and coming right now. But I was tired of getting off with my clothes on. I wanted him, all the way, so I gave up fighting.

  He kissed me forever. In my experience, limited as it was, guys don’t waste much time on kissing, especially when they know they’re on the fast track to something more.

  But Cadotte seemed to like kissing. Hell, if I was that good at something, I guess I would have liked to do it all the time, too.

  He nibbled at my lips, tasted me with his tongue, framed my face with his long, sexy fingers, stroking my chin with his thumbs, caressing my cheeks with his palms.

  And he didn’t stop with my mouth, giving equal and arousing attention to my neck, my eyelids, my ears. I never realized that the insertion of a clever tongue into the bend of my ear could make me damp a whole lot farther south.

  I explored the solid muscles of his back with my fingertips, then ran my nails over the quivering flesh at his side, before palming his extremely nice ass. It wasn’t enough. I needed to feel naked skin against skin more than I needed
to breathe.

  "Can we take this to my room?"

  He lifted his head from a teasing lick across the lace-covered peak of my breast. Dawn threatened; just enough light filled the room so I could finally see his face.

  No more laughter, the need was as stark in his eyes as it was in my gut. Without a word, he got to his feet in a fluid, graceful motion and held out a hand for me.

  I could have made a smart comment. I could have ignored his hand. I wasn’t so far gone that I couldn’t stand up by myself. But the loss of his warmth, even in the heat of a summer night, made me shiver.

  I put my palm against his, let him bring me to my feet. Then hand in hand we entered my bedroom.

  It wasn’t much. A bed, a gun safe, a dresser. I slept there—nothing more. Until now.

  I had never brought a man into this room. The question of why not flitted through my head. I didn’t answer. 1 had better questions to occupy my mind right now.

  How quickly could I get him naked? How many times could he make me scream? Would he think I was weird if I asked him to tie me up and lick me all over?

  My first question was answered without my saying a word. He pulled his T-shirt over his head and shucked his jeans one second later, He didn’t wear underwear. Another mystery solved.

  I was tempted to turn on the light so I could see him, but then he could see me, and that didn’t tempt me at all. I was a big girl—everywhere. I swear that naked, I looked even bigger.

  I hovered just inside the doorway, suddenly unsure. He crossed the carpet in a sinuous movement that made me remember the loose-hipped gait of the big black wolf.

  The image disappeared when he reached out and unhooked the front clasp of my bra with a flick of his fingers. My breasts, suddenly free, popped loose with a near audible thunk. I had no time to be embarrassed. He lowered his head and rubbed his cheek against the fullness, breathed in as if he could catch my scent, then shoved my shirt and bra off my arms and latched onto a nipple with a scrape of his teeth and a push of his tongue.

  I’d read in some woman’s magazine that the larger the breasts, the less the arousal a woman gains from them. Considering how guys worshipped women’s chests and wanted to touch them in an ascending chart based on their size, I’d figured this was nature’s idea of a hysterical joke.